Wrongo and Ms. Right will be heading back to the US on Monday morning, so this is the last post from London. The news from America was both typical and troubling again this week. But letâs start with a UK-based cartoon from the Financial Times that drives home the point about how long itâs taking to negotiate a Brexit deal:
Meanwhile, back in the USA, the GOP Congress Critters who broke into the hearing were simply following orders:
What happens when you have the best lawyers:
New White House Ukraine strategy:
Letâs send healing thoughts to Jimmy Carter, who broke his pelvis this week:
Nice message from London:
October 2019 iPhone photo by Wrongo
It occurred to Wrongo that the diversity in England is due at least in part to being the headquarters of the British Empire, followed by being a part of the EU for what is now 47 years. With Brexit, those who voted âLeaveâ wish for a country that is less diverse.
Crawford Notch, White Mountains NP, NH – October 2019 photo by mattmacphersonphoto
Wrongo wants to get away from US politics. Lately, itâs nearly impossible to judge what is real, and whatâs not. A few things to consider:
First, regarding Turkeyâs move into Syria: At the UN on Thursday, a resolution was offered in the Security Council condemning Turkey’s invasion of northern Syria. The resolutionâs principal sponsor was the EU. But, the resolution was blocked by the US and Russia. Think about it: America just joined with Russia to veto a UN resolution that would have condemned the slaughter of the Kurds who helped the West defeat ISIS in Syria.
How often do you think that the US and Russia have been on the same side in UN vetoes?
Second, on Friday night, Trump went to Minneapolis to another of his campaign rallies. He spoke for 102 minutes. Among other things, he repeated a debunked rightâwing bloggerâs claim that Rep. Ilhan Omar married her brother to enter the US. Trump then widened his attack to target Somali refugees in Minnesota:
âAs you know, for many years, leaders in Washington brought large numbers of refugees to your state from Somalia without considering the impact on schools and communities and taxpayers….You should be able to decide what is best for your own cities and for your own neighborhoods, and thatâs what you have the right to do right now, and believe me, no other president would be doing that.â
In September, the Trump administration issued an executive order giving state and local governments more freedom to reject refugees.
Trump removed any doubt, that this is going to be the worst, most racist presidential campaign weâve ever seen. Is America ready for this?
Trump went on to say that Joe Biden only got to be vice president because he knew how to “kiss Barack Obama’s ass.” Donât you wonder if Mike Pence feels the heat from Biden? This causes Wrongo to ask the question: âWhatâs the difference between an ass-kisser and a brown noser?â
Answer: âDepth perceptionâ.
Third, the Ukraine story has many more levels than we have imagined. We learned on Wednesday that two of Rudy Giulianiâs âassociatesâ were arrested for funneling foreign money to Republican politicians. It seems that both had also been helping Giuliani investigate Joe Biden. Despite the Trump administrationâs contention that the two âassociatesâhad nothing to do with the White House, the WaPo reported: (brackets by Wrongo)
âJohn Dowd, a lawyer for [both men and former Trump lawyer] told Congress in a statement earlier this week that they had been assisting Giuliani in his work on behalf of the president. The two also claimed in interviews and social media posts to have attended an eight-person session with Trump in Washington in May 2018 to discuss the upcoming midterm elections.â
According to the indictment, they funneled money from an unnamed Russian businessman to various US political candidates.
Is everything we are hearing about Ukraine connected? Giulianiâs fingers seem to be all over the US/Ukraine relationship. Think Paul Manafort. We know that Rudy Giuliani was consulting with Manafort as he pursued his schemes. And Manafortâs lawyer Kevin Downing, who was coordinating with Rudy, represented the two âassociatesâ in their court appearance yesterday.
Itâs beginning to look like weâre headed for a Constitutional crisis.
Anyway, itâs the weekend, and weâve got to rest and recuperate so that we can face whatever Trump has in store for us next week. Itâs time for a Saturday Soother.
Letâs start by brewing up a mug of Sumatra single source coffee ($9.99/12 oz.) from Topsham, Maineâs coffee roaster Wicked Joe. The roaster says its full bodied and earthy, with notes of dense chocolate and spices.
Now, settle into a comfy chair and listen to âA Small Measure Of Peaceâ from the soundtrack from the 2003 film, The Last Samurai, composed by Hans Zimmer:
The film closes with: âAs for the American Captain, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he died of his wounds. Others that he returned to his own country. But I like to think he may have at last found some small measure of peace, that we all seek, and few of us ever find… “
A small measure of peace is Wrongoâs wish for all of us.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Sunrise, Llyn Padarn, North Wales – photo by risquer
Wrongo wants to take a look back at a revealing moment in the White House last week. Trump hosted survivors of religious persecution, including Nadia Murad, a 26-year-old Iraqi-born human rights activist and 2018 Nobel Peace Prize winner. Sadly, the event revealed Trump at his worst.
…âI cannot forget Trumpâs recent treatment of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for her campaign to end mass rape in war. The Islamic State, or ISIS, forced Murad into sexual slavery when it overran Yazidi villages in northern Iraq in 2014. Murad lost her mother and six brothers, slaughtered by ISIS.â
More from Cohen: (emphasis by Wrongo)
âShe now lives in Germany, and has been unable to return home, a point she made in her July 17 White House meeting with Trump. âWe cannot go back if we cannot protect our dignity, our family,â she said.
Allow me to render the scene in the present tense. Trump sits there at his desk, an uncomprehending, unsympathetic, uninterested cardboard dummy. He looks straight ahead for much of the time, not at her, his chin jutting in his best effort at a Mussolini pose. He cannot heave his bulk from the chair for this brave young woman. He cannot look at her.
Every now and again, in a disdainful manner, he swivels his head toward her and other survivors of religious persecution. When Murad says, âThey killed my mom, my six brothers,â Trump responds: âWhere are they now?â
âThey are in the mass graves in Sinjar,â Murad says. She is poised and courageous throughout in her effort to communicate her story in the face of Trumpâs complete, blank indifference.â
When Murad mentions Sinjar, Trump says:
âI know the area very well, youâre talking about. Itâs tough.â
Whatever. Toward the end of meeting, Trump asks Murad about her Nobel Prize:
âThatâs incredible….They gave it to you for what reason?â
Murad responds:
âFor what reason?â Murad asks, suppressing with difficulty her incredulity that nobody has briefed the president….I made it clear to everyone that ISIS raped thousands of Yazidi women,â she says. âOh really?â says Trump. âIs that right?â
Trump, who canât stop whining about his victimhood at the hands of the Democrats, the media, and the alleged âdeep stateâ, canât show a hint of compassion for a woman who was brutalized. Also, he shows a total lack of understanding about anything that Murad said. About being raped, about losing her family, about her work to end mass rape.
Weâve watched how far the presidency has fallen in the past three years. We often talk about âpresidential temperamentâ. The word temperament comes from Latin, meaning âdue mixtureâ. All politicians love attention and approval from the public, but being president should also mean working for the best interests of the nation as a whole.
But we currently have a president who canât seem to display humanity. With Murad, he demonstrated an inability to understand the moment, or the importance of understanding another personâs pain.
Time to wake up America! We need our next president to display the temperament to lead us back towards unity. Our greatest leaders have always done just that, often in times of division.
Weâve become inured to Trumpâs daily lowering of the bar of expectations for both the presidency, and for the possibility of unity as a people.
But itâs now time to turn our backs on this president. We need to move on.
We all have moments when it is difficult to summon the anger that the latest presidential outrage requires, but we need all of our focus between now and November 2020 to bring the country back to something approximating normalcy.
Torres del Paine NP, Chile – 2016 photo by Andrea Pozzi
After our granddaughterâs graduation in PA (summa cum laude), we had a few wines and beers, and talk turned to politics and the mess America is in now. Son-in-law Miles, (dad of next weekâs grad) asked a very good question. âIs now really the worst of times? What about when Martin Luther King was assassinated?â
Wrongo immediately flashed back to JFKâs assassination. He was a DC college student when JFK died. But his focus wasnât on the loss of a president, or what that meant to the country. His focus was on what the loss of JFK meant personally.
That changed in 1968 with the assassinations of MLK and RFK. Wrongo was in the Army, stationed in Germany when Dr. King was killed. There was great tension in the enlisted menâs barracks. For a few days, it took a lot of effort in our small, isolated unit to keep anger from boiling over into outright fighting between the races.
By the time we lost RFK, it was clear that the Vietnam War would drag on, killing many of Wrongoâs friends. But, Wrongoâs job was to defend America from the Russians, with nuclear weapons if necessary.
It was difficult to see how or when Vietnam would end. It was hard to imagine Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or Robert McNamara doing much to stop young Americans from dying in Asia.
The year 1968 also included the Tet Offensive. Mark Bowen in his book, Hue 1968, says:
âFor decades….the mainstream press and, for that matter, most of the American public, believed their leaders, political and military. Tet was the first of many blows to that faith in coming years, Americans would never again be so trusting.â (p. 507)
When Americans finally saw the Pentagon Papers in 1971, they learned that Americaâs leaders had been systematically lying about the scope and progress of the war for years, in spite of their doubts that the effort could succeed. The assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate changed us forever.
Our leaders failed us, it was clearly the worst of times. We were in worse shape in 1968 than we are in 2019. Back then, it felt like the country was coming apart at the seams, societyâs fabric was pulling apart. Then, May 4th 1970 brought the killings of college kids at Kent State, which was probably the lowest point in our history, at least during Wrongoâs life time.
Last week, we acknowledged the 49th anniversary of Americaâs military killing American students on US soil. We vaguely remember the Neil Young song âOhioâ with its opening lyrics:
âTin soldiers and Nixon coming, weâre finally on our own…â
Thatâs why the decade from 1960-1970 was the worst of times. We got through it, but we have never been the same.
In 1968, we saw that change can arrive suddenly, fundamentally, and violently, even in America. Bob Woodward spoke at Kent State last week, on Saturday, May 4th. He offered some brand-new information about Nixonâs reaction to the student shootings: (emphasis by Wrongo)
âIn a conversation with his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman in September 1971, Nixon suggested shooting prisoners at New Yorkâs Attica Prison riot in a reference to the Kent State tragedy. âYou know what stops them? Kill a few,â Nixon says on a tape of the conversation.â
Woodward continued:
âWe now know what really was on Nixonâs mind as he reflected…on Kent State after 17 months….Kent State and the protest movement was an incubator for Richard Nixon and his illegal wars.â
Woodward meant that what was coming was a war on the news media, creation of the âPlumbersâ unit to track down leaks, and attempts to obstruct justice with the Watergate cover-up.
Many of us see 2020 shaping up as another 1968. Some see Nixon reincarnated in Trump.
We havenât faced this particular set of circumstances before, so we canât know just how it will go. Will it be worse than the 1960s, or just another terrible American decade? Is it the best of times, or the worst of times?
Are we willing to fight to preserve what we have anymore?
Wake up America, you have to fight for what America means to us. Constitutional liberties are under attack. The right to vote is being undermined. Extreme Nationalism has been emboldened.
To help you wake up, listen once again to âOhioâ by Neil Young in a new solo performance from October, 2018. Heâs added some documentary footage and a strong anti-gun message:
You may not know that Chrissie Hynde, the future lead singer of The Pretenders was a Kent State student, and was on the scene at the time.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Sunset at Malin Head, Donegal, Ireland – 2019 photo by jip
(There will not be a Saturday or Sunday column this weekend, or next. Wrongo and Ms. Right are traveling to two different states, attending the college graduations of grandchildren Elise and Conor.)
After the contentious Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, AG Bill Barr has canceled his scheduled appearance before the House Judiciary Committee. There is plenty of speculation about what happens next.
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) had previously said that he would subpoena Barr if he refused to testify. If Barr ignores the subpoena, as the Trump administration has done regarding document production, Democrats on the committee have indicated that they will move to hold the AG in contempt of Congress. From the LA Times:
“A contempt finding is how Congress may respond when someone refuses to testify or provide information as part of a House or Senate investigation. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld that Congress has a right to compel people to comply with its oversight efforts.”
In the past, just the threat of being held in contempt (not to mention Congressâ power over funding the government) was usually enough to convince an administration to comply with a request, or at least negotiate a compromise.
No longer. The Trump administration has no intention of complying with subpoenas from Democrats.
If Barr was held in contempt of Congress, what happens next? Congress has a few options. The most common is that it can send a criminal contempt referral to a US attorney. If prosecuted and convicted, the punishment is up to a $10,000 fine and a year in jail.
The last administration official to be held in contempt of Congress was Anne Gorsuch, Neil Gorsuch’s mother, who was head of the EPA in the 1980s. The House issued a subpoena, Ms. Gorsuch said âno thanksâ. Congress referred it to the DOJ for enforcement, and the US Attorney refused to carry it out.
So the finding of regular contempt is enforced by the DOJ, and the DOJ has the discretion to not prosecute the finding.
If they fail to do it, the House would fall back on their inherent contempt power. Yes, there is such a thing. The long dormant inherent contempt power permits Congress to rely on its own constitutional authority to detain and imprison someone who is held in contempt until the individual complies with congressional demands.
Problem is, the inherent contempt power hasn’t been used since 1935. The inherent contempt power is not specified in a statute or constitutional provision, but has been deemed implicit in the Constitutionâs grant to Congress of all legislative powers.
The Sergeant At Arms is Congressâs proper arresting authority, however, there is no jail in the Capitol. There are holding cells at the Capitol Police Dept., but they are not appropriate for a long term detention. And even if the Sergeant At Arms did arrest Barr, it is likely that he would quickly be released.
Hereâs what weâve learned this week: Congressional enforcement of a subpoena has no teeth if it is used against a member of the Trump Administration. So, there will never be a consequence for Barr, or any other member of the Trump administration disobeying a subpoena.
Democrats need to think very clearly about their messaging in the face of their anger at William Barr. Saying that âTrump is terrible and we are powerlessâ is not a winning message.
Saying âvote for us andwe’ll fix this when we win in 2020” is better, but doesnât sound like a great message either.
The Mueller Investigation game has already been won by Republicans. Democrats can try to test the system. If it works, we still have a country.
But, if they try, and it doesnât work, we’re back to saying: âTrump is terrible and we are powerlessâ.
Things are moving a lot faster than most Democrats realize. It isnât clear that traditional politics (compromise, etc.) will survive. And itâs even less clear what is going to replace it.
Tax day! Wrongo got the Wrong family taxes finished, and submitted with a few days to spare. Last week was one of the many that will make you scratch your head. Here are three amazing things from last week:
Scientists unveiled an image of a black hole
That image is 50 million years old
Millions of Americans still believe the Earth is 6,000 years old
And just when you thought Americaâs cities couldnât be any more corrupt, check out NYCâs Hudson Yards, Manhattanâs mega-project that is the largest private real estate development in the US by area. Private? City Lab reports that Hudson Yards was partially bankrolled by a federal investor visa program called EB-5, which was meant to help poverty-stricken areas:
“Specifically, the project raised at least $1.2 billion of its financing through a controversial investor visa program known as EB-5. This program enables immigrants to secure visas in exchange for real estate investments. Foreigners who pump between $500,000 and $1 million into U.S. real estate projects can purchase visas for their families, making it a favorite for wealthy families abroad, namely in China. EB-5 is supposed to be a way to jumpstart investment in remote rural areas, or distressed urban ones.”
The threshold for these EB-5 visas can be reduced to $500,000 if investors place their capital in a “targeted employment area” (TEA). The TEA can be either a rural community or distressed urban area with a high unemployment rate (at least 150% of the national average).
Investors typically obtain visas for two additional family members, so Business Insider thinks the development likely created about 10,000 EB-5 visas, the maximum permitted in any year.
These are the kind of immigrants both parties can agree should be let in!
But is Hudson Yards a distressed neighborhood? It is bordered by expensive neighborhoods such as Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen. It sits at the start of the High Line, and is too wealthy to qualify for the EB-5 program. To solve the problem, the state included a few census tracts from Harlem as part of the Hudson Yards TEA. Hereâs a map of the TEA:
This looks just like a gerrymandered Congressional district in North Carolina. And it tells you all you need to know about how our local, state, and federal politicians are in the pocket of private industry. Money is always the driving factor, and it engulfs our politicians of both parties in a stew of questionable ethics.
America can’t be bothered investing in our own people, so we sell visas to bribe foreigners to do the investing for us.
Time to wake up America! This is the tip of the iceberg for the rot in our political process. To help you wake up, listen to âWhy We Build the Wallâ from the 2010 album âHadestownâ by AnaĂŻs Mitchell. This “folk opera” opens on Broadway on Wednesday. The play is inspired by the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Here is âWhy We Build the Wallâ, featuring Greg Brown. Wrongo is seeing the play in the middle of May:
Note that this song was written in 2010, long before Trump, or any politician had any interest in building a wall.
Sample Lyric:
Who do we call the enemy?
The enemy is poverty,
And the wall keeps out the enemy,
And we build the wall to keep us free.
That’s why we build the wall;
We build the wall to keep us free.
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Angel’s Rest, Columbia River Gorge, OR – 2019 photo by Thenervouspoops
(Sunday cartoons will be published on Monday, as Wrongo and Ms. Right are visiting a granddaughter in Buffalo NY)
Busy week at the Mansion of Wrong, as Wrongo prepared the Wrong family taxes for presentation to the Swamp on Monday.
His town responsibilities led to interviewing three interns for a part-time (paid) construction accounting position at the Department of Public Works. All three were accounting majors at Western Connecticut State University, and all were smart, articulate and working in multiple jobs while attending college full-time.
Those students made Wrongo feel hopeful about the next generation. That maybe America will avoid being consumed in the dumpster fire that the previous generations are leaving them.
Possibly lost in the news about Assange and William Barr was this from CNN, who reported on the bizarre words by former Pope Benedict XVI. He âretiredâ just before the current Pope, Francis II was elevated. Benedict wrote an essay on the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church that was published this week in a German magazine for priests. In the article, Benedict claims that the sexual abuse of children by priests was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s and the liberalization of the churchâs moral teaching:
âPart of the physiognomy of the Revolution of â68…was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate…Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused, the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests….here were â not only in the United States of America â individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity….In various seminaries homosexual cliques were established… which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the climate in the seminaries.â
His Awfulness. Benedict blames clerical pedophilia on the swinging sixties. He blames pedophilia on homosexuality.
It’s too bad the Catholic Church didn’t have a guy who is completely and unquestioningly in charge, like some sort of a “Super Bishop” who could have told everyone what to do. Someone who could have put a stop to all the child raping. Yes, that would have been Benedict, or those who came before him, or after.
The sexual revolution wasnât about raping kids. What kind of moral failure is it on the part of the Catholic Church for the former Pope to say: “But they were doing it too!” Coming from an institution that prides itself on being the arbiter of morality, this is an historic failure.
There are tons of records of priestly pedophilia that predate the 1960âs, including plenty of cases of churchly cover-ups. Why is this retired guy entitled to speak about anything?
Enough! Itâs time for our Saturday Soothing! Letâs start by checking out Vancouver, BCâs Notch Coffeeâs flagship coffee, Sumatra Boru Batak (C$18.00/340 grams). Expect notes of Baker’s Chocolate, dried mango and tobacco, says the brewer.
Now, contemplate all of your to-be-done yard work while you sip this coffee and listen to âSimple Giftsâ from Aaron Coplandâs âAppalachian Springâ played in 1962 by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Youâll remember the melody, and maybe, you will think of the simple gifts that are missing from your life today:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Eagle pair on nest, Litchfield County CT – 2015 photo by JH Clery
With the college admissions fraud, wealthy Americans are now bribing people to get their kids into college. Itâs just another way that the wealthy are rigging the game. Robert Reich enumerates:
Weâve become a nation where any number of greased poles stop your ascent. People with wealth seem unwilling to compete fairly. It turns out that executives from Pimco, Hercules Capital, and the co-chairman of the law firm, Willkie Farr & Gallagher, were named in the buy your way into Yale scam, along with a few Hollywood types.
Itâs become very difficult to differentiate between applicants for the prestige colleges. Good grades and test scores and life experiences are no longer enough to help a kid to stand out the way they might have a few years ago. So some are bribing their way to the head of the line.
Itâs just another cost of doing business in America. The truly wealthy can just pay for a new building and see their children get into the best universities. But, the merely rich canât do that. OTOH, they canât be expected to simply earn their way in.
As for the kids: They all knew whether what was on their applications was true or not. They had to be in on the scam. This is what passes for the charmed life of the rich in the USA: Kids knowingly cheat right along with their cheating, entitled parents, because they believe they deserve to go to Georgetown.
Robert Reich is correct, this is the rot that concentration of wealth has brought to our country.
Randall Lane has a long read at Forbes about âReimagining Capitalismâ in which he summarizes his one-on-one discussions with two dozen billionaires, including face-to-face meetings with the three richest people in the world, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett, about capitalismâs future. Lane says:
âVirtually every billionaire I spoke with acknowledged that higher taxes on the billionaire set are inevitable; most even saw them as beneficial, if correctly applied. According to Gates, Buffett, Khosla and others, the correct way to levy taxes on the superrich is….Either an estate tax without the loopholes that currently render it useless or a higher capital gains tax applied only on extreme fortunes…â
He quotes Buffett about the disparity of earnings between the top 1% and the bottom 50%:
âThe market system as it gets more specialized pushes more money to the top….The natural function of a more specialized market economy is to divert more and more of the rewards to the top. Thatâs something I donât think weâve fully addressed in this country.â
Lane points out that Bill and Melinda Gates even went on Steven Colbert and called for higher taxes on the super-rich.
Younger Americans know that the deck is stacked. That may be in part why some kids play along with their parents and cheat to get into Harvard.
An often-cited 2016 Harvard University survey found that 51% of American youth aged 18 to 29 no longer support capitalism. Only 42% said they back it, while just 19% were willing to call themselves âcapitalists.â A follow-up focus group study concluded that most felt that:
âCapitalism was unfair and left people out despite their hard work.â
Gene Sperling, Obamaâs Director of the National Economic Council, has an interesting take on redefining our overall economic goal. He says we should strive for âEconomic Dignityâ. His conclusion is that the Fed and the Congress should implement a full employment monetary and fiscal policy that fosters tight labor markets.
Sperling says that would be a triple win for economic dignity, because it would lead to higher wages, and it would give companies greater incentive to provide advanced training to their employees. Meanwhile, high labor demand gives more workers some âtake this job and shove itâ leverage that they lack today.
Taken together, it would allow people to care for and provide opportunity to their families, something that is at the core of Americaâs beliefs.
Young Americans know that capitalism in its current form creates inequality, oppression, and exploitation. It could be made to work for all if it were more responsive to societyâs needs, and yes, if it provided economic dignity for all.
Those who have been rewarded by capitalism shouldnât be able to use their bounty to make the lives of others worse than they are. This isnât just about the Koch brothers. Itâs also about the merely wealthy who scam the college admissions system to get their kids into better schools.
We should be showing the young that thereâs a better form of capitalism.
Those of us of a certain age, but not quite old enough, were too young to attend the 1963 March on Washington. The march and Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” speech influenced our era, our views, and changed the country. There are times one wishes, if only I could have been there for that moment in history. Then again, such thinking fixes the civil rights movement in time. The truth is, that struggle never ended.
Wrongo was in Washington in 1963. Dr. King is one of his heroes. And, as Tom Sullivan says, the struggle has never ended. Wrongo spent the 1960s and 1970s convinced that America would turn a corner, see the wrong in slavery, and know that racism was holding us back.
He thought that we would achieve a point of equilibrium where Americans of all stripes would accept each other as part of a larger tribe, one that shared common beliefs about democracy and equality for all.
Wrongo was wrong. Weâre not there. Weâve made some progress, but then we fell back on old beliefs.
Today we are 51 years removed from Dr. Kingâs assassination, and while America is better and fairer than it was then, we will enter the 2020âs needing to do much to improve society.
This brings me to MLKâs last book, âWhere Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?â published the year before he died. In it, King lays out a vision for Americaâs future, including the need for both better jobs and housing, higher pay and quality education. King called for an end to global suffering, saying that for the first time, humankind had the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.
He wrote about how Civil Rights reforms had fallen short, but he couldnât have envisioned what the Supreme Court did in gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 with its 2013 decision in Shelby County vs. Holder.
So here we are in 2019 with white kids mocking Native Americans at the Lincoln Memorial, chanting âBuild that wall, build that wall.â This happened days after Trump made light of the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee to mock Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Here we are: Income inequality is the highest itâs been since the 1940s.Our federal government is shut down because we canât agree about the threat posed by illegal immigrants asking for asylum at the US southern border. And racism is marching back into the light from under rocks all across the country.
Time to wake up America! Racism is the wound that wonât heal. We have much to do, and the work wonât be easy.
To help you wake up here is a 2019 song by The Killers, âLand of the Freeâ. It is broadly about America and the intolerance holding us back. Listen to it, and reflect on what it makes you feel. Depending on what about it makes you angry, it is a reflection of who you are. The video is very powerful. Please take the time to watch it.
Think about whatâs at the heart of this song. People who want the same things we do:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
âWhite men have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know.â
Winter, Yosemite Valley, Yosemite NP, CA â photo via wallpaper studio
 This week Right Wing Watch, who follow Americaâs least attractive thinkers so that we donât have to, had a column about how Evangelical Christians are circling around Ruth Bader Ginsburg like vultures. The article included this tweet from anti-abortion and anti-gay activist Matt Barber:
We know that RBG just had cancerous tumors removed from her lungs. Yet, what has been made public so far is that RBG was given a clean bill of health, and is expected to make a full recovery. That diagnosis seems to be a big disappointment to many on the Christian Right.
They were extremely happy with Donald Trumpâs choice of Neil Gorsuch. They werenât so thrilled with Brett Kavanaugh, preferring Amy Coney Barrett, who they saw as totally committed to overturning Roe v. Wade. And they want more. In addition to overturning Roe v. Wade, they want prayers back in schools, and they want same-sex marriage abolished.
Things get interesting when you consider just how much Evangelicals truly, deeply hate RBG:
In October, pastor Rodney Howard-Brown, who has prayed over Trump in the Oval Office, guest-hosted The Alex Jones Show on Infowars, where he said that Ginsburg should be shot for treason.
Lou Engle, a dominionist organizer of stadium-sized prayer rallies, urged Americans to engage in three days of fasting and prayer over the Supreme Court. Earlier, he led prayers asking God to âsweep away the judgesâ who support the right to abortion.
Liberty Counsel President Mat Staver has argued that Congress should have impeached justices who supported Roe v. Wade and Obergefell vs. Hodges (the case that legalized same-sex marriage). (BTW, Liberty Counsel opposed the Senateâs bill that would outlaw lynching in the US because the bill extends the right not to be lynched to gays and transgender people.)
Earlier this month, former Trump campaign adviser Frank Amedia insisted that Chief Justice John Roberts has not proven to be sufficiently reliable to the Religious Right. That means God has to remove more justices so that Trump can fill Robertsâs seat with another justice whose âvalues and moralityâ reflect a âkingdom enlightenment as to what is required by God to change the law of this land now.â
Heritage Foundation Senior Legal Fellow John Malcolm told the Daily Caller that Trump would be under pressure to replace Ginsburg with a woman, and named Amy Coney Barrett as a preferred successor.
You may not believe that God spends much time thinking about who sits on the Supreme Court, but these people are deadly serious. They think God is a âfamily valuesâ Republican. They believe that they know who God wants on the Supreme Court.
America needs to look very closely at any group that argues for followers of a specific religion as a test of who is worthy to sit on the Supreme Court, or who should head our government.
Praying for the death of RBG ought to repugnant to all Americans, but sadly, it isnât particularly surprising that some âChristiansâ exhibit such callous inhumanity. They, and their kind of thinking, should be repudiated by all Christians.
Thereâs some consolation in the fact that RBG has worked to make America a more fair and equitable place. She has made that her lifeâs calling.
Contrast that to these phony Christians who are working to make America a one-party political entity that follows Jesus Christ.
