Free Republic

Sure, that would've gotten everybody's attention.

I seem to detect an invisible </sarcasm> tag there . . . but the point of the exercise is never to impress the unimpressable (and who would be less impressible than a journalist who is there as an expression of black - black Democrat - identity?) but to make points with viewers who may be persuadable.

The target audience is the mass audience - not only blacks but whites who can be impressed to see a Republican making a sound pitch to blacks.

It would have been trivial for the framers of the Constitution to prohibit felons from being selected to be president. On first blush it would seem obvious. One reason they didn’t might be prescience, the fact that they could smell Jack Smith two centuries away.

Of course the other reason might have been that in the eyes of George III every one of the founders was a felon . . .

So how is she the “change” candidate then?

If you give her a 2020 dollar, she’ll give you back79 cents and call that “change."

...the late George W. Bush…

Dubya died? When?

George HW Bush is the one who is “late"

My 25th was back in February, I now notice. Remember when we had to be so very careful to close our HTML tags?

FR was a crucial support for me back when I started and for many a year after that. My cancer, the passing of my (Republican) wife and the loss of the ’20 election all combined to suppress my FReeping, very largely, since then.

Many blacks hold intractable resentment towards white people and white society because of historic iniquities. While that's certainly understandable, holding any kind of resentment is self-destructive. In the case of this particular resently, it holds black people back, preventing them from melding into society at large.

Indubitably.

Democrats tap into that resentment. They foster it, inflaming it whenever possible.

Also indubitably - but also ironically, if you ignore the systematic purchasing of the negro (as the polite term then was) vote by the Democrats starting during the Depression.

Before that, blacks had remained Republican since the Civil War. But of course you can only blame hungry people so much for selling out political principles. I am thankful that I have never been that hungry.

Two reasons why the Biden victory in ’20 was, shall we say, surprising :

1. no POTUS in prior history had ever been defeated in a reelection bid by a senator or VP

2. Nobody who had been a senator for 20 years before attaining VP or POTUS had ever won the presidency.

Only the first criterion applies to VP Harris - but in all reasonable perspective it should be plenty, given the mess the Biden Harris administration has made.

“I think all of us know the electoral college needs to go,” Walz said. “But that’s not the world we live in.”

I’m sure that the framers who represented the most populous states in the 1780s would have preferred nationwide majority rule over the Electoral College. Or, considering that the Constitution leaves the method of selecting each state’s electors to the legislature thereof (i.e., there is no constitutional mandate to conduct popular votes which in any way determine the identities of the state’s electors), maybe not - who knows.

But when Waltz says of eliminating the electoral college, "that’s not the world we live in,” he is not whistling Dixie. Good luck getting the smallest 50% of the states to agree to changing that!

What President Trump did by questioning Harris’s credentials as “black” on that “interview” in front of black journalists was brilliant. The subtext of those comments was, “She’s playing you with the race card”.

Yes but.

IMHO the stronger play would have been to reflect the question back to the black journalists by saying that

“You personally identify as black. If you identify racially with VP Harris and support her on that basis, that is your business.

But if you identify with the public in general or with the black public interest in particular, I recommend that you support someone who is an experienced executive who has a solid record which includes the lowest black unemployment in history of unemployment statistics.

As opposed to someone who may be superficially appealing to you and who has been a prosecutor, a senator, or a vice president but who has no high level executive experience."

Blacks are a much tougher nut to crack. A large portion of the black population are, psychologically, sort of "permanent immigrants" who refuse assimilation and maintain an oppositional defiant attitude towards white people.

. . . but if the Democrats do not win a big majority of the black vote, that will mark the end of the deep blue state phenomenon.

Talk is that black men, like men generally, are less than overwhelmingly enthusiastic about a Kamala Harris presidency. If that means Harris only gets 80% of the black vote - even somewhat more if it also implies low turnout - that means “advantage, Trump.”

If a Republican wins the WH due in part to black votes, that will be a banner day not only for the Republican Party, and not only for the country, but for blacks themselves. It would mean that both parties would be on notice to court the black vote - instead of one party giving it lip service and the other party giving up on it.

Are you ready for a Republican Party which fields competitive black candidates inside and outside of majority-black areas? Of course you are.

Maybe they should just quit beating around the bush, and call for repeal of the First Amendment.

Taking responsibility for changing the Constitution is not the way they roll. Instead, they just get SCOTUS to claim the Constitution means what the Democrats want it to. Hence their desperation to regain control of SCOTUS.

Actually, it’s a disgrace to even press against anyone’s rights to the point that it even becomes necessary to appeal to the Bill of Rights. For example, the phraseology “the right of the people” implies that repeal of a relevant constitutional provision would not obliterate the right because the right in question is only articulated, not created, by the constitutional provision.

I refer you to the fact that the Bill of Rights was not in the original draft Constitution, not because Federalists opposed any of the rights articulated therein, but out of concern that articulation of a given right would be taken as a ceiling over, not a floor under, the implementation of that right. And that is precisely what happens any time anyone is forced to appeal to the Bill of Rights.

But as to the First Amendment in particular, the Warren Court’s 1964 New York Times Company v. Sullivan decision misinterpreted 1A in a way which damaged society by subverting state laws against libel. “The freedom of speech, of or the press” means something other than simple “freedom of speech, of or the press” (without the preceding “the”) means. As written with the crucial preceding “the,” the phrase refers to the right as it already existed in the states. Not untrammeled freedom but freedom as limited by laws against libel, slander, and pornography.

New York Times Company v. Sullivan was a unanimous decision, and even included enthusiastic concurrences - but I appeal to the Morrison v. Olsen decision, which would have been unanimous if not for then-freshman Justice Anton Scalia’s dissent. Scalia famously said that most most abuses come as a wolf in sheep’s clothing, “but this wolf comes as a wolf.” And sure enough, after a decade or so, the majority opinion was a dead letter - and if a lawyer ever referred to the case in a pleading, he would have to cite, not the 8-1 majority opinion but the sole dissent.

So don’t think that a unanimous opinion, even with enthusiastic concurrences, can’t be wrong. Not if Scalia disagreed with it - and Scalia did disagree with it, but never had the chance to officially put that opinion in legal history.

Correct reading of the Constitution would have deferred to state libel law in the Sullivan case.

The dirty little secret is that the mechanism of the Electoral College is, by design, compatible with mechanisms which do not include popular vote determining or even affecting the selection of POTUS.

Conducting popular votes within the states to determine the selection of the electors is traditional, and not doing it would be challenged in Congress - but the Nebraska plan shows that the state legislatures are, constitutionally, supposed to control the process. The Democrats in Congress imposed what should be called, not “Election Day” but "Election Season" nationwide - but the states should have told Congress where to go with that idea.

Republicans should threaten to do it if Kennedy’s ^Biden’s name not ^is removed from swing states.

The Government-Media Complex.

The idea is that “the media” is supposed to get out the word as to what is going on. That was the rationale of the early congressional action to subsidize the mailing of newspapers from one printer to several of his fellows. Perfectly logical - in appearance.

That impulse to spread the word was magnified by the development of the telegraph - and the, in historical terms, instantaneous creation of the Associated Press. By the 1870s there were objections to the substantial propaganda power of the AP. The AP responded, that the AP feed came from the members of the AP - newspapers which were (in that long-ago time) notorious for not agreeing on anything.

So that was the state of play, with the AP rapidly spreading the word, and having the reputation of being unbiased, when in 1964 SCOTUS handed down its notorious New York Times Co. v. Sullivan decision. Unanimously, with enthusiastic concurrences, SCOTUS held, basically, that the political parties could take care of themselves without recourse to libel actions, and that henceforth it would be hard for politicians to get standing when they tried to sue newspapers.

Now comes the joker:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary. - Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)

The reality is that the AP might be the original ‘virtual meeting.’ And in that context it not only is not presumptively objective, it presumptively promotes journalism as such to the extent of constituting “a conspiracy against the public.” Now, what is the interest of journalism in comparison with the interest of the public? In reality journalism is entertainment. Entertainment interests the public, but the public interest lies not in exciting news but in no “news” - at all. “No news is good news” because good news “isn’t news.” Said differently, we want security, journalism prospers in the absence of security.

My conclusion is that President Trump is the embodiment of the impulse to create security at minimum cost and risk; the Democrats create insecurity for Americans by opening the floodgates to military-age men of any provenance whatsoever.

Democrats have destroyed black America.

I think that black children should all be given “forty acres and a mule.” Just like all the other children are.

“forty acres and a mule,” by themselves, feed nobody - what was taken for granted was that black slaves would, with that capitalization, work (farm) and feed themselves and their families.

What is free education, if not (in principle, at least) provision of the wherewithal for each child (black or other) to become a self-sustaining adult?

It is the failure of the free schools in that mission which is the problem. And at the root of that is tolerance for failure. Tolerance for failure, and the conversion of the education associations into unions.

we don’t know who is currently running the government and that if kamala is elected, we still won’t know .

We had serious doubts from Day 1 of this administration.

It’s actually unfair, in one sense, to levy the charge that Harris hasn’t “done anything” as VP. Because vice president is not an executive position. No more than Senator is.

The point, surely, is that Kamala Harris has never held any publicly noticeable executive position. Whereas she is applying for the biggest executive position in America - the very position which Mr. Trump has a track record of handling. At least as well as his support in the Senate would allow. Inflation didn’t expand during his Administration, because he wasn’t throwing dollars around for no reason. It didn’t even get bad during 2020 during the Covid emergency.

The Biden-Harris Administration, OTOH, has had disastrous inflationary implications, and history is likely to show that we are in a Recession at this very moment. But the Democrats take the position that the economy is like the weather, which people talk about but which is unpredictable and is just gonna do whatever, no matter what a Democrat Administration does, or doesn’t, do.

What Harris does bear responsibility for is the fact that - at least since the Trump-Biden debate, America does not have a president who commands respect. Harris, as VP, is responsible for not invoking the 25th Amendment. If she doesn’t have the clout to make that declaration stick within the administration, she should have threatened to resign in that case. But she hasn’t done that because being important -even if only nominally - is more important to her than is the USA.

Well, it’s perfectly true that VP is not a position with any executive authority. At all. She casts deciding votes in the Senate in the event of a tie - that’s it.

Of course in the present instance someone other than the “sitting president” is running the Administration - but we don’t know who, and it might not be Harris.

But since we’re sure Joe isn’t presently in charge of anything, the real scandal is that Kamala has not taken responsibility by invoking the 25th Amendment. Apparently she doesn’t actually have the clout in the administration to do that . . . which leaves one to wonder whether she would exercise that clout in 2025 if, Heaven forfend, she is inaugurated as the next president.

She acts like she has no authority, and insinuates that the mess we’re in is somehow due to Mr. Trump, who hasn’t had any authority since January 2021.

A young person actually suggested to me that the fact that Biden was reelected to the Senate so many times, added to his status as former VP, was a good credential for POTUS.

The reality is that the election of Biden as POTUS was an extreme outlier, in the sense that he was the first person to be elected to POTUS w/o becoming at least VP less than twenty years after attaining statewide office.

He also was an extreme outlier as the first person to unseat a sitting POTUS who was not a sitting or recent governor of a state. The office of VP is not an executive position; his/her only actual job is to preside in the Senate as cast tie-breaking votes. For those reasons Biden’s victory was very surprising, and the fact that people went to DC on January 6 to question it should have surprised no one.

Like Biden, Kamala is running for POTUS with no big-time executive experience on her resume. And is running against former POTUS - and previously famous private-sector executive - Donald Trump.

Back in 1964 a libel case (New York Time Co. v. Sullivan) was decided by the famously liberal Warren Court. One salient feature of the case was that it was brought by an unsympathetic plaintiff (unsympathetic in the sense that, as a Southern Democrat, Sullivan was not in good odor either with the Republican Party or the mainstream liberal Democrat Party).

That might very well have increased the Warren Court’s comfort level in launching, 9-0, a novel interpretation of the First Amendment. There is an awful lot of careless talk among conservatives as well as (formerly, at least) among liberals to the effect that the First Amendment created an unlimited right to freedom of speech and press, which is what the Sullivan decision came close to creating (at least when a plaintiff is a politician).

In a video which I wish I had bookmarked, Justice Scalia clarified the meaning of 1A by pointing out that the Framers of the Constitution were not opposed to freedom of speech and of the press, but rather took for granted that the American tradition of freedom already was established and could be taken for granted. In their debates with the Antifederalists, the Federalists argued that it wasn’t possible to enumerate every freedom, and that a bill of rights in the Constitution could be construed as a ceiling over our rights rather than, as the Antifederalists hoped and as the Tenth Amendment instructs, a floor under them.

Scalia noted that 1A protects, not blanket freedom of speech and press, but the freedom of speech and press - meaning, Scalia explained, freedom of speech as it already existed and was limited in preexisting state practice. If you ever wondered where censorship of pornography came from and how it survived the ratification of 1A, there is your answer.

All of which is to say that, whether or not Mr. Sullivan should have won his case, Sullivan was decided on faulty grounds. The laws of libel were not touched by 1A - and this had been understood from the founding of the Republic right up until 1964.

I am saying that Mr. Trump has the right to sue for libel to recover damages for the broadcasting of lies which already have very nearly cost him his life.

I would even argue that it is problematic for C-Span to broadcast lies even lies spoken by Congressmen within the halls of Congress. At minimum there should be a mechanism whereby offended parties could put a cease-and-desist order on the repetitive transmission to the public of lies by the likes of Adam Schiff even tho they were uttered within the constitutionally established protective halls of Congress.

not a word about opening the pipe line

Hear, hear!