An impeachable offense:

...Such poor leadership ability by the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to help. They....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017

...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000 Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2017

We are a long way from impeachment as we await the Mueller report.  Though obstruction of justice looks like a lock one never knows.
There are always subsidiary counts in a bill of impeachment. This morning's POTUS tweets slandered the people of Puerto Rico.  DJT spent the rest of the day covering his ass - praising  himself, the troops, the Governor and other Puerto Rican leaders for their efforts to recover from Hurricane Maria.

But the message above was not retracted.  The President is charged under the Constitution with the duty to "faithfully execute" the laws.  Under the 14th Amendment every person born or naturalized in the U,S is entitled to the equal protection of the law.  The President's remarks this morning breach that duty. - GWC

FP: The myth of a better Iran deal

http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/09/26/the-myth-of-a-better-iran-deal/amp/

When Dorothy Day took a knee | America Magazine

Linking of faith and flag goes back a long way.  The seal of Fordham says IHS.  that means In hoc signo vinces - In this sign you will conquer - the sign of the Cross.  That is said to have been the vision of the Emperor Constantine before the year 314 Battle of Milvian Bridge.  He did conquer and Christianity became the  religion of the  Roman empire.  Our emblem no longer evokes the military image, but that is its origin. - gwc
When Dorothy Day took a knee | America Magazine
by Robert Ellsberg

Ammon Hennacy, a courageous activist who joined the Catholic Worker in the 1950s, said he was inspired to become a Catholic by the example of Dorothy Day. Specifically, he referred to an occasion during Mass when the organist began to play “The Star Spangled Banner.” As everyone else stood up, Dorothy dropped to her knees in prayer. Dorothy did not like that story; she did not think that was the right reason to become a Catholic. But she did not dispute Ammon’s account. In his view, Dorothy’s action represented a courageous repudiation of the blurring of cross and flag (and sword) that went all the way back to Constantine.

I thought of Dorothy when I saw images of N.F.L. players “taking a knee” in protest during pre-game renditions of the national anthem this past weekend. Of course, the context is very different. Possibly, the players, who were protesting racism and making a gesture of defiance against a president’s provocative appeals to white nationalist grievance, did not exactly think that they were “praying.” But the symbolism of dropping to a knee in the midst of a patriotic ceremony would not be lost on Dorothy. Though not really a football fan, she would surely have understood and honored their protest.***

Fordham/SEIU Agree on Union Election for Adjunct Faculty

Office of the President
Fordham University
September 27, 2017

Dear Members of the University Community:

I am very pleased to announce that the University and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 200 United reached an agreement to allow a mail ballot election to unionize most adjunct and full-time, non-tenure track faculty, following a summer of intense negotiations.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) will supervise the election over a two week voting period, likely in October 2017. Any disputes which may arise regarding the election process will be decided by an arbitrator selected by the parties.

Fordham has agreed to remain neutral during the election: the University, and by extension its management (any University officer, administrator, supervisor, designee, or agent), is restricted from favoring one side or the other in the weeks leading up to the election and through the two-week election period.

If SEIU wins the election, the University and the union will begin negotiations for two separate collective bargaining agreements.

Those eligible to vote in the election include: all adjunct faculty except those who teach in the Gabelli School (undergraduate and graduate) and the Graduate School of Education; and all full-time non-tenured track (FT-NTT) faculty except visiting professors (all ranks), artists or writers in residence, and research fellows. There are some additional exclusions, including adjunct or FT-NTT who teach only online courses or non-credit bearing courses, and adjuncts who also serve as administrators for the University. Law School faculty are not participating in the election. 

Approximately 700 adjunct and 150 FT-NTT faculty will comprise the pool of 850 eligible voters. The 850 faculty include those contingent faculty who were employed in the spring of 2017 or who are currently teaching for us. SEIU must receive a simple majority of the votes cast to proceed with unionization. The University strongly encourages everyone eligible to vote in this election to do so.

We will share further information with the University community, including the affected parties, very soon, including rules governing the election, voting procedures, and contact information for SEIU representatives. Here are the so-called  TIPS Guidelines for fair labor practices.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. McShane, S.J.

Early opposition to The Vietnam War = Episode 3 = Burns & Novick

My first demonstration
The 2d Internationl Days of Protest

 

The battlefield  of the Ia Drang Valley - 1965

Episode 3 of the Burns and Novick epic documentary on the Vietnam War brings us to the commitment of two hundred thousand American ground troops in 1965.  I was a cloistered college student at the time.  But I had a sense of the criminality of our effort.  That is captured by  the memo of then Assistant Secretary of Defense John McNaughton describing our purpose as 70% avoid humiliation, 20% contain China, 10% help Vietnam.

Holy Cross College was not Berkeley.  But one day at Kimball Hall - where we checked our mail - was a group of people from the Catholic Worker movement, the communitarian pacifist group led by Dorothy Day.   They spurred vigorous debate.  What got my attention was that David Miller a Catholic Worker from Syracuse had challenged federal law by burning his draft card. He said, “I believe the napalming of villages is an immoral act. I hope this will be a significant political act, so here.” Miller was arrested, tried, and convicted.  The conviction was affirmed on appeal despite the argument of his eminent ACLU lawyer Marvin Karpatkin that burning the draft card was protected expressive speech.  

I began to regularly attend the Friday night talks at The Phoenix Club's store front on the fraying east end of Main Street in Worcester.  I remember hearing Frank Wilkinson who had been jailed for refusing to answer the notorious question "are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party".  He refused to answer citing the first amendment and went to jail for it.  He spent the rest of his days trying to shut down the House Un-American Actvitiies Committee.

Another Phoenix speaker was Jesuit Fr. Robert Drinan , the Boston College Law School Dean who would in 1970 join Congress on an anti-war platform.  But the most memorable talk was by David McReynolds of the pacifist War Resisters League.  After his talk we went back to the home of the eccentric Abbie Hoffman, a founder of the Berkeley  Vietnam Day Committee which organized the first mass protests against the war.  We watched black and white hand-held film  of protesters blocking troop trains at the Oakland Army Terminal.  We saw footage too of the thousands who in October had joined the International Days of Protest.  I was very impressed by the international aspect which to me added legitimacy.

So I joined the second International Day of Protest in March 1966.  With thirty or so others  I marched in a circle in front of the War Memorial Auditorium.  We carried signs protesting the war.  Confronted by a similarly sized group denouncing us as communists, and threatening violence, the leaders instructed us to put down the signs and disperse.  As I headed through the hostile crowd a fellow student was punched by a man with what we called brass knuckles that tore his face open.  He needed surgery and I am sure he carries the scar to this day.

A year later momentum had shifted against the war.  Instead of joining a modest group of picketers threatened by an angry mob, I met my girlfriend in New York for the massive April 1967 demonstration featuring Rev. Martin Luther King.  We never did get to Dag Hammerskjold Plaza to hear Dr. King's speech because a cloudburst sent us scurrying for cover.

Two decades of work in the anti-war movement, and then the nuclear arms control movement would follow.

Riding the Tiger = The Vietnam War - episode 2 : by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

The Vietnam War
Episode 2 - Riding the tiger

Apropos 1961-1963 they opened with So What, from the Miles Davis classic album Kind of Blue.

Burns and Novick draw substantially on Neil Sheehan. He was a `gung ho' reporter, like David Halberstam, hopping on helicopters in the pre-embedding news control days. There was, at first, no critical distance. They were on the team.

Sheehan was one of that now almost extinct breed - the Ivy Leaguer who headed to the officer corps. (Though Yale restored Navy and Air Force ROTC in 2012).
David Halberstam and Daniel Ellsberg were of the same cohort. In 1971 Sheehan
obtained what became known as the Pentagon Papers which brought the Times a Pulitzer Prize.

Sheehan's principal book is the best take on the war, i/m/h/o: A Bright Shining Lie = John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. It views the war though the vision of Vann, a brilliant and fearless soldier who, though tragically wedded to victory in Vietnam, saw the seeds of defeat where the body counters saw victory.

Daniel Ellsberg, in a post-Tet letter to Vann wrote about the NLF losses "My own attitude about such matters now is that the VC are right to bet that the GVN and U.S. will fail to exploit ​any such `opportunities' and fanaics like you, me (before) and our friends were always wrong to imagine otherwise."
Episode 2 -
- George Conk

Catholics - The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick

The Vietnam War: A film by Ken Burns & Lynn Novick
Episode 1

The Catholic angle was interesting.  As elsewhere - e.g. China - the converts were presumed to be collaborators and often were.  Diem was an exception there and his Catholicism was part of the reason Catholics rallied to the U.S. cause, though any intense anti-communist was pushing through an open door.

Kennedy's shift from rejection to engagement may have flowed from his Catholic identity.  Every week at mass there was a last prayer - for the conversion of Russia.  Among Catholics an American Navy doctor was much celebrated.  His books Deliver us From Evil and the Night They burned the Mountain were best sellers.  He declared the two greatest evils in the world to be disease and communism.  He served in the effort described to bring fleeing Catholics from the North after partition.  Dooley was forced out of the Navy when his homosexuality became known.  He then set up the jungle clinic which helped to establish his mystique. - gwc

Chemerinsky brief argues Trump's pardon of Arpaio is void

Chemerinsky brief argues Trump's pardon of Arpaio is void
Updated: A proposed amicus brief filed Monday argues that President Donald Trump’s pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio is void because it violates the Constitution. The brief (PDF) was submitted to a federal judge in Phoenix who is considering whether the pardon, issued before Arpaio had a chance to appeal his contempt conviction, requires her to vacate the conviction, Law.com (sub. req.) reports.

Arpaio was found guilty of contempt for violating a federal judge’s order to stop detaining citizens based only on a suspicion they were in the country illegally. Trump pardoned Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, on Aug. 25.

On one side is the U.S. Justice Department, which is urging U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton to vacate all orders in the case and dismiss it as moot.

The Resegregation of Jefferson County - The New York Times

What we call the "but for test" demonstrates that but for slavery and the American system of apartheid known under the sanitized name "Jim Crow" white people would not be trying to escape Black schools and neighborhoods.
The complexity of resisting the resegregation movement turns on the difficult question "whose burden is it to correct the historical error of America's original sin. - GWC
The Resegregation of Jefferson County - The New York Times

What one Alabama town’s attempt to secede from its school district tells us about the fragile progress of racial integration in America.
by Nikole Hannah Jones

Jefferson county resegregstes

The Resegregation of Jefferson County https://nyti.ms/2xNZUBJ

Tribalism: Where Trump Goes they will Follow

Trump Says Jump. His Supporters Ask, How High? https://nyti.ms/2y07DvQ

Which tribe?   Anglos.

More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic Divide – Talking Points Memo

There is a well embedded meme that the way for the Democrats to win is to go back to "Black and white unite and fight" - that is appeal to working class solidarity.  That hasn't worked out so well in the past.  And it's even harder with increased atomization of the workforce and deeply embedded clashing universes of discourse.

There are many divides in the country besides race - religion, gender, class, etc.  I think it is plain that the driving force in the election of Trump was race.  He did put it at the center of his campaign from the first moment, didn't he? Therefore I conclude that the Sanders campaign is wrong: economic appeals will not overcome the deep divides.  It's going to take more fine grained appeals than that - to recover those white Obama voters who turned to Trump in 2016,  - gwc
More Thoughts on the Intra-Democratic Divide – Talking Points Memo
by Josh Marshall

A big chunk of the left of the Democratic party – a lot of labor liberals, a lot of people who supported Bernie Sanders say you re-polarize the electorate around class and economic issues and gain back some of those Trump voters that way. In its crudest form (and there are less crude forms) this is the ‘ditch the identity politics and focus on unifying class issues’ argument. There are numerous problems with this argument, both moral and strategic.

For starters, I think it greatly overstates the appeal of social democratic economic policy to big chunks of the electorate. It also tells half the party’s voters that critical issues to them need to take a back seat to economic and class politics, with the implicit message that those are the ones that really matter. Enough of ‘identity politics’, let’s focus on the real stuff.

What it all comes down to is that once you get beyond Trump’s hardcore racist revanchist base, there are a lot of voters who supported Trump. 

The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republicans

Let's get this straight.  The problem is not "partisanship". It's not economic anxiety of the white working class. It is the deeply embedded racism and ignorance of most white voters in the U.S.  They have produced a party that is hostile to government, and undemocratic.  The problem is the GOP.  there is no equivalence among Democrats. - gwc

The Only Problem in American Politics Is the Republicans

by Jonathan Chait

"whatever the very real flaws in the American political and electoral system, it is simply impossible to design any kind of a system that can withstand a stress test like a major party captured by a faction as radical as the conservative movement. Its absence of limiting principles to its ideology, indifference to empirical evidence, and inability to concede failings of its dogma lead to an endless succession of failures explained away to the base as faintheartedness.

The doom loop Drutman describes is, in reality, both sides responding to the phenomenon of Republican extremism. Republicans are sealed off in a bubble of paranoia and rage, and Democrats are sealed off from that bubble. Democrats fear Republican government because it is dangerous and extreme. Republicans fear Democratic government because they are dangerous and extreme."

The Cold Warrior Who Never Apologized - The New York Times

The Cold Warrior Who Never Apologized - The New York Times
by Jonathan Stevenson

As Gen. H. R. McMaster, the national security adviser, wrote in his book “Dereliction of Duty,” the early stages of the Vietnam War caught America’s military leaders flat-footed. Having gone through World War II and Korea, they were all ready for a conventional war. But insurgencies and unconventional warfare were something else. As a result, they were inordinately acquiescent to the wishful thinking of their civilian overseers — and no one thought more wishfully about the war than Walt Whitman Rostow.

A Yale Ph.D. and a Rhodes scholar, Rostow left his academic perch at M.I.T. to join the State Department under John F. Kennedy; he was later Lyndon Johnson’s national security adviser during the center-cut of American involvement in Vietnam, from April 1966 to January 1969. More than anyone else, he epitomized the overweening confidence of the civilian strategists of the era — he was the best and the brightest of “the best and the brightest.” He could lay distant claim to operational warfighting competence, having selected bombing targets as a major in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. But like many other prominent civilian strategists of the day, he was by training and disposition an economist and a technocrat.

In his 1960 book “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto,” Rostow posited that robust growth was a nation’s best insurance against the political emergence of Communism, and cast growth as a multistage process that depended crucially on a “takeoff” period propelled by rapid expansion in key segments of an economy. Though criticized as tendentiously Western-centric, the book attracted Kennedy’s attention. In a matter of months, Rostow moved from holding forth in the academy to planning America’s strategy in Vietnam, tightly guided by his ideas about economic development.

How Trump Won: Facebook and Cambridge Analytica

Check out @AdamParkhomenko’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/AdamParkhomenko/status/905569823777796096?s=09