Dangers pile up. The Court, the foreign meddlers... and our oppressed military.

Studies of gerrymandering show that this horrific crime by the political caste against U.S. citizens won’t die easily. As described in Quanta Magazine, mathematicians have dialed in on the problem in such a way that the Supreme Court can no longer use its longstanding rationales for ignoring the problem.

From The Washington Post: Gerrymandering is the biggest threat to democracy: “In the 2016 elections for the House of Representatives, the average electoral margin of victory was 37.1 percent. That’s a figure you’d expect from North Korea, Russia or Zimbabwe – not the United States. But the shocking reality is that the typical race ended with a Democrat or a Republican winning nearly 70 percent of the vote, while their challenger won just 30 percent.”

“Last year, only 17 seats out of 435 races were decided by a margin of 5 percent or less. Just 33 seats in total were decided by a margin of 10 percent or less. In other words, more than 9 out of 10 House races were landslides where the campaign was a foregone conclusion before ballots were even cast. In 2016, there were no truly competitive Congressional races in 42 of the 50 states. That is not healthy for a system of government that, at its core, is defined by political competition.” -- writes Brian Klaas.

Justice Anthony Kennedy - on whom the fate of the republic resides - can no longer claim there's no metric for harm done by this foul cheat. Mathematical models of "voter efficiency" have settled that. If he is also reluctant to demolish "legislative sovereignty" with apportionment commissions, he can always point to my own Minimal Overlap solution to gerrymandering, which largely eliminates any need for such commissions and allows state legislatures sovereign power over one chamber. A senior federal judge I know deemed it interesting and impressive.

The need is paramount. Andrew Reynolds - an elections expert who has consulted in over 25 nations on issues of democratic design - wrote recently in the Charlotte Observer that governance in his home state of North Carolina had struck a new low: “When it comes to the integrity of the voting district boundaries no country has ever received as low a score as the 7/100 North Carolina received. North Carolina is not only the worst state in the USA for unfair districting but the worst entity in the world ever analyzed by the Electoral Integrity Project.”

Of course Reynolds was referring to gerrymandering and other cheats, perfected not just in North Carolina but in all but two other Red States. (In fairness, two blue states are almost as bad, in rigging contorted districts.)

But there is a key outcome from all of this. As Reynolds points out:

“Seventy-six of the 170 (45 percent) incumbent state legislators were not even opposed by the other party in the general election.” (This is the unforgivable crime of the democrats, who should be recruiting retired military officers to run, in every red assembly district in the nation... and decent sane republicans should be doing the same, in the GOP primaries.)

Reynolds concludes: “Respect for democracy is not a partisan issue. In America true Republicans are as loyal to democratic principles as are Democrats.”  And I agree.  But where will you find these “true Republicans, who put country ahead of dogma, facts ahead of emotion and adult behavior over playground fury?

They used to be called “Eisenhower Republicans.” But nowadays, I have another term for them: Eisenhower Democrats.

Prove me wrong McCain, Murkowski, Collins, Corker and so on. Are you ready, at long last, to stand up to Rupert Murdoch, put a stake in the heart of the undead were-elephant, and start a party of sane conservatism?

== The war on the military and all other smartypants ==

For historical perspective, see my six part series on how the Bush administration waged war against the US military.  

Then what about all the generals DT is hiring?  “Donald Trump is enlisting generals for the upper ranks of his administration to a degree uncommon in modern politics — and that has some lawmakers, diplomats and former national security officials worried that the president-elect will be relying too heavily on military leaders to shape foreign and security policy,” reports Politico. 

I have to repeat things, till at least one other person in media or politics notices, too. But the one common thread, since 1995, has been the Murdoch-Koch-Fox-etc war on all fact-using professions.  Not just science, teaching, medicine, law, economics, journalism... but now the "deep state" Intelligence Agencies, FBI and military officer corps.

There is a strain of fact-hatred on the far-left, too! I would make a big deal of it, if it controlled liberalism, the way confederate-romatic hatred of brains and knowledge have completely taken over the American right. See where Robert Heinlein predicted all of this!

Looking back at Heinlein's Future History - coming true before our eyes.

How can any modern person rationalize going along with a drum beat of hatred toward people who know stuff? I've dissected this before. The right's insanity is based upon taking truisms and conflating them prodigiously.  

Example: We all know that; "Being smart and knowing a lot does not automatically make you wise."

THAT IS TRUE!  But what this has become, on the American right, though never stated with this explicit absurdity, is: "Being smart and knowing a lot automatically make you unwise."

When stated that way, baldly and openly, it is spectacularly stupid.  And yet, that is the implicit lesson that underlies the outright war against science, journalism, teachers, civil servants, economists, diplomats, medical doctors and nearly all other knowledge castes in American life... a list that now includes the Intelligence Community and soon will assail the U.S. Military Officer Corps.

Yes, some senior officers of the CIA let themselves be bullied by the President (G.W. Bush) into bending the truth re Saddam's WMDs.  There were reforms to make that less likely. Now? DT screams: "They flubbed WMDs so we should pay no attention to all our entire range of intelligence agencies!  The CIA, DIA, NRO, FBI... ignore them all if they say something I don't like!"  Are... you... kidding me? 

Because one GOP president bullied defense officers into lying on his behalf... we want another GOP president to do the same exact thing? Parse this out.  

== Populism vs wealth ==

Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable) - always both brilliant and stunningly cocksure weighs in on wealth inequality, which he agrees is bad and getting dangerously worse. But he is skeptical of how it’s dealt-with by his colleagues. Taleb proposes that: “what people resent – or should resent – is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen. Again, on that account, the detractors of Donald Trump, when he was a candidate, failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, they removed the resentment (the second type of inequality) one may have towards him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.”

Interesting fellow. Wrong far more often than he thinks he is. But that is why we need an open society.

In The World Post, Julian Baggini asserts that a consolidating “populist international” binds the anti-establishment revolt across Western democracies together with the strongman approach to governance favored by Putin.

“(To view the Trumpists and other right wing) populists as hapless victims of Kremlin manipulation is to underestimate the genuine admiration they have for the qualities Putin represents. It may well end in tears, but this is no marriage of convenience: this is true love. If we want to know why so many voters have fallen for the populists, we need to understand why the populists have fallen for Putin.” 

“This might sound perverse, given that one of the only things populists agree on is their disdain for elites, and as an ex-KGB man with almost absolute power at home, Putin is hardly an outsider. But populist resentment has never been directed at all elites ― just at the wrong kind, those who comprise the political mainstream, who have led Western democracies for the decades since World War II. That is why the rich and powerful Donald Trump can be seen as anti-elitist: he belongs to an elite, but not the Washington or Brussels one. Putin similarly belongs to a Russian elite, but not to the Western liberal establishment.”

Alas, Mr. Baggini is close, but misses, probably because he thinks that this is all about politics. It’s not. Yes, the deep reflex that has been exploited is Suspicion of Authority (SOA) - the theme conveyed in every single Hollywood film and a core element of the western enlightenment revolution.  The enemies of that revolution, who seek to re-establish 6000 years of feudalism, know they can only succeed by doing what the Confederate plantation lords and Prussian nobles accomplished, in 1860 and 1932, divert populist rage toward *other* authorities or elites. 

Baggini thinks it is the Washington establishment of centrist politicians, but no, demographically it is a much larger tsunami of hatred toward every profession that deals in knowledge and facts.  Like scientists, teachers, doctors, statisticians, economists, journalists... for years I’ve demanded of any confed to name an exception. One knowledge caste not attacked by Fox and alt-right? Name one?

There are three exceptions. The financial-CEO elite, the doctors of divinity, both of who do know a lot about their fields… and until recently the military/intelligence officer corps.  That last group, though hard afflicted by every period of republican leadership, had not been attacked openly.  

But that has changed, as Donald Trump prepares the way for what bodes to be mass firings in the intelligence and military communities. And the promotion of weirdos and fanatics. Watch. 

The "Crisis" and the Guard: Betraying America's State of Readiness

I seem to have struck a chord with the Ritual of the Streetcorner. I thank everybody who wrote in, both online and off. And yet, I suspect I am not reaching enough people to make this kind of thing worthwhile, timewise. I mean, who is listening, even at blog levels?

Still, opinionating is as addictive as indignation... and indeed, they are cousins. So I doubt I’ll have the will-power to stop.

Hence, the political lamp is lit.

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For about two years I have been railing that military readiness should be an issue for the democrats, as it was for JFK in 1960.

Only with a difference. In 1960 the "Missile Gap" turned out to be overstated. But today's hollowing out of the US military -- chivvied and purged, attrited and drained -- is blatant and utterly treasonous. While contractors wallow at the trough, our actual levels of readiness have plummeted to levels not seen since before Pearl Harbor.

Can anyone claim that we would be ready to deal with a surprise attack, a call for help from some ally, or any other kind of emergency now? Better than, say, in the year 2000?

And now this.

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Study: Army Stretched to Breaking Point By ROBERT BURNS, AP Military Writer Tue Jan 24, 6:43 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.

Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump — missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 — and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives. "You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue," he said in an interview. He added that the Army is still a highly effective fighting force and is implementing a plan that will expand the number of combat brigades available for rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan..."
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What isn't mentioned is something even worse -- the near demolition of our nation's military reserves and National Guard. The plight of these working men and women, who have trained on weekends and sacrificed their summers, perfectly willing to leap to their country's need in an emergency... who are instead being used as sepoys, sent away from their families -- and the states that might need them in a real crisis (e.g. Katrina) -- is simply awful.

Even those who believe in the Iraq Intervention should admit now that it's "elective surgery" and not an "emergency". After collapss of the WMD and terror arguments, their only remaining rationale is "spreading democracy." Perhaps commendable, but critical?

We can argue the merits of this intervention on that basis. Fine. The professional units are for implementation of national policy. That policy may be ill considered and the top leadership incompetent, but at least one can envision it.

(My own view is “moderate”; I can see both the Balkans Intervention and Afghanistan as legitimate moves in a dangerous world. In both cases, the outcomes justified the judicious application of competent force. Indeed, I even felt that we had a duty to deal with Saddam, eventually, by coming up with a plan that would be calm, efficient, unhurried, ethical, overwhelmingly persuasive and smart.)

Having said all that -- and with a willingness to discuss judicious application of professional units in the skillful pursuit of legitimate national policy -- we are still left with the following observation. By no possible excuse is it forgivable to expend and use up our reserves without a genuine emergency.

Certainly this does not include the administration artificially invoking the words “war” and “emergency,” simply to suit its own purposes. (Would conservatives have swallowed that from Bill Clinton?) Not a self declared excuse, but the real thing.

The kind of crisis that unites a nation, instead of dividing it. (If half the country does not see “war”, or a critical foreign threat, then doesn't a burden of proof fall on those who do?)

The kind of emergency that republicans used to say our military was for, while decrying “adventures overseas.”

The kind of war that -- in all times past -- the rich cared enough about to be willing to help pay for.

The kind of war that we can conceivably fight clear of, with hope that normality may plausibly return. Instead of something so vague -- e.g. a “war on terror” -- that it can be extended forever, so long as anyone out there dislikes us.

The kind of emergency that might suddenly befall us, without warning, out of some semi-random direction. The way those 9/11 planes seemed to crash in upon us out of nowhere, taking by surprise. The kind of shock that we were told we would become MORE ready for, after 2001, instead of much less so.

That kind of emergency is what the reserves and National Guard are supposed to be for.

The Guard and reserves are not meant to be instruments of administration policy, but the robust manifestation of a united citizenry. They are noble remnants of the milita of old, eager to defend, though history shows that militia are far less useful in the projection of imperial power. They are the resiliency that America relies upon, in case we are struck by something that the professional anticipators failed to detect in time.

(Or are Cheney-Rumsfeld telling us that now their grasp of all potential threats is perfect? Need I ennumerate the times they have said that, across forty years, and proved wrong? Oh, tell it to Louisiana. Tell it to the Gulf cities.)

If they are used in the proper way, with maturity and true awareness of what they are for, the Guard and reserves cannot be depleted! Because an aroused America will refill the ranks, the way a unified country always has, whenever real crises erupted in the past! But not this time. Re-enlistments in the reserves are plummeting. More proof that most of us don’t see a crisis. No “war.” We're unconvinced.

What we see is brave and noble and decent militia men and women being used, spent, expended on international elective surgery. On a project that at-best is optional and should be done professionally, efficiently, and ethically, or not at all.

So why are almost no democrats raising these points? These arguments would be effective almost across the breadth of the political spectrum. And thus, they offer a way around Karl Rove’s contrived, artificial and treacherously divisive "culture war."

But political reflexes are dismal. Except for Representative Murtha, and maybe Senator Clinton, who else is speaking up for the abused Guard, or decrying our eviscerated state of readiness? Or standing up for the militia? Are liberals really so reflexive that they cannot even perceive an opportunity to win, the way JFK did, through patriotism?

Alas, it appears they might be.

So Rove is left with his flank protected, knowing that his opponents will not even try exploiting his most calamitous weaknesses, nor turn attention upon his most heinous treason.

.