National Stew

No ICE at the Polls!  Voting is the democratic part of Democracy! It is the work we do to choose the representatives in our representative Republic! Dill Buckley called it: Our Civic Sacrament."  Attitudes and rules for voting evolved from the Time of our Great Declaration to the present. Our nation was not born fully grown and having an adult understanding. Like all infants, it had to grow into adulthood slowly and often, erratically.  At the start, most of the founders believed that only white adult male property owners would have the right to cast a ballot, though by the end of the revolution, people came to realize that the war itself was won by mostly young males who owned little to no property.  After the Declaration, each colony wrote a constitution. All but Pennsylvania included property ownership as a requirement for the right to vote. Franklin was asked why he did not include that requirement in the document. He explained that if a man owns a jackass, he ca...

 Grievances against the King of England and Donald Trump The list of grievances against the King of England, as it appears in the Declaration of Independence: “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them. He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only. He has called together legislative bodies at place...

  Do we wait for perfect people? There are not now, nor have there ever been, perfect people, except one, and if you believe that story, we crucified him! Is perfection attainable? Human history and daily practice say no. Should we let that stand in the way of progress?  A historian I trust said that one of our founders was a horrible man. I have no argument against that theory. The question then: “Is the product of his intellect invalid?" If the product of the minds of our founders is deemed incorrect and inoperable because they were severely flawed men, we also have no right to take on the trials of our own day! We are as flawed as they, in ways we can not yet grasp! Do we wait for perfect documents? Our founders were flawed, as we have noted. We live and work in a system they created. Is that system inherently wrong as a result? Shall we wait for perfect people to produce perfect governing documents? If so, we would not to this day have attended the greatest evil of their t...

National Stew News

Ending TPP  Ending JCPOA Ending NAFTA  Ending Affiliation with WTO    TPP  The Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump obviously did not understand was the biggest boon to China in this century! Under the agreement, we would have an economic and democracy-boosting agreement with the Pacific Rim nations that would have rivaled China and provided security and economic and military leverage against them!  JCPOA  The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was intended to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons and improve regional and global security. Iran accepted restrictions on its nuclear program and underwent regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Our removal from the program resulted in our blindness to the Iranian nuclear progress, which is now just short of weapons production!  NAFTA  The North American Free Trade Agreement was ended by the Trump administration and the new agreement brokered by them led to higher U...

That is the headline I expect to see post-election  It's too early to see the full effect of the debate, but the most morose of the Commentary I have seen came from Democrats early after the event. It was that on which the pundit class based its commentary!  It seems the only way media on either side of politics comments is Democratic self-loathing! The first ten things I read from the right this morning were the whimpering comments from the left about how they lost and needed to change course! Their self-deprecating made it as bad as they perceived!  Tragically the debate was bad but not as bad as the dems made it out to be. It was one tiny data point in the face of a megalomaniacal cartoon-style villain, a felon with 34 felonies and multiple remaining felony indictments who incited an election overthrow to dispossess the votes of 81 million voters!