#it's me! going to be a cog in the democratic process.

[notbecauseofvictories]

guess who signed up to be an election judge??

#it's me! going to be a cog in the democratic process. #which...based on everything I've read is being a glorified hall monitor and scanning ballots #but either way! 2024 Year Of Doing Shit. #2024 Year Of Developing A Life Outside of Work #about me

[sunshineandcybertronians]

It’s Nice to Have a Friend - (Secret Solenoid) TFP Starscream x reader

Word count: 5,599

Warnings: none

A/n: This is my Secret Solenoid gift to @sheabeeprime. This ended up way longer than I meant it to be. The ideas for what I could do just kept piling up and I decided to do all of them. And in true Scarlet fashion, I named this after a Taylor Swift song.

~

The view was amazing from where you sat on the edge of a cliff. Staring at the amazing view ahead of you. The wind in your face and hair. Just you, your thoughts, and the giant robot on your left.

Yeah, you honestly had no idea why Starscream decided to sit with you. And no idea why he always came to your home to pick you up when he was hunting for energon. Maybe he just needed company? Whatever the reason, an opportunity like this was too cool to pass down. So you tagged along whenever you were free. Which sometimes meant having to tell him you were busy or why you weren’t home when he came last. Though it was amazing how he would avoid being seen.

You didn’t know much about him. All you knew was that he was grumpy, had a huge ego, and his ex co-workers sucked.

You bit your lip. Today was the only chance for you to ask this. You pushed a strand of hair that flew in your face.

His helm faced forward, but his optics were on you. “What is it, human?”

“Hmmm?” You looked up at him as innocently as you could manage.

“’I know you were going to ask me something. Just ask me and get it over with.”

“Well,” you began, “There’s this parade going on…”

“And?” he raised one of his large eyebrows.

“It’s celebrating all the different countries in the world.”

“So?”

“I was thinking we could go?” You shrugged and gave a strained smile.

“No.” He immediately shot down the idea.

“But you could learn all about different human cultures.”

“Why would I want to learn about other humans anyway?”

“Wouldn’t simply knowing those kinds of things get you ahead of, and make you more knowledgeable than, the Decepticons?” you asked nonchalantly.

“Hah! You think saying that will make me go?” A look of amused triumph was on his face, but you could see the metaphorical cogs turning in his helm. He soon let out an angry and reluctant hum. “But I suppose I could take some of my precious time to come to your… ‘celebration of opposing humans’.” He waved his servo.

You let out a laugh. “We aren’t enemies or any like that just because we’re from other countries. Yeah, there can be some wars, but we’re mostly allies.”

Starscream gave you a perplexed look with his head tilted. Eventually, he just huffed and turned away, mumbling, “That doesn’t even make sense.”

You examined him, then shrugged. “Okay. But whether or not it makes sense to you, I’m honored you’ll bestow your presence upon the parade.”

He considered your words and, once he processed that it was praise, he puffed out his chassis with his helm held high.

There was a bit of trial and error in figuring out how to get there. You didn’t have exact coordinates and Starscream didn’t know where it was. Finally, you both decided on a method. You would give him directions while looking at a map on your phone. Once you steer him in the general area, you should be able to see the parade from the air. Upon this decision, Starscream jumped off the cliff to perform a flawless, midair transformation. He soared back up to meet you, showing off a few spins, and opened the cockpit for you to get in.

You eagerly got in and he took off. He shot through the sky like a comet, reaching up through a puffy white cloud, which resulted in a huge smile on your face. There was something amazing about being that high above the ground. Clouds stretching out made it feel like a new, hidden world.

“Which way?”

“Oh, right!”

 It was strange how people appeared so small from up above. The whole event would probably have seemed grander from the ground, but you weren’t going to pass up the opportunity to see it from the air. Especially with a giant robot.

“Wow. Look at it,” you commented. Suddenly, the rule of ‘if I can see you, you can see me’ came to mind. “Uh, are they going to find it suspicious that a jet is just floating here?”

“You tell me.”

You thought for only a second. “Definitely.”

Starscream maneuvered himself into a cloud, enclosing around him as though it were just a hologram. The nose poked out and there was a thin layer of cloud over the glass off the cockpit.

“You can still see, right?” he inquired.

“Yep. Thanks.”

You leaned back comfortably. The view was amazing. However the wonder slowly wore off and the silence began pricking at you. You almost wished for him to start complaining, or asking you questions, or for a radio. Though you doubted that he would enjoy human music. Or would he? Maybe you should try introducing some to him, but which genre?

“So what’s going on?” Starscream’s question brought you out of your thoughts.

“Oh, well people representing each country are walking in their group with a flag of that country. Like Italy, over there. They invented pizza!” You sat straight and pointed.

“What now?”

“Pizza, it’s a type of food that has cheese and tomato sauce an-“

“Nevermind. I don’t want to hear about the things you fleshies consume.” You thought you felt his alt mode shudder.

“Hey, if you were human, you would like it too,” you said. You fought the feeling of being offended that was taking over your thoughts.

“Then thank Primus I’m not.”

“Whatever.”  You crossed your arms and slouched back. “… But we do need to eat to survive you know.”

He hummed in reluctant consideration. “I suppose you’re right.”

Some time passed as you continued to sit there. Occasionally you would comment on a ‘country’ that was passing by. Sometimes he would ask about one. It was surprising how much your mind blanked out when you tried to talk about a country. You would have assumed that you wouldn’t have this problem considering you grew up on Earth.

A white flag with a circle and black lines on the corners caught your eye. You couldn't see the details from so far away, but you knew the circle was a blue and red yin yang. "Oh! That's the flag for South Korea."

"South? That sounds more like a location than a faction."

"Faction? What? Well, yes, it's a location. A location with its own government and own way of doing things. Like how you're a cybertronian. Because you're from Cybertron? Were you thinking about it like that? Factions?"

He hovered slightly higher then fell back into place. "How was I supposed to know? Cybertron had one government and leader. Much simpler."

"Hmmm." You considered the thought. "That's either really nice or there was a lot of corruption."

"Oh, you bet there was corruption. But does that mean there's a north, whatever it's called?"

"Korea. And yes, there's a North Korea. It split into north and south a while ago. North Korea has a dictator and isn't a place you want to go."

“What kinds of governments does each of these ‘countries’ have?” He asked.

“Well, the USA is a Democratic Republic. And there’s also socialism in some places, and at some point I think Russia was communist? Why can’t I remember anything?” You cursed yourself.

“Remind me why there isn’t one large government and leaders over the whole Earth?”

“That would be hard to do. A lot of people just wouldn’t agree to that. One of the reasons being that people want their own way of doing things. Since all of these countries formed on their own, having them all agree on giving up their own leadership to have a universal government is nearly impossible. There will always be someone who disagrees on how to run things.”

“It would be easier if someone just conquered the Earth.”

“You think people haven’t tried? There’ve been quite a bit of attempts, like Napoleon, but they all failed in the end. It’s a big place and people fight back.”

Another silence fell upon you both. You bit your lip as you scanned over the parade again.

"There's Japan. They have anime," you said.

Starscream finally lost his patience. “I’m not learning anything of use here! I’m just sitting here watching humans walk! The most informative bit was what you told me about North Kaon!"

"North Korea."

"Whatever it was! You expect me to remember all of these names?”

“Well, at least you can get an idea of what each country is like.”

“Admit it, you just told me to go because you wanted to come.”

“Maybe,” your voice rose an octave higher.

He scoffed.

“But,” you added, sitting up, “I did genuinely want to see it with you and show you a little more of Earth.”

“Why would I want to stay here even longer?!”

“I didn’t say that.” You looked at the gauges softly as if it were his face.

“Ah,” there was a nervous stutter present in his voice, “right.”

“Why did you come to Earth if you hate it so much?”

“It’s one of the last locations where we can find even scraps of energon. And you’ve come along to aid me enough times to know it’s important,” he said.

“It’s one of the only things you do.” You recollected everytime you were with him.

“Because ever since leaving the Decepticons ranks, I no longer have access to our storage or equipment to effectively find it. But I promise you, if it weren’t for Cybertron becoming a desert wasteland during the war, I would have never come to this mud ball.”

“Well. Even if you really wanna get back to cybertron, I’m glad I met you. And that I got to experience your awesome flying skills.” You tugged on a strand of your hair and ran your fingers through it.

There was  a brief silence.

“I mean, of course you would… How much longer did you want to see the parade?”

“Maybe a half an hour.”

“Hmmm. I’m going to be sore after hovering in the same spot for so long.”

“I could always rub your wings later if you want,” you offered.

“And let your grubby, little, fleshie hands on my magnificent wings? I think not.”

“Okay.” You rolled your eyes playfully. “It was just an idea.”

For a few more moments, neither of you said anything.

“Would you like to see a demonstration of my aerobatic skills later?”

“Actually, I would.”

A comfortable pause fell upon you.

“…Would you like to go down there?” he offered. He tipped his nose ever-so-slightly to the ground.

“Nah.” You leaned back in your seat with a smile. “I like it up here with you.”

 It had been two months and six days since you last saw him.

Yes, you were counting and had no idea why. Maybe he finally got tired of your fleshie self and left. Maybe you should have seen it coming with how much he disliked humans. Maybe you annoyed him so much that he decided to never see you again without a word.

Yet, when you truly thought about it, it didn’t make sense. He seemed to enjoy being with you, even if he never showed it outright. He was always the one who decided to bring you along when hunting for energon. Even when he was a giant robot, and clearly had some sort of prejudice against humans, it felt as though he still treated you as an equal to some degree.

But maybe he truly did get tired of you.

You stood by your window. The sun had dipped below the horizon and the last ghosts of light had faded away into darkness. You stood in your sweat pants and baggy t-shirt. Your hair was brushed and you were ready to relax. A warm cup of hot chocolate was in your hands, the warmth seeping into your skin. You stared into the cup, thinking of nothing in particular when you blinked at a sudden light.

Your eyes instinctively followed the light. Outside the window, hovering just above the ground, was a large, greenish blue, swirling vortex. You stepped back, but promptly leaned closer for a better look. It didn’t seem to be pulling anything into it. It seemed gentle, yet powerful. You would have found it beautiful if your mind weren’t preoccupied with confusion.

Something seemed to appear inside of it. It was tall, and metal and--!

You nearly dropped your glass mug. After placing it safely to the side, you grabbed a jacket and rushed out the door. You raced to where you saw the portal as fast as your feet would carry you. It was still there when you reached it. Starscream held a device in his hands and his red optics searched the area, as if looking for something.

“Starscream!” You ran up to him, nearly in tears. “Where were you? You’ve been gone forever!”

His optics avoided your eyes. “Well, I…” His mouth pushed into a thin frown. “I lost my T-cog.”

“You’re what now?”

“T-cog! It’s what allows cybertronians to transform.”

Your current expression dropped as it finally dawned on you. The reason he had suddenly disappeared. Then you remembered that there were other people nearby.

“Why don’t we go back through your portal thing and talk about it there?” You began to jog into the portal.

“Ground bridge.”

“Whatever it is.”

You ran while he walked in. The fact that the ground seemed to be made of swirling energy, though it felt completely solid, messed you up. You being smaller didn’t help either. You were running and still falling behind. After a half a minute, Starscream turned around to pick you up and carry you through.

A flash filled your vision and you had to blink several times to adjust to the dark, new area. The walls, ceiling, and floor were made entirely of metal. The only light source came from a dim glow from an foreign, alien screen. It was clear from the dust that no one had been there in a long time. The scale was so large that you felt confident that this was something cybertronians built.

The portal behind you shrunk until it vanished. Starscream lowered you down onto the ground. As soon as your feet hit the floor, you dashed to Starscream’s foot to give him the biggest hug you could.

“I missed you,” you mumbled. Of course, he might have not heard it if it weren’t for nearly every surface being made of metal, causing an echo.

His posture went rigid. He began to reach down to pat your head, then pulled his hand away. He stayed like that without moving a servo the whole time you hugged him.

“Ah… Me too.”

You let go. The cold of the living metal still lingered on you.

“Where have you been? How did…?” You stared up at him.

“I came across some other humans,” he began as he walked over for something to sit on. He helped you up onto it and you sat next to him. “I tried to asist them in building a cybertronian. I believed that they would allow me to keep energon I allowed them to find.” He stared at the floor the entire time.

Your eyes stayed locked on his glowing optics. “Build a cybertronian? Wait, if that was what happened, how did you lose your T thing?”

“I-They needed a t-cog in order to build a cybertronian. The one they already acquired was lost and they decided to take mine instead.” He almost seemed to curl up at the last words.

This settled on your mind like a ton of bricks. You didn’t say a word. Suddenly the room felt very heavy. The silence was like a suffocating blanket that you couldn’t seem to push off. You swallowed.

“They took… it? But, you could have fought them off easi-“

“They shot me with some sort of stun mechanism then proceeded to rip me open to take it!” His talons clenched into fists before him.

Once again, you couldn’t speak.

“Why is it that the first humans I meet, other than you, are no better than the Decepticons?”

“… Because some people can just be like that. Just like humans have potential for both good and harm, it seems like cybertronians are the same in that way.” You stared at the ground. “So… You can’t transform anymore?”

“No.”

“And that’s why you couldn’t fly back to me?”

“Not until I found the Harbinger and a portable ground bridge.”

You nodded. You pulled your legs to your chest and stared off into nothing. “That must stink. Not being able to fly.”

“It’s been terrible! How do humans survive like this?” He lifted his fists to his face.  His eyebrows, or whatever they were called, dug into his optics.

You shrugged. “We’re just used to it.”

The metaphorical blanket came back onto you, but somewhat more comfortably. Somewhat. You both continued to sit.

“… Are you upset about my not being able to transform?” Starscream cut through the silence. Almost so softly that you could hardly believe he was the one who said it.

“Huh? Well, yes,” you let go of your legs, “because you’re upset. I know how much you love flying!”

“But what about you?”

“Me?” You pointed to yourself.

“Yes!”

“I don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“How do you feel about me not being able to transform?!” He stood up and spun on his heels to face you. His wings stuck up on point.

“Well,” you thought for a second, “I did enjoy flying, but it honestly doesn’t matter too much to me if you can turn into a jet or not. I’m just happy you came back.”

“Oh.” The frustrated expression fell from his face and he looked away. In any direction except at you.

“What’s wrong?” You straightened your back as if it would help you see what was up.

“Nothing, I think. I had simply thought that you only liked me because of my flight capabilities.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because Megatron only kept me alive because I was useful? It was always like that on Cybertron, and with those other humans. Once I become useless, I’m tossed away.”

You felt your heart twisted and your blood boiling. “I hate people who are like that. Forget them. They aren’t worth your time. I’m glad their out of your life.” You stood up. “And to me, as long as we get to hang out, I’m good.”

Starscream tilted his head. “You truly don’t make any sense.”

You shrugged. “The best people in life are free.”

“Huh?”

“People who don’t expect anything in return,” you elaborated. “They care and love you unconditionally.”

“I don’t believe anyone like that exists.”

“They exist. And so do I.” You confidently stared up at him.

His gaze darted between you and away from you. He took a few steps back, as if you were a mysterious creature that could become hostile or blow up any second. Eventually, he gave in to a beautiful, natural smile. And the room suddenly seemed brighter.

 “So, Starscream, I was thinking…” You walked into the room.

“If it’s anything about making a giant s’more again, I’m not interested.”

“No.”

Starscream had been feeling down, pun not intended, about losing his t-cog. You had cleared out two days in your schedule to have a sleepover with him. He had surprised you when you jokingly offered for him to brush your hair and he accepted. He also tried to braid it when you taught him how. It was surprisingly well done, considering the size of his talons, but still sloppy. You had to remind him that he wasn’t a failure at braiding. While laying in your sleeping bag and bundle of blankets you brought for the occasion, an idea came to you.

“I was thinking,” you continued, “that since you’ve been down about not being able to,” Starscream gave you the stink eye, “you know. So I decided it would be fun to do something similar to that one day with the parade.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I can’t fly you to another one.”

“No, not that. I mean that there’s this scout group doing a world presentation or whatever near where I live. They’re going to have cardboard stands set up for each country they researched about.”

“I really don’t think you’ve thought this through,” Starscream sighed, “I do not think these, or any, humans would react well to seeing a cybertronian.”

“I’ve already figured that out!” You bounced on your toes. “I’ll be carrying a camera that will stream video to you over here. That way you can see it without having to be there! And I have some earbuds so I can start a call with you and be able to hear and answer back if you have any questions.”

“Will the humans be suspicious about you speaking to no one?”

“Nope! They’ll just assume I’m on a call with someone, which technically isn’t wrong. So what do you say?”

 “Okay. So you can still see the video feed, right?” you asked while readjusting the camera on your hat.

“Yes, now stop shaking around!” Starscream’s voice came through your earbud. You swore that you would go deaf if this lasted too long.

“Okay,” you mumbled.

The sky was overcast. You walked into the building along with families that had come to see the scouts’ projects. There were tons of tables and three paneled boards lined up. People wandered around. They would stop to read, then turn and walk to the next one that caught their eye. It was clear which groups were family because they would greatly compliment the child’s work.

You figured you needed to start somewhere. It was a stange feeling to be there when you didn’t know anyone, even if the event was open to the public.

“Are we just going to stare?”

This snapped you out of your daze. You blinked for a second. Right, you weren’t alone. You had Starscream.

“Right,” you said and stepped forward.

You walked along the rows, glancing over them until one caught your eye. “France,” you said while pointing to the printed out flag, making sure your finger could be seen by the camera. “It’s in Europe. The capital is Paris. The population is 66 million.” You read off of it. You walked over to another. “Germany. It’s also in Europe. You know, maybe this whole row is European countries. Anyway, capital’s Berlin. Population is 83 million. Their currency is euros.”

“Ironic how these give more information than you did that other day.”

You rolled your eyes. “Yes. Ironic.” You walked a few more steps and stopped. “Some place named Estonia. The flag looks cool.”

“It’s three lines of color, like the other ones.”

“I like the colors.”

“There’s a lot of writing and pictures on each report,” Starscream commented. “Did each of these children research, find the information, and organize it in a presentable way?”

“Yes?” your voice came out as more of a question.

“Impressive.”

You smiled. “Some kids don’t do scouts, but they end up doing things similar with science fairs in school. They’ll do experiments or research, and they they have to make a presentation about it, like a vinegar volcano.”

“A volcano?!”

“No, it can’t do anything dangerous.”

“Then what’s the point? I wouldn’t call that science.”

“It’s simple science that kids are able to do. You know, since they’re kids?”

You noticed one of the parents staring at you and you gave an apologetic look while moving your hair to point at your earbud. You continued walking and eyeing some of the posters to read to Starscream. You had gotten to the Asia section and did your best to pick out something to show him.

“And see? The rainbow bridge.” You pointed.

“Huh? Oh, yes. Very nice,” he said absent mindedly.

You quirked an eyebrow up, but eventually shrugged. He was probably getting bored with all of this. A part of you was beginning to wonder why you thought this was a good idea. This thought detracted you from the sounds surrounding you. You suddenly felt cold and like something was hitting you?

You looked around and suddenly noticed that the fire alarm had gone off. Loud beeps filled the room. Everyone was trying to get out. Kids looked in all directions in confusion. Adults tried to keep them calm and safely head out. Your clothes were beginning to dampen. Instead of trying to get out, your first instinct was to get out of the sprinkler. You crawled under a table and peeked out.

The last few people were almost through the door. That’s when you decided it was time for you to go, but something caught your eye. Something in one of the upper windows that lined the wall near the ceiling. Starscream? His red optics stared down at you and he signaled for you to stay there, along with whispering to you through your earbud. You were confused, but you hid under the table once more.

You waited until the water stopped pouring. Once it was over, you pulled yourself out and to your feet. You glanced around. That was rather sudden. And now there were puddles all over the floor.

A loud rattling echoed in the room.

You turned to see the large door, the kind you would see in a garage, at the back of the room open up. The temperature of the room changed to match outside. Starscream held the door up with a mischievous smirk. You took your earbud out.

“What did you do?”

“I may have gotten bored simply watching through a screen and decided to come. And I may have possibly started a fire, opened a window, and held it next to one of those fire alarms.” His grin grew with each word.

“Really?” You asked rhetorically with your hands on your hips. But you couldn’t help but crack a smile yourself.

“What? I was bored.” He shrugged and waved a hand.

You shook your head with a laugh. “Whatever.”

Starscream ducked in. He had to stay bent down to order to fit. You moved out of his way was he came in.

“So, you were actually interested in this?” you questioned.

“I thought it would be better to see it in person with you.”

“Yeah, but some fire trucks or someone else is going to eventually come back here and see you.”

“Hmm.” He looked back. “I see. But one look for a nanoklick couldn’t hurt. I just did all of this so I could see it anyway.”

“Okay.” You shrugged. “Just hurry.”

After his wing nicked the roof when he tried to straighten himself, he quickly realized that it was easier for him to be on his knees. As he got down on his knees, you helped direct him down in the small free space between the tables. The legs skidding against the floor echoed through the room and made you jump. You were surprised he was even trying to do this when he could barely fit between the rows.

He had to lean in close to get good look of the displays. He would occasionally ask you the meaning of a word he didn’t know. You had to admit, it was more fun to have him there in person. Unfortunately you couldn’t enjoy this for fear of being seen. You constantly looked over your shoulder.

Eventually your paranoia dropped by a few notches. Though, by then Starscream had gotten tired of being crammed in a small space and probably noticed your concern. It was awkward getting to the garage door, between him being unable to move much and him blocking you. But you made your way out.

He lifted the door and ducked under and out. You followed when you noticed him freeze. Confused, you followed his gaze. Your blood went cold and you felt as if your mind was being squeezed into a box.

Staring up at Starscream was what looked to be a five year old child. The little boy was alone, probably wandered off, and had an orange jacket and hat. His expression twisted into disbelief then fear. Your heart rate quickened when you saw his face wobbling.

“Scrap,” you let out as you both turn the other way in panic.

Starscream closed the door with a loud bang that sent a shiver up your spine. You didn’t noticed what Starstream was doing behind you, since you were already running on instinct. When he came into your field of vision again, he was twisting on one foot to regain balance and lifted up the remote ground bridge device. In his panic, he hesitated on which button to click, but quickly pressed it once he remembered.

“Is it a good idea to open it up in here?” you questioned as the piece of cybertronian technology swirled and grew before you.

“I would have preferred a larger space, but I don’t believe we have much of a choice.”

He scooped you up and pulled you through. Like always, you blinked when a flash filled your vision. The air suddenly changed and you were back on the Harbinger as the ground bridge closed behind you. When he held you to the ground and you finally collected yourself enough to jump off, you realized that three of the cardboard presentations had managed to come through along with you and Starscream.

You stood there. “Well, that was interesting.”

“One shouldn’t cause any problems, right?” He looked to you before his eyes darted back to where the ground bridge was.

“That was a kid. They won’t believe him. They might look around, but after seeing no giant robot, they’ll dismiss it.”

“That’s good to hear.” Starscream groaned and held his shoulder. “That made all of my joints stiff. And the tip of my wing caught on the top of that door.” He glanced at his wing with a slight pout on his face.

You stared up at him, taking a moment to consider your words before you were unable to take them back. “… Would you like it if I massaged your wings?”

His optics widened and darted around the area. “Fine,” you could barely hear in the midst of low grumbles.

You blinked twice before fully processing what that meant. As you were trying to figure out how to even reach his wings, he held out his hand. You stepped onto it and he carried you to a table or whatever it was. It was too large for you to tell exactly. You carefully got off of his hand and he sat with his wings facing you.

You sat with your legs hanging off the edge. Your hands reached out to his wings. He readjusted himself so you didn’t have to lean forward in order to touch them. Your fingers shook. You hesitated. Finally, your hand laid flat on it. It was cold. You didn’t know what you expected. It was basically like touching a regular piece of metal. You weren’t sure what you were expecting. But somehow it felt different. Maybe because he had trusted you to touch it. You began rubbing it soothingly. You prayed that you weren’t doing anything wrong.

He hummed as you rubbed patterns onto it. Although you were sure he could barely feel it, you saw him relaxing. There was silence for several minutes.

“Why are you so kind?” he said.

“Huh?” You did your best to peek around to look at his face.

“How can humans be like this? At least you and the ones you talk about. Those small humans, no matter how well they proformed with their research, were praised. And how can other humans get along well enough to be allies despite having separate territories and governments? How can anyone do anything for someone else without expected anything in return.” He turned his helm to you. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”

“No?” You tilted your head in confusion. “I just wanted to because it was the nice thing to do?”

“How? Why?” He turned his whole body, leaving your hands floating in the air. “Why are you always so nice to me? Has it ever occurred to you that you would get nothing in return? Especially from a grounded Decepticon defect?”

“I’m not looking for anything in return,” you started calmly. “I might get to learn about cybertronians, and do some cool things with you. And I get to spend time with you. I get that in exchange, but I’m not expecting anything more. Can you please accept that there are some people who are just nice? Who actually like you and want what’s best for you?”

His face twisted, as if about to argue. But paused, like he had never considered that before. He opened his mouth again, but closed it again, when no words would come out.

He eventually sighed. “I suppose I’ll simply have to trust you,” he said softly. He stared at you closely. “Your hair dried.”  

You suddenly remembered it had been wet from the sprinklers. He reached out and touched your hair, letting it fall on his talons.  Then he flinched back. “Uh… apologies.”

You reached out to pull his finger close to you and hug it. “It’s okay.” You smiled. “I like it.”

Starscream appeared shocked by this, but relaxed and smiled. A genuine smile.

#starscream x reader #secret solenoid #secret santa #starscream #transformers #transformers prime #tfp #tfp starscream #tfp x reader #I swear I didn't see the thing about IaCon just because you were my giftee #someone I followed reblogged it XD

[hystericalfeminist]

BUILD ME A CANON

Earlier this week, Delhi University's Oversight Committee removed works by writers Bama, Mahasweta Devi and Sukirtharani from the university's syllabus for undergraduate students of English. Bama and Sukirtharani are Tamil Dalit writers whose work looks at the experiences of the marginalised. Mahasweta Devi, a Bengali writer, was well-known for her Left-leaning politics and for being an advocate for tribal communities and their rights. She passed away in 2016.

I'd suggest one moment's silence for the Oversight Committee committing an oversight, except this is not an oversight. An oversight is an unintentional mistake, but this seems very intentional. As the DU clarified in a statement later, "the syllabus of the course has been passed through a democratic process with the involvement of all the relevant stakeholders and necessary deliberations at appropriate forums” (emphases mine). The university claims the English syllabus is suitably diverse and inclusive (suitably being the key word here) and it's interesting that as part of its defence of the Oversight Committee's decision, DU has pointed out the process of coming to that decision was "democratic". What it doesn't acknowledge is that if the committee is full of people who belong to dominant groups and doesn't have members who represent the minorities and the marginalised, then the committee's "democratic process" is critically flawed.

The DU statement came after the Academic Council submitted a dissent note, protesting the Oversight Committee's decision. The Academic Council described the Oversight Committee's functioning as vandalism and alleged it has been harassing liberal arts departments. "It is important to note that the Oversight Committee does not have any member from the Dalit or the Tribal community who can possibly bring in some sensitivity to the issue," said the Academic Council in its note.

There was some noise on social media about the decision to drop works by these three writers. Most of the discussion that I saw was about Mahasweta Devi's dropped short story, Draupadi. (Apparently the Oversight Committee chair complained the short story doesn't show the military in a good light. From what I remember, it's the police. They carry out wrongful arrests and brutally gangrape a tribal woman.) There's been far less discussion of Bama and Sukirtharani's works on English Twitter, who have mostly been referred to as the "two Dalit writers", like an addendum to Mahasweta, which is infuriating in itself. I know that this is probably because not enough people read translations. Particularly translations of literature from Indian languages.

There is also little talk about what has replaced the dropped works. One of the authors who has been included is apparently Pandita Ramabai, identified as an upper caste writer (Brahmin, if I'm not mistaken). I've no idea if her writing continues to feel relevant and/ or engaging, but it is all sorts of bizarre to "replace" a 20th century author with someone who died in 1922. Also, if she was included because she was Brahmin, I hope they have fun reading her book The High Caste Hindu Woman which is, I'm told, deeply critical of how sexist Hinduism. Whether or not Pandita Ramabai voiced any opinions of casteism in Hinduism, I don't know.

Even though translations don't get read as much, the fact is, the writings of Bama, Mahasweta Devi and Sukirtharani have been translated to English and other languages. They're part of different university's syllabi and for better or for worse, DU is not such an influential player in academia. If DU's decision to drop these writers convinces some Indian universities to do the same, we can only hope that other universities (in India and abroad) will start thinking about including them in their syllabi (if the writers aren't in them already). In a not-so-distant future, it's very likely that there will be universities abroad that will have a more diverse, inclusive and representative portrait of Indian culture in their syllabi while institutions like DU remain mired in a casteist, Hindutva bog. At that point, who should decide what will make the canon for Indian literature? The Indians or the foreigners?

It's the second time this week that we've heard conversations about erasure in the Indian cultural scene. Earlier this week, social media was on fire after the Indian edition of the Rolling Stone carried a cover story about the record label and music platform Majja, featuring two artists best known for their collaborations with Dalit rapper and lyricist Arivu. Rumour has it that the Rolling Stone cover was bought by Majja, presumably to promote upcoming albums by those two artists. However, since Dhee and Shan Vincent de Paul are currently riding a popularity wave because of their work with Arivu, many readers — beginning with director Pa Ranjith — expected the cover story would be as much about Arivu as Dhee and Shan Vincent de Paul. People also pointed out that Arivu had effectively been removed from a (disastrous) remix of "Enjoy Enjaami" (the original song is amazing).

Shan Vincent de Paul, one of the artists featured on the Rolling Stone cover, issued a statement on social media saying he had the utmost respect for Arivu and had no intention of erasing him. He clarified that the story was part of his efforts to promote his new album Made in Jaffna, which he's releasing with Majja. "I have no control over how the Press chooses their messaging or what narratives they push," de Paul wrote, which would be an excellent point if the cover wasn't bought. He may not have control over the narrative, but he's hardly an irrelevant cog in the wheel. Instead of attempting to exonerate himself, de Paul could have acknowledged that the story doesn't give as much space to Arivu as it should. I am, of course, presuming he's read the story.

If the rumour about the cover being bought is true then Rolling Stone and Majja are complicit in deciding a narrative that sidelines Arivu, either intentionally or carelessly. More than half of Rolling Stone's cover story is about "Enjoy Enjaami" and there is just one quote from Arivu. This sidelining may not be deliberate — the way DU's Oversight Committee's decision was — and it could be an example of the kind of unthinking oversight that the privileged commit all the time when it comes to acknowledging the contribution of the marginalised. Either way, the impression conveyed by the two organisations is that Arivu is not the person they want to promote. Countering the decision of the establishment — it doesn't get more establishment than Rolling Stone and Majja. One of Majja's founders is legendary music director AR Rahman — is the reaction on social media. The songs being freely available on multiple platforms and the (relatively) free access to the artwork and arguments by Dalit creators and critics on social media makes it difficult to invisibilise Arivu.

A translation of Mahasweta Devi's Draupadi is available online as are some of Sukirtharani's poems. DU has dropped Bama's novel Sangati. I'm not sure if there's an extract that's available online. It is not lost on me that it's easier to listen to a song than it is to read a novel, or a short story, or a poem. It is also not lost on me that the fact you can bob to an infectious beat makes it easier to not register the deep-rooted casteism referenced in the lyric, "Enna kora, enna kora, yein chella peraandikku enna kora? (In what way is my darling grandson any less?)" There are no such distractions when you read, for example, Sukirtharani's My Room Needs No Calendar: "As they write on me/ with their penises,/ I will my body to stop/ slithering away."

Sukirtharani and Bama minced no words when they were asked to respond to their works being dropped from the DU syllabus. "I was not surprised at all. Dalit voices such as myself and Bama’s are speaking for all oppressed women, not just Dalit women," said Sukirtharani. "I don’t see this necessary as an exclusion of just Dalit writers as we have seen how progressive writers whose works speak against caste, Hindutva, fundamentalism have also been removed in the recent past. These things will happen in our society, but we cannot be ignored." She said she wasn't going to ask for an explanation, but believed DU owed her an explanation. At the very least, they should have intimated her about the works being dropped. "When they want to project an image of India wherein there are no caste and religious inequalities, our works point out that caste and religious inequalities exist in our society. So, it is obvious that they want such works removed from the syllabus," she said.

Bama said, "For more than 2,000 years, we have been segregated, our histories have not been written. This government is trying to strangulate our voices, but we will shout. The youth of this nation have understood [what is happening]. Rather than being upset, we are angry. The anger will reflect in our works in future.”

I find myself wondering if the business of building a canon was always so complicated and rife with uncertainties. Will the books, music and art propped up by commerce and politics be the ones that make up our mainstream cultural identity? Could we build a better literary canon for Indian literature if more excerpts and poems were available online for free, if more works were translated? Would we care more if the literature was easier to access or would we still dismiss it because they're translations, because the works are by Dalit women? Can the conversations that we hold in the informal spaces of the internet be loud enough to make the canon more inclusive, to make the mainstream expand its narrow definitions? What is more likely to make it into an archive and survive into posterity — the Rolling Stone Cover image or the many "fixed it" versions that people created online? Is it possible that both can and will be preserved? Does dropping the works of writers like Bama and Sukirtharani and Mahasweta Devi make them invisible? Will the dissent make a few more people buy Bama's novel? Will it make some curious enough to look up Sukirtharani's poems?

The words, the tech, the platforms, the imagery — are all these still the master's tools? How long must one wield them before they can claim the tools to be theirs? Will they always be the master's tools and not "our" tools? Is the master the one who cares for the tools and uses them better? Is the master the one with the loudest voice and the deepest pockets, the one who can bribe the boys and hire the deadliest mercenaries? Who decides when the tools have been reclaimed?

#Building a canon #Indian academia #Life in a progressively undemocratic country #Arivu #Bama #Sukirtharani #Mahasweta Devi #Indian literature #Culture and identity #Rolling Stone #Music #Enjoy Enjaami

[tcrmommabear]

The Weight of Debts Unpaid

Hi, I’m a terrible fandom mom and best friend, but I’m crawling out of the hell-hole work has buried me in to toss this very late birthday present into the wild, wild world.

So, my lovely @catsafarithewriter, I promised Emara AU, my favorite creation of yours besides the lovely face you maintain (and everything else you’ve written), and by god was I going to give you Emara AU

A few months late.

You can expect your Christmas present on Valentine’s Day XD

Threw in my own theories and slight headcanons, but I’m still excited for when we get the official version of the AU. You know I’ll be screaming and cheering from the stands XD

Let us begin!

He was heavy in her arms.

Not a surprise when his body is half wood and all dead weight. She’s feeling it in her legs as well, the feeling of something viciously sucking at her soul, but really, she’s done this well without legs. Who needs them with arms like these?

He’s still heavy.

The hallways stretch for miles, barely different from one to the next. Swathed in red and carrying the heavy pinging blare of alarms miles ahead of where they started. She doesn’t feel like she’s made any difference running through these halls, finding no relief, no sanctuary, just a million different eyes and guns trained on her limping form.

He’s so god damn heavy.

There’s a door cracked open from fleeing cats who couldn’t be bothered to follow evacuation protocol. She crashes into it and through it, pulling it full shut until the locking mechanism clicked louder than the alarms.

Silence reigned in the small room, the alarms cut off mid dutiful shriek, but the world remained red, flashing through the unnecessary window watching the hallway.

She sets him down as gently as she can spare, sinking a bit more harshly onto her knees before him. He’s still lifeless, torn between two wholes until they couldn’t even form a half. Skin, fur, and wood melted and warred together, fighting for the right to be called “horror”.

In theory, she knew this was what Macavity had planned. Pushing, pulling, twisting, breaking in the name of thoughtless science. Experimenting until every idle curiosity had been fulfilled. Seeing the product of such twisted ideas made her stomach recoil.

His chest rose in sections, eyes startling real glass, and all the rest of him was the exact shade of wrong she wanted to believe the real one was gone, and this was just a fake. She could maybe walk out of here, leaving behind all of this, this world, this fake doll, and go see her real one-.

He is real. He is her real one.

She wasn’t going to abandon him. Not again.

She raised a hand, pressing them against his “scarred” lips, sinking the tips past the teeth and opens his mouth wide. She spares a second for the squeamish and violating feeling, then pulls out the bottle she’d managed to save from the chaos known as Macavity.

She steals a swig of the formula before making his wooden throat choke the rest of it. Her taste gives her enough energy to unlock her legs from their crouch, falling back against the opposite wall. As fast as it came, it tore through her system and flare uselessly out her damaged, mechanical right knee.

For him, it started slow. Chest rising together section by section until it was a whole, left hand shuddering to replace the claws, the right side of his chin shifting between furry and flesh. His chest became more hurried as magic revitalized itself, fireworks beneath his skin until burning out his eyes, green and blue and yellow.

He hacked the formula onto her lap, the blue liquid hitting her legs and sparking up into her chest. She grunted, knee jerking as the black hole was fed, and as quickly as they hit her system, the flared out again, unable to hold much of a charge.

At least the blue left no stain on her clothes. No clean up necessary, mind-numbing sparks guaranteed or your money back. Legs sold separately.

The process of watching him shift, cat, man, wood, was enough of a show she felt an odd motion sickness surge in her gut. Drenched in guilt and expired Creation juice, but she’d really prefer to blame everything on the flashing red lights, cutting streaks across his face like prison bars.

He got his glare back before his words, though she could read “I will eviscerate you” through the context clues. She had told herself a million things as she stalked through the building towards the highest level lab they locked him in.

That she was righting a wrong. That she’d get revenge against the ones who took both sets of legs. That she was helping a friend.

That he wouldn’t be heavy in her arms.

She doesn’t know what to tell herself now. Not when he’s fully back and glaring at her. She never knew the weight of his glare felt like until now.

“Why?” he hisses out, eyes slit in the human face he fluctuates to. His question is followed by a cough, wheeze, and the cat form fully takes over, the human disguise melting away. Less magic being used now that he’s in his more natural state, doing a terribly accurate impression of a badly animated doll. He looks as terrible as she feels, though she’s sure his slightly wrinkled suit would have some words to exchange with her torn and dirty jeans and shirt.

Her heart constricts.

Why indeed.

She's prepared herself for all scenarios. This one scared her the most. She hadn’t the faintest clue for why she did any of this. Maybe because their partnership wasn’t “just a job” anymore? Maybe because of the way he kissed her hand during tea? Maybe because, despite knowing intimately well the soulless depravity, seeing the results up close had been the final straw?

“Why not?” she supplies, going for nonchalant and falling somewhere between robot and blubbering. The answer isn’t an answer, the exact opposite of an answer, a nonanswer that left both of them dissatisfied and hurt.

But was there really any better one to give?

She sold him out. Let him be experimented on and drained of his magic- his very essence, the equivalent of a soul and blood pumping through your veins- until he was catatonic.

His glare doesn’t drop, and a childish impulse tells her to return it. She didn’t want to be an adult when the he, the world, and all the little regrets were being unfair to her. She knows she fucked up. She gave up her partner, her friend, her confusing source of feelings she did not need to identify right now, for…

Hunks of cogs. Scrap metal. Parasites made of the equivalent of an atomic bomb and lighter fluid sucking at whatever scraps of magic a human could contain. All loving connected to the ends of her thighs and twice as shiny.

She focused too hard on distracting herself, a tear slipping through her “brave” facade. She saw him shift, out of the corner of her eye, from murderous to agonizingly sympathetic.

“Haru…” he begins cautiously, eyeing her legs, “Why haven’t you moved your legs?”

“I didn’t want to do it,” she blurts out, instead of answering, “Turning you in. I didn’t even really want to do the whole “Demeter” thing, but hey, who can say no to Macavity?”

She laughs. He doesn’t. She wishes she hadn’t.

“I knew if I turned myself in, let Macavity know I wasn’t going to do this anymore… He’d just send someone else. Someone not me. And where would I be? Locked in a room with no way to get out.”

She takes in a shuddering breath, “No way to rescue you.”

There’s more life to his appearance, more flesh than bark, but he’s just as stoic as when she began. She sits before him, waiting for something to snake across his face so she can get a read, an idea. But nothing. Green eyes, still faintly glowing, remained fixed on lead, and cogs, and betrayal, and a haphazard reason she could barely stand on.

Hardy har har.

“Okay.”

That’s it?

“That’s it,” he echoes back, just as she realizes she’d said the thought out loud.

“But-” she sputters, attempting to lurch up before remembering her body had taken a democratic vote to be everything but useful and complying, “After every- How could you- Do you have- Do you not realize what betrayal is, Humbert?!”

They both paused at the sound of his name, a moment of red light flashing between that’d been all but forgotten. She wonders, dimly, and not for the first or last time, if that was his real name or one he’d picked up over the years.

“You’ve saved my life countless times, Haru, as yourself and as my partner, Demeter. The betrayal was unexpected, and it hurt, but…”

He looks at her, made up of hope and magic, and she realizes how badly she’d read the moments leading here. How easily fear can come across as anger, confusion as hurt.

Oh.

‘Do you trust me?’

Didn’t know the play, but still willing to play the part.

“I think, Haru, I can afford to put a little trust in you.”

Well, now she’s a goddamn fool.

“Humbert,” she chokes out between tears, “I liked you better when you were emotionally constipated. I can’t handle this emotional rollercoaster.”

The laughter bubbles up unwillingly, shared between the two for a second as the whole situation registered into their minds. For a moment, though, she could almost believe they were just back at the tea shop.

If only the “red alert” alarm could be so kind.

The shrieking beeping stops, the flashing red light pinging on and glowing ominously steady.

Lockdown.

“Shit.”

“We’re trapped, aren’t we?”

“Lesson learned, heart-to-hearts saved for after great escapes.”

“With the state your legs are in, we can’t make it much farther, can we?”

Right, those appendages.

They’re busted from the 9th Hell and back, and can’t hold on to much of a charge. At least not the fake magic solutions usually put into the machine. She knows she can’t move. She knows she can’t stay.

She knows she’s too valuable to kill.

“Baron, you need to-!”

She feels a surge starting in her calves where he’d dug his fingers into the grinding gears, frozen lightning blazing through her veins. It shifts, feels like leaves stretching to sunlight, water running through roots, worms churning in the earth, and she’s back.

The light fades, but her legs click before whirring back to life, lowly humming with an abundance of energy. She catches her breath and watches the mirage of flesh melts away until he’s back to the animated wood form that tells her he’s barely got any magic running through him.

He gave her as much as he could.

She’s furious he gave her so much.

She can’t deny that having her legs devour something other than her own energy isn’t a nice feeling, though. She tests it, bends a knee, and watches it move like magic and machine and a normal human limb. It’s foreign and familiar and she wishes it was neither.

Humbert presses against the door, glancing down each end of the hallway through the window.

“We better get moving. I’m not letting either of us get left behind.”

He offers her a hand to stand up, one of many. But this feels different.

Her legs are heavy on her body.

The magic Humbert poured into her is nothing but crumbs for a black hole.

There’s still a dozen more floors before they’re even close to ground level.

She’s pretty sure her foot isn’t supposed to feel itchy.

“Ready, Haru?” he asks.

Well, they’ve had worse days.

Her hand clasps his.

“Ready.”

#tcr #the cat returns #tcrmommabear #tcrmommabear writes #emara au #tcr emara au #do creations dream of clockwork sheep #clockwork sheep au #catsafarithewriter #i had a lot of fun writing this #and doing that writing thing where youre dumbly sassy as internal dialogue #my favorite part is all of it #and especially the nonanswer line #cat my love i hope you like this!!! #i know you liked the bits i showed you #now here's the full thing #bring this au back when youre ready #youre doing amazing sweetie!!! #happy birthday cat #happy very late birthday #the queue returns

[queencitydispatch]

"Please can we not make her mayor?"

I woke up today to this fascinating question regarding Cllr. Ana Bailão’s votes to uphold systemic oppression within the Toronto Police. “Please can we not make her mayor?”

It was a deceptively complex question that got me thinking of some of the fundamentals of activism, social change and politics, that I wanted to unpack this question bit by bit.

I’ve cut it into five sections: PLEASE, CAN, WE, NOT MAKE HER, MAYOR.

///

1. PLEASE

I assume this softens the meaning of the phrase - “I want her out of politics” is pretty harsh – especially in the context of a man publicly critiquing a woman. Yet it shows us something important – we are implying we need permission to participate in politics.

Why are we asking for permission? And to whom is this appeal directed? Last time I checked, I don’t need permission to do most things in life, including participating in the political process. Our US-based friends did not ask for permission when they recently revolted against their governments; they did it even though they faced police brutality, neo-Nazi paramilitaries, psychological warfare, a global pandemic and more.

The “please” comes out of the respectability politics that makes “Ontario” as a political entity so curious. “Please don’t gut our healthcare!” is not coming from a position of strength. (Anyway, it’s much easier for progressives to walk back overzealousness in the name of justice than it is for people to walk back bigotry.)

To best challenge power, we must never apologize for having ambitious convictions. We need to champion big ideas, even if they’re ahead of the curve. Two months ago, police reform would have been considered impossible in America. And they were right, it was impossible...under the existing model. So they changed the model.

Change – especially lasting change – comes from the grassroots, so while it’s not a bad thing to support progressive political candidates, parties and organizations, it is *significantly* more important to support issues-based activists and organizations (i.e. if you give $10 monthly to the NDP, why not also give $10 to your favourite advocacy group?). Issues-based groups are formed to challenge one specific cog of power at a time and can therefore deliver deep, fundamental and long-lasting impacts. (Plus…this is a great way for potential candidates to gain some experience; get those ppl knocking on doors now and they’ll do much better in 2022.)

2. CAN

If we are asking “do we, as a community, have the capacity to elect someone better?” The answer to this is yes, but if we’re instead asking “will someone within the existing structure please FINALLY get off their ass and challenge her?” then we might ask ourselves why this hasn’t already happened. The civic left has largely allowed Cllr. Bailão (and, to a lesser extent, Mayor Wonderbread, who is merely a pathetic, respectable version of Rob Ford) to go unchallenged because she’s been deemed impossible to beat, but by not challenging her, the civic left has allowed her career to continue essentially unfettered because they don’t want to spend resources on a race they’re unlikely to win. If only there were some other downtown districts where a new, young generation of activists can start to build their careers…except the seats available are full with straight white boy progressives.

Why does the civic left protect Gord Perks, Joe Cressy and Mike Layton? Like…honestly…I just don't see what the big deal about Joe Cressy is. He bumped Ausma Malik out of the 2018 election instead of doing the right thing and making way for a supremely talented racialized woman like I'd hope someone committed to true justice would. There is even a movement in the democratic party to ask white men to not run in safe seats. [This paragraph and the next have been edited for tone, thank you to Colin Burns for encouraging me to rethink my words and my misdirected anger, my frustration naturally lies with Cllr. Bailāo's behaviour.]

Gord Perks verged into alt-left territory last year as a free-speech absolutist and consequently an apologist for bigotry when he should have defended trans folk. He even shared his disappointing thoughts publicly (yup, he did, they’re still up, don’t @ me on this one, you’ll regret it: http://gordperks.ca/toronto-public-library-chief-librarians-decision/) so considering who he seems to be, we can do better after 14 years? (TL;DR – there’s need for renewal in a lot of parts of our movements, and the labour movement is no exception.)

Mike Layton is a lovely man with his heart in the right place. I’ve volunteered for him and would gladly do it again. It therefore pains me to recognize that his last name is more than a name. I’m happy for everything he (and his team) has contributed in a rapidly changing district. My concern is that lefties can’t afford to support dynasties in the same way that liberals and conservatives can, especially in downtown districts where our odds of winning are good and where we ought to be supporting talented Black, Trans, Indigenous, disAbled and economically-disadvantaged candidates that are already on the front lines of social change. (This list is illustrative, not exhaustive.) By the time of the next election, Mike Layton will have been there for 12 years. Perhaps it’s time for him to open an opportunity for others.

3. WE

Who is “we”? Is it people in this district? Is it people in Toronto? Is it progressives? Whoever can identify this “we” and mobilize them will have the best shot of defeating her. This is the “coalition” people describe as needed to win election. Of course, this includes whoever’s running for office and their team. That organizing work needs to start right now if there’s going to be any chance of a lefty winning this seat in 2022. (If you think she isn’t already considering her council seat successor, remember that her old boss was Mario Silva, who was *coincidentally* Davenport’s City Councillor and MP for a combined 16 years.)

4. NOT MAKE HER

This is maybe the biggest hurdle to get over since “NOT ANA BAILAO” is not an option on the ballot. Considering there are no formal (lol) parties or slates on council, her name recognition is her biggest electoral asset, so a keep-it-safe campaign won’t work. Plus her public image is fairly non-toxic, so as pissed off as we all are, most people won’t be swayed by a STOP BAILAO campaign from the left (the trope of the conservative woman can be very powerful – thanks Maggie – so expect her campaign to lean pretty typically right).

When we say “Cllr. Bailão should not be Mayor” we rob ourselves of the ability to say “I think this person would make a great mayor” or “these are the some of the values I want in a mayor.” – and I don’t mean just of the City Council types. (At this point, Josh Marlow is the other councilor to watch.)

I hate hearing “why can’t we have AOC or Jacinta Arden or Anne Hidalgo or Ilhan Omar?” They didn’t come out of thin air. We already have those people here, we just haven’t elevated them to where they can make a difference and this is why. (Also, lefties, let’s seriously push for term limits and ranked ballots…especially the term limits, most ppl out there love the idea, it costs zero dollars and ensures districts have a healthy amount of turnover.)

5. MAYOR

Toronto City Council is a “weak mayor” system. The Mayor need council approval for pretty much everything important. The Mayor will find success or failure on how well he can build a team of reliable allies on council. It’s something thing Mayor Wonderbread does too well: his allies don’t offer a lot of different views. A hypothetical Mayor Bailão would probably do similar.

So then how rigid should a politician be? Are they supposed to be trustees, where we trust them to do what’s best for us and we have a check-in every 4 years? Or are they supposed to be conduits of public opinion with little regard for context? Or is a councillor meant to reflect the demographics of their district, even though they can only truly embody one set of lived experiences as an individual? Or perhaps, in the case of Cllr. Bailão, someone not dedicated to steering the ship but merely running the engine, not caring where it sails even though we've seen icebergs on the horizon? We’ve grown up in a SimCity generation where we think the mayor can make whatever they want happen. As great as that might sound sometimes, in a democracy, accountability matters. But it must come with a recognition that SimCity mayors don't fear the wrath of the voters.

///

I want to recognize that a 10% reallocation is fucking pathetic and still Toronto council couldn’t do it…but at least we know where we stand, and with whom.

We often look at politics as a sport or a soap opera, and it feels great when your team scores points or your favourite character delivers a knockout performance. Even I was like “dang girl” when Nancy Pelosi defiantly ripped up the President’s speech. I was also touched by Jagmeet Singh’s touching display of emotion the day after he was ejected from the House of Commons for calling out bigotry. But that’s not politics, that’s a long running TV drama series, so as disappointed as I am in what happened, I’m not gonna yell at her in the street because White Man Raging is not a great look these days…or ever.

So let’s not make this about my neighbour, Cllr. Ana Bailão. Let’s make it about the system of oppression she has willingly chosen to uphold and tearing that motherfucker down piece by piece.

[ki6-7-l8r]

The Decline Of America

The USA is at the terminus of its existence, at least in its present form. Rampant greed, xenophobia, and ignorance, and the brutality and inhumanity it creates has now reached the point of complete dissolution. Present trends cannot continue much longer.... If something worthwhile is not done, and soon, the whole system will collapse, because it is out of touch with reality... Immutable ignorance seems like the biggest enemy. The greed of society as a whole, has reached a point where 51% of the population of the USA makes $30,000 a year or less... 67% of the US population could not come up with $400 in an emergency.. You may have noticed that I said *the greed of society as a whole* not just the greed of rich elites. They for sure are a problem, but we all should contemplate our own greed, and how we contribute to this process... The USA is not a compassionate society. If it was you would not have poverty and homelessness. If we were good, society as a whole would just end it. If none of us were greedy, it would not be possible to have an economic system based on greed, because it would not have any mandate from the whole population, and the whole population would not sustain it. The people are for sure propagandized and brainwashed, but it would only take a small amount of empathy on the part of everyone to end most social problems. But we cannot do it, because of the phenomenon of alienation...... Because everyone has to be an economic slave to survive, it creates pathological currents and affects, as well as reactive patterns.... The wealthy see society as people that someday might take their money away from them. The disenfranchised and Leftist activists make them enraged, because they sense the ground giving way under foot, whether it really is or not. The poor and working classes are becoming more nihilistic over time; denied all means of self-actualization, their only real pleasure comes in finding ways to create disruption and tear everything down. Even a rude checker at Walmart or some other store, is generating a huge amount of misery by being nasty to people and ruining their day. A checker rings out 100 people a day or more, that is a lot of people to poison with rudeness and ill-will.... But a society that is indifferent to the misery of so many, will just have to accept this, it is never going away. The real problem of the USA has to do with social psycho-dynamics.... There is nothing that holds American society together, except popular culture, manufactured beliefs and corporate ideologies that use both liberal and conservative propaganda to keep everyone in line. Every kind of meaningful value is either counterfeited to serve some type of conformist ideology or denied that it has any importance. What matters is that everyone be a cog in the vast machine, working and consuming and being ripped-off of their lives in both of these activities. Eventually people get ground down to the point where they just give up and do not care anymore, that is what is happening now.... You cannot tell people to care if it is not in them to do so. The wealthy and affluent do not care about the working classes, which other than them is all that is left, the middle class is long gone now. But they are the ones who will have the burden of maintaining this system. As most of us give up and drop out, it is not going to be our problem. Even if this whole system just collapsed, and a new government was created, it would not matter to a huge number people. One set of exploiters and tyrants is as good as another, life under this system is bad, life under a new system will be bad, there is nothing in this present system that is worth fighting for to more and more people. We can give rifles to the Fortune 500 and they can go fight the wars for us, just as the kings of old and their knights fought all of the wars, they did not expect the peasants to go fight them. In modern societies like America, the peasants do all of the fighting.... America is disintegrating, and everybody knows it. People are sick of the status-quo, whether they are liberal or conservative... This consists in everybody who is not affluent and well-off, and that is most of us now.... A huge number has dropped out of the workforce.... People are willing to try Trump's fascism and Sanders' socialism, anything, as long as it is not more of the same. Those arguing for the status-quo, are in a very small club, and it is getting smaller every day, and those with a lot to lose are getting freaked-out. We are in a histrionic phase. Nowhere is this more evident than in the conservative psychosis. Conservatives have totally gone off the rails, and need to go on medication. They go into raging shit-fits; and affirm that anyone who is even a mere liberal, is a traitor to the nation that should be tortured and murdered. They believe in fairy tales like "free markets," that are never manipulated by wealthy people to their own profit and advantage. Insider trading can never really interfere with the sacred bull of the 'free market." They are willing to fight and even kill others over a bunch of stupid jingoistic 'cattle-prods' of verbiage, like a bunch of dumb brutes.  It has coincided with the general degradation of intelligence that has effected everyone in the USA, including me. Now that I am 55 and have really gotten old, I know that my best work is behind me now.... The Democratic party is trying to make everyone think that it is progressive. It is not, it is the liberal wing of the monied establishment. Hillary is a conservative Democrat, that bears little difference to what could be considered a center-right Republican, if there are any anymore. they have all gone so far to the right and into unreality, but that is to be expected, in an era where nobody knows where it is all going or what is going on, except that it is in the toilet. Americans, scraping every used-up bin of aborted thought, to find some kind of unworkable shibboleth to cling to.... But your WASP's America does not exist anymore... We are moving to a New America, and everyone is flipping-out because nobody knows what that is. But if nobody is willing to deal with their reality and selfishness on some level, the New America will make itself evident, and most likely it will be something that will end up pleasing nobody at all......... 

#sputnik news #usa #emo #democrats #counterculture #punk #republicans #rt #darkart #socialism #communism #philosophy #poverty #nihilism

[polss]

Political Swizzlestick: Seema Nanda and Tom Perez - DNC Heads - need to rid the DNC of its bullshit....Or get fired when the Dems lose to Trump.

As anyone who followed the train wreck that was the Iowa caucus knows, Tom Perez is the head of the DNC. 

Let me throw another name out for you. Seema Nanda is his boss, the CEO of the DNC. 

 And they are both on their way to helping Donald Trump get reelected. 

 How can I say such a hateful and unfair thing? 

Because it's neither hateful nor unfair. 

It's truthful. 

 In the 2016 election, the GOP and the DNC gave us two candidates that we hated more than any other candidates in the history of US elections that we've tracked. So we had an election where everyone in the liberal-leaning states voted their asses off against Donald Trump and everyone else in America voted their asses off against Hillary Clinton (and to a lesser degree against President Obama's economic policies, which most of us will admit we didn't particularly like.) 

It's now four years later. People in the liberal states who hated Donald Trump have four years of evidence showing that their hatred was justified. 

People in the conservative States and in the Swing states have seen Donald Trump address probably 80 to 90% of his campaign promises, far far far more than any previous Republican president. Republicans are on board , even most of the 2016 "never Trump" Republicans have realized that it's four years later and their skin has not been melted off by a nuclear disaster. They are on team Trump now. 

 So, what does that mean for the 2020 election? 

Well It means that again The Electoral College will decide the winner and victory will be dependent upon which candidate wins the Rust Belt states (as well as North Carolina and Virginia). 

Trump won those rustbelt States in 2016. While the DNC can probably count on Michigan moving back into the DNC column, There is no guarantee on the rest of the Rust Belt. 

Now Trump will have a few more votes as moderate Republicans realize they can tolerate Trump or just fall under the sway of Trumps continuous 4 year long disinformation campaign. 

It's no given that the Democrats can win. 

In the face of that, people who want to vote against Trump who aren't Democrats and don't believe in the ethics of the DNC, have just seen what appears to be an attempt by a candidate to steal the Iowa election. 

"Whoa! Whoa there!" you might say. "There is no evidence that Pete Buttigieg's people were cheating In Iowa and hope to cheat again in Nevada in that caucus!" 

Well, then, why did embattled DNC had Tom Perez call for a manual recount of Iowa's results? 

That action makes my point. He did it because there was the PERCEPTION of fraud that threatened to drive away non-reliable Democratic voters like myself.

Tom Perez is the replaceable COG of the DNC . He gets that. Calling for a recount Is something he can do. If Trump wins re-election, Perez will be gone. 

Nanda should be gone too but Perez is in the position that would certainly take the fall. 

Really in that instance anyone with over 20 years of experience working in the DNC in management should be removed. 

Why can I say such an unfair thing?

Because there is a culture of corruption in the Hillary and Bill era DNC operatives. That corruption needs to be scrubbed out. And at that point it would make a lot of sense to simply cut out the infected tissue, if the leadership cannot self-correct. 

Every action that the DNC leadership has taken over the years is designed to protect their ability to push down on the scales for one candidate over another that the public has chosen. 

When I cast my vote In a primary for a Democratic candidate, the DNC does not count my vote as one part of however many total votes are cast. 

That's a fuzzy statement. Let me explain this another way. 

I'm going to throw some numbers out there to keep the math easy. 

If I am one of 10,000 people who vote for a candidate in a state where 100,000 votes are cast. My candidate has gotten only 10% of the vote. AT BEST, my candidate will get 10% of however many delegates the DNC has assigned to the state. I could be in a state with a population of say 3 million people that tends to vote Democrat in the general election. 

 My neighboring state also has 3 million people in it, but may always vote Republican in the general election. Given that the GOP dominates that state, Democratic turnout is always low because they have no ability to affect government. They have 50,000 people who turn out and vote in the Democratic primary. The candidate I hate gets 10,000 of those votes in that state (20%).

With fewer people supporting that candidate, that candidate is likely to get more delegates.... possibly twice as many. 

That is an unfair system. 

And it gets even more unfair. The DNC weights the system to cheat for the leading vote getters.

Many/Most/all? state democratic primaries and caucuses have rules about “viability” of candidates.  Google your state’s primary or caucus and read the rules.  Basically if your candidate earns less that 15% in a certain region of the state, they are considered unviable in that region and barring a change are mostly inelegible to secure actual delegates using the votes placed in that region. It’s like those votes were never counted.

If it is a caucus state (an entirely deeper level of clusterfuck) you and your fellow participants are actually told you need to vote for another candidate or not have a voice at all.

The candidates who are viable in various regions and them alone split the actual state delegates.  How fucked is that?

Applying the viability rules to our example, it is entirely likely that despite 10,000 people voting for my candidate in my state of 100,000, there is statistically a great chance that our preferred candidate didn’t clear 15% in ANY of the state’s various regions. For all of our efforts, our candidate is likely to walk away from the state with zero delegates.

We probably should have stayed home and played nintendo instead.

That not piss you off yet?  Wait until you look at the neighboring state.  In that state the candidate we hate pulled 20% of that state’s total 50,000 votes. Their candidate actually won the state with 6 other candidates splitting the rest of the vote. That candidate won 100% of their “pledged” delegates.

So while each state has say 25 pledged delegates, my candidate who earned twice as many actual votes gets 0 delegates and the candidate I hate gets all 25 of my neighboring state’s delegates.

That is fucked up logic.

So why don't we just count the existing votes? If between two states with 3 million people, 150,000 votes are cast and the candidate that I like gets 10,000 of those votes and the candidate that I don't like gets 10,000, both of those candidates would get the same number of delegates. And both me and my neighbor in the next state over would have the same ability to choose our candidate. 

"But we have to do this to protect small states!" 

Do we really? If someone who lives in Iowa has the same ability as I do living in Texas to cast a single vote with exactly the same value, how exactly are they being hurt? 

Is it worth more to the DNC to give say, Iowa a state where 90% Of the population is white, a much greater ability to affect the nomination, then it is to have unrepresented voters in a large red state with blue State demographics (Texas) feel like they finally have the ability to exercise a political voice and a reason to get registered to vote? 

I think if you look clearly at that picture, the former gives you the ability to ensure that your candidate is a lily-white candidate who fully agrees with the values of the DNC core. 

The latter gives you the ability to force the GOP to change their tactics. No more obstructionist government. No more underhanded dealings. No more talking in racist dog whistles. 

The former has been what the previous leadership of the DNC has valued. The latter I would argue is what the DNC leadership from here on out should value.

In the latter instance, if the GOP wants to win future elections at minimum, they have to treat either Black or Mexican voter with respect --- like they're valuable humans too. Default current operating practices of the GOP would have to change. And our society would benefit from it. 

So the question becomes do you want control of the nomination process? Or do you want to win? 

The argument for delegates is the same argument for the Electoral College. "The US was designed to be a republic." That statement is regularly made to defend the status quo. 

When it is made in that context what that is actually saying is that the US was designed where people vote for convention delegates or electoral voters who are "smarter or make more capable than them" to cast an actual vote that mean something on their behalf. 

That is, not surprisingly, a republican argument. 

But if you told Americans back in the Revolutionary War who thought they were fighting against taxation without representation that that's what they were fighting for, trading the British House of Lords making decisions for them for rich Americans making decisions for them, the Civil War might have come a lot quicker. 

Americans were promised democracy. This is why they supported the new US government. This is why those who are willing to vote for the Democrats expect democracy to be delivered. 

 It boils their guts every four years when they read about how the DNC has “super-delegates”, party insiders whose opinions are on their own worth several delegates.

I am pissed when I think that my vote and likely several thousand of my Texan neighbors' votes are required to get one single DNC delegate , but superdelegate Hillary Clinton's opinion, directly and indirectly, is probably worth more delegates than some states! 

Hillary has blown two freaking presidential elections ----  two opportunities for the dems to run the show....and yet here I am beholden to her sensibilities. 

That is not democracy. That is corruption. 

The DNC only won in 1992 because Ross Perot split the Republican vote. Without that, Bill Clinton would have been curb-stomped. 

Barack Obama won in 2008 because he was running against a second Great Depression. George Bush was totally unable to address the problem with the standard Republican tactic of trickle down economics and John McCain ran on continuing Bush's economic policies. 

Obama's people did run a brilliant campaign in 2008 but let's not overrate winning when you're running against a second Great Depression. 

You have to go back to 1976 to see the last time some random Joe Schmoe Democrat cleanly won their way INTO the white house. 

So let's not overrate our chances or give the Clintons, the Obamas, or some hoity-toity career DNC operative, the ability to select "winning candidates" against the will of the voting public. 

And the superdelegates are just one objectionable piece. The pool of delegates alloted to a state is usually divided into pledged and unpledged delegates.  The unpledged delegates are just like super delegates --- totally unbeholden to the voters.

And, the DNC makes it even worse. My vote and everyone who sees the candidates like I do's votes don't give us a single delegate "chip". 

No, we get a “pledged delegate” chucklehead who doesn't really even have to vote the way we voted. This is slimy. It's underhanded. It's disgusting. ....And it's the DNC today.

"But the GOP does the same thing" you might argue. 

The GOP believes America is a republic. They have a built-in argument for their corruption that their voters accept. 

The DNC believes America was founded on democracy. Democratic is part of the name. So why not be democratic? 

Since 2016 a huge chunk of the democratic voting base has argued to get rid of the Electoral College and embrace a direct popular vote because it's more democratic. 

Maybe you can't do that in the actual election, but you sure as heck can do that in the selection process. 

I have this advice for Seema Nanda and her employee Tom Perez. Be different from all of the other people who have had the positions that you're currently in. 

Discover ethics. 

Be Democratic.

Spend your political capital changing the rules to make the party successful. Instead of pushing down for one candidate against another and pissing off all of us “non-reliable” DNC voters that you need to win the Rust Belt and the other swing States in order to defeat Donald Trump in 2020, push down on the scales to help the DNC against the GOP. 

Meet with all of the presidential candidates and get the majority of them to sign off on shit canning delegates. 

The candidate with the most votes will be the nominee at the convention. 

With the possible exception of Mayor Pete, I think every other candidate will gladly concede to those terms in order to remove the perception of corruption that has dogged the party in this election. 

Count every citizen vote in the primary season. Give us totally transparent running vote totals after each race, and then celebrate the totals at the DNC convention. 

Give me exactly the same voting power as someone in Iowa, New Hampshire, New York City, California or anywhere else in the country and you'll increase Democratic registration countrywide, turning a lot more States purple and blue.

You, Seema Nanda and Tom Perez, will get to be seen as the white hats of the DNC. You'll be seen as once-in-a-lifetime leaders --- the reformers who permanently dragged the party out of corruption. 

These are controversial changes, No Doubt, but they are changes that increase the party's chances of defeating Donald Trump. 

Your reputations will get the benefit of the doubt when the DNC defeats Donald Trump. 

And if the DNC loses to Donald Trump....you're in exactly the same boat you'd be in if you do nothing. 

Tom Perez can call for recounts, but Seema Nanda is going to be required to change the culture of the DNC. 

 There was a guy you might remember by the name of Barack Obama who talked about being on the right side of History. You two are currently on the wrong side of History. 

Don't think that you can't get rid of this 20th century corruption that is inherent to the party rules, because someone in your positions eventually will. 

 If you don't do it, your replacements will or your replacement's replacement will. It's just inevitable. 

The Democrats are losing too many presidential elections for things not to change. 

Or you can stay the course and be unemployed in a year.... another disgraced scandal-ridden failure in those positions, reduced to writing books because your political careers in the DNC are over. The choice is yours.

final note

I thought about not writing this piece because it might hurt turnout.  People might read this and think, “why even vote in the primaries?” But then I thought, “that is actually a great reason to publish this.  If people don’t vote in the primaries that puts the screws to Perez and Nanda.”  

People have to register to vote in the primaries.  People not registering in time costs the party votes in the general election.  They want strong turnout in the primaries because it shows you are registered. I want them to sweat bullets. (Please register to vote now even if you chose not to vote in the primary because your candidate will fall short of your state’s viability thresholds.)

And then there is the Bernie factor.  Bernie is running away with this race to the chagrin of the DNC leadership.  Bernie voters are loving this.  They are going to vote. His turnout is guaranteed.  The only way Bernie could lose is if the DNC has strong turnouts for an alternate candidate. They need turnout.  

And if Bernie is the nominee he also would benefit from the most possible registered democratic voters ahead of the general election.

Everyone gets what they want if you do the right thing, so why not maximize turnout?

[magicians-apprentice]

From the article:

=======================

I managed to miss a good chunk of the feel-good hash-tag du’jour “#metoo”, where women are encouraged to share their stories of victimization in order to illustrate their victimhood status.

Okay, let’s make one thing very clear before I go into why all this makes me uncomfortable.

Sexual assault is bad.

That I even need to clarify this illustrates just how fucked up the public discussion on the abuse of women (which I would consider a superset of sexual assault rather than identical) has become. And that I need to clarify this illustrates just how fucked up the public discourse on generally abusive behavior (which again, I would consider a superset of misogyny rather than identical) has become.

It’s almost as if we’ve forgotten what it means to act with manners, treating each other with respect. We’ve forgotten what it means to seek the seven virtues for ourselves and hold them in our hearts as we interact with others: to practice chastity and temperance as we interact with strangers, to act with charity and patience, to show diligence, kindness and humility.

In some quarters, we have deliberately forgotten these virtues–dismissing them as something only religious zealots do. After all, these seven virtues (literally “a habitual and firm disposition to do good”) are a Christian teaching–and as we all know, in these modern post-religious times, anything religious is bad and deserving of being dumped as trash.

And once you dump religion (and its teachings on what it means to be a better person), what is left to govern our interactions with each other?

Politics?

I mean, it’s not like leaving it in the hands of individuals works very well, especially when there is a power disparity.

But I’m not very comfortable with the #metoo thing, for two reasons.

First, we’ve had this conversation before.

We’ve done the whole “women, by show of hands, how many of you have been sexually assaulted?” Like #YesAllWomen, #WhenIWas, #ShePersisted, etc.

And have they helped do anything to actually reduce the instances of sexual assault? Have they done a damned thing other than to devolve into a pointless exercise of victimization reaffirmation?

I mean, shouldn’t we use a different strategy?

#MeToo named the victims. Now, let’s list the perpetrators

It’s true that telling our stories can help – it can help victims not feel quite so alone and make others understand the breadth and depth of the problem. But the truth is that nothing will really change in a lasting way until the social consequences for men are too great for them to risk hurting us.

Why have a list of victims when a list of perpetrators could be so much more useful?

But I suspect part of the problem with the newfound approach of women standing up to abusers, perhaps by getting the police involved, is related to my second reason why all this makes me uncomfortable.

Second, we can’t seem to agree on what sort of “abuse” qualifies one for the #MeToo campaign. And in the process it’s slowly devolving away from talking about physical assault, through loutish behavior, and ending at outright misandry.

Take, for example, this article which seems to conflate sexual assault, abusive behavior and loutish behavior–that is, behavior that is obnoxious but not necessarily abusive: #MeToo. To me there is a sharp distinction between “predator” and “creep”, between “sexist remark”, “rape jokes” and “rape”–yet the article uses them as interchangeable terms.

It’s not to say any of these behaviors are acceptable. But when we live in a world where a suggestive conversation is considered under the same umbrella as a violent rape, when some guy who was told “no” asks for a date a second time is considered under the same umbrella as Harvey Weinstein–haven’t we devolved the later by lumping them under the same umbrella as the former?

Don’t we do a disservice to rape victims by equating their violent rapes with the discomfort of being in the same room as two men share an inappropriate joke?

Can you imagine someone going in a hospital room where a woman, half beaten to death after her rape, lies in recovery and telling her “sister, I know exactly how you feel; once someone called me a ‘bitch'”?

I mean, it’s gotten so bad that the #MeToo campaign has spawned another campaign–from men: #HowIWillChange, which presumes men are guilty of sexual “abuse” until proven innocent.

Again, it’s not to dismiss loutish behavior. Remember my premise above: we have forgotten the seven virtues–and an inappropriate joke in the workplace is a violation of the principle of temperance, of voluntary self-restraint in the face of others.

But the Left, many of whom have latched onto the latest fad of claiming #MeToo (and worse, #HowIWillChange), want nothing to do with this religious mumbo-jumbo, having declared it obsolete.

So what is left? Unprincipled handwringing hasn’t worked; just look at the countless other hashtags going back decades which have done nothing to resolve issues of misogyny in the workplace. Neither has the misandrous attempts at forcing men to confess their sins (but without a framework for “sin” other than deconstructed feminism), which often turn into victim blaming when men point out that, in some instances, they’ve been on the receiving end of inappropriate behavior by women.

(Hell, I’ve been on the receiving end of workplace sexually inappropriate behavior; first, by an overly flirtatious woman when I was working at JBL who wanted to show me her boob job in private, second, by an overly flirtatious QA woman at Symantec at a Christmas Party who suggested we go find a room somewhere to have sex. When I pointed out I was married, she said “me too”; it gave us something in common.)

And it’s why, by the way, we won’t change tactics and provide a list of perpetrators: because doing something like that could backfire. Yes, Harvey Weinstein deeply deserved to be outed decades ago. But the poor sap who asks you out on a date at an inappropriate time: would including his name on a master list of “male predators” really solve anything?

Personally I believe the problem is that in our modern day and age we’ve been systematically dismantling all the cultural frameworks of what it means to be a better person.

The Left has engaged in a systematic war on religion–and while the bad parts of religion (such as tribalism and elitism) certainly deserve to be attacked, the aspects which teach “original sin” (that is, when we are all born we are all blank slates unknowing of what it means to be a good person) and how to be a better person (that is, how one can improve oneself morally and ethically) certainly did not deserve to be tossed in the trash heap.

Because without striving to make ourselves better–without the constant individual pursuit towards personal knowledge, self-discovery and self-improvement–what is left? People as cogs in a political machine? Piling up money and political connections? Claiming “#metoo” so you can feel good about your victimhood status and your position on the victimization totem pole?

By the way, the drive to understand what it means to be a better person is not exclusive to Christianity. All major religions address this problem, to help those find “salvation” of a sort. Islam teaches Zakaat, the responsibility we have to help others, including the poor, the destitute and travelers in need. Judaism teaches the mitzvahs, commandments which require avoidance of certain bad behaviors and the performance of certain good deeds. Buddhism provides tools to its followers designed to help find samadhi, oneness. All the major world religions have something to say about how to be a better person, from literal commandments to spiritual practices.

Even the seven virtues of Christianity have their roots in earlier pre-Christian teachings.

Do away with all this teaching–do away with the ancient question of what it means to become a better person–and what is left?

Certainly Karl Marx had nothing to say about justice or morality. Marx’s work, off of which progressive liberalism owes a hat tip to, was only descriptive of historic evolution and economic issues. He had nothing to say about the *morality* of capitalism or communism. Later writers certainly interpret his works this way–and clearly liberals, when talking about unjust wealth inequality, are making a moral proclamation. But all these moral proclamations are being made absent a consistent moral framework of any kind.

And without such a framework, all that is left is politics: we make moral proclamations not because we have any moral principles, but as a political tool to gin up outrage in order to force political change.

That’s what the #metoo campaign really is: a political attempt to gin up outrage to force political change.

But politics cannot affect morality when political believers do not believe in morality.

All politics can do is rearrange the deck chairs: to give more political power to one group, to take political power away from another group. And worse: politics can only provide the illusion of morality–which is why Harvey Weinstein was able to thrive so long. Because as a major donor to the Democratic Party he had the perfect fig leaf, in the form of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to pursue his own sexually abusive appetites amongst the glitterati of Hollywood, all of whom knew for decades what sort of a predatory asshole Mr. Weinstein was.

Ultimately political attempts to fix morality without any sort of moral framework–which is where the Left currently sits–cannot work. Because there is no “there” there that can be fixed.

Which is why in the end, the “#metoo” campaign will join earlier attempts in the trash heap of history, having done nothing in the end beyond ginning up some outrage about how horrible men are.

You want my “#HowIWillChange”?

Here it is.

To better understand the idea of Original Sin.

To better understand the principles of the Seven Heavenly Virtues and to faithfully attempt to better represent these virtues when interacting with others or when working on my own meditations.

And to demand the cardinal virtue of Justice (that is, righteousness and fairness) in part, by pointing out the hypocrisy in the world around me. A practice which is exemplified in a very small way by this blog post.

And if you don’t see how the seven heavenly virtues leads to an eschewing of misandry and misogyny, to a demand for workplaces free of sexual abuse and sexual favoritism, to a call for women to stand up for themselves rather than to meekly hide in the face of injustice only later to share sad little stories about being offended by jokes told by loutish men who have been raised in a modern culture which teaches us to “feel good” about ourselves and to know no personal limits from that awful old-fashioned religious bullshit–then you are part of the problem.

=====================

[copiosis]

The Best Future Hinges On You Doing Nothing

We're in a positive revolution. I know, it doesn't look that way. Often such revolutions are invisible. Doesn't mean they aren't happening.

The revolution will end when doing nothing becomes as valuable as "working your ass off". In fact, doing nothing will become so valuable, it will replace "working your ass off" as a success path.

Smart people are on this revolution's early edge. People like Facebook Co-founder Chris Hughes and Democratic Presidential Candidate Phenom and entrepreneur Andrew Yang are not only planning, but are vocal about implementing a basic income for all Americans. Don't get me wrong. A basic monthly income of $500-$1000 will not allow most people do nothing status. But it's a start.

Persuading Americans there's immense value in doing nothing is a long road. To get there, we gotta start somewhere. Even if Basic Income isn't implemented or Yang doesn't become president, post 2020 election America will know more about Basic Income than they ever have.

That conversation starts breaking down Americans' collective belief that working hard is the only way to success. The next to fall is the idea that Americans are free today. Both beliefs must go.

That's what this revolution is about.

And they will go. In their wake will come new ideas. Ideas including what people already know, but hardly see evidence of. Even though evidence is plentiful.

Doing Nothing Is Inspiring

People's best ideas come when they're doing nothing. Or, rather, looking like they're doing nothing. They're doing something. They're letting their insight and intuition heavy-lift. That's why inventors often come up with their best ideas in the shower, or making love or driving. Their "working my ass off" mode is off, making room for inspiration.

Doing nothing begets breakthroughs. But it also makes resource procurement easier than working your ass off. Funny thing is, even when you're working your ass off, your ass being worked off has less to do with progress than you think.

They say success is an 80/20 game. It's actually a 1/99 game. One percent of success comes from your effort. The rest is happens when you "let go and let god". I explained this analyzing Arnold Schwarzenegger's famous success speech in which he claims working your ass off is a prerequisite to success.

It's not.

The American Freedom Fallacy

Let's look at American Freedom next. Most Americans will probably say Americans are free. Some will compare American freedom to other countries. They'll say Americans are more free than any other country. That may be true. But varying degrees of non-freedom still are non-freedom.

In basic secular terms, Americans are as not-free as any other group. Freedom means being able to do whatever one wants – even doing nothing – with no negative consequences.

Recently, an American helped me understand how free Americans are. He gave an example of a street musician:

“A street musician is free to play whatever he wishes to, subject to panhandling or other ordinances (he doesn’t have a natural right to block my use of a sidewalk or street). I am free not to pay him if I see no value in his product.”

This is accurate of course. But it's not freedom. It does describe the way things are now. Which I call "non-freedom". Let's look at the dictionary's definition of "freedom”:

"Hindrance", "restraint", "not being subjected to a, or affected by (a particular undesirable thing)"...all these words point to the nature of freedom as it doesn’t exist in America.

A hungry person is not free. A sick person without healthcare is not free. An unwilling houseless person is not free. A person working a job they hate is not free. Not according to this definition. All these people are being subjected to or affected by an undesirable thing.

So is our street musician.

They are all hindered, restrained. They do not enjoy unrestricted lives.

How do Americans not get this?

Eighty-five percent of the world's population apparently hates their job. So at least 85 percent of humanity world wide is not free in this one dimension. It's fair to say most Americans are in that bunch. And that's just looking at jobs.

The vast majority of Americans are notfree. Because the vast majority of people on the planet aren't. We're not that exceptional.

Watery Poop Flows Downhill

If you're not free, you're damn sure going to make sure other people aren't either. Which is where I think people's disdain comes from. They imagine some guy sitting in his basement playing video games all day.

"If I gotta work, you damn sure better work too", they think.

Social pressure is like a fat poop rolling down hill in a brown stream of water. We all get caught up in it. Working. Losing our asses. And our lives. The whole thing stinking in the process. We've just been in it so long, we don't recognize the stench.

Natural questions arise when thinking about everybody doing nothing. Who will make things people need? Who will do jobs no one likes to do? How do you expect people to get their food, clothes, etc.? Someone must make these things.

These things can be made. And everyone can be free at the same time. Just because you can't figure how that is possible, doesn't make it impossible.

Capitalism and its version of “freedom”, which is really non-freedom, is extremely poor at figuring this out. That because it forces everyone to work. Why would it figure out how to free people from working when it depends on everyone working?

That makes no sense.

We need a new socioeconomic system. New ways of thinking too. I explain what that thinking sounds like in this recent 30-minute conversation.

Your Mom's Priceless Contribution To The World: You

For example, how much money did capitalism pay your mom for birthing and raising you? How about your dad? How about your grandparents? How about all the generations of people who came before you, without which you wouldn’t be here?

All those people provided you and the world with immense value. Were it not for who they were (not necessarily what they did, but including that), you wouldn’t be here.

And yet, capitalism’s non-freedom hasn’t recognized any of that value. Priceless value!

Multiply that by the 300+ million people in the United States. That’s massive amounts of value capitalism fails to acknowledge and reward. This value is worth something. And that’s just one area in which capitalism’s non-freedom fails. There are many, many others.

So when a person says “People are perfectlyfree to produce goods and services others do not value” they're going along with a system that fails to acknowledge and compensate most real, obvious value humans create.

It's impossible to know in advance the value a human, sitting in his basement somewhere, doing whatever he is doing.  It's better to assume value is there. He isgenerating value. You not seeing it doesn't mean it's not there.

Nor do you or can you know what he might someday do after sitting there. So you can’t assess that persons contribution value. Well, you can, but you’d be wrong. Unless you claim the value is intrinsically, inherently high. Which it is.

I know that person’s value is inherent.

When a person offers something having immense value (who they are), but value society (and by extension people paid money) doesn’t value it, they risk losing things they shouldn’t have to lose: resources they need to thrive.

Some have said “Coercing others to pay for goods and services that they do not wish to pay for is tyranny.” By extension this person also would say, "coercing others to support people doing nothing is tyranny."

I 100 percent agree with people who say this.

But I wouldn’t use the word “tyranny”.

It iscoercion. And no one should be coerced because everyone is inherently free and of value.

Here’s where I would use the word “tyranny”: That a person must find something immediately “valuable” to others to do, instead of what they are passionate about, so they can get their basic need. That is tyrannical.

As a result of that tyranny, many, many potential Picassos, Gateses, Jobses, Musks, etc. get lost to waitressing, garbage hauling, and Walmart. Or they become drug-addicted sufferers. Why? These people know they have value. But society doesn’t. Unless they contribute as a cog within a narrow band of capitalist value.

Otherwise, they're "drags on the system.”

I'm changing that.

The Goal: No One Having To Do Anything

You're free not to pay that street musician. However, just because NO ONE at the time may see value in what he is doing, doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be afforded the necessities while he hones his music to the point where people value it.

We can have a future wherein you aren’t obligated to do anything you don’t want to do.Including giving your money to someone because you think their contribution is worthless. While at the same time, that person you think is producing no value, is producing value. As such, they can receive all the necessities they need. And that’s done in a way that leaves you (and everyone else) free.

That’s freedom.

See the difference between that and today? This is why I say people aren't free in America.

Your freedom would be impinged upon if the musician or a third party forced you to reward that musician. That said, a world is possible that doesn’t force you or anyone else to pay the musician. YET, the musician is “paid” and still gets his needs met.

We (America and the world) CAN pay people to become the best of who they are, without taking anyone’s money who doesn’t want that to happen. And it can be easy.

Some things to think about:

If you don’t want your money used to pay people to become the best of who they are, and we install a system that pays people to do that, but it doesn’t use any of your money to do it, why do you care?Why would you resist that? You don’t have a dog in that fight.

If society can make it easier for people to become the best of who they are and contribute in the way some of our best have, without that costing you or anyone else, don’t you think it should? Everyone could contribute their value more quickly if not having to simultaneously earn a living. But more than that, struggling is unnecessary in the future. What do you have against eliminating earning a living, when it’s possible to do so?

That's where the future is going. Facebook's Hughes thinks only people working should get a basic income. He's still stuck in the poop stream. Yang's showering off the stench. He thinks every American should get $1000 a month unconditionally.

I agree.

It's a good start. But we'll go much farther. We have to. That's what the whole revolution is about.

#america #amerika #american exceptionalism #make america great again? #President Obama #Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez #bernie sanders #Yang Gang #Andrew Yang #capitalism #capitalism is evil #capitalism is violence #capitalism is hell #free education #Free Healthcare #socialism #democracy #democratic socialism #copiosis #bernie sander for president #bernie2020

[oh-boy-am-i-gay]

Why One Nation and Pauline Hanson is a danger to Australian democracy and society

We have the Australian version of Donald Trump and his administration - Pauline Hanson and One Nation. The resemblances are uncanny - Islamophobic policies, temper tantrums on all forms of social media, bizarre claims being made left, right and centre by politicians that have no business being in the positions they are. Just as Trump and his administration pose a danger to American society for all the obvious reasons so does Hanson and her party.

Why they are a threat to democracy: They want to ban halal certification and the burqa and the usual Islamophobic bullshit. That flies in the face of our Constitution (section 116). Her policies are against the law - unconstitutional, undemocratic and unaustralian (what happened to our Australian values to give everyone a fair go???)

Why she is a threat to society:

She is too small minded to realize she is a significant cog in a much larger machine that churns out the type of people that commit atrocities and acts of extremism. Allow me to explain. ISIS and their acts of terrorism and extremism are fueled by the idea that “the west is against us”. Our experts came out and said social cohesion are the only way to combat this level of extremism - which makes sense. If we make them a part of our society, if we show that we want them to be productive members of society than that argument “the west is against us” falls apart. Except hanson and her vitriol instead validates and legitimises ISIS’S argument thus empowering them to recruit even more people and encourages more acts of terror. That is how this complex process endangers all of us in the long run while she attempts to give people a false sense of security in the short run.

Not only does she reject Muslims who do integrate into society she also has the gall, the fucking nerve, to turn around and question why Muslims don’t integrate into a society. You try being in a place nobody wants you to be even though you have a right to that space.

That party is a fucking mess. When Hanson’s not denying climate change, refusing entities the democratic right to freedom of press, making anti vaccination claims, campaigning for undemocratic and unconstitutional policies, blatantly lying to the Australian public and breaking her promises, she’s defending her politicians who argued gay people should be institutionalized and argued single mothers are too unattractive and lazy to hold a mate. Do I even need to go on?

Just because the adults in charge aren’t doing the best job doesn’t mean we need to elect toddlers into the highest positions of public office.

#charlie does life #one nation #Pauline hanson #Islamophobia

[thisdaynews]

The United States of Anxiety

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-united-states-of-anxiety/

The United States of Anxiety

Tim Alberta is chief political correspondent atPolitico Magazine.

Des Moines, Iowa

Dear Washington,Since our last correspondence, voting finally got underway in the Democratic primary for president. That term—voting—is used loosely in Iowa, the state with a nearly 50-year history of kicking off the presidential selection process. Rather than step into a private booth anytime during the day to cast a ballot for their preferred candidate, Iowans wait until dusk to gather in churches and libraries and high school gymnasiums all across the state and sort themselves into groups.

By now, you’re well aware just how spectacularly this ritual backfired. Iowa Democratic officials not only failed to transmit results on caucus night; they failed for more than a week to provide verified numbers to satisfy the simple question of who won the state. There’s still no official winner. This debacle probably sounded a death knell for Iowa’s place at the front of the line, and if so, well, good riddance. The truth is, an overwhelmingly white, rural state doesn’t reflect a slice of America the way it once did. Someplace else deserves a chance to pick presidents—or, at least, to sift the serious candidates from the jokers.

There is one thing I’ll miss about Iowa: the people.

Iowans take mighty seriously their charge of vetting potential leaders of the free world. In fact, you could argue they take ittooseriously: It’s not uncommon to encounter a caucus-goer who has seen each and every candidate in person, holding off on making a decision until—like a dairy farmer assessing a prize-winning heifer—they could assess the contenders in the flesh. The more time you spend in Iowa, the more you appreciate how the people here stay politically informed both as a point of communal relevance and civic duty.

Iowans are a great bunch to talk with if you want to understand what high-information voters think about the election, and the state of the country more generally. And among Iowans, I’ve found there’s an even more selective group that is hyper-informed about American politics: Uber drivers.

Don’t laugh. There’s a reason journalists love to share Twitter vignettes from backseats all across the country, and it’s not because we’re lazy. The drivers we encounter make up a fascinating cross-section of the electorate: young and old, blue collar and white collar, black and white and brown. One thing they have in common: They are cogs in a gig-employment machine that, more than most American industries, scrambles our notions of cultural, ideological and socioeconomic belonging. The other thing these people have in common is they spendlotsof time in their vehicles, which often translates intolotsof time listening to talk of current events, either by radio or podcast or conversation with their passengers.

If Uber drivers tend to be more politically informed than your average worker, Iowa’s Uber drivers are the most politically informed on Earth. Talk to enough of them and you’re liable to learn a lot about how people are living and how they’re voting—and why.

“Let me guess,”JOHN FISHERsaid as I climbed into his cherry red Chrysler 200. “You want to talk about the caucuses?”

Yup—and apparently, I wasn’t the only one.

With thousands of journalists, campaign staffers, volunteers, activists and curious onlookers descending on Des Moines, Fisher’s car had turned into something of a traveling panel show. He liked to let the guests make their pitch, on behalf of a candidate or maybe a specific policy proposal, before introducing a programming twist.

“Finally, I’ll say that I’m a Trump supporter, and it’s dead silence for a minute,” he said, laughing. “But then we just keep talking. They’re still very kind. So, I’m kind to them in return. They don’t get pushy or anything. When they leave, I always wish them and their candidates the best of luck.”

Fisher, a 66-year-old Des Moines native, started driving after he retired from the insurance industry in 2015. He likes the extra income; even more, he likes the experiences with new people. “I’ll listen to anybody. I’m not a right-winger. I’m barely a Republican. I just like Trump,” he said. “These Democrats, they’re really not doing themselves any favors with impeachment and the way they treat him. I just don’t understand it. Why drag our country through this?”

He paused. “Then again, I only watch Fox News, so maybe I’m only getting one side of things.”

I asked if there were any Democrats he could support. “Pete Buttigieg. I like that he’s young and energetic. And I like his supporters, too,” Fisher said. “I actually like Tulsi Gabbard, too, every time I hear from her. But then you have these old dogs— Sanders, Warren, Biden. They need to get out of the way.”

Fisher said that national security—particularly “the drugs and the violence coming across the border” with Mexico—has long been his priority at the ballot box. But there’s another concern that weighs on him more and more: the diverging economic fortunes of Americans based on where they live. “Right now things are very good in a place like Des Moines,” he says. “But the rural areas are drying up. The farms are being bought out by large corporations. The young kids are all moving to the cities. That’s a bad sign for the rest of the state.”

CASEY FORCEknows something about rural Iowa.

Raised in the town of Lovilia (population: 512), a speck of turf located 30 miles southwest of Oskaloosa, she felt the calling of the world. Force worked overseas as an international business consultant, first in Japan and then in Russia, unsure of whether she’d ever live in the U.S. again. It was only after a visit home for the holidays, and a chance encounter with her future husband, that Force returned to Iowa. But small-town life wasn’t an option. Now 40 years old, with two children, ages 2 and 7, Force works in special education at a high school in south Des Moines.

“And I drive six days a week,” she said. “Usually it’s just a handful of rides here and there, before school and once the kids are asleep at night. This paid for our last trip to Disney World. We’re going to take another one soon.”

Force voted for Hillary Clinton in the last general election. But she has never caucused before. This will be her first time—if she can work up the courage to participate. “I’m super intimidated by this whole thing,” she said.

The other hang-up: Force still hadn’t settled on a candidate. “I’ve just been listening. Last night, I had some Bernie Sanders volunteers; they offered me yard signs. The night before it was the Trump rally; I drove a lot of people from there. Then there was a girl I picked up from WalMart who was all emotional because she couldn’t decide who to caucus for. I’m really busy with work and family and everything, so I’ve been interested in hearing what everyone else thinks and why.”

Ultimately, Force said, she was leaning toward Buttigieg. But she’s prepared to vote for any Democrat who’s on the ballot in November. “I’m an educator, and we need money for our schools, and I just know we’re not going to get it without Democrats in power,” she said.

Force worries about her children and whether they’ll be able to afford college. She also worries about the low-income students at her school; two of them were recently lost to gun violence in a triple homicide that shook Des Moines. Above all, however, she worries about “the decision-making at the top” of the U.S. government.

“I still think back to that [Access Hollywood] tape, and how the reporter on the bus with him got fired and Trump became president,” Force said. “I think about the #MeToo movement. I think about the racial episodes. And it just seems—I thought we’d gotten somewhere as a country with Obama in office. I guess not.”

Behind the wheelof his grey Hyundai Sonata later that night,GEOFFREY O.sounds no less optimistic.

“I don’t believe in our politics anymore,” he says, shaking his head. “They are all lying to us. Like Andrew Yang – where is he getting that money from? And how much is he giving himself before I get my share? And Bernie Sanders, he talks about paying for everyone’s education—but how? Where is he getting that money from?”

Geoffrey, who was born in the U.S. but raised in Uganda, thought he was leaving dysfunctional and corrupt governance behind when he returned to America a few years ago to attend college. But that idealism has diminished. On one side, he says, he sees a Democratic Party that makes unrealistic promises. On the other side he sees Trump.

“I respect that he is the president. But he is detached from reality,” said Geoffrey. (He asked not to be identified by his last name because it’s not hard to find an African migrant in Iowa.) “Trump does not want immigrants in this country. But America a big place. It needs immigrants to help solve its problems. People are running away from their countries because they don’t want to die, and we don’t let them into this country? He is anti-immigrant, and the people surrounding him are anti-immigrant.”

Geoffrey holds out some hope that things will change, that people will become “exhausted” with the extremes and look for middle ground. But he’s not holding his breath. Rather than concern himself with politics he’s hard at work, driving his sedan eight to ten hours a day, all week long, hoping to make $150 each day to pay for his undergraduate degree.

Geoffrey longs for the notions of the idyllic America of his youth. But he worries this country is “no longer welcoming to people like me.” Moreover, he worries that it isn’t safe. “When I drive my Uber I just pray there are no shootings that happen,” he said. “That is my greatest prayer: I hope I don’t meet someone holding a gun.”

JOSEPH GAYhas his own concerns about the state of the country. But he has a unique solution: Make Trump the permanent president.

“I think Trump is the best thing that has come along in America in a long, long time,” said Gay, 68, as he steers his blue Ford Ecosport through the Des Moines suburbs. “And I think all the trouble they’re giving him, it’s just criminal. They said they were going to impeach him even before he took office. It’s just not right. He’s the only president I’ve ever seen keep his word, keep his promises.”

Gay’s own political evolution is recognizable: a Democrat until Ronald Reagan came along, then a conservative-leaning independent, and now, a full-fledged, no-turning-back MAGA enthusiast.

“You know, if it wasn’t for Trump, I might not even be a Republican anymore. The Republicans stopped caring about me a long time ago,” he said. “I wouldn’t vote for Democrats either. Honestly, I would just stop voting altogether. I really wish Trump could serve three terms—or even longer. Let him serve as long as he wants. The guy, he’s just—he’s an amazing person.”

Is there anything that Gay dislikes about the president?

“Oh, once in a while he says things that are goofy, and it’s like, ‘C’mon Donald, you didn’t need to say that,’” Gay chuckled. “But I do like his sense of humor. ThePocahontasthing, that was funny. Childish, maybe. But still funny.”

The thing is, Gay explained, he doesn’t have time to waste being offended. There are more immediate problems. Having worked odd jobs most of his life—mostly involving construction and delivery—Gay has no pension, no savings, no nest-egg for retirement. He drives for Uber three days a week and trades shifts with his wife, who drives the same car another three days a week. They do this to supplement their Social Security, which isn’t enough to cover the cost of living. “I could have made better choices to where I had a better job and more income to retire with. But this is where we’re at,” he said. “Uber works pretty well for us, even though I don’t think they should take as much of a cut as they do.”

Gay’s biggest concern for himself and his wife is getting sick. “We don’t have a retirement thing, and medicine is expensive, so money would get pretty tight,” he said. “I’ve got some things I could probably sell. But still.”

And the biggest concern he has for America? “The Democratic Party. The socialism,” he said. “I can’t tell you a single one I’d vote for anymore. They’re all socialists now. It’s dangerous.”

She’s two decades from retirement age,butANGELA GOLDBERGis driving the Uber because she doesn’t want to wind up like Gay.

A 45-year-old mother of four, Golberg has a part-time marketing job that keeps her busy anywhere from 15 to 25 hours a week. But it’s not nearly enough. Not with three of her kids attending college. Not with this economy so unstable for people, like her, who don’t have advanced degrees. Not with the endless political disruption and all that it could entail.

“I’m nervous about Social Security. They keep talking about it as an ‘entitlement,’ but it’s not an entitlement. Ever since I was the age of 16, and you’re old enough to get your job at McDonald’s, I’ve been paying taxes into Social Security. And now they’re trying to claim it’s an entitlement,” she said.

To fortify her family’s income, and to add some cushion to her and her husband’s retirement plan, Golberg started driving for Uber. “In this area, I’ll be lucky to make $100 to $150 on Friday nights. Saturdays, I’ll be lucky to make about $250 if there’s a lot going on at night,” she explained. “But I’ve already hit $1,000 for this weekend, starting Thursday night, because Trump was here. This has been a wonderful few days.”

Golberg was glad to see the president come to town, even as she wrestles with her decision to vote for him in 2016.

“I liked him, I liked his track record, so I voted for him,” she said. “But I can tell you I don’t like his behavior and the way he goes about things. He’s lacking in social graces, I guess would be the best way to say it. And he is a bully.”

Golberg said she’s leaning toward voting for a Democrat in 2020, but wouldn’t be participating in the caucuses. (“I don’t really know how it works.”) As for who that Democrat might be, she’s got no idea. Joe Biden “just tries to take credit for being Barack Obama’s vice president, but that was Obama making the decisions.” Elizabeth Warren “I’m not quite sure about—not sure she can beat Trump.”

She seemed most taken with Buttigieg. “I think Pete would have a real chance. He talks about what he believes in, what his plans are, how he’s going to do it, whether or not it’s accomplishable. I like him,” she said. “And he doesn’t slam anyone. I don’t like when the candidates slam one another. It’s really distasteful. Let Trump do that.”

CRAIG CARTERknows he shouldn’t laugh. But he just can’t help himself.

“This guy, the president,” Carter said, “He entertains the old farmer in me.”

While cruising through West Des Moines in a black Ford Escape, Carter, 70, described the moment three years ago when he knew Uber was right for him. After running a successful asphalt paving business for many years, he had finally retired—only to find his wife annoyed at his constant presence around the house.

“The night I decided to become an Uber driver, my wife was looking at me in that sweet, Christian way of hers,” he said. “She told me she never thought I’d live this long – it was clear I needed to get out of the house and do something to leave her alone and prolong our marital bliss of 48 years. So I did.”

These days, Carter said, two things provide his “comic relief”: Uber rides and Donald Trump. Sometimes they overlap.

“Oh, I’ve had a whole lot of caucus rides lately. Everyone wants to talk about The Donald,” Carter said. “I had a worker for Biden, like a month ago, and he wouldn’t stop talking. So, I warned him, ‘Here in the Midwest we don’t talk about politics, sex or religion.’ And he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘For the next month, you’re going to get a pass on the politics.’ Man, was he ever right.”

Carter said he’s glad to have civilized political conversations with strangers in the car—because he can’t have them at home anymore.

“My wife’s a Democrat, and we both woke up on Election Day with that McCauley Culkin look”—he slaps his cheeks—“ahhhh!” We couldn’t believe that he won. But you know, that shock faded for me. Not her. She still has that look every morning. Like she’s out for blood. … She bought herself a shirt, a pink shirt, with a little kitten holding an M-16 military rifle, and it says, ‘Grab this pussy, asshole.’ I’m serious.”

All humor aside, Carter said Trump’s crude nature has begun to wear on him—so much so that, after a lifetime of voting for Republicans, he’s open to voting for the Democratic nominee in 2020. The only catch?

“It’s gotta be Bernie,” Carter said, grinning. “Maybe he’s a socialist, I don’t know. I don’t want to put that label on him. But the truth is, I see myself in him. And he might be the man to do something near and dear to my heart: legalizing marijuana.”

That pipe dream aside, Carter said he’s coming around to Sanders’s trademark proposal: Medicare for All. When I asked what issue concerns him most, Carter pulled out his iPhone, opened up his photos, and toggled between two screenshots. They were taken from his account on the Walgreens pharmacy app. The first shot showed how much his heart medication cost with insurance: $2.18. The second showed the cost without insurance: $249.00.

“Seriously now,” he said. “When I see that, I just think to myself, how are we doing this to people?”

I met too many fascinatingIowa Uber drivers to recount: the old rich chap who drives for charity and gives cash tips to passengers down on their luck; the Malaysian immigrant who needs to push his dying Chevy 10 more months to have enough money saved to open his long-dreamed-about Asian market; the guy who placed strict no-political-talk rules on relationships with his closest friends, including a next-door-neighbor, in order to preserve relationships.

I didn’t meet any Trump voters who were resolved to abandon the GOP this November. Nor did I meet any Democrats who threatened to sit out the election if a certain candidate—say, Bernie Sanders—wins the nomination. Partisans were, pretty reliably,partisan. There were no dramatic, road-to-Damascus resolutions to be witnessed on the streets of Des Moines. Despite unprecedented political disruption, people are preparing for some variation of the same binary choice they’ve been making their entire adult lives.

The prevailing sentiment among the people with a front-row seat to the greatest political show on Earth was discomfort. Something isn’t right in our country—that much came across, unsolicited, in every conversation with every person of every possible political persuasion. This continues to be the most obvious and contradictory feeling of union in America circa 2020: Despite living in a time of nearly unrivaled peace and prosperity, the one thing that unites us is that nobody feels very good about it.

It’s time to move on from Iowa. There are so many more stories to tell.

If you’ve got places you think I should visit, people you think I should meet, drop me a line: [email protected]

Your old friend,

Tim

Read More

#Anxiety #Foreign #Politics #states

[douglasacogan]

"What If Ordinary Juries Were More Like Impeachment Juries?"

The question in the title of this post is from this great new piece from The Appeal by Sarah Lustbader.  The piece thoughtfully builds off this post of mine from the past weekend titled "Some GOP Senators, fully aware of the mandatory minimum sentence, embrace a form of jury nullification to justify acquittal of Prez Trump."  Here is how it concludes:

Rubio and Alexander are probably trying to hold on to their jobs; it’s hard to believe that they are taking a principled stance about mandatory minimums and sentencing. And yet, there may be a valuable insight to be taken from the politicized nature of the impeachment process. Ordinary juries are told over and over just how limited their role is in the larger criminal legal process.  They are told that they simply decide whether the prosecution has proved its case beyond a reasonable doubt, and they must give no thought as to the potential consequences of that decision.  In most jurisdictions, the jury is not told the potential sentence if they choose to convict and are forbidden from researching the question.  Once, after losing a trial, I spoke to a few of the jurors who told me in no uncertain terms that if they had known the severity of the sentence awaiting my client, they never would have voted to convict.

Often, jurors report feeling like “cogs” in a “machine” whose sole aim is to punish people as frictionlessly as possible.  Paul St. Louis, a Virginia resident, was on a federal jury that found a man, Frederick Turner, guilty of drug offenses. “It wasn’t easy to arrive at this verdict, and the result of our deliberations gave us no pleasure,” he later wrote in the Washington Post. “A few months later, I found out the result of our verdict was worse than I expected: Turner, a meth addict with no prior criminal convictions, received a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years on two counts of having a firearm while dealing drugs. I was astonished; we had no idea that we were sending someone to prison for four decades.” Less than a year into that sentence, Turner killed himself in prison. “Today,” St. Louis wrote, “I feel like a pawn used to send a man down a path that led to his unjustified death.” If he could go back in time, St. Louis says he would nullify because the “sentence he received was simply unjust.”

Seth Stevenson, writing in Slate, recounts his deep regret at reaching a guilty verdict in a 1998 case. “It was the language of the law that hemmed me in. It seemed strict and unyielding.” Stevenson also noticed that cabining people’s roles throughout the system helped make the conviction more likely, and seemed to relieve each player of moral responsibility. “None of these professionals felt they’d had much control over the case’s outcome.  The prosecutor who tried a minor as an adult, the judge who sentenced that teenager to decades in prison even though she felt he wasn’t maximally ‘culpable’ in the crime, and the defense attorney who didn’t second-guess any tactical choices on behalf of a losing client — they all felt they’d done what the system required of them.”  Both the defense attorney and the judge “reminded me that the onus of the verdict is on the jury. I saw them as the machine’s operators and myself as one of the gears they were turning.  They told me I’d been the one in control the whole time.”

At the very least, an impeachment trial forces its jurors to take responsibility for their decision.  This is actually closer to the way juries functioned in the U.S. in the 19th century.  “Between 1880 and 1930, states and municipalities used law to increase governmental controls over the full range of nineteenth-century avenues for democratic participation,” law professor Tabatha Abu El-Haj writes in a 2011 law review article. “Prior to that, the practice of democratic politics in the United States was less structured by law.” Juries, she writes, “were widely understood to have a legitimate political function and were insulated from judicial second-guessing.” But at the end of the 19th century, “long-standing efforts to limit the criminal jury to the status of a mere fact finder succeeded … putting an end to the republican political conception of the jury.”

It is clear, though, that this goal is still floating around somewhere in the notion of jury service.  As Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the Supreme Court in the 1991 case Powers v. Ohio, by providing an “opportunity for ordinary citizens to participate in the administration of justice,” the jury trial “preserves the democratic element of the law” and “places the real direction of society in the hands of the governed.”

Prior related post:

Some GOP Senators, fully aware of the mandatory minimum sentence, embrace a form of jury nullification to justify acquittal of Prez Trump

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247011 https://sentencing.typepad.com/sentencing_law_and_policy/2020/02/what-if-ordinary-juries-were-more-like-impeachment-juries.html via http://www.rssmix.com/

[actutrends]

How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate

Illustration by Israel Vargas; Images: AP; Getty; Harvard University; Wikimedia Commons

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.—He wasn’t expected to win. It was a surprise to some that he even had run. But on the evening of December 5, 2002, in a sweaty, crowded classroom adjacent to the main lecture space at Harvard’s school of government named after John F. Kennedy, Peter Buttigieg, 20 years old, stood before 50 or so of his peers as one of two people seeking to be the president of the Student Advisory Council at the university’s esteemed Institute of Politics.

From practically the moment he arrived he had been ubiquitous at the college’s premier political organization, where undergraduates stoke their appetites for public service and strivers hobnob with the biggest names in politics to launch careers to come. Buttigieg was by all accounts a standout among standouts: thoughtful, articulate, poised and mature. But he was reserved, too, a bookish, diligent wonk who didn’t immediately register as one of the campus’ overt and charismatic climbers who more nakedly considered themselves future members of Congress or residents of the White House.

Now, though, here he was, making his pitch for a post that was for a politically inclined student the rough equivalent of an aspiring journalist getting to be editor of The Harvard Crimson. In a short but forceful speech, Buttigieg told them he was “running because the IOP has the most potential of any organization we’ve ever encountered.” He said, “We want to look forward, not inward.” Less public but no less key to his candidacy, Buttigieg shrewdly had made private, back-channel overtures among a group of leaders and influencers who were especially involved at the IOP. Managing, too, to present himself as the candidate of change because of the reformist, left-leaning company he kept, he nonetheless had brought with him an unlikely running mate, not one of his friends and fellow Democratic political junkies but a woman who was a Republican—a canny, pragmatic pick, in the estimation of many of those who were there, to try to widen his coalition of support.

And when the votes were counted, the winner was not the favorite—another unusually eager IOP participant, a determined worker in her own right, a woman who would go on to success as a trusted aide to two of the most famous women in politics. It was Buttigieg. To many who cast votes that night, the election marked a transformational moment—the debut of a young man who was steeped in history and political theory but had yet to actually apply those ideas in political combat.

“That election,” Heather Woodruff Grizzle, a year older than Buttigieg, who was the outgoing SAC vice president and is currently a strategist in New York, told me, “demonstrated that Peter really had the chops to do politics.”

As Buttigieg, the youngest of the Democratic field of (still) 15 hopefuls, has leapfrogged far more seasoned opponents to settle into the competition’s top tier, he has begun to take sharper attacks from both veteran politicians and his party’s progressive flank—accusations and insinuations that he’s a line-jumper, an opportunist trying to play at once the inside game and the outside game, glossing over finite qualifications with calmly delivered pledges of unity and an airy vision of the future.

People who knew him here at Harvard observed some of the earliest indications of this instinct for the political middle. But they also saw a serious-minded student coming of age at a time when politics suddenly mattered more than it had in perhaps a generation—and whose ideas were fashioned in response to a genuinely disruptive historical moment.

He got to Harvard in a year that pulsed with the unprecedented and highly divisive 2000 election and its contentious aftermath. His sophomore year began with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Throughout his junior and senior years, Buttigieg, along with the country generally, grappled with the global stakes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Buttigieg put the finishing touches on a capstone thesis about American foreign policy and good intentions gone bad, Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in his dorm room across the street from the IOP, activated as thefacebook.com a website that would change the way citizens organize themselves socially and politically. And at the end of that last semester, Buttigieg left amid a presidential election many viewed as a crucial referendum on America’s complicated attitudes about freedom, security and democracy. “People felt the importance,” IOP staffer Eric Andersen said, “of what was going on between 9/11 and really up through the election of 2004.”

It was this very particular meld of time and place, based on dives into the archives of the university and the IOP and more than 40 interviews with Buttigieg’s friends, roommates, classmates, faculty and staff, that forged the most enduring piece of his political education.

“The thing that most stood out during that time is that we saw, particularly with the Iraq War, that politics has consequences,” said Jonathan Chavez, one year younger than Buttigieg and one of his good friends from the IOP. “That your voting or not voting is not just something that is sort of this game. That there really are sort of real-world dire consequences to action. And I think that really was something that stuck with him.”

From the IOP to his digs in Holworthy Hall in Harvard Yard and then Leverett House overlooking the Charles River to august, red-brick academic buildings to back booths in dive bars like Charlie’s Kitchen, Buttigieg was, said Jim Kloppenberg, one of his favorite and most influential professors, “sorting out how he thinks about politics.”

“A lot of his framework and intellectual scaffolding,” said Previn Warren, one of Buttigieg’s closest friends, “was shaped during those years.”

Buttigieg, Harvard College Class of 2004, would go on to be a Rhodes Scholar, a subordinate cog in a global consultancy, a reservist in the United States Navy, the mayor of a just barely medium-sized Midwestern city, and now the principal of an implacably precocious presidential candidacy. All those stops along the way, of course, lent him experiences that have animated his long-shot ascent in the bulging field. They also have served as lightning-rod sources of criticism from the progressive left for his “ best-and-bright-ness,” a frictionless Ivy League track, those critics say, that has produced a platform of guarded prescriptions for change—Medicare For All … Who Want It; free college … but not for everybody—and a general distrust of conflict that exacerbates political fissures. But nothing molded him and his worldview more permanently than his four years here. At a moment when many in his generation turned away from a political system they saw as unresponsive at best and unscrupulous at worst, he not only stayed in the fray but upped his involvement. And this sensibility that has been surprisingly appealing to more middle-of-the-road Democrats in states like Iowa and New Hampshire emerged during his time here.

He started in these elite environs as an untested academic. He ended as much an orator and operator, less theoretician, more fledgling politician. He railed against the timidity of the Democratic Party coming out of 2000, then embraced its safest, most centrist candidate in 2004. He spoke out against the Iraq invasion but would join a military becoming mired in two wars. The Buttigieg increasingly evident on the campaign trail today, politically liberal, tonally and temperamentally moderate, by predisposition an idealist and institutionalist but ultimately a pragmatist, came into sharp relief for the first time through what he did at Harvard.

Had Al Gore, not George W. Bush, won in 2000, Buttigieg has said, he “happily” would have become “a literary critic at some university.” That, of course, is not what happened, and so that’s not what he did. Instead, that fall, on the fourth floor of Holworthy, his roommates told me, Buttigieg cut out from the pages of the New York Times the red and blue map of the results of the election and taped it to the wall by the door.

“He was so fascinated by it,” Steve Koh said.

“I remember seeing that map a lot,” Pete Schwartzstein said.

And as November stretched into December, as people from coast to coast argued over Florida’s hanging chads and the popular vote versus the Electoral College and the Supreme Court made Bush the 43rd president, the map on the wall in the dorm was a constant graphic reminder of “this unnerving, unsettling sense,” said John Beshears, “that, gosh, this democratic process that we rely on is kind of fragile, and subject to these forces that you didn’t learn about in high school or earlier when you were talking about democracy.”

Buttigieg already was keenly interested in politics, but the remarkable events of his first semester injected a fresh energy and urgency. He quickly became a regular at the IOP. A brainy only child in South Bend, Indiana, he had grown up a JFK devotee, and the Institute of Politics acts as a kind of hands-on memorial to the assassinated president and Harvard grad. As a high school senior Buttigieg had won an essay contest, too, commissioned by the JFK library. It was about, of all people, Bernie Sanders—but Buttigieg admired Sanders, he made plain in what he wrote, not so much for his more radical roots or even the courage to self-identify as a “socialist” but for his attempts at “conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill.” Sanders, as the teenaged Buttigieg saw it, was by that stage of his career trying to change the system from within. And the institution within the institution of Harvard that Buttigieg plugged into first and the most was the JFK-inspired IOP.

Students who were juniors and the most active in the organization couldn’t help but notice him. “I remember thinking that he was very smart and then also gracious in a way that not every college student is,” Erin Ashwell said.

“I clearly remember kind of two types of people at the Institute of Politics,” Eugene Krupitsky said. “There were the kinds of people that walked in the door and you knew they were there because they were going to run for office someday and they were there to kind of learn it all and make connections.” These were the sorts of undergrads who incorporated into their AOL Instant Messenger handles the letters FPOA, for “future president of America,” one member of the Class of 2005 recalled. And at the IOP, said one student treasurer, there were “more wannabe senators than you could shake a stick at.” But the second sort of person, added Krupitsky, was someone like Buttigieg. “His approach, quite honestly, initially,” he said, “was really very much about intellectual curiosity.”

Buttigieg was a history and literature major, “Hist and Lit” in Harvard lingo, in part because of his parents—his father was an English professor, and his mother is a linguist—but also because “anything else I wanted to study,” he would explain, “I could study it through the guise of history.” In some sense, though, his most significant syllabus was the constant, high-profile programming at the IOP. Jason Sauer called it, “one part coed fraternity, one part political fantasy camp.” The forums that year included “ The Essence of Leadership,” “ The Challenges of the New Economy,” and “ The Future of the Supreme Court,” as well as an all but rolling seminar on the 2000 election—taught variously by scholars, strategists, combatants and candidates to come. And that year’s fellows—the rotating reporters and political and policy professionals brought in to be instructors and mentors—included Rick Davis, the manager of John McCain’s just-wrapped-up presidential bid, and Donna Brazile, who had run the show for Gore.

Davis taught a study group about the McCain campaign and campaigns in general—“polling, strategy, mobilization, legal, messaging,” he told me. It drew more than 100 students per session. One of them was Buttigieg. “I recall him being very eager, smart and motivated,” Davis said.

Buttigieg and other IOP enthusiasts treated it like their own little incubator of ideas.

“This wasn’t a place where we were just sort of learning about the past or talking about ideas in the abstract,” said Jason Semine, a classmate and friend of Buttigieg. “We were learning about events as they were occurring … so it was sort of a living, breathing thing.”

At a forum, in February of that year, Buttigieg had a question for Ted Sorensen, one of JFK’s closest advisers and speechwriters. Wearing a baggy, gray fleece pullover, Buttigieg waited in line to speak into a standing mic. His question, trying to tie together his twin interests of history and politics, was the last of the evening.

“My name is Peter Buttigieg. I’m a freshman here at the college. I have a sort of historical question for Mr. Sorensen,” he said.

“There’s this great scene toward the end of the movie,” he continued, referring to “ Thirteen Days,” about the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had just come out. “You’ve been asked to write two speeches, one which was actually used and one in the event that there are [nuclear] airstrikes, and you’re explaining that you can’t even imagine how you would have explained airstrikes. … I wonder, as somebody who studies both history and politics, if you dared to prepare a way to explain airstrikes, and how you would have gone about doing that.”

“That’s a very interesting question,” Sorensen said. The answer given by Sorensen, who died in 2010, is worth watching in its entirety. It elicited ripples of laughter and applause. For Buttigieg, the takeaway, he would say through a spokesman going on two decades later, was clear: “the importance of words.”

The day before the start of his sophomore year, the World Trade Center towers fell, first the one, then the other, and Buttigieg and his roommates sat on their couches in their Leverett House suite and watched the TV between a pair of windows looking out on the Charles. “Stunned,” said Schwartzstein. “Angry,” said Koh.

Buttigieg’s friends say it changed him. If the outcome of the election of the year before had precipitated thorny questions concerning domestic politics, September 11, 2001, broadened significantly the scope and the stakes.

It “dominated the psychology,” Buttigieg would say, of the rest of his time in college.

“It fueled Peter,” Schwartzstein told me.

At the IOP, where the forum fare that year featured a question-and-answer assembly with Bill Clinton, discussions about the future of the Democratic and Republican parties and efforts to understand an utterly altered world (“ Public Service in the Aftermath of 9.11.01,” “ Afghanistan: A Turning Point for America,” “ Should Iraq be Next?”), Buttigieg turned his avidity into a leadership role. He became in December the chair of the Student Advisory Council’s community action committee, the goal of which was to foster connections between the IOP and the student body and the area in general. It suited Buttigieg. It was not, however, considered a spot from which to mount a run for SAC president.

“There were certain positions in the IOP that set you up to be president, and they were typically the leaders of certain big committees,” said Semine—like the one he was in charge of, forums, or fellows or study groups. But community action wasn’t one of them. It would be, said Jonathan Chavez, “like being the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and saying, ‘I’m going to run for president.’”

In addition to his community action tasks, Buttigieg was a project co-chair of the group of students that worked with pollster John Della Volpe on the IOP’s annual national survey of the views of politics and public service of college undergrads. (Also part of that group: Elise Stefanik, now the Republican congresswoman from New York who’s become one of President Trump’s most vociferous defenders.) Two of Buttigieg’s closest friends—Previn Warren, who is an attorney and a legal adviser now to his campaign, and Ganesh Sitaraman, a Vanderbilt law professor and longtime adviser to Elizabeth Warren—used the data from a series of polls to write and edit a book. Invisible Citizens, published in 2003, is a glimpse into much of what stimulated the friends’ running politics talk after the attacks.

“While September 11 initiated a noticeable spike in levels of civic awareness among high-school and college-aged Americans, it seems disturbingly clear that this interest is fading more rapidly with every passing day,” they wrote. “Young people have fallen back into an abyss of disinterest,” they said. So much had changed, but Buttigieg and his progressive friends were frustrated by what had not—“systemic problems,” they said in the book, “corporate malfeasance,” money’s outsize sway in politics, and “a choking centrism guised as bipartisanship.”

This wasn’t all Buttigieg was worried about.

He brooded over the coming war in Iraq.

And he was frustrated, too, by the Democrats’ general passivity, which had emerged in the wake of the 2000 election defeat, grown after September 11—and now, as the country headed toward midterms, become even more deferential to the creeping hawkishness in Washington.

“In those early Bush administration years, and after 9/11, certainly,” Jason Sauer told me, “he was someone who sort of was very interested in kind of getting the Democratic Party off its back foot to be a more assertive Democratic Party.”

“The Democrats were identifying themselves by what they oppose, rather than what they support,” said Andy Frank, an IOP friend, telling me it “deeply frustrates Peter—and has for a long time.”

“Democrats,” Buttigieg would write, “unsure of themselves, were afraid to sound like an opposition at all, and many carefully avoided opposing the Iraq War for fear of looking unpatriotic.”

Increasingly active with the Harvard College Democrats as well, Buttigieg became its internships director and the head of the subcommittee that supported the gubernatorial candidacy of Robert Reich—in this race pointedly siding with the cerebral, more liberal option.

In his “Hist and Lit” seminar, one of his instructors noticed small but significant changes in Buttigieg. He always was confident without coming off as arrogant, Rebecca Noel thought, and over the course of the year he turned notably “more talkative,” too.

That summer, back in Indiana, looking for ground-level political experience, Buttigieg volunteered for Democrat Jill Long Thompson’s ill-fated congressional campaign. The first weekend of September, just before the start of school, he hosted Sauer for a visit. Sauer had traveled from his home in Kentucky. Buttigieg took Sauer to Notre Dame Stadium to watch the Fighting Irish football team beat Purdue, and they had dinner at his parents’ book-filled house. Democrats from more conservative locales, the Harvard IOP friends sat on the patio in Buttigieg’s back yard and talked. “We stayed up all night and talked about sort of our concerns about the future of the Democratic Party in Kentucky and Indiana,” Sauer said. “We both sort of had at the forefront of our minds the increasing struggle as Democrats in red states.”

Becoming a political actor, though, and not just a thinker, took some coaxing. That’s Clarke Tucker’s recollection. Because that fall, he met Buttigieg in Annenberg Hall, in a café in the basement. Tucker was the president of the Student Advisory Council, and Buttigieg, now a junior, still was the chair of the lower-profile committee for community action.

“Did he show up burning to become SAC president? I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Tucker told me. Tucker is an attorney in Little Rock, Arkansas, a Democrat and a former state representative who ran unsuccessfully for Congress last year. Back then, though, he gauged Buttigieg’s desire to compete for the IOP’s top student office. “He didn’t come to me, or anybody else that I’m aware of, saying, ‘What can I do to win this election?’” he said. “I thought he would be a good leader for the IOP, and I did what I could to convince him to run. … Convince is probably a strong word. But I definitely encouraged and worked to get him to run.”

Once he was in, though, he ran to win. And on that evening of December 5, 2002—in the packed classroom, brimming with flushed-face intensity and smelling like scarfed-down pizza pies—Buttigieg mustered a speechmaking skill that was striking to people who had known him for two-plus years.

“There is nothing less than a crisis now in national youth engagement in politics,” Buttigieg said, a reference to his work on the polling project.

“The single biggest challenge is getting the arms and legs at the IOP to be part of the body,” he said, a nod to his community action work.

“He won over the room,” said his classmate Theresa House.

But the overarching theme of his speech, and the argument for his candidacy, I heard over and over from people who were there, was change. He could make that case partly because of something his friends had called “The Proposal.”

“I remember there being a faction,” said Heather Woodruff Grizzle, naming Sitaraman and Warren—and Joe Green, too, the gregarious, Hawaiian shirt-wearing roommate of then unknown Mark Zuckerberg. And then there was Buttigieg. “Peter, Ganesh and Previn came forward with ‘The Proposal,’” a student who also was heavily involved with the IOP told me.

This proposal advocated essentially for more open, less cliquish elections and ramped-up student say-so and power within the structure of the IOP—less busywork and fewer administrative chores, more reading and writing and assisting staff and professors on research. The manifesto, which had circulated to acclaim from some but the exasperation of others, contributed to the reputations of its authors. “Ganesh, Previn and Joe were all sort of agents of change, so to speak,” said Jason Semine. And Buttigieg, I was told, “was with them.”

As much as he was aligned, though, with the ringleaders of this reform effort, Buttigieg wasn’t seen as an agitator. He was lauded by nearly everybody at the IOP, then and now, for his deliberative, understated nature. He was, though, a believer in a more head-down inside game. In the run-up to the vote for leadership of SAC, Buttigieg displayed his talent for that inside game by approaching Semine—the forum committee chair who by virtue of that role had a relationship with a lot of underclassmen. In other words: persuadables. “And he wasn’t hiding the ball here,” Semine said of Buttigieg. “He was pretty clear: ‘Hey, I’ve got this election, I need to drum up votes…’” For Semine, who knew Buttigieg well, it was unexpected, and “pretty savvy,” he said.

This, people thought, was pretty savvy, too: When it came time to pick a running mate, Buttigieg pivoted away from the lefty, rabble-rousing connotations of “The Proposal.” Betsy Sykes was a Republican. The cross-party-lines pairing wasn’t that unusual—these were nonpartisan elections, and Tucker’s vice president was Woodruff Grizzle, also a Republican—but what else Sykes brought was her status as the chair of the fellows committee, another one of the primary leadership feeders. “Having Betsy as his running mate I think very much helped,” said Jonathan Chavez. Now, in the rough contours of this tight-knit electorate, Buttigieg had the votes to his left—plus more than he would have had to his right.

Buttigieg, too, was liked by the staff. The adult professionals who ran the operations of the IOP didn’t have SAC votes. But that’s not to say their approval didn’t carry some weight. And Buttigieg could be a measured intermediary between the two groups.

“You had all these really smart kids around you who had every idea in the world, and he was always somebody I could go talk to, to try and get a good read on what was accurate and what was not accurate in terms of what we were likely to face,” Dan Glickman, the former congressman from Kansas who by then was the director of the IOP, told me. “Cathy and I used to talk about that,” said Glickman, referring to Cathy McLaughlin, then the executive director of the IOP, now the executive director for the Biden Institute. “Whenever we had an issue, she’d say, ‘Well, go talk to Pete.’”

Buttigieg’s opponent in the election, meanwhile, was Caroline Adler, “kind of like a Hillary Clinton type,” said House—intelligent, industrious, ultra-prepared. “ Tracy Flick,” said Chavez. Since Harvard, Adler, now Adler Morales, has worked for Clinton (on her 2008 presidential campaign and in the State Department) and for Michelle Obama (in the White House and still as her communications director). In December 2002, she was “the favorite going in,” Tucker said. But Buttigieg won, and Adler, according to a close friend, was “devastated.” Her allies stewed about unjust gender dynamics at work. She was ambitious, and showed it, and that was and remains, they said, dicier for a woman than for a man. Buttigieg, they said, along with pretty much everybody else I talked to for this story, was equally ambitious. He was just more subtle about it.

His first full month in his new position, at a forum with Senator Ted Kennedy, Buttigieg again approached the standing mic. Forum regulars had come to expect from Buttigieg a certain something.

“I was responsible for a thousand graduate students,” said Joseph McCarthy, a Kennedy School dean at the time, “but I still noticed Peter, which is rare. … He would ask very searching questions and yet do it very respectfully and thoughtfully and seemed older than his years.”

“You could hear the commas and the semicolons,” said McCarthy’s wife, Marina McCarthy, a Democratic consultant.

Here Buttigieg faced Kennedy. “It feels like a lot of your colleagues have adopted a posture of being for whatever the Republicans are for, only less,” he said ( around 51: 30). “The tax cuts—just a smaller one—and the war—just maybe not quite as quick as the Republican war. And then there are voices like your own, which are more forceful in opposition. I wonder if you see this as a split in the Democratic Party, and how you think, politically speaking, in the next few years your party’s going to sort out what it thinks the meaning of ‘opposition’ is.”

“Well,” Kennedy responded, “I would certainly expect that those differences would be clearer—I think they are getting clearer—as time goes on, certainly with regards to the involvement in Iraq.”

That certainly was true for Buttigieg. “Opposition” to him on this front meant standing up and speaking out. In the middle of March, a week before the invasion of Iraq, he gave a speech to some 350 people in front of the Science Center at an “Emergency Anti-War Rally.”

“Bush wants us to remember American security but forget that there might be consequences to American security if we alienate all of our allies,” Buttigieg said, according to coverage in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper. He pointed to the signature spire of nearby Memorial Church, where names of alums killed in action are carved in marble. “They remind us of a time,” he said, “when we had to take up arms against another nation, and there may be a day we have to again, but that day isn’t today.”

It was a risk—particularly, perhaps, for anybody at all interested in a future run for elected office. “It was not a consensus view on the campus,” Semine said. “A lot of our peers shared it, but it was not consensus.”

What it was, too, was another something new—even for the people who knew Buttigieg the best.

“That was probably the first time I saw him speak in public,” roommate Pete Schwartzstein said. “And he definitely took on a different persona—like a very commanding tone.”

“He was able to kind of straddle two worlds,” said Brian Goldsmith, a friend who was a year younger than Buttigieg (and popped up the other day on his list of bundlers). “One world was the very academic, intellectual world … but then the other thing he could do, which most of the sort of intellectuals at Harvard couldn’t, was that if he ever needed to give a speech, or summon himself for a public moment, he was just extraordinarily good at it.”

It was, thought Previn Warren, “a watershed moment.”

The summer before his senior year, Buttigieg was a research assistant for Harvard Kennedy School professor David King for a paper that would run in a book called Lights, Camera, Campaign! “When I look back on the students I have had,” King said when I met with him recently in his office, “he stands out as one of a handful. Like it’s a very, very, very small number. Truly outstanding. Really something. And you knew it within the first few days of spending time with him.” The paper Buttigieg helped King with dealt with Gore’s campaign in 2000 and specifically a whistle-stop bus-and-boat trip he took down the Mississippi River. Buttigieg crunched numbers from polls and campaign finance data that showed it helped Gore win Iowa and Wisconsin. “Kind of interesting,” King said with a smile, “that we wrote a paper about traveling through Iowa and generating votes.”

On and around campus that fall, Buttigieg and his roommates downed bottles of Sam Adams while rooting for the still-cursed Red Sox as they almost beat the hated Yankees in the baseball playoffs. At the same time, Buttigieg and his IOP mates followed along intently as Democrats mounted runs for president.

That year’s accelerating Democratic primary was not dissimilar to this year’s, a big, unwieldy field—albeit with “only” nine candidates—vying to oust an Oval Office occupant who had lost the popular vote and was seen by party aspirants and their supporters as inept and unfit. Buttigieg watched all the candidates come through the IOP for televised sit-downs with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, from John Edwards to John Kerry to Al Sharpton to Dick Gephardt to Howard Dean. Buttigeg asked Gephardt a question about the youth vote. He lamented in conversations with King in his office the mealy-mouthed way in which Kerry had talked about his faith in a debate. In spite of that, though, and even though his stance on the war might have made him more simpatico with Dean than with Kerry, Buttigieg opted nonetheless to support the Massachusetts senator.

“He was liberal,” Brian Goldsmith said, “but he was an institutionalist. And he was pragmatic. And I do remember him thinking Kerry would be a much better choice for Democrats than Howard Dean in 2004.”

In classrooms and libraries, Buttigieg worked to cap what would prove to be his Rhodes-worthy résumé, earning a perfect score on a project in professor Alyssa Goodman’s class, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.” The title of his project? “Young People and Politics.” Goodman remembers Buttigieg well. “Very serious,” she told me. “Very disciplined.”

He took two classes that year from Jim Kloppenberg—“Social Thought in Modern America” in the fall; in the spring, “Democracy in America and Europe: An Intellectual History.” Kloppenberg and I had lunch one day earlier this month at the Grafton Street gastropub across Massachusetts Avenue from Harvard Yard. Buttigieg was, he said, a frequent office hours visitor.

“I do think that those courses were helpful to him, as similar courses were to me, when I was an undergraduate,” Kloppenberg said, “just helping me become acquainted with the wider range of perspectives available in American history than the very narrow debate that is the focus of most mainstream politicians. And that was a period when people were wondering whether the wheels had come off”—the Bush presidency, September 11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Democrats seemingly not quite sure how to respond—“and so having a chance to think about that in relation to a century and a half of American thought was a useful thing for anybody who was interested in the public sphere as he was. … We were trying very much to sort out the relation between a commitment to democratic ideals, democratic politics, American history … and what should we do?”

That February, in his room in Kirkland House, Zuckerberg set up Facebook. Its vast political impact, of course, wouldn’t be apparent for years to come, but it was an immediate sensation among students at Harvard. Eric Lesser, a Massachusetts state senator who was a freshman at the time and already a Buttigieg mentee, told me he remembers being in Lamont Library that week. “I was just walking past the rows of desks,” he said, “and you just saw on, like, every laptop screen, Facebook, Facebook, Facebook.” Buttigieg was the 287th person to register for Facebook, but that was little more than an accident of proximity. Because most of that month he crashed to finish his thesis, due March 1. He fell asleep with books on his chest, his roommates recalled. He kept in a drawer in his desk a bottle of Maker’s Mark, “for emergencies,” he would quip. “The Quiet American’s Errand Into the Wilderness”—that’s what his thesis was called. It’s about the legacy of Puritan thought on the American political character and Graham Greene and Vietnam (with an eye on Iraq) and ultimately about good intentions gone bad.

He also as a senior was responsible for twice-a-month columns in the Crimson in which he tried to tie down some of the strands of thought that had animated his entire time in college. Many people might wince at their undergraduate writings, but these in retrospect can read like some skeletal blueprint of the race he’s running right now.

The “antidote to fear” is “hope,” he wrote in September 2003. He worried about the Democrats running for president. “Until someone emerges in the American public eye as a decisively hopeful candidate, strong enough to remind voters that fearmongering plays into the hands of terrorists, yet positive enough to offer a meaningful alternative, the Democrats risk continued, perhaps fatal paralysis.”

“The trouble is that tearing down the President is not enough to elect a new one,” he wrote in January 2004. “Bush-haters often complain of the Orwellian quality of this administration’s approach to the truth. I agree, but the next time the White House announces that two plus two equals five, it won’t be enough to gasp, ‘You’re lying!’ Someone has to give the right answer.”

“Until they can convey their plans for the future,” he wrote that March, “Democrats have a complaint, not an argument.”

In May, his final column sounded like a vow. “Compassion,” “strength,” “morality”—all words, and not just words, he thought, that Democrats needed to reclaim from Republicans. “Columns are short,” Buttigieg concluded. “But time is expansive, and I know of nothing more worthy to fill the approaching years than the project to turn these principles from cliched and overused words into effective political values.”

His roommates, classmates, professors and the staff at the IOP figured Peter Buttigieg would become an academic, or maybe work in Washington, but as a behind-the-scenes brain more than an out-front face. More Ted Sorensen than JFK.

As it turned out, of course, he would chart his climb, every step of the path, through institutions, working that first summer in Arizona and New Mexico as a researcher for the Kerry campaign, then go to Oxford, then McKinsey, then city hall in his hometown, and now … plausible shots at wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and then who knows from there.

But here back in 2004, as spring began to flip to summer, who could be sure? Classes were done. The weather was warm. Kloppenberg met Buttigieg for a drink in the back of Charlie’s Kitchen.

“Where are you going to go?” he asked. “What are you going to do?”

Nancy Scola contributed to this report.

The post How Harvard Made Pete Buttigieg the Moderate That Progressives Love to Hate appeared first on Actu Trends.

[bigbirdgladiator]

Right church, wrong pew, as we Catholic types are wont to say.As I tried to explain in Thursday’s column, Rand Paul is wrong to insist that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause demands that the so-called whistleblower be unmasked and publicly questioned. That does not mean, though, that Senator Paul’s general idea (that the “whistleblower” should testify) is wrong; nor does it mean that the Constitution’s guarantee of trial rights is irrelevant.The right to present a defense, also vouchsafed by the Sixth Amendment, is the guarantee on which Paul and the rest of the president’s supporters should focus.This comes with the same caveats elaborated on Thursday. The Constitution vests the House and Senate with plenary authority over their respective impeachment proceedings (the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment, the Senate to try the case). No court has the power to make either legislative chamber afford a particular quantum of due process.That said, impeachment is inherently political. Here, it has been launched when we are less than a year out from an election in which the American people are supposed determine for themselves whether the president should keep his job. By the time impeachment has run its course, we could be just a few months from Election Day. Apparently, though, the political class is intent on end-running the sovereign, attempting to remove President Trump on its own. To pull that off, it will need to convince the country that (a) it has grounds so extraordinarily serious that Trump must be ousted forthwith and (b) the procedures under which it impeached were fundamentally fair.I don’t think they have a prayer of demonstrating the former, such that two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would be spurred to remove the president. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent.) As for the latter concern, due process, there must be some and it must be meaningful -- not because it is legally mandated, but because it is politically essential.This is why many of the more pragmatic Democrats knew impeachment was a bad idea. As a practical matter, they don’t have close to the votes to remove, so it’s doomed to fail. The public knows it’s doomed to fail and may well resent Democrats for gratuitously putting the country through it. If Trump is denied due process, the proceedings will look like a kangaroo court and Democrats will be blamed. And if Trump is afforded due process, the case he presents may damage Democrats come November.We do not have a ton of prior impeachment experience to go on, but the presidents in each episode were afforded the right to present a defense -- both in the House proceedings leading to articles of impeachment and in the Senate trial.The right to present a defense is importantly different from the right to confront the House Democrats’ case for impeachment.As I noted in Wednesday’s column, the confrontation right emphasized by Senator Paul only allows the accused to cross-examine whatever witnesses the prosecution chooses to call in making its case. It does not give the accused a right to cross-examine every source who may have provided accusatory information, even sources whom the prosecutor does not call. Consequently, if the Democrats believe (as they do) that they could establish their case for articles of impeachment without summoning the so-called whistleblower as a witness, the president and his Republican defenders would have no right to call the whistleblower merely to cross-examine him on the statements made in his hearsay complaint.By contrast, the right to present a defense is more extensive. Broadly speaking, it empowers an accused to do two things: (1) pointedly discredit the prosecution’s version of events, whether through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses or presentation of the accused’s own witnesses, and (2) present the accused’s own witnesses and evidence in order to prove facts and theories that favor the accused and cast doubt on the worthiness of the prosecutor’s case.In most any criminal case, courts will give the accused a decent-sized berth to prove and argue that the accused was set up by the investigators; or that the investigative procedures used were underhanded or otherwise skewed against the accused. Here, the president will want to persuade the factfinders (and the country) that Democrats have conspired with like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence agencies (including the FBI and the Justice Department), to paralyze and, if possible, shorten the Trump presidency.Most defenses based on government misconduct do not get very far. They tend to be fabricated, overblown, or focused on prosecutorial misconduct that is far afield from the charges against the accused. In this instance, however, the president has a great deal to work with.Prominent Democrats and Trump detractors have been quite brazen in their public rhetoric about Trump (including, as is now being reported, the so-called whistleblower’s counsel, who has spoken explicitly about a “coup” by bureaucrats). Moreover, the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton emails investigation outlines in wince-inducing detail pervasive anti-Trump bias on the part of government investigators.The same IG is about to release a report specifically dealing with investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia investigation. Of course, we do not yet know what that report will yield (and even less what will come of the Barr/Durham probe of the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins). We do know, though, that the FBI and Justice Department represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the FBI believed Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s hacking operations to influence the 2016 election. And we know that the Obama administration -- undoubtedly in collusion with foreign intelligence services -- ran informants against Trump-campaign officials in an effort to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy. Finally, we know that the president was repeatedly told that he was not a suspect of the FBI’s investigation, under circumstances where he appears to have been the central suspect.After years of very aggressive, expensive investigation -- by a special counsel who staffed his investigation with notorious partisans -- no Trump–Russia conspiracy was found. Moreover, the FBI and the Justice Department on four occasions obtained warrants to monitor a former Trump-campaign adviser, telling the federal court under oath that he was a clandestine agent of a foreign power and a key cog in the Trump–Russia cyberespionage conspiracy; yet that adviser, Carter Page, was never accused of any crime, much less the traitorous misconduct outlined in the warrant applications.The president and his supporters will want to lay much of this out in his defense case against any impeachment allegations. It is clearly relevant on the question whether the Democrats are to be believed that the Ukraine episode is what they portray it to be: a matter of such grave severity that Congress should remove the president from power just ahead of an election. The fact finders and the public are entitled to consider whether Democrats are blowing the Ukraine episode way out of proportion, just as they did with the collusion caper. Indeed, in the Clinton impeachment case, the president and his Democratic supporters were permitted to press the case that Republican claims about the egregiousness of his misconduct were overwrought, as evidenced, for example, by Clinton’s high approval ratings.In the presentation of his defense, President Trump would thus seek to call the “whistleblower” as a witness (a hostile one, no doubt). His counsel and Republicans would proceed to try to demonstrate his connections to senior Democrats with intelligence-community ties who have been scurrilous in their public comments about the president. They would grill him on allegations that he is among the intelligence-community officials who leaked information in a manner intended to cast the president in a poor light. And they would press him on the preparation of his hearsay complaint -- his consultation with an Adam Schiff staffer, his close collaboration with overtly anti-Trump lawyers, and so on. I might even have him read aloud from Schiff’s wannabe Godfather IV caricature of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and ask whether he helped the chairman’s staff write it.It is in connection with the president’s right to present a defense, not his confrontation-clause right, that Senator Paul and the president’s defenders should frame their argument that the “whistleblower” should be subpoenaed to testify at public impeachment hearings.A cautionary note. When I was a prosecutor, I loved defense cases. They were often not very well thought through -- just an effort to dirty up investigators toward no coherent end, or toss in some favorable details about the accused that were quite beside the point of the charges. A defense case can open the door to prosecutors to place before the factfinders a great deal of unflattering information about the accused that would otherwise have been excluded as irrelevant. Defense lawyers tend to be much better at dismantling the prosecutor’s case for conviction than at presenting their own affirmative case for acquittal. When a defendant proceeded with an extensive defense case, I almost always ended up concluding that it had helped me more than it helped the defendant.Presenting an affirmative case would not be without risk for the president. If the Democrats’ case for impeachment is weak and has no chance of success, he would probably be better advised to leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, if the president wants to argue that the bureaucracy has had it in for him from the start, and has coordinated with Democrats to undermine him, he has an unusual embarrassment of riches to exploit.

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[sweatygardencollectorblr]

Right church, wrong pew, as we Catholic types are wont to say.As I tried to explain in Thursday’s column, Rand Paul is wrong to insist that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause demands that the so-called whistleblower be unmasked and publicly questioned. That does not mean, though, that Senator Paul’s general idea (that the “whistleblower” should testify) is wrong; nor does it mean that the Constitution’s guarantee of trial rights is irrelevant.The right to present a defense, also vouchsafed by the Sixth Amendment, is the guarantee on which Paul and the rest of the president’s supporters should focus.This comes with the same caveats elaborated on Thursday. The Constitution vests the House and Senate with plenary authority over their respective impeachment proceedings (the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment, the Senate to try the case). No court has the power to make either legislative chamber afford a particular quantum of due process.That said, impeachment is inherently political. Here, it has been launched when we are less than a year out from an election in which the American people are supposed determine for themselves whether the president should keep his job. By the time impeachment has run its course, we could be just a few months from Election Day. Apparently, though, the political class is intent on end-running the sovereign, attempting to remove President Trump on its own. To pull that off, it will need to convince the country that (a) it has grounds so extraordinarily serious that Trump must be ousted forthwith and (b) the procedures under which it impeached were fundamentally fair.I don’t think they have a prayer of demonstrating the former, such that two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would be spurred to remove the president. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent.) As for the latter concern, due process, there must be some and it must be meaningful -- not because it is legally mandated, but because it is politically essential.This is why many of the more pragmatic Democrats knew impeachment was a bad idea. As a practical matter, they don’t have close to the votes to remove, so it’s doomed to fail. The public knows it’s doomed to fail and may well resent Democrats for gratuitously putting the country through it. If Trump is denied due process, the proceedings will look like a kangaroo court and Democrats will be blamed. And if Trump is afforded due process, the case he presents may damage Democrats come November.We do not have a ton of prior impeachment experience to go on, but the presidents in each episode were afforded the right to present a defense -- both in the House proceedings leading to articles of impeachment and in the Senate trial.The right to present a defense is importantly different from the right to confront the House Democrats’ case for impeachment.As I noted in Wednesday’s column, the confrontation right emphasized by Senator Paul only allows the accused to cross-examine whatever witnesses the prosecution chooses to call in making its case. It does not give the accused a right to cross-examine every source who may have provided accusatory information, even sources whom the prosecutor does not call. Consequently, if the Democrats believe (as they do) that they could establish their case for articles of impeachment without summoning the so-called whistleblower as a witness, the president and his Republican defenders would have no right to call the whistleblower merely to cross-examine him on the statements made in his hearsay complaint.By contrast, the right to present a defense is more extensive. Broadly speaking, it empowers an accused to do two things: (1) pointedly discredit the prosecution’s version of events, whether through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses or presentation of the accused’s own witnesses, and (2) present the accused’s own witnesses and evidence in order to prove facts and theories that favor the accused and cast doubt on the worthiness of the prosecutor’s case.In most any criminal case, courts will give the accused a decent-sized berth to prove and argue that the accused was set up by the investigators; or that the investigative procedures used were underhanded or otherwise skewed against the accused. Here, the president will want to persuade the factfinders (and the country) that Democrats have conspired with like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence agencies (including the FBI and the Justice Department), to paralyze and, if possible, shorten the Trump presidency.Most defenses based on government misconduct do not get very far. They tend to be fabricated, overblown, or focused on prosecutorial misconduct that is far afield from the charges against the accused. In this instance, however, the president has a great deal to work with.Prominent Democrats and Trump detractors have been quite brazen in their public rhetoric about Trump (including, as is now being reported, the so-called whistleblower’s counsel, who has spoken explicitly about a “coup” by bureaucrats). Moreover, the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton emails investigation outlines in wince-inducing detail pervasive anti-Trump bias on the part of government investigators.The same IG is about to release a report specifically dealing with investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia investigation. Of course, we do not yet know what that report will yield (and even less what will come of the Barr/Durham probe of the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins). We do know, though, that the FBI and Justice Department represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the FBI believed Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s hacking operations to influence the 2016 election. And we know that the Obama administration -- undoubtedly in collusion with foreign intelligence services -- ran informants against Trump-campaign officials in an effort to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy. Finally, we know that the president was repeatedly told that he was not a suspect of the FBI’s investigation, under circumstances where he appears to have been the central suspect.After years of very aggressive, expensive investigation -- by a special counsel who staffed his investigation with notorious partisans -- no Trump–Russia conspiracy was found. Moreover, the FBI and the Justice Department on four occasions obtained warrants to monitor a former Trump-campaign adviser, telling the federal court under oath that he was a clandestine agent of a foreign power and a key cog in the Trump–Russia cyberespionage conspiracy; yet that adviser, Carter Page, was never accused of any crime, much less the traitorous misconduct outlined in the warrant applications.The president and his supporters will want to lay much of this out in his defense case against any impeachment allegations. It is clearly relevant on the question whether the Democrats are to be believed that the Ukraine episode is what they portray it to be: a matter of such grave severity that Congress should remove the president from power just ahead of an election. The fact finders and the public are entitled to consider whether Democrats are blowing the Ukraine episode way out of proportion, just as they did with the collusion caper. Indeed, in the Clinton impeachment case, the president and his Democratic supporters were permitted to press the case that Republican claims about the egregiousness of his misconduct were overwrought, as evidenced, for example, by Clinton’s high approval ratings.In the presentation of his defense, President Trump would thus seek to call the “whistleblower” as a witness (a hostile one, no doubt). His counsel and Republicans would proceed to try to demonstrate his connections to senior Democrats with intelligence-community ties who have been scurrilous in their public comments about the president. They would grill him on allegations that he is among the intelligence-community officials who leaked information in a manner intended to cast the president in a poor light. And they would press him on the preparation of his hearsay complaint -- his consultation with an Adam Schiff staffer, his close collaboration with overtly anti-Trump lawyers, and so on. I might even have him read aloud from Schiff’s wannabe Godfather IV caricature of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and ask whether he helped the chairman’s staff write it.It is in connection with the president’s right to present a defense, not his confrontation-clause right, that Senator Paul and the president’s defenders should frame their argument that the “whistleblower” should be subpoenaed to testify at public impeachment hearings.A cautionary note. When I was a prosecutor, I loved defense cases. They were often not very well thought through -- just an effort to dirty up investigators toward no coherent end, or toss in some favorable details about the accused that were quite beside the point of the charges. A defense case can open the door to prosecutors to place before the factfinders a great deal of unflattering information about the accused that would otherwise have been excluded as irrelevant. Defense lawyers tend to be much better at dismantling the prosecutor’s case for conviction than at presenting their own affirmative case for acquittal. When a defendant proceeded with an extensive defense case, I almost always ended up concluding that it had helped me more than it helped the defendant.Presenting an affirmative case would not be without risk for the president. If the Democrats’ case for impeachment is weak and has no chance of success, he would probably be better advised to leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, if the president wants to argue that the bureaucracy has had it in for him from the start, and has coordinated with Democrats to undermine him, he has an unusual embarrassment of riches to exploit.

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[newsfundastuff]

Right church, wrong pew, as we Catholic types are wont to say.As I tried to explain in Thursday’s column, Rand Paul is wrong to insist that the Sixth Amendment’s confrontation clause demands that the so-called whistleblower be unmasked and publicly questioned. That does not mean, though, that Senator Paul’s general idea (that the “whistleblower” should testify) is wrong; nor does it mean that the Constitution’s guarantee of trial rights is irrelevant.The right to present a defense, also vouchsafed by the Sixth Amendment, is the guarantee on which Paul and the rest of the president’s supporters should focus.This comes with the same caveats elaborated on Thursday. The Constitution vests the House and Senate with plenary authority over their respective impeachment proceedings (the House to decide whether to file articles of impeachment, the Senate to try the case). No court has the power to make either legislative chamber afford a particular quantum of due process.That said, impeachment is inherently political. Here, it has been launched when we are less than a year out from an election in which the American people are supposed determine for themselves whether the president should keep his job. By the time impeachment has run its course, we could be just a few months from Election Day. Apparently, though, the political class is intent on end-running the sovereign, attempting to remove President Trump on its own. To pull that off, it will need to convince the country that (a) it has grounds so extraordinarily serious that Trump must be ousted forthwith and (b) the procedures under which it impeached were fundamentally fair.I don’t think they have a prayer of demonstrating the former, such that two-thirds of the GOP-controlled Senate would be spurred to remove the president. (Trump’s approval rating among Republicans is hovering around 90 percent.) As for the latter concern, due process, there must be some and it must be meaningful -- not because it is legally mandated, but because it is politically essential.This is why many of the more pragmatic Democrats knew impeachment was a bad idea. As a practical matter, they don’t have close to the votes to remove, so it’s doomed to fail. The public knows it’s doomed to fail and may well resent Democrats for gratuitously putting the country through it. If Trump is denied due process, the proceedings will look like a kangaroo court and Democrats will be blamed. And if Trump is afforded due process, the case he presents may damage Democrats come November.We do not have a ton of prior impeachment experience to go on, but the presidents in each episode were afforded the right to present a defense -- both in the House proceedings leading to articles of impeachment and in the Senate trial.The right to present a defense is importantly different from the right to confront the House Democrats’ case for impeachment.As I noted in Wednesday’s column, the confrontation right emphasized by Senator Paul only allows the accused to cross-examine whatever witnesses the prosecution chooses to call in making its case. It does not give the accused a right to cross-examine every source who may have provided accusatory information, even sources whom the prosecutor does not call. Consequently, if the Democrats believe (as they do) that they could establish their case for articles of impeachment without summoning the so-called whistleblower as a witness, the president and his Republican defenders would have no right to call the whistleblower merely to cross-examine him on the statements made in his hearsay complaint.By contrast, the right to present a defense is more extensive. Broadly speaking, it empowers an accused to do two things: (1) pointedly discredit the prosecution’s version of events, whether through cross-examination of the prosecution’s witnesses or presentation of the accused’s own witnesses, and (2) present the accused’s own witnesses and evidence in order to prove facts and theories that favor the accused and cast doubt on the worthiness of the prosecutor’s case.In most any criminal case, courts will give the accused a decent-sized berth to prove and argue that the accused was set up by the investigators; or that the investigative procedures used were underhanded or otherwise skewed against the accused. Here, the president will want to persuade the factfinders (and the country) that Democrats have conspired with like-minded officials in the bureaucracy, particularly in the intelligence agencies (including the FBI and the Justice Department), to paralyze and, if possible, shorten the Trump presidency.Most defenses based on government misconduct do not get very far. They tend to be fabricated, overblown, or focused on prosecutorial misconduct that is far afield from the charges against the accused. In this instance, however, the president has a great deal to work with.Prominent Democrats and Trump detractors have been quite brazen in their public rhetoric about Trump (including, as is now being reported, the so-called whistleblower’s counsel, who has spoken explicitly about a “coup” by bureaucrats). Moreover, the Justice Department inspector general’s report on the Clinton emails investigation outlines in wince-inducing detail pervasive anti-Trump bias on the part of government investigators.The same IG is about to release a report specifically dealing with investigative irregularities in the Trump-Russia investigation. Of course, we do not yet know what that report will yield (and even less what will come of the Barr/Durham probe of the Trump-Russia investigation’s origins). We do know, though, that the FBI and Justice Department represented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that the FBI believed Trump’s campaign was likely complicit in Russia’s hacking operations to influence the 2016 election. And we know that the Obama administration -- undoubtedly in collusion with foreign intelligence services -- ran informants against Trump-campaign officials in an effort to establish a Trump–Russia conspiracy. Finally, we know that the president was repeatedly told that he was not a suspect of the FBI’s investigation, under circumstances where he appears to have been the central suspect.After years of very aggressive, expensive investigation -- by a special counsel who staffed his investigation with notorious partisans -- no Trump–Russia conspiracy was found. Moreover, the FBI and the Justice Department on four occasions obtained warrants to monitor a former Trump-campaign adviser, telling the federal court under oath that he was a clandestine agent of a foreign power and a key cog in the Trump–Russia cyberespionage conspiracy; yet that adviser, Carter Page, was never accused of any crime, much less the traitorous misconduct outlined in the warrant applications.The president and his supporters will want to lay much of this out in his defense case against any impeachment allegations. It is clearly relevant on the question whether the Democrats are to be believed that the Ukraine episode is what they portray it to be: a matter of such grave severity that Congress should remove the president from power just ahead of an election. The fact finders and the public are entitled to consider whether Democrats are blowing the Ukraine episode way out of proportion, just as they did with the collusion caper. Indeed, in the Clinton impeachment case, the president and his Democratic supporters were permitted to press the case that Republican claims about the egregiousness of his misconduct were overwrought, as evidenced, for example, by Clinton’s high approval ratings.In the presentation of his defense, President Trump would thus seek to call the “whistleblower” as a witness (a hostile one, no doubt). His counsel and Republicans would proceed to try to demonstrate his connections to senior Democrats with intelligence-community ties who have been scurrilous in their public comments about the president. They would grill him on allegations that he is among the intelligence-community officials who leaked information in a manner intended to cast the president in a poor light. And they would press him on the preparation of his hearsay complaint -- his consultation with an Adam Schiff staffer, his close collaboration with overtly anti-Trump lawyers, and so on. I might even have him read aloud from Schiff’s wannabe Godfather IV caricature of the Trump-Zelensky conversation and ask whether he helped the chairman’s staff write it.It is in connection with the president’s right to present a defense, not his confrontation-clause right, that Senator Paul and the president’s defenders should frame their argument that the “whistleblower” should be subpoenaed to testify at public impeachment hearings.A cautionary note. When I was a prosecutor, I loved defense cases. They were often not very well thought through -- just an effort to dirty up investigators toward no coherent end, or toss in some favorable details about the accused that were quite beside the point of the charges. A defense case can open the door to prosecutors to place before the factfinders a great deal of unflattering information about the accused that would otherwise have been excluded as irrelevant. Defense lawyers tend to be much better at dismantling the prosecutor’s case for conviction than at presenting their own affirmative case for acquittal. When a defendant proceeded with an extensive defense case, I almost always ended up concluding that it had helped me more than it helped the defendant.Presenting an affirmative case would not be without risk for the president. If the Democrats’ case for impeachment is weak and has no chance of success, he would probably be better advised to leave well enough alone. Nevertheless, if the president wants to argue that the bureaucracy has had it in for him from the start, and has coordinated with Democrats to undermine him, he has an unusual embarrassment of riches to exploit.

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