The Aerodrome: On the WASPs

The Aerodrome: On the WASPs:

On the WASPs

Elizabeth Gardner, age 22, in the pilot's seat of a B-26, one of the most difficult to fly aircraft of the Second World War.  Gardner would live until age 90 and worked for a time after the war as a test pilot, a role that would require her to bail out from failed aircraft twice.

From Sarah's Blog

75 Years Ago—Dec. 20, 1944: US terminates WASP (Women Airforce Service Pilots) program—returning combat airmen will perform their ferrying services; 1037 women served, with 38 fatalities.

Among those who follow World War Two, the WASPs are well known.  But to be frank, I expect for the average person World War Two is at this point known in a general way, highly influenced by movies.  Indeed, at least one such movie, Saving Private Ryan, at least partially caused the boom in focus on World War Two by both the aging Baby Boomer generation and the following Millenials (and others).  That film, and the other popular portrayals that followed, such as The Pacific and Band of Brothers, do a good job of portraying slices of the war, but they're just slices, and the war was so vast that really detailed portrayals can only come through books, and a lot of them.  No one book could possibly do justice to anything but the narrower topics it deals with.

In terms of the air war, two really notable films were done early on, those being Twelve O'Clock High and The Best Years of Our Lives.  People no doubt don't think of that last one as an "air war" film, but the portrayal of returning psychologically distressed bombardier Cpt. Fred Derry to a life that's coming apart at home, certainly should qualify it as such.  More recent efforts, such as Memphis Belle, have been lacking.  Perhaps the best film involving aircraft is Tora! Tora! Tora!, on the attack on Pearl Harbor.  In an odd way, the best one as a tribute to air power might be Battleground, in which not a single airplane is ever seen. Those who have seen the film will know why I'm referencing it here. Those who haven't, should see it.

Anyhow, one of the stories that isn't all that well known by people today is that of the WASPs.  Indeed, the role of women in the service in World War Two isn't that well known in general.

The WASPs were not technically in the service, but rather were civilians employed by the service. This has always occurred, contrary to some more modern commentary.  I.e., there have always been civilian "contractors" in contract to the military.  During the American Revolution heavy transport was normally done by temporary contractors by both sides of the conflict, some of whom had little choice in the matter.  I.e, when artillery, for example, was moved in a country that was surprisingly short of horses, freighters and farmers were called to do it, or sometimes just compelled to do it.  Later on, during the post Civil War frontier era, transportation of all sorts, both freighting and packing, was very often done by military contractors.  Civilian mule packers remained a feature of Army life all the way through the Punitive Expedition.  So its not surprising that civilians were used to ferry aircraft from North America to Europe.

More surprising is that they were women, however.

WASP pilots in front of the notoriously difficult to fly B-26 Marauder.

When women precisely entered established roles in the military is surprisingly difficult to determine.  By and large, however, most historians point to World War One as the conflict that brought that about. The degree of female employment during the Great War was enormous in general, and indeed it was so vast that the entire Rosey The Riveter story of World War Two is really a myth when the full story is considered as the World War Two role of women in industry repeated the experience of the prior war.  Female employment during the First World War would rival that of the Second and in some sectors of the various warring nation's economies, female labor was more important in World War One than it was in World War Two.  Given the near absolute demand for fighting age males to serve in the military during World War One, and the more primitive and less mechanized nature of the economy in the 1910s as compared to the 1930s and 1940s, when machine labor was already accomplishing more, it's not too surprising that women not only entered large numbers of normally male dominated industries but that they further were allowed into some roles in the military more or less for the first time.

Cornelia Fort, who became famous for encountering Japanese aircraft while flying as a flight instructor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.  She was the first WASP to be killed in service a year later.

Those roles were largely clerical and and near clerical at the time.  Women as clerks in general, including secretaries, was a new and somewhat controversial thing in the 1910s.  By the 1920s, however, it was fully established.  But wasn't established was the presence of women in the service. Following the Great War women were discharged from the Army, Navy and Marine Corps, and their roles once again filled by men.

When this began to change on a more permanent basis I really can't say.  I.e., I don't know, and haven't studied for the purpose of this entry, women women clerks and nurses reappeared in military service, and therefore I don't know if it was in the 20s, 30s, or 40s.  If it was as late as the 1940s, it certainly changed nearly overnight and women once again were recruited for those roles.  Contrary, however, to the common recollection of the period, it wasn't as easy to recruit women to military service as commonly thought, and there remained a quite strong societal prejudice in the United States against female servicemen.  During the war the service studied it and found that a strong deterrent to filling those positions was that there was a common belief in society that female servicemen were "easy" and came from the same class that might otherwise be populating bars and offering favors easily.  This was completely unfair and the service worked hard to combat the myth but it was never really overcome.  Operating against it, however, was that female nurses had been a common and vital feature of the Allied efforts during the Great War and therefore there was a well established female military nursing role already, one that had its origins as far back as the Crimean War.  Perhaps worth noting here, however, is that female nurses in World War One were not in the service but rather usually in the Red Cross, an organization that was highly involved in World War One and whose male members, in the case of the US, had the option of being enrolled in the Army upon the US entering the war.  Female members, who remained critical to its operations, were not enrolled in the service.

Gertrude Tompkins Silver who disappeared in 1944 ferrying a P51 from California to New Jersey.  She and her plane have never been found.

With that being the background, perhaps its not too surprising that women pilots would be contracted with to ferry aircraft in World War Two.  Military age male pilots were in the service, and weren't available, although older pilots who were not of military age were not.  On coastal areas, quite a few of the latter entered Civilian Air Patrol units, however.

Women were not new to aviation in World War Two.  Indeed, aviation, which entered its youth in the Great War, was one of the new things that came about in which women had a rapid appearance in.  There were female aviators prior to the war and at least one notable female pilot attempted to enroll in American military service during World War One, going so far as to purchase her own uniform to be used in what amounted to a publicity campaign in aid of that effort.  It went nowhere, but the point is that aviation wasn't new to women in the Second World War.

Indeed, the early female appearance in aviation continued on after the Great War, and even during it, with some notable female pilots achieving headlines during the 1920s and into the 1930s.  Today best remembered is Amelia Earhart, but she is far from the first and may be best remembered today simply due to her tragic and mysterious disappearance, but she was far from being the only notable pilot.

Bessie Coleman, African American and Native American who held an early pilot's license and who died in a an aviation accident in 1926.

Indeed, there were women barnstormers in the 1920s and women figured well in air racing, a sport that was popular following World War One and prior to World War Two,and which had a role in the development of fighter aircraft.  There were also some women stunt pilots early on.  What was generally absent, however, were female commercial pilots and there were no female military pilots.

Florence Lowe "Pancho" Barnes.

Given this history, perhaps it isn't surprising that the government turned to women flyers to fill certain roles that didn't have to be filled by Army Air Corps pilots, and that is the way it was viewed. The WASPs weren't commissioned, enlisted or enrolled in the military. They were part of more than one civil service organization that came to be under the overall umbrella organization of the WASPs and had varied flying duties. The irony, right from the onset, is that in actuality the aircraft of the late 1930s and the 1940s actually had become in some instances much more physically demanding to fly so, even while women flew every type of aircraft in the American air fleet, some of them were very physically demanding aircraft.

WASP pilot in cockpit of P-51 Mustang.

The WASPs are best remembered for ferrying aircraft, and indeed one of the entities that came into the WASPs was the Women's Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, which was formed specifically for that purpose.  In addition to that role, however, they also flew target towing missions and other service flying roles within the United States.  Quite a few of the pilots were from well to do backgrounds which had allowed them to take up flying prior to the war.

WASP pilots and the B-17 Pistol Packin Momma.

The program was disbanded in December 1944 as male Army Air Corps pilots returning from overseas became available for the same roles.  At that time some of them attempted to volunteer for service in the Chinese Nationalist air force but were unsuccessful in that effort. Some, such as Elizabeth Gardner, were able to keep flying.  In 1949 they were offered commissions in the United States Air Force in non flying roles, with 121 taking the offer.  They were accorded veteran status in 1977.


There were 1,074 women who went through WASP training during the war, all of whom were pilots prior to entering the program.  Over 600 applicants failed to make it through that training.  A total of 25,000 women volunteered for the program.  38 women were killed in air accidents while part of the program.  The largest plane flown by WASP crews was the B-29.

Page Updates for 2019

1.  January 1, 2019.  Cast Iron.

2.  January 1, 2019.  They Were Soldiers:  George Deshon.

3.  January 12, 2019.  They Were Soldiers:  Robert Stack, Steve McQueen

4.  January 23, 2019.  They Were Soldiers:  Celedonio Domeco de Jarauta, Frank Sutton

5.  January 23, 2019.  They Were Clerics:  Celedonio Domeco de Jarauta

6.  January 23, 2019.  They Were Lawyers:  Karl Liebknecht.

7.  January 26, 2019.  The Aerodrome reformatted.

8.  April 3, 2019.  The threads on Quotes About Agriculture and Quotes About Lawyers made their own pages.

9.  May 5, 2019.  They Were Lawyers:  Cheslie Kryst, Moe Berg.:

Quotes About Lawyers:  Quote from Moe Berg.

10.  Pages on Dodge 3500 and Jeep TJ added.

11.  The Dodge 3500 Project updated.

12  The Dodge 3500 Project updated.

13.  With the help of reader input, particularly that of Rich, the uploading problem here has been cured by changing the format of the "Labels" gadgets that list topics here from a cloud to a list.

I liked the cloud better as it more easily showed what has been posted on here most often, but apparently it grew too big for Google Chrome.  If Chrome is later able to digest it, I'll go back to it, but it's a simple list now.

While that was going on some other changes were made, mostly detrimental, trying to see if a fix could be found.  I'm trying to unring the bell on those, but restoring the calendar, which links into Today Day In Wyoming's History is proving to be difficult.

14.  The Dodge 3500 Project updated.

Sunday Morning Scene: Churches of the West: St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Hanna Wyoming.

Churches of the West: St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Hanna Wyoming.:

St. Joseph's Catholic Church, Hanna Wyoming.

This is St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Hanna, Wyoming.  This modern Catholic church is located just on the edge of town where several other churches are located.

Best Posts of the Week of December 15, 2019

The best posts of the week of December 15, 2019

Sunday Morning Scene: Denver Catholic Register, December 1919.

The Impeachment of Donald Trump

December 21, 1919. Radicals booted out, Twins seeking cowboys.

On this day in 1919 a group of radicals, including perpetual sourpuss Emma Goldman, were deported.

Emma Goldman's deportation photograph.  If it seems that she's frowning in the photo due to deportation, Goldman was always frowning.

Goldman is a celebrated figure today, but at the time plenty of people were glad to see her and her fellow travelers go.  Frankly, she was a perpetual malcontent.  In the US she advocated for extremist positions.  Upon returning to Russia (she'd grown into her teen years there, and was born in a town in what is now Lithuania), she grew rapidly discontent with the Soviets and then relocated to Germany, where she wrote two books about her "disillusionment" with Russia.  While living in Germany, she irritated the German left who rapidly grew discontent with her, and then went on to the UK, which seemingly occupied the status of host country for the perpetual malcontent at the time.  During the Spanish Civil War she was at first enthusiastic about the anarchist Republicans but worried they were giving too much over to the Reds, which probably failed to grasp that there was no way that the organized Spanish extremist left wasn't going to dominate over the disorganized Spanish left. Eventually she ended up in Toronto, which ironically was an extremely conservative town at the time.

Emma looking discontent in 1911.

She probably came by her perpetual discontentment honestly and presents what ought to be a case study in the combination of high intelligence with a really messed up early life.  In other words, while she's widely admired today in spite of advocating for really loony ideas, she herself was pretty much a loony.  As we've dealt her story before we won't go into detail here, but she was born into an unhappy family which was her mother's second marriage.  Her mother had two children by her prior husband, to whom she'd been married very young, and the second marriage was basically arranged and never happy.  Goldman's father was strict and potentially abusive.  Goldman herself was raped by a suitor while in her early teens.  Her constant discontent with everything thereafter may well have been due simply being a highly discontented person, which given the nature of her life, a person can't blame her for.

Emma Goldman in 1886, in about the only photograph of her smiling.

She lived a genuinely crappy life in a lot of ways and was in the Eastern European demographic that was attracted to radicalism due to the conditions she was living in.  Smart, difficult and working in manual labor, she was attracted naturally to radical political ideas, even though they were not grounded in any sort of reality.  It says something about the spirit of the times that they gained traction in their own day.

They'd obviously gained enough that the US determined to deport foreign born radicals and on this day in 1919, it did it.

This has been looked back on as a betrayal of American values, but a person, even now, has to pause a bit and wonder if it was.  Goldman was truly a radical and her ideas antithetical to any sort of government at all.  Soviet Russia, while definitely having a government, was nearly the poster child for radicals at the time and she was a Russian.  Some seeing the product of radicalism in their own land might reconsider their own cause but she never did, just finding other left wing movements lacking.

Without going too far it it, it's also notable that a lot of the figures of the radical left were of this era were, quite frankly, messed up, and then adopted lifestyles that guaranteed they'd be even more messed up.  For the 1910s, this is sort of book ended by the perpetually crabby Goldman on one end and the perpetually befuddled looking Rosa Luxemburg on the other, both now heroes with no achievements which keeps their heroism going on, as their adherents can always imagine that the ideas they advocated for were never tested, even if they were.

She died in Toronto in 1940 and her body was brought into the United States for burial.  She's one of the poster children of a certain brand of radicalism from that era even though, in retrospect, she is to be more pitied than celebrated if some degree of rationalism is applied.

One paper that wasn't questioning the deportation was the Cheyenne State Leader, which even suggested that if their ship sank they'd welcome it.  The Leader was never subtle in its views.

The leader also reported the unlikely story that two sixteen year old Texas twins were required to marry six feet tall Wyoming cowboys or forego an inheritance. The Leader often had odd stories like that, and a person has to wonder if the story was accurate.  It reportedly originated by way of a letter to Leader from the aforementioned twins, which sounds fairly dubious.  Hopefully it was.

December 20, 1919. Pershing in race?

No, he wasn't.

A committee in Nebraska was attempting to draft him.  He'd end up declining.

Pershing fits into that group of American military heroes that the public seriously thought about elevating to the nation's highest office.  He fits into the subset of them that declined that invitation when it became serious.

Men, and at that time it was all men, were lining up to be candidates for the 1920 Presidential election, which in our era should give us pause.  It was December of 1919, and the candidates were not yet fully identified by any means.

Doggone these are cool.

1919 Griswold Waffle Iron Advertisement

Has anyone  here ever used one like this?

Meanwhile, in the Senate. . .

eleven Federal judges were approved on December 17.

It is now the case that the Trump Administration has a record number of judicial appointments and its being clear that the Federal judiciary is being made over.  Predicting how these things work out is always extremely difficult, but the nation really hasn't experienced anything like this since the Carter Administration.

Indeed, the Carter Administration provides a lesson as the Administration was largely ineffective, except in this area.  The remaking of the judiciary under Carter has had some lasting effects all the way to the present date. That is now over.  Even if Bernie Sanders is elected President in the Fall, the Trump appointees will mean a conservative court for the next twenty years.  That in turn will be decried by the liberals, but as conservatives in this context are not jurisprudentially conservative, what that really  means is that a large number of issues that the Court has seized as its own over the past forty years will now return to legislatures.  That could be regarded as a triumph for democracy, but generally political liberals have been aware that since the early 1970s many of their positions have been deeply unpopular with the public and won't stand up in legislative debate.  So the irony has been that "left wing" jurists distrust the voting public while "ring wing" jurists don't worry about the voting public one way or another.

As has been noted, what the U.S. actually lacks are jurists who have a "conservative" judicial philosophy.  American conservative jurists have tended to be cut out of the Scalia mold in which they are conservative in that they seek to conserve the original text of the Constitution, rather than conservative in the sense that they bring an underlying conservative notion of what the law consists of. In earlier times there were jurists who did that, and there are still legal philosophers who do that.  However, on the bench, there are not.  The opposite is actually true on the left where "liberal" judges actually do have a "liberal" or "progressive" judicial philosophy.

The change here is really due to Mitch McConnell.  Love him,  like him, or hate him, McConnell appears to have been highly savvy to his time.  Judicial appointments were stalled by McConnell during the Obama Administration and massively accelerated during the Trump Administration.  A stable of well qualified conservatives appears to have been vetted by the Federalist Society and the appointments have been rapid.  Trump has cooperated in this, and this appears to be the one place where some sort of "deal" was in fact made. Based upon what's been occurring, it appears highly likely that McConnell always viewed Trump as a one term President and that the political conservatives one chance to really impact the judiciary.  Indeed, because Republican Presidents have been really unreliable in this area the Trump Administration may ironically have been the one real opportunity that McConnell would ever have, and he's seized it.  By doing this, the country will in fact be hugely impacted in ways that are only just beginning to occur.

Of course, the dream here would be for the Senate to have the opportunity to appoint one or two more justices to replace one or two more liberal justices with conservative ones.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who is 86 years old and in poor health is often regarded as the most likely to need to step down (or die) but she clearly has no intention of doing so if she can avoid it.  Should a Democrat be elected in November 2020, it would seem almost certain that she'd then resign.  But as Scalia's death has shown, there's no reason to believe that being a Supreme Court justice guarantees living a long life and so the balance is always in the air.

That balance, however, has been very much tilted rightward in the Federal judiciary as a whole, and therefore a change in the courts approach to many things will be inevitable.  One of those inevitable changes will be the return of major social issues to legislatures, something that they haven't had to deal with in full for decades.

A request of our readers who use Chrome.

If you use Google Chrome on your browser, is this site working well for you?

If it isn't, can you indicate what any problems you are experiencing are?

Lex Anteinternet: Chrome Messing Up Blogger. Time for Lex Anteinternet Part II?

Lex Anteinternet: Chrome Messing Up Blogger: It is, and that's odd, as Chrome is a Google platform and so is Blogger. Anyhow, right now, on Chrome this blog is so slow its unusabl...

I posted on this last week and the problem persists.

Of course, I don't know how limited, or widespread, it may be. 

The page seems to hang up on the labels and never work right after that, and this page certainly has a lot of labels.  I may go in and try to wipe out some duplicative and unnecessary ones.  If that fails, I'm seriously considering starting a Part II of Lex Anteinternet as a second blog.  I hesitate to do so as all the Google stats that go with this one will be lost, as it'll be a brand new blog.  But a blog that's impossible to load is pretty pointless.

Mid Week At Work. Engine block assembly line, December 17, 1919.

Today In Wyoming's History: December 17, 1919. Vernon Baker born in Cheyenne

Today In Wyoming's History: December 17:

1919  Vernon Baker born in Cheyenne.  Baker is a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in combat in World War Two, with his citation reading as follows:

For extraordinary heroism in action on 5 and 6 April 1945, near Viareggio, Italy. Then Second Lieutenant Baker demonstrated outstanding courage and leadership in destroying enemy installations, personnel, and equipment during his company's attack against a strongly entrenched enemy in mountainous terrain. When his company was stopped by the concentration of fire from several machine gun emplacements, he crawled to one position and destroyed it, killing three Germans. Continuing forward, he attacked an enemy observation post and killed two occupants. With the aid of one of his men, Lieutenant Baker attacked two more machine gun nests, killing or wounding the four enemy soldiers occupying these positions. He then covered the evacuation of the wounded personnel of his company by occupying an exposed position and drawing the enemy's fire. On the following night Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy mine fields and heavy fire toward the division objective. Second Lieutenant Baker's fighting spirit and daring leadership were an inspiration to his men and exemplify the highest traditions of the Armed Forces.

Baker had a rough start in life when his parents died while he was still young.  Partially raised by his grandparents, he learned how to hunt from his grandfather in order to put meat on the table.  Entering the Army during World War Two, he made the Army a career and retired in 1968 as a First Lieutenant, his rank at that time reflecting force reductions following World War Two.  He retired to Idaho where he chose to live as he was an avid hunter, and he died there in 2010.  Baker is a significant figure from Wyoming not only because he won the Congressional Medal of Honor, but because he was part of Wyoming's small African American community.

It has to be on time, and on target.

That's an artilleryman's phrase, but it's true of a lot of things. 

Including newspapers.

When the local paper closed its internal press and moved to contract in a city 150 miles away, it promised that this would rarely disrupt delivery.

That hasn't been true this year.

Indeed, it's been absent a lot, and for consecutive days.

You can read the on line version, some would point out, if you are a subscriber, but this isn't really true.  Not all of the content is actually capable of being viewed in that fashion.  I'm not sure why, but it appears be related to what's provided by a wire service or a syndication for a column.  The thing is, that's often what you might really want to read.

Indeed, I'm not confident that it's limited even to that.  It seems a bit broader in actuality.

Given all of that, I've given up expecting the paper to arrive early enough to be read on snowy days, and indeed, I've gotten used to not reading it at all.  Yesterday, for example, I didn't get the Sunday paper, something I normally look forward to reading, and ended up reading it this morning, with my Monday paper.

The paper has gotten expensive to subscribe to.  I understand it faces challenges, but in an electronic age a paper that doesn't show up for print subscribers and which can't be fully viewed for paying subscribers is increasing its challenges.  Maybe those challenges are insurmountable.  Not solving them will make them so.

The 2020 Election, Part 4

"The election is only one year from today".

"Only"?

That's the comment I heard on the news this morning, and my reaction, and that's why we've started a new thread here even though the last one wasn't at that stage where we'd normally go to the next installment.

The campaign has being going on for months and there's still a year to go. Frankly, that's patently absurd.

Canada recently had a national election that featured a campaign of about sixty days. That's just about right.  An election process that takes over a year to complete is monumentally messed up.  No regular person is paying that much attention at this stage and that means that the only ones who are, are political aficionados who likely don't reflect the views of average voters at all.

This isn't all of it of course.  But it doesn't help.  By this time we will have had an election, but we will also have had endless primaries, caucuses, and conventions.  Congress will go in and out of session as will the Supreme Court.  The House will have voted to impeach the President and the Senate will vote to keep him in office.  Quite a few voters who voted in the early primary seasons will be dead by the election itself, and new voters who vote in the general election will not have been old enough to have voted in the primary.  Pundits are fond of saying that tradition is the vote of the dead, but in this system, the vote of the dead actually is the vote of the dead.

November 4, 2020.

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Yesterday came the news that Michael Bloomberg is filing to run as a Democratic candidate for the Presidency in Alabama.

This is more in the nature of preserving his options than anything else.  Alabama has an absurdly early deadline to file to run for the office.  As I've noted before, the entire country would be better off if this entire process only had a 90 day lead into the General Election, rather than a year long one. Anyhow, Bloomberg has to file there if he intends to run anywhere.  It doesn't mean he will run.

It also doesn't mean he won't and he's obviously thinking about it.

If he does, it'll be a real symbol of what's currently wrong with American politics.  Bloomberg is 77 years old and yet another East Coast candidate.

Just a week or so ago a 25 year old New Zealand politician noting the average age of House of Commons members there in a speech was heckled by an older politician and suddenly became famous when she dismissed the heckling seamlessly with a "OK Boomer" retort.  That action has shocked members of the Baby Boom generation, and no wonder given that they have such a death grip on American politics.  The average age of the U.S. House of Representatives is 58 years of age, and the Senate 62 years of age.  The average age of the top contenders for the Presidency right now has to be in the 70s.  The last thing the Democrats need is another candidate whose political concepts were cast in the 1960s.

Indeed, my prediction is that if Bloomberg runs, the temptation for Hilary Clinton to run will become overwhelming.  Bloomberg's candidacy only makes sense in any fashion if Biden is crashing towards a failure, assuming that Bloomberg isn't wholly delusional about his chances of success and assuming that he's not willing to drag the entire party down in order to make whatever point he's seeking to make.  Assuming that those items are not the case, a Clinton run actually makes more sense than a Bloomberg one, and she'll know that.

November 8, 2019

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Americans today will experience something they haven't since the early 1990s, that being live televised impeachment proceedings.  Indeed, they'll actually experience something they've never experienced to the extent these will, which is live electronic media impeachment proceedings.

As noted above, there's now less than one year before the General Election and its difficult to imagine Congress really doing anything rapidly.  How long these will go on isn't clear to the author, but we're in the tail end of 2019 now, and even if Congress moves with blistering speed, nothing is really going to get done prior to the end of the year. Assuming that Congress moves forward really quickly, and assuming that there's a party line vote, that would mean that the Senate might have an Impeachment Trial on its plate in very early 2020.

Whether the Senate moves quickly is another matter. Both sets of proceedings risk being turned into circuses of a sort, and the length of them might end up depending upon how long any one body feels that they obtain an advantage by doing that. Any way its looked at, however, it seems the results are basically clear right now.  The House will vote to impeach and the Senate will vote not to.

What isn't clear is how this will impact the overall election.  If there are real bombshells that come out during the proceedings, it might.  Having said that, so far nothing has really changed all that much in basic support in committed camps to date.  A real risk for the Democrats may be that the focus on this sort of thing has now run for a full three years and they're exposed to claims of having done nothing else.  Irrespective of how a person feels on that sort of claim, it's already starting to circulate and it makes a bad basis for anyone's Presidential campaign.

Those old enough to remember the Nixon impeachment in the 1970s will recall that there was an overall air of collapse at the time.  This was less true during the Clinton proceedings, but at that time there was a real feeling of political cynicism.  Both atmospheres stand to be much amplified this time.  That the country could go for a century between the first and second impeachment efforts, and then end up doing it three times in less than fifty years isn't a good development.

November 13, 2019

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Deval Patrick, formerly the Governor of Massachusetts, has entered the race as a Democratic candidate.

Patrick, age 63, is taking the late entry approach.  It'll be interesting to see if this works for him. Coming in now, he will receive attention at this late stage whereas many earlier former stars in the campaign have faded.  At age 63, while not young by normal calculations, he is in this race. He's generally a liberal candidate.

It's now strongly rumored that Hilary Clinton is in fact pondering running.  I think at this point she's likely decided to in fact run.  My guess is that a full Bloomberg announcement and a Clinton one will come shortly.

Clinton is unlikely to be any more successful in 2020 than previously, and I don't believe that she'll secure the nomination.  Her mere presence in the race, however, will hurt the Democrats overall. Bloomberg's will do the same.

November 14, 2019

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Not surprisingly, the weekend shows focused on the impeachment hearings.

One did have Deval Patrick on it, however, and the two I listed to both discussed him.  He's seen as a middle of the road, centrist, Democrat.  In that context, it was noted that the reelection of Louisiana's governor saw the reelection of a Democrat of the nearly extinct social conservative variety. There was quite a bit of speculation that the rank and file is searching for somebody in the middle.

Buttigeg has been rising in the polls in Iowa and there's lots of speculation that may be for the same reason.

Indeed, on the one news show that Patrick was interviewed on he came very close to being examined in a bit of a hostile way on Buttigeg. The suggestion from the while interviewer was, or at least seemed to be, if Patrick was trying to take that position as he realized that he was he was 1) black, and 2) not homosexual, and therefore more electable.  Patrick who probably understood that this was the point, nicely sidestepped it, and frankly the question shouldn't have been asked.

Indeed, Patrick interviewed extremely well in general.  He's clearly more personable than Buttigeg and frankly, if this interview is any guide, more personable than any other running Democrat.  He did miss the ball a bit when asked what the difference was between he and Buttigeg and while he did not that he had a variety of experiences that made him qualified for the Oval Office, he didn't contrast himself directly.  If he had, it would have to be noted that he's been the Governor of a major state, where as Buittigeg has only been the mayor of a mid sized city.

On the same general topic, over the weekend President Obama came out in a speech noting that Americans like improvement but they don't like radical overhaul. That's an arrow shot at the hard left of the Democratic Party.  It did hit home with at least one weekend show pundit who claimed, basically, that Obama was betraying his own past as he had been the radical candidate.  The evidence doesn't support that.

On candidates who don't have a uniformly radical past, Bloomberg, who has been in both parties (like Trump) in his past, disavowed his "stop and frisk" policy from his days as the Mayor of New York. That was controversial, but it was also quite successful, giving us an interesting example of a politician disavowing his own successful actions in the past when they don't fit his current political aims.

November 18, 2019

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I happened to listen (not view) a Democratic debate this season for the first time.

The reason is that Meet The Press had it on their podcast feed and I heard it there while driving somewhere.

It was quite interesting, in part because listening to it gives you a prospective on the prospective of the pundits.  Not too surprisingly, my takeaway was different from theirs.

I'll note that listening to a debate is different than viewing it, and that too can have an impact.  But the Press also tends to go into these debates with a preconceived narrative to a degree, so they're not that inclined to alter it no matter what's said, except around the margins.

Listening to it, it was frankly Andrew Yang who won the debate.  A person doesn't have to agree with everything he believes in order to say that.  He's the only one who had fresh views and didn't have difficulty explaining them.  His answer on national defense was brilliant. So much so that a later "major" candidate co-opted it for his own later answer.

Compared to Yang, everyone looked pretty anemic.  Having said that Buttigieg came across fairly well. An effort to go after his experience by Amy Klobuchar ended up simply embarrassing Klobuchar as Buttigieg dismantled her on that topic and then used  his answer to dismantle everyone else.  Buttigieg also manged to really disrupt a statement by Kamala Harris on none of the white candidates really being able to understand the position of black voters, even though Harris clearly had a point on that demographic being used repeatedly by the Democratic party.  Again, a person doesn't have to agree with Buttigieg on anything in order to see that his debating skills were superior to nearly every other candidate.

Harris came across as a snot and surprisingly relied on her courtroom history as a California district attorney in her closing, noting for most of her professional time she's done that and started off her public addresses with "the people of. . ."  That'd be true, but in a debate in which Corey Booker had just complained about how the government has incarcerated a lot of minorities on drug charges, Harris' former role in putting people in jail seems like an odd thing to emphasize.

Harris was big on "recreating the Obama coalition" without explaining it.  Indeed, the "Obama coalition" may not have really ever existed in the first place.  That emphasizes, however, that the Democratic base isn't anywhere near as left wing as candidates are and that caused hemorrhaging towards Trump in the last election.  It's already known that black voters are uncomfortable with Buttigieg and that the "black church" retains a significant role in that demographic which is likely grater than any other religious demographic in the Democratic party.

Indeed, Warren basically stated that there's no room whatsoever for Democrats like recently re-elected John Bel Edwards in the Democratic Party.  Edwards is pro life and and Warren made support for abortion a litmus test on the basis that its a human rights matter, an extremely weak argument for supporting a policy that ends human life.  Harris leaped on this and indicated that she'd codify Roe v Wade as a matter of Federal law, which isn't a position that many who hold the freedom of state's to craft their own laws will find popular.

While she was able to hardly get a word in, after the debate got rolling, Tulsi Gabbard may have been next to Yang in being clear and blunt.  Her post election role as a commentator and her strong animosity towards the Clintons resulted in a debate with Harris and she pretty much took Harris apart.  Indeed, Harris may have come across the worst in the debate as her answer for everything seems limited to snark.

In terms of ideas, again, like them or not, Yang's were the freshest and well thought out.  Buttigieg's seem thought out.  Klobuchar should have done well, as she does in other venues, but she just came across as angry.  Warren came across as a person whose ideas are limited to the concept that no matter what the problem is, large or small, she'd sick the Federal government on it with a super expensive program of dubious utility.  Indeed, she makes Lyndon Johnson's backing of the Great Society look minor in comparison to what she'd try.

In other news Bloomberg launched a gigantic ad campaign.  The This Week pundits made the interesting observation that he's not really a Democrat, and he's been in both parties.  His presence in the race this late is likely because Warren and Sanders are sinking and people are losing faith in Biden.  It's doubtful that Bloomberg will make a real difference in the race, however, no matter how much money he spends on it.

Bloomberg's entry means that, if we include both parties, there are now no less than three candidates who are old New Yorkers, Bloomberg (who was born in Massachusetts), Sanders (who grew up in New York and retains an extremely thick New York accent) and Trump.  It's hard to grasp, for those who live outside of New York how the state and city retain such a grasp on the nation's politics.

November 25, 2019

I've noted here before that a lot of the demographic assumptions that the Democratic Party has made for quite some time are likely based on a set of false assumptions.  The past week the degree to which that is true and becoming more true started to play out in the primary, all the detriment of Pete Buttigieg.

I noted above that Buttigieg had taken criticism from Kamala Harris and seemingly effectively parried it during the debate. That perception, however, may not have been shared by black voters at all.

Indeed a poll on Buttigieg's position in the upcoming Iowa primary not only showed him last among black voters, but actually at 0%. That's a stunningly low figure and shows that there's definitely going on in a demographic that the Democrats absolutely depend on.  Not only is Buttigieg dead in the water in the campaign if he can't fix that, and that will be hard to fix, but it shows that the party as a whole, may be in really deep trouble in regard to black voters.

We'll get back to that in a moment, but continuing this story on, early in the week a prior statement by Buttigieg surfaced in which he attributed a lack of black economic advancement basically to a lack of role models (I'm really condensing this down).  This resulted in an explosive op ed being published in which a black author not only went after him but in no uncertain terms.  That op ed was in turn rapidly circulated on the Internet and received widespread black voter applause.  Buttigieg reacted by calling the author who credited him with listening, which he said was he could expect a white person to do, showing a real lack of any hope for anyone paying attention to the issues raised.

All that's telling, but a poll that was released coincident with all of this finds that black Democrats are much more conservative, indeed on some issues outright conservative, than their white counterparts. They're also older, showing that the Democrats aren't attracting younger black voters.  That no doubt will stun the Democrats and my prediction is that they'll ignore it.  In the minds of party leadership black voters are in the hardcore left, and that's a view that tends to have been supported by the fact that black politicians who have risen up in the party have seemed to be of the left.

In reality, however, black voters are largely in the Democratic Party due to events that occurred in the 50s through the 80s.  Since that time the GOP has made nearly no effort to recruit black voters even though it knows it needs too.  Irrespective of that, what turns out to be the case is that the black demographic in the Democratic party tends to be conservative on social issues and liberal on economic ones. This is the classic position that pertains to immigrants, and in this sense they're effectively internal immigrants in their own country.

Not yet addressed, this same problem exists for the country's growing Hispanic demographic.  They're highly socially conservative and are only in the Democratic Party because of economic issues and the party's seeming position on immigration.

Up until now none of this has had an impact in a national election, but now for the first time it is. And this shows a trend that's played out with other voting blocks over time.  Once economic conditions are no longer paramount for a voting block, social ones tend to take over.  In the case of the black demographic economic conditions are still an extremely large concern, but social issues are now actually playing out.  And in addition to that Buttigieg, who is the son of an academic and lead what amounts to a very upper middle class, left wing, sheltered life, is showing a lack of understanding on the situation for American blacks that they are really reacting to.

My guess is that he won't be over to overcome this problem.  But beyond that, a person has to wonder if this is a tipping point and the Democratic Party will start to lose black voters.  If it does, at least right now they'll end up independents by and large, which is what actually seems to be happening with younger black voters.  In some rural regions, the Democrats are losing black voters to the GOP, although they seemingly haven't noticed this.  The Democratic Party has three candidates this year who are African Americans, with one being in much too soon to have really been heard from, but those candidates don't seem to be gaining much headway.  All of this may suggest that a voting block that the Democrats have depending on since at least the 1970s is being lost to them seemingly without their having noticed it.

November 28, 2019

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Kamala Harris, whose campaign never really took off, in spite of pundit expectation that it would, bowed out of the race yesterday.

Harris never seemed to really get rolling and instead came across as a younger candidate, in the American sense (age 55) who had promise but somehow never delivered.  Her most notable moments came when 1) she proposed clearly unconstitutional actions in regards to firearms and was debated down on the topic by Joe Biden; and 2) when she took Buttigieg to task in regard to his statements about his support of the black community.  Those latter statements may very well have impacted him as the following week he was the subject of an op ed that was blistering on the topic.

Harris was a prosecutor prior to becoming a politician and frankly, to some degree, that may have hurt her in the Democratic field.  She came across as snarky, something that lawyers can easily do if they've spent much time in the courtroom, and its hard to take a candidate very seriously about their support of the downtrodden if they've spent a career in that branch of the law.  She was from the hardcore left and her departure leaves the field somewhat more level.

Also departing the race is Montana's governor Steve Bullock (age 53). Bullock was a moderate who should have done well as a candidate from a state where he has to pull from all political spectrum.  His campaign, however never took off and he acknowledged that and withdrew in the face of the inevitable.

The Harris departure brought another politician into the Twitter spectrum when Washington Post reporter Matt Viser noted that now the only candidates who have qualified to appear in the next debate are Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer and Warren.  Qualification is based on funds raised and therefore this doesn't reflect every Democrat running.  Yang and Booker, for example, are running.

Anyhow, Viser noted that this meant that while the field was "historically large and diverse" it is now all white.

This is interesting for a number of reasons.  For one thing, there's been a press obsession with the ethnicity of candidates that has actually operated to make it less diverse than it actually is.  Harris was regarded as black by the press, but that definition really hearkens back to the old Slave States definition of black as "one drop of blood".  In reality, her mother was of Tamil heritage and was born in Indian and who had Canadian and American citizenship.  Her father was from Jamaica.  Both parents had strong careers in academics.  Harris regarded herself, quite naturally, as black and Indian, but her ethnic heritage gives her a different ethnic heritage than most African Americans.  The press never really looked at this and simply regarded her as African American.  Corey Booker, on the other hand, has a more conventional African American heritage.

This none the less brings up a point which pundits seem to dance around.  While Harris expressly noted that she was "the only black candidate on the stage" last debate, her support among black voters was just slightly better than Buttigieg's, which is at a stunning 0%.  Harris may in fact have suffered i this area by claiming to be "black" when that status doesn't reflect the same sort of experience that the average African American would have.  White voters certainly aren't going to bring this up but African American voters have been highly savvy about things in the past.  They tend to very strong identify with candidates that they believe appreciate their circumstances and often don't worry about ethnicity when they vote as a result, preferring results over ethnicity.  Indeed, even in the segregation era black communities in the South would sometimes vote for white candidates that appeared to support segregation in a race, as they knew that their actual efforts in office would aid them.

This may have played into rock bottom black support for Harris in the race.  She was claiming to be black and does have Jamaican black heritage, but she's also half Tamil as well and her personal history diverges significantly from most African Americans.  As a former prosecutor, moreover, she has a history that most African Americans would have associated a lot more with problems in the system than with efforts to address them.

Booker's campaign is also faltering and signs exist that he'll be out of the race quite soon.  Earlier in the week he was begging for donations so that he could qualify for the next debate and that appears to have failed.  So far he is still in.  For some reason his campaign also has rock bottom support in his own ethnicity.  The reason for that is hard to grasp, but it may simply be because black voters don't regard him as somebody who will likely be effective.  It might also be, however, because his credentials haven't really impressed them so far.

An added aspect of this, however, ties into Buttigieg. All three of these candidates, Buttigieg, Book and Harris lacked support not only from black Democrats, but from Hispanic candidates as well. Again, this may simply be because minority voters identify with effectiveness over ethnicity, to their credit, but it may also be because the old reasons for these communities identifying with the Democratic Party are wearing off.  Combined with that, these communities contain social views that are much more conservative than the Democrats have been espousing in recent years.  This has been wholly ignored by the Democratic Party as a whole and minority Democratic candidates have very carefully aligned themselves with the seeming party platform in order to note loose white Democratic support. But a winnowing process seems to be going on, hardly noticed, in which, in spite of its claims to the contrary, the Democratic Party is becoming the WASP party.  It's presently hemorrhaging young black members as a result.

The remaining African American candidate, Deval Patrick, can't qualify for a debate yet as he just started running and hasn't obtained sufficient donations.  Of course, another new candidate who is extremely well self funded, Michael Bloomberg, can't qualify either.

Anyhow, Viser noted that while the field started large and diverse, only white candidates will be debating next go around, which isn't implicitly diverse.  Perhaps that's true, but it can't be said that Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer and Warren are all stamped out of the same mold either in numerous ways.  Be that as it may, Liz Cheney took Viser's comments as the opportunity to comment on Twitter, about Warren; "What about Pocahontas"

What exactly would motivate a person to say a thing like we'd have to leave unanswered, but it wasn't a smart thing to do.  It drew floods of Twitter protests and it make Cheney look incentive.  Her point, no doubt, was to thrown stones at Warren for claiming to be a Native American, something Warren was being patently absurd in doing in the first place, but extreme claims from Warren seem to be her thing.  Being as its a storm on Twitter, it probably has already faded, but she should think twice before saying something like that again.

According to the Chicago Tribune Klobuchar is rising in the polls in Iowa.  The Democratic field is clearly shifting, if not actually getting smaller given that two have gotten out and two have gotten in, but it seems almost certain that Booker is out of the running and that Patrick and Bloomberg won't be successful in getting into it.  Given that, the candidates who will debate next time, Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, Steyer and Warren, with perhaps also Yang, are those who are going to keep on keeping on until mid race.  Steyer's campaign has a lot of money but is not likely to go anywhere, and Yang has a lot of enthusiasm and originality but is not likely to go anywhere. So the really serious contenders appear to be Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Sanders, and Warren.  The field has suddenly narrowed.

December 4, 2019

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Since typing the above out a couple of days ago I've now heard analysis on the element of race and the Democratic Party on multiple platforms, one that was recorded before I set out the above, but others after that.  It's interesting in part because I'm hearing my own analysis repeated back to me by pundits.

On that, I'm surprised that some pundits are surprised that black voters don't necessarily vote for a black candidate simply because the candidate is black.  I'm also surprised that some pundits are surprised that Hispanic voters don't vote for a black candidate on the basis that Hispanics are minorities (although my prediction is that their category as such will cease to be recognized within a generation as they go through the same process that the Italian and Irish "racial" minorities have in the past), and minorities "of color" will of course vote for a candidate of color, even if their ethnicity is considerably different in terms of heritage.

Some Democrats who were backing or running seem to have made those assumptions as well, and Corey Booker, who is of course still in the race, was loud in the press regarding Kamala Harris' departure on the issue, nearly claiming that black voters owed their votes to him or to Harris because they were black.  Of interest on Harris, I've since seen one post by an Indian American about how proud Harris made her, which brings up once again that while Harris campaigned as a black candidate, her claim to that status is a bit mixed as none of her ethnic heritage comported with the African American norm.  That shouldn't matter, but to some it seems to, and candidates themselves will seem to claim votes based on those claims.

Anyhow, most of the analysis is really close to what I already set out, with pundits rediscovering the really long held truths that: 1) African Americans place their votes with the candidate that they feel best realistically serves their interests, irrespective of that person's race; and 2) African American voters aren't necessarily as loyal to any political party as Democrats have tended to assume in recent years.

On the latter, one commentator, a liberal African American figure who appeared on Meet The Press went further and noted something that I've hinted at, but which he was much more blunt about.  Perhaps his status as an African American allowed him to take on a topic that others don't want to address as they don't want to tread the risky waters that accompany it, and I don't blame them. That had to deal with Buttigieg's almost total lack of support among black and Hispanic voters.

That commentator flat out brought up that Buttigieg has trouble with black voters, and Hispanic voters, as they are "conservative morally", by which he meant that the two demographics do not share the WASP acceptance of homosexual conduct as a moral nullity.  That fact has been a somewhat loudly whispered truth for awhile, but it probably does take a black liberal to openly state it.  He did, and then went on to state that the Republicans are missing a bet as they don't exploit the social conservatism of African Americans and Hispanics.

In stating that he's correct.  The GOP has not known how to address this in recent years and has basically done nothing much more than to note that the Democratic Party simply depends upon black voters without actually assisting them much.  The recent departure of Harris from the race may be a good example of that as Harris was really pronounced on traditional Democratic hard left issues, but none of those directly address black and Hispanic concerns and one of her open positions, her position in regards to abortion, runs directly contrary to a view held by large numbers of Hispanic voters and isn't really all that popular with black voters.  This tends to show that, as previously noted, black and Hispanic support of the Democrats has been for economic reasons and, in regards to Hispanics, because the GOP has been perceived as hostile to Hispanics.

In spite of all of that, the fact that things were beginning to change in this are should have been evident in the 2016 race.  During that race the GOP had two Hispanic contenders who remained in the running for a very long time and one black candidate who did fairly well early on.  Comparing that to the 2020 race, none of the Democratic minority candidates have done well at all.  The one who is likely to remain in the race the longest, Yang, is able to do so due to his unique positions and self funding, but whether fairly or not Asian Americans are regarded as having been more fully assimilated into the nation as a whole than other minorities.

At any rate, the fact that the Republicans did have serious minority candidates who didn't campaign on their ethnicity should be worrying to the Democrats as it signals something going on at the street level.  The GOP is beginning to have conservative black candidates at the state level, which means that the Democrats are now hemorrhaging some voters who had been in the GOP over social issues.  And the GOP has picked up one entire Hispanic demographic, Cuban Americans, and there are starting to be inroads into other Hispanic demographics. As the Hispanic economic situation improves the social issues will start to rise, and even such notable left wing Hispanic figures of the past have voiced some very conservative social views openly.  As Hispanics, moreover, begin to assimilate into Middle America, and they are doing so now, this will accelerate.

The irony this presents is that in this cycle the Democrats are leaping leftward, and they can probably at least safely do so as President Trump has the pretty united opposition of both African Americans and Hispanics.  But at the same time Democrats who for years and years have pointed out with glee that the GOP has a demographic problem are now pointing out that the Democratic Party also has a demographic problem.

December 6, 2019

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Yesterday Finland sat a new Prime Minister.

What, you may legitimately ask, does this have to do with the United States and its election?

Well, perhaps this.

All three of the contenders from Finland's major political parties for this position were under 35.  The government, formed by Social Democrat Sanna Marin, has five women at its head, as a coalition government, four of whom are under 35 years of age. Marin is 34.  She replaces outgoing Social Democrat Anitti Rinne who is 55.

The point?

Well the point isn't that I'm endorsing the Finnish Social Democrats, with whom I have a lot of disagreement.  The point isn't even that I'm endorsing any Finnish political party, all of whom I probably have a lot of disagreement with.  Indeed, Finland shares the Nordic peculiarity, even though the Finns aren't actually a Scandinavian people (save for the minority Swedish population) of seeming political goofiness in recent years.

Rather, I'm noting the stark contrast in ages that the leaders of some other democracies exhibit in contrast to ours.

Indeed, in the current election, as noted before, we're actually fielding potentially the absolute oldest field of candidates of all time.  Donald Trump is the oldest President in his first term ever.  If reelected he'll be the oldest President to be reelected and if he's defeated there's an outstanding chance that whoever replaces him, in the current slate, will then become the oldest President to have been elected to the office.

Prior to Donald Trump, no American President was elected to a first term who was in his  70s.  Now, three of the Democratic top contenders are in their 70s.  Bernie Sanders will actually be 79 years old by the election next year.  Trump will be 74.  Elizabeth Warren will be 71.

What does this argue or indicate?  Probably nothing much more than the first grasp of the Baby Boomer generation on the nation's politics and culture.  Of the nation's 45 presidents, only 11 have been over their 50s when they assumed the office. Granted, that's roughly 1/4, but it's also the case that some who  assumed the office in real times of crisis were much younger.  Franklin Roosevelt was 51.  Abraham Lincoln was 52.  George Washington was 57.

Is this significant?  At least in some senses, it must be.

December 10, 2019

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Bernie Sanders has reacted with outrage to Major League Baseball's proposal to cut 42 minor league teams.  Indeed, he wrote the commissioner of baseball about it and posted as much on his twitter feed.  On the latter, he took an economic, and social justice, point of view, stating:

This has nothing to do with what's good for baseball and everything to do with greed. 

It would destroy thousands of jobs and devastate local economies.

One of the teams slated for the axe, we'd note, is the Vermont Lake Monsters.

Champs, mascot of the Vermont Lake Monsters, a minor league team slated for removal by MLB.  From wikipedia commons and listed as public domain.

December 16, 2019

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The 2020 Election, Part 1

The 2020 Election, Part 2

The 2020 Election, Part 3

Lex Anteinternet: I've found it hard to get too worked up about the ...

firing of Laurie Nichols as the President of the University of Wyoming in a post that started off stating:

Lex Anteinternet: I've found it hard to get too worked up about the ...: and I'm not sure why. I probably ought to be concerned, as something is going on and I'm completely clueless about it. As the s...

I'm still not all that worked up about it for some reason, even though in my earlier posted I noted:

Well, at any rate, the Trustees really do owe the state, and Nichols, an explanation.  There's some reason for their decision, even if its trivial, and as the state only has one four year university, they should let us know what it is.

Now something really interesting has happened.

The press has gone after a confidential file regarding Nichol's release. And opposing the release of that information is. . . Nichols.

Nichols states she has no idea what is in the information, but she doesn't want it released as she doesn't want, her attorney claims, any chance that it gets bounced around in the press and her name in tarnished.  Her attorney stated in a brief before the court on that, according to the Tribune;

“Nichols doesn’t even know what the records say or why they were gathered. . .  adding that Nichols “assumed the worst” in terms of what records were at stake. “Thus, any release would subject her to a potential trial and lynching.”

She's quite right.

Not so says the lawyer who is representing the press.  He noted:

“I’m assuming she’s saying a media trial and lynching. . .  That takes a dim view of the public in my mind. ... Members of the public could in fact be very sympathetic to her and supportive of her if they think that these are bogus reasons [for her demotion] and that the board didn’t act as they should.”

Oh leave the poor woman alone.  If she doesn't want the reasons made public, it was her job.  Respect her wishes and move on.

This doesn't have anything, of course, to do with the law.  But then maybe in this era of hyper rumorization, the law ought to be a bit modified.  If there is a right to privacy, maybe even for public figures, it trumps the public's right to know in some instances.

December 15, 1919. No peace, no booze. Colorado approves the 19th Amendment.

The United States Supreme Court, on this day, made it plane.

No peace, no booze.

Of course, the reprieve that striking down provisions of the war time prohibition bill, which was always subject to questions about what it really applied to, would have been temporary anyhow  Nationwide prohibition was coming in next month with the application of the Volstead Act.  And many states, Wyoming and Colorado included, had voted in state prohibition anyhow.

The written opinion would actually be released the following day, Decmeber 16, and find that the prohibition authority was valid under Congress' war powers. The text of the short opinion was as follows:

Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries & Warehouse Co., 251 U.S. 146 (1919)
Hamilton v. Kentucky Distilleries & Warehouse Company
No. 589, 602
Argued November 20, 1919
Decided December 16, 1919
251 U.S. 146

Syllabus
The power to prohibit the liquor traffic as a means of increasing war efficiency is part of the war power of Congress, and its exercise without providing for compensation is no more limited by the Fifth Amendment than a like exercise of a state's police power would be limited by the Fourteenth Amendment. P. 251 U. S. 164.

The War-Time Prohibition Act, approved ten days after the armistice with Germany was signed, Act of November 21, 1918, c. 212, 40 Stat. 1046, provided:

"That after June thirtieth, nineteen hundred and nineteen, until the conclusion of the present war and thereafter until the termination of demobilization, the date of which hall be determined and proclaimed by the President of the United States, for the purpose of conserving the manpower of the Nation, and to increase efficiency in the production of arms, munitions, ships, food, and clothing for the Army and Navy, it shall be unlawful to sell for beverage purposes any distilled spirits, and during said time no distilled spirits held in bond shall be removed therefrom for beverage purposes except for export."

Held, in respect of liquors in bond, even if belonging to one who made and owned them before the act was passed and paid revenue taxes upon them since June 30, 1919:

(1) That the act was not an appropriation of such liquors for public purposes. P. 251 U. S. 157.

(2) That the time allowed for disposing of all liquors in bond on November 21, 1918, could not be declared unreasonable as a matter of law, even if they were not sufficiently ripened or aged to be disposed of advantageously during the period limited. P. 251 U. S. 158.

(3) That the prohibition was not in violation of the Fifth Amendment as a taking of property without compensation. P. 251 U. S. 157.

(4) That it was within the war power when passed (notwithstanding the cessation of hostilities under the armistice) as a means of war efficiency and for the support and care of the Army and Navy during demobilization. P. 251 U. S. 158.

A wide latitude of discretion must be accorded to Congress in the exercise of the war powers.

The court cannot inquire into the motives of Congress, in determining the validity of its acts, or into the wisdom of the legislation, nor pass upon the necessity for the exercise of a power possessed. 

It is settled that the war power carries with it the power to guard against immediate renewal of the conflict and to remedy the evils which have arisen from its rise and progress. Id.

Assuming that the continuing validity of an act passed under the war power may depend not upon the existence of a technical state of war, terminable only with the ratification of a treaty of peace or by a proclamation of peace, but upon some actual war emergency or necessity, the Court cannot say that the necessity for the prohibition had ceased when these suits were begun in view of the facts that the treaty of peace has not been concluded, that various war activities -- among them, national control of railroads -- continue, and that the manpower of the nation has not been completely restored to a peace footing.

The Eighteenth Amendment did not operate to repeal the War-Time Prohibition Act.
In defining the period of the prohibition, Congress, in the War-Time Prohibition Act, doubtless expecting that the war would be definitely ended by a peace under a ratified treaty or a proclamation before demobilization was complete, intended that the prohibition should continue until the date of the termination of demobilization had been definitely ascertained by the President and made known by him through a proclamation to that end.

The reference to the "demobilization of the army and navy" in the President's message communicating his veto of the National Prohibition Act, is not the proclamation required by the War-Time Prohibition Act.

In an exact sense, demobilization had not terminated then or when these suits were begun, as shown by the report on the subject of the Secretary of War, made to the President and transmitted to Congress; nor does it appear that it has yet so terminated.

There was good news for some Americans being held by Pancho Villa, they were let go.

And there was good news for women voters in Colorado as Colorado ratified the 19th Amendment, the last state to do so in 1919, and over a month before Wyoming, where women could already vote, did so.  Wyoming's Gov. Robert Carey would have had to call a special election in order to achieve this, which he repeatedly indicated he would not do.

The Non Partisan League, which put out the paper The Nonpartisan Leader, put out its December issue, featuring a rather over the top view of farmers.

The NPL was a semi socialist branch of the Republican Party that dated back to 1915.  It can, therefore, be regarded as a really radical branch of Republican Progressivism from that era.  It advocated for state control of grain mills and the like, and indeed it was influential in the upper Midwest where policies it advocated were put into effect during the Great Depression.  By that time it was part of the Democratic Party, having made the switch in 1920.