Friday, January 11, 2019

A plea to congressional progressives

Behold the turtle. Till it sticks its neck out...it makes no progress.

As Maine goes, so should the nation


Even with Florida's new law re-enfranchising 1.5 million felons who have completed their sentence, including parole and probation, over 4 million ex-cons don't have the right to vote in America. That's on top of a million or more still serving their sentence in the most incarceration crazy nation on Earth. But two states, Maine and Vermont, allow every eligible adult to vote, including Big House residents. Many argue the incarcerated have forfeited their right to vote as just punishment for their anti-social behavior. Yet, if the goal of justice is to both protect the public and rehabilitate the incarcerated for eventual return to society, convict voting serves both purposes. It has no adverse effect on public safety and may have a positive effect on rehabilitation by encouraging felons to re-engage with the society from which they've been excluded.
How is convict voting working in Maine and Vermont? FBI violent crime stats place Vermont 49th and Maine dead last in violent crime per hundred thousand residents with an average of 141. Alaska and New Mexico top the fifty in violent crime with an average of 754 per hundred thousand. The reasons must be many but convict voting certainly doesn't hurt.
A famous US political phrase 'As Maine goes so goes the nation' was popular at one time, reflecting Maine's reputation as a bell-weather state for predicting presidential elections. When it comes to convict voting, as well as the 4 million on parole, probation and simply former felons, we should update that to 'As Maine and Vermont go on convict voting...so should the nation'.

Pompeo's pompous pitch for perpetual war


Can the Trump administration get any more schizophrenic on perpetual war? One day Trump announces we're withdrawing all 2,000 troops from Syria plus half the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, arguing we have no business in the Middle East. Within a month he allows his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to promote perpetual war in a speech at American University in Cairo. Pompeo pointedly blamed all America's foreign policy problems on his boss's predecessor Obama, whom he said foolishly ended the Afghan and Iraq wars, refused to attack Syria and worst of all, reached out in peace to America's current enemy de jour Iran. Pompeo's speech comes nearly ten years after Obama's famous 'A New Beginning' speech in Cairo, in which Obama offered a reset to the US relationship to the Muslim world so terribly damaged by George W. Bush's Middle East war policies. Pompeo boosted of continuing US Syrian intervention till every last Iranian is out of Syria, lauded US withdrawal from the 5+1 Iranian nuclear deal and even threatened US intervention against Hezbollah in Lebanon. Sadly and tragically, the foreign policy establishment committed to perpetual war, including virtually all of Trump's subordinates, simply ignore Trump's pronouncements for peace, the one decent thing he's done as president. Once again we learn that 'war is the health of the state'.