Trego's Mountain Ear

"Serving North Lincoln County"

Tag: Politics

  • A Right to Your Own Opinion But Not Your Own Facts

    I always credited this quote to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It turns out that the original was Bernard Baruch, “Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”

    According to QuoteInvestigator.com “In 1983 U.S Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a member of the National Commission on Social Security Reform. He employed the saying within an op-ed piece in the “Washington Post”:

    “There is a center in American politics. It can govern. The commission is just an example of what can be done. First, get your facts straight. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts. Second, decide to live with the facts. Third, resolve to surmount them. Because, fourth, what is at stake is our capacity to govern.” So I have the original Moynihan quote – and it is a little different from the Baruch quotation.

    My father credited Moynihan with the destruction of the Black family – when I finally asked the right question – basically a why do you believe this- I realized he had never read the Moynihan report – the title is The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (published in 1965 and available at https://old.blackpast.org/african-american-history/moynihan-report-1965/

    Dad had confused the messenger with the message. Perhaps because Lyndon Johnson continued his ‘Great Society’ message and policy despite Moynihan’s recommendations, possibly because Johnson never bothered to read Moynihan’s report. Moynihan wrote the facts as he saw them in 1965 – and history has demonstrated that he was correct.

    I’m sure Moynihan never knew that Dad had the wrong opinion of his report and the wrong facts. I’m fairly sure that he knew President Johnson had a flawed opinion based on incorrect facts.

    A lot of our current political differences can be seen as people insisting on their own facts. When the definition of “woman” becomes something we don’t agree on, we have a communication problem. I have a tendency to accept Mussolini’s definition of fascism – others accept Joe Stalin’s. Those different ‘facts’ have been around for nearly a century – and the Soviet definition included all Capitalists.

    When the definitions change, people have their own facts. In the mid-eighties, when I taught at Trinidad, only one hospital – Mount San Rafael – and only one surgeon – Dr. Stanley Biber – was performing transexual surgery. Biber required a lot of counseling before performing the surgery – no one considered the surgery, available only in a rural Colorado hospital – to be normal. Now, with athletes and assassins arguing the meaning of the word “woman”, and with at least one Supreme Court Justice unclear on the definition, we have disagreements over facts.

    Are Palestinians facing genocide, or did they attack and murder/kidnap 1300 people a couple years back? It’s past time to quit changing definitions. We can’t afford to have people who are a couple bubbles off making their own facts.

  • The Decline of Representation

    The past three Presidents – Obama, Trump and Biden – have each wound up governing by executive order. True, Obama managed to squeak a healthcare bill through Congress – but even with that, Trump was complaining that executive orders were no way to run a country, that we needed real leadership. Now Trump is also choosing the Executive order route – and the branch of government contesting his executive orders is the judiciary.

    I’ve watched the challenges of representative government from a school board – and much of what got accomplished was because three out of five board members were in agreement on that particular issue. It took a long time, and a lot of effort, to get a pay matrix for teacher contracts approved. It took even longer to get a classified pay scale voted into existence. The addition of the pre-school that started this Fall was first brought up in 2020. I’ve been taught how hard it is to get a representative democracy working with only five elected trustees and no political affiliations. How much worse it must be with 435 representatives narrowly split between two parties.

    I think I’m seeing Trump make the same decision that Obama made – “if I can’t get Congressional authorization, I’ll do it based on my own authority.” Montana’s laws do not give a schoolboard chair that power – by law the board chair chairs the meeting, and the board has only a collective power, utterly lacking individual power for the chair. Still, the board chair does have the (unlegislated) power of asking advice from the board association’s attorneys and setting the meeting agenda.

    So nationally, we’re seeing folks who disagree with Trump taking his decisions to judges who disagree with Trump – when the reality is that our House of Representatives are locked in a pattern of behavior where they can’t do their job. The problem isn’t the President or the Judges – a representative democracy fails to work when most of the representatives come from the extremes. As I was looking for a way to finish, I noticed this meme:

    It’s not quite what I wish it was – but I’ve been called both a Trumpkin and a Libtard. I have the feeling that it’s more a question of where the caller sits on the spectrum than where I am. It would be nice to have more folks from the middle in Congress.

  • Fascism Defined

    If you look at the back of a Mercury dime, you will see the fasces, a bundle of sticks around an axe (well, you will see it if the coin isn’t too worn, Mercury dimes haven’t been made since 1945).

    Please note that the dime illustrated has a 1916 date. The word fascism apparently came into use in Italy, and the year was 1921. Obviously, the fasces on the dime weren’t connected with fascism.

    The word ‘fascist’ is thrown around loosely – largely because the Stalinist Communists used it against both the real fascists (Hitler and Mussolini) and any capitalist they wanted to tar with the same brush. The only people who weren’t fascists to the Soviets were fellow communists.

    Benito Mussolini described fascism as “the marriage of corporation and the state.” I can’t say that Benny invented fascism, but he did start the first fascist government. Anyone remember that, in his second month as President, Barack Obama fired Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors? Fascism focuses on putting the nation first. Anybody remember red caps that say “Make America Great Again”? Fascism calls for total control by authoritarian leaders. Can anybody recall some of the extreme controls that came with Covid? Like Newsom activating California’s Guard to work with covid tests?

    Fascism promotes a strong, centralized government, ran by an authoritarian leader. Barack Obama, despite having fired the CEO of General Motors, doesn’t qualify as Fascist. Biden, despite leaning toward authoritarian, doesn’t qualify. Donald Trump – despite the red caps that say “Make America Great Again” doesn’t hit all the bases. It’s easy to find one aspect of each president where he touched on one of the aspects – but none of them meet all of Mussolini’s criteria, and Stalin’s criteria were never correct.

    Mussolini, with coauthor Giovanni Gentile, wrote The Doctrine of Fascism. It’s only 33 pages, and Benny the Moose was a decent writer – it isn’t a hard read. If you think about calling someone a fascist, it’s available at https://dn721808.ca.archive.org/0/items/mussolini-archive/The%20Doctrine%20of%20Fascism%20Benito%20Mussolini.pdf

  • Thinking About Venezuela

    I’m no expert on international politics or Venezuela – but I have been there once (Hugo Chavez was in charge then, and I was a college professor working with the departments of State and Defense – I was just as happy to be confined to the airplane as the Venezuelans were to order all people with US passports not to be allowed off the plane). At the same time, I had a student who was dual citizenship (Venezuelan father and mother re-married) whose father was trying to convince her that moving to Venezuela would be better than staying in the US. How things have changed since 2008.

    My father was in Venezuela before the second World War – the US Navy had contracted with Standard Oil to provide survey work, and Dad was paid at ‘Venezuelan Exchange’. If I recall correctly, he was making $93 per month instead of the regular sailor’s pay of $21 per month. I guess I was raised knowing that there was a lot of money in Venezuelan oil, and the girl’s father confirmed it when we visited at her graduation.

    As near as I can tell, we have 3 destroyers, a cruiser, and 3 amphibious assault ships cruising off Venezuela (Navy Times) and the other day they sunk an open boat – apparently loaded with drugs and 11 Tren de Aragua gang members. The deal is, the boat was in international water – so the legality of the strike may well be questionable. Ah, well, John Paul Jones was called a pirate when the Ranger raided Whitehaven.

    Apparently, our President put a 50 million dollar bounty on Venezuela’s President Madero – while that’s twice what the bounty was on Osama bin Laden, the inflation calculator shows that it takes $1.83 today to buy what a single dollar bought in 2001. 82 percent inflation in those 24 years. Venezuela’s navy has 42 ships – and may not be particularly capable on blue water.

    If we are getting close to qualifying as piracy it is probably a good idea to change from a department of defense to a department of war

  • We Have Documents of Different Quality

    I see that the phrase ‘undocumented’ is going out of fashion – and illegal alien is going back in. I suppose it’s like Shakespeare wrote about what’s in a word – if we accept the changed word, we accept a different reality.

    One of the words I understand is ‘mojado’. It’s a Spanish word that translates simply to ‘wet’. Always seemed a bit more polite than ‘wetback’ – it shows something when you insult someone in his own language. But I should get back to the topic – I have a US passport. I think that’s close to the highest quality of documentation one can have – though mine needs a new replacement before next year. My drivers license is of lesser quality – it specifically says “not for federal identification.” Still, it tells folks that the state of Montana trusts me to drive a car on public roads, and no traffic cop will put that same faith in my passport. A bill from Lincoln Electric, showing my street address, can be a supplement to either the drivers license or the passport. A voter ID card is another supplement.

    Citizens or not, we all have documentation. It’s just that some documentation is better than others. Time was when my drivers license could have a post office box number – but that wasn’t good enough to buy a pistol. It had to have a street address. I think that’s because we have a bunch of people who can’t figure out the rectangular coordinate system that has been federal law since 1785 – yes, that system was before the constitution. Still, that day I didn’t have good enough quality identification to buy a pistol. The folks at Cabelas insisted that my ID had to include a street address.

    I met a hitchhiker who was undocumented and homeless – he explained that his wallet was stolen in Oregon and, since he had no address, he was traveling to Vermont, to get a copy of his birth certificate and begin the process of recovering his papers.

    Still, generally speaking, there are very few who are undocumented. There are many who lack the quality of documentation they need.

  • The Enumeration Clause

    Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 covers two things – the Census and apportionment of representatives in Congress. Here it is:

    Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New-York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

    The last sentence doesn’t count anymore. The critical terms are that the “respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons,” “and within ten years.” It doesn’t say citizens. On the other hand, we quit excluding “Indians not taxed” back in 1924. We quit counting slaves as 6/10ths back in the 1870 Census. https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-citizenship-status/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D will take you to the individual states populations listed by citizenship.

    Six or seven percent of US residents are not US citizens – but the number varies by state. Over 99 % of Montana residents are citizens. Almost 95% of Californians are citizens. The average congressional district has about 761,000 people (2020 Census) – Montana’s population in 2020 was 1,137,233 and we have 2 congress critters. Basically, we don’t have any complaints about being underrepresented this time around. Before the 2020 Census, we only had one congresscritter – and were extremely underrepresented.

    So there are a couple questions about Trump ordering another census. The Enumeration clause says “within 10 years.” I suspect that five out of nine Supreme Court Justices will agree that 6 years is within 10 years. (I won’t guarantee that they will agree with me, but they should) Then there’s the question of whether illegal aliens should be counted. That’s going to be one for the courts – but if a guy can’t be there legally, I can’t see why he should be counted as a resident.

    By choice, I’d see congressional seats apportioned by number of citizens – but that isn’t how our founding fathers wrote the Constitution.