April 25, 2017--Jack: Trump's 100 Days

"What's this 100-days business?"

Jack is not a student of history so when he called, sounding annoyed, already annoyed, I said, "It refers to Franklin Roosevelt's first 100 days in office in 1933. During the Depression. He accomplished so much in his first 100 days that it became a self-imposed benchmark for the presidents who came after him. As a way to brag about the importance of their ideas and how much they would get done."

"But like Trump said the other day, it's not a real deadline. He could have said it's not a sprint it's a marathon."

"He can say anything he wants, but to me this sounds like a rationalization."

"He wasn't rationalizing."

"Well, he was and so are you." Jack didn't take that up, so I added, "Believe me if he got a lot of things done, like something, anything approved my Congress or if the Syrians agreed to a legitimate ceasefire after he launched 59 Tomahawk missiles, he'd be all over TV and Twitter pointing it out. Now he's trying to cover up. Which I get."

"Well he tried to repeal Obamacare."

"And? Is he all about trying or doing? That's what he promised during the campaign--that he knew how to get things done."

"He'll get Obamacare repealed maybe even this week. That would be quite an accomplishment."

"Only if you consider taking healthcare coverage away from 24 million people an accomplishment."

"It's Congress' fault. They couldn't agree to . . ."

"You can blame it on Congress all you want, but Trump is the president and he made all those promises. Forget 100 days. What did he say he'd do on Day One? Remember that? Among other little things, God help us, repeal Obamacare."

"What about the executive orders? He . . ."

"You mean the ones that got overturned by the federal courts?"

"I mean by that so-called judge who lives on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean."

"You mean federal judge Derrick Watson, who lives in Hawaii? Which by the way is a state. Even if a majority of Hawaiians are people of color."

"I was pulling your leg a little bit. But I love the way you liberals refer to black people and Mexicans as 'people of color.' Why don't you call them what they are? What are you hiding?"

"This sounds a little racist to me but since I know you better than to accuse you of that, I'll tell you. When talking just about African Americans we call them that. Or Cuba Americans. Or for that matter Mexican Americans, we call them that. But when we refer to all of them that's when we say 'people of color.' You have a problem with that?"

"It just sounds so phony and politically correct to me. I hate all this politically correct baloney. It's another way liberals look down their noses as anyone who is a conservative or supports Trump."

"You're straying from the subject," I said, "I thought we were talking about Trump's first 100 days, which end on Saturday."

"What about tax reform? And as I said Ryan is still working on healthcare."

"Both dead on arrival. On Wednesday Trump promises to unveil 'the biggest tax cuts in history.' He already boasted about that, calling it 'massive.' Even his Secretary of the Treasury says it will take at least a year to pass. It's not going to happen between this Wednesday and Saturday. And with his friends in the real estate industry already lobbying against any changes in real estate taxes, what chance does anything bold have to pass even a year from now?"

Jack shifted the subject, "Ryan says he has the votes to repeal and replace Obamacare. This week."

"He's dreaming. They have to pass legislation to keep the government from running out of money. That happens Friday. So maybe if they manage to do that it will go on Trump's almost non-existent list of 100-days accomplishments."

"So what did your favorite president get done? And don't forget there was the Depression going on, which made it easier to get things through Congress."

"Fair point. But in a legitimate 100 days, among other things Roosevelt got Congress to pass the creation of the FDIC and the bank holiday. Also, the Glass-Steagall Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority--the TVA--and Social Security--that's a big one-- and he ended the gold standard.  Which pretty much everybody would consider amazing. And I could go on. He got 15 separate pieces of New Deal legislation passed in a little more than three months. Against that, on Trump's list, you'd probably mention the new Supreme Court justice. Which he does get credit for though Gorsuch is not my cup of tea."

"I'm not really into this 100-days business. I just . . ."

"You just brought it up out the blue to bust my chops?"

"Not . . ."

"I'll tell you one big thing Trump could do by Saturday."

"I'm listening."

"Start a war with North Korea. Even if he doesn't know where our aircraft carriers are."

Jack hung up.

September 14, 2105--What's With Ben Carson?

Not only has Dr. Ben Carson surged into second place in polls of Republican voters, almost in a statistical dead heat with Donald TRUMP, but national polling shows him doing best among GOP candidates in the all important head-to-head with Hillary Clinton.

According to the latest CNN poll, TRUMP and Hillary are tied, Clinton bests Jeb Bush by 4 percentage points, but loses to Carson by 5 points.

It's still very early, but this makes one think.

An African-American, evangelical, conservative surgeon?

So he is not just an unexpected and unusual Republican favorite but his appeal goes beyond the evangelical base of the Grand Old Party and includes many Democrats and Independents.

Of course he has that anti-government thing going. Along with Carly Fiorina and Donald TRUMP, the three non-establishment candidates, they garner well over 50 percent of potential Republican primary voters.

We tend to think of African Americans as pretty automatically voting for Democrat candidates. The last three Democrat nominees for president received on average about 90 percent of black votes.

One question, then, about Dr. Carson--would he get more than 10 percent if he were the nominee? Obviously, yes, and that would give him quite a leg up in key swing states such as Ohio, Pennsylvania,  Florida, and Virginia. In the general election if he could carry those four states he'd be well on his way to winning the presidency.

But that's political inside baseball. It does not say much about Crason's clearly wide appeal.

Some remind us that there is a long tradition of Black conservatives who have thrived on the national political scene. Senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts and Colin Powell come to mind. Many feel Powell would have been able to win the GOP nomination in 1996 and had he done so would have had a good chance of defeating Bill Clinton.

Carson's cultural conservatism appeals not only to large numbers of blacks (about one-third self-identify as social conservatives) but also to white and Latino religious conservatives. His views on abortion and same-sex marriage (he opposes both) are cases in point.

Like other African-American conservatives who preceded him, he comes off as comfortably non-militant. He doesn't threaten as many whites as did Jessie Jackson and even Barack Obama.

I think, though, that there are other reasons why he is doing so well. Primarily because he is a physician, not just because he is anti big government. Then, there is kind of surgeon he is (neuro) and the fame that accrued to him from his successful, highly publicized effort to separate conjoined twins.

Many feel we are in our national core virtually terminally ill and in need of treatment. Metaphorically, of course, but those who feel this way, considering the state of our national health, may be thinking why not call on a doctor to heal us?

And then there is the further metaphor of his work with Siamese twins. As with them, we were at one time a conjoined body politic, but in recent decades have lived separately and angrily in our partisan corners. Little gets done. We barely speak to each other.

Carson is someone who understands the difference between being united and being separate. And how to do both successfully.

By this logic, I doubt if he would have the same appeal if he were, say, an orthopedic surgeon.

One the other hand, remember George W. Bush who declared himself, "a uniter, not a divider"? Though we know how well that turned out, we did elect him with an assist from the Supreme Court.

November 25, 2014--The (Sort of) Good News From Ferguson, Mo

Yes, there is some good news from Ferguson. Keep reading.

Back in 1985, the then chief judge of he New York court of appeals, Sol Wachtler, famously said that an even half-competent prosecutor, because of the nature of how the grand juries function, could have them "indict a ham sandwich."

This is because it is easy to demonstrate "probable cause," the threshold grand juries are instructed to follow when considering an indictment. "Probable cause," not the much more demanding "beyond a reasonable doubt" that a conviction requires.

The justice system is structured so that indictments are relatively easy to obtain but convictions aren't.

But the grand jury in Ferguson, Mo, because of the behavior and lack of clear instructions from the prosecutor failed to indict Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown,  an unarmed African-American teenager back in August.

From his statement late yesterday and reports from legal experts who over-night examined the grand jury evidence that was released, it is clear the prosecutor, in effect, conducted a version of a full trial; but a trial in which the interests of the deceased were not adequately represented nor was there compelling evidence that the side representing the state (the prosecutor) aggressively made the case for indictment.

Quite the opposite.

In his formal statement announcing that the grand jury failed to indict Wilson, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch, said that the main reason there were no indictments was because there was so much "conflicting evidence."

Well, that's true in every judicial situation. There are virtually no open-and-shut cases. A trial by its nature deals with conflicting evidence. The prosecution cites evidence and the defense attempts to refute it with "conflicting evidence."

At the grand jury "trial" of police officer Wilson, the cards were stacked against the potential state's case in that, by presenting so much conflicting evidence to the grand jury, the prosecutor, rather than representing the interests of the state (the traditional role for prosecutors from common law times until today) in effect acted as it were the defense attorney for the potentially accused.

(It may not be irrelevant to note that McCulloch's father was a police officers who was killed, when McCulloch was 14, in an incident that involved an African American kidnapper.)

Further, the prosecutor gave the grand jury a checklist of five possible levels of indictment, from murder-one to involuntary manslaughter. Unlike every other grand jury with which I am familiar (and I have served on two, including a so-called special grand jury that dealt with and handed down more that 25 indictments for the New York City version of the Crips gang), this time apparently McCulloch just gave them the list and did not make recommendations about what he felt would serve the interest of justice.

No wonder it took the grand jury more than two days to do nothing. They sat through a quasi trial with no opening or closing statements that could help guide their thinking and no guidance from the prosecution about how to think about the potential charges.

So it is no surprise that this sad time the ham sandwich walked.

Then, where's the good news?

Think back not to many years about similar situations in too much of America. Situations in which white men could maim, torture, and kill black people (usually young black men) with virtual impunity.

How many clear situations of murder with intent went uninvestigated or half-heartedly looked into? There are enough outrageous examples from my lifetime alone to fill this page.

And not just cases from the South. Even in New York City, the self-proclaimed center of liberal thought where we take pride in our open pursuit of justice, the so-called Central Park rapists were recently released from years in jail because it finally became clear that their trials were rigged by the prosecutors who did not do their due diligence when faced with the rape of a white women jogger by an alleged marauding band of young men of color. And how many white police officers have shot and killed young African-American boys and men in New York and have been under-prosecuted? One such killing occurred as recently as last week in a public housing project in Brooklyn. We'll see how justice takes its course over the next number of months.

But consider the progress. Even in Ferguson.

As flawed as it was, at least this time there were months of investigation and pressure to pursue justice. The system may have failed, but what happened in Missouri (and matters are not concluded--there may very well be a U.S. Justice Department civil rights case that could lead to indictments and a criminal trial), this case was not handled as equivalent ones have been through our tortured racial history.

So as we watch the media show endless footage of the telegenically burning police car (thereby abetting the narrative that "they" are dangerous and must be controlled and if necessary repressed by civil authorities), think back about where we have been and how far we have come. Including who is our president and attorney general.

June 18, 2014--The Six Americas

I hesitate to bring him up, he was such a . . . you know what, but John Edwards, during the 2008 primary campaign, reminded us that there are two Americas--"the privileged and the wealthy and the America of those who live paycheck to paycheck."

He of course was oversimplifying--for example among the less-privileged there are the working poor and those, without hope of work, who live in unrelenting poverty. And then there are the "privileged" who are the wealthy one percent and the simply affluent. This could then be thought of as four Americas.

But his reductionist two-Americas lens was still a good one through which to see the United States. It continued to be as the Occupy Wall Streeters reminded us.

The two-Americas idea was not entirely new, not even in it phrasing. It was derived from the findings of the presidentially-appointed Kerner Commission, which, after the urban riots of the 1960s, in 1968, reported that the United States was "moving toward [becoming] two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal."

The Kerner conclusion about race adds two more Americas for a total of six. And though the commissions findings were and are essentially true, they too lacked nuance. For example, the report barely mentioned how poorly many other millions of color, Hispanics for example, were doing. And it did not take even a glance at how women were faring or look at the stratification within the black community.

But as with Edward's summation, it too attracted attention, debate, and led to some palliative social policies.

Thus one could say that are more than two Americas. Six at least and even eight.

I've already noted that there is an America for most people of color, not just for African Americans, and that the socioeconomic divide if far more complex and its complexity is more important to pay attention to than Edwards' simple wealthy-versus-paycheck people.

And it may be almost equally important to consider the two ideological Americas, which also has a geographic component.

A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that the partisan divide stretches way beyond Congress. Liberals and conservatives prefer to live near people of like minds and want their children to marry those with similar political views.

More distressing, beyond having differing views that are subject to debate and compromise (both essential to a functioning democracy), Pew reported that 27 percent of Democrats and 36 percent of Republican see the other party as a threat to the nation's well-being.

Then there are the two cultural Americas, both closely aligned with the two ideological Americas. Some have declared the Culture Wars ended with "victory" for the progressive perspective that, among other things, supports same-sex marriage.

It is true that in a crescendo of court decisions and actions by voters and state legislators it is now legal in 17 states for men to marry men and women to marry women; but in states and cities along both coasts, in contrast to pretty much everywhere in between, battles rage about what to teach children--evolution or intelligent design; abortion, in spite of Roe v. Wade, is available on demand in only four states; and various forms of Christian prayer at public meetings, recently declared constitutional by the Supreme Court, now occurs commonly in much of America, including in Congress.

So how many Americas do we have? Ten? A dozen? Much to understand. Much work still to be done.