Duty to Warn
As millions of Americans desperately seek an alternative to Donald Trump, the 2016 presidential election now faces the volatile possibility of a “December Surprise”.
Here are some Constitutional realities:
The Electoral College is set to vote Monday, December 19.
Of 538 electors, Donald Trump apparently has 306 committed to him. Exactly 270 are needed to win. Hillary Clinton apparently has 232. There do not seem to be any other candidates with confirmed committed electors at this point.
1. Stop the efforts to ram through the Trans-Pacific Partnership during the lame duck.
2. Stop the efforts to ram through a supplemental war spending bill for assorted future wars during the lame duck.
3. Stop the efforts to repeal the right to sue Saudi Arabia and other nations for their wars and lesser acts of terrorism during the lame duck.
4. Build a nonpartisan movement to effect real change.
5. Ban bribery, fund elections, make registration automatic, make election day a holiday, end gerrymandering, eliminate the electoral college, create the right to vote, create public hand counting of paper ballots at every polling place, create ranked choice voting.
6. End the wars, end the weapons dealing, close the bases, and shift military spending to human and environmental needs.
7. Tax billionaires.
8. End mass incarceration and the death penalty and the militarization of police.
9. Create single-payer healthcare.
10. Support the rule of law, diplomacy, and aid.
11. Invest in serious effort to avoid climate catastrophe.
Soon after the 9/11 terror attacks 15 years ago today, then-US EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman assured New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe.
Now she has issued a “heartfelt” apology, admitting that her misleading advice caused people to die. But will she also apologize for pushing lethal atomic reactor technologies that could kill far more people than 9/11?
Back in 2001, Whitman went public to “reassure the people of New York and Washington D.C. that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.” She also said, “The concentrations are such that they don’t pose a health hazard….”
The Environmental Protection Agency itself later said there was insufficient data to offer such assurances.
Speaking out against racism is one thing -- and a wonderful and admirable thing it is -- but choosing to do so by sitting out the U.S. national anthem, and then having others join in, or "come out" as routine national anthem sitters: this is fantastic!
A self-governing republic of thinking people (whose first thought should be "My god, what are we doing to the rest of the planet with all this pollution and all these wars?") ought to have no use for mandatory flag worship, required hand positions, or enforced recitations of pledges of allegiance to colored bits of cloth. Or if only some people outgrow such practices, others ought to leave them alone about it.
Chicago is one of America’s greatest cities. Yet many of its residents live in terror in what is virtually a war zone. When a demented killer slayed 49 in a gun rampage in Orlando, Fla., there was national attention. Presidential candidates called for escalating the fight against the Islamic State in the Middle East, even though the killer seems to be a homegrown terrorist.
But in Chicago, 404 have died in gun violence this year. According to the Congressional Research Service, the murder rate averaged 16.0 per 100,000 a year from 2010-2014. That is nearly four times the national average of 4.6 per 100,000 and nearly three times the Illinois state average (5.8).
These killings are not randomly distributed. African Americans constitute about one-third of Chicago’s residents, but they account for 80 percent of its murder victims.
The killings are concentrated in endangered communities, communities burdened with abject poverty and deplorable conditions. Desperation and murder are segregated in Chicago.
he federal lawsuit, titled Katie Johnson v. Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey E. Epstein, accuses Trump and Epstein of rape and other sexual assaults during the summer of 1994, when plaintiff was 13 years old. Attorney Garten denied the accusations and cast doubt on the existence of the plaintiff.
This won’t be the last.
Half a week into the Orlando tragedy, this reality remains pretty much unacknowledged, as cause-seekers focus on security and ISIS and the specific mental instability of Omar Mateen, who, as the world knows, took 49 precious lives and injured 53 others at the nightclub Pulse in the early hours of June 12.
Was it terrorism? Was it a hate crime? Apparently there’s a media obsession with categorizing murder. No, this was faux-war, as all our mass killings are, waged by an army of one or two or a few. And it won’t be the last. Mass killings are part of the social fabric – still shocking, still horrifying, but becoming more and more . . . “normal.”
Tighter security won’t stop them. Destroying ISIS won’t stop them. Banning immigrants won’t stop them. Maybe nothing will – though I don’t believe that. I do believe in karma, which is to say, the idea that what goes around comes around. If we act with violence, violence will come back to haunt us.