BLOG

So the Supremes, appointed by Republicans, Bush I, Bush II, and three justices appointed by the Donald, who lost the popular vote by 3 million voters and who probably will soon be indicted in Georgia for election fraud, and maybe Federally for a failed coup d’état, have decided that 50 years of precedent be damned, that there is no constitutional right for a woman to make her own reproductive choices. Never mind an entire generation of women who have grown up under Roe. So let’s socially engineer by judicial fiat, what has been law for generations.N Let’s face the facts. The “justices” make up their own minds, and then build a constitutional rationalization to support their position from an infinite variety of decisions throughout the centuries of common law. And by the way, Bush II, like Trump, was also a minority president, except in the anti- democratic electoral college, designed originally to allow slave states to remain so. Our Constitution also ensured that woman and black people could not vote. So all you originalists and textualists can go back to where we were before Roe v. Wade, to that wonderful mid 20th century where segregation ruled, or the early 19th century where slavery ruled. Why not overrule Brown v. Board of Education to keep America white and segregated Justice Alito, that righteous avatar of Catholic abortion dogma rests at one of the pinnacles of governmental power, believes that American women should be the victim of state gerrymandered legislatures, representing a minority of the American polity. When Thomas Jefferson said famously, “keep the preachers away from government,” he surely should have included Alito. Let’s not forget the notion that the court is or should be not politicized. That train left the station in the early 20th century. When FDR’s National Recovery Act was shut down by the conservative Court, a court packing threat from the Democrats in congress caused the conservative majority to back off from shooting down the progressive programs that were to help the nation out of the great depression. The problem is now that there are not enough votes in the Senate to do any such thing because of successful Republican moves to suppress the vote; instead packing the court with ideologues, the most notable of whom is the handmaiden herself—Amy Coney Barrett, whom the Donald picked to fill the seat of a progressive giant, RBG. Never mind the hypocrisy of dissing Obama’s selection of Merrick Garland, not even given a hearing thanks to Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants, including Chuck Grassley, who should be in a nursing home feeding on double doses of Prevagen. Mitch at the helm has seen to our current “Justices”, helped by disinformation emanating from Rupert Murdoch’s FOX news, a money-grubbing Australian oligarch, no better than the Russian ones. Mitch’s net worth has increased ten-fold since he was elected and not on his Senate salary for sure, his wife benefiting from Chinese largesse to and from her uber wealthy family. Oh, and don’t forget Clarence Thomas, a black man who hates his own people, abetted by his wife, Ginny, encouraging the rioters to storm the capitol, sending emails to insurrectionists and GOP party leaders to stop the certification of the vote by the Senate. Thomas is all bent out of shape because of the dastardly leak, impugning the “integrity” of the court. But he will probably not recuse himself on Trump’s appeal if he is convicted of felonious conspiracy to precipitate an insurrection. Other dramatis personae include the repulsive Ted Cruz and the vituperative Josh Hawley, who voted against the purely ceremonial certification of a lawful election, necessary to enshrine the vote. Also, lets not omit a Bronx cheer for Bret Cavanaugh, the beer swilling frat boy, credibly accused of waving his penis in Christine Blasey Ford’s face at his fraternity house, assaulting her. While admittedly a college escapade, it does not speak well to his character. But no matter, he has absolved himself by joining in this sadistic exercise of Republican misogyny. “I like beer, Senator Klobuchar, don’t you?” Cavanaugh hubristically asked the Senator whose father died of alcoholism. No matter, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution, says the red spider veined nosed icon of the religious right. Now, poor women who live in Texas, Mississippi, or other places of enlightened Republican legislators will have to book an airplane flight or drive to a place where it is legal. But wait! They do not have the money to do so, instead they can carry them to term and drop their newly born at the nearest police station or underfunded Mississippi or Texas childcare facility. Thanks a lot, Amy. Perhaps you want to adopt some more children. This whole sordid episode of “Making America Great Again,” curdles the blood even of the most casual observer.

"A house divided against itself, cannot stand..." - Abraham Lincoln From California to New York, from Oregon to Florida, a frightening division has descended upon our country. From rural to urban America, people wonder whether the nation and its institutions can survive this polarity. There have been times in American history that the nation was divided, never more so than in 1860. Throughout that history, there had been bitter partisanship and division. From the heat of the constitutional convention in steamy 1787 Philadelphia, the founders fought bitterly to a compromise that actually welded two nations into one in a constitution which just ninety years later devolved into a insanely bloody civil war, brother against brother, father against son, family against family. A partisan press with countless newspapers and pamphleteers spewed hatred and vituperative allegations against their countrymen both at the founding and throughout the years leading to the Civil War. Twitter has nothing on them. A rural south, an industrializing north, both parts of which employed slavery, regarded Negroes as inferior, abetted involuntary servitude and a racist ethos, challenging even the most enlightened of our citizenry. During the time between the founding and the Civil War forged compromises kept the Union together. The Missouri compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska act (1854) failed as attempts to reconcile admission to the Union of new states as either slave or free. The Constitution itself had slavery baked in to its original ratification (Article 4 sec. 2.3) imposing that, " No person held to Service or Labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any Law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due," Later, the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 imposed the duty on citizens and officials of the individual states themselves to return slaves to their owners or face civil fines, and that persons harboring slaves to criminal penalties. Slave catchers roamed the North, collecting bonuses for bringing slaves in; captured slaves were not permitted a jury trial. Sound like a rickety Constitution? Of course, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments cured some of that, but still, it took the bloodiest war in the history of the Republic, 700,000 dead and wounded to get the amendments passed and only in the last few years was the Confederate battle flag removed from South Carolina government buildings. The Civil Rights act of 1964, race riots in Los Angeles, freedom riders, political assassinations of civil rights leaders, and a frothing George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door shouting "segregation forever!" interceded in the 1960s, almost 100 years after the end of the war and ten years after the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education outlawed segregation in the public schools. Well, that same Constitution has given us the Electoral College, a Federalist exercise in balancing the interests of the various states, and which now presents us with a highly undemocratic underrepresentation of large populations, California for instance, with its 40,000,000 people and North Dakota with its 500,000 each carrying two senators. Do the math on fair representation. Yes, I know the House is supposed to do that, but with present gerrymandering, the Democrats are obliged to win by much bigger majorities than Republicans. With Republicans dedicated to disenfranchising voters in Florida, for example, contrary to the will of the voters, Democrats must win votes in far greater numbers than Republicans to achieve a working majority. We now have entrenched minority government. With an unleashed president, sociopathically bound to his vindictive agenda, extreme anxiety pervades the Democratic Party, fearing that this president will be re-elected, boasting that "he alone" is claiming responsibility for the booming economy, acquitted from his misdeeds by a kangaroo court, comprised of quaking GOP senators afraid of tribal banishment to an ignominious gulag of GOP opprobrium, losing their congressional health plans, positions, prestige and power andthe ultimate loss of the dignity which they inartfully tried to preserve. Instead, they have lost it anyway by their surrender to political expediency. We need either a constitutional convention or a huge movement among voters to recognize that the divisions among us are not the result of a political agenda, but instead, tribal cultism. Many of the policy agendas result from identity politics, rural against urban, wealthy against poor, a displaced working class losing out in the battle against inevitable technological displacement, climate change and nuclear proliferation, the greatest threats to the world. A leader who can heal these divisions and create forbearance and a spirit of compromise is what we need more than ever. A president of either party who can understand reality, not phantasmagorical narcissism. It is said that great crises manufacture an FDR, a Winston Churchill, an Abraham Lincoln. Where may he or she be?

Passion seems to be bestowed as a blessing on few people but seeking it is a not inconsiderable chore conferred on the many. I am not officially retired, but it seems that way. The clients call less and the work I did as a trial lawyer has become less and less appetizing. Business has diminished, not only because I am seventy-nine years of age, but because I have zero desire to market myself like a snake oil salesman. I leave that particularly odious practice to well-funded and battle stationed Morgan and Morgan and others, whose legions of paralegals, investigators, paid experts and well-staffed soldiers battle with insurance companies, and “fight for you,” its overworked lawyers all the while complaining to their colleagues and family that they hate what they do. Fifty years at the bar, and I do not mean Flanagan’s, is enough, so I leave the task of transferring wealth from one party to another and taking a piece of the action the alleged passion of the many. I do still consult with clients, if I can be of help them. I wonder if I can achieve a modicum of mastery the piano, considering that when I took violin lessons as a youth, the bandleader working at my dad’s upstate New York hotel, a Catskill fiddler by the name of Billy Rogers (nee Rosenberg) who, admittedly, was not a music teacher, told my father, that I was the “dumbest, most tone-deaf child he had ever met.” But then again, he was no Isaac Stern nor even a music teacher. Music teachers do not scream at their beginning ten-year-old students. The sole reason Dad asked him to teach me was because a guest had left a violin in one of his hotel rooms. Before my dad’s discovered violin aspirations for me, I had expressed neither the interest nor the inclination to play the most difficult, annoying instrument, or torturing everyone within hearing distance. “Press the strings until your fingers bleed and you develop callouses,” said Billy. I do not recall what happened to the violin or Billy, although he was aged in 1952. Dad either sold the violin or most likely, gave it away. Another serial disappointment from his son, I guess. After becoming a lawyer, I decided I would learn to play tennis. And I loved it. I was addicted. I became reasonably competent, starting at the age of 35, and playing regularly until I hit 70 and had spine surgery laying me up a few years. I was never the best, but I was pretty good, had a good serve and tried to play again a few years ago, losing to a younger fellow who had been playing just a few years. I had beaten him soundly before. Never fast on my feet, my molasses-like movements said, time to hang up the sneakers. Life is a series of things being taken from you. At 55 I had taken up golf. I think I have a pretty good swing, but athletically, I needed time to learn, ( a nice way to say I am a slow learner) and time is running out. Although that would not stop me, if I had some agreeable companions with whom to play. Many of the friends whose company I enjoyed have died or fallen away. There is nothing worse than spending 18 holes with someone monumentally annoying. “Nice putt,” they said, as my ball sped past the hole. Plus, most golfers do not share my politics and, inevitably, an afternoon of enjoyment turns into a dumpster fire. Most players who are Republicans, cheat. The shoe wedge or miscounting the score is a frequently insufferable habitude of the right-wing selfish, individualist, “let them eat cake” crowd. Now, when my days are not consumed by interminably long doctor’s visits or some new ailment appears, I am seeking something to do with my spare time. Going to the hospital or delivering goodies to the ill and infirm is too depressing, since I already am depressed about most people walking past me as though I did not exist. I have become irrelevant and invisible, both not particularly enviable results of my wrinkles and weathered skin and increasingly whitening hair. A grey ghost. I suppose I should take comfort that a geezer like Joe Biden could be president, gaining inspiration from him. But he seems so delicate, so frail now, that a stiff breeze would blow him over or he might stumble coming down the stairs of Air Force One. It is frightening to behold. Still, Joe beats the alternative--the orange-colored crook who is still peddling the big lie. The country is in the worst crisis since the great depression, and Joe is not FDR.  Which brings me back to the piano. I asked a neighbor who is a music teacher at an exclusive private school, “Is learning the piano at 79 doable?” He replied, “definitely, it will be good for your mind. Always keep two hands on the keyboard and learn musical notation.” I replied that I had purchased a book that said I will be able to play a Bach prelude within six weeks if I practiced 45 minutes per day. Encouraging. I guess I will find out if it can be my new passion.

Putin the Cat. Vlad, the cat, looked into the Ukrainian cookie jar and said to himself, “yum, yum. This is going to be a cakewalk, a delightful treat. Those NATO countries have been divided by the useful idiot and now I am going to eat all those delicious, buttery galettes. I’m going to eat them all while everyone is out to dinner, no need to take a bite at the edge. Lenin said, “thrust the bayonet, if you find steel, pull back. If you find soft flesh press forward.” Hitler and Stalin divided Poland in two parts on the 23 of August 1939. This was known as the Molotov-Von Ribbentrop pact, which Hitler later trashed with his invasion of the Soviet Union, including a part of it--the Ukraine, in 1941, much to the surprise of Stalin, who had starved 3.9 million Ukrainians with his misbegotten plan to collectivize Ukrainian grain and agriculture in the 1930s. Children catching frogs and fish during the famine were dragged into a pit and suffocated. People hiding grain took a slow train to Siberia. Ukraine, having been part of the USSR, was only subject to Stalin’s madness until the Germans arrived, in 1941, hoping to use it as a breadbasket, furnishing slave labor to fuel the German war effort. On the way, Hitler commenced his killing fields of Ukrainians, Poles, Jews and other untermenschen on his path tolebensraum in the east. Ukraine was the equivalent of a conqueror’s European Grand Central Station. Now Ukraine is at the crossroads again of a power struggle between Putin’s Russian kleptocracy and Ukrainian nationalism, loosely supported by the West. The destruction has caused an economic nightmare for the Ukrainians and probably the west which will be yoked with the expenses of rebuilding it after Russia has destroyed its infrastructure. The idea of Russia paying reparations for their adventure is like having Jeffrey Epstein babysit your 16 year old granddaughter. The Russian economy is in tatters, food is scarce in the Russian supermarkets, the oligarchs have lost most of their assets, the Russian people are facing a declining Ruble and nowhere to trade their oil and gas. But statistics say that sanctions only work 15-30% of the time to effect regime change, or a rogue state’s policies. The Russian experiment with democracy started in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. It did not last long. Putin considers the dissolution of the USSR as disastrous as the fall of Rome. Democracy in Russia never really took hold. The first years were like the Wild West. Oligarchs got insanely rich, while the rest of the people were left behind as vassals. We thought we won the cold war, “the end of history,” scholars wrote. Authoritarianism has lasted in Russia in one form or another for over 1,000 years. It does not seem to be on the wane. The Czars, Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Bulganin, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsen, Putin? Who is next in line? Is Russian culture similar in a different shade than Islamic culture, needing generations to change? The contradiction in our minds is that Russian History is rich in cultural accomplishments. Tolstoy, Turgenev, Chekov, Tchaikovsky, giants In literature, art, music. So was Germany. Americans should ask themselves how such leaders emerge from civilized societies? What are the causes of such aberrant historical turns? Economics? Cultural differences? Tribalism? Inequality? The Ukraine war is a disaster for Putin; he thinks leveling a country of 40 million people who hate him will inure to his benefit. What is he going to do with Ukraine when he wins this war, if he does? Occupy? It is doomed to failure. Putin has neither the money nor the troops to oppress this population, a group of angry Slav brothers who will fight him to the death. This is their homeland, their families have been dispossessed, and their cities ruined. They hate the Russians. Estimates that it would necessitate 500,000 Russian troops to quell continuing insurgencies. The work Ukrainians have done to make their country a modern democracy in tatters, because of a kleptocratic manic. This begs the question that this may be the part of the incipient cultural revolution—a war among Slavic brothers and cultures. NATO is burdened about the question of escalation to World War III. Neville Chamberlain was obsessed with negotiating with Hitler to avoid a repeat of World War I where 42 million died. The fear of war as it resides in the minds of Western leaders may result in an even worse outcome than standing up to the likes of Vladimir Putin. If nuclear weapons have been a deterrent to war, now they seem to be a deterrent to stopping it.

An increasingly minoritizing white America are struggling with the past of a nation substantially built on the backs of imported slaves, their sweltering sub-decks populated by a degraded humanity, forced to lie in their own urine and feces. The first twenty slaves arrived in British America in 1619, according to Jill Lepore, author of a new history of the United States. The sorry institution exploded in the colonies after the invention, in 1793, of the cotton gin, an impetus for profitable manufacturing of cottons and linens and for the necessity of an exponential increase in chattel slavery in all of the thirteen colonies. The consequences of this institution led to the American Civil War, being, as most wars, driven by economic forces, further justified by the rationalization of preserving a “way of life, and individual liberty” (of white men). Perpetuation of that puissance expanded the number of slave states as the American Union spread over the continent, through the victimizing doctrine of “manifest destiny,” enabling theft of the lands of native Americans, Mexicans, and others, including Hispanics in the great American West. Frighteningly, Hitler conceived the idea of lebensraumfrom the American model, writing about it in Mein Kampf. Now, the chickens have come home to roost. The stain on our history, through knowledge of the past has caused a dissolution of MAGA 1950s equilibrium of America. The whiteness of “Leave it to Beaver,” and “Father Knows Best,” is reluctantly surrendering to the political realities of a woke generation. The dispossessed, the robbed, the abused portion of the American polity are demanding reparations for the backbreaking servitude and social discrimination they were obliged to endure through much of the history of the Republic but also creating much of our wealth and infrastructure. Predicated on economic servitude’s malevolent benefits and the building of America through economically indentured generations since the Civil War, there is currency to the argument that America owes a monetary debt to the descendants of slaves, not merely those who lived in the 19thcentury. Current white nationalist backlash is no different than the traitorous Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest’s (KKK founder) defending the Southern aristocracy perpetuating itself on the treasure created by negro slaves, continuing unabated through an aborted reconstruction fulminated by the impeached, but not convicted, racist Andrew Johnson, and the desegregation of the South and the military by the former president of Princeton University and of the United States, who believed that black men were inferior to whites, the heroic Woodrow Wilson, who envisioned a peaceful world order and campaigned unsuccessfully for a league of nations and gained a Nobel Peace Prize for his failed effort. White racist men such as the current president and his base of white supremacists will not succeed in suppressing demands for economic equality, immigration justice, and more American diversity. Finally, after centuries of struggle, the world of white dominance of our country is being dragged kicking and screaming into a more diversified American 21stcentury ethos. Despite the last gasps of an anachronistic, aberrational president, a disenfranchised minority is beginning to define its own future. Republican gerrymandered voter suppression occurring in the heartland is being challenged not only by a new generation of Americans, but also by many white people who are beginning to understand the economic disparities created by racial prejudice and economic deprivation and an electoral system engineered to perpetuate the status quo of voter suppression and rural overrepresentation. We are a national entity--a people, not geographical state boundaries alone. Although our economic and federal system ensures more freedom, it also provokes more economic disparities and even tribalism, the ultimate enemy of a free republic. The electoral college is the single most undemocratic institution in our federal system, allowing states like North Dakota two senators for 500,000 people and California with its 39,000,000 the same two senators. It must go the way of the proverbial horse and buggy. It was a successful compromise among disparate states not yet a country to ratify a new constitution. Now it must be put to pasture. The middle class is beginning to realize that it is not immigrants causing employment loss, it is unparalleled technological change creating the disorder. 80% of the jobs lost are because of it, not scapegoated immigrants and minorities. All this unhinging is happening very rapidly, almost like the recent California earthquake. Trump’s America is trembling beneath his feet, despite Twitter rages, petulant ad hominem attacks on adversaries, and the chaos of an indelibly incompetent administration that thinks that climate change is a hoax, and that “a new and better health plan” (that does not exist) will help our country by ejecting 30 million people from their insurance. And yes, that people of color who criticize him or his policies “go back,” an old Strom Thurmond trope. The technological forces pushing major international corporations and the uber-wealthy to new, gilded age disparities between them and the middle class is becoming increasingly self-evident as a threat to our republic. Equally, the thinly veiled disguise of whites being abused by the descendants of slaves or immigrants no less a hoax than PT Barnum’s appeal in the carnival midway of a horrible freak show.

War with Iran? During the 1930s Japan was busy invading China, committing racial atrocities in a rampage broadening their economic and political empire. The rape of Nanking in 1937 by the Imperial Japanese army (the then Chinese capital) was a huge horror preceding the unspeakable horrors following Pearl Harbor both in Europe and in the Pacific theatres of war. Estimates of dead in that Nanking massacre range from 50,000 to 300,000. The United States imposed crushing sanctions on Japan, including an oil embargo and rubber from Dutch and British possessions in the South Pacific. The United States had also demanded that Japan withdraw from China, under which the Japanese were busy renaming Manchuria to Manchukuo, a province of Japan. This embargo was an existential threat to the Japanese, choked their economy, poaching their territorial and imperial ambitions. The Japanese then initiated war against the United States by surprise attack on December 7, 1941. President Roosevelt’s administration knew what they were doing preceding Pearl Harbor, wanting to snip the Japanese wings, joined by the British ostensibly, to protect their empire, upon which the “sun never set.” Now why this history? Well, because Iran is fomenting terror throughout the Middle East. It is supporting Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthi rebels in Yemen. It wishes to achieve hegemony through military and political action. This enrages the Saudis, Egyptians, and Israel. Although the US has withdrawn from the Iran nuclear deal, the Europeans are under pressure from the US to shut down the Iranian economy. Inflation is 50% and unemployment 25%. They are succeeding. Iran is suffering, and pressured. Unable to produce sufficient revenues to keep the country going, the theocrats in charge are becoming desperate, escalating tensions in the straits of Hormuz through which much of the world’s oil traffic must traverses. So the militants have decided to shoot down a US asset and bomb two ships. Trump says the drone was in international waters, but who believes him? Today he called off a retaliatory strike, and that may be a clue to where the drone was actually located—over Iran or International waters. John Bolton is a known bellicose national security advisor, and Mike Pompeo a known hawk. Next to the word “cunning’” in the dictionary is Bolton’s photo. And Pompeo? He loves war. Bolton and Pompeo want regime change in Iran. Bolton and Pompeo want regime change in Iran. Bolton aggressively supported the Iraq war, and we know how that turned out when George W. Bush decided to avenge his dad’s attempted assassination. Trump does not even know what he said the day after he said it and may, arguably, have beginning dementia. He is a feckless ignoramus, hardly able to stand up to a foreign policy crisis. He is busy conducting reality show rallies in, of all places, Orlando where most of his Floridian supporters live. His base does not care about anything except their religion—Trump. And all Trump cares about is getting reelected, to continue his pursuit of illicit riches for himself and his family. People, he said he was opposed to all wars, “America First,” but that was only when Democrats were in power. And when President Obama was not born in the United States. Does anyone believe that this narcissist will tell us the truth or manage a gathering storm? Of this, wars are born, old men sending young men and women to die.

During his “wilderness years,” Churchill understood Adolf Hitler’s ambitions, presciently shouting to a deaf world the dangers ahead. The Rhineland. Sudetenland. Czechoslovakia gobbled up while appeasers twiddled. England and France could have sent Hitler packing. Instead, they gave him three more years to arm. It was too late. Fifty million died. Stalin, double-crossed by his former Poland-dividing German friend, decided too late that he had to fight. Millions of Soviets soldiers and civilians died because of his dithering. FDR had to contend with America Firsters and could have entered the war sooner; he had third term political considerations in in 1940; but he knew he had to fight, too. Eventually. WE RELIVE THE MISTAKES OF HISTORY AT OUR OWN PERIL, LIKE WILEY CAYOTE CHASING THE ROAD RUNNER. PUTIN INVADED A SOVEREIGN COUNTRY. STOP HIM, GERMANS. STOP HIM, FRENCHMEN. STOP HIM, NATO. STOP HIM, AMERICA. UKRAINIAN CHILDREN ARE FREEZING AND STARVING. PEOPLE ARE LOSING THEIR LIVES TO A RUSSIAN BLOODTHIRSTY PYROMANIAC, A HANNIBAL LECTER. Here’s the rub: using time as his weapon, like Hitler, Putin is conscripting, propagandizing, and gradually conscripting massive manpower—constructing his war machine, gaslighting his people, building support, slowly, craftily, cunningly, odiously. Russians believe his lies about Ukraine as a Nazi haven, a virtual pizza parlor filled with basement dwelling pedophiles, or in this case, jackbooted storm troopers. Despite President Zelensky’s Churchillian appearance before congress, we must move swiftly, because time is on Putin’s side. A war of attrition is not on Ukraine’s side. Even with US Ordinance, rockets, drones, artillery. Western fear is Putin’s ally. Time is Putin’s ally. Wars start slowly but inevitably spiral out of control; aid the west provides the Ukrainians resembles aid the US gave to England in 1940, followed by exponential materiel increase from the great American “arsenal of democracy.” It was not enough. Not in 1940 and not enough in 2022; it will not be enough in 2023, 2024, 2025 as this war drags on. Too many Russians, too much manpower. Too much time. Victory requires a credible threat of NATO mobilization—an army ready to do battle. And an ultimatum. But that will not happen, I fear. Billions of dollars for weapons in a proxy war with Ukrainians fighting Russians has been impactful. Americans can watch Netflix war movies while Ukrainians bleed. They can watch Tom Hanks storm the beach at Normandy. Much less dangerous. Let’s just ship some more rockets to Ukraine instead. Yellowstone is on. Even so, it was heartening to see the bipartisan support for Ukraine in the Congress. Military planners in the Pentagon and in Western European capitals should be preparing for a wider war. It would be malfeasant for them not to do. We just don’t realize it yet. NATO is obliged to tell Putin to get out of Ukraine or face an allied army to evict him. Putin must be given an ultimatum to get out or face military force. Germans and French, British and American, Canadian and Australian. Putin understands naked power. The west must mobilize. He does not understand anything else. Lenin said, “push forward the bayonet. If you find soft flesh, push. If you find steel, retreat.” Putin learned Lenin in school; Lenin is in his DNA. He learned it in the KGB. He learned it in Mother Russia. He wants it all. He is Czar Nicholas, Comrade Stalin, Comrade Lenin all rolled into a painting in the Hermitage, his hometown museum, where he went as a schoolboy, where his parents took him, where he learned of the greatness of Russia. Where the Czar had palaces. Russians never had democratic traditions. Ask Nicholas II and his family, brutally executed by Bolsheviks. Ask the millions starved by Stalin in the Ukraine during his communized agriculture plan. Ask the people sent to the Gulag, or the Hungarians who dared to revolt against the Soviet hammer and sickle. Ask the subjugated Poles carved up by Stalin and Hitler. Ask all of the subjugated and terrorized people who suffered behind the iron curtain. Ask Alexi Navalny, a political prisoner, poisoned once, and now jailed in a Russian gulag. A delusional revanchist KGB agent in the Kremlin tries to raise the Soviet corpse by terrorizing a sovereign nation. A nation which had its own history before Lenin and his desciples created a dark Bolshevik empire. NATO, led by Germany and France and then the United States, face the eventual inevitability of mobilizing an army to kick Putin out of Ukraine and Crimea. The alternative is too grim to contemplate. Trench warfare. Stalemate. Ukrainians under siege. Massive Russian armies. Possibly being defeated. World economic disruption. Continued war crimes. A war of attrition, cold and misery. I hope I am wrong about this.  Western ambitions about this outrageous war ending through negotiation are delusional. If Putin sees that we are serious about the sovereignty of nations, he must face a serious military threat-- mobilization of NATO forces. Only then he will likely back down. Until then brave Ukrainians will bleed, freeze and die bearing the brunt of our fear.

A dilemma now stares at an increasingly divided Democratic party, having now been handed by Robert Mueller, a road map for impeachment of Donald Trump, a bible, if you will, of misfeasance and lawlessness, Nancy Pelosi and her minions must now decide which route to take--the dreaded "I" word or a substantive campaign for electoral victory. On the one hand, many advocates for impeachment, including Elizabeth Warren, argue that it is the constitutional duty of the congress to protect our democracy from an unfit president by introducing a bill of impeachment. Nancy Pelosi believes that it is too soon to decide, knowing full well that the election is only 18 short (or long) months away, depending upon one’s point of view, and that impeachment hearings will create a distraction, paralyzing government, playing into Trump’s wheelhouse exacerbating his victimhood. He still holds his 40% approval among his base, many of whom believe in the Trumpian ability to shoot someone on 5th avenue, and suffer no consequence, possibly Nancy Pelosi or an undocumented immigrant, take your pick. Moreover, the two-thirds vote for removal in the polarized senate is probably not possible, magnifying the arduous, Sisyphean moral imperative of how congress should act under present circumstances. Others believe that this President is dangerous and is capable, through his masterful control of his base, able to manipulate public opinion escalating his “poor Donald” into another term. Nothing frightens Democrats more. Watergate-like hearings take time. The parade of inevitable witnesses creates boardrooms full of fulminating cable network executives exalting over the volume of pharma medications they can sell to old people, watching 24/7. On the other hand, a full examination of the facts and testimony might very well convince many voters to vote against the president even if a bill of impeachment is not passed in the house or that he is not removed by the senate. A currency to the moral obligation of congress quickly to proceed now with impeachment is persuasive. There is clarity to removing a president who, many think, has no regard for our institutions, the law or the consequences of his narcissistic fulminations. Mueller’s argument that DOJ regulations prohibit the indictment of a sitting president, because he would not be able to “clear his name” through a trial, resonates to some. Therefore, the only remedy is a trial in the Senate through impeachment. Machiavelli proposed that governments do not function well on morality. Abraham Lincoln suspended the right of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War, and after Pearl Harbor Franklin Roosevelt interned loyal Japanese Americans in camps, ripping families apart and from their homes without judicial process. Clearly, these two actions violated the Constitution, but saving the Union or national security was the imperative, not historical rectitude. That came much later as would many questions about the stains of the American past, including slavery. Legions of governments in the world modeled their constitutions after ours, and the lack of forbearance among the polity effectively abnegated the paper document, allowing the rise of totalitarianism. In our country, argue Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in a new book, How Democracies Die, argue that our institutions are under threat by the loss of forbearance in our polarized society. The more polarization results in less forbearance, increasing the threat to our institutions. The tolerance needed to listen to others with whom we disagree is the foundation of our democracy, not a paper document alone, they argue. That tolerance has lately disappeared, to our detriment. So, what is Congress to do? Bringing a bill of impeachment now, many think, poses a political risk to the Democrats but not bringing it poses a risk to the Republic by leaving an unfit president more time to erode our institutions, the very ones congress is charged to protect. Democrats must think long and hard whether the moral choice will ultimately lead to a more perfect union or whether it will lead to more disunion. A long and nasty impeachment resulting in the removal of this president might provide more fodder for his base than a resounding loss at the polls a mere 18 months from now.

Cruel and Unusual. At 3am Friday, April 12, the Supreme Court of the United States contributed to our national voyage towards injustice and perhaps even totalitarianism. The court ruled that a prisoner who chose to die by nitrogen hypoxia, more or less proven to be painless, was trying to delay his execution because he had not chosen this methodology in a timely fashion. The court ruled 5-4 along predictable lines, that the inmate, granted, a brutal murderer, did not, within the time limits imposed by the state, and therefore for procedural reasons, would have had to wait for a new death warrant to be signed. So, the court vacated the stay of execution of the lower court so that there would be no further delay in putting him to death. As though he would not be available for such purpose 30 days later. The court did not even allow for Justice Bryers’s request to wait for a court conference the following morning in order to discuss the issue. The stay was vacated at 3am. Recently, I visited London. A very knowledgeable guide told me and my grandsons how the English executed people in the 15th century as we traversed the innards of a venerable Westminster Abbey. First, they hanged them until almost dead. Then, they disemboweled them, burning their intestines in front of them, whilst they attached their limbs to four horses to draw and quarter them. Now, that is a real deterrent for stealing or treason or murder. My youngest grandson 11, his eyes wide open dropped his jaw. He will remember that tour, surely. Now the Supreme Court of the United States is debating the efficacy of lethal injection or nitrogen hypoxia as the lesser of what constitutes “cruel and unusual punishment,” as a definition of what the Constitution proscribes. In fact, the practices as described in the previous paragraph is what prompted that prohibitory language in our constitution. Arguably, the guillotine is a more humane form of punishment than the painful three-drug cocktail as utilized in the progressive state of Alabama, which only 70 years ago, preferred lynching as a methodology for enforcing its cultural ethos. More crucially, capital punishment itself should be reexamined under the “evolving standards of decency” criteria as set forth by Chief Justice Earl Warren in Trop v. Dulles (1958), a case that articulated what punishment the courts may impose upon a defendant. In Furman v. Georgia (1972) capital punishment was constituted as cruel and unusual in and of itself, leading to a 4-year moratorium on the medieval practice, until regressive state legislatures struggled to overcome the shortcomings of the system and Gregg v. Georgia (1976) effectively reinstated it by addressing the shortcomings of the system in Furman. Space does not here allow an extensive discussion here, but the reader is invited, if interested, to read the history of this sordid abuse of state power. In his dissent in Dunn v. Alabama (2019) Justice Breyer, clearly upset, argued the priorities of the court as being skewed. And it is indubitable that capital punishment has no place in the pantheon of criminal justice in the 21st century. The idea that the state takes a life and that the highest court in the land, decides life or death based upon a procedural technicality, ludicrous in itself, strikes at the heart of our democracy. The murderer dies, the victim is not restored to life, the vengeful family gains nothing, deterrence is not effectuated, and the poor suffer the penalty disproportionately. More importantly, our societal humanity suffers a damaging blow. The very idea that the Supreme Court of the United States occupies its time deliberating the timeliness of death appeals while scrutinizing the finality of execution and whether the condemned should die by hanging, firing squad, three-drug cocktail, nitrogen gas and the uncertainty of pain inflicted by the methodology in the context of the Constitution as it should be 2019, appeals only to the ghoulish instincts of people like Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and even Clarence Thomas, all products of a crypto-masochistic society that refuses to change the interpretation of an 18th century document. Chief Justice Roberts, who has recently shown some reason has joined in this charade, to his discredit. Totalitarian states traditionally employ capital punishment as a method for keeping dissent under control as well as for apostacy, stealing bread, homosexuality, and other crimes not really eligible in the US for this most extreme of penalties. Other methods include torture, and in the case recently of Saudi Arabia, dismemberment by bone saw. This was clearly an act of state murder, and hard to distinguish from what is still happening in our country, differing only in pretext. As Justice Blackmun wrote in 1994, that he would “no longer tinker with the machinery of death,” so should the present Supreme Court no longer do so.  We sit with Saudi Arabia, China, Pakistan, and other totalitarian states in our employment of this barbarity, which is still applied unfairly against racial minorities, and the poor.