Free Republic

What’s going to come out of this is hardball indeed. The “motion to remove” is going to go away eventually, and it won’t come back, so the party leaders in Congress are going to be more powerful and enforce discipline more harshly.

North Korea? Iran? Afghanistan? Venezuela?

Turkmenistan??????

1) He needs somebody who isn’t SuperMAGA to balance the ticket.

2) Vance has a great rags to riches story, but all the talk is going to be about the riches, rather than the rags. I don’t know if he really appeals to the crowd.

Obama understood that if he wanted to be president, he’d have to marry a Black woman.

Tim, alas, never learned that lesson.

“allegedly”

That was my reaction too.

That’s still bad.

Public spitting, defecation, urination, masturbation — shamelessness was part of Diogenes the Cynic’s philosophical strategy

Your view might describe America from the 1880s to the 1930s or 1970s or even the 1990s, but it had little to do with antebellum America and has even less to do with the United States today. The defeat of the South in the Civil War and the problems of the newly settled states made the Northeast dominant in the American economy from the end of that war until more recent times.

That wasn't the case before the Civil War. The North was gradually industrializing, but it wasn't robbing the cotton rich South of anything. If you aren't developing industry and financial institutions, or if other regions are doing it better than you are, you will have to pay somebody for the products you don't produce at home. The antebellum South had great power in American politics, and wasn't dominated by anyone else.

The development of the South and West in the last 50 years has made the Northeast less powerful in the economy. You don't have to be in NYC and pay high taxes to trade in the markets. You don't have to have factories in the Northern states or have a corporate headquarters in New York or Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland anymore. Northern Rustbelt cities have declined and the Sunbelt has risen. The same elite urban or suburban culture prevails in Atlanta or Charlotte and in NYC or LA. Our current divisions are ideological not regional.

plato told

him:he couldn’t
believe it(jesus

told him;he
wouldn’t believe
it)lao

tsze
certainly told
him,and general
(yes

mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
or

not)you
told him:i told
him;we told him
(he didn’t believe it,no

sir)it took
a nipponized bit of
the old sixth

avenue
el;in the top of his head:to tell

him

Maybe Manchin was using the Capitol Hill exercise machines that beat up Harry Reid.

He’s been against vaccines — all kinds of vaccines — for years. You’re looking at this one way, maybe a Deep State vs. ordinary Americans way. He’s looking at it in an environmentalist, back to nature way. So, no his vaccine stand isn’t a political ploy.

Um ... that may not be what his friend meant when he told Bobby he should have his head examined.

Raised in the woods so he knew every tree.
Kilt him a boar when he was only three.
Bobby, Bobby Kennedy, King of the Wild Frontier.

If Republicans in Congress were living up to what they always said they believed they would have supported restraints on spending and cuts in budgets, but McConnell and Ryan didn’t want to do that.

There were objections to Trump early on because he wasn’t a “real” Republican or conservative. “Real” Republicans and conservatives in DC concentrated on fighting Trump, rather than in implementing what they said was the Republican or conservative agenda.

For centuries, cities had high death rates and their population had to be replentished by the countryside, which had high birth rates. That changed over the last two centuries. Death rates are lower and lifespans are longer, but birthrates are also lower. The countryside is less populated and doesn’t make up for low birth rates anymore. Countries turn to immigration to make up the birth deficit, but that brings other serious problems.

Many, many errors in there, but I don’t have the time or the patience to carry on this pointless discussion any longer. Go on living in your fantasy world if you like.

He came there to fight bears and find Nirvana, and he's all out of bears.

Gotta love the Astro Boy haircut.

You can’t just ignore or dismiss the real fears that people had at the time. The Blair family, whose patriarch had been a confidant and strong supporter of Andrew Jackson, was building the Republican Party in Missouri and Maryland. Germans in those states were also voting Republican. Politicians in South Carolina and other Deep South States looked at the Border States with alarm and could imagine Republicans building up their party in Western Virginia, Eastern Tennessee and Northern Alabama.

Slave uprisings were a major fear in the slave states: Gabriel’s rebellion, the German Coast uprising, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner. Patrols for runaways were a major part of life, and they were vigilant about slave gatherings that they thought might spark a rebellion. Some slaveowners might believe that slaves were contented until abolitionists got to them, but they were terrified of abolitionists getting to them, even from a distance (hence the desire to keep slaves illiterate when possible).

In contrast, tariffs weren’t a major burden on most Southerners. If the slave states had stayed in the union, tariffs wouldn’t have gone up as high as they did. Lincoln would have lost control of Congress in the next election and tariffs would have gone down again. The militancy against the 1828 tariff was largely confined to South Carolina, the state where slave owning families were most powerful and had control of the government. Other states probably recognized that tariffs went up and down with the political climate. Later secessionists adopted talk about the tariff and fishing bounties because they were large slaveowners themselves, or because they wanted their revolt to be about more than worries about slavery. It wasn’t the main issue until after the war when no one who had supported the rebellion wanted to acknowledge the importance of slavey.

The percentage of slaveowning families in the Deep South States was rather high, estimated at 49% in Mississippi and 46% in South Carolina, at 36.7% in the first seven seceding states and at around 25.3% in the last four states to secede. Those numbers aren’t exact, but even if one lowers them they still reflect the place of slavery in the slave states. Those who didn’t own slaves were often dependent on the slaveowners — and of course they were concerned about what a post-slavery future would look like.

“Slavery was strictly, a sectional interest” — sure, until Southern states tried to overturn the Missouri Compromise and even the Northwest Ordinance. Slaveowners brought their problems upon themselves. Eventually, unless more territory were annexed, slave states would become a minority. Wouldn’t we have hoped that would be the case? The leading founders certainly wished for an eventual end to slavery. Slaveowners couldn’t face that so they engineered the situation that brought Northeast and Midwest together — just as their splitting the Democratic party created the situation where a Republican’s election would be inevitable.

Lincoln’s first draft of his inaugural address didn’t mention the Corwin Amendment. The amendment hadn’t been passed by Congress then, but still, he didn’t see fit to mention it. Several historians have suggested that Seward, who had put a lot of effort into crafting the amendment and spiriting it through the Congress, prevailed upon Lincoln to the mention amendment in his inaugural address. I haven’t been able to find out if that is true, but historians who have been suspicious of Lincoln in this matter have made that suggestion when it would benefit their cause not to.

Republican votes had to be “whipped” for the Corwin Amendment because more Republicans voted against it than voted for it, but Lincoln wasn’t the one doing the whipping, nor did he bring the “whole party machinery” behind it for ratification. I asked you to provide evidence for your claims, and you haven’t.

Pushing the amendment would have broken the Republican Party in two. A substantial part of the “party machinery” didn’t and wouldn’t support the amendment, which was quickly overtaken by events and became a dead letter. The amendment wasn’t going to be ratified by the necessary 3/4ths of states.

Lowcountry secessionists agreed that Republicans would immediately attempt no overt antislavery laws. Such an effort would scare Southerners out of the Union and out of Yankees’ clutches. In contrast, Republicans’ deployment of southern patronage would leave the region enfeebled. John Townsend spread a spooky metaphor for nonovert enfeeblement, as chilling as a caged rat: a spider’s web. Imagine, wrote Townsend, “some insect, strong in itself, but which has sillily entangled itself in the meshes of a spider. With moderate exertions at first, it could … free itself. … But it prefers to be quiescent for awhile. Fatal hesitation!” The “artful” spider “dashes forth from his hiding place and fastens a cord around the wing,” then retreats, pauses, rushes forth, retreats, pauses, assaults, until the prey can barely move.

Republicans will creep southward “stealthily, cautiously at first, lest we break through their meshes, and form a government for ourselves.” By appointing southern turncoats to federal stations in the South, including custom houses, post offices, and court houses, Lincoln would spread his meshes inside the South. After we become “unable to resist,” we will have to “submit to…the mercy of the spider.”

Presidential patronage as creepy as a monster spider—and more spooky than the master image for territorial confinement, a rat in a poisoned cage?! Absolutely, for Republican office would supposedly be the poison inside the jailed South. The patronage bait would attract allegedly traitorous southern politicians to make agitation against slavery as democratically normal as arguments against tariffs and banks. It would be as if gag rules had been lifted not only inside Congress but also throughout the South, as if English abolitionists had been allowed to spread their ideology across the Texas Republic, as if Kansas free soilers had been permitted unrestricted access to western Missouri slaves and nonslaveholders, as if Border Northerners had been invited to perfect their Liberty Line inside the Border South— with all of this Jacobinical disruption now contaminating hidebound South Carolina.

Pic-a-nic baskets got too expensive?