Category Archives: Current Affairs

2020 Speculations: Wanted — A Fighting Leader

If my intuition is right — that her fighting voice and image best fits this moment and the angry, fired up base — this could well be her moment.

“We won’t always win when we fight,” she said, “But if we don’t put up a fight, we’ll always lose.”

So far, the Committee newcomers,  Harris, Booker and Klobuchar, are promising, but just not yet in the same class.

So these are my current speculations on the 2020 Democratic horse race. I’ll close with a quote from a Warren floor speech before the vote, about the ultra-secret FBI instant-“investigation”.  She declared flatly that, despite all its shortcomings,

“ . . . the available documents contradict statements Mr. Kavanaugh made under oath. I would like to back up these points with explicit statements from the FBI documents — explicit statements that should be available for the American people to see. But the Republicans have locked the documents behind closed doors.”

If anybody can find a way to pay open those closed doors, it could be her. And if that happens, Brett Kavanaugh may soon have many new reasons to Ralph. And the White House could be faced with a real fighter in 2020.

It would be about time. Overdue, in fact.

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Post-Confirmation: Our World Won’t End Right Now. (But you can see the clouds gathering.)

I don’t mean to diminish for a minute the magnitude of the institutional violence done to women this week, especially survivors of direct assault and abuse. Yet the list of legal catastrophes whose likelihood would climb with Kavanaugh’s ascension had already gotten long, and portends massive negative impact on many other segments of the population.

Further, there was an excellent, but now forgotten overview of this in the opening session of Kavanaugh hearings, presented by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

I don’t know why Whitehouse isn’t  better known.  Maybe it’s Rhode Island’s mini-size (at barely 1200 square miles, it makes Vermont — 8 times as large– look huge; or maybe its due to the state’s mostly Democratic voting record.) Perhaps it’s because he is not running for president.

Whatever; Whitehouse was a prosecutor and state attorney general before he came to Washington. He knows how to make a case succinctly and trenchantly. And he made this detailed pre-rapist case against Kavanaugh in the first round of opening statements on September 4.

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Notes on a Terrible Day In Our History

So when the committee reconvened to hear Kavanaugh, the tactical plan had changed markedly. I don’t know if they consciously thought of it this way, but they clearly decided to do a remake of the Clarence Thomas triumph.

Kavanaugh insisted that no one but a few clerks had seen his opening statement before he made it. Perhaps so, but he had spent much time consulting at the White House and with others in prepping for the appearance. As he is known for his studies of precedents, my guess is he went over the Thomas hearings in the process.

The Thomas scenario is built on flipping the abuse script and making the wannabe rapist into the victim.

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Carolina farmworkers win a round in labor union struggle

For agriculture, the additional restrictions in the 2017 law meant that farms couldn’t directly help workers pay their union dues, even if both the farmer and the worker wanted to. It also meant that if a farm was accused of mistreating its workers and the owners wanted to avoid a lawsuit by settling with the union to enter into a union contract, they also wouldn’t be able to do that.

In 2017, Union County Republican Rep. Jimmy Dixon, who is a farmer himself, added the anti-union language to that year’s wider-ranging Farm Bill. But at the time Dixon told The N&O the intent was not to target FLOC specifically, but rather to help individual farmers who felt pressured by the union.

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Blue Wave? Red Wave? How about the Carolina Brown Wave (aka Big Poop)??

The hog industry’s PR agencies cultivate a wholesome, (white) family-friendly image. But most of the hogs and the farms are really owned by giant international corporations; and the biggest is Chinese. (That ginormous Smithfield plant? Chinese-owned.)
And Big Poop can also play hardball, in that vast battleground, the front lawn. The Republican NC legislature is comfortably stashed in the pocket of their newest jeans.

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