Rewriting history: Slavery was fun on-the-job training!

A major goal of America's radical right authoritarian (RRA) wealth and power movement is to lie about inconvenient things, including inconvenient history.

As we all recall from a couple of months ago, I posted about a plan to whitewash some very inconvenient American history by the RRA DeSantis and his happy crew of RRA thugs. They floated the idea that slavery was good for slaves because they got some learnin' 'n skills 'n good stuff 'n things out of being slaves. It was just on-the-job training with free room & board tossed in for extra goodness! Last July, the WaPo wrote about Desantis' demented faux history plan:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is intensifying his efforts to de-emphasize racism in his state’s public school curriculum by arguing that some Black people benefited from being enslaved and defending his state’s new African American history standards that civil rights leaders and scholars say misrepresents centuries of U.S. reality.

Former U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who announced last month that he was joining the race for the GOP nomination, blasted the idea that enslaved people were able to use slavery as some kind of training program.

“Slavery wasn’t a jobs program that taught beneficial skills,” Hurd, the son of a Black father and a White mother, tweeted. “It was literally dehumanizing and subjugated people as property because they lacked any rights or freedoms.”

My recollection is that the DeSantis rewrite of history cited 16 examples of slaves who done good after slavery. If I recall right, 7 or 8 of the examples were debunked almost instantly by real historians. One of the historians who came up with this crackpot scheme to whitewash slavery is a co-founder of a history think tank (or whatever) in Ohio called YAAHA (Yocum African American History Association -- no, I didn't make that up). Its communications include comments like these: 

The Yocum African American History Association (YAAHA) is a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to sharing educational resources about Black history and providing historical milestones that prove that Black history is American history. .... YAAHA is happy to announce that we are in the top 25 Best Black History Blogs and Websites online. We are honored to be number eight.

Welp, long story short (I know, too late for that), I wrote to YAAHA and informed them that on of their founders was spewing historically incorrect crackpottery and silly anti-historical whitewash. I was shocked that I got a response back.* Even more shocked to find that the yahoos at YAAHA were aware of the whitewash and approved of it because it spoke truth to ignorance about the benefits of slavery to slaves.

* Digression: Over the last 5-6 months, I've tried to contact all kinds of people and organizations (clueless journalists, corporate liars, crackpot scientists and politicians, etc.) when there's something worth saying to them. So far it's mostly (well, completely) been constructive criticism. I get a response back ~2% of the time and a hearty silent non-response ~98% of the time.

Back to YAAHA

After my initial dart, YAAHA sent me a follow-up email asking for contributions to their new book, The Chronicle of Heroes. The group wants to change perspectives about Black history in America. Parts of the email are shown or quoted below.

YAAHA is thrilled to introduce The Chronicle of Heroes, Black Contributions to America, which is based on the wishes of our 24,000 Facebook followers requests to share our posts along with a historical timeline that teaches Black history is American history. We need your support for book publishing costs to make it a reality. Please help us by donating at https://donorbox.org/the-chronicle-of-heroes.

• Book size is 9" x 11," 200+ pages, 600+ photos
• Non-partisan
• Stories of cooperation between the races
• No generalities or stereotypes
• An American story of resilience
• Heroes who struggled against unmanageable circumstances
• Empowering through education

The history of Black and White communities is a tapestry woven with resilience, innovation, courage, and the quest for justice within American history. Yet, countless stories remain obscured, waiting to be unveiled. Some of the most egregious omissions are the stories of cooperation between the races. Throughout every milestone in American history, Blacks and Whites have worked together for a common cause. This is invaluable information for the citizenry as it illustrates that like-minded people transcend race.

Transcending race

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Wait! What?

Hm. No agenda, no generalities, no stereotypes, nonpartisan, just the facts? Excuse me!! DeSantis approved this debunked faux slave history story.

What could be going on here might be a huge grift wrapped in a gigantic pile of cherry picked history and outright lies. The point is obvious: Whitewash the horrors of American slavery and get DeSantis elected as president. It's a win-win for the RRA movement and YAAHA!

One can reasonably think that DeSantis might try to make this wonderful new whitewash fiction mandatory in Florida schools, churches, libraries, bathroom stalls, hotel rooms, airplane seats, lunch counters, jails and everywhere else he can force it on people. That ought to smooth over the naughty bits of the history about American slavery. 

If DeSantis can pull it off, taxpayers will pay for the means needed to deceive and disinform themselves. What a slick plan. One has to admire the big cojones on these inventive entrepreneur historians and patriotic political leaders. 

Law school: What a denial of a stay looks like

In the last several weeks, a slew of intermediate court decisions have mostly or all come out against Trump or the indicted goons who helped him try to succeed in his 1/6 coup attempt. For example, yesterday a federal judge rejected Trump's attempt to move a 14th Amendment lawsuit is a Colorado state court to the federal court in Colorado. Things are not going well for the extremely bad guys at the moment, but it is still early days. Their fortunes could still turn around.

In his criminal lawsuit in Georgia, Mark Meadows, like all the other traitors, has been trying to delay and wriggle out of legal jeopardy as best he can. Yesterday a federal judge rejected Meadow's attempt to stop the Georgia state court case while his appeal to a federal court is being heard. What Meadows is trying to do is get his case moved from a Georgia state court to a federal court. Meadows believes that his chances of getting off are better in a Federal court than a state court.

The federal trial court judge, Steve Jones, rejected Meadows' request for a stay or delay in the state court while the federal appeals court ponders the Meadows request to be tried in federal court. 

Page 1 of the decision 

A couple of snippets from the denial of an Emergency Stay are interesting. Jones writes in his 10 page decision:

Meadows seeks a stay of the order remanding—or more specifically, declining to exercise jurisdiction over—his criminal prosecution initiated in Fulton County Superior Court.

An emergency stay may be granted if the movant shows (1) he is “likely to prevail on the merits on appeal,” (2) “absent a stay [he] will suffer irreparable damage,” (3) the State would not suffer “substantial harm from the issuance of the stay,” and (4) “that the public interest will be served by issuing the stay.” .... “The party requesting a stay bears the burden of showing that the circumstances justify an exercise of that discretion.” [in other words, Meadows has to demonstrate those four factors are present]

Factor 1: “Ordinarily the first factor, the likelihood of prevailing on the merits, is the most important.” He first points to the Court’s recognition that the issues presented in his removal action were novel and then asserts three specific contentions of error. These arguments simply preview the issues Meadows is raising on appeal. There is nothing in the summary of arguments he plans to raise in his challenge to the denial of removal to convince this Court that its decision was incorrect. Thus, Meadows has shown no likelihood or prevailing on the merits of his appeal.

Factor 2: Meadows fails to show that anything more than a possibility of irreparable harm in absence of a stay. Some “possibility” of irreparable harm is insufficient, and more than “mere possibility” is required.

Section 1455(b)(3) provides that “[t]he filing of a notice of removal of a criminal prosecution shall not prevent the State court in which such prosecution is pending from proceeding further.” .... Meadows’s alleged previous harm is not a basis for finding irreparable harm to grant his Emergency Motion.

Judge Jones similarly rejected Meadows arguments for factors 3 and 4. He lost on all four arguments. That does not mean that he will lose his plea to get his case transferred to federal courts. It just means that the Georgia state court can continue its prosecution until the federal court decides whether Meadows should be tried in federal or state court. But even if Meadows succeeds to get his case transferred to federal court, he will still be tried under Georgia state laws, not federal law. 

According to one source, Meadows apparently is trying to get a friendlier federal jury pool in a federal court instead of the juror pool in Fulton County state court in Atlanta: 

If a trial went forward in federal court, the jury pool would likely have been broader and slightly friendlier to Trump and his allies than one drawn only from Fulton County. A federal court trial also would be unlikely to be televised, whereas the state court judge has already vowed to livestream all the proceedings.

And the legal battles continue . . . . . 

Bits: Radical right pro-elite econ policy; GOP moderates?

The New York Magazine Intelligencer column writes about policy plans the authoritarian radical right is toying with:

The discourse of the Trump era has been dominated by a conceit that the two major parties have swapped economic identities. The Democrats have supposedly abandoned their historical role as spokespeople for the working class to represent the neoliberal global elite, ....

[However] the two parties remain stubbornly attached to their traditional distributive goals. The Democrats still want to tax the rich and spend on the non-rich. Republicans still want very badly to do the opposite.

The Washington Post reports that Donald Trump’s campaign brain trust is working on a new economic plan to anchor his campaign. The leading idea is to pass another huge tax cut for the wealthy (a cut in corporate tax rates), paired with a tax increase on the middle class (a 10 percent tariff).

Trump’s brain trust believes current economic conditions indicate the U.S. economy is being harmed by excessively progressive taxes. To be sure, they have consistently believed this for more than 30 years through every conceivable combination of economic circumstances: high inflation, low inflation, recession, boom, war and peace,

Supply-side economics is a religion masquerading as an economic theory, and Trump’s brain trust, as it were, is a collection of the high priests of the supply-side cult: Arthur Laffer (who first began promoting supply-side economics nearly 50 years ago), Stephen Moore, Lawrence Kudlow, and Newt Gingrich.

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America's dismal, for-profit mainstream media continues to (i) fail to understand the extremism and hostile intent of America's aggressive, corrupt radical right authoritarian (RRA) wealth and power movement, (ii) is incompetent and clueless about the RRA, (iii) most likely knows the situation, but cannot speak it because the profit motive has poisoned and killed professional journalism in the US, or (iv) some combination of the foregoing. An article The Hill published exemplifies the shocking uselessness (or worse, complicity) of the MSM:

GOP moderates line up behind McCarthy 

opening Biden impeachment inquiry

House GOP moderates are lining up behind Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) decision to launch an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, downplaying the political risks it poses for them even as they benefit from not having to vote on the matter.

A handful of centrist Republicans said Tuesday that opening an official probe gives GOP-led committees greater latitude in their investigations, and argued that launching a probe does not guarantee articles of impeachment will be brought to the floor.  

Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.), who’s embroiled in a House Ethics Committee investigation and separately faces federal charges regarding his financial disclosures and for his representation of campaign fund allocations to donors, said on Wednesday that McCarthy’s move was “a step in the right direction.”

There are no moderate or centrist Republicans in the House who support the GOP's witch hunt. It is neither moderate nor centrist to support an impeachment inquiry of Biden when there is no solid evidence he committed any impeachable offense. The Republican cowards do not even have to vote on it. This is a blatant act of moral cowardice. 

Including the lying crook Santos in with moderate and centrist Republicans makes perfect sense. Santos exemplifies what the morally rotted RRA Republican Party has degenerated into. The open question is whether there are any  real moderates left in the GOP in congress? Probably not if one defines RRA to include silent complicity in evil.

The political math: RRA ≠ moderate or centrist

Bits: Dissolution of the Union; Impeachment Kool-Aid update; Analysis of democracy rot

America's authoritarian radical right (ARR) continues to call for the dissolution of the Union if the ARR doesn't get everything it wants. What it wants is full legalization of all corruption, death of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, dictatorship, Christian Sharia theocracy and plutocracy. Rolling Stone writes: 

IN FEBRUARY, GEORGIA Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene called for a “national divorce” between red and blue states. Now, she’s taking her call for a schism even further by encouraging states to outright “consider seceding from the union.”

On Monday, Greene (R-Ga.) wrote on X (formerly Twitter) that “if the Biden admin refuses to stop the invasion of cartel led human and drug trafficking into our country, states should consider seceding from the union.”  

The ARR continues to foment a bloody civil war.  

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One of the far right House Freedom Caucus members, Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) said there's currently no evidence that Biden committed any impeachable offense.

Appearing on MSNBC's "Inside with Jen Psaki," Republican Rep. Ken Buck was asked about the constant push from political bomb-thrower Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to impeach the president. Buck noted the "time for impeachment is the time when there's evidence linking President Biden to a high crime or misdemeanor." "That doesn't exist right now," he said.

That's strange. The Freedom Caucus isn't known for being tied to actual facts. Besides not having committed any impeachable offense is grounds for impeachment in the demented minds of the ARR.

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A NYT opinion piece discusses the thinking of two experts about the recent rot of American democracy caused by America's ARR:

One of the most influential books of the Trump years was “How Democracies Die” by the Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Published in 2018, it served as a guide to our unfolding ordeal.

Because that volume was prescient about how Donald Trump would try to rule, I was surprised to learn, in Levitsky and Ziblatt’s new book, “Tyranny of the Minority,” that they were shocked by Jan. 6. Though they’ve studied violent insurrections all over the world, they write in this new book, “we never imagined we’d see them here. Nor did we ever imagine that one of America’s two major parties would turn away from democracy in the 21st century.”

What astonished them the most, Levitsky told me in an interview last week, “was the speed and the degree to which the Republican Party Trumpized.” In “How Democracies Die,” he and Ziblatt had reproved Republicans for failing to stop Trump’s rise to power. But at the time, he said, “we didn’t consider or call the Republican Party an authoritarian party. We did not expect it to transform so quickly and so thoroughly.”  

.... in recent years, only in America has a defeated leader attempted a coup. And only in America is the coup leader likely to once again be the nominee of a major party. “Why did America, alone among rich established democracies, come to the brink?” they ask.

So in 2018, two high 'n mighty academic poobahs did not consider the GOP to be authoritarian. I must be some sort of genius, maybe even a God! By 2018 it was obvious the GOP elites and leadership had become staunchly authoritarian. By then, ARR elites were busy getting the rank and file to drink the poisoned Kool-Aid with them.

Anyway, my alleged genius aside, Levitsky and Ziblatt point out the obvious for an explanation. They see part of the answer is in our Constitution. They figured out that the US Constitution allows partisan minorities to routinely dcefeate majorities, and sometimes govern. Well duh! They see an America that is locked into a minority rule crisis. Well duh!, again. Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t have any proposals to emerge from minority rule. Wonderful!

The Economist, a nest of feisty Brits on the other side of the pond, published this in July 2018, and I have cited it here probably a dozen times since then:

American democracy’s built-in bias towards rural Republicans 

Its elections no longer convert the popular will into control of government

“EVERY system for converting votes into power has its flaws. Britain suffers from an over-mighty executive; Italy from chronically weak government; Israel from small, domineering factions. America, however, is plagued by the only democratic vice more troubling than the tyranny of the majority: tyranny of the minority.

This has come about because of a growing division between rural and urban voters. The electoral system the Founders devised, and which their successors elaborated, gives rural voters more clout than urban ones. When the parties stood for both city and country that bias affected them both. But the Republican Party has become disproportionately rural and the Democratic Party disproportionately urban. That means a red vote is worth more than a blue one.

If Brett Kavanaugh, whom President Donald Trump nominated this week, joins the Supreme Court, a conservative court established by a president and Senate who were elected with less than half the two-party vote may end up litigating the fairness of the voting system. [Authoritarianism warning!]

This bias is a dangerous new twist in the tribalism and political dysfunction that is poisoning politics in Washington. Americans often say such partisanship is bad for their country (and that the other lot should mend their ways). The Founding Fathers would have agreed. George Washington warned that ‘the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge…is itself a frightful despotism’.”

Guess Germaine wasn't so genius after all. 🤪 He just read a short thing some Brits wrote for The Economist and internalized it. Internalized it because the Brits' analysis made a hell of a lot of sense in July of 2018. It still makes a hell of a lot of sense in September 2023. Apparently, Levitsky and Ziblatt just figured that out. Guess they're not the grand poobahs the NYT makes 'em out to be. Sheesh!

2024 Presidential Election Odds & Predictions

 PLACE YOUR BETS!

Although New York sports betting laws do not allow betting on 2024 presidential elections, as soon as Joe Biden had been declared the winner over 45th President Donald Trump, sports betting sites across Europe – where political betting is legal – began pricing up who would win the 2024 election.

According to the 2024 election odds listed at Ladbrokes, President Joe Biden (40.0%) and former President Donald Trump (30.8%) remained most likely to be the next US President.

Joe Biden Wins in 2024

Biden is the bookies’ current favorite.

Lots and lots of other details, for your amusement:

https://www.empirestakes.com/ny-sports-betting/presidential-election-odds

Don't forget the radical right Convention of States threat

I've posted about this one or twice before, but re-posting about it helps keep it in mind. In the hands of the radical right this is a powerful weapon in the hands of democracy haters, pro-tyranny and pro-kleptocracy authoritarians, racists and bigots. America's radical right really does want to completely destroy what we have and install some form of a kleptocratic dictatorship. Common Cause writes:

STOPPING A DANGEROUS ARTICLE V CONVENTION

Wealthy special interests are pushing for a constitutional convention that could put everyone in America’s rights up for grabs. It's on us to stop them

Wealthy donors, corporations, and radical far-right actors are pushing calls for an Article V Convention in states across the country to reshape our Constitution for their own benefit.

Frighteningly, they are just a few states away from succeeding

What is an Article V Convention?

Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, Congress is required to hold a constitutional convention if two-thirds of state legislatures (34 states) call for one.

But here’s the catch: there are absolutely no rules for an Article V Convention outlined in the Constitution.

That means the group of people convening to rewrite our Constitution could be totally unelected and unaccountable. There is nothing that could limit the convention to a single issue, so the delegates could write amendments that revoke any of our most cherished rights – like our right to peaceful protest, our freedom of religion, or our right to privacy. There are also no rules preventing corporations from pouring money into the convention to ensure they get their way.

In short, an Article V Convention would be a disaster. It would lead to long and costly legal battles, uncertainty about how our democracy functions, and likely economic instability.

But extremists and wealthy special interests see it as their best chance to write their far-right agenda into the Constitution. That is why they are working around the clock to convince their allies in state legislatures to make it happen.

How far are we from an Article V Convention?

Right now, there are four major campaigns for an Article V Convention: the Balanced Budget Amendment campaign, the Convention of States campaign, the Wolf-PAC campaign, and the term limits campaign.

Each has different goals, but together, they have convinced 28 states to call for a convention. That means they have just six states to go.

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What saves us, if the Convention of States beast ever gets unleashed, is the current Constitution. It requires ratification of the new constitution by 75% of states, i.e., 38 states. 

At present it is hard to see 38 states agreeing with an authoritarian, radical autocratic-plutocratic-Christian theocratic constitution.