Governments Instituted Among Men

Thom reminds us that Thomas Jefferson said that “to secure these Blessings (meaning Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness) then governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed”.   So it’s the government of the People and not of the Internationalist Corporation.  I would remind you that Andrew Jackson advocated on behalf of universal manhood sufferage, as long as you were white, of course.  Jackson doesn’t believe you have to own property to vote.  And as I quoted a while back, “The wealth of a society in terms of the triangle of income is best measured at its base, rather than at its apex”.  This means that you measure wealth from the masses at the bottom of the wealth triangle and not the few at the top.  Politicians need to keep this in mind.  Thom Hartman states that while competition in business is well and good among each other.  But for government it’s not a case of “winners and losers” but the government is to secure the blessings of Liberty for all Americans.   I would also quote the line that “any time when government is destructive of these ends, said government should and ought to be abolish and new government instituted”.   Conservatives claim to revere our early documents, but they don’t. 

We have the battle of the political cartoons.  Ted Cruz uses his little girls as props in one of his little bedtime story reading.  The thing I saw was just funny and didn’t make much sense if it was supposed to advance Cruz’s campaign.  But then a cartoon appears that depicts Cruz’s young daughters as monkeys.  Maybe that was over the line, but I think the whole idea of Cruz reading bedtime stories is funny because of the way Cruz botched the telling of the story “Green Eggs and Ham”.  But then a cartoon appears that shows Hillary Clinton walking her two “lap dogs” of the New York Times and the Washington Post.  I think we need a little comic relief because the issues themselves are so bad carried to grotesque proportions by Trump, cartoons like this are kind of tame. 

As the Beatles say, “Happy Christmas and a very new year”.  They were reading reviews of their Hard Day’s Night movie and it said “We had a quiet time making it”.   They said on the news it was 61 degrees in Anaheim.  41 is more like it.  It’s pretty nippy out there even now after breakfast.  Last night I got a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from Donnie.  I dozed off during the ABC network news and Bill asks me just after seven, “Are you out of cigarettes?”  I said I was.  So he gave me five dollars to go get two packs of John Black, one for me and one for him.  There was a guy I’d never seen before.  It was a Christmas present to me.  Then it was Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.  At eight it was a Wonderful Life on KNBC and Peanuts on seven so I watched a Mr. Magoo Scrooge Christmas on KTLA for the hour.  They throw in new musical songs as embellishments, which is to be expected.  I slept fairly well but woke up a little early and never really got back to sleep.  I turned on KNBC news.  I looked in Bill’s drawer where I had some of my papers stashed.  I was looking at calendars of years passed, and I should move them to the other location.  It was cold out.  I sat in the front room a while.  Bill went out for coffee and they were giving away complimentary donuts.  We had sugar frosted Cheerios and a fried egg, and toast, butter and jelly.  Rico had extras for the coffee so I got one black and one with cream and Hendrix.  That warmed me up a little.  The bird has been very chirpy lately.

Mark Hannah, great Republican campaign manager (from Ohio) was asked about 1900 what makes a successful political campaign.  He said “First is money, and second is money, and the third- - I forget”.  Some have said we are almost as bad as the guilded age, which was coming to an end just about the turn of the last century once Teddy got into office, and I don’t mean Kennedy.  But in some ways we are actually worse now.  Because back in the gay nineties (again the 1890’s not the 1990’s) there were a lot of sufferagettes and early Union strikes, and significant segments of the population were politically millitent.  Today there is still a yawning apathy that is spanning the length and breadth of society, that “hampers forward progress”.

Let’s do a blast from the last file right now.  In terms of content the most exciting thing I learned from Rachael Maddaw was that Governor Snyder of Michigan is personally appointed dictator of the state and can replace any elected officer he cares to if he declares an emergency.  I never heard of such a rule to override the rule of the people.  And Flint, Michigan is going to have lead polluted water now because of Snyder.  Can’t this guy be impeached or anything?  That is what I wrote last Saturday but it so far hasn’t made it into a blog.  The guy on right now was talking about Greece a little and how the will of the people of Greece is ignored by the EU in terms of how the economic problems of Greece are handled.   Do you know what I mean? 

Today is Christmas and it continues pretty cold out but Rico wanted us to have our iced tea on the chilly side of the courtyard out of the sun.   Tom Hartman would be the Wednesday before last, I guess.  I was reading in “The Ten Commandments” and there are no quotes or parodies of Dylan songs I was expecting to see in 2006.   “Don’t Take Me Alive”, the compilation, appears in May of 2006.   There are also the Larry Elder letters where I appear to contradict my later statements on God.  I said that “God is not in control of history”.  What I meant by this was “the sort of guidance and control and “protection from evil” if you will, that one comes to “expect” from an all powerful deity.  In other words the sort of things Larry Elder would want and expect from God.  Put another way, I had not yet evolved into the sort of total determinist person I am today.  Because back then I was thinking there were certain things you were “supposed to expect” from a deity.