2020: Agenda to Primary Mrs. Donnie McPutin

A. National Defense
1. Know what the Triad is.
2. Read intelligence briefings instead if watching Fox News.
3. Restaff the State Department
4. Recommit to NATO
5. End the Trade Wars that are killing the American Farmer
6. Active measures to punish election meddling.
7. End wars of choice.
8. Maintain national funding for deployed warriors and sailors; strategic forces and nuclear power.
9. Fund NASA with the DoD Budget rather than independent agencies to put aerospace research and launch activities in one pot. Go to Mars to develop closed loop environmental systems we can all use. Build a real Space Station.

B. Regional Government
1. Create 7 Regions of equal electoral electoral vote strength.
2. Have each region form an electoral vote compact to give all of their votes to whomever wins the popular vote in that region.
3. Appoint Regional Vice Presidents based on how the region votes. Congress creates a national caucus with one House member and Senator per region.
4. Submit regional budgets for domestic military and civil spending to fund regional armies and air wings, agriculture, transportation, law enforcement, clean water and and hydro-electric power and other discretionary functions.
5. Submit a constitutional amendment for regional excise taxes to discourage wasteful spending. States collect these taxes.
6. Require regional balanced budgets and enforce with automatic tax increases and spending cuts.
7. Create separate legal and
 regulatory codes for each region with regional caucus review of regulation.

C. Civil Rights and Justice
1. Pardon non-violent drug offenders
2. End the war on cannabis. Let science speak.
3. Add teeth to labor and civil rights law.
4. Pass ENDA.
5. Consolidate enforcement of civil rights, public integrity and labor law into one Department. Move most other functions to regions.
6. Reorganize Circuit Courts along regional lines with two circuits per region.
7. Tell the truth about repealing Roe v. Wade and enact national law on late term abortion.

D. Science
1. Develop self-driving electric cars in controlled lanes with overhead power distribution and proves (Sorry kids, no more snow days).
2. Help developing world clean their air and water as the top environmental priority. Quit sending them our garbage.
3. Fully fund fusion and develop plans so that conversion does not cost good jobs in energy.
4. Equitable distribution of federal lands. Get government out of the land business. Return lands to First Nations so that they can sell grazing rights to ranchers.
5. Link drug regulation and research to license fees. Take over ownership of orphan drugs and contract research and manufacture to lower prices with fair profits.
6. Keep NPS, PTO, NIST, NOAA, NTSB, NIH, CDC and FDA. Limit GMO patents to 2 seasons.
7. Abolish the Departments of Commerce, Interior, Energy, HHS, HUD, Transportation and the EPA.

E. Treasury and Commerce
1. End the myth of per capita debt and allow wealthy to prepay income surtaxes to pay down the debt. End the death tax for real this time.
2. Create optional personal requirement accounts holding insured voting and preferred shares in the employer, not Wall Street.
3.  Enact a single business income tax for all firms. Use it to fund retirement savings health care, child credits, education from daycare to grad school and adult education (with pay) with offsets so that companies who use them pay no tax. States collect and refund any taxes.
4. End the need to incur heavy debt and parental support for higher education. Forgive capitalized interest on student loans and give America a refund. Make community college part of high school. Forgive those debts too. Abolish the Department of Education.
5. End special interest tax breaks, including for Wall Street. End tax cheating through fair reforms, including an asset fair tax rather than capital gains taxes. Cheating is not a Republican value.
6. Set the child tax credit high enough to end the need for abortion services. Tie tax credits to regional cost of living. Adjust quarterly. End welfare.
7. Put economic research in one place (Census, Economic Analysis, Labor Statistics, etc.).
8. Look at ways to save American jobs through currency reforms, including a standard market basket of goods or precious metals. Adjust quarterly.
And the best for last:
9. End the income tax for most families and sunset the rest once the debt is paid down. No wealth tax aka post facto income tax. During the transition, increase net pay to cover regional taxes and make net and gross pay the same.


Make the GOP tent big again!

Doh! God

Growing up Catholic, or even Christian, you learn that Jesus is the Word of God, aka the Logos and the perfect image of the father. Narcisus was only a 2 dimensional image, but the Logos, who is also Sophia or Wisdom, is omni-dimensional.

Likewise, the Spirit is also Grace and perfect Love of the Father for the Son (and in the Roman Church, the Son for the Father. The root for the Spirit in Greek is of Feminine gender, so of course, the Church uses a Neutered term to describe the power that overshadowed Mary. Accepting even linguistic feminity would mean Jesus had two Mommies. The feminine understanding of the One God in Judaism is called Shekinah (as opposed to Ashura, who was the bride of Yahweh).

Yahweh is also how the Father is named, aka Jehovah aka He Who Is aka Elohim or Allah - both of whom are the same word.  One is Hebrew the other is Arabic. Baal is the Caananite version, probably as understood by Melchezadech, King of Salem (like Pharoh was a king). I have been a bit dense for the past half a century in figuring out what attribute distinguished the Father. I have been thinking of Him in terms of being Perfection, as I used it in Musings from the Christian Left, aka Conscience of a Catholic Radical aka The Future is Calling: It Wants a New God.

Perfection is an adjective, not a known or a verb. It did not sing. Over the past week or so I thought about using Life, although Jesus called himself the Way, the Truth and the Life and the original Church called itself The Way. As a side note, Alcoholics Anonymous at first called itself the Fellowship of the Spirit. If you called it the Fellowship of Shekinah you would be correct, but that would have locked many out of A.A. if they were agnostic.

It just hit me that Being, aka Supreme Being, aka He Who Is was the attribute I should have been using in my book. Doh!

Of course, this means editing at least two manuscripts, one for paper and one Kindle. So much for a week off. I have come down with a cold anyway, nut writing this blog post provides the mental note to place in the text (all but this last bit).

That means understanding the Trinity as Being, Truth and Love. That does sing and Being was right in front of me since I saw The Ten Commandments. Being as in be still. Human being, not human doing.

The 3 persons of God are more accurately called personas, or the three ways we experience God, aka, how God occurs for us. It is not so different semantically than the 13 names Judaism uses for the One God, aka Ashem.

Actually, there are Seven billion conceptions of God, one for each person, or a multiple of 7 billion, since everyone has the idea of a benevolent God, a harsh God, no God, a God in all of us and the self as God. That makes for about 35 billion mixes before you dress them up wth doctrine and myth (God, the Fairy Tale).

And now, I really am on vacation, since Trump lasted the day, meaning the next data dump will be on Friday, July 5th, when the Mueller  Grand Jury must adjourn with no further extension or action. Thank God! Almost every redaction labeled as Grand Jury Secret in the report comes off and Barr can then send everything to Nadler. Indeed, he pretty much has to. I suspect that this was the plan all along. No shoe remains undropped. I suspect I will be sleeping better than Trump this week.

God Bless.

Letter to Senator Hawley re: Gee v. June

Your Amicus is essentially a challenge to Marbury v. Madison, as well as the entire body of civil rights law based upon the 14th Amendment. Indeed, your argument would essentially return the nation to the days of Plessy v. Ferguson, which is unconscionable. Without this Amicus, the Court would have ruled per curiam that the Louisiana law is unconstitutional, reversing the 5th Circuit and making clear that no abortion case would ever be heard by the Court again. This indicates that Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh consider Roe v. Wade and the right to privacy to be settled law. This Amicus shows a total misunderstanding of the right to privacy. It has nothing to do with confidentiality. Instead, it creates a zone where private conduct is immune from legislation by state government. It is the ultimate protection against the tyranny of the reactionary mob. It is the bedrock of a free society based on God given Natural Rights.

On the matter of abortion, the unborn fully enjoy the right to life against the power of state and federal government as neither can execute a pregnant woman nor force her to have an abortion. It does not include any such right against the interest of its mother, although Congress and only Congress, may extend legal personhood to it under Section 5 if Amendment XIV. It will not do so, however, because attempts to do so in the first trimester of pregnancy would require that all Dialation and Cutage procedures be regulated by government. The rights of mothers and their doctors to due process under Amendments V and XIV against selective enforcement would require this, meaning that all miscarriages be investigated to determine if prosecution is required, including prosecution of the mother. If the fetus becomes a legal person, paying for its termination must also be a criminal act, as it is for killing any person. One is either a legal person or not. If not, state government  power to regulate abortion violates privacy.

This controversy is ended in the legal sphere. Any attempt to say otherwise perpetuates a fraud. The only recourse remaining is to increase and make fully refundable with Pay the child tax credit to the level required to support a child, regardless of the wage paid to parents. For the Republican Party to resist such action is to clearly state that the attempt to control abortion is a means to regulate sexuality and impose burdens upon women and not the rights of children in the womb. You must ask yourself, does the Republican Party stand for Life or merely against the right of women to be left alone?

Pelosi, Trump, Clinton and Nixon

The debate about impeachment is centered on two things: what is Bob Barr doing and what will Pelosi do about impeachment? I have talked about Barr - he is doing what Pelosi is doing - seeing if Mike Pence is implicated or not. She won't say it, nor will the media - since it is not a story without proof and journalistic and political ethics do not allow speculation on possible criminality about an innocent man - which has never stopped me before.

Everyone thinks Pelosi is drawing an analogy to the Clinton impeachment. She might be. Trump is like Clinton as a philanderer, but he is also like Nixon, a tax cheat and a crook who obstructs justice and abuses power. In 1999, no one in the Democratic Senate Caucus told Clinton to resign. Almost the entire caucus pushed Nixon out. For that reason, going the distance on Clinton may or may not have helped Bush win (although that was mostly because Gore put all his eggs in a basked controlled by John Ellis Bush, the candidates smart brother and because Gore could not win his home state).

Getting Nixon out may have helped Ford almost win, even after the pardon - although that was likely because Ford could not win Ohio. Congress still went deeply for the Democrats in 1974, which probably lanced the boil for Ford to come close. There is no doubt that, unless Democratic voters stay home because of cowardice, that the GOP has any chance of keeping the Senate or the White House, especially if Trump is the candidate. A liberal Republican with an economic plan could successfully primary the SOB and it would be fun for anyone but Trump to see him have to debate someone with nothing left to lose (see fiscalequity.blogspot.com to see why I should run - but you must give me money to do so).

It could be that the GOP got rid of Nixon because a trial would have given Ford no chance at all. AS it was, Nixon supporters still felt he might have been railroaded - as the Trump base feels now. At trial would have changed that. Without a Senate trial, Ford came a hair's breath away from winning, which meant Teddy Kennedy would have won in 1980 and there would have been no Reagan tax cuts. Pelosi should go forward for that reason, even though it is likely that Grassley will convince Trump to leave the same way Goldwater did with Nixon, for the good of the Party. This may put Pence into the White House - unless he is implicated too, which means Pelosi would be President,.

Pelosi loves being Speaker and she knows GOP voters hate her so much that she could not be President in her own right. The only thing would hate more than becoming president is for Pence to become president - so she waits. Even worse would be for Grassley to become President - but there is no chance of that unless she vacates her seat and Trump resigns before another speaker is chosen to become POTUS in her place. Trump getting a second term would be worse still, although the decimation of the GOP might kill it this time and turn the natural fault line in the Democratic Party into a permanent rift, especially if the sane wing of the GOP joins them for good. A progressive Republican could keep the GOP alive and cost the Democrats the AOC wing.

If Pence is guilty and Pelosi does become POTUS (which the GOP would arrange if he is), then her VP nominee would be sure to win in 2020. This is why McConnell will never let her nominee be confirmed and why she would never let Pence's nominee for VP be confirmed either. This is why the most importer person in Washington right now is Chuck Schumer. If he can get five vulnerable GOP Senators to switch, McConnell cannot block a VP vote as Leader. There are too many vulnerable Republicans for him to get 41 votes if not in the majority.

That is a lot of balls in the air (including mine if I primary Trump).

Joe Biden, the Hyde Amendment and You

Vice President Joe Biden took the entirely symbolic step of reversing his position in the Hyde Amendment, which prevents Medicaid funding of abortion services. This was politically necessary to defuse the issue in seeking the Democratic Party nomination for President. He is betting it will not cost him many votes in the November 2020 General Election.

He could easily say that Hyde is not a presidential matter, which is true. No President would veto the Human Services appropriation because it either included or omitted Hyde. This battle is fought in the appropriations subcommittee and maybe on the floor of the House in an open rule or the Senate as an amendment (likely as an excuse to get something else done, like entitlement cuts).

Entitlement increases are what is needed to reduce abortion, as most are for economic reasons or to cover-up sexual activity by teens or cheating spouses. Make the child tax credit high enough and no one will care how old the mother is or who's the father.

Even with insurance, most non-therapeutic abortion is paid without insurance, although the very poor in some states do use Medicaid from their own tax collections to bypass Hyde. Still, you are more likely to finance abortion by seeing a movie or getting a fast food than in paying taxes and insurance.

In all cases, even without Hyde, there is no moral reason not to buy a burger, go to a movie, pay taxes or participate in group insurance, including Medicare for All, because you do not want to fund somebody else's abortion. The effect of your payment and the actual procedure us too remote for it to be any of your business. Even the Ethics textbooks at Catholic minor seminary state this. Indeed, that is where I learned this.

This is a teachable moment that Vice President Biden should take advantage of to end this entire debate. It is necessary to do so for November 2020.

Doing this is almost riskier for the pro-choice side, because changing too many hearts and minds ends its usefulness in mobilizing feminists as it also neutralizes the pro-birth movement.

The Alabama abortion law has forced the pro-Birthers to go All-In anyway, so it really is time to put all cards on the table and let the chips fall as they may.

This law, as well as fetal heartbeat and trap law (and in Missouri, trap regulation) cases have come forward because the pro-life movement is under the mistaken notion that adding Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court may cause Chief Roberts and Justice Alito to change their minds about repealing Roe v. Wade. Note that both new Justices clerked for Justice Kennedy.

Kennedy was seen as the swing vote on many social issues. In the partial birth abortion case, he had voted against state bans of the procedure, which he considered infanticide because the child was being born to accomplish it (even if the child was not yet viable), but voted for a federal ban. He did so, with Roberts and Kennedy joining, based on the Commerce Clause.

A better hook would have been the power of Congress to enforce the 14th Amendment.  Justice Thomas rightly  claimed that the Court could already do so under already delegated power, which is likely correct, but farther than Kennedy, Roberts and Alito wanted to go. The Movement is betting the farm that Roberts and Alito and the new Jusices will now go with Thomas.

Many believe (including me) that the law is an attempt to adopt the Justice Scalia position (Gorsuch filled his seat) that state legislatures should make equal protection and due process decisions without federal interference, essentially bringing back the Plessy v. Ferguson Status quo. Scalia believed that the framers of the 14th Amendment never wanted it to be a catch-all, regardless if the fact that debate showed that they wanted exactly that.

The fact that both if the new Justices admired Scalia adds to the fear that his vision did not die with him. Most doubt that Roberts would join this vision, although it is fairly clear that those who enacted the federal partial birth abortion ban did so as an invitation to overturn Roe in just this way.

The more realistic fear is that the Thomas derived congressional power theory could be seen as a compromise that Catholic Roberts may take. He is more likely to reject it as judicial activism. Even the congressional power view scares femunists because that gives the pro-birth movement an avenue for hope and fundraising (because congressional action would be constitutional and Roberts would support it). This is not likely either, because unconstitutional selective enforcement would be required, forcing broad enforcement that  would require police power to investigate miscarriages too. That complexity is why Roberts will likely not support the Thomas theory of the case.

The teachable moment is to be straight with the voters that overturning Roe could mean revoking Plessy, so it should not be supported, even by Catholic voters, and that only congressional action could make the unborn legal persons, but that the prospect of police power to investigate miscarriage makes that unlikely as well. Trust the voters to see the truth.

The crisis of the moment is the other way the pro-Birthers are looking busy to get a case to the Court to overturn Roe,  the legal thuggery called Trap laws. The Court has already agreed with a circuit court ruling that held these laws unconstitutional, but that was two justices ago. Because another circuit went the other way, this matter may be heard.

The other option is for the Court to not hear the case and simply order that the fifth circuit decision be vacated, giving the ACLU, et al, the ability to go after all efforts to enact them through law or regulation. This would end the narrative that the Court will allow Roe to be overturned by a death by a thousand cuts. That would end fundraising on both sides. We will know by the end of the month. It is doubtful that a court that affirms its prior opinion on trap laws will ever hear another challenge to Roe.

Many in the pro-birth movement care nothing for what they call the legal mumbo jumbo, especially not the recognition that the unborn already have a right to life against the state, which is why a pregnant woman cannot be executed or forced to have an abortion. They truly believe abortion is murder, although not being murdered is not an inherent right. It is a contractual one because having government is not a civil right. If it were, then all of our freedoms would depend in that government.

Instead, the pro-Birthers believe that the law of God and the Church should take precedent. On the contrary, the First Amendment and pluralism demand that Catholic politicians not impose their personal morality on the government, something that some Catholic bishops cannot except, even though Dignitatis Humanae affirms the right of individual conscience in religion. Catholic politicians need not and indeed cannot impose their faith on others.

The stance of Democratic politicians claiming to be personally pro-life but not the requirement to ban abortion is a natural extension of that doctrine.  Sadly, this has prevented most of them from publicly explaining why Roe was rightly decided in the American system. 

Biden rejecting the Hyde Amendment ripped off that bandage. It is time for Catholic politicians to explain all of this to their faith leaders, both publicly and privately. The bishops need to be called out for putting loyalty to the party line, both Vatican and Republican, above the truth.

The Vice President needs to explain this in detail and well enough before 2020 to make abortion and Hyde a non-issue for both sides, except as a justification for increasing the child tax credit to living wage levels of $1000 per month per child, distributed with payroll. Make the Republicans say publicly what they say privately, that they do not want to pay higher taxes to subsidize other people's sexuality. You see, this whole debate really is about controlling female sexuality and punishing the poor.