Friday, October 30, 2020
The e Mail and the Election
His wit invites you by his looks to come,
But when you knock it, never is at home.
— William Cowper, Conversation
One of the exciting things to which we can look forward on November 4 is the return of the in-box on the computer to something we remember from what now seems like long ago.
What we have learned from the last 6 months is that there are untold ways of attempting to capture the attention of an e mail recipient and what follows is merely a small sample of the means employed by senders. The computer announces the arrival of an e mail by providing the identity of the sender, albeit frequently in incomprehensible style, coupled with a brief description of the e mail’s content, which may or may not prove helpful to the recipient in deciding whether to strike the key that opens the e mail or the key that deletes it.
As any good English teacher will instruct the student, it is important when writing a short piece, that the opening grab the attention of the reader and compels the reader to continue reading. With e mails, that is, of course, impossible, because what the recipient sees when an e mail arrives, is the name of the sender which except during an election, is usually someone of whom the recipient has never heard, and a VERY short description of what the sender hopes will pique the recipient’s interest and cause the recipient to invite the contents into the recipient’s universe. A few examples from two senders follow but their e mails are nothing more than representative of the dozens that arrive each day during the election season.
With the advent of the first snow an e mail was received the subject matter of which was “Brrrr.” Contrary to the recipient’s first thought that the sender was commenting on the onslaught of winter in her part of the country, it was in fact an e mail asking for contributions so the campaign for which she was working in Montana could buy handwarmers for those knocking on doors and snow shovels for clearing driveways so voters could get to the polls.
In Colorado, former governor, John Hickenlooper, is hoping to replace the current sitting senator, Cory Gardner. In order to attract the attention of his supporters, Hickenlooper sends out e mails at the rate of 3 or 4 (and sometimes more) a day that are intended to cause the recipient to want to part with money in order to help with his campaign. The language used to entice is different each time.
An e mail sent out on October 24 had a simple subject line-“Pickle.” That subject, like “brrr,” was designed to arouse the recipient’s curiosity, and when satisfied, to cause the recipient to send money to the sender since the “pickle” referred to described the campaign’s financial woes. “Pickle” was next followed by an ungrammatical e mail inquiring “who would you rather have . . . .” contrasting the two candidates in the race. A short time later that same day another arrived announcing that: “Our lead is plummeting” but then, in order to prevent the recipient from panicking, that e mail was soon followed by an e mail the subject of which was: “The sky is ‘not’ falling.” That reassurance was followed, in the text, by a statement that the candidate was not trying to fool us by using that language but to alert the reader to the fact that the fund raising was short of what was needed. Later in the day another was received promising: “I’ll be direct with you” and to the reader’s non-surprise it expressed dismay at fund raising results. A short time later another arrived suggesting how many Boulder people should contribute that day to achieve a goal. The e mail having not, apparently, achieved the desired result, later that day another arrived entitled “scrambling” that suggested that being direct had not served the candidate as hoped and “scrambling” was describing the actions of the candidate in an effort to stay afloat.
The first e mail the following day announced, “our lead has shrunk” followed shortly by a bit of a non-sequitur that instructed the reader that “I need you to stay strong,” a suggestion that it was the recipient rather than the candidate who was worried.
The next day’s pronouncement stated that “A lot has changed” followed shortly by an e mail announcing that “I couldn’t sleep last night” followed by another announcing “dangerously behind” followed shortly by “Three sentences” and then another with the subject “seven.” (For the curious that e mail requested a $7 donation representing the 7 days remaining before the election.)
The foregoing is nothing more than a brief sampling of the sorts of e mails we are getting ad nauseam” before the election. Whether or not the e mails described are helpful to the reader or the candidate, one thing on which we can all agree is that the day when our e mails come solely from friends, family, and even advertisers, will be a welcome day indeed.
Thursday, October 22, 2020
The Art of Packing
— Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (1907)“[T]he Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders. . . .”
Federal courts are a lot like suitcases as events over the last 5 years have shown. There are many different ways to pack them. This would be of no particular interest except for the cries of alarm being sounded by the packers in chief. They keep demanding that presidential candidate, Joe Biden, disclose whether, if elected president, he would use the only method of packing the United States Supreme Court that Senate Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, have not needed to employ-expanding the number of Justices who sit on the United States Supreme Court.
The question is posed not because Republicans object in principle to the idea of increasing the size of the United States Supreme Court in order to create a majority aligned with their views, but because of the success they have enjoyed packing the entire federal court system without resorting to such an obvious tactic. There is strength in numbers and that has enabled Mitch and his cohorts to effectively pack the United States Supreme Court, and many Federal Courts of Appeal and Federal District Courts with conservative judges. Their success ensures that the political alignment of those courts will comport with the politics of the packers far into the future.
The first method of packing that was demonstrated by the Republicans took place in 2016 after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. Following years of precedent, when Scalia’s death created a vacancy on the Court, President Obama did what all presidents before him had done on such occasions. He sent to the Senate the name of a replacement. Mitch did what had never before been done by a Majority Leader of the Senate-he refused to meet with the person who had been nominated by the president or to hold hearings or permit a vote on the nomination. Even though the 2016 election was 10 months away, Mitch said that a successor should not be selected until after the election and the people had spoken. The vacancy remained until after the 2016 election when the vacancy was given to the trump to fill, a much-valued gift that was the first example of Mitch and his colleagues packing the Supreme Court without expanding its size. If the Scalia vacancy had been a suitcase, upon arrival at its destination the traveler would have discovered the suitcase was well stocked with the traveler’s needs.
The next example of packing the suitcase and the Supreme Court occurred 3 ½ years later when Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, died less than 2 months before the 2020 election. With her death, the opportunity to select her successor was presented to Mitch and his cronies. Notwithstanding their earlier concern that any seat of a Supreme Court Justice who died in the same year as an election should remain vacant until the election had been held, Mitch concluded that his reasoning, following the death of Justice Scalia was wrong. The vacancy was immediately filled by Mitch and his gang thus once again demonstrating what had become their tried and true method of packing the Supreme Court.
Of course lower courts, like suitcases, can also be packed and Mitch and his followers did that throughout the last two years of the Obama administration and the 3 1/2 trump years. During the last two years of the Obama administration, Mitch effectively blocked the appointment of new Judges to the United States Courts of Appeals. In contrast, during the administrations of Presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Bush, the latest nomination to a Court of Appeals made by them and confirmed during the end of their respective tenures was submitted in the same year as the presidential election and they were confirmed that same year. Of the seven Obama nominees submitted by him in 2015 and 2016, none was confirmed, and their seats were vacancies that Mitch and the trump were able to fill after the trump became president.
Of course the Mitch method of packing the court applies equally to the Federal District Courts. There were 42 unconfirmed Obama nominees to the Federal District Courts when the trump became president. Nineteen of them had been nominated in 2015 and 23 of them had been nominated in early 2016. Those were vacancies that, before packing, would have been filled by the Senate before the election in 2016. Instead, and to the Trump’s and Mitch’s great delight, they were all filled after the trump’s election by nominees submitted by the trump and confirmed by a Senate controlled by Mitch and his colleagues.
According to one study, the trump has appointed almost a quarter of all active federal judges in the United States, That’s a record of which Mitch can be proud. Demanding to know whether the Democrats might try to pack the U.S. Supreme Court by adding Justices to the Court, the only means of packing the Republicans did not need to invoke in order to change the political make-up of the Federal Judiciary for many years to come, seems disingenuous. There’s a reason. It is.
Monday, October 12, 2020
The Monster and The trump
High thoughts must have high language.
— Aristophanes, The Birds
The questions that many have posed after listening to the trump’s interview with his personal news outlet, Fox, and its many iterations and bloviators, is whether the Executive Order issued on September 22, 2020 was intended to address the kind of language that could be called the hallmark of the trump. It was brought to mind by his interview on Fox on October 8, three days before he was once again turned loose on the country to roam at will in his search for four more years.
The Executive Order in question is entitled “Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” In the preamble to the Order, one of the stated purposes is said to be “to combat offensive and anti-American race and sex stereotyping and scapegoating.” It explains that many people are pushing a vision of America “grounded in hierarchies based on collective social and political identities rather than in the inherent and equal dignity of every person as an individual.”
In commenting on the sorts of conduct the Order is designed to correct, the Order observes that there is in this country an ideology “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country.” It criticizes training materials from Argonne National Laboratories that say that racism “is interwoven into every fabric of America and describes statements like ‘color blindness’ and the ‘meritocracy’ as ‘actions of bias.’”
In further describing the behavior that is being corrected by the Order, it offers as an example a recent Department of the Treasury seminar in which attendees were instructed to avoid “narratives” that Americans should “be more color-blind” or “let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates.”
In another seminar conducted by the Department of the Treasury, employees were told that “Americans should be more color-blind” and “should let people’s skills and personalities be what differentiates them.” That language, the Order said, was inappropriate.
A Smithsonian Institution museum graphic stated: “[f]acing your whiteness is hard and can result in feelings of guilt, sadness, confusion, defensiveness, or fear.” The Order says that kind of language is “contrary to the fundamental premises underpinning our Republic . . . that all individuals are created equal. . . .”
After offering numerous similar examples the Order says that “Training like that discussed above perpetuates racial stereotypes and division and can use subtle coercive pressure to ensure conformity of viewpoint. Such ideas may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars. Research also suggests that blame-focused diversity training reinforces biases and decreases opportunities for minorities.”
It is hard to believe that the trump would sign an
Executive Order that asserts that the problem with the approach taken by the training offered by many companies is based on an ideology “rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist and sexist country; that some people simply on account of their race or sex , are oppressors; and that racial and sexual identities are more important than our common status as human beings and Americans.”
The Order was signed by the trump who has repeatedly shown his disrespect for people with whom he disagrees by the language he uses when addressing them. It is mostly directed towards women and people of color.
The morning after Kamala Harris’s debate with Mike Pence, the trump referred to her as “this monster who was onstage with Mike Pence.” He went on to say that she was “totally unlikable” and a “communist” and called her a monster a second time during his commentary. Kamala was only the latest recipient of insults hurled at women who have offended the trump.
Following his brief encounter with a pornographic film actress who sued him he called her “horse face.” Other women he has occasion to comment on he describes as having “fat, ugly faces.” He described one woman he disliked as having the “face of a pig.” Another woman was described by him as a dog. During the Republican presidential debate prior to the 2016 election, he posed a hypothetical question about Carly Fiorino, one of his competitors, saying “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not supposed to say bad things, but really folks, come on. Are we serious?” Of Rosie O’Donnell he said she has a “fat ugly face. Describing his former aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, a black woman, he called her “that dog” and a “crazed, crying lowlife.” Referring to New York Times columnist, Gail Collins, he called her a “dog and a liar” and said she had “the face of a pig.”
The foregoing is nothing but a smattering of the words the trump has used to describe women. More can be found online. They all give rise to the same question. Is that one of the kinds of conduct that the trump’s Executive Order says companies should not try to correct? Who knows?
Here is one thing we know. On November 3 we have the opportunity to return the trump to the private sector where he can say whatever he wants, and no one will care-and the Executive Order can be rescinded.