The New Democratic Party Base

When I was born (into the white working class), the base of the Democratic party was white working men. That's no longer the case. Much of that base has shifted to Reagan/Trump. The election of President Obama signaled what the new base would be, but Obama left the leadership of the Democrats in the hands of the Bill Clinton Centrists. They lost to Trump, which wasn't easy.  

The change among Democratic voters can be seen in a few statistics  In 1994 only 25% of the party called themselves liberal. 45% called themselves moderate. That was not the party of FDR or LBJ.

Today 51% of Democratic voters call themselves liberals, while 34% call themselves moderates. The percentage of Democratic liberals has doubled. The base has changed.

That shift has been in the works for a while. It was a main reason Obama defeated Hillary in the primaries. 

In the Bernie-Hillary contests, the liberals divided. Many backed the independent socialist on the issues, but a good number backed Hillary. For these liberals electing a competent woman was a civil rights issue, although some Hillary supporters said they preferred Bernie's platform. (If she had adopted Bernie's platform, as Kamela Harris and others are doing today, Hillary would have pleased the base and won.) 

Today the old party leadership, often good vote counters, is taking a few steps to the left and preparing to age out of power. The next round of leaders are likely to cater to their base of voters, which consists of people of color, educated women, young lefties with a New Deal-like view of socialism, gays, environmentalists, unions, students unable to afford college, etc. (Of course, Wall Street will still be working some of its magic back stage.)

DNA and Confusion

My daughter had my DNA run, and I came out 

30.8% Irish, That's based on a bit of DNA that science associates with some--but not all--of the people who live in Ireland. The company that did this claimed to be naming my "ethnic mix."

Actually I am 100% American, but that's not a category like English or Irish.  Apparently.  

DNA tells you something about a person's physical characteristics. For example, it might tell you which racial category Americans will put you in, if you don't already know. 

Your ethnicity refers, for the most part, to cultural factors, to the social groups you inhabit. You might be a fourth generation Inner Mongolian Catholic in Dublin, which would make you ethnically Irish, but that wouldn't show in your DNA, which might put you in NE Asia. 

The company that analyzed my saliva claimed to be able to name my "ethnic mix," but that was false. They named places where parts of my physical mix were common. My "mix" rests on what philosophers call a category mistake. That is, it confounds physical characteristics with social characteristics.

Humans share 50% of their DNA with bananas, say the experts. I'm not sure--does that make my ethnic mix fruit-based?

Who Is Roger Stone?

In 1996 Robert Stone resigned from his role as a consultant to the Bob Dole Presidential campaign to run a group sex ring with his wife. They took out ads on the Internet and in a magazine called  Local Spring Fever. Stone was looking for partners for  himself and his wife, a "hot, insatiable lady" seeking "exceptionally muscular  . . . single men."

That's none of our business, of course. It takes all kinds  We will be pleased if Stone's access to exceptionally muscular men improves in the the course of 2019.

Why were the Stones seeking single men? They weren't single themselves. Was this position a matter of ethics of some kind?

Trump and Stone

Roger Stone, was arrested by the FBI this morning for lying under oath. The FBI was working without pay. Stone raised his two flabby arms in the famous Nixon salute, forming a V with his arms and raising two victory fingers on each weak hand. To which, I returned two fingers of my own. Stone is so bankrupt of morality that Nixon (for whom as a fresh chunk of shit, Stone served as a fecal transplant) remains his idol, his Satan to imitate. 

May Roger Stone get rogered in a cramped cell.

Meanwhile, Trump, a moron, claimed that his disastrous defeat in shutting down the government was a signal victory.  He'd just had his nuts chopped off; he celebrated this event as a planned weight loss. 

Trump could lose thirty pounds of ugly fat by cutting off his head. 

In the course of Trump's tepid bragging, he said "I think." My first reaction was that this was another one of his lies, but there really is a sense that he thinks. I mean, a dog that brings his leash to you is thinking, just not in words. Trump thinks like a dog (without the dog's genuine attachment to its friends and family). At this point we haven't figured out exactly how a dog's mind solves problems, and we don't know how Trump's mental apparatus flexes and flails; but it works well enough for him to order two dishes of ice cream at lunch. His brain functions on the "mo' food" level.

Going to Vietnam at Last!

The White House has announced that President Spanklyn T. Borderline has finally volunteered to go to Vietnam. He will be lunching there with a pal, the dictator of North Korea. Two factors drove this decision. One was an unexpected recovery from bone spurs in the President's feet. He recently regained the ability to walk and play golf, which he lost more than 50 years ago. The other was the rumored end of the Tet offensive.

On this trip, the President will be accompanied by his sons, pursuing their interest in shooting geckos. 

ARISTOTLE

In an old speech broadcast today by Amy Goodman, Martin Luther King, Jr. cited an example of how racists reason.

"God made man in his own image. Everyone knows God was not a Negro. Therefore, Negroes are not men."

(Many people believe they can describe the color of God's skin and what God's opinions on human sexual behavior are and so on. None explain why an all-knowing, all-powerful Being would care about such things in the first place.)

If We Had Lost the Civil War

What would have happened if we had lost the Civil War or had never fought it? A history of Brazil, which abolished slavery in 1888, provides one likely outcome.

By 1880 the United States and Brazil would have been the last two western nations where a rich man could own enslaved women. World opinion would have isolated the two nations politically, and they would not have made natural allies. Brazil was led by a monarchy.

For many years abolitionists would have been banding tightly together in the North and in the Border States. The Republican party, backed by abolitionists, would have achieved a tight grip on the House, Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court. Most enslaved people would have left the border states, led out by free people of color and white sympathizers, or they would have gathered in intimidating numbers in and around the major cities of Tennessee and Kentucky. More than a million black people would have already freed themselves or been freed. 

In places like Virginia and North Carolina, support for slavery would begin to fail. 

In the Deep South, where a financial way of life depended entirely on slavery,  the authorities, frightened, would have begun taking extreme steps to stop escaping slaves and anyone who aided them. Militia would have begun legally killing and maiming people in Mississippi and Georgia in an attempt to intimidate the abolitionists. But the abolitionists would have continued working more and more openly. 

When the federal government proclaimed an end to slavery in 1885, outright opposition in the main remaining slave states would have collapsed in favor of a call for gradualism. In effect, a Jim Crow era would have stabilized the South with slavery gone but white men still in control. Black people would have been expected to sign contracts to work as submissive laborers on white-owned farms and so on, not too different from what actually happened after Reconstruction ended. Voting by people of color would have been suppressed in the South, as it still is today, but the suppression would become less effective over time. 

Attempts to steal free labor will never end, but the will to resist is strong.   

I'm Not Going

I support the right of Palestinians to their own nation, to medicine, to food and to respect, but I don't support anti-Semitism in any form, even the mildest. There seems to be a touch of anti-Semitism in the new Women's March leadership, although I can't get a good reading on what is going on.

I (and many in my family) turned out for the local version of the original Women's March, and it was vital, leading to good things like many new women winning political office. For the first time in our history, the Democrats have a handful of strong women running for the Presidential nomination. 

It's unfortunate that the toxic Israel-Palestine conflict has somehow been introduced into the Women's March. That splits progressives. Some on the Left will not be turning out to march with defenders of Louis Farrakhan on the 19th, tomorrow. I'm not going.

The Guilty

In a kleptocracy, as practiced by President Spanklyn T. Borderline Personality-Disorder (and crooked national leaders around the globe), the best part is the power to protect the guilty. 

As a private citizen, Spanklyn lolled about while protected by enormous inherited wealth. He could cheat the hard-working plumber with pleasure and impunity, because the plumber could not afford an attorney. Who could win against Spanklyn's 101 lawyers trained in legal abuse at the nation's most elite academies?

Spanklyn could crush a small business, trample a mid-size city and cheat anyone except the Mafia. 

Becoming President gave Spanklyn the ability to empty the offices of federal prosecutors. That felt great! He appointed an accused rapist to the Supreme Court. From the Oval Office he "sold" million dollar apartments to dozens of Russian oligarchs while lifting their sanctions. His extended family sold green cards to Chinese billionaires looking for dual citizenship. His cabinet contained one flagrant, graceless crook after another. 

But Spanklyn overreached. He doesn't live in Putin's Russia. Nothing in his slobby life of enormous wealth and privilege prepared him to cope with non-compliant people. Suddenly he can't have it all his way. 

His fear has always been that people secretly despise him, liking only his cash. Now they openly despise him, mock him every night on television; and certain implacably obsessive cops are staring at him and his family. He hasn't had a pleasant moment since 2016, except for the involuntary smile that lights up his pouting visage when he spots another villain on the dias. He can't help it. His mindless, loose,  prehensile lips curl in delight.

Pence's Rebel Wife

Vice President Pence’s rebel wife has taken a job at a religious school where female employees must agree to submit to their husbands  “as the church submits to Christ.”  Some husbands have objected to the ambiguity of the requirement, given that churches sometimes submit to Christ by ignoring Him. 

If Pence’s wife is ignoring her charmless, white rat husband’s wishes, that is encouraging news; Pence is unlikely to learn about it, because his worshipful gong is too attached to Trump’s butt-cheeks for sound to penetrate. (Please remember it is discourteous to say “penetrate” in the presence of professional Republicans.) 

Inventing the Wall

Last week, in one of his minor episodes of stone-cold ignorance, President Spanklyn T. Borderline told us that the wheel is older than the wall. The wheel is old. It was invented by someone throwing clay pots in the region of Sumer (Iraq) about 6,000 years ago.  A few hundred years later, someone attached pottery wheels and an axle to a box, inventing the wagon.

But every student of the Bible knows that walls go back at least to the city of Jericho; that's about 9,000 years ago. The Torah tells us that the walls of Jericho collapsed and then an attack led by a fellow named Joshua killed nearly every man, woman and child who lived there. 

Many college graduates have heard that Genocidal Joshua fit the battle of Jericho.

My interest is in the person who invented the wheel. This potter or  the potter's descendants should get a Nobel Prize, but of course the inventor will remain nameless. No fame for the inventor of the bow and arrow or the tamer of the horse (who evolved from the eater of the horse). Who built the first fireplace? 

Brazil!

Knowing little about Brazil's history, I checked out a popular new tome, BRAZIL, A BIOGRAPHY by Schwarzc and Starling. I'm making my slow way through the story, much of which is focused on slavery.

The Portuguese had colonies in Africa, which made it easy for them to kidnap black men and ship them to the New World (to replace the dying Amerindians).  The Portuguese didn't ship many women or children. They weren't the strongest laborers. 

In the United States enslaved women were of value for several reasons, one of which was that they gave birth to new, valuable, baby slaves. In Brazil, where a slave's life expectancy (25 years) was ten years less than in South Carolina, it was cheaper to replace a dead slave with a new one from Angola. Brazil imported about four times as many slaves as the United States and turned their part of the New World into a living hell.

Slavery lasted in Brazil from around 1500 to the 1880s. 

Statistics

I don't normally read Nicholas Kristoff unless I choose to start my day with a downer, but he recently pointed out some facts that made me pause. In 1960 19% of all children in the world died before reaching the age of 5. Today that figure is 4%. 81% of all children have been vaccinated, despite what some parents fear in the  far western reaches of Sonoma County. 

Here is a basic question. Are human cultures around the world gradually evolving in a positive way? How would I measure that? I'm guessing there is evidence for no and for yes.  

How to Quit Smoking

In trying to recall why I quit smoking cigarettes, I had to look things up. On January 11, 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry announced that cigarette smoking caused cancer, so I switched to cigars.

This is not to take anything away from Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who made a related announcement in 1988. Koop may have been a great man. When President Reagan, an old fool, tried to get Koop to claim that abortion was bad for women's health, Koop refused. Reagan managed to block Koop's attempt to address AIDS, but Koop did a lot for disabled children.

I cannot keep track of the damage done by Republicans.

Anyway, after Terry I switched to cigars, not mentioned in the first news reports. I didn't inhale cigars and smoked them for about fifteen years. At first people around me enjoyed it, saying it reminded them of their grandfathers, but over time objections began to arise. I switched to a pipe. By then I was a professor, and a pipe came attached to tenure. Again, pipe smokers usually don't inhale. Strangers on the sidewalk. told me the smoke remained them of their grandfathers and, in some cases, of their clay-piped Irish grandmothers. 

As time passed, the places where a pipe could be smoked grew fewer until there were none other than in my own van. I kept saying that I could give up smoking without effort or regret, and last year I did. By then the habit of combining this activity or that with smoking had already been whittled down to the nub by all the laws making places smoke-free. One day I stopped buying tobacco and immediately forgot about smoking. The whole painless process had taken less than 65 years.  I was curious about how how my kith and kin would respond to this modification in my behavior. To date not a single person has noticed. 

Warren

I'm a left-wing independent, but like many independents I often vote for Democrats, even for centrist Democrats and Wall Streeters when the Republicans nominate a slob who sits on a gold toilet. Last year I saw the Democratic Party, with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, take a big turn toward my positions, toward the New Deal, a step driven by women, the young, unions and by people of color. The party of 2020 will not be the party of Clinton triangulation.

My early, provisional choices for the next Presidential race are Warren and Castro, if they run on Bernie Sanders' issues. (If Hillary had done that and picked a VP with a purpose, she would be President today.)

Elizabeth Warren was a working-class kid who became a professor. That's my kind of person. The central argument against her is that maybe people won’t go for her, because she is unusually intelligent and female. I don't buy that, but time and primary campaigns will tell.

For two years I've been saying that it makes no sense to nominate someone with high negatives. I want to see how well Warren campaigns and if voters are drawn to her. The Democrats should nominate someone popular with women, people of color, young voters and gays. That's the test. We'll see how Warren does.

Warren will be under attack from the Fox machine and from Democrats allied with other candidates. My hope is that she ignores the bullshit and keeps focused on what she believes the country needs.

I noticed that Hillary Clinton ran up a lot of votes in 2016.. That proves to me that an intelligent woman can win. Warren--with her New Deal agenda--may be able to bring extra votes to the polls. 

We have a year and a half to find out if Warren and Castro are the strongest candidates or if someone else might run better. 

Is Democracy Even Possible?

The core of the democratic idea is that ordinary people can and should govern themselves and their nation. We've never tried that in America. It's not part of our culture.

Our founding fathers had little faith in ordinary people. Their idea (and Constitution) was an attempt to set up a system in which the governing would be done by wealthy, well-educated white males who could read Latin and had no use for political parties. They offered us a kind of tyranny by an elite minority. There are worse systems. 

About four years in, that experiment failed, and now we have political parties, minority rule and Spanky Trump as our looney babbler-in-chief. 

I'm going to suggest a genuinely democratic system that few will support outside of New England. I know this plan sounds strange, but it might work. 

The basic idea is that the job of running things will be done by a permanent, expert civil service (already partly the case). Policy will be set by a huge group of ordinary people serving short terms and chosen at random in a yearly lottery. There will be no campaigns and no campaign funds and no use for political parties, who can't affect a lottery. 

For example, in Healdsburg, a town reminiscent of Mark Twain's Hadleyburg, there are 6,000 voters Each year 50 of them would be selected at random and be required to serve on the city council for 12 months (meeting once a week). To provide institutional memory and know-how, the city would hire an expert manager (which it already does). 

Probably more than half the city council members would be women. A percentage would be gay. Some would be rich and some poor. Some might be in wheelchairs. The town is 30% Latino and has had no Latinos on the city council in this century, but in the new system there would be many Latino council members. 

In the current reality, the most important attribute needed for election to many city councils is a real estate broker's license. In the new system, the most important attribute would be citizenship. Ordinary people would set policy, using common sense. Everyone would have a chance to serve. We'd be governing ourselves. 

Independents

I was born a working class, New Deal Democrat or, as we now say, a democratic socialist. I eventually chaired three different Democratic clubs, but a year or two back I followed my wife out of the party. For several decades the official Democratic leadership had focused on pleasing certain wealthy members of the American oligarchy. Ordinary people had begun to feel left out, excluded. At times, when the Democratic leaders set out to do something for working people, it would turn out to be half-Republican and half-assed.

In this last election, things took a turn for the better. We elected many people of color, women, gays, etc., and they seek change.

I am now an independent, which, in my state means I'm part of the second largest voting group (Republicans are third). I no longer have to pretend that Bill Clinton is a gent. I feel better. The air is cleaner.

Most independents want to vote with Democrats (Bernie Sanders votes with Democrats). They will vote Democratic if party leadership offers voters the kind of help ordinary people actually want: genuine health care, stronger social security, low income housing, climate control, etc. Not everyone among the Democrats welcomes participation or support from independents, but they have long been welcomed by Democrats in California. You've seen the results. 

Abolish the PBS NewsHour

I gave up watching the PBS NewsHour years ago when it was captured by Republicans. I think they scared the maximum protection Depends off the producers by threatening to cancel all remaining federal support. The NewsHour was already running corporate ads (sponsors they dared not offend). Some academic studied the NewsHour and discovered that Republican guests  outnumbered Democratic guests by 2 to 1. 

Tonight my wife was driving home from the supermarcado, and she put on the radio version of the show. The topic was the new Looney-Fascist president of Brazil, and PBS covered it, as usual, by interviewing two people, one pro and one con. That is how this bunch would cover Ted Bundy, one for serial killing and one against. But I didn't hear this blather, because I stopped listening a long time back.