Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that the military aid was held up due to "great concern" that he and President Trump had about "issues of corruption." but he offered no specifics. Pence had said publicly that the delay had nothing to do with Trump's reelection bid. The U. S. ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland's testimony to Congress was that he "mentioned" to Pence in Warsaw that he had concerns that the delay in aid had become tied to the investigations"into Trump's
domestic opponents.
"The Republican Party, because of its capitulation to Trump, is headed for a moral and political accounting. President Trump's racketeering scheme for Ukraine is likely to inflict lasting damage on the reputations of all of those at high levels in his administration who had participated or stood by mutely." ]1]
II. The New York Parole Board
The official mission of New York's parole board is to "ensure public safety by granting parole when appropriate." New York's prison's hold some forty-six thousand people. Almost twenty percent are lifers," which means they are serving a prison sentence with "life" on the backs of their uniforms, like twenty years to life. The process called Parole Prep works only with "lifers." In the past five years, Parole Prep volunteers have helped a hundred and forty-nine people get out of prison, twelve of whom were women. [2]
A two-hundred page report, published in 1975, declared that New York's parole system had "failed dramatically," and was "beyond reform." The board's decision-making process, which was "based on an assessment of an inmate's rehabilitation," rested on "faulty theory," the report said. A major statement in the report was that: "The Board's practices exemplify nationwide criminal justice policies that are rooted in retribution and racism and result in extreme punishment."
New York currently has sixteen parole board members, who conduct some twelve thousand parole interviews a year. Although the cost of imprisonment is higher in New York than in any other state -- $20,000 a year per person and often considerably more if the individual is elderly or ill -- parole board members are not required to justify the financial impact of their decisions.
One of the mantras of the Police Benevolent Association is that there shall be "no" parole for "cop killers." The union keeps a list of people on its Web site who are in prison for the murder of police officers.
III. GOP Gerrymandering
"Drawing legislative districts based on eligible voters instead of total population would be a huge win for Republicans, who tend to represent areas with fewer noncitizens. Democrats currently hold all of the 5 state House seats with the highest percentage of foreign-born noncitizen residents. Using the voting-eligible proportion as the metric for reapportionment cold lead to half of all state legislative districts in the country being redrawn. Those new districts would exclude up to 55 percent of Latinos, 45 percent of Asian Americans, and 30 percent of African Americans from being counted as constituents --compared to 21 percent of white people, according to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights." [3]
Democrats need only nine seats to regain control of the Texas House of Representatives for the first time since 2002, but redrawing districts based on eligible voters would keep the state solidly in red, shifting eight or more seats back to the GOP, according to an analysis by Andrew Beveridge, a professor of sociology at Queens College in New York.
A leaked Census Bureau document estimates that the agency already has accurate citizen information for 90 percent of people in the country. The aborted voter purge is seen in Texas as a preview of how a redistricting map based on citizenship would unfairly target Latinos. While the census is constitutionally required to count every person in America regardless of citizenship status, the 2018 Texas Republican platform called for "an accurate count of United States citizens only."
IV. One True Johnson Scandal
"But there was only one true [President Andrew] scandal just as there is only one true Trump scandal, and though the particulars are very different -- the former class resentment was the inverse of the latter class resentment --they share a common element an open hostility to democratic ideals. Successive generations of historians flipping the script on Reconstruction, framing white Southerners as victims of a tyrannical Northern regime. Reconstruction governments were painted as hopelessly corrupt." As historian Eric Foner put it: "Andrew Johnson was impeached over violating a fairly minor act of Congress, whereas his real crime was trying to deprive 4 million American citizens of their rights." [4]
ADDENDUMS:
*According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, productivity growth has averaged just 1.3 percent annually over the last 14 years. That compares with 3.0 percent annually in the long golden age from 1947 to 1973, and again from 1995 to 2005. The high-productivity-growth years from 1947 to 1973 were ones of rapid wage gains and low unemployment.
*The Air Force plans to use expanded airspace to fly no fewer than 10,000 sorties annually, while dropping 15,360 magnesium flares and 15,360 bundles of metallic chaff on areas containing critical habitat for threatened species and innumerable sacred Native American sites. [5]
*"In 2017, US schools spent at least $2.7 billion on security systems, on top of the money spent by individuals on things like bulletproof backpacks, the IHS Market consulting firm reported." "There have been more than 380 mass shootings -- in which at least four people other than the shooter were injured or killed -- so far this year om the U.S., according to the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive."
Footnotes:
[1] Steve Coll, "In the Loop,"The New Yorker, December 2, 2019.
[2] Jennifer Gounerman, "The Interview," The New Yorker, December 2, 2019.
[3] Ari Berman, "Count Me Out," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[4] Tim Murphy, "Trump's Not Richard Nixon. He's Andrew Johnson," Mother Jones, January/February 2020.
[5] John E. Wilks, "Public blasts Air Force..." Sierran, January/February/March 2020.
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