Abortion: Judgment or Compassion

“Beta O’Rourke May Benefit From an Unlikely Support Group: White Evangelical Women”, Elisabeth Dias, New York Times, 2018-10-09

This shift is that these women are seeing O’Rourke as a “stark moral contrast to Mr. Trump.”  They are seeing other moral values that Trump does not have; values that are just as important as opposing abortion.

The problem with abortion as a political issue is that it ignores many problems that are not controlled by an “unwilling” mother.

Shall a teen-age girl be responsible for a child fathered by force, whether by a known or unknown male?

Shall a woman of any age be forced to bear a child whose birth will kill her?  What would that do to any previous children she had?

We really cannot make any sweeping pronouncements about abortion without knowing all facts in each individual case.

If we make all abortions illegal, who will be punished?  Will it be the unwilling mother?  Will it be the “back alley abortionist”?  Will it be the not present father?

Ironically, some of these “value” voters are supporting a party that is quite willing to cause unwanted abortions in other countries.  How many pregnant women are killed in wars?  How many of these pregnant women even support the wars in their countries?  And some of these politicians with the “big buttons” are quite willing to obliterate large numbers of women and children.

Terrorism a “mental health problem”?

Trump has already pronounced this a “mental health” problem, and not a “guns situation.”

"Trump says Texas shooting is a problem of mental health, not guns", Ashley Parker, Washington Post, 2017-11-06.

Is ISIS-induced terrorism a “mental health” problem and not a religious problem?

Government too big or too little? Make up your mind!

Republicans seem to be at the forefront in complaining about "big government".  Then they turn around and complain about the Federal government not doing enough.

The attack ads and phone calls from Republicans are overwhelming about the overreach of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare),  Among their statements are the Federal government should not be between you and your doctor.

Now Republicans in Congress are complaining that the Federal government is not doing enough about ebola.  In other words, the Federal government should get between ebola patients and their doctors.

See "Congress Scrutinizes Handling of Ebola Cases in Texas", New York Times, 2014-10-16.

If Texas secedes from the United States…

Will Texans be allowed into the United States without visas?  Will Congress be calling for stricter border controls?  Will gates have to be put at the border of the Interstates and other highways?  How long would the wait be to get from Texas into the United States on I-35 or I-10.  Would it be anything like the crossings from Canada at Sault St. Marie and the Ambassador Bridge?

Maybe many large corporations will headquarter in Texas for lower taxes and fewer regulations.  But will they have the schools and highways that have been subsidized by the United States government?  Will many Americans outside of Texas want to move to a “foreign” country?

Will Texas survive without the Federal government largesse for military bases, NASA, and border control?

These questions were raised in my mind by “From Kurdistan To Texax, Scots Spur Separatists”, Katrin Bennhold, New York Times, 2014-09-10.

Corporations, persons, tools, and fools

Corporations are persons?  Someone said that you know a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.

How did we get to this situation that corporations have “freedom of speech” and many other freedoms granted to actual living individual persons?

Corporations were originally created to give monarchs and other nobility a piece of the economic action.  As the merchant class rose in the cities, the monarch couldn’t tax them because they had no land.  By creating a corporation of a given business, the monarch could insist on a few shares of a corporation and rake in more in profits than he would have in taxes.  Also, by giving a monopoly to a corporation, he protected it from competition.

These monopolies soon expanded far outside the monarch’s country with colonization of other parts of the world.  An example is how British law forbade the American colonies from producing a long list of items or importing goods through any other organization than the British East India Company.  Was the British East India Company composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation?  The Boston Tea Party was an act of defiance against the corporate monopoly enjoyed by the British East India Company.

Is today’s Tea Party a tool of corporations who want to extract minerals without paying the full cost of such extraction?  These corporations are waging legislative, administrative, and public relations campaigns to allow them to operate on corporate terms.  Are these corporations composed of Adam Smith’s “order of men” who “were not to be trusted” with proposing legislation?  Also as the British East India Company was a “foreign” entity, many of the extractors of today are entities from out of state or even out of the country.

Does “Open for Business” or “Business-friendly” apply to locally-owned companies or to large corporations that will move elsewhere whenever they think an area is not bending to their wishes?  Does it mean that large corporations will be given subsidies, including reduced taxes, that aren’t given to locally-owned businesses?  If we want truth in government, maybe we should insist that states and localities that claim to be “Business-friendly” should admit being “Corporation-friendly”.

Can you find “corporation” in the U.S. Constitution?  That was deliberate.  Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention remembered well the dominance of a corporation over Colonial affairs and did not want a repeat of that stranglehold.  Many of the national politicians of the time had a vision of craftsman and farmers plying their goods in local markets.

But with advances in transportation, the economic situation changed drastically.  To build canals required capital.  To gather capital, groups of people had to organize to buy shares and/or borrow money.  If the enterprise failed, the shareholders didn’t want to be held individually responsible for the losses of the company beyond their own financial contribution.  Wouldn’t you?  Thus, the limited liability corporation came to the United States.

With the coming of the railroads came ever larger corporations.  The Illinois Central Railroad hired a lawyer to get special privileges for it like breaking unions, hiring foreign workers, and gaining privileges not held by people.  Yep, that lawyer was the “of the people, by the people, and for the people” guy.  Apparently, the Civil War opened his eyes to many things.  This excerpt from one of his letters shows this rather strongly:

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

My, how political parties morph over the generations!  I think only two Republican Presidents have had similar misgivings.

Many decades later another war-time leader worried about the “military-industrial” complex.  But one of his predecessors pulled a corporate branding trick on the American people.  The Department of War was now to be called the Department of Defense.  Now corporations weren’t in the business of selling war machines but were fulfilling “defense contracts”.

One of the political ironies is the political party the claims the federal government can’t do anything right bends over backward to lavish more money on the military-industrial complex.  Do they not know that snafu and fubar are terms coined by the guys in the foxholes?

So, are corporations the tools of the people or are the people the tools of corporations?  If we let the latter happen then we are the fools.

For a lot more about the abuse of and by corporations, see “Life, Inc., How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back” by Douglas Rushkoff.

Mel owns shares in a few corporations and almost always votes against their overpaid executives and boards.

Jesters and columnists, clowns and politicians

Another note from my helter-skelter, written whenever pile is headlined:

Re Molly Ivins + Mark DePaolis,

and followed by a comment about jesters and one about clowns.

1) The purpose of the jester was to say things nobody else dared say.

2) We have lots of clowns in public office.  Why not have some who have something to say instead of mere posturing?

I wondered was this something they wrote or something I pulled out of my own thoughts.  After a search for their names, jester, and clown, I assumed it was something I wrote one day after reading them both in the Star Tribune years ago.

Ivins was noted for her acerbic wit; she did not suffer fools gladly.  The “left” loved her and the “right” hated her.  She died too early of breast cancer.

Although I haven’t seen anything in the paper recently by DePaolis, he is still practicing family medicine at Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital in the Twin Cities.

I did find some books by DePaolis available online; I’m sure you can also find Ivins’ books online.

The fraudulent campaign against "voter fraud"

"The list of acceptable forms [of voter ID} includes a concealed-handgun license but not a state university student ID. The omission suggests it is not voter fraud but voters unfriendly to the GOP that Abbott and other Texas Republicans are trying to thwart."

"The Republican Push to Make It Harder to Vote", Linda Killian, The Atlantic, 2013-08-02

The same article has a statement from the Libertarian Party:

“Republicans claim to be the party of limited government. Now we see what that term really means: when Republicans say limited government, they apparently mean government limited to them and their supporters.”

What too few people realize is that too many who had only themselves to blame for not voting let Republicans win time after time.

As of 2013-08-04, registration in North Carolina was 2,765,857 Democratic and 1,987,750 Republican.  But here is something strange, the vote in 2010 for governor was 1,931,580 for Walter H. Dalton (DEM) and 2,440,707 for Pat McCrory (REP).  Does this mean over 500,000 Democrats voted for McCrory?  Does it mean that over 800,000 Democrats didn't even show up and Republicans picked up over 400,000 votes from non-affiliated voters?  Turnout in 2012 was 68%.  68% of 2,765,857 is 1,880,783.  Given that Romney got 50.39% of the vote in 2012, I lean to the notion that lots and lots of Democrats were disappointed in Obama and just didn't show up.  How to lose elections in one easy lesson!

Another point, maybe too many Democrats voted for President but left much of the rest of the ballot blank - 2,178,391 Obama and 2,270,395 Romney.  Reading these tea leaves is really getting confusing.  Obama received more votes than Dalton, but McCrory received more votes than Romney.  About the only firm conclusion I can come to it is that at least 21% of the registered Democrats did not vote for Obama and at least 30% of the registered Democrats did not vote for Dalton.

Abuse of power; abuse of freedom

Many complain about an overreaching government, but most of these complaints are really about regulation of overreaching corporations who take actions against "the common welfare".  But these critics are generally silent when an overreaching government acts against an innocent citizen.

See "Free After 25 Years: A Tale of Murder and Injustice", Wade Goodwyn, NPR Weekend Edition, 2012-04-28.  This is a case of a sheriff in Texas deciding that a husband was guilty of murdering his wife and ignoring or hiding all evidence that proved the contrary.  Luckily the husband was not executed.  But because the real killer was not sought out, the real killer murdered a second man's wife.

Many novelists, like John Lescroart, make a career of writing about false accusations and rushes to judgment on circumstantial evidence.  We can't draw conclusions from novels about frequency of false accusations in real life, but it does make one wonder.  The above case proves that false accusations exist.  The Innocence Project is winning many exonerations.  Since 1992 they have exonerated 200 people based on DNA and other evidence that was not presented at a trial.  The Innocence Project believes this is just the tip of the iceberg. \

Another abuse is the overreaction to many demonstrations, including pepper-spraying, clubbing, and dragging away.  This leads to another kind of abuse, abuse of freedom.

"Congress shall make no law … abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble…".  Does peaceably assembling include filling a public space so that others cannot move through that space?  Does peaceably assembling include camping out?  Some respond that they need these demonstrations to have their voices heard.  I wonder if these people were in the less than 50 percent who showed up to vote in 2010 or were in the more than 50 percent who didn't show up to vote in 2010.

The First Amendment also includes freedom of speech.  Does freedom of speech include buying up large portions of the broadcast spectrum and broadcasting half-truths, innuendo, and lies?  Does freedom of speech include using a bullhorn at a demonstration turned up so loud that others cannot even be heard by the person next to them.  Or by the whole group shouting so loud that others cannot be heard?

In summary, power is given for authorities to govern, not rule; freedoms are given to put a check on authorities, not to govern by mob rule.

Are Rick Perry et al. Christians or hypocrites?

Texas Governor and candidate for the Republican nomination for President led a prayer rally for "Nation in Crisis" that was attended by 30,000 people.  In his address, he read several Bible verses.  I wonder if he read Matthew 6:5-6, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.  Verily, I say unto you, They have their reward.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."