Newt is a nut case!

Yesterday on a Sunday television talk show, Newt Gingrich, recently soaring into the lead in the Republican Presidential polls, upped the ante and increased the ferocity of his rhetoric in the face of eroding support. It seemed to be classic Newt! He has had a historical tendency to engage in rhetorical flourish and verbal pyrotechnics. It seems to be a way for him to garner attention. It fits with his self-absorbed "look at me" adolescent way of gaining attention.

So, yesterday Newt said that he would use the Capitol police or the US Marshall's service to arrest judges whose rulings violate Gingrich's self appointed sense of US Constitutional rectitude. In Newt's view, these errant judges would be brought before the Congress to explain their ruling and if they failed to do so they would be impeached. The impeachment process has historically been used as a consequence of personal indiscretion. In Newt's view, a judicial ruling at odds with the view of a portion of the public (Tea Party nut cases for example)would be subject to review and correction.

Newt is an alleged scholar with a PhD from Tulane. I presume he has never read Marbury vs. Madison and understood the underpinnings of our independent judiciary.
Newt's notion would destroy the independence of the judiciary. It is an appalling idea.

The polarized political environment in which we live causes candidates with insufficient intellectual mettle to pander to a narrow core constituency that lives in a fear based reality. In Newt's view and theirs, the world would be a better place but for those "activist" judges. If it were only that simple.

What a crazy time! I can't wait for the next ridiculous proposal from Newt.

Occupy Wall Street

Occupy Wall Street

During the early 1970’s I attended law school at the University of California at Davis. The law school, named King Hall, after the then recently assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King, attracted a fair number of students who were active participants in that tumultuous period in our history.

A group of my fellow law students and I organized an effort to blockade trains carrying munitions to the Port of Oakland for shipment to Vietnam. The campus and local police cleared the tracks, with a few arrests but no pepper spray or other such acts of violence. Then sitting California Governor Ronald Reagan told a newspaper that the activists in Davis were “bums.”

Bums?

Hardly! We were law students exercising our first amendment rights.
We responded to the Governor’s mischaracterization of us by putting on suits (some of us had to borrow one – see photo below) and ties and headed to the Governor’s office in Sacramento.

We called for law students from all over the Bay Area to join us in a peaceful demonstration in Reagan’s office. Our fellow law students responded and we engaged in a “sit-in” and for hours read the United States Constitution aloud, over and over again.

Our hope was that we” bums” could teach the governor something about protest in a free society.

From his record as Governor and President I am not sure we taught the great communicator anything. But we did capture the attention of the media and people across the country, who applauded our efforts.

Now, forty years later, I watched in shock at the videos of the UC Davis police pepper spraying students who were peacefully sitting on the Quad in the middle of campus. The Quad at UC Davis is the primary gathering place for students. It is akin to Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. On the Quad, card tables with literature promoting student organizations, and spontaneous political protests compete with Frisbees and undergraduate mating rituals for attention.

The vivid images from the campus of UC Davis galvanized my fellow alums. We flooded the Chancellor’s office with emails. We implored the Dean of the law school to take action and along with the law students and faculty to support the protesters rights and monitor the situation while creating a teaching moment.

Those of us who read the constitution to the governor that day years ago have spent long careers as lawyers, judges, businessmen and elected officials trying to make positive and lasting change in our society. Now the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the events at Davis have invigorated us again to remember that striving for equality and an open society never ceases.

As an aging Boomer, I am now re-engaged in part because of the peaceful protest at my alma mater, and the outrageous police reaction to that protest. The Occupy Wall Street movement gains traction in part as a consequence of the over reaction by police. Thanks to those excesses my own support for the inchoate goals of the Occupy Wall Street movement will no longer be passive. And, with less hair on my head and a ready supply of suits and ties, I can join the protesters without being called a bum.

Ground Hog Day!

I have decided to reactivate and once again begin to scratch my Political Itch! I do have a sense of deja vu. It seems just moments ago that we were experiencing the run up to the 2008 election. These four years have had a velocity that is breathtaking. I suppose that is, in part, a consequence of my ever increasing age. Four years is a smaller portion of my life with each passing day! That velocity may also be a function of the acceleration of our lives through the ever strident 24/7 news flood and the broad reach of social media. I suppose that I will have to tweet my posts to Political Itch and post them to my Facebook wall. LOL! Pretty funny.

So, here goes again. Look forward to my rants. In the words of a forgotten hipster from the 1960's "Stay high, keep moving and give all of yourself away!"

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who, over the past twelve months, read my posts on Political Itch.
What an amazing political year it was. I will no longer be scratching my political itch. I will, however, reactivate my other blogs, www.cybersamizdat.blogspot.com and www.poetrysmackdown.blogspot.com

Thanks for visiting.

Amen

“Never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”

Margaret Mead

A Reservoir of Emotion

Talking today with a friend about the Presidential election, we shared some stories of working forty and fifty years ago, as liberal organizers, to make a difference in a world that was then overtly racist and discriminatory.

It is amazing to consider. My first public effort occurred in the first weeks of December of 1963. I was a sophomore at Washington State University and, while involved in student government, organized a week long symposium called "Student Get Off Your Apathy." Some of you will recall the early stirrings on campus during those times. I was specifically responsible for a day dealing with civil rights issues. I invited a speaker to come from Monroe, North Carolina, where the so-called "Monroe Movement," was an early catalyst for the civil disobedience that would transform the South.

Just five years later I was working in the rural south helping to organize the disenfranchised and create opportunities (see posts on that subject at www.cybersamizdat.com). It was very basic, elemental work to provide basic services, and by the way, register people to vote who had never considered that to be an option. I know that is hard for people today to understand, but it was indeed the case.

Now, we are on the cusp of electing an African-American President of these United States. And, as my friend and I talked today, I could feel a reservoir of emotion, in some deep hidden place, begin to well.

It is a common thing, I believe. That the banal aspects of life, including those occasional soaring idealistic goals we commit ourselves to, leave small deposits of emotion as we move through our lives. A reservoir of emotion will fill, never to overflowing, until some event occurs; a trigger which releases the flood.

Somehow, I sense such an emotional release will come with the election of Barack Obama. It is time for that to happen. It will be transforming and liberating for a great majority of us and for those around the world who look to us. I believe that.

Washington State's former governor, Gary Locke, was just in China. A Chinese official, a woman, asked Locke who he thought would win the Presidential election. He said, "Barack Obama." The Chinese woman replied, "American people are beautiful."
I hope and pray it is so.

Democracy at Home and Abroad

It is so ironic that the Republicans and Bush the Lesser with their neo-con strike force profess such fervent belief in the democratic process and the spread of democracy across the world, and recently, especially in the Middle East, while they undermine it in America.

Remember how excited Bush the Lesser was about the red fingers of the Iraqi's when they had completed voting several years ago (right after Mission Accomplished).

The irony, of course, it that in that face of that professed passion for the democratic process, the Republicans are the masters and most aggressive purveyors of voter suppression techniques. While the Democrats are working the GOTV effort with all their vigor, the Republicans don't want people to vote. How ironic for such champions of democracy.

It appears that the Republicans may favor democracy and the democratic process overseas more than they do in America.