Happy Father's Day!!
I chose this image because it has polar bears, and one of my sons is away from his family on
Father's Day, as he is up on Alaska's North Slope, with polar bears, doing bird migration research.
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“Other governments have separated mothers and children.”
ReplyDelete— Former CIA chief Michael Hayden, in Twitter, while posting a black-and-white photo of Auschwitz.
United Methodist Church calls out Sessions and Trump[Click]
It’s Not Collusion, It’s Corruption[Click] Tentative Democratic Party campaign theme for this November. An anti-corruption plank in the party platform? How about a revived anti-monopoly plank? Controlling monopolies by encouraging competition was one of the major accomplishments of the New Deal, trashed by the New Democrats.
—Alan
How did that New Democrat crap ever gain traction in the first place?
DeleteI remember my mother raving about the speech given by the young, up-and-coming governor of Arkansas at one Democratic convention. I listened to the same speech and completely failed to be impressed. But of course I voted for him when he ran for president. Didn't have much choice, since Jerry Brown hadn't gotten the nomination. And he was a pretty good president, if you didn't lose your job to NAFTA or get kicked off Welfare. He did leave a budget surplus. But he wasn't a Democrat! And his wife is absolutely not a Democrat!!!
Oh, bother. Why do I let myself get carried away like that? It does no good. I have bigger problems. The order I tried to place with sears.com last night and then again this morning didn't go through. I'll have to call the credit union to see if there is some problem with my credit card. What a PITA.
Well, the New Deal consensus was awfully long in the tooth; the New Dealers in Congress (as my memory serves me) were very well entrenched, set in their ways, and not generally receptive to the changes that a changing society and economy required. (Sound familiar?) The civil rights compromises (a purposely diplomatic choice of word) that had been required to gain the support of the Solid South politicians for the New Deal were becoming untenable. The Democratic Party was losing elections. So along come these New Democrats saying that the way to win elections was to be more like the Republicans--peel off some of those "swing" voters. Be more "business friendly." They were too young to have personal recollection of the 1930's, let alone the 1920's, and didn't understand the powerful effect of the concerted, purposeful work of the New Deal to discourage monopolies, encourage competition, and make sure that no companies were too big to be allowed to fail. And here we are--once again with a bunch of superannuated politicians who are out of touch and unwilling to cede control. Now, I don't say that the lot of them should be cast out; that was a mistake the New Dems made. They shoved aside old but able and effective office holders, together with the ineffective ones. They threw out the baby with the bath water. But by and large I think we need a new lot of rascals. It looks to me like the DNC, the DCCC, and their allies are losing control of the situation, and we might in fact be in the early stages of a Democratic Party renewal. At the same time, the GOP is careering into moral, political and economic disapproval the likes of which brought them crashing down in the early 1930's, after dominating national politics since the Civil War. During that eighty years, there had been only two Democratic presidents--Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson.
DeleteThat's my take on it, anyway.
--Alan
Palimpsests at St. Catherine’s[Click] A nice little update.
ReplyDelete—Alan
Catching up, I appreciated the article on the Southern Baptists. But I missed any mention that, when I was growing up, Southern Baptists totally eschewed any involvement in politics whatsoever -- and I do mean *totally* -- and denominational governance was so strongly congregationalist that what the annual Convention did had little effect. in referring to their displacement the author refers to people who held these beliefs as "moderates," but I don't think that really catches where they were coming from. You were still referring to people who were absolutely against alcohol and in many cases not very happy with the idea of dancing.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the feedback, Bill. It has been my understanding that Baptists had a very determined and long-standing position that politics and religion should not be commingled, because of the danger that inevitably posed to religion. In general, it seems that during my lifetime the basic republican opposition to religious favoritism in government has weakened greatly--if not been forgotten altogether. The signpost on that road which sticks in my mind was when the words "under God" were interpolated into the Pledge of Allegiance. As memory serves, it was announced in our civics (or did they call it social studies?) class on the first day of eighth grade. More recently I have read that the Knights of Columbus were the most active lobbyists for that change.
DeleteIn the column on Romans 13 my attention was particularly drawn to the following bit:
"The debates in the 1850s over whether Romans 13 required obedience or resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, and more broadly over whether the Bible supported enslavement or abolition, fractured the Bible’s authority in the public sphere." The link (from the word "fractured") goes to a chapter on the moral aspects of the Civil War which seems very interesting. Not that it is particularly news, but it seems well composed.
Re Baptist practice, I understand that there are still some congregations that abjure the use of musical instruments in church services.
--Alan
My take on separating families at the border:
ReplyDeleteThis isn't just child abuse, it's kidnapping. It's crimes against humanity.
And do you see it's purpose? They want us to be so desperate that we will agree to $25B for the wall. It's extortion.
Dean blogger Liane's take on same:
They're using the extortion as an excuse. They're actually more interested in the kinds of theft of treasury that they can get away with if they turn this into a genocidal dictatorship. It's more than patently obvious that that's the direction they're headed in. There's a reason trump has no-press-allowed, no-recordings-allowed meetings with the worst dictators on the planet, and it's not because he wants to berate them for their atrocities.
Firmly seizing the moral low ground is unlikely to be a successful political strategy. At least I hope so.
DeleteAlan
Ditto what Alan said.
Delete