Oh, Those Evangelicals

Tis the season to be thinking of the Birth of Christ, of resurrection and redemption, and of man’s relationship with his church and with eternity.

In short, Merry Christmas to all.

Well, not to all, exactly. That’s why President Trump says he will be in Miami on Jan. 3 to show his political support from the religious right.

I have several points to make here, but first let me clarify one important issue. By “religious right,” I am not talking about Orthodox Jews, even though he is holding his rally in Miami. Oy Vey, no. Not that.

According to one survey, people who identify themselves as Evangelical Protestants make up a little less than 11 per-cent of Miami Dade’s worshiping population. Orthodox Jews barely show up. Catholics make up nearly 22 percent of the population.

But, the Evangelicals have been almost solidly in Trump’s column. Some see him as a hero, protecting them from the liberals who mock them or force them to give up their beliefs.

Others see him as an imperfect tool, but one who is ending the abuses of the state and putting conservative judges on the Supreme Court, leading to the outlawing of abortions in America.

Trump, in turn,  simply sees them as voters he needs to keep in order to win the next election. Doubt that? Well, tell me what church he goes to every Sunday. Heck, I still remember him telling someone that he doesn’t ask God for forgiveness, because he has never done anything wrong.

Not a position that evangelicals would agree with. At least not until 100 of their leaders wrote a letter attacking Christianity Today for pointing out the President’s flaws as a Christian and supporting his impeachment.

I think the Trump-supporting Evangelicals have made a horrible error. I won’t say they are being tempted by Satan - which some of them might believe. And I certainly won’t try and teach them the basic tenets of their own religion.

But I have to point out that, in their fervor, Evangelicals For Trump  have lost sight of a cornerstone of their religion - the prohibition of meddling in politics as a way to salvation.

They should take another look at the relationship between God and man and government laid out in Romans 13:7.

Evangelicals should know the reference - Jesus was asked if it was right for his followers to pay taxes to Caesar, and Jesus showed them Caesar’s face on the Roman coins.

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,” is what he answered. It wasn’t just taxes, it was recognizing a division between government and religion.

Religion has no business picking winners and losers in the political arena. Its leaders can say, with moral authority, that something a government is doing is wrong. 

They should be shouting that our government is doing something very wrong - like holding children in cages and taking them away from their parents - because the government is pursuing a greater good.

Religion’s power is in setting standards for what is moral and what is immoral, not picking the best candidate to uphold the standards it believes in.

And, as long as we are on the subject of the mistreatment of the people who are crossing our border to escape hunger or threats of death in their own countries - without waiting in Mexico four or five years until “their turn” comes up - let’s look at another verse in the Bible.

 Those Evangelicals who seek political power by supporting President Trump might ponder this phrase -  “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these, My brethren, you did it to Me.” Then, think of our policy on the border.

For those of us who are not Evangelicals, l should note  that religion is one thing the Constitution of the United States says should not be controlled by government, or control our government.

Where does it say that? Well, we had a chance to declare an official national religion when the Constitution was being adopted. But, when they finished on June 21, 1788, our founding fathers chose not to do so.

Instead, they went on to pass an amendment which said, simply, the government can pass no law interfering with the practice of religion by its citizens.

Well, that led to some interesting court cases over the years, but only law students will want to hear that at Christmas time. 

So, let me finish with one more Biblical injunction for the Evangelicals who have rallied to the defense of President Trump and attacked his critics in a full-blown charge into the realm of politics - rallies and all.

King James version of the Bible, of course. Matthew.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

An ecumenical Happy New Year to you all!

A Really Interesting Question

Watching the impeachment hearings this week, a really odd but interesting question popped into my head.

Some people who know me will say that was easy, since there isn’t too much stuff up there to keep an idea out. Others should be impressed that I am so open to new ideas.

So, let me pose it to you.

Will there ever be a post-Trump era for Republicans?

The easy thing for Republicans to say is “Of course. He will win or he will lose, but sooner or later we will move on.”

But, I don’t think it’s quite that easy.

Let’s say he wins. And, let’s say the Democrats don’t win a Senate majority and can’t impeach him. That means he serves two terms.

But it doesn’t mean he is gone. Trump will have proved he can lead the party to victory. So, he will pick the candidate to run after he leaves office. Maybe his daughter. After all, she has lots of business arrangements with China, has managed to accumulate a net worth of at least a quarter billion dollars, and has a fine husband to advise her.

There just won’t be room in the Republican Party for any other candidate. And, if she loses, it will be someone else’s fault - I can just see the tweets now - and she will be put up again in 2028. Or, maybe one of his other kids.

Think it’s an exaggeration? Just look at the Republicans in the Senate as they mindlessly repeat the talking points Trump has handed to them. Even a 10th grader taking a test knows they should change the words in the essay question.

Of course, when Trump finally leaves office the Republican Party will have firmly become the Trump Party, and what anyone else thinks won’t matter a bit. What President Trump thinks probably won’t matter much either, because most of the former Trump voters will finally see that his promises and pledges are worthless.

Remember he will give everyone better and cheaper health insurance, make sure everyone has good high-paying jobs, make us safe from attacks by other nations. You know, things like that.

You just can’t win an election without voters.

Now, what if he loses. You know it won’t be his fault. He doesn’t work that way. Someone betrayed him, someone lied, the election was rigged by the deep state - the one he has been setting up for the past three years.

So, naturally, he will want to be the candidate again. Fail to win in 2020 and you can run again in 2024. Or 2028, if that becomes necessary.

Too old? Ha. He has very good genes, and his doctor said there is no one else in the country as healthy as Donald Trump.

Let’s all just shed a tear for Mike Pence.

  

What Profit A Man......?

So, as the impeachment hearings go on and plow toward their inevitable conclusion - you really think the Republican majority in the Senate will review the facts honestly? - I have been wondering what comes next.

Well, I have come to some conclusions. I suggest you print out a copy of this blog and put it in an envelope to put under your Christmas tree next year. Then, we’ll see how accurate I was, and you can have some egg nog if the results are too painful to deal with sober.

Here we go.

First, the most obvious ones. The Republican majority in the Senate will vote not to impeach President Trump. They will call it a great victory. The Democrats will sulk, but not do very much.

Mitch McConnell will go back to doing what he does best - blocking votes on proposals that come out of the Democratic majority House of Representatives.

Donald Trump will start running advertisements on television explaining how wonderful things have become in America. He probably won’t use his daughter, Ivanka, as an example of upward mobility, even though she is only 38 and has managed to build a fortune estimated at $300 million. 

Mitch McConnell will pray a lot, and think a lot, about mass shootings. Every time another one happens, his thoughts and prayers will go out again. President Trump will find lots of people to blame for the shootings, as long as they are at least 300 miles away from the United States Senate.

Those things were simple to predict.  Now, some harder ones.

Congress will meet in 2020, and once again fail to vote on a full budget. There will be threats to shut down government, and there is a good chance it may happen.

Mitch McConnell will talk about the need for bi-partisan co-operation, and hold meetings with Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives. Any agreement they reach will be shot down by President Trump.

Republicans will, on their own, come up with some proposals to deal with the rising cost of health insurance and with the growing problems of global warming. They will be modest, but they will be shot down by President Trump, whose name was not on the bills.

Several Republican Senators who were not sufficiently supportive of President Trump will face grass-roots primaries, from radical Trump supporters. President Trump will say he had nothing to do with them, but will then wink at the crowd. Ted Cruz will charge that he was betrayed, but no one will care.

Mitch McConnell will suddenly realize that he has only one job - not to block legislation passed in the House by Democrats, but to do what President Trump tells him to. “You should watch your tweets more,” the President will tweet to him.

As the election season heats up, President Trump will announce that he will be proposing another round of tax cuts to prop up what has become a slowing economy. He will talk a lot about how much it will help everyone, but not provide many details. Democrats will complain, and a lot of voters will say it’s all too complicated to understand, but that they like tax cuts.

In September, word will leak out that Trump’s new tax cut plan will involve giving a 20 per-cent increase to the tax cuts in his last plan. When people complain that it will raise the deficit, he will find at least four experts to say they are wrong. One will be Jared Kushner.

To celebrate Thanksgiving early, Kim Jong-un will fire an intercontinental ballistic missile over Hawaii in a demonstration that he will call “The Rainbow Bridge of Free People.”

Donald Trump will claim the missile launch was in his honor, and Mitch McConnell will agree that the President knows more than anyone else, especially those generals who never knew the missile launch was coming.

Florida will once again vote to elect Donald Trump as President. When he wins, he will immediately show his concern for the budget deficit by cutting Social Security by 20 per-cent.

Mitch McConnell will call a press conference to say no one asked him about making that kind of budget cut. The only reporter who will show up will be from the Bluegrass Weekly. The only question he will ask is “Where’s the free coffee?”

Off To Sond Land

I’ve been watching the impeachment hearings in Washington the same way that a lot of people look at car wrecks on a busy highway.

They know it’s wrong to let your idle curiosity intrude on other people’s suffering, and they know that everyone else is doing it and creating a monumental traffic jam. 

Still, they slow down when they pass the wreck and take time to stare. Then, when its passed, they step on the gas and speed away - probably 20 miles over the speed limit - and feel virtuous it’s not them.

So, let’s take a road trip. We’ll go down the Sondland Highway, speeding along in our old Chevy Ambassador.

So, what do we see? Everything. Ambassador Sondland had lots of time to testify, to revise his earlier testimony and to respond to endless questions from partisan Democrats and partisan Republicans. And, somewhere in those hours of testimony, some truths have emerged. We’ll get to them a little later.

First, though, we have to look at what I mean by everything. I mean that Sondland testified that he saw quid pro quo, that he never saw it, that he had a cell phone conversation with the President and that he didn’t remember it.

He said he never talks with the phone held away from his ear, but that he might have done it, and would not question the testimony of another man at his table who said he saw it.

He said he was always interested in the Ukraine, and was concerned about corruption there. But he didn’t quite get the point of naming anyone who was corrupt, and saw nothing wrong with the President of Ukraine announcing an investigation into Joe Biden’s son and the Ukrainian company paying him an outrageous sum to be on its board of directors.

That’s just one thing.

No one talked much about Sondland writing a $1 million check to the Trumps inaugural committee. No one asked him if it was that, or the hotels he owns, that made President Trump to make him an ambassador in the first place.

He was asked about a lot of things that happened around President Trump’s demand that Ukraine’s president publicly announce an investigation into Joe Biden’s son and the company he was connected with as a pre-condition of getting vital military aide when his country was under attack by Russian-controlled forces.

He remembered something about it. But, he didn’t take notes, so he couldn’t be sure. And, he was sure it was all Rudy Giuliani’s fault. Because President Trump personally directed him to listen to the President’s lawyer who was pushing for those very same investigations.

But, it wasn’t the President’s fault, he also testified.

Well, just two things to take away from this.

First, when you lawyer up and you face questioning about things that other people have already testified to, you stick to what you are told to talk about. And never answer questions your lawyer has told you to avoid.

Which, you might have noticed, that no matter what he was asked, the answers were often the same. “I don’t quite remember. I didn’t take notes. Ha, ha, ha.”

Second, and more important, he did provide at least one honest answer to one big point,

He was asked about the growing pressure among Democrats and Republicans and non-political government officials to get the money released so that the weapons would start flowing to Ukraine, just as Congress planned when they passed a bipartisan resolution to approve $400 million dollars for that purpose.

He pressed Ukrainian officials to make that statement that they would be investigating Biden and his company. It was, he said, the best way to break the logjam, to get the pipeline clear so that the weapons would flow.

He made it seem almost noble, the best of a number of bad choices.

( Let’s not forget that the logjam broke when the Washington Post broke the story about the hold-up. Credit where credit is due. )

So, here’s what I would have asked him.

Mr. Ambassador, you said this was the best of some bad choices. What if the President said you have to open an investigation, and you had better come up with evidence of corruption, and get it done before the Democrats nominate a candidate for president?

Mr. Ambassador, what if the President said I won’t approve the aid unless Joe Biden’s reputation is damaged - it’s his kid, after all - so badly that he drops out of the race?

Mr. Ambassador, what if the President said something really bad had to happen to someone to keep Joe Biden from running?

Mr. Ambassador, what if the thing you are asking for is just one of many steps leading to the destruction of our democratic government as we know it?

Just where do you draw the line? Oh, yes, you didn’t take notes.

Andrew Yang, Praise and Sympathy

Andrew Yang has singled himself out among all the candidates for president by coming up with a radical proposal - give $1,000 a month to every adult in the country and build a trickle-up economy.

It’s an expensive idea, and that alone will kill it. It’s a radical idea, and that alone will kill it. Lots of people say it will only encourage the lazy, the losers and the undeserving, and that will kill it.

Well, they my be right, or they may be wrong, but just saying those things will probably kill the idea as well.

So, let’s just take a few minutes and look at the conversation he has started, the one beyond “It’s crazy and he has no chance.”

I think he is a man ahead of his time, probably generations ahead of his time. That’s because Capitalism has driven the progress of mankind since we invented money, but it may be time to put a governor on the machine.

Our wonderful capitalist machine really does run by itself as we approach the 21st century. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” creates fortunes and mega-fortunes in ways a lot of us don’t understand. Think you do? Just read the entire 3Q statement of any mutual fund.

When you finish it, in a year or so, you might know where that fund was when you started. But only If you ignore the footnotes, which is where the real information can often be found.

Or explain to me just what automated trading is - how the algorithms that drive changes in stock market trading by giving value to events and actions really work, or how they evaluate volume trades and price changes.

                                                         So what?

Let’s not miss the main point. The economy is going great, despite the dangers from really big problems that are ignored in the short term. Our unemployment numbers are getting worse and the official figures don’t actually reflect the size of the problem because they ignore people no longer looking for jobs. Full employment has come to mean people working at two or three part-time jobs because that is the only work they can get. And, don’t get me started on private contract workers - the people who work for a company but are not in the company.

I was a private contract worker once. I delivered newspapers on my bicycle, and the newspaper didn’t have to worry about things like insurance or benefits, or deal with replacing me if I got sick. That was my problem. I bought the papers and made about seven cents a week for each customer, plus tips. If I missed a day, people asked for a refund from the paper and I lost money for the week.

So, here comes Andrew Yang who wants to set a $12,000 annual income floor for every adult in the country. Frankly, I could use the money.

But what about the debt? Well, our Republican government gave a big tax break to the wealthy and to corporations that added a trillion dollars to our national debt, and that we will be paying for with interest. Lots of companies became wealthy by using that money to buy back stock.

Let me explain how that works. Your company is worth $10 million, and you have 5 million shares of stock outstanding. Each share would be worth $2, depending on your dividends. Now lets say you used your government tax gift to buy back 10 per-cent of the shares. Every share you hold has just gone up 10 per-cent. And you haven’t created a single job.

Now if all that money went to every adult, we would have a lot more customers for a lot of things. Prices would change, of course, and rents would probably go up. But more people would be buying lots of things they might not be able to afford now, and more people would be needed to make them, and ship them and sell them. That’s job creation.

Now, I do worry about our federal deficit. And I know that the first one to try something new often fails. Kinda like the first woman running for president or the first person who said slavery was wrong.

But I also know that the technology that keeps our economy going results in fewer workers each year, and we have to recognize there will be a lot more people out of work. Training for new jobs just won’t make up for the actual job losses and the extra competition for new positions as more and more unemployed people compete for the new jobs.

                                                      Now, The Future

So, what to do? In Star Trek - and there have been lots of interesting things written about the Star Trek economy where people no longer need money - there was assumption that Adam Smith’s invisible hand worked so that people freed from working would find useful things to do with their lives. They became artists and inventors, doctors and poets, space explorers and entertainers.

Or, they just sat around and enjoyed the fruits of the new social order, kind of like some of the the children of our wealthy families do today.

So, let’s just say Andrew Yang is a politician (he is running for president, after all) who is a couple of centuries ahead of his time. I remember one Star Trek episode where the crew ended up in the past, and were shocked to find that people needed money to get things. “What is money?” I think one of them asked.

Well, I can already imagine someone from today going back to the 1940’s with nothing but a credit card in her wallet and trying to buy something in a store. “Chip or tap?,” she might ask. Explain that economy at the cash register.

Yes, Andrew Yang is a prophet ahead of his time. But, he won’t get beamed up to the White House.

Taking Judicial Notice

Like a lot of other people, I went to the polls this week to cast my ballot.

Not surprisingly, the very first contest involved people I had never heard of.  It has happened before, and it will happen again. And, not because I take no interest in politics.

People who know me will tell you that I take politics very seriously. Even my wonderful wife will sometimes look at me as I am discussing one or two vital points in a political debate and say, lovingly, “shut up, already.”

So, why didn’t I know those people? You will understand in just one word.

Judges.

The first people you vote for on the ballot in my county were judges. You got to vote for any of the people named.

So as not to harm the stellar reputation of any of those now-respected jurists, I’ll make up some fake names here.

I got to vote for Joe Smith on the Democratic Line. I got to vote for Joe Smith on the Republican line. I got to vote for Joe Smith on the Conservative line.

I couldn’t vote for him more than once, so I went on to the second name, to pick a jurist who represented the values of my party. That was Tom Jones, and - surprise, surprise - his name was on the same three party lines.

The third? I’ll call him Tommy O’Brien, although he wasn’t Irish. Same thing.

We don’t have to keep making up names for all the candidates, since the result is mostly the same. To be fair, there were two candidates who were not cross-endorsed. They had lonely ballot spots on the Libertarian Party line. Next time, I will seek them out as a protest vote.

Now here in New York we go through waves of political reform, just as we argue over how long we can keep the title of Most Ineffective State legislature or most corrupt government. We call that one the Tweed Trophy. (Look it up of you don’t know who Boss Tweed was.)

Well, the political reform wave goes something like this: Judges aren’t allowed to express political opinions, or let their political philosophy interfere with their rulings. When running for office, they can’t talk about anything except their background, but they can be endorsed by organizations like the firefighters benevolent association or a civil service employees association.

And, of course, they can be chosen by a political party to run for office. In fact, to get on the ballot, they have to be chosen by one party or another.

Now, in years past, just one party ran the county. Every two years they got a majority of the votes, which meant they almost always had a majority on the county legislature and all their judicial candidates won.

At that time, they argued that the voters had the right - nay, the duty - to pick the candidates of their choice. And so, it was done.

Then, in the course of time, things changed. Some scandals, some mismanagement, some financial problems and tax increases, and all of a sudden winning those judicial seats wasn’t a certainty any more.

A lawyer who worked hard for the party for many years could no longer be certain that their name would be put into the golden circle of candidates who might get the nomination to a judgeship. And being a judge is, among other things, a pretty good job.

For a time, the powers that be tried apportionment. We got 70 percent of the votes, you can have 30 percent of the judicial seats. Ten judicial seats up for election, we get 7.

But, it wasn’t a great system. Now, we have a better one. Vote for anyone you like, on any party line. All we get to do is choose the names that will be on the ballot.

See, everybody gets to do something. Isn’t democracy grand.

Footnote: Our country really is a laboratory for democracy. There are 38 states that hold elections for some judicial posts, but we have a wonderful mix of appointments, retention elections, general elections and legislative conformation. In Rhode Island, they are appointed by the governor for a life term.

The Brennan Center For Justice has a really nice summery of the way we pick our black-robed jurists from state to state. It makes interesting reading if you want to look it up.

It’s that or just happily voting for people you have never heard of every two years,

The Nationals Are Not The Mets

OK, indulge me a bit. This will be about baseball, and this will be about politics. Which means that I will probably lose some of my normal readers.

I am willing to bet that, in this vast nation stretching from sea to shining sea, there are some people asking themselves right now “What’s a Met?”

Well, the World Series has just ended - a remarkable and exciting World Series - in which the underdog Washington Nationals defeated the favored Houston Astros in a final game seven, in Houston’s home park.

Politics comes because, pundits are fond of saying, a lot of people don’t take politics seriously until the baseball season ends.

Well, there were a lot of little things that made many of our sports pundits think the Astros would win. They burned through their division while the Nationals barely made the playoffs, they rolled over the mighty New York Yankees in a division series while the Nationals struggled tooth and nail to get there.

And playing four games in their home park gave the Astros two advantages. They knew the quirks of their field - and every ball field is a little different - and they got to use a pinch hitter four times.

So what happened? Washington won two games in Houston, then Houston won three games in Washington. Then the World Series moved back to Houston, where the home team lost the last two games.

There is a lesson here. In order to decide who has the best team - or the best political candidate - you actually have to play the game.

That’s one of the things that makes the Democratic Presidential debates so interesting. You see a dozen or so candidates - all saying they don’t have enough time, many saying the rules make it too hard to get on stage - all explaining why they should get to run for President in an admittedly imperfect forum. All true, but guess what? The smart ones modify their positions, they all calculate just how much to attack and how much to appeal to the supporters of the people they are running against.

And the polls give us a running update on how well they are doing, while the pundits try to explain the unexplainable. After all, there is no good and secret answer to how to win this big, ungainly clash.

But, they are playing the game. And, some invisible hand of public opinion (thank you, Adam Smith), will somehow elevate just one of them to the status of Democratic candidate for President.

Meanwhile, on the other side, nothing really changes. Trump is good. Trump is wonderful. Trump is being picked on. Democrats are unfair to Trump. He knows how to fix the economy, and bring our troops home, and make our nation safe from the Mexican drug-dealing bad people.

Static. In both meanings of the word. Just the same noise over and over again - call it talking points, if you want to make inertia sound sophisticated - which changes nothing and only wins over the people who are already won over.

And there are numerous polls showing how well President Trump would fare in the next election. A lot show it could be close, but those are national polls, and don’t look too deeply at a lot of things. For example, when was the last time you saw a poll that showed how well the President would do based on electoral votes, rather than the popular vote?

Now, let’s go back to baseball. 

The New York Metropolitan Baseball Club - that’s the name originally chosen in 1961 for the franchise we now call the New York Mets - won the World Series twice in magical, wonderful years. Mostly, however, they have been a team that swings from hopeful to woeful.

(I don’t know the history of the original New York Metropolitans, which played in New York City from 1880 to 1887. I know they did not have a World Series back then.)

Now the polls show that there will be a real, contested race between Donald Trump and whoever runs against him. And he is hovering around 45 or 50 per-cent.

But what does that mean? Well, here it is.

The Washington Nationals won 93 games in the regular season and lost 69. The New York Mets, who are in the same division, won 86 games and lost 76, falling seven games behind. That was very respectable compared to the Marlins, who sat at the bottom of the division with a record of 57 wins and 105 losses.

They were 40 games behind the division leader.

Now the people with an eye for detail and a love of arithmetic will notice that the numbers don’t seem to add up. That’s because the division leader was the Atlanta Braves, who won 97 games and lost 65 - four games better than the Nationals.

Then there was a wild card playoff and a division series and all the rest of the wonderful things that happen in baseball. And, of course, the Nationals won.

It shows something that everyone running for President should take to heart. You have to play the game.

Let's Talk Turkey

It’s amazing how often we let small things get in the way of our seeing bigger things. Or forget history and repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

Yep, Donald Trump. Rash, unpredictable and wrong. But, at least he showed President Obama, by pulling troops out of Syria that Obama put in as peacekeepers.

Why was that bad? How abut adding to global strife, encouraging radical movements, making wildly erroneous political assumptions, ignoring blood feuds that go back generations and adding to one of the knottiest geopolitical problems known to man - one that goes back centuries?

Well, as the title says, let’s talk Turkey.

First, let’s admit that some people couldn’t find Turkey on a map. So, I’ll tell you where it is, and try not to bore the cartographers among us. Just remember, in this case geography is everything.

Turkey is just about everywhere. It’s in Europe and it’s in Asia. It’s on the Black Sea and on the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean Sea. It’s neighbors with Greece and Bulgaria, Syria and Iraq and Iran, not to mention Georgia, which became an independent republic following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

And it’s old, very old, with a history of strife between national and religious groups going back long before the Crusades. In fact, Constantinople - named for Roman Emperor Constantine and eventually the capitol of the Eastern Roman Empire, saw it’s first siege in 626 AD, and changed sides regularly as Crusaders and Muslim leaders conquered and reconquered it.

Now, the thousand-year struggle between the Christian and Islamic worlds is playing itself out again, a relative stone’s throw from Istanbul, the name that the Turks gave to what was the largest and wealthiest city in Europe from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries.

How do I know this? Well, members of the Eastern Orthodox Church still call the leader of the church in Istanbul "His Most Divine All-Holiness the Archbishop of Constantinople New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch." In Greece, the city is still Konstantinoúpoli(s). At least, that’s what the web says.

Oh, speaking of language, the Medieval Slavic Russians had their own word for Constantinople. They called it Tsargrad, which roughly meant City of the Leader.

So, now our President has pulled our troops away from the border area between Turkey and Syria, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - the President of Turkey - has sent troops out to chase the Kurds away from its border, creating a 30 mile safety zone that he says will keep terrorists away. And, of course, will keep his own Kurdish population from getting out of control.

How many Kurds does he worry about?  Turkey’s population is just over 83 million, and nearly one in five of them are Kurdish.

When we pulled out, he sent troops out to chase the Kurds away from Turkey’s border, creating a 30 mile safety zone to keep terrorists away. And, of course, Turkey’s President thinks it will help keep his own Kurdish population from getting out of control.

But will that kind of buffer keep a nation safe? Russia made safety zones out of all the small countries around it right after World War II, but that didn’t end well.

Germany built a similar buffer right before World War II, saying the nation needed room to grow. But that didn’t work out either. 

You could go back to the Roman Empire, conquering states right and left, then more states to keep those states safe, or go back to Alexander the Great. He started out in Macedon - another nation on the Aegean - and conquered neighboring Greece, then Persia, then Egypt, then India…well you get the idea. His empire also didn’t last.

Today, I can only think of one state that keeps putting parts of neighboring lands under its control to insure safety - Israel. 

Strangely, that has only served to isolate Israel from much of the world and make all of its Arab neighbors angry. And its also  angering many of its own citizens.

Oh, wait, there is another nation doing the same thing. Russia. And Russia is the new good friend of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. I wonder how that will turn out?

Meanwhile, the few hundred soldiers we had keeping the peace and holding down terrorism on the Turkish-Syrian border are coming home. Well that’s what our President said, and maybe some day they will. But, for the time being, the Pentagon says they are being redeployed to Iraq, to protect them from the Iranians.

At least, that’s what we hear from the White House. 

Hey, what could go wrong with that?

The Debates - Lets Do Them Better.

 You know what made the Lincoln-Douglas debates so great?

I’ll tell you in just two words - Lincoln and Douglas.

Now for those readers without a great love of history, let me give some perspective.

Abraham Lincoln and Michael Douglas - no, make that Stephen A. Douglas - met at a time of national crisis, probably the biggest crisis ever faced by the United States.

Of course, at the time, we were a nation made up of sovereign states, united in some ways but very divided in others. Bitterly divided. Some even questioned if our nation would survive.

Sound familiar?

Well, let’s look a little closer. I’ll get to the recent debate with all those Democratic candidates in a bit.

First, Lincoln and Douglas weren’t running for President. Not even close. When they met in 1858, three years before the Civil War, they were running for Senator in Illinois.

Because there was no television or radio or internet, there were actually seven debates, so more people could see them. And, the debate was limited to just one subject - the expansion of slavery into the new territories that were sprawling out into the middle of what would become our nation.

The South, which pretty much ran the political machinery of the United States, was slowly losing power to the faster-growing and industrial North, and losing new territories - which would sooner or later become states - meant they would lose control of the Senate. Sound familiar?

As an aside, that format - while not created by Lincoln and Douglas - set the pattern still used today by debate teams in high schools and colleges across the country. One issue, explored in depth. Some high schools still have for-credit courses in speech and debate. None of them strictly follow the Lincoln-Douglas format, which was one candidate speaking for 60 minutes, the other for 90 minutes and the first getting a 30-minute rebuttal.

Imagine talking all that time without repeating yourself or sounding like an idiot. Sound familiar?

By the way, Lincoln lost. Democrats won 54 seats in the Illinois legislature, Republicans got 46, and they chose Douglas for Senator. Lincoln thought his political career was over.

Now, let’s get to the recent Democratic debate. Too many people, all talking for just over a minute on the same thing over and over again. And a format that gave people extra time to respond, which meant that attacking a front-runner meant they got more TV time.

How would I make it better? Well, there were a dozen people talking for three hours. I would put out a table with coffee and pastries and just four chairs.  Then I would put out a list of subjects - climate change, health care, the economy, our relationship with other nations and other obvious things - and let the candidates pick the ones they wanted to debate, from one to six. Ties would be settled by a random draw.

Then they would all sit down, with timers, and start talking. Four people for a half hour is fair. You want to change the time, go ahead. Heck, let the candidates decide how to break it up if they want.

What you would get is a thorough examination of the issues by people who will certainly be involved in charting our future in one way or another. Since they picked their topics, we can assume they know stuff about it and we might all learn something.

And Elizabeth Warren would not be allowed to debate every subject, even though she has a plan for all of them.

Rushing The Season

There’s a bit of a chill here in the northeast. The temperature outside, when I got up and read it on my wall thermometer, was in the 50’s, which would have been delightfully warm in February, but not in October.

Still, it got me thinking about the joys of winter to come. I called the repair shop to get my snowblower fixed. I found a couple of warm sweatshirts. And I thought about the joys of holiday shopping in Bryant Park in Manhattan, going from tent to tent and eating hot roasted chestnuts while a light snow came down on me and my wife.

Naturally, politics soon intruded.

I thought of the White House at Christmas, the lighting of the tree, a prayer service, and of the President reading that most beloved of stories, A Christmas Carol.

That soon became a movie, with Mike Pence playing the roll of Jacob Marley. He was surprisingly good, especially when he showed Scrooge - the staring roll was, of course, played by our President - the chain of wrongs Scrooge had done in his life against his fellow men.

The Ghost of Christmas Past was played by Bill Clinton, which seemed a more than appropriate choice, while the Ghost of Christmas Present was natural for Bernie Sanders.

As that second ghost and Scrooge flew over the rooftops of London (yes, the story had clearly changed to a movie at this point) I looked at the crowds of happy people below and wondered who would be playing the Ghost of Christmas Future.

When we stopped off to see Scrooge’s well-meaning, happy but ineffective nephew - who had been trying unsuccessfully all these years to get Scrooge to come to his party - I found another masterpiece of casting. It was Mitt Romney, but drinking punch.

Well, we shed a tear, Mitt and I, for how Trump was losing the warm feelings shared by everyone at the party. Then came the scene where the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come appeared.

I would have cast Whoopi Goldberg, but my idle thoughts did me one better. It was Elizabeth Warren, telling Trump that she had a plan for his salvation. She outlined it clearly, but Trump just kept muttering “fake news, fake news.

Then came the end. Instead of running out the door filled with the Milk of Human Kindness, showering gifts as he went and shouting “Merry Christmas” as a symbol of his new and wonderful salvation, Trump rushed to his office and got there early, to surprise his clerk, Bob Cratchit.

 Then, when Cratchit showed up late, saying he had made merry with his meager family Christmas dinner, Trump bristled.

“That’s the last time you make merry on my dime, Bob Cratchit. You’re fired. You can go to the poorhouse for all I care. I’m calling the home secretary to see if your wife is in this country illegally, and should be deported with all your children. Free medical care for them, bah,” he shouted.

With that, the camera pulled out, showing the dirty streets and black smoke curling up from the smokestacks of London. In one small corner of the screen, if you look closely, you can see Mike Pence quietly counting the new links on Trump’s chain, already much longer than the one he wears himself.

But, he is catching up.

So, Here's My Plan

 Like a lot of other people, I’ve been looking around lately for a way to make some money.

Now, I like to think big, so of course I have been looking for a way to make a lot of money. And, I think I got it.

The plan isn’t quite perfected yet, and there may be a small legal issue or two to work out. But, I’m willing to share it with you, and any improvements you can suggest will probably be rewarded as soon as the plan goes into effect and the money starts to come in.

To give credit where it is due, President Trump came up with the original plan, but - since he hasn’t asked me for a cut - I will just invest his share in a secure place until he wants it, or until my legal obligation to return the money to him runs out.

So, what’s this great idea? Kinda like a new real estate boom. I will be selling political dirt.

The beauty part is that none of the digging will take place anywhere in the United States, where there are some laws against that sort of thing - you never know when some state or federal attorney general will try to crack down on you.

No, all the dirt will come from off-shore. From other countries. From places willing to sell dirt about political candidates to me, and I will forward it to whatever campaign needs it.

How much would Elizabeth Warren pay for some juicy bad deeds that involve a second cousin of, say, a candidate we will call J B? How much would Mayor Pete pay for the results of an investigation into Corey Booker’s efforts to sell another country - we’ll call it “C” for right now - the best real estate in Newark at a deep discount?

We will, of course, work both sides of the street. What would some lawyer, once the mayor of a large metropolitan city, pay for information about an inside deal with a not-for-profit religious foundation that was importing untaxed whiskey for a politician we will call M R?

You see the beauty of the plan? There are 195 countries in the world, according to the United Nations, and that means 194 nations that might just want a piece of our next presidential election.

(Fun Fact - the biggest country is China, with 1.43 billion people, or 18.6 percent of the world’s population. India is second with 1.36 billion. The U.S. comes in third with 329 million, or 4.3 per-cent the world’s population.)

Now we would need a sliding scale to figure out what to charge. Some nations, places like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, have shown a real gift for coming up with information that can get people who oppose them thrown in jail for life. Heck, our friends the Russians seize the property of people they consider enemies of the state, and reportedly send agents out across Europe to kill people who - that fake information shows - are deep state enemies.

For those countries, we would pay very little for information that would be fit to give to some supermarket tabloid or cable television host, and a lot more for something we could leak to the Times.

Imagine the bidding war we could have in places like the Middle East, as nations vie to sell dirt to Republicans or Democrats, or to sell to both sides, just to cover the bases no matter who wins in 2020.

Heck, at this point, MI 5 might want to cover its country’s bases as well, just in case that Brexit thing doesn’t work out as planned.

And in this world of instant comment and unflagging loyalty to political parties, we would have covered our bases too, since we would have sold information to whoever wins the next Presidential election.

As Donald Trump says, there nothing wrong with that. After all, we’re doing it in plain sight.

Well, time to try and reach a good lawyer to review the idea and deal with any problems that might come up. It will take a while to pick the right one, but I hear Washington is full of them, and a lot of them should be looking for work real soon.

Politics Is Just Another Sport

A lot of people like to say that politics is a lot like sports. I mostly agree. It is like a sport. But, since I like to quibble about things, here’s a question for you.

Which sport?

Baseball is America’s game, but football has the Dallas Cowboys, which is America’s Team. Soccer is America’s fastest-growing sport, auto racing has America’s most passionate fans. And so it goes. Starting to sound like politics already - which candidate is the best, which one has the most passionate followers, which one has the best chance to win?

And the parallels don’t stop there. We ask which sport is America’s game, but we also argue about how to decide it.

America’s game would be the most popular, of course. But, popular for who? 

Football argues that it has the biggest tv ratings and the biggest average crowd size for its 16 regular season games. But baseball says a lot more people will see a game over its162 game regular season. Besides, while most baseball stadiums have a lot fewer seats, those seats are filled a lot more often.

Then there’s the question of participation. How many people actually play those sports? Volleyball is really popular as a pick-up game, and in some places Bocci has a big following. They even opened a summer league a few years ago in Southampton.

Should we only count games played by adults? That would leave out a lot of college football players, and all the high school baseball and football games. But counting teens, or counting everyone playing a sport, opens the door to bowling and a lot more soccer. How about martial arts and badminton which are - by some surveys - the 10th most popular sports in the nation. Yes, surveys can disagree.

But, let’s get back to the point. Oh, sorry, I haven’t made the point yet.

The reason politics is like sports is the fans. Yes, the fans who develop a blind loyalty to a team - win or lose, even over decades - but who have the unpredictable habit of turning rabid every so often and demanding the coach be fired, the owner sell the franchise or - when real money is on the line - vote against a bond issue that would allow the team’s stadium to be expanded.

Yep, just like politics. The support from your base is loud and proud and colorful, right up to the day when the fans desert in droves and demand that the team owners should be dumped as well. Kind of like the French Revolution. Long live the KIng!

In our modern times, fans just vote with their wallets. Ticket sales go down. Way down. They also vote with their feet, and walk away from the games.

Which brings us to our nation’s current political fiasco.

The fans of our President are still loud, at least at his rallies, and the political machinery of the Republican Party is solidly behind him, paying the small price of opposing everything they stood for over the past few decades…things like state’s rights, the rule of law and opposition to the growing national debt.

Soon we may get to see some Supreme Court justices who only got their job by manipulating the nominating system rule on whether the abuse of political power is illegal, or unconstitutional, or whatever word the lawyers think fits best. Should be interesting.

And, you will see some Republicans walking. Walking away from the polls on Election Day, walking away from the party when it asks for campaign donations, and walking away from their elected jobs in Washington when they begin to think they will soon be in the minority party and lose all those lovely perks.

Oh, wait. That’s already happening.

The Debate - Some Random Thoughts.

Well, everybody got it wrong.

The candidates, the moderators, the invisible man who gave a pathetic talk to a friendly Republican audience at the same time as the debate in a vain effort to try hog the stage. They all missed the point.

And, maybe, the government and, maybe, us.

Bold talk, you say, in an outraged tone. What point? You ask it quizzically.

Well, here it is. We are a democracy, we have a government. We are, at heart, a nation of laws and processes.

Not a nation of kings or despots. At least, not. Yet. But…

Let’s imagine a world where one man, just one man, has the power to decide which laws to pass and which policies to put into effect over things like foreign trade and health care.

(For my readers in other countries, some of which have had women as their chief executive, you can imagine one woman doing that too. Examples upon request. You can start with the original Queen Elizabeth, or better still Catherine the Great.)

Well, we do have just one man in the Senate who has ruled that we shall have no laws to control guns and prevent mass shootings, and we have the same man deciding who will or will not be seated on the Supreme Court. Kinda close.

Then we have a man in the White House deciding, all by himself, how our water and air should be polluted, how our alliances and trade agreements should be kept or broken, and how to respond when he is told Greenland is not for sale.

(I thought he could have just offered a trade. I’ll give you Hawaii for it. After all, they have a lot of bad people from different races living there, and they gave Obama a fake birth certificate, something Greenlanders would never do.)

The theory is that none of those things should be done without the consent of Congress - not just one leader, but the whole body. If the system is so broken that one man can stop the actions of a majority of the nation, then it’s time to take to the streets, or maybe just stop funding government entirely until democracy comes back. No crying about things and saying you can’t do anything. Do something!

Which gets me to the point. Every candidate at the debate, at some point, was asked “what’s your plan” for gun control, or for health care, or for dealing with the national debt. (OK, not really. But they should have been asked.)

The right answer, which no one gave, was “I’d like to do this, but any plan like this has to be approved by Congress, and I expect it will be changed when all of those people in the House and the Senate debate it and find ways to make it better.”

The commentators got it wrong by focusing on the proposed plans and their differences, and ignoring the process that would turn any plan into reality. How about asking “Why do you think this would get through Congress?”

The candidates spent a lot of their time talking about what they would do - which is appropriate, after all - and almost none of it about how their ideas would impact other people. Think about it.

Most of the debate over health care could be eliminated if some candidate would simply say “We will provide health care for everyone, and you are all free to get supplemental policies to cover other things. The cost of that new insurance would be  lot less than it is now, because all the basic care is covered by the government.

Then we could talk about things like preventive health care, dental coverage, drug costs and all the other things that would be good to have.

And, oh yes, when all of the candidates were asked why they were the best person to deal with mass shootings and with foreign trade and with health care and with the ever-growing national debt (I know, not really that one), they might have said “No one on this stage is the best one to do everything, and how I would solve a problem might not be the best for the whole nation. We are a democracy, after all.”

Let’s not forget that. Maybe we could all remember it for the next debate.

Reparations

I’ve been thinking lately about reparations for blacks in the United States, a hot-button subject that will likely keep coming up for the rest of my life, my children’s lives and their children’s lives.

It is a nearly-unsolvable issue, one that keeps getting more and more complicated as time passes. And, many people have decided to simply leave it for someone else to solve. You know, like our changing climate.

So, why am I adding my two cents?

Well, every topical issue that comes up lately seems to go away before I can finish writing about it. Tariffs are on and then off and then on again. Russia tests a hypersonic missile, then we test one that just breaks the non-proliferation treaty we said was already broken. North Korea fires off a new flurry of missiles, then sends President Trump a Hallmark friendship card.

Or the economy is on the verge of collapse again. Or going into a mild recession. But not for everybody. So, who? And, until we know, why worry?

See what I mean? The issue of reparations will be around for a long, long time. More than enough time for this blog to still be relevant. I can catch some of the rapidly-changing stuff later on.

And one more thing. I an finding that my blogs have gotten a little preachy, a lot more like a term paper than an opinion, and - frankly - rather predictable. You know, you mention a subject and you know what I will say about it before I say it.

So, let me do one last, long, preachy and maybe boring blog, then I will revert to the sparkling, witty and a bit shallow blogs that we had so much fun with before,

I picked reparations as a subject because it is important and because it meets my test for one of the biggest challenges facing humanity, big issues that people have never really been able to deal with. They are, of course, sex and race. And reparations touches on them both.

 To get to the point quickly - and I will just as quickly go back to my normal rambling - the issue of reparations could be solved relatively fairly and relatively quickly if we all agreed just what people mean when they talk about it. But, everyone has their own idea, and as usual our common language serves to keep us apart instead of getting us together.

Let the ramble begin!

There are only a few kinds of reparations. The simplest to understand is a car crash. You hit my car. It is your fault. You pay to fix my damages. That is a reparation.

Or, you are a successful businessman. You bribe some politicians to change the local zoning so that your competitor has to spend a half million dollars just to meet the new town code, and they are forced to close. It all comes to light three years later. She sues you for the loss of her business, and a jury comes up with some cash value they think is appropriate. That, too, is a reparation.

Or you and your allies go to war with another nation and its allies. You lose, and the winners force you to pay for all the costs of the war.

That would be a big reparation. It’s happened many times over the centuries. Heck, we can probably find some people arguing that those lovely lands on the French side of the English Channel are really British possessions. You know, the “Let’s make Britain great again” crowd.

And let’s not get into the big related subject of colonization. Or whether women have been treated worse than men, and deserve a larger reparation.

Let’s simply start by looking at one of the world’s biggest reparations, and what came of it. It happened after the end of World War I, a war where - until the United States was finally dragged into it - our nation wasn’t sure which side we wanted to support.

Anyway, after they lost, the Central Powers were forced to make payments in cash or in land to the winners. Smaller nations like Turkey and Bulgaria had so little money that their reparations were cancelled. Germany got the big bill - 132 billion gold marks, worth about $33 billion in our currency.

Payment got complicated, since the Central Powers had to issue three sets of bonds to start payments, only two of which mandated unconditional payment. The total reparation was later reduced, but not enough.

Germany’s economy was crippled. Young men who were 8 years old when the war started were nearly 30 when their nation went in to a deep recession. Businesses failed and jobs were scarce, and a man named Adolph Hitler came to power on a wave of economic resentment. Of course, he blamed the Jews for all of Germany’s problems.

The common theme is that reparations are imposed by a winner. Often after war, sometimes in a court. And, rarest of all, by social pressure.

Which gets us back to where we started. Should the United States pay reparations to the dependents of slaves, or to blacks in general, or is there a third alternative?

In fact, there is. Not a perfect one, of course, but something that gives us a guideline to what reparations should be and what they should do. It happened in South Africa in 1994, after the government collapsed under international and internal pressures that forced the end of Apartheid.

Apartheid was a system of blatant racial discrimination by a tiny white minority that held most of the land, most of the money, most of the resources and all of the power in South Africa.

The country was so broken that its government gave up. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison, became President and spent the next six years trying to deal with the legacy of Apartheid - the bitterness, the hatred, the pent-up demands for revenge.

What that nation got was a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which did an imperfect job of trying to right the nation’s past wrongs. Part of the work involved helping individuals. Another part involved public acknowledgment of past wrongdoings. Very few people whose suffering had gone on for generations ended up getting any money.

How it happened is a long and complex story, of hopes that were dashed and efforts that broke apart on the hard rocks of reality. Who would be helped and how to do it was debated over and over, as well as little things like who should be taxed to pay for the benefits, and how much of the country’s budget should be used, when there were so many other pressing needs to be met.

Ultimately, as more and more people demanded aid, the country set up a scale of who would be helped first. It also had to decide what to do about its infrastructure - build paved roads in poor black areas, improve schools, see that adequate health care was available, address the yawning gap between the life expectancy of blacks and whites. 

By the time it was all settled, few people qualified for direct reparation payments, and the money - originally set at the median income of the nation - had dropped so far that proposed payments were close to the poverty level.

The lesson that comes through for me is that reparations can’t go to people who died many years ago, and shouldn’t just be given out to anyone who asks for it. And it’s tough for any individual to prove in court they were harmed by a racist society.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t take big, costly steps to fix the problems that are the legacy of inequality. You can easily look at roads, and see how the ones in poor areas are rarely repaired, while the ones in wealthy areas get repaved regularly. It’s tougher to look at the nation’s education system and see whereto inequalities exist.

Or, just start simple. Who still needs clean water and adequate hospitals and fire protection? How many millions of dollars are spent each year to deal with beach erosion, compared to how much is spent to lower the infant mortality rate, which is outrageously high in poor and minority communities.

‘sIf you need some kind of light to burn at the end of the particular tunnel, it is this. When you have a society that had - deliberately or accidentally - destroyed families for generations by denying one ethnic group good schools, good jobs, and the ability to accumulate wealth by making it difficult to buy housing you have a multi-headed problem that it will cost a lot to fix.

And the longer you wait, the more expensive it will get.

You know, like climate change.

Footnote - Lovell Fernandez, a professor of law at the University of Western Cape, provided a good overview of South Africa’s reparations struggle in his paper on Reparations Policy in South Africa about 20 years ago. Makes interesting reading.