Texas Lege: Blank checks for guns, back of the hand for gun violence; ditto on fentanyl issues

 

That's just one of several takeaways from last week's work by the Lege, courtesy of the Trib, but it's a biggie.

The House voted to REQUIRE schools to have armed guards (as well as every classroom to have a panic button). Some version of this will surely pass the Senate and the final bill be signed into law by Strangeabbott. The Trib notes that both houses continue to give the back of the hand to Uvalde families who want the sales age for semiautomatics raised to 21. The Trib doesn't even mention lack of discussion about a serious red flag law.

==

A parallel is playing out on drugs, where both houses are passing "tough on crime" bills while Sen. Joan Huffman continues to block a House bill to get fentanyl test strips legalized. As the story notes, it's weird because she's actually been supportive of other addiction help. And, addiction support groups are right; murder charges for fentanyl distributors and others will just make low-level dealers, and users who know  them, even more leery of law enforcement. More War on Drugs stupidity.

RIP Mark Kleiman, classist War on Drugs hypocrite

RIP Mark Kleiman, an overrated classist and a hypocrite in the War on Drugs. The truth is that addiction cuts across race, class and socioeconomic guidelines, so if Kleiman really were worried about pot potency, he should have looked at ritzy pot shops just as much as worrying about Walmart. I first saw this via Popehat's Twitter; Ken, if you're going to write over-the-top, and IMO untrue, encomia (Kleiman was NOT a "giant of his field") I'll Tweet out the reality, as I already did Tuesday night with those links.

The only thing, IMO, he truly got right was that marijuana legalization is not a panacea. And he screwed the pooch on that by bringing in his classism.

That takes care of the "classist" part. Well, not quite.

Let's spell this out more, with the alcohol analogy.

Did Kleiman ever call for additional taxes on Two-buck Chuck, Ripple, Mad Dog or T-bird? On vodkas with fake Russian names?

I'm hearing crickets right now.

Actually, the National Review encomium is anti-crickets. It notes that Kleiman explicitly accepted the way things were with alcohol but said we should take a different cultural tack with pot.

To extend the issue, since Kleiman often compared alcohol to pot? People become alcoholics on Glenlivet or sauvignon blanc just as readily as on Two-buck Chuck or fake Russian vodka. And rich white Republicans become alcoholics or addicts at generally the same rate as poor black Democrats. And, if Kleiman really knew that much about addiction, he would have known that, too.

To put it another way, per Grits' recent trip to Canada? One could have steep enough taxes on it, yet have a "generic" version of legal marijuana sell cheaper at Walmart than black market skunk weed currently does.

Now, the "hypocrite" part.

Kleiman was a Hillbot, and a big one, in the 2016 Democratic primaries, to the point of doing some "gotcha" on Bernie Sanders. That and more is at the second link. Shock me that Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly mourns his passing so much.

I wanted to do something more than the brief mention I put in yesterday's Roundup, in part because I had personally (online) tangled with Kleiman over this and other things.

First, beyond Hillary Clinton's well-known "superpredators" comment, which itself tied at least indirectly to the War on Drugs, Kleiman ran a group blog with a mix of neoliberals and a few neocons sprinkled in. I didn't think that much of the intellectual level of his writing partners, either. He was so bad I put him in a mock Clinton Cabinet.

Hell, Kleiman was an apologist for ConservaDems when Shrub was still president.

Also, this genius thought the Bundy family out West were NOT terrorists. They were at that time, and even more beyond then, with them and their friends at the Malheur NWR standoff.

If Ken White really thinks Kleiman was a giant, rather than offering a powder-puff encomium, I've got to further question his legal judgment, beyond his being a First Amendment weaponizer. Otherwise, Popehat overrates Kleiman as much as ActualFlatticus overrated Jay Sekulow.

He was a leader in the field. A giant? Not so much. Any drug policy analyst who loved DARE, as Wiki reports Kleiman did? DARE was a great tool for police PR, but not police-community relations. DARE was actually kind of full of it, and still is. And outside the field, his dyed-in-the-wool Democratic stance, per his Bernie trolling, was fairly narrow. His love for Hillary was surely infused with the same incrementalism that infused his drug policy.

Even worse, per Wiki, is his consulting firm taking money from PMI Impact, a public policy outfit of Philip Morris, now Altria. PMI Impact fights illicit tobacco trade. Of course it does. Not because it cares if people are smoking or not, but because it wants them smoking legal, Philip Morris-made cigarettes or e-cigs, as it actually was in this case.

My personal background with Kleiman was some online tangling with him during the 2016 Democratic primaries. Per the hypocrite link, I thought he was playing "gotcha" with Bernie Sanders, at least to a degree. Then, we tangled further over the classism issue. And, if Kleiman really was such an expert on drug policy to include being knowledgable about addiction, he knows what I've told you above about addiction statistics.

I didn't know until writing up this post, though, about him taking Philip Morris blood money. And, that's exactly what it is.

One wonders if he opposed full-on legalization of pot because of taking tobacco blood money and being a hypocrite on alcohol.

Also interesting. Anti-War on Drugs crusader Glenn Greenwald and the gang have nothing on Kleiman at the Intercept.

Stephen Breyer — part of Supreme Court librulz who hate the First Amendment and Fourth

I have written before about how Democrats' "Oh, the SCOTUS" cry every four years does little to nothing to entice me to jump back into voting for the centrist half of the duopoly. And, librul justices' stance on various portions of the First Amendment is a primary reason why I say this.

Democrats usually appeal to abortion as the big reason why voting for Jill Stein, or Cynthia McKinney, or David Cobb, or Ralph Nader, actually is the "greater evil" or whatever, just as Kuff did last week. I respond, as I have before, that abortion, and LGBTQ issues, are a narrow portion of the spectrum of civil liberties, and that beyond that portion of the spectrum, current librulz on the court have a less than spotless record by several degrees.

I had a big-ticket roundup on this issue just a year ago, when Tony Kennedy retired.

I then counter with noting someone like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the "notorious RBG," doesn't really like the First Amendment that much all the time, or how other Justices have been selective in their support of the Fourth Amendment and criminal rights in general, with examples in that "big ticket" link.

Well, now we have librul Stephen Breyer willing to sacrifice part of the Fourth Amendment, and tying this to that other part of my plaint? He is willing to sacrifice part of the Fourth Amendment that applies to criminals, and more specifically, to policing, so he can "back the blue."

What bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit.

And, it's not even the first time Breyer has voted to undercut the Fourth Amendment. He did so three years ago cuz War on Drugs, an issue where both the courts and librul preznits (remember Bill's crime bill? Hillary's "superpredators" related to that? Joe Biden halfway standing by that bill still?) have repeatedly been willing to junk protections for alleged criminals. Elena Kagan, when in the executive branch, has a history of hating the Fourth Amendment applying equally to minorities cuz War on Drugs.

Sonia Sotomayor, when still an appellate judge, didn't think minors deserved full First Amendment protections. She also wrongly thought the First Amendment meant churches were free from some labor law prescriptions.

And one or more librulz — in most cases maybe more than one — have for 25 years consistently hated third parties (like Kuff and fellow travelers like Manny).

And, all nine justices at the time — including librulz Breyer, Sotomayor, Ginsburg and Elena Kagan, along with libertarianish Kennedy, and pseudo-originalist Scalia — hated the First Amendment's freedom of assembly clause.

The real problem is librulz fetishing the Supreme Court over two issues.

Actually, that is probably No. 2.

The real problem is Democrats thinking they "own" the actual or potential votes of anybody to the left of diehard Republicans.

Dream on.

And, the more you think that, the further from reality it becomes.

==

Update, June 17: Turns out that Breyer kind o hates democracy in general at times, voting in the minority to approve Virginia House Rethuglicans' appeal of a lower court ruling on redistricting and gerrymandering. Now, I know the case was more about the issue of standing, but still.

Update, July 1: Breyer and Kagan think a cross is perfectly OK on public land as long as its connected to a war. Part of it with Breyer, per this analysis, is that he was upholding his own previous ruling in Van Orton v Perry, and even if not upholding precedents in general, justices will uphold their own previous rulings through any and every convolution.

For the unfamiliar, Van Orton v Perry was one of the most godawful "civic religion" rulings the court has made in at least 20 years. It's the one where the court said that the state of Texas could keep the Ten Commandments on state Capitol grounds.

Any unbiased idiot could see that the Eagles chose the Ten Commandments because of all the other God vs Godless communism stuff of the Cold War, and that it was NOT promoting "religion" in the abstract, but Judeo-Christian (usual Judeo fig leaf) ideas in the concrete.

And, he says 40 years passage of time means there was no "intimidation." He ignores the idea that, rather, it meant the intimidation was strong enough nobody publicly protested.

This would be like telling post-World War I original civil rights advocates, "Well, nobody protested for 40 years ..."

Me, Poppy Bush, the Gulf War, a conspiracy theory and a vacation trip to Tsarskoe Selo

Betcha didn't know I visited the Romanov summer palace, did you?

Well, per Paul Harvey, with the death of George H.W. Bush, here's the rest of the story.

===

It was the late summer of 1998. I was the editor of my first own weekly newspaper. (Not in that I owned it, but I was the managing editor of a paper for my first time.)

I was living in southeastern New Mexico at the time. I got a bit of time off around Labor Day, including the holiday itself, and took a vacation.

No, not to St. Petersburg, Russia, sadly. But, I did visit Tsarskoe Selo. While there, I heard some very interesting claims about the Gulf War. Let this column I wrote after my return tell the details.

The old mining community of Mogollon, practically a ghost town, may seem innocent enough to the average hiker or other tourist.

Like many abandoned mining towns, some of its buildings have been reclaimed in recent years, mainly by people who are considered to be, or consider themselves to be, outside the normal bounds of society. In short, you may see men and women who appear to be hippies, or the children of hippies, living in old houses, general stores, and so forth, not only in Mogollon, but in Jerome, Arizona (another place I visited during a short Labor Day vacation) and elsewhere across the west.

But there is one difference in Mogollon, an old mining town about 70 miles northwest of Silver City, located in some of the most rugged country in our state.

It begins with the first, and only, business in the dozen or so buildings in Mogollon.

This business, located in one of the first buildings on your right as you enter Mogollon, immediately stands out due to its name: “The Tsarskoe Selo.”

To those unfamiliar with history, this was the name of a summer palace of the Russian Tsars (hence the name), just outside St. Petersburg, Russia.

Inside is a store selling collectibles one would never expect to see in the middle of nowhere, and possibly not even in a city as big as Albuquerque.

Owner Dan Ostler specializes is selling Faberge products. By this, I don’t mean cosmetics such as Brut cologne.

Ostler sells the high-dollar ceramic eggs, porcelains, and other collectibles made in Tsarist Russia by the French-founded company of Faberge. These are the fine items that you hear announcements about their traveling display in museums in Dallas, Phoenix, or Los Angeles, and nowhere lower on the American cities’ status pole.

Right there, as Ostler showed me some of the sample eggs he had (starting at $70 a pop, and rapidly moving upward). I realized that I was in a world just a little bit different than what I had expected when I opened the door to his shop asking directions to the famous Catwalk (at Glenwood, just south).

The next thing that caught my eye was one of several business cards of his that he had on his counter. The only readable things on the card were his name, in Roman letters, and a telephone number, in our normal Arabic numerals. The rest of the card, though, was also Middle Eastern, written in the Arabic language.

As I was interested enough to want to talk, and he seemed to welcome a little conversation, I stayed around beyond asking directions, and heard more than I was prepared for.

I first learned the “why” behind the Arabic business card. Dan Ostler said he is a former CIA agent with more than a decade of time spent in the Middle East. He then showed me some of the other business cards he had, noting that with connections such as this, he could run a high-dollar business such as his from his small shop and his modemed computer in the backwoods of western New Mexico.

As he showed me some of the cards he had been given by friends, perhaps ex-CIA contacts in some cases, I realized that he truly was a connected person.

The business cards included one from an Army Lt. Col. who is also a United Nations weapons inspector, and a reported “Friend of Bill” from Mt. Ida, Arkansas.

Ostler asked if I knew where Mt. Ida was, and I said, “I believe that’s near Mena,” which earned my first kudos from him.

Mena, if you did not read or hear about the exposé series last year by the San Jose Mercury News, is where the CIA has, for over a decade, reportedly flown in on its own airline, Air America, or at least turned a blind eye to CIA-connected smugglers such as Nicaraguan contras flying in, massive amounts of cocaine stemming from Columbia. By the way, this began in Reagan’s presidency, and so is not just tar on Clinton’s hands.

We talked more about the CIA in this regard, and Ostler soon revealed himself to be a man who definitely did not run the CIA up the flagpole and salute it every morning. He confirmed, from what he had heard and knew during his years in the agency,  that the CIA had been involved, or at least connected with drug smuggling, for at least 15 years before Nicaragua. The latest issue of the magazine The Progressive confirms this, noting that the CIA, in the name of supporting anti-Communist governments, helped smuggle heroin out of Pakistan in the 1960s and Laos in the 1970s. (CIA top brass, both past and present, of course refused to comment to the magazine for that article.)

He also told me what sounded like a conspiracy theory, but one that is halfway believable, for how the Gulf War got started.

Supposedly a well-connected older-money New Englander, a month or two before Iraq invaded Kuwait, gave undercover Iraqi defense officials a special tour of some of Kuwait’s defense installations?

Why? According to Ostler, Kuwait was at this time one of the biggest producers of pirated computer software, music recordings, and so forth, and so some of this businessman’s friends decided there was a simple way to teach Kuwait a lesson. This also, according to Ostler, is why Bush’s State Department never came clean to Congress and the public what they may have known in advance about Iraqi intentions.

I did an Internet search for the gentleman in question, but other than finding someone with a name to match in a Cambridge, Massachusetts, electronic telephone directory, could find no further information. To me, that doesn’t mean Ostler’s story is not true; rather, it may testify to the low radar profile of the man in question, whose name I have obviously omitted from this story.

In any case, for anybody traveling in the Silver City area, consider a trip to Mogollon. You might find a whole lot more than you expected, as well as some nice Christmas or anniversary gifts for special loved ones. (Ostler also sells Lionel trains, and ceramic displays for under the tree.)

===

I went back there in 2010. Tsarskoe Selo was still there (and remains listed today on some business information websites and even Yelp), but, sadly, unoccupied. I did a teh Google, well, actually, a DuckDuckGo for the site plus Ostler's name. Got an email address on one hit. No idea if it's live as of the time I write this piece or not, but we'll find out, won't we?

Update: I forgot to mention in that original column that ceramic displays for "under the tree" weren't the only type of such art. Ostler also sold authentic Hummel.

For the good of Texans, Joaquin needs to challenge Beto

As of this time, neither El Paso Democratic Congressman Beto O'Rourke, for all his reported progressivism — the only announced challenger so far to Sen. Ted Cruz — nor possible challenger, Austin Democratic Congresscritter Joaquin Castro, have yet to endorse Rep. John Conyers' HB 676, his so-called "Medicare for all" single-payer national health care bill.

I can understand where friend Brains is coming from — primary fights can be expensive, and in states where you're a permanent minority at this time, and by several percentage points, that's money wasted that could be used in a general election.

On the other hand, "glide path" primaries, or attempted ones, often produce crappy candidates. Wendy Davis for gov in 2014. Tony Sanchez for gov in 2002 as part of John Sharp's "dream team." Hillary Clinton for prez after the DNC tried to force a glide path by cheating.

I don't know where Castro stands on legalizing, or even decriminalizing pot, or the larger War on Drugs. If he's at least halfway to O'Rourke's neighborhood, that means that single-payer would be the only possible dividing line of significance, if one of them came out in favor.

In other words, contested primaries between viable candidates force them to stand for something. All Hillary Clinton would stand for is her gender and her turn — and she lost the general.

That said, due to state court of criminal appeals race shenanigans by the Texas Democratic Party, I can't vote for either O'Rourke or Castro. I have to sign a Green Party ballot access petition, so I can't vote in the 2018 Dem primary.

So, if Castro won't challenge, or even if he does, if neither will shit or get off the pot on single-payer, fuck em.

Hell, Charles Krauthammer, wingnut deluxe, now thinks single-payer is inevitable and that Congressional Republicans should accept that, and maybe even try to steal a march.

Beto O'Rourke, Matthew J. Dowd, or Ted Cruz?

Beto O'Rourke

As of this time Friday, we could be two-thirds of the way to a three-person general election showdown for the pimply prepubescent Ted Cruz's Senate seat.

Congressman Beto O'Rourke, El Paso Democrat, has just said he plans a big announcement on Friday. The cat's not being further let out of the bag, but it's widely believed he'll have a formal campaign launch. He's indicated his interest in the seat, and you don't puff an official non-campaign like this.

He's got some good bona fides — favors marijuana legalization, opposes much of the War on Drugs. He's also, as of Tuesday, House co-sponsor of the "No PAC Act," designed to bar Congresscritters from taking PAC money. Overall, he'd at least be left of the center of today's Democratic Party, per On the Issues. And, he was a good enough campaigner to topple Silvestre Reyes.

On the other hand — and to riff on Idries Shah, we normally need more than two hands, because there are more than two sides or views — per this graphic, O'Rourke has yet to become a co-sponsor of John Conyers' HB676 Medicare for All bill. The Berniecrat type folks at the Down With Tyranny blog (one of the trio is a spinoff from a Digby blogging assistant) would puff Beto's work on the No PAC Act while not noting he's failed to co-sponsor HB676.

Matthew Dowd, former Shrub Bush strategerist [sic — think about it], has indicated some interest in an independent run, and specifically as an independent, calling the two so-called major parties "dinosaurs." But he still seems to be in the mulling stage and not beyond.

Per what I just said on Twitter, he probably needs to officially shit or get off the pot soon. It takes a lot of money for a Senate campaign in Texas. True, Dowd won't have spend money on a primary, but, that's less costly than the general. That's especially true, if per the first of the two links about him, Dowd is serious about a "bottom-up" campaign. Beyond and before teevee, that's a lot of gasoline driving around the small towns of The Great (and great big) State of Texas.

Also, as far as that bottom-up? Dowd's not really associated with Texas these days. That may hurt, too. And, per this piece, he's got a lot to answer for that is BushCo related, like why did he wait until 2008 to hop off the GOP train? And, was that in part to land a juicy media job?

Frankly, his earlier hop from Dem to GOP in 1999, combined with this, has a heady whiff, or stench, of positions-lite political opportunism. How much that will hurt him in the general public's eyes, I dn't know, but personally, I'd trust him even less than the average politician.

And, O'Rourke's road trip to DC with GOP Congresscritter Will Hurd may give him some small leg up over Dowd among those independent voters.

Especially if Dowd takes a quick campaign announcement crap, that means others need to drop their drawers or get out of the race soon.

No. 1 would be Joaquin Castro. Per the Stateless, he promises to shit or get off the pot before the end of April. However, he also has baggage for us true liberals, left-liberals and beyond — he also hasn't become a co-sponsor of Conyers' bill.

No. 2 would be Michael McCaul or any other would-be GOP challengers to Rafael Edward Cruz. And I think I may start calling him that more, just like the Lite Gov of Texas is often identified in these pages as Danny Goeb.

(Sidebar: Per Rafael's Wiki page, take note that his first government political appointment job of this wingnut states'-righter, was a federal one, and was in the administration of Slick Willie. Just saying. Also note that the parents of this godly Dominionist Christian, including his godly Dominionist Christian father, divorced in 1997.)

==

Brains has a very good additional take, from which I've updated mine; also take a look at Charles Kuffner. Somewhat per the two of them, and definitely my take, Dowd might enjoy being a Mario Cuomo Hamlet character more than actually running.

That said, I'll slightly digress from Brains on one issue.

I think Dems DO need a contested primary. First, speaking of shitting or getting off the pot, one or the other of O'Rourke and Castro would almost certainly have to come out for single-payer to distinguish himself from the other.

Second, though I'm not a Dem, thinking in Dem mindset, a contested primary might boost interest, and thus turnout in the general election. As Kuff points out, and as we regular followers of Texas politics know, Democratic turnout in midterm elections sucks donkey dongs — obvious political pun quite intended.

I expand my call for a contested primary here.

Mark Kleiman puts being a #Clintonista ahead of fighting #WarOnDrugs

Mark Kleiman: Full metal Clintonista

Many people who oppose the stupidity of the War on Drugs know the name of Mark Kleiman as one of the top academic-sector crusaders for a more enlightened drug policy. And, his "more enlightened," as in examining state-by-state marijuana legalization, is often very in-depth and thoughtful.

That's why, after last Thursday's Democratic debate, it was not sad, but disgusting (and also, not at all unexpected, from what I know), to see him showing his in-the-tank Clintonista colors to go "gotcha" on Bernie Sanders' drugs and incarceration thoughts from there:

Consider, for example, this from Bernie Sanders:

… at the end of my first term, we will not have more people in jail than any other country.

That’s a very specific promise, with a timeline attached. And it is a promise that no President has the power to fulfill.

I agree it's a more specific promise than anything Clinton said.

And, I knew before reading the piece that the feds account for only about 10 percent of incarcerations. So, no, Sanders can't do that.

Beyond that, though, it's "gotcha." Clinton, like Sanders (and like all presidential candidates), when they talk about "crime," never limit themselves to federal crimes, the federal judiciary, etc. All of them talk about crime as though it's primarily a federal issue.

That said, there are two things a president could do, by executive action, that would immediately reduce federal drug crime arrests and convictions, AND would send a message to states. 

One would be to move marijuana from the Schedule 1 list to something more fitting it. Marijuana and/or other cannabis products have known medicinal value and have a medically safe usage level. The DEA and FDA, per the Controlled Substances Act, determine what listing a drug fits into, so no Congressional action is needed. Moving it way down, to, say, Schedule IV, is about right. (Lest it stir up wingnuts in Congress too much, I don't think I'd drop it to Schedule V.

After that, all Sanders needs is an executive order to DEA to tell them that, in the wake of a rescheduling, DEA efforts should solely be focused on illicit growing, ie, pot farms in national parks.

Third would be to use another executive order to note that the DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies would no longer participate in federal-state drug task forces that focus on marijuana.

Fourth would be to direct the Department of Justice, and drop hints to the various federal financial agencies, about openly accepting profits from marijuana growers and sellers as part of the rescheduling.

With all that, Sanders can definitely cut federal drug incarceration, and get state drug incarcerations to drop.

Other executive orders could do things like tie COPS grant applications to police use of body cameras, non-incarceration sentencing alternatives, etc.

As for which of the two Democrats would be more likely to do this? It ain't Hillary Clinton, that's for sure.

That said, let's look at the rest of the piece.

Let's start here:

Those of us supporting Hillary Clinton this year are sometimes accused of wanting to settle for political small-ball rather than sweeping change. But no matter how good Sen. Sanders’s intentions may be, he’s not going to be able to change very much for the better unless he’s willing to learn something about the way the world, and the political system, actually operate.

First, as I already knew, from an exchange on Twitter, Kleiman's very much a Clintonista.

That's despite her "super-predators" comment showing she's never been enlightened toward people of color, nor toward stopping the WOD. 

And, I know Kleiman's well aware of this, which only makes his wrong-footing worse.

And, yes, per Brains, other people, reporters as well as pundits, think Bernie made too bold of claims. That said, with Mother Jones, his campaign has followed up with more specifics, more narrowly tailored.

Did he goof by making an overly ambitious statement, and in too concrete of terms? Yes.

Contra Elias Isquith, not Kleiman, as I first thought:

And if the press decides that it no longer sees Sanders as America’s cranky but lovable socialist grandpa, and that it no longer sees his promises as ambitious rather than demagogic, then it could turn on his remarkable presidential campaign — hard and fast.

Is he demagogic? No. If Isquith is implying that he is? Screw you. But, he doesn't seem to be implying that — but he does seem to be hinting that the bipartisan Inside the Beltway media has a finger posed over the "smite" button on their keyboards.

Back to Kleiman. But it's not just on selling out his integrity on the War on Drugs to be an establishmentarian.

Beyond that, others on his group blog are elitist about ending the War on Drugs. In addition to decrying a state-by-state approach to marijuana legalization, they also decry the possible Walmarting of marijuana.

And? If some people want to pay Walmart prices for "junk food" pot rather than break their wallet for Whole Foods type organic, artisinal pot, that's their choice, isn't it?

As I've blogged before, the real can-do candidate? One who's been flexible in meeting goals, like the community land trust when he was mayor of Burlington? Bernie Sanders.

And, stuff like this is all part of the "kitchen sink" that Sanders already warned about.

On the other hand, Kleiman's intellect in general is sometimes overrated. He, like Doug Henwood, and perhaps a few other non "liberal" people of the left, for some strange reason thinks the Bundys et al are not terrorists.

And, he's flat-out wrong. They have used fear and intimidation as deliberate tactics — and it worked two years ago.

I hadn't seen that piece until after I started this blog post. Having now seen it, I've lost yet more respect for Kleiman. I'm like the 91 percent of New Hampshire Democratic voters who voted based on valuing integrity.

#FeelTheBern on #socialism, #BlackLivesMatter, even foreign policy

Bernie Sanders knocked it out of the park, at least in terms of Democrats, in his "socialism" speech at Georgetown today.



Several brief points, mainly taking from stuff I tweeted during the speech.

First, he hearkened back to Franklin D. Roosevelt, not just 1933 or 1937, but the FDR in the middle of war, who still looked to greater economic equality (if but haltingly for minorities) in his 1944 State of the Union address.

He then transitioned to Lyndon Baines Johnson and Medicare. This was good, which then led to a pivot to calling for a "Medicare for all" single-payer national health care system.

However, if Bernie wants to really go for the long bomb, he could have thrown deeper.

First, I still contend that the only good way to control costs in American health care, a single payer system isn't enough. Medicare being tight on reimbursement rates might help, but it might not be enough. I still say we need to look at nationalizing chunks of the hospital/clinic/doctor health care provider system.

(Update, Nov. 24: I have now written a broader blog post specifically defending corporate socialism, which Sanders did himself back in his salad days.)

Second, he didn't touch all of LBJ's Great Society. That's despite quoting Martin Luther King Jr.:

"This country has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor."

Let's remember that LBJ riffed on this in relation to African-Americans.

More, far more, than the New Deal, the Great Society was focused on racial as well as socioeconomic issues. Hence LBJ at Howard University’s 1965 commencement:

You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: 'now, you are free to go where you want, do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please.' You do not take a man who for years has been hobbled by chains, liberate him, bring him to the starting line of a race, saying, "you are free to compete with all the others," and still justly believe you have been completely fair... This is the next and more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity—not just legal equity but human ability—not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.

Exactly.

Heck, LBJ might even had said #BlackLivesMatter today, per this from 1968 and riots:

When you put your foot on a man's neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what's he going to do? He's going to knock your block off.

More of his Great Society and other quotes are at Wikiquote.

But, this must be balanced with socioeconomic concerns, too, both in the ivied towers of the Ivy League and the crumbling curbs of Main Street.

Speaking of, while he did make more than one allusion to unionism, I wish he had spoken more directly about the issue. Unfortunately, many unions, like the oily SEIU, have already lined up to endorse Clinton. And, per Sanders and social democracy, the American non-parliamentary two-party system is part of why Democrats co-opt unions without having a Labor or Social Democratic party.

On the other hand, organized labor could withhold endorsements before we get further into the primary system. And, just one — a truly liberal one like the Longshoremen — maybe could do a Greens endorsement in the general.

But, Sanders did touch on other issues today, even if family and maternity leave doesn't help the underclass if it's not paid leave.

He did note that climate change is a moral issue.

And, he did touch on foreign policy. Including calling a racist spade a spade, from Donald Trump or whomever.

No, he did more than that.

He covered foreign policy in far more depth than at the second Democratic debate, and did well.

Arbenz. Mossadegh. And many others the CIA overthrew all got mentioned. Vis-a-vis the GOP's Benghazi fixation, let's remember what Benghazi was — a spook shack.

He then called out Gulf oil states for not accepting refugees from their own corner of the world. Saudi Arabia has a tent city that can hold up to 1 million people and is only used for pilgrims at the hajj. It sits empty as I type. He also said the Gulf states need to join in the fight against Daesh. Related to that, he forswore an endless "War on Terror."

And, wingnuts will call him "earnest" or whatever while doing their own pontificating, but he focused on the moral angle of many of these issues.

Finally, in a lighter vein, and throwing Hillary Clinton under the bus, he said he wasn't running because it was his "turn." More seriously, besides the bright lines he continues to draw with her over things like Wall Street regulation, he threw her under the bus on the War on Drugs, calling for a lot less incarceration, especially on things like minor drug crimes. Given that Clinton gets significant campaign funds from private prison companies, this is important.

For a few more text pullouts, see Mother Jones. And, the NYT gave him a respectable read — on its First Draft blog. Let's see how the main page plays it. And, a Paul Krugman. Or others.

"Others" including a "real socialist" like Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant, who is not yet highly impressed by Sanders.

And, per PDiddle in comments below, I'm at least some sort of semi-pacifist myself. And, I have blogged extensively about Bernie sucking too much at the military teat. PD's got more on his take at his blog. And, Sanders' website has full speech text.

Too bad he already co-opted himself by (on paper, at least) forswearing a third-party run.