I happened to see an article on fishing as the cradle of civilization in the current, on line, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. I don't normally read the post, and never have, and I'm admittedly one of those people who, when they look at it, are usually looking for the cover illustrations that the magazine featured prior to the mid 1960s, which are often fantastic. This is not to say that it's a bad magazine by any means, but rather to say I'm not all that familiar with it in its current form.
The short article, and it was very short, that I read starts off with this statement:
Of the three ancient ways of obtaining food — hunting, plant foraging, and fishing — only the last remained important after the development of agriculture and livestock raising in Southwest Asia some 12,000 years ago.
I got to thinking about that, and while there's some truth to that statement, it's not completely accurate by any means whatsoever and to the extent it is, it's an accuracy that's much more recent than we might suppose. And frankly, it's a symptom of why modern people, frankly, hate their existence to the extent that they do. More on that last comment in a moment.
Fishing is fish hunting.* Let's make no mistake about it, that's what it is. I like fishing, aquatic hunting, but I like terrestrial hunting more. Still, fishing is probably my second favorite thing to do, right after hunting.
It's ingrained deep into our DNAs and people who claim they have a distaste for either activity are simply denying part of their human nature. But humans are in huge denial about much of their nature today in every conceivable way. The reaction to that is universally negative. In spite of the improvement in nearly every aspect of our lives in some ways, people often hate the modern world in a really deep down and profound way. The closer they remain to some early element of it, and frankly that includes small scale agriculture, i.e., gardening, as well as hunting and fishing, generally the happier they are. Even outdoor activities that seem to have nothing to do with these activities, if closely studied, really do. Hiking, camping, etc., are all auxiliary to them and part of them, in a deep overall sense.
Anyhow, in reality when humans took up agriculture, as we've already explored here, it turns out that in reality they continued hunting as a primary activity for many, many years. Indeed, for centuries. And even in highly developed modern cultures hunting provided meat for the table in most of them up until extremely recently. Indeed, even in the Western world, in those regions that are not heavily urban, it still does. Urban people don't realize that, but it is the case.
Market hunting is gone, but only fairly recently, and indeed not even completely. Even in the western world there'd some market hunting outside of North America. If there is none in North America, that's due to regulations and laws that sought to preserve game for all, in keeping with the egalitarian nature of late 19th and 20th Century American culture, something that we're slowly losing, egalitarianism that is, in the 21st. Anyhow, the introductory statement, the more you look at it, is wrong.
What is correct is that individual fishermen making their living from the sea does continue to exist in a form that's surprisingly recognizable over the eons.
Yet ancient fisher folk and their communities have almost entirely escaped scholarly study. Why? Such communities held their knowledge close to their chests and seldom gave birth to powerful monarchs or divine rulers. And they conveyed knowledge from one generation to the next by word of mouth, not writing.
This is an interesting question. I don't fully know the answer to that question, but it's well worth looking at
That knowledge remains highly relevant today. Fishers are people who draw their living from a hard, uncontrollable world that is perfectly indifferent to their fortunes or suffering. Many of them still fish with hooks, lines, nets, and spears that are virtually unchanged since the Ice Age.
Again, that's correct, and it is interesting in the extreme.
I'm not going to comment paragraph by paragraph on the article following that, but it makes a really good case for studying the culture of small scale, but professional, fishing.
Centuries ago, urban populations numbered in the thousands, but the demand for fish was insatiable. Today, the silent elephant in the fishing room is an exploding global population that considers ocean fish a staple. Deep-water trawls, diesel trawlers, electronic fish finders, and factory ships with deep freezes have turned the most ancient of our ways of obtaining food into an industrial behemoth. Even remote fisheries are being decimated.
Despite large-scale fish farming, humans face the specter of losing our most ancient practice of food gathering — and thus leaving behind an ocean that is almost fishless.
I"m going to pick up again here. And in doing so, I'm going to swim against the tide (yes, I know that will be seen as a pun.
That the "oceans are in peril" is well known. However, even though I'm not really an optimistic person anymore, my occupation doesn't allow for it and experience counsels me against it, I'm not pessimistic here. In actuality, over my half century of life many fisheries have come roaring back, including ocean fisheries. When I was a kid you didn't swim in the Great Lakes and nobody pulled fish from it. On a trip to Ontario as a kid we crossed into New York to swim in Lake Ontario as it was so polluted on the Canadian side you didn't swim there. And just recently it's been reported that sharks are present in numbers on the East Coast this year as seals are as well, and the seals are as the fish they feed on are back as well, back from the edge of extinction.
Not that there's not reason to be concerned, but here's actually a topic where I'm pretty optimistic.
As part of that, the statement about the "exploding global population" is one that's really jumped the shark (yes, another pun). It's seemingly missed repeatedly by nearly everyone that we're now at or near peak human population. Every demographer concedes that in this century, which we're now 20% of the way into, the human population will start to decline.
It already is declining in Europe. It would be declining in the United States but for an odd American belief that it's always 1862 and the frontier is always open and expanding. The United States, where such comments are always written, does have an expanding population, but only because the U.S. has massive immigration rates.
Now, this isn't an article on the topic of immigration, but simple math demonstrates that the U.S. population would be declining, as the U.S. birth rate is largely below replacement, but for immigration. Proponents of large scale immigration, which is unique to the United States, have ironically begun to cite that as the reason that it must be kept up. So, at the same time that its common to read about the "exploding global population" the same quarter argues that the collapsing Western world birth rate means that a high level of immigration must be maintained.**
This is largely based on some false demographic and economic concepts. Immigration isn't a bad thing in and of itself by any means, and in some instances justice and morality demand that immigrants be allowed into countries that can absorb them. But the concept that the economy depends upon it is incorrect as that ignores the wage depression aspects of it. Further arguments about needing to have lots of (low paid) immigrant laborers to pay for the retirements of (formerly much better paid) retirees is also based on a false premise. In reality, in the age of work place automation, which is coming in at a blistering level, those arguments are a house of cards.
Population growth does damage the environment, to be sure. But that growth is slowing or reversing in the entire northern hemisphere and it will be everywhere else, fairly soon.***Only, once again, in the US and Canada, in the opposite really true, and in at least the US there's been some massively impacted areas due to internal emigration, as well as immigration, the two not being the same. This has to do, however, once again with the American belief that this sort of thing doesn't matter as the country is always somehow expanding. But even in the US there are regions in which the trend has been in the other direction, while there are also those where the opposite is very true. What's significant, however, is that for political reasons, rather than the economic ones we tend to cite, this has been the choice of the country, or at least of its leaders, and not simply something that occurred.
Irrespective of all of that, what is clear is that in advanced societies, setting aside whatever it may mean and the morality or immortality of what may be causing it, the population is going down, save for the United States, and Canada, where immigration alone is causing it to go up.**** This trend crosses cultures and regions, and is true of advanced nations in the East, such as Japan, as well as advanced nations of various cultures in the West. It's known that it applies to all cultures everywhere. So, while right now there are serious articles about a demographic collapse in Japan (which isn't really the disaster its portrayed to be), in the foreseeable future there will be such articles about the more advanced nations of South America.
As this occurs demands on resources decline and we're seeing the "rewilding" of places, such as the "rewilding of Europe".
Which takes me to the next point.
Whether every aspect of all of this is good or bad can be left for discussion elsewhere or to another time if discussed here. But with rewilding we should hope for the rewilding of people. That is, not turning people into absurd pseudo pagans or something, but getting them back out there. Back to the streams, back to the beach, and back to the fields.
*Ironically, this article includes an image of an ancient Egpytian couple in a marsh. They're not fishing, however, they're hunting, as the caption demonstates:
Featured image: Menna and Family Hunting in the Marshes (c. 1400–1352 B.C.); Metropolitan Museum of Art.
**As we've discussed elsewhere, there's an odd human tendency to believe that we live in the worst of all possible eras, which is far from true. This inclination causes us to exaggerate the risks of many things and to believe that the news fo the past remains the news of the day.
I'm constantly hearing about how the whole world is at war. It isn't. Likewise, I'll hear how the current era is the most violent of all time. That's the polar opposite of the truth.
I'm not going to get into the many environmental issues that are frequently in the news today in any form. So I'm not going to argue one way or another about them. But I'll note that today there's a panicky article in our local newspaper about the absolute the need to eschew lead bullets in hunting. The real message should be get out hunting. Sitting around in the house worrying about lead bullets is a lot more damaging that the lead could ever be.
***There are real moral issues to this. The means of achieving the slow down aren't being endorsed here. I'm merely observing the actual trends.
Railroad station, Carson City, 1940. It likely didn't look much different in 1919. The man is waiting for the mail, which was moved by train at the time.
On this day in 1919, the Sunday day of rest returned to the command.
It darned near had to. The command was behind, by several days, in its original anticipated schedule, but it had taken it 20 hours across the dust and muck of the Nevada desert to travel the stretch before Carson City, and this on a road that was theoretically a designated highway, although the designation at that time was just that, a designation. Very little of the Lincoln Highway, as we've seen, was improved in any fashion whatsoever. There had been problems with teh road the entire way, but after the column hit Nebraska the road became worse with each mile, with Utah's and Nevada's roads being particularly bad.
Speed, of course, in the era was relative. . . .
The command was provided "Union religious services". I have no idea what that actually means. General ecumenical perhaps? Non protestant soldiers with Sunday obligations, which at this time would have largely been Catholics, but perhaps some Greek Orthodox, would have had to hike into town to see what was available for them.
And there was transportation to Hot Springs for bathing, which was no doubt welcome.
And some worked, including the operator of a tractor.
Emblem of the former Socialist Party of America
Meanwhile, in Chicago, a city the convoy had passed through some weeks earlier, day two of the Socialist Party of America's Emergency National Convention saw the bolting left wing of the party. The English speaking bolters, on this day, formed the Communist Labor Party in its own convention.
This was addressed a bit yesterday when it was related that the emergency was the rise of a radical, or rather more radical, left wing of the party that was hearing the siren song of Communism. In this, the US Socialist Party was going through the same struggle that Socialist parties everywhere were. Nearly all of them had started out as hardcore radical parties, but over the years as their fortunes had risen, their positions became less radical as they moved towards accepting democratic forms of government. Ironically, World War One, during which it had been supposed that Socialist would take the position that all worker should be united in opposing the war in favor of the solidarity of labor, in fact saw the opposite development and the movement of mainstream Socialist towards accepting representative democracy. At the same time, all the same parties saw movements within them that were extremely radical. As this process occurred, these parties split. In Russia, the split saw the rise of four different Socialist parties, with the Communist Party being the most radical. Germany saw a succession of splinter parties that eventually saw two parties, the Social Democratic Party and the Communist Party emerge.
In the U.S. the Russian Revolution gave rise to the Communist Party of America in May, 1919. The Socialist Party continued on but radical elements within it were attracted to Communism. The Emergency National Convention was called to address this, and to put an end to it. By that point, however, the right wing Socialist were a minority in the party. While they seized control of the convention, they could not keep the left wing from walking out, which it did and on this day, in their own convention, the English speaking radicals formed the Communist Labor Party. Ironically, the Emergency Session had come about due to the left wing demanding that it occur in order to move the Socialist Party towards Communism.
The Communist Labor Party was not to be long lived as it merged with the Communist Party of America the following year, which then became the Communist Party of the USA. The Socialist Party of the USA would continue on, with various swings and splinters, until 1972 when it changed its name to the Social Democrats, USA, reflecting the evolution of the party. Ironically, the Social Democrats have not seemed to really benefit from the current flirtation in some circles in the US with social democracy. The Communist Party USA still exists as well, with its high water mark really having come during the 1930s.
Elsewhere, the fights brought by Communism saw dramatic events take place in Ukraine where the Whites entered the city, taking it without a fight from the Reds during the Russian Civil War but ending up fighting, slightly, forces of the Ukrainian People's Republic that entered the town simultaneously.
Russian White victory parade on this date in 1919 in Kiev.
The entire event in some ways is emblematic of the confusing nature of the Russian Civil War.
The Ukrainian People's Republic was an Ukrainian effort to create an independent government for the region following the collapse of the Russian Empire and the withdraw of the Germans from the region. During that period various forces contested for control of the new country with a directorate emerging that had the most support. At the same time, the country found itself facing a Soviet invasion in January 1919 and it also found itself at war with Poland to its west. To compound matters, White Russian forces contested with the Red Army for control of the region, and Ukrainian Greens sought to bring anarchy to the country, fielding an army of their own.
Under these conditions the independence of Ukraine was unlikely to occur but the region did manage to survive surprisingly long. On this day the re emergent Whites took Kiev but the Ukrainian government sought to as well, not appreciating the ability of the Whites to move as quickly as they did. The Whites retained control of the city. The Ukrainian People's Republic effectively came to an end in 1921 with its territory divided between the Soviet Union and Poland, although it would amazingly maintain a government in exile up until the country was able to form its own government again following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
When I posted it, I cross posted it on Reddit where somebody asked, "are they making fun of him for gardening?"
I suppose they are, but the costs of gardening, and nearly all of the comments that are included in this Gasoline Alley cartoon, are ones I've heard myself. It's interesting to see how the costs of gardening are summed up in just this fashion by those who don't, and apparently have been at least since most people ceased to live rural lives.
Of course, while the intangible costs of gardening are noted by those who don't garden, the intangible benefits of gardening, are not.
Having noted all of that, I didn't get a garden in this year. The electrical service to my well had a disruption early last Spring and I still haven't gotten it repaired. I need to.
The Motor Transport Convoy had a long day, starting at 6:30 a.m on August 30 and ending at 2:30 a.m. on August 31. During that 20 hours they went 66 miles. Conditions were so bad that the soldiers had to push the vehicles through some stretches of road.
Keep in mind that this was a road that was otherwise open for civilian use. . . but without the aid of soldiers to push.
The convoy was met by Nevada's Governor, reflecting the fact that the city on the far western edge of the state is the state's capital.
The Red Summer continued on when Knoxville, Tennessee, erupted into violence. A start of the riots was the arrest of Maurice Mays, a biracial politician, for the murder of a white woman even though there was no basis to believe that he was the killer. This resulted in a lynch mob developing that ultimately rioted. This in turn caused black residents to arm themselves for their own protection and to seal off part of the city. Violence later developed.
Mays was later tried and in spite of a lack of evidence, convicted. His conviction was overturned by the Tennessee Supreme Court and he was re-tried, found guilty again,and sentenced to death. His suspected father, the former white mayor of Knoxville, with whom he had a friendly relationship, committed suicide a few years thereafter.
In Chicago the Socialist Party convened an Emergency Session.
The Socialist Party of America was a rising political party at the time, it's boat rising with the rising tide of radical political parties everywhere. The emergency was the invitation by Lenin for certain Socialist elements to join the Communist International which was causing a rift in the party. The party was dominated by its "right wing", which on this day achieved control of the convention on its opening day, bringing the rift with the "left wing" to an immediate head.
The Country Gentleman came out featuring an article on "counterfeit farms". I wish the article was available so I could learn what they were writing about.
And the movies saw the first release of Dangerous Nan McGrew, which would be re-released in the 1930s in the form of a Betty Boop cartoon.
And the Gasoline Alley gang, which seemed to be on vacation, went golfing.
The 2019 MVPA Lincoln Highway Convoy (TMC19)August 10 – September 14, 2019, York, PA to San Francisco, CA. Travel from the 44th annual MVPA Convention in York, PA to San Francisco, CA. To participate you must register by 1 May 2019. This is the second MVPA convoy to commemorate the Lincoln Highway, built by the US Army in 1909! Contact MVPA-HQ to request information, schedules and routes; (800) 365-5798, (816) 833-MVPA, hq@mvpa.org.
It'll make better time than the original, and I believe its in Nebraska right now.
Should anyone who stops in here happen across this convoy commemorating the 1919 Motor Transport Convoy, let us know and post what you know.
Motor Transport Co. 554 en route to Santa Cruz, August 29, 1919 to escort the Pacific fleet to San Francisco. Motor Transport Co. 554 was making this trip in California at the same time that the transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy was struggling to get to California.
The Motor Transport Convoy trucked from Eastgate to Fallon, Nevada, in desert conditions, making 66 miles in 9.25 hours.
In Belgium, a Socialist effort at banning the public consumption of alcoholic spirits was passed which ironically spurred the development of heavy Belgium beers and ales by religious communities, giving us Belgian beers as we know them today.
I haven't been doing a blow by blow on Wyoming coal for awhile. It's just too depressing. But a lot has been gong on.
That probably was emphasized by the two coal related stories in the Tribune this morning.
One headline proclaimed that the sale of the Blackjewell Eagle Butte and Belle Ayr mines is "dead". The sale had been approved by a bankruptcy court, but details have held up the sale and, according to the article, it is in danger of "floundering". If it flounders, 500 laid off miners will not be returning to their jobs there, at least any time soon.
Secondly, Navajo Transitional Energy Company took out a full page ad about their purchase of three mines in Wyoming and Montana. This is elaborated on in their recent press release, which in part states:
FARMINGTON, N.M. – Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC) announces a
significant acquisition and expansion of operations outside the Navajo Nation paving the
way for others to follow in its conscientious energy development footsteps.
NTEC has purchased substantially all the assets of Cloud Peak Energy, a public company
that has recently filed for bankruptcy. The primary assets are three coal mines located in
the Powder River Basin of Wyoming and Montana: Antelope, Spring Creek, and Cordero
Rojo mines. The properties include surface and mineral rights to approximately 90,000
acres of land.
One of the really interesting things about this is that the company is a native owned Navajo company that even as it expands notes that its focus is to provide jobs to the Navajo people. With its purchase of Cloud Peak's assets its taking a big step in coal, even as it also is indicating that its working on future energy resources.
The Navajo themselves are a very large Southwestern tribe with over 300,000 enrolled members, making it the second largest recognized Indian Tribe in the United States. Their history is unique in some ways, one being that they, along with the Apache, are an Athabaskan speaking people whose ancestors migrated from the Canadian far north. Native companies are not unique, but one of this size is unusual and its clearly in an expansion mode.
I first noticed this fire traveling to Laramie on Sunday. I hadn't heard of it by that time, but it was really rolling along.
Since then access to parts of Pathfinder Reservoir have been closed so that seaplane fire bombers can have unrestricted access to Alcova and Pathfinder Reservoirs.
This wartime Jenny on the Job poster could be taken more than one way, ie., don't forgot to have fun after work, or don''t play around at work. I'm pretty sure, based on other posters, the former is meant.
This is a U.S. Public Health Service poster and there was wartime concern that workers engaged in long hours would forget to have any downtime at all. That was known to contribute to poor health.
An irony of this is that workers of the 1940s likely tended to be a lot more social, and have more fun as a rule, after work, than they do now. As the author of Bowling Alone has gone into, Americans have retreated over the years into their own homes and lives and, save when they're young, and not even as much with the young as in former times, they don't get out nearly as much as they once did. This has resulted in a lot of former institutions disappearing over the years, such as fraternal organizations.
Not all of those old habits are really missed. For example, the once common gathering of some blue collar men at the bar, where they spent the whole evening, is something that's gone by the wayside and that's probably for the better. And of course a lot of people do have a lot of out of the office activities they engage in. The U.S. Public Health Service wanted to make sure that workers of the 40s were getting out there then.
She was a Catholic Berber, married to a Roman Pagan, in North Africa. Devout throughout her life, she struggled with a dissolute difficult husband who none the less held her in respect. Mother to three sons and a daughter, one of the sons was Augustine, who himself lived a life that caused her endless distress.
She followed him to Rome when he left for their, pursing a career in the law. He converted to Christianity there, prior to her death at age 55. After her death, he would take holy orders, and rise to become St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the greatest Fathers of the Church.
On this day in 1919, the Trailmobile kitchen had an accident that there was no recovering from.
The Red Summer resumed as white rioters attacked the black community in Laurens County, Georgia. The attacks seemed to be related to white fears about rioting that had happened earlier in the summer in the neighboring county. The event lasted two days and featured a lynching of a man presumed to be a leader in the black community on the first day.
Louis Botha, a Boer commander of the Boer War and the first Prime Minister of South Africa. Botha had been a leader of the Boer community during the war and shepherded it into the peace with the British. By some measures, his actions may be regarded as having converted the Boer defeat into a type of victory as South Africa obtained dominion status in 1910 and the Boers effectively governed the new state, with Both as its P.M.
Botha as a Boer commander.
Much of Botha's post Boer War effectiveness was due to his ability to unite Boer aspirations with the larger British Empire, something that was not only difficult but not always popular. During World War One Botha acted to commit troops to the British Empire cause which was enormously unpopular among the Boers and resulted in the Boer Rebellion. None the less, he generally persisted and can be credited with effectively snatching a type of victory out of the jaws of defeat.
He effectively died of the Spanish Flu, which he'd survived, but which had weakened his heart. Like many Spanish Flu victims, he died of the collateral effects of the disease.
The Soviets nationalized its film industry on this day in 1919.
As the 1919 transcontinental Motor Transport Convoy was being received in Willow Springs, Nevada, the crew of an Italian warship was being received in Boston Commons.
On this day in 1919, the Motor Transport Convoy traveled from Pinto House to Willow Spring, making 44 miles in 8.25 hours.
Mention is made of the Mack "chain drive". During this period, and for quite some time thereafter, some vehicles used chain drives, like bicycles, rather than drive shafts, to convey the rotation of the engine to the axle.
By and large, however, the vehicles held up that day in spite of the conditions.
late 14c., "freedom from obligations, leisure, release" (from some activity or occupation), from Old French vacacion "vacancy, vacant position" (14c.) and directly from Latin vacationem (nominative vacatio) "leisure, freedom, exemption, a being free from duty, immunity earned by service," noun of state from past participle stem of vacare "be empty, free, or at leisure," from PIE *wak-, extended form of root *eue- "to leave, abandon, give out."
Meanings "state of being unoccupied," "process of vacating" in
English are early 15c. Meaning "formal suspension of activity, time in
which there is an intermission of usual employment" (in reference to
schools, courts, etc.) is recorded from mid-15c. As the U.S. equivalent
of what in Britain is called a holiday, it is attested from 1878.
vacation (v.)
1866, from vacation (n.). Related: Vacationed; vacationing.
Recently I attended an excellent series of seminars put on by a legal organization of which I am part. These were part of a convention, and were put on for the purpose of education in the special interests of the group, which in turn generates Continuing Legal Education credits. In my state, as in many others, a lawyer is required to have 15 hours of Continuing Legal Education every year, including at least 1 hour in ethics.
Most of the topics directly pertain to our declared area of practice focus, but one was on a two part seminar on ethnics. Half of that was on lawyer well being.
It'll surprise no one whatsoever if they do any research on the law that lawyer well being has reached a point of discussion such that it is regarded as a matter of crisis within the profession and even without. Just last week a study was published on things to avoid if you didn't want to be unhappy, and one of the four things on the list was "being a lawyer".** It may be that lawyers were once like the Finns were once. . . expected to work hard, shut up, and die because of the triumph of the conditions of our lives over our own well being.*** But probably not. Things have probably gotten worse for us over the years.
In my view, and of course I could well be wrong, the negative transformation started in the 1970s when the Baby Boomer generation entered the practice and slowly influenced it such that it became focused on economic return as its purpose rather than its professional nature, something that professional organizations such as the American Bar Association had struggled to build for years. But that didn't cause that to occur alone. The flood of additional lawyers that started coming into the field in the 1960s and lasted all the way into the 2000s put a emphasis on economics in a way that the prewar field lacked to the same degree. The deregulation, moreover, of lawyers, which commenced with the elimination of some practice restrictions and advertising restrictions was brought about by the United States Supreme Court, to the entire fields detriment. The modern evolution of admission to the bar has made things even worse with the Uniform Bar Exam, which has separated lawyers from the law of their own states and opened up the floodgates of lawyers from large cities practicing across state lines in spite of their routine lack of knowledge of the law in those states.
All that has created an atmosphere that isn't universally nifty, and I suspect that translates itself into a perception of blueness, if you will.
Well, anyhow, one of the topics that's been addressed by some as this has come about is whether or not people who enter the law are inclined by their pre law natures to get into a funk. This seminar discussed a study that showed that, nope, they aren't. That's good news for lawyers, really, as it means that they weren't drawn to the profession as it attracts melancholics or something.
Of course, it's also bad in that it means that something else is causing that blue mood in the profession, assuming that its really there. It might not be.
There's been who have studied this and claim that all the data on it is really false as it relies on statistical self reporting, which is unreliable. Indeed, it suffers from an odd sort of confirmation bias that really sets all such data way off. It may be, indeed, that not only is the population of lawyers no different in psychological make up than anyone else, but that the entire concept that they're more prone to the funk isn't correct either. I've seen at least one lawyer argue that in a state bar journal somewhere.
Having said that, what statistical data we can really actually draw suggest that there is something going on. Lawyers definitely, according to statistics (again) are more likely to suffer from depression and a host of actual psychological ailments, such as alcohol and drug addiction. If lawyers mental make up isn't any different from anyone else's, that suggest something about their line of work is. Frankly, that's fairly obvious.
Anyhow, the person who did the seminar reported that the number one thing that seemed to make lawyer well being better was. . . vacations.
Lawyers are like everyone else in this respect as well, although a lot of the ones I know are very good about taking vacations. Americans as a whole, however are not, even though its one of our main industries. Statistically Americans leave a lot of vacation days on the table every year. They just don't think they can afford to take them.
And there is indeed something really wrong about that.
So, anyhow, the simple but apparently effective solution for lots of folks, and I dare say it would include Americans as a whole, who are depressed at record numbers, is. . . take your vacations.
Naniwa no bessō akebono no zu (Sunrise at the vacation cottage in Naniwa).
It may be just me, but I love it. It's fascinating. Particularly for a language such as English, which is derived from so many others.
**The value of such studies is frankly questionable. One of the other things it questioned was owning a house. Well, I've rented and I've owned and owning is definitely much, much better.
***This was the Finnish ethos up until probably the 1950s, and it reflected the harsh economic conditions of the time. Finnish men, but not women, died accordingly at relatively young ages.
American cemetery at Belleau Wood, photograph taken on August 25, 1919.
On this day in 1919, a photographer was at work taking photographs of the recent American battle ground of Belleau Wood.
View of Chateau Thierry and the famous bridge where the Marine stopped the Hun hoards on their march on Paris, taken on August 25, 1919.
Things picked up a bit on this Monday, August 25, 1919, for the Motor Transport Convoy, although they now suffered a mechanical failure beyond their ability to address.
Other soldiers, much further south, had come back across the border. The most significant US incursion into Mexico since the Punitive Expedition had come to an end.
As with the last, this incursion had featured the use of aircraft fairly extensively. In this case, the press was reporting that aircraft had proven decisive by resulting in the deaths from a strafing run by U.S. planes. The expedition had also started, of course, due to aircraft when U.S. airmen had been held hostage by Mexican bandits.
Also occurring on this day was another significant aircraft related event. The predecessor to British Airways, Aircraft Transport & Travel Ltd., commenced the first regularly scheduled commercial channel hopping flight. That early ride between London and Paris must have been a bit frightening to the passengers, but clearly pointed the direction of the future.
The flight was made in an Airco DH16, an plane that was converted from the wartime DH9. It could hold four passengers.
North of the border, in Alberta, the 1919 Calgary Stampede commenced, but this year it was termed "The Victory Stampede". The artwork of Charles Russell played a part in the big event that year.
If that seems surprising, Russell painted quite a few paintings with Alberta themes or for Alberta ranchers. The ranch culture of Montana and Alberta were closely connected.
The first Calgary Stampede had been held in 1912. This was only the second. So it was not only first post war Stampede, but a real resumption and continuation of something that may not have become the big rodeo event that it did.
Maps and governments continued to change in Eastern Europe. Today, the first Lithuanian Soviet Republic came to an end due to Polish occupation of the principal portions of its territory. The USSR would reestablish it as a puppet state in 1939.
Harry Houdini was performing, but on film, in a movie featuring him that was released on this Monday.
Jenny on the Job was a World War Two series of work posters aimed at women who hadn't occupied industrial jobs prior to the war.
A poster like this reveals more about the era, to an informed viewer, than we might at first suspect suppose.
To start with its important to know that women had in fact worked in industrial occupations during wartime before. The idea that this was a novelty during World War Two is completely erroneous. Women were employed in large numbers in industry during World War One and it may be argued that they were at least as important, and even perhaps more important, in the First World War in that capacity as compared to the Second. So why would any sort of reminder about how to eat be necessary?
Well, while the war did put an end to the Depression with finality, and the post war spending spree brought in floods of domestic machinery into the household, greatly reducing the labor that had been associated with maintaining a household almost overnight, some of this change had started to come in, slowly, after the Great War. As we've also noted, World War One did cause a leap in technological advancement that saw a lot of technologies that were coming into their own prior to the war really advance during it. Domestic machinery wasn't really part of that but what did occur was a social development that is somewhat associated with technology that had a direct impact on women and young men, introducing for the first time the concept of a sort of late teenage, early 20s, youth period in which individuals of that age weren't immediately burdened with adult responsibilities. That really came into the forefront in the 1920s, but it was also heavily arrested by the Great Depression.
Be that as it may, these small beginnings were enough of beginnings that by the 1930s not all American women were as fully dedicated on a daily basis to heavy domestic labor as they once were. We can't go too far with this, but we can say that this was occurring. So really for the first time we start to have middle class women, and for that matter a significant number of middle class men, whose daily tasks were not as physically demanding as they only recently had been. And that sort of introduces the modern era, in a very early way, of appearance.
If we think of it, particularly in the case of women, we'll note that fashions, as we've already addressed, for women have always changed exceedingly rapidly, but we'll also note that its really the 1930s when women's fashion's begin to be recognizable to us. This isn't to say that if a woman wore a typical daily wear type dress from the 1930s today it wouldn't look odd, it would. But if a woman wore a dress from the 1920s, she'd appear to be in costume as opposed to attempting to affect a bit of an old fashioned look.
With this a sort of modern standard of female beauty, roughly speaking, also started to come in. This is so much the case that the pinup girl of the 1940s really remains with us and on odd occasion you'll see people still attempting to duplicate that appearance in artistic depictions of one kind or another. Perhaps most oddly, 1940s and 1950s style pinup girls, which are not the same, show up quite a bit in modern tattoos including tattoos sported by women. That's a sort of homage to the appearance standards of the 40s and 50s in a really odd way, as by those standards of course a woman would never have been tattooed.
Anyhow, as part of all of this, including the move by large numbers of people from rural life into town life, we started to see the introduction of an era when eating, and in particular eating lunch, wasn't what it was. Farm workers had typically eaten three large meals a day, and on a lot of farms and ranches they still do. Industrial laborers had up until the 1920s typically walked to work carrying their lunch . . and their tools, and they also consumed three pretty substantial sized meals. But office workers usually didn't do that, i.e., eat three big meals, and if they did, they'd soon find themselves gaining a substantial amount of weight. So in came light lunches, by the standards of the day.
When the war came in, a lot of people found themselves in industrial occupations that were unlike they work they'd done before. This included a lot of young women who had no doubt worked in at least their parents' homes, but who may not have done any kind of really routine heavy labor. By 1940 these new workers were used to what was becoming or had become the new American standard, which for many of them meant a very simple cereal based breakfast and a really light lunch. It didn't provide enough caloric intake for industrial occupations that still involved a lot of heavy labor.
On this day in 1919 the Motor Transport Convoy negotiated Shellbourne Pass.
Not too surprisingly, four wheel drive FWDs came through the best on this days' travel.
The unit made it to Ely, Nevada, after 77 miles over 8 hours, fairly good time by the standards of the convoy. They arrived mid afternoon after once again failing to to take a Sunday's day rest, and camped in a municipal campground that was already a destination for tourists, showing how quickly motor tourism was advancing in spite of the poor state of the roads and the primitive condition of the cars. Shoshone Indians, who have a very small reservation near Ely (which is not noted by the diarist) visited.
On the same day, pitcher Ray Caldwell was hit by lightening while pitching for the Cleveland Indians in a game against the Philadelphia Athletics. Caldwell was knocked unconscious for five minutes but upon being revived asked for the ball back and resumed playing.
He completed the game, having pitched 8.2 innings and threw the winning pitch. The blast of lightening knocked the hat off of the catcher and players and spectators at first thought that Caldwell might have been killed.
Caldwell was a great pitcher but was notoriously personally erratic, being an alcoholic and having, a self destructive streak. That would result in his having a shortened major league career, after which he played in the minors. His reputation as a drinker and a partyer was a deterrent to teams picking him up. He became a farmer, railroad employee and bartender in his later years and, in spite of his early life, lived to age 79.
Caldwell worked as a shipbuilder during World War One, an occupation taken up by a variety of baseball players as it allowed them to continue playing baseball rather than being conscripted into the Army.
In other news, American cavalry continued on in Mexico in search of bandits. Mexican Federal troops were reported to be engaged in the same activity.
The intervention was apparently causing speculation in Mexican newspapers about various ways that the U.S. might more fully intervene in Mexico.
This Sunday edition of the Cheyenne State Leader also featured an article about "Jap" immigration. A current newspaper would never use this pejorative slang term, but this was extremely common for newspapers of the era.
The paper also had an odd line about a woman whose "husband brings home the bacon" being "the better half of a good provider". That's is hard to discern now, but what it referred to was the reluctance of a lot of women to leave their wartime jobs and resume to traditional pre war roles. This was an issue at the time as it was felt that it was keeping men out of work, their traditional role.
Yes, although I sure hope that this thread isn't too active for awhile. However, as the Democrats have already announced that their first debate will be in June, 2019, I suppose its time to start this thread.
It seems like we just completed the 2018 election, because we did, and of course the 2016 election isn't all that far back. And that's why we're already on the 2020 election.
More than any election in modern history the results of the last Presidential election have simply not been accepted by a large percentage of the public. And at the same time, the President has never modified his conduct, as some hoped he would, to become "Presidential". As a result, the Democrats have been "resisting" the entire time, and now they're lining up to run in 2010.
And what a long line it is already.
So far the Democratic candidates are:
Michael E. Arth
Arth is a resident of the United Kingdom and has to be regarded as a gadfly.
Corey Booker
Booker is the vegen Senator from New Jersey. He's loud and brash from a region that seems to produce loud brash politicians that the region seemingly loves but which the rest of the country really does not.
Booker is a bit of a media darling with a media that's centered on the East Coast but he's very unlikely to be popular with Democrats outside of that region.
Harry Braun
Renewable energy consultant with no chance whatsoever.
Pete Buttigieg
Buttigieg is an openly homosexual mayor from Indiana in a race that seem to be featuring a collection of mayors. As a rust belt mayor, he comes from the part of the country which gave Trump early support, but his open gender orientation and his party would tend to indicate that he's on the leftward side of the party which the rest of the nation might not feel comfortable with.
Julian Castro
Castro is the Mayor of San Antonio. As a Texan he may have advantages that the other Democratic candidates may not
John Delaney
Delaney is a Congressman from Maryland.
Tulsi Gabbard
Gabbard is a Congressman from Hawaii.
Kirstin Gillibrand
Gillibrand is a Senator from New York, making her yet another New Yorker in politics. There seems to be an unending supply of New York Presidential hopefuls.
Kamala Harris
Harris is a Senator from California. She's well known but has some baggage, apparently, that she'll have to overcome.
Amy Klobuchar
Klobuchar is a Senator from Minnesota.
Ken Nwadike Jr.
Nwadike is a film maker from California. He stands no chance.
Elizabeth Warren
Warren is a Senator from Massachusetts and a former Harvard professor who likely stands no chance. She was a popular name for the Presidency for quite some time, but her bolt is basically shot in a race that is full of well known names that aren't as tainted as hers and which are younger than she is in an era that actually seems to be turning towards younger candidates. I suspect that Warren will remain in the race for a long time, but I'd give her little chance of success.
Robby Wells
Wells is a former college football coach who has previouslybeen associated with the Constitution Party, which makes his running in the current Democratic Party rather odd.
Marianne Williamson
Williamson is a spiritual teacher from California and stands no chance.
Andrew Yang
Yang is an entrepreneur who stands no chance.
A really early candidate, Richard Ojeda, has already dropped out.
Democrats have tacked enormously to the left since Trump was elected in away that they have not done since the late 1960s. There's a real gamble in doing that as the electorate may very well not be doing that. Anger with Trump in the Democratic camp doesn't necessarily equate with joining the hard left, but the running Democrats seem to have largely assumed that, so far.
There's some candidates that people are waiting to see if they will emerge. Joe Biden is chief among them. But, while nobody will agree with this, I think that the field is wide open enough that Hillary Clinton may try one more time. She's come back again and again, and it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Republicans
Usually an incumbentPresident is safe from challenges inside of his own party, but there's nothing "usual" about Donald Trump. There's been at least some discontent with Trump the entire time he's been President and it'll be interesting to see if the GOP his able to hold thing together going into the 2020 election.
Here's how things are so far:
Trump and Pence, presumably.
But they'll likely have at least some GOP opposition. Indeed, they already do.
Bill Weld.
Weld is the former governor of Massachusetts and ran as the Libertarian candidate in 2016.
An interesting potential candidate is Ben Sasse from Nebraska, a frequent Trump critic who is well liked. Sasse is clearly positioning himself to run for the Presidency and nearly did after Trump was nominated, but he is likely also calculating whether to run in 2020 or 2024. The choice will be critical as if Trump appears weak, 2020 will be his best bet and not 2024. If the Democrats put a President in 2020, Sasse's chance my have passed forever.
Independents
This race may be the first one in a long time in which there's some serious independent candidates. Indeed, with the Democrats tacking to the left, many of the third party candidates who are normally to the left of the Democrats may simply choose to attempt to run there and at least one of the candidates from the right who is normally in a third party is running in the GOP race. So the emergence of middle of the road independents may be a feature, and might even be a realistic feature, of this race. Howard Schultz of Starbucks has been mentioned a great deal in this context.
So they're off and running. Let's hope we don't have too many updates of this thread until 2020. I think the entire country is tired of politics, by and large.
Bernie Sanders, late of Vermont but originally from New York has joined the Democratic contest.
This is no surprise. Indeed, it was inevitable, but frankly it shouldn't have occurred. Bernie did much better than anyone would have expected in the last Presidential primary season and he may have actually have been the nominee, maybe, but for the fact that the Democrats have somewhat of a rigged system, but his bolt is shot by now.
Sanders is 77 years old and therefore is actually the pre baby boom generation. Technically Sanders if from the "Silent Generation", which my father and maybe my mother (depending on where you draw the lien) was from who are regarded as having focused on careers and family over activism and therefore were "silent". There's a lot to admire about Sanders personally, but he's obviously not silent and quite the activist, which is what attracted people to him in the first place.
But he's way up and years and the field he plowed is one in which he (and oddly enough Trump) have effectively broken the ground in and there's a bunch of younger plow mules in it now. Sanders getting back into the race really simply contributes a certain element of pathos to it. He ought to have stayed out.
In colonial times gathering, including polling, featured beer. Now a Democrat proposes that a brewer prevail at the polls.
And a crowded field gets a bit more crowded.
Colorado Governor and former Mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper, jointed the race as a Democratic candidate.
Hickenlooper was fairly popular in both political offices. He came to Colorado as a geologist in the early 1980s and was laid off in the big petroleum decline of that period. Rather than leave, he started a brewpub which was successful and went into politics after that.
In other election news, Hillary Clinton claims she won't be running. We'll see.
Former New York Mayor Bloomberg, who is a Democrat who was once a Republican, and who is super wealthy, has also announced that he's staying out. The Punditry believe that this positions Joe Biden to run.
_________________________________________________________________________________ Updated, March 11, 2019
Will Democrats go with the Joe they know?
If Joe Biden isn't running, that will be the surprising news.
Biden, last week in an interview, asked if he was running for the Presidency. He didn't say that he was, but he did say that he had an announcement coming up and "don't be surprised".
Michael Bloomberg and Senator Sherrod Brown, both of whom were presumed to be candidates with Brown all but saying he was, have now dropped out to make room for Biden.
This really throws a curve ball into the hopes of the large field of candidates. With the Democrats leaping towards the left against a latent effort to lash them to the decks of the middle, by more established members of the party, Biden stands to complete that task and secure the nomination. Indeed, should he run, my prediction is that he'll take the nomination.
This isn't a comment on the race per se, but how odd the political times have really gotten.
I don't usually watch the Sunday news shows on Sunday, as I'm busy on Sunday doing other things. I do listen (not watch) them later, by podcast. So I catch up on them a day or two or three after they run. That's why my commentary on them is rarely perfectly timely.
At least Meet The Press brought something into sharp focus which has already been pretty obvious. The Democrats are undergoing a struggle that the GOP did about four to six years ago in that they face an upstart insurgency that they can't control. Theirs is evolving, moreover, much more quickly, and comes at a slightly different time in American demographics.
Truth be known the Democrats have long bought off o the thesis that demographics are history and that history was on their side. The problem with that thesis is, as we've noted in one of our laws of history, is that you never know what side history is on until its history. History is fickle that way. Anyhow, the Democrats have sort of gleefully thought that as certain minority demographics rise in the country they will; 1) remain an unchanged identifiable demographic which; 2) will always be Democratic.
Of course, things never really remain that way. People keep being people and pretty soon the strong ethnic identify becomes weaker over time and, as people's fortunes rise, their political economic views decrease in favor of differing economic concerns and philosophical views. There's no reason to really believe, for example, that at some point the inherently conservative social views of Hispanics won't override their economic views.
Anyhow, a really remarkable feature of what's been occurring in this shift is that a Democratic political class that is solidly Baby Boomer is getting whacked upside the head by the Millennial and the Sub Millennials and they don't like it. Meet the Press was fully of commentary on how Millenial politicians like Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez have got to learn to respect their "wise" elders like Nancy Pelosi.
Pelosi the Wise? Many millennials are giving that the m'eh.
I'm not making that up. I heard that very comment, more than once, by the pundits on Meet the Press.
Now, make no mistake. I'm not endorsing Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez here. I have lots of problems with a lot of her views. But I'm also not going to dismiss here the way that Nancy Pelosi basically has done.
And that hasn't worked for Pelosi. She dissed Oscasio-Cortez with her Green New Deal, and there are a lot of reasons to criticize that. But simply dissing it was politically stupid and not an example of wise sagism. And it didn't make Oscasio-Cortez crawl in and kiss her hand and submit. On the contrary, Oscasio-Cortez and her fellow travelers came out on the offensive and implicitly make Pelosi part of a political hit list they put together of candidates that they intend to politically drive under for being moderate, which is pretty much exactly how they've put it.
Alexandria Oscasio-Cortez. . not a Baby Boomer, not a moderate, and not going away.
Indeed, the Republicans, although certainly for at least partially cynical reasons, have done a much better job of adapting to the new political reality (which we'll get to below) than the Democrats, perhaps because they've suffered a base shift in recent years that is still tearing their party apart. Senior Republicans in Congress have recently been criticizing Oscario-Cortez's policies but in a serious way. Republicans started off with Reddit, Twitter and Facebook snits, but now they're running op-eds in major newspapers treating Oscasio-Cortez and her fellows as adults who need to be addressed.
Now, as noted, that's partially a calculated political move, and a risky one. Republicans, by doing that, are seeking to portray Oscasio-Cortez as the face of the Democratic Party. And by doing that, they may actually make her the late 20s face of the party at a point when a major demographic shift is about to happen in politics (more on that below), but that's only part of it. Part of it is that they've picked up on that shift quicker than the Democrats have and grasp it. They realize that she very well may be representative of a new age in politics, literally, if not necessarily philosophically.
Indeed, they should grasp it as they themselves nearly had a candidate in a younger generation, Marco Rubio, who will twenty years older than Oscasio-Cortez is still a good thirty years younger than Donald Trump and Nancy Pelosi. And they've been pondering demographics for awhile. They may actually see what's going on at the very time the Democrats seem to solidly believe that the Baby Boomers will be in power forever.
The irony of all of this was oddly pointed out last night when I stopped by PBS and caught a documentary featuring the performances of Peter, Paul and Mary at The Newport Folk Festival in 1963, 1964 and 1965. It was one of the PBS fundraising episodes and you could buy the CD (which I'm not about to do) and one of the hosts gushed about how watching this reminded all of us what it was like to be on the cusp of change at that time.
That was right after the song above played.
How thick with irony.
I'll be frank, I'm not a Peter, Paul and Mary fan. And I don't like this song either, which I regard as the self indulgent anthem of a generation. But the point is blistering. The generation that sang that song demanded to be heard immediately and it pretty much was.
Come mothers and fathers Throughout the land And don't criticize What you can't understand Your sons and your daughters Are beyond your command Your old road is Rapidly agin'. Please get out of the new one If you can't lend your hand For the times they are a-changin'.
Hmmm. . . not like that generation seemed to be very willing to listen to their wise old elders.
Nancy Pelosi is part of that generation. So is Trump for that matter. And Chuck Shumer. And Joe Biden. Nancy Pelosi actually attended JFK's inauguration.
Come senators, congressmen Please heed the call Don't stand in the doorway Don't block up the hall For he that gets hurt Will be he who has stalled There's a battle outside And it is ragin'. It'll soon shake your windows And rattle your walls For the times they are a-changin'.
History, as they say, doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
The Boomers did a good job of demanding attention as a generation in the 1960s, amplified self indulgence as a virtue in the 1970s, and can be legitimately criticized as not having all that good of job of running things since. You cannot blame every single member of a generation for anything, and there are vast numbers of Boomers who ran contrary to the spirit of their times at any one time. Indeed, part of that expressed itself in the election of Donald Trump.
In the 2020 General Election for the first time in decades Boomers will be outnumbered in the voting population by younger generations, some of which, such as my own, aren't young any more either. The collective mass of non Boomers in the voting population doesn't see things all the same way by any means, but there are some common threats running through it all the way from the bottom end of it at age 18 up to the upper end in the mid 50s, a bit cohort that has lived in the shadow of a demographic that has held political sway from some point in the 1970s until the present day and which has been basically told to agree with their political elders as soon as they became elders. Some of those groups are never going to be heard from as their views were so swamped by the massive generational cohort of the Boomers. But the youngest generations in that group will be heard from and, like the Boomers in the 60s, are demanding to be heard right now. Boomers telling them to sit down and be quiet are fooling themselves.
None of which means that politicians like Biden don't have a good chance. Biden is older, to be sure. So is Sanders. So the evidence is good that younger voters, who seem to like both of these candidates, if they are in the Democratic camp, are willing to consider older politicians, including Boomer and Pre Boomers, but they are impatient and tired of the status quo. As noted, that was part of what helped Trump come up last go around, and Sanders voters and Trump voters oddly identified with each other, even if those two candidates do not.
Picking up where we left off a couple of days ago (and with no new announcements to report) the other problem the Democrats were struggling with last week was what to do with a problem named Ilhan Omar.
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar.
Congresswoman Omar is the second Islamic Congressman from her district in Minnesota. Keith Ellison was the first, and in fact was both the first Muslim to be elected to Congress and the first African American to be elected from Minnesota. But Ellison fits into a distinctly different category than Omar.
Ellison was born in the United States and was a convert to Islam. Muslim converts in the United States were of all stripes (its arguable that this has changed since 2001) but the notable about them is that there was a distinct strain of Islam that was informed by the Black Muslim movement of the mid 20th Century. That movement was militant, and some of it still is, but those who converted to Islam influenced by that movement, who were often African Americans, were not to the same extent. Often there was an underlying ethno political aspect to it that was built on the mistaken thesis that Islam was the predominant religion of region from which African slaves had been imported from. This is in fact in error, slaves tended to actually be animist or sometimes Catholic, not Muslim. Africa is a big continent and its not really safe to assume what people are or were simply based on their being African, but that was a common belief at the time.
Be that as it may, Ms. Omar really is an African and in fact was born in 1981 in Mogadishu, that Somalian town that's become the very emblem of what a failed state means. She entered the United States at age 14 as a refugee and became a U.S. citizen at age 17.
Now, that's generally the sort of story that Americans like in one fashion or another. A refugee child comes to the United States and makes good. But it symbolizes something larger than that.
Current Americans are aware that the United States has been undergoing an epic level of both legal and illegal immigration. Rates now vastly exceed those which were legally allowed prior to 1975. The Democrats were instrumental in that change and, moreover, were instrumental, thanks to one of the very rarely passed legislative efforts of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, to changing the immigration system from one that favored the relatives of the already admitted, largely from Europe, to the underprivileged around the globe.
A person can debate that one way or another, but one thing that developed over time, and which we've noted before, is that both parties came to have a cynical role in the ongoing high rate of immigration, which most Americans no longer support for a variety of reasons. Indeed, a recent article in the Atlantic, which takes a fairly liberal view of things, pleaded with the Progressives to greatly reduce legal immigration. In the case of the Democrats, they came to hold the view that all immigrants were future Democratic voters.
There are real reasons not to hold that assumption correct but there are also reasons that the Democrats could assume that, at least for the short term. Dating back all the way to the post Mexican War period, immigrants have in fact tended to be Democrats for economic reasons. Democrats, no matter what their states views on any one thing have been, have tended to very strongly back the local economic needs of immigrant populations, even to the detriment of native poor demographics. Most immigrant populations, in turn, tend to value economic concerns over all others, for logical and natural reasons. But to be fair, that relationship has also often informed Democratic politics on various things on a greater level.
The problem with this turns out to be that the greater diversity of the migrant pool, which has very much increased in diversity in the last thirty years, at some point begins to mach one population against another. This first became notable in the riots following the Rodney King matter in California some years ago in which a primary target of African American rioters became migrant Koreans. This had nothing to do with race but with economics, however.
Now, however, we're seeing the first real instant of irreconcilable views both of ethnicity.
That migrant populations have their own cultures and look back upon things occurring in their native lands long after the original migrants have passed on is well known. The famous example of Irish Americans is a good one, as Irish Americans basically funded the Irish Republican cause long after there was any way to rationalize it. Some still look on Ireland in that fashion to a fairly absurd extent today.
Indeed, Irish Americans are a really good example of this as the one and only Catholic President we've ever had was from an Irish American family. No prior Catholic candidate was able to succeed because of the Protestant assertion that Catholics were inherently loyal to a foreign power, the Vatican. John F. Kennedy made a basic bargain with the electorate to ignore his faith to obtain the office, something that brought Catholics into the mainstream but which has also enormously harmed them to the present day. Mitt Romney seemed to be creeping up on making a similar bargain with the electorate for the LDS when he was running.
No Muslim candidate has made that bargain so far and it might not really matter if they do, as Ms. Omar has brought into focus what happens when the demographic pool becomes so large that competing views can't really be accommodated.
Those comments, which she has now made on two occasions, make it plain that she holds a fairly hostile view of Israel. Negative views on Israel are not unique in Islamic communities that have North African origin. They are probably not particularly common among the old Muslim converts of the native born in the United States, although post 9/11 there have been converts to radical Islam, although the numbers are no doubt quite small. It can't be said and shouldn't be that Ms. Omar is radical. She must not be, or she wouldn't be in Congress at all, as radical Islamic women do not run for office. But she's obviously very sincere in her Islamic faith in a fashion that Rashida Tlaib, another Muslim woman elected to Congress this cycle, is not. This is not to say that Tlaib, who is genuinely a political radical (she's a member of a body called the Democratic Socialist of America), is not sincere, it's just of a different stripe. Tlaib is foul mouthed and doesn't dress in a traditional fashion, so she fits more into the radical demographic in the United States and in Islamic regions in a way that Omar doesn't.
At any rate, for the first time ever, the Democrats are now faced with the fact that large demographic groups within their party are at odds with each other and with the larger American concept of getting along with everyone. In this case, moreover, the new demographic, which really didn't exist in any appreciable numbers until quite recently, is clearly at odds with the views of American Jews.
Jews have been an identifiable American demographic back to the country's founding but really started coming into the country in large numbers in the late 19th Century. Faced with oppression everywhere, the United States, which is not without its own native born anti-Semites, is none the less the nation that is the least anti Semitic in the world and the most friendly to Israel. Member of the Jewish faith are found in every party, but traditionally the Democratic Party has been the party that they most identified with. Now the Democrats find this old identifiable demographic finding itself clearly at odds with a new one. And Democrats aren't doing a good job of handling it.
The Democratic Party hasn't been able to silence Omar who has kept on speaking. Indeed, Omar and Tlaib (who has said nothing anti Semitic) won't be silent, and are like Oscasio-Cortez in that fashion. This left the Democrats trying to condemn what they said, but fearful of upsetting the new Islamic demographic, they simply condemned all sorts of prejudice, which caused Omar to come right out and declare that to be a victory, a declaration that had some justification.
We don't know how this will play out, but it'll play out in some fashion that's going to upset somebody. A prior example would be that of Cuban Americans who were solidly Democratic back in the 60s but who are solidly Republican now. The views of both parties came to strongly influence their views and that Hispanic demographic is an undeniably Republican one that was once Democratic. The Democrats now face a tricky situation that could end up being a huge distraction for them in the 2020 election, and so far there's no good evidence that they've figured out how to address it. _________________________________________________________________________________ March 16, 2019 Our recent focus here on Democrats and their internal divisions shouldn't, we'd note, be taken to mean that the GOP has broken free of them. It's been apparent the entire Trump presidency that the GOP is sharply divided between those in the GOP who support Trump and those who despise him. And the Trump supporters in office are themselves divided between those who support him for political expediency and those who truly support him. There's huge philosophical divided in the Republican Party. The amazing thing has been that the GOP hasn't split apart or collapsed under the strain, which is a tribute to those who control it at the top. People have been praising, or at least were, Nancy Pelosi for keeping things all together but like him or not its really Mitch McConnell who has done political yeoman's work in that regards recently. The question all along has been at what cost this unity has been purchased. Political pundits have held the entire time that this was going to destroy the GOP long term, and certainly the Republicans suffered in the last election. Be that as it may, Trump's base has remained steadfastly loyal, so much so that President Trump himself can't really stray much from his base without suffering real political consequences. All of this came to a head recently over the use of emergency funds to be used on the border wall. As everyone knows, Trump declared a State of Emergency to appropriate funds unilaterally. The GOP voted to disestablish the State of Emergency yesterday. Trump is going to (and maybe already has) veto that measure. There aren't the votes to override the vote. Wyoming's two Senators voted against the bill, fwiw. The entire State of Emergency law is a threat to democracy in the first place and emblematic of the complete lack of courage in Congress. Since the start of the 20th Century Congress has slowly allowed the Oval Office to co-opt its power and has, at this point, largely ceded huge aspects of its Constitutional duties to the Executive. Congress is supposed to control the purse strings, not the President. The U.S. got through two World Wars without an Emergency appropriations power of that type existing. When the Japanese struck in the Pacific, President Roosevelt went to Congress for authority to act, that being in the form of a Declaration of War. When the United States intervened in Mexico in 1916, President Wilson felt his powers so constrained that mobilized National Guardsmen, who were believed to face the real threat of imminent war, were not allowed to cross the border with the Regular Army and he had to go to Congress to ask for the size of the military to be increased. Indeed, while comparisons of this type can go much too far, it's well worth remembering that the Roman Republic fell to the Roman Empire through the actions of the Roman Senate. The Roman Senate had a policy of creating Dictators for emergencies. Finally, they just loss the ability to take that step through their own largess and the Emperors came in. The Congress of the United States has gone a long ways towards making the President some sort of elected Emperor. It's time for it to knock that off. All of this is the case whether there's an emergency or not. The President has plenty of legitimate powers he can exercise. Allowing a President to redirect funds, something that wasn't need in World War One, the Great Depression, World War Two, the Korean War or the Vietnam War, all of which were legitimate emergencies, is going to far. Many Republicans in office seem to realize this. If we get a Democratic President in 2020, or 2024, and this hasn't been reeled back in, there will surely be new emergencies that those who failed to address this will be plenty upset about. Speaking of Democrats and the President, this week Beto O'Rourke announced for the office. This was long expected but its hard not to see O'Rourke's announcement at this point as an effort to grab the limelight before Joe Biden steps in. I suspect it'll fail. For whatever reason, O'Rourke is one of the Democrats who attracted a lot of attention early on but who is really fading now. Prior to the vast number of announcements O'Rourke seemed like the Great Young Hope of certain Democrats, but now there are candidates every bit as youthful who are running for the office and even younger Democrats getting attention in Congress. O'Rourke doesn't fit in with any of them very well as he either seems really superficial in comparison to them, something that's emphasized by his childish nickname, or he seems old in comparison to the. He's already in trouble for statements he made in his youth and I suspect his Texas star has already faded. ________________________________________________________________________________ March 26, 2019. The all the eggs in one basket edition.
We're taught, from our earliest years, the cliche that we "shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket". But that appears to be exactly what the Democrats have done. The last two Presidents, if we include Trump in that set of parameters, have been subject to the wildest reactions from their opponents. President Obama, from the onset of his election, was accused repeatedly of being a Socialist and a secret alien (including, in that latter charge, by our current President). The result was predictable. The extreme level of personal accusation in some quarters didn't work against him, and while he lost ground in Congress, he remained in office for a second term. So, his being a Democrat, the Democrats surely learned by that, didn't they? Nope, not at all. Trumps election brought a visceral reaction from Democrats that was, amazingly, even more extreme than the extreme reaction that President Obama's election brought in some quarters of the Republican Party. The party as a whole has lurched to the left, indeed ran to the left, and now even left wing old ossificants such as Nancy Pelosi find them self out-lefted by both old up and coming pre Boomers, like Sanders and young up and coming Millenials like AoC, the latter of whom is on the cover of Time magazine this week as "The Phenom". Well, the predictable, and predicted by me, has occurred. The Mueller investigation ended not with a bang followed by impeachment, but with a legal conclusion that wouldn't support one. And it turns out that the Mueller report, more than anything else, is what the Democrats had going into the election.
The reaction to that has been predictable. Trump is doing victory laps around the Oval Office. Democrats are crying in their free trade, decaffeinated, gluten free, free range, green tea. Democratic media figures who were counting on something explosive have been flopping about on the decks of the media like fish gasping for air on a dock. Republican media figure who were all steeled to condemn Mueller are now full of praise for the stalwart Marine veteran of the Vietnam War.
Of course, some Democrats just can't let it go. In a week in which sober media commentators have noted that Mueller's report makes impeachment impossible, NPR came out with this headline:
Impeachment Just Got Less Likely And 6 Other Takeaways From The Barr Letter
Less likely? Try impossible.
The New Yorker declares:
On the Mueller Investigation, the Barr Letter Is Not Enough
The New Yorker is correct, for what its worth, but the secret hope that Mueller some how unrings the bell in the report is just piling more eggs in the basket that's oozing yoke out the bottom. The report will be released. . . but the fact that President Trump is among those demanding that probably tells you all you need to know about what it says.
Now, we don't know what all is in the report and Trump's troubles in this quarter are not over. There are still investigations independent of Mueller's pending in New York. But this ship has in fact sailed and its' not going to come back into port. Democratic hopes that this entire story revives and is entertained by a public that's sick of it are hopes in vain. People were very tired of this entire matter and the fact that it came out the way it did means that average people who don't have posters of Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow and AoC up on their walls are mighty glad that it is.
Which means that the Democrats really need to come up with talking points that just don't sound like screams to man the barricades in Barcelona circa the 1930s.
A sober political associate of mine points to Joe Biden and Beto O'Rourke in this vein. I've discounted O'Rourke, who I feel is the American equivalent of Justin Trudeau and just as unqualified the Oval Office as Trudeau is to hold his, which is to say unqualified, but he has a point. Maybe O'Rourke is more politically savvy than his childish nickname would suggest. At any rate, Biden was already positioning himself as the "old" non AoC progressive and O'Rourke really doesn't posti himself as a progressive at all.
So the question now is can the Democrats adjust. Goodness knows that they have plenty of time in which to do so. But by the same token, having taken a hard and fast "resistance" position now for three years, assuming a mid course change would be assuming a bit much.
The fact that we haven't posted here since March 26 might lead some to believe, or perhaps hope, that the fields had stabilized and perhaps started to narrow.
Nope. That hasn't happened.
Of course since then we had the weird spectacle of Joe Biden apologizing/not apologizing and getting it while not getting it on his creepy habit of touching women in what he seems to feel is a fatherly way and which they don't like. When a couple of women brought this to the nation's attention Joe dug the hole a little deeper by seemingly being unable to really understand what the whole thing was about, and then suddenly he looked and sounded much older. . . and indeed, he is old. His start may have faded nearly as soon as it had illuminated. He hasn't recovered yet.
In a different example of not getting it, Ilhan Omar made yet another statement in a public speech that is of a type that's difficult not to regard as anti Semitic. The President stepped down to the occasion and Tweeted about it, which he should not have done. A Democratic spokesman on Meet The Press simultaneously tried to say he'd heard her talk and found nothing wrong with and then when confronted with what she's said, soft condemned it. All of this does several things, but what it amplifies is that there in fact now regional demographics in the Democratic base that in fact no longer hold pro Israeli views and in fact are hostile to the Jewish nation. The Democrats don't want to alienate them, and so they're trying not to do that while not appear to be anti Semitic. Trying to find a path through the swamp, Democratic left wing hero of the moment AoC claimed that attention to Omar and herself was an attempt to silence women of color in Congress, which is absurd. Those who suggested that the President shouldn't tweet about it in the fashion in which he did, which was inflammatory, were correct however, in my view.
Of course, to add to that, I don't think Presidents should tweet at all.
The President took to his Twitter account to suggest yesterday that perhaps the French should resort to air tankers to put out the fire in the Notre Dame de Paris Cathedral, a bizarre suggestion that only serves to amplify in all sorts of ways the unnatural unreal world in which we live in.
Mike Gravel of Alaska announced his candidacy/non candidacy on April 2. Gravel is a former Senator from Alaska. Gravel is quixotically a left wing politician in a very right wing state and is 89 years old. He claims to be running only so he can appear in debates and push the discourse to the left. His candidacy is going nowhere.
Tim Ryan, a Democratic Congressman from Ohio, came out two days later with a strong push aimed at rust belt workers and a vision to revitalize American industry with new technologies. He made Meet The Press last weekend and makes a very appealing and cogent pitch for revitalizing industry by marrying it with new technologies in new fields in new industries.
Ryan has been in Congress for awhile, and was one of the Democratic Congressmen who signed a statement in 2006 identifying themselves as Catholic and declaring allegiance to Catholic principals. Nancy Pelosi was also one, so clearly some of those who executed that document have hugely elastic principals. Ryan so far has only come out on a singular economic issue, although he was widely talked about before he announced, so it'll be interesting to see if he keeps tacking more to the middle while at the same time sounding progressive in other areas.
Eric Swalwell from a Congressional district in California announced on April 8. Not surprisingly, he's tacking to the left with proposals that probably are popular in his district but not elsewhere. His candidacy is going to go nowhere.
Bill Weld, who was already running and who is mentioned above, made his candidacy official on April 15, tax day.
If this seems like a crazy number of candidates, it is. Democrats are careful to state each time that they're celebrating the interest in their party, but there are now so many candidates that the oddity of it is that attention now must fall, by default, solely on those who are real front runners. So a lot of these candidates simply aren't going to be heard from and will disappear from the race as it progresses.
_________________________________________________________________________________ April 17, 2019
Not posts for a long time and then two in two days? Yep.
This time we post on a local race.
The Tribune is reporting that Representative Cheney is off to a good start on fundraising for her next reelection campaign.
Yes, next campaign.
There's something massively wrong with a system in which fundraising for the next campaign, even if we're dealing with a two year term, starts less than four months into a term that was just won.
I'm not signaling Cheney out in this. I'm just nothing it. But that's really fouled up. American political campaigns are absurdly long to start with and they're effectively becoming year around permanent campaigns. That might make sense if we had a parliamentary system in which elections could happen at any moment, particularly if we had one like the Italian parliament which never makes it through their terms, but in our system that's a huge symbol that the system needs fixing.
The nation would be much better off if the campaigns of all types were shorter, perhaps four months or so in length, and if nobody could raise a dime in that effort until that period commenced. That would require some sort of Constitutional Amendment, however, and that's not going to happen any time soon. The fact that were in a permanent campaign season, however, is something that really ought to disturb us. Almost no nation that has had that occurred has endured it well.
_________________________________________________________________________________ April 19, 2019
The report has two volumes. The first one deals with the Russians and the Trump campaign. It concludes that while the Russians did interfere with the 2016 Presidential Campaign, the Trump campaign did not engage in a conspiracy with them.
That was the big topic being investigated early on. And Trump comes though clean on that one.
Then then there's the obstruction of justice matter, which is dealt with in volume 2.
Not exactly a real exoneration:
IV. CONCLUSION
Because we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgement, we did not draw ultimate conclusions about the Presiden's conduct. The evidence we obtained about the President?s actions and intent presents difficult issues that would need to be resolved if we were making a traditional prosecutorial judgment. At the same time, if we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment. Accordingly, while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.
So this issue will clearly live on. Here you have to be a bit amazed a la Nixon and Watergate. While varying theories abound (I've even heard one that the break in to the Watergate Hotel was to obtain evidence that Democratic Party was receiving funding from the Red Chinese and then Nixon kept that a secret from the public for the good of the nation), the general belief is that Nixon didn't order the break in, but he did engage in the cover up, which was a dumb move. Mueller didn't say that Trump attempted to obstruct justice, it just doesn't draw a conclusion, and it is plain that he did maneuver against the investigation, when, based on the conclusion in volume no. 1, he didn't have to.
_________________________________________________________________________________ April 20, 2019
Having now heard the NPR commentary on the Mueller report, it's almost impossible to imagine this not being the principal topic in the election going forward. I haven't read the two volume 400 page report, but the synopsis of it from reporters is pretty shocking.
As everyone knows, Mueller concluded that there was no conspiracy regarding the election that was undertaken with the Russians, but there was plenty of discussion on this and that within the campaign. What the Trump campaign was thinking is baffling. Trump himself comes across extremely poorly, and it appears to be the case that he may have been saved from a direct accusation of obstruction of justice by the fact that his staff did not always follow his directions, something that's been talked about in press before.
During the last campaign I noted that by electing Trump the GOP had taken a course where it was going to have to be identified with him. At this point that risk now seems paramount indeed and this will be hard to overcome in the upcoming campaign. At least one Republican is trying to separate out already, however, that being Utah Senator Mitt Romney. It'll be interesting to see if Romney is positioning himself to run against Trump in the primary. The level of outcry over the Mueller report's contents may determine that. Trump has weathered the storms that have kicked up in his Presidency so far, but this one he might not. The topic of impeachment has come back up, although it appears that it is unlikely to occur. What isn't unlikely to occur is hard Democratic focus on what's occurred, which would seem to be hard to overcome.
_________________________________________________________________________________ April 22, 2019.
Seth Moulton, a member of Congress from Massachusetts, announced he was running for President today thereby adding to the already enormous Democratic field.
Moulton is a Harvard graduate with a degree in physics who served as a Marine Corps officer after obtaining his degree. He has the usual slate of "progressive" ideas currently symbolizing the Democratic left.
The amazing thing is that with a field this crowded candidates are still entering. Joe Biden is expected to enter the Democratic race officially this week, which pundits believe will jump him to the top of the Democratic pack irrespective of his recent troubles, but none the less lesser known candidates continue to get into the crowded bus to run against the better known ones.
In big news in a local election, Senator Enzi, age 75, announced he will not run for reelection in 2020.
This means that the 2020 Senatorial race in Wyoming is going to be a really big deal.
My early prediction is that Liz Cheney will seek to move into Enzi's seat. For a very long time there's been a strong tradition in the state of the Congressmen moving into the Senate under these circumstances. That would, of course, make the race for the Congressional seat a hot one as well.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes in the current political climate. My guess is that the race for these seats may fairly strongly resemble the recent race for the Governor's office. Indeed, in terms of a wild card, if there was a candidate who could simply walk into this seat, if he wanted to, it would be recently retired Governor Mead. There's no indication that Mead intends to come out of retirement, but if he's reading the papers, the thought has to be crossing his mind.
The Tribune gave two separate analytical stories on consecutive days regarding the upcoming race for the seat Senator Enzi will be vacating.
The first was a lengthy in depth analysis that came to much of the same conclusion that my entry immediately above did. That is, Cheney is likely to run and if she does, she'll take the seat. The Trib also mentioned Mead as a possibility. It mentioned Cynthia Lumis as well, which I did not, but she's definitely a possibility. Lumis retired from the House as her husband was very ill and dying. He's since passed away.
There's a lot of scenarios to play out here but one thing I suspect is that Cheney may not be particularly coordinated or even willing to coordinate with Mead or Lumis. Therefore what we shouldn't expect is for Mead or Lumis to go to Cheney with an intent to run and Cheney abstain from running. I suspect that Cheney knows now whether she's running or not, and I suspect she is. She'll not announce for a while, however, as that's been her in office pattern. Mead and Lumis aren't going to jump in immediately either, but if either one of them wants the office, they should likely announce before Cheney or at least let it be known that they'll likely run, as that will put pressure on Cheney not to run against them which would also cause the fight for the House to launch, which we've already noted would occur if Cheney runs for the Senate.
If Mead wants the office, he could have it. The same is true for Lumis. Indeed, if the GOP hasn't reached out to both in the hopes of securing an easy win without much effort followed by an easy run by Cheney for the House, it's being foolish.
The more recent article noted the possibility of a large field of candidates for the Senate seat. I don't see that being the case unless Mead, Lumis and Cheney all abstain from running for it, which I just don't see happening. If none of them did, I think that would be likely, and the race would resemble the recent Governor's race pretty closely.
On abstention, the Sunday article mentioned that Cheney might choose not to run in order to prevent the insertion of more political drama into the 2020 election. I just don't see that being a credible view. Cheney's seat in the House is now secure and her running for the Senate, which would almost certainly be a successful race, doesn't make the 2020 Presidential Race any more or less dramatic. At the most, it might mean that a Congressman who has risen up in the GOP surprisingly rapidly would be removed for a freshman House member, but given the the minority position of the House currently and that this will likely be the case in 2020, I can't see that being a real factor in her consideration. Indeed, it'd make more sense for her to use her rising stature to move to the Senate.
This is particularly the case if we consider that Cheney is ambitious and shows ever sign of trying to advance politically if she can. If limited to the House, which is no small limitation, she'll keep moving up GOP ranks there. But I'd be amazed if she wasn't constantly open to higher office, whatever that might mean.
So, again, my prediction right now is that Cheney will run for the Senate, but Mead and Lumis are thinking about it. My guess also is that the State's GOP is already trying to sort this out as if Mead or Lumis run, they need to try to get Cheney not to quickly. On the other hand, if Mead and Lumis aren't going to run, and Cheney is, they need to try to sort out who will run for the House. There's no obvious candidate for that right now, so it's highly likely that we'd see a big field for that race that would feature the same candidates who ran against her in her first run, combined with several who recently ran for Governor. And that's just in the GOP primary field. Gary Trauner, I suspect, is likely to be the Democratic candidate for the House or the Senate.
I managed to miss it, what with all going on, but New York City's Mayor Bill De Blasio announced he was running for the already extremely crowded Democratic nomination a few days ago.
De Blasio would be positioned on the far left of the Democratic field and will be regarded in most places as a gadfly. Born William Wilhelm Jr., De Blasio has made a name for himself in that regard, and that won't assist him in this campaign. While his determination to run in this year makes sense, as its the most left leaning Democratic field of all time, his policies and views are not likely to be a hit outside of the city where he's mayor.
Another Democratic announcer, Steve Bullock, is more likely to get attention elsewhere. Bullock is the Governor of Montana. Montana has surprisingly liberal politics, so that it has a Democratic Governor isn't hugely surprising, but it also is a Western state where a lot of issues that bother Western voters are approached much differently than they way they are in the east.
It doesn't really matter, however. At this point, Joe Biden is pulling so far ahead of the the remaining candidates that the race has effectively become, even at this point, a contest between Biden and Trump. To the extent that there's really anyone in the Democratic Party, right now, who is effectively challenging Biden, it's Bernie Sanders, and he's far behind.
Predicting an outcome in a primary season that's a year away is, of course, risky. But unless some major developments occur, Biden appears to have captured the lead and will be difficult to displace from that lead at best. He's highly likely to be the Democratic nominee.
It was nice to have a break in this thread really.
But that's over.
Back to school. . . or um work. . . or rather.. . politics.
People are now announcing, in a somewhat broken and halting fashion, their intent to run for Senator Enzi's seat. We still feel that Elizabeth Cheney is the odds on favorite for the seat, and that right behind her is the wild card of former Governor Mead, perhaps now refreshed after a few months out of office. If he runs, he'll get it. If she runs, she'll get it.
But others are declaring.
The first official declaration is that of Yana Ludwig, who is described by the Tribune as a Democratic "activist". She's been active in at least Albany County and has been a founder of Albany County for Proper Policing and also active with Showing Up For Racial Justice.
She is self declared as a Socialist. Indeed, she issued a rather naive statement to the Tribune on that.
I think people are trying to throw socialism on as being left of Democrats, but we’re talking about economic systems – not political orientations, I do identify as a socialist, and I’m going to be really open about that on the campaign."
And for that reason, that campaign is going absolutely nowhere.
Indeed, its the very sort of position that causes people to not take Democratic candidates very seriously in the state.
Filing with the FEC was a Democrat Chuck Jagoda, who lives in California. There's been a rash of out of state filings recently by people who seem to think that a non resident can legally run for office here. They can't. But it keeps happening.
I don't know anything about Jagoda, who may be an actor, but a Democrat from out of state not only can't legally run, he'd have no point in running.
And then on the Republican side a Joshua Wheeler has announced and set up a website. He notes his experiences as a veteran and declares himself to be conservative, but I otherwise know nothing about it.
And the election for retiring Senator Enzi's seat is now over.
Cynthia Lummis has officially registered to run for the seat, even while her unofficial staff has declared simultaneously that she hasn't decided yet on whether or not she's running.
She's running.
The pretext for non running is that she retains a PAC and the PAC's must be tied to an office. Her's remained tied to her former House seat and, it's maintained, she was simply switching it while she ponders.
Well, whatever, she's running.
Not making an official announcement yet is wise and it keeps a campaign from really starting. Her filing acts as a placeholder while she gets up and running and places her in a good position to start her campaign when she wants to, or needs to.
Right now, she doesn't need to. The only other Republican running is unknown and the Democrat has no chance whatsoever. Indeed, the currently running Democrat won't be the nominee in the Democratic Party unless Lummis' announcement causes every other potential Democrat to decide not to run, which is at least somewhat unlikely.
The only thing that could disrupt Lummis' campaign at this point would be for Matt Mead to announce. While that's been speculated upon, my guess is that Lummis already knows that Mead isn't running, and even if they haven't been in communication, unless Mead has an extremely strong desire to return to politics, Lummis' announcement will preclude it.
Part One of the first Democratic debate was held last night, and you won't be reading any commentary about that event here. I didn't watch it.
Part of the reason was that I worked late and when I got home it would have already been well in progress. And nobody else in the family showed any interest in turning it on, including the other highly politically minded denizen. I didn't suggest it either.
It just seems too early, and indeed, it really is.
A debate this early frankly is a disservice to a nation that just doesn't get a break from politics anymore. Like him or despise him, Trump is the President and the ongoing campaign against him, which really commenced prior to his being sworn in, just isn't what the country needs. By the same token, Trump's style means that the nation never gets a break from Trump, which is fatiguing in the extreme.
I'm old enough to remember prior controversial Presidents. While not really remembered as such now, Ronald Reagan was a very controversial President and for those on college campuses during his administration, and I was, there was as certain "resist" type of thought that was frankly fairly unthinking, but it was nothing like what we have today. And Reagan, for his part, cajoled and frankly often played sort of dim rather than rushing out to be in everyone's face all the time. For that matter, a lot of what he did on the international scene was not only out of the public eye, it was clandestine, which was a problem in its own right.
Clinton was controversial although in retrospect its very difficult now to appreciate why that was the case. It's a bit reminiscent of now in that the opposition party simply couldn't stand him. That turned out to be a problem in that the entire impeachment debacle, and that's what that was, resulted in the end. And of course I guess we got a foretaste of the current political fare during President Obama's administration as there were those who were always conspiratorially minded regarding him.
This weekend on Meet the Press Chuck Todd noted, although I think he's likely off the mark, that Trump's calling Biden "Sleepy Joe" may backfire as a sleepy, i.e., less in the news all the time, President might be just what the country might want right now. I don't know about that, but the country really needs a break from constant politics. It's just too much.
On another matter, part of the problem of modern politics was demonstrated on Meet the Press when one of the members of the "round table", Doris Kearns Goodwin, inadvertently revealed how antiquated the political class is. Maybe that will change this election, but her comment was telling. Remarking on Trump, she made an analogy which started off, addressing Todd, to the effect of "when we were all kids we watched the Ed Sullivan Show. . ."
Chuck Todd didn't watch the Ed Sullivan Show when he was a kid.
The Ed Sullivan Show was a huge deal. . . prior to Todd being born. Todd was born in 1972. The Ed Sullivan Show ran from 1948 to 1971. Frankly, I had to look that up as I don't have a first hand recollection of the Ed Sullivan Show either and I was really surprised to learn that it was still running when I was a kid. Up to around age 8 in my case. Apparently my parents didn't watch it, or it was on really late when I was in bed (I know that's the case, for example, for The Dean Martin Show).
Anyhow, an offhand reference to the Ed Sullivan Show has to be a total mystery to most of the viewing audience who no doubt wondered "who is Ed Sullivan?" But people who can indeed remember first hand the Ed Sullivan Show are those who have been driving the car to a substantial degree from at least right about the time it was cancelled.
Anticipating a run by Liz Cheney for Mike Enzi's seat, Robert Grady, a former adviser to George H.W. Bush has announced that he's exploring running for that seat.
Of course, I'd guess that much of that exploration would depend upon whether or not Cheney decides to run for that office. Now that Lummis has entered the race, maybe, she might have decided to forego that.
Brady is a Harvard educated native of Livingston, New Jersey who is also a venture capitalist who relocated at some point to Jackson. He was an economic adviser to Governor Mead. Recent politicians who have relocated to Teton County and ran for Wyoming office haven't been successful, such as Dodson And Freiss. Brady has been in Teton County long enough, and has been active in the community there, and has his association with Mead, such that he might be able to overcome that and make use of his former association with Mead and President Bush. Of course, whether or not he runs for office at all will depend upon what Cheney decides to do.
A poll is already out, apparently leaked out, rating the respective primary chances of Cheney and Lummis against each other. Cheney comes out about 20 points ahead.
Neither person has actually announced they're running as of yet, which is smart on both of their part. And the value of a poll so early is really questionable. As was noted in the news article about it, Cheney may be ahead to that degree simply because she's currently in office and therefore has current name recognition whereas Lummis has been out of office for awhile.
Still, it's not only interesting that an early poll of that type has been taken, but that somebody leaked it. There's reasons for those things.
As a minor prediction, as the election season arrives, if the poll results remain more or less the same (which I doubt they will), and if they both declare themselves candidates, which I also doubt (I think that will be worked out beforehand), I think Mead will enter the race. He has really good name recognition and would be pretty popular, I suspect. If he's tempted, I also think he'll enter before Cheney and/or Lummis announce. Indeed, I also think that would be worked out beforehand.
By "worked out", I'll note, what I mean is that I think the GOP will get together with its three main potential candidates and work so that only one of them announces, rather than have them run against each other.
July 10, 2019 The one out, one in, edition.
Yesterday, Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund investor, announced that he was running for President on the Democratic ticket, so an already crowded Democratic field ended up with a new name.
While most likely not a name really known to most Americans, Steyer has been active in politics for some time. Clean energy and climate change have been an apparent focus of his. He became active in politics, he's stated, after a revelation about the faith of his mother, the Episcopal Church, focused his attentions in a new direction.
Knowing little about Steyer, it's hard to gauge his chances. He has the money to make his message known and he is not a career politician, which may provide appeal to the Democratic rank and file in a race filled with career politicians.
At the same time, Eric Swalwell, a Congressman from California, saw the handwriting on the wall and dropped out. The first Democrat to do so. He had no chance right from the onset, but is to be credited for realizing that on a timely basis.
This past week Cynthia Lummis made her campaign for U.S. Senate official. In my view, this contest is now over and she has won.
Interestingly, what I thought would happen, that a deal would have been worked out in the GOP about who would run before the announcement was made, may not have. Her campaign was asked about Liz Cheney and her reply was somewhat cryptic, only noting that Cheney would have to make her choice, but that Wyoming would have have great team with Cheney remaining in place. This hints pretty strongly that upon being approach Cheney would not promise not to run and in fact is considering doing so. On that we should keep in mind that Cheney's original bid for office was against the retiring Senator Enzi who seemed to have taken a degree of offense at her campaign's presumption that he was bowing out at that time. She may still strongly harbor desires for that office.
It'll be interesting to see what she does, but my prediction is that Cheney will not run for the Senate now that Lummis has chosen to go for that seat. Cheney is over a decade younger than Lummis and Barrasso and she may have a chance to run for the seat yet in the future. It'd likely be politically fatal if she tried to run against Lummis for it, as she'd lose her House seat and would be unlikely to obtain the Senate seat.
As for Lummis announcing over a year prior to the election, I wonder if this was in order to put in her setting as a place holder. If no deal could have been worked out with Cheney (or Mead) announcing first would be a wise strategy as after that, it looks like everyone is trying to bump her out of a position that she's would appear to be strongly entitled to.
I was surprised to hear yesterday that Cynthia Lummis is already running some sort of video campaign advertisement, which is very early for that. But then, elections have been like this, this year.
I also heard that the ads content has her campaigning on her support for Donald Trump. Looking up her campaign website, which is already up, it takes that approach as well, without naming him specifically. Wondering about the video ad, I found it:
It didn't come across quite the way it had been explained to me. From the explanation, I was expecting something like what Sam Galeotos did in the 2018 General election where he lashed himself to the deck of the SS Trump. That's basically what killed off his chances at becoming Governor. This ad is more subtle than that, although in its concluding portions it does make reference to the border wall that has and is a major Trump talking point, and it talks about opposing the "Green New Deal" and opposing "Socialists".
I think the interesting part of this is that this is an apparent early adoption of what is widely believed to be Trump's strategy for the 2020 election. The border wall will be spoken of a lot as it remains a visual hot button item for a certain section of his base. The Green New Deal was still born and isn't going anywhere, and was actively opposed by Nancy Pelosi, but because it remains a talking point for some Democrats, and it will be mentioned in the 2020 Presidential election, it remains a foil on the GOP side as well. And the use of the term "Socialist" is likewise out of Trump's playbook and has become a really handy tool for Republicans as Democrats have failed to disassociate themselves with Socialism, with some even embracing the term, often with no real grasp what Socialism actually is.
Combined with that is the traditional Wyoming themes; hard work, outdoors, etc., combined with social conservatism, such as opposition to abortion. The ad appears to be trying to bridge the GOP in general, with a late hard lean on the new GOP items that came up in the last election.
Lummis might be wise to take this approach and she appears to be fairly skillfully welding all of these together. But there is a danger to it as Trump really isn't as widely admired in the state as Republicans seem to believe. Indeed, I heard about the ad from two people who had an instant negative reaction to him being mentioned and were therefore already disinclined to vote for Lummis. And as noted, Galeotos sank like a rock once he started to try to bill himself as Wyoming's Trumpite.
Of course right now Lummis has no real competition and if she gets it, it'll be from Cheney. Whether Cheney would try equally as hard to bridge the GOP is yet to be seen. She might actually not bother to try to closely associate herself with Trump which ironically might help her a bit in a race with a candidate who has, although I still feel that Lummis has the nomination, and therefore the position, wrapped up.
On this race, another minor candidate has some signs up in the vicinity all of which feature his silhouette standing at attention and saluting. His website notes him to be a "combat veteran" and if you go deeper into it it notes that he served with the Wyoming Army National Guard in Iraq.
FWIW, putting a silhouette of yourself saluting at attention is a really dangerous limiting presentation and actually tends to be off putting to some veterans. I'll leave it more or less at that, but at least voters of middle age or up can remember a time when any male candidate had likely served in World War Two, Korea or Vietnam, and any male voter from his mid 50s up has a pretty high chance of having served themselves. Emphasizing your veteran status with that demographic at least doesn't go too far and may be off putting with them.
On other stuff, something related to the 2020 election that was posted here earlier today:
August 21, 2019
John Hickenlooper, who had performed well in the last debate, but who has his eyes focused on the Senate, and who may be receiving help keeping them focused there from fellow Democrats in Congress who hope to take the Senate back in the next election, dropped out of the Presidential race last week.
Hickenlooper took approaches in the recent debate, to the small extent I saw it, that were outside of the pack and well thought out. Notably, he was opposed to the U.S. basically surrendering under excuse in Afghanistan and withdrawing.
It's strongly suspected that the Democrats asked him to focus instead on the Senate, where he has a strong chance of obtaining a seat from Colorado. His chances to obtain the Presidency were always poor. If that's correct, it's a wise move on the Democratic Party's part as it shows a focus on an overall governmental effort rather than just the Presidency.
Also dropping out this month was Mike Gravel of Alaska, who stood little chance in the first place. The former Alaska Senator, age 89, was a bit of a gadfly candidate to start with and his campaign, as predicted, when nowhere. Gravel reflects an earlier era in Alaska politics, prior to the oil revenue there, which produced a unique set of politicians.
California Representative Eric Swalwell, who was basically running on gun control, has also dropped out.
Swalwell seemed focused on gun control and his early failure may show that the issue has much less traction than supposed. The failure of a special session in currently troubled Virginia, also called for legislation on that topic, produced nothing.
Indeed, the entire topic has been much in the news of late, but that might mean a lot less than supposed. Nothing concrete has occurred and an early indication by President Trump that he might entertain some changes in the law have been somewhat countered since them. Principally these dealt with background checks.
Democrats continue to speak on the issue, but rarely show any real understanding of the topic. Kirstin Gillibrand, for example, was on a weekend show saying that all the weapons in issue had been "high gauge", which makes no sense of any kind whatsoever. She also proposed to make semi automatic rifles "illegal" "like machineguns", which actually aren't illegal but which are subject to a separate set of laws. A person proposing legislation ought to be aware of what the law actually is, as well as the nature of what that person is discussing.
A more knowledgeable speaker running for that office from the Democratic candidate did focus on large capacity magazines, which are a real thing at least and are a topic that makes some sense discussing in this context. He was also focused on "military style" weapons, a popular focus for Democrats, but one which is hard to define and which, in the modern context, would be difficult to do anything about really (that would have had to have been done, if it were to be done, in the early 1970s).
A host on one of the weekend shows noted on this issue that generally gun owners tend not to be opposed to universal background checks until it becomes clear that running any check through a dealer means running even a gift, or potentially a loan, to through the system. At that point they become concerned. Perhaps cognizant of that what seemed to be some early support from Trump seemed to have somewhat lessened.
As per usual, when this topic comes up there tends to be a discussion regarding the NRA and whether it is "loosing power". This sort of speculation is routine but this go around there's more to it, as there has been real trouble, both financially and politically, within the NRA recently. There was a big shakeup after the recent national meeting in which long time NRA figure Chris Cox lost his position and Ollie North was evicted. The choice of North for anything was really questionable in the first place and some might regard his ouster as sort of a return to some sort of reason. Cox was a public voice for the organization and some have wondered if he was posed to be its next head after Wayne LaPierre. Along those lines, there's some who speculate he was supporting an attempted "coup" with in the organization. There's precedent for that as way the organization is currently run, and its current views, sort of came about due to something akin to that in the 1970s.
This always spawns a lot of interesting back channel traffic in the firearms media to a degree with some suggesting its time to overthrow the NRA. That's why it won't happen. Those people are actually far to the right of the NRA and want no gun regulation at all, with some even maintaining that there should be a push for the deregulation of machineguns. That's not going to happen and that's why the NRA leadership, which isn't radical in the overall context of things, isn't going to change and isn't going to suffer from diminished support either.
On other matters, there's real concern that the economy may be headed into a recession with indicators that it is. If that occurs that would really threaten President Trump's chances for reelection and perhaps end them. He's been talking as if he's concerned.
He's also been distracting the electorate, which he's good at doing. This past week mention of buying Greenland, which isn't going to happen, certainly did that.
Yesterday Jay Inslee, the Governor of Washington, dropped out of the Democratic race. I don't think I'd mentioned Inslee above, which provides the reason for his dropping out. He just wasn't getting any traction. His primary message was on climate change apparently, but he didn't qualify for the next round of debates.
The Democratic field is definitely now growing smaller rapidly, which doesn't make it small. Four subtractions in just a couple of weeks gives pretty good evidence to a major contraction in the field going on now.
Massachusetts Representative Seth Moulton announced yesterday that he was dropping out of the Democratic field for the office of Presidency.
Moulton made headlines early on by coming out for banning military style semi automatic rifles, analogizing them to the M16 he carried as a Marine officer in Iraq. His positions were generally liberal but he did uniquely favor the expansion of nuclear energy. His campaign was one of the large number of Democratic ones that was basically going nowhere.
With all of these announcements coming one after another, including Hickenlooper's, who was the best known of the departing candidates, the Democratic field is now rapidly thinning and it can be expected that this trend will continue on until there's just a few left quite soon.
Regarding Hickenlooper, he has announced his bid for a Senate seat from Colorado.
And with this entry, part 1 of this thread concludes, as its now so lengthy that it takes up the entire page when posted.
