Post by PeelerUNBELIEVABLE, but our resident pedophilic cocksucking serb swine just
finished sucking off her SECOND gay neo-nazi gang, today! LOL
Listen to her trying (and failing) to talk with a FRESH big load of jizz in
Post by jew paedophile VERMIN Barry Z. Shein's preferred jew aliash Ron Jacobson (RJ11)Butt regardlessh, never mind all that jew shite jew VOIMIN
Shein....better you shoukd SHEND a dollar a day (jusht 4 shekelsh) to
jew shubcommunity vatch sho that they can CONTINUE their good VOIK
exposhing jew PAEDOPHILESH in varioush jew ARCHDIOCESHESH....including
YOUR jew ARCHDIOCESHE of B'righton and B'rookline (Mass)!
You have been EXPOSHED jew paedophile VOIMIN Barry Z. Shein!
There is NO ESHCAPE for you!
EXCEPT if you do an aliyah to 'Israeel' and become an OLLY!
BOS---------------------------------------------------------------TLV
NONSHTOP and G-DSHPEED, a"h!
TSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSHK!
THAT's the sound she makes when she squeezes the jizz to and fro between her
rotten serbian teeth!
Yup.
The mangina is so outclassed by Barry!
Jeff Jacoby writes about several subjects.
http://view.email.bostonglobe.com/?qs=317a6338780a781015b632f0d88f86fdf29d00c51eaca71e60120d5039ccfff481c8ea430a2f6a704675cfc035bb16a364db1b0c698580e8db0910808c45dff277ae28043024001d6961519254a27fa35ba1e6dc58ed7bd5
View web version
The Boston Globe
Arguable - with Jeff Jacoby
Monday, May 18, 2020
Subscribe to Arguable
‘Be not afraid’: the pope who transformed the 20th century
John Paul II, the most charismatic and consequential pope in modern times,
is associated in my mind with two Jewish holidays.
I first learned of him on Oct. 16, 1978, the day he was elected by the
conclave of cardinals gathered in the Sistine Chapel. It was the first day
of Sukkot, the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles, and I was walking to my
synagogue in Washington, D.C., for evening services. A newspaper headline —
it must have been in the old Washington Star, an afternoon paper — jumped
out at me from a vending box on Pennsylvania Avenue: “Habemus Papam!” The
Latin phrase means “We have a pope,” and is the traditional announcement
made by the senior cardinal in the conclave upon the election of a pontiff.
At the time, I didn’t know anything about the new Polish pope. A year later,
I knew much more, since I had followed with interest the coverage of his
trip back home to Poland in June 1979. Already it was becoming clear that
John Paul II was no ordinary pope. So when it was announced that he would
travel to the United States in the fall, beginning with a stop in Boston
(where I had recently relocated to attend law school), I decided to go and
see him when he appeared on Boston Common. But it wasn’t to be: The pope’s
visit to Boston coincided with Yom Kippur, the most solemn day of the Jewish
year. Instead of heading into town to see the leader of the Catholic Church,
I spent the day in the synagogue, fasting and in prayer.
The future pope, born 100 years ago today as Karol Wojtyla in the Polish
town of Wadowice, initially had no interest in becoming a priest. It was the
theater that fascinated him; in his teens, he was “obsessed” (his word) with
acting and the stage. When he became a university student at 18, he later
said, a vocation in the priesthood was the furthest thing from his mind.
That changed during World War II. Amid the Nazi occupation of Poland, Wotyla
found his calling in the church. By the time he was ordained in 1946, Poland
was under communist rule, with a government hostile to religion. The new
priest began quickly to be noticed — first as a brilliant intellectual, then
as an increasingly outspoken champion of human rights. By 1958 he had been
made a bishop; in 1967, he was named to the College of Cardinals by Pope
Paul VI. Eleven years later, the 58-year-old Wojtyla became pope himself —
the first non-Italian to ascend the throne of St. Peter in 450 years, and
the first Slavic pope in history.
Yet that was the least of his historic achievements. When John Paul II died
in 2005, Henry Kissinger — himself a figure of considerable historic
significance — said that it would be hard to think of anyone whose impact on
the 20th century had been more profound. The pope left his mark in numerous
ways, but two in particular stand out in my mind.
One was his pivotal role in the downfall of Communism in Poland, the
collapse of the Iron Curtain, and the disappearance of the Soviet Union.
Without John Paul II, America and the West might never have won the Cold
War. Testimony to that effect came from none other than Mikhail Gorbachev,
the last general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. “Everything that
happened in Eastern Europe in these last few years,” he wrote in 1992,
“would have been impossible without the presence of this pope.”
It began with that trip to Poland in 1979, the first of nine journeys John
Paul would make to his homeland during his 27-year papacy.
Documents later unearthed in the Kremlin archives show that communist rulers
expected the new pope to adopt “a new aggressiveness” toward the Soviet
bloc. “Wojtyla will apparently be less willing to compromise with the
leadership of the socialist states,” forecast a report prepared for the
Central Committee in Moscow shortly after John Paul’s investiture. When he
sought permission to visit Poland in 1979, then-Soviet ruler Leonid Brezhnev
recommended that he be turned down. But Polish officials felt they had no
choice but to welcome the first Polish pope, despite their misgivings.
A secret memorandum sent by the Communist Party to teachers in the nation’s
schools in advance of John Paul’s arrival expressed those misgivings with
panicky clarity:
The Pope is our enemy. . . . Due to his uncommon skills and great sense of
humor he is dangerous, because he charms everyone, especially journalists.
Besides, he goes for cheap gestures in his relations with the crowd; for
instance, [he] puts on a highlander’s hat, shakes all hands, kisses
children, etc. . . . It is modeled on American presidential campaigns. . . .
Because of the activities of the Church in Poland, our activities designed
to atheize the youth not only cannot diminish but must intensely develop.
But the message from the pope, delivered in one Polish city after another to
crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands, proved irresistible. “Be not
afraid,” he repeated again and again. “Never despair, never grow weary,
never become discouraged.”
The impact of those words on Poland’s people was powerful. After decades
under numbing, despondency-inducing totalitarian rule, Poles began to see a
different possibility for themselves. “Suddenly cognizant of their own
history, their own heritage, they wondered why they had allowed themselves
to be frightened for so long,” wrote Joseph Shattan in his 1999 book on the
Cold War’s “architects of victory.”
In the wake of the pope’s galvanizing visit, it grew increasingly clear that
the status quo could not last. In July 1980, the Polish government decreed a
sharp increase in food prices, prompting tens of thousands of workers
nationwide to go on strike, and to organize an independent trade union,
Solidarity, led by an electrician at the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk named Lech
Walesa.
“The most remarkable feature of the strikes that led to the formation of
Solidarity was their religious, nonviolent character,” Shattan recounted.
In contrast to earlier strike waves that had swept through Poland . . .
workers in the summer of 1980 confined themselves to nonviolent sit-down
strikes. The influence of the church and the pope were everywhere apparent,
especially at the Gdansk shipyard. ‘During their memorable strike in 1980,’
Lech Walesa later wrote, ‘the first things the Gdansk workers did was to
affix a cross, an image of the Virgin Mary, and a portrait of John Paul II
to the gates of the shipyards.’ Walesa himself wore a pin with a picture of
Poland’s most revered icon, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, in his lapel,
and the oversized pen with which he signed the [strike-ending] August 31
Gdansk accords — a souvenir from John Paul II’s trip to Poland — had the
pope’s picture on it.
The 1979 trip to Poland detonated a psychological and social explosion that
became unstoppable. As Solidarity grew in strength, Moscow insisted with
growing vehemence that the Polish government suppress its deepening
influence. Warsaw Pact forces carried out military maneuvers along Poland’s
borders, but there was to be no repeat of 1956 and 1968, when the Kremlin
ordered troops to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia, respectively. In
December 1981, martial law was imposed by the communist regime in Warsaw;
Solidarity leaders, including Walesa, were rounded up and imprisoned. “The
counterrevolution is now crushed,” Brezhnev told the Politburo the following
month.
But the “counterrevolution” was just getting started, and it had
considerable help from the Polish pope. In 1983, John Paul paid his second
visit to Poland. He made a particular point of requesting permission to
visit Walesa, thereby bolstering the anticommunist opposition and Solidarity’s
central role in the resistance. Within weeks of the pope’s visit, martial
law had been lifted. The pro-democracy movement grew steadily stronger. The
dictatorship weakened.
In September 1989, communist rule ended for good in Poland with the election
of a democratic government headed by Tadeusz Mazowiecki. Within months,
communist regimes in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, and East
Germany were gone as well. The pope took a victory lap. “The irresistible
thirst for freedom broke down walls and opened doors,” he said in January
1990, because “women, young people, and men have overcome their fear.”
Over and over, he had urged his followers: “Be not afraid.” That message,
propelled by the pope’s humane, benign, and ultimately realistic worldview,
led to the liberation of half a continent. It was an extraordinary
achievement, one that answered forever Stalin’s cynical put-down. “The
pope?” sneered the Soviet dictator in 1935. “How many divisions does he
have?” Of military divisions, John Paul II had none at all. Yet in the end
he deployed enough power to topple the mighty Soviet empire.
The other aspect of the Polish pope’s legacy that stands out in my mind is
how he transformed the Roman Catholic Church in its attitude toward Jews.
As a young boy in the 1930s, my father attended public school in Snina, a
town in eastern Czechoslovakia. Twice a week, a Catholic priest would come
in to teach the catechism, while the few children who were Jewish would wait
outside. As they left the classroom, my father recalls, the priest
invariably made some insulting remark about Jews.
For Jewish citizens in the Europe of my father's youth, such Christian
contempt was a fact of life. Its origins lay in the church’s ancient claim
that God had rejected the Jews when they rejected Jesus. This “teaching of
contempt” fed an often virulent antisemitism, which created the climate for
Europe's long history of religious persecution. Eight decades ago, that
history culminated in the Holocaust.
Yet as I wrote in 2005 after the death of John Paul II, not every priest in
that era treated Jews with disdain:
Consider the story of Moses and Helen Hiller, a Jewish couple in
Nazi-occupied Poland who entrusted their 2-year-old son to a Catholic family
named Jachowicz in November of 1942. The Hillers begged their friends to
keep their child safe — and, should they not survive, to send him to family
members abroad who would bring him up as a Jew. Soon after, the Hillers were
deported to Auschwitz. They never returned.
The Jachowiczes came to love the little boy as their own and decided, when
the war was over, to adopt him. Mrs. Jachowicz asked a young priest in
Krakow to baptize the child, explaining that he had been born Jewish and
that his parents had died. But when the priest, some of whose friends had
also died in Auschwitz, learned of the Hillers' wish that their son not be
lost to the Jewish people, he refused to perform the baptism. Instead he
insisted that the Jachowiczes contact the child's relatives.
Today that boy is a middle-aged man, an observant Jew with children of his
own. The young priest, whose name was Karol Wojtyla, died last week. He will
be buried on Friday as Pope John Paul II, in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.
When it came to the Jews, John Paul's attitudes were revolutionary. He had
grown up with Jews as neighbors and classmates. Roughly one-fourth of
Wadowice’s population was Jewish, and the young Karol Wojtyla was fond of
his Jewish friends. He and his father lived on the upper floor of a house
whose Jewish owners lived below. At a time when the Polish church could be
vilely antisemitic — in 1936 the Catholic primate of Poland, Cardinal
Augustus Hlond, issued a pastoral letter declaring that “there will be a
Jewish problem as long as Jews remain” and painting Jews as corrupters ,
atheists, and pornographers — the future pope's closest companion was a
Jewish boy, Jerzy Kluger. To the young Father Wojtyla, the contempt for Jews
and Judaism that came so readily to priests like the one in my father's
school or to Cardinal Hlond must have always rung false, even heretical.
So he fought it. As a priest in Krakow, he would not countenance the
betrayal of murdered Jewish parents by baptizing their child. As a young
bishop at the Second Vatican Council convened by Pope John XXIII, he
supported Nostra Aetate, the landmark Vatican declaration repudiating the
idea of Jewish guilt for deicide and affirming that God’s covenant with the
Jews is unbroken.
In 1979, on that first visit to Poland, John Paul went to Auschwitz, taking
pains to emphasize what the communist government of that era took pains to
obscure: the Jewish identity of the vast majority of the victims. He paused
deliberately before a memorial plaque written in Hebrew — one of many
plaques in many languages that the communists had installed. “This
inscription awakens the memory of people whose sons and daughters were
destined for total extermination,” he said. “The very people that received
from God the commandment ‘Thou shall not kill’ itself experienced a singular
ordeal in killing.”
“It is not permissible,” he continued, “for anyone to pass by this
inscription with indifference.”
Milestone followed milestone. In 1986 John Paul paid the first papal visit
to the Great Synagogue in Rome, where he stressed the debt that Christians
owe to the Jews, “our elder brothers.” In 1993, he formally recognized the
state of Israel, repudiating forever the old theology that Jews were doomed
to everlasting exile, never again to be sovereign in their homeland. He
became the first pope to publicly beg forgiveness for Christian wrongs done
to the Jewish people.
And in 2000, on a deeply emotional pilgrimage to the Holy Land, he became
the first pope to pray at the Western Wall, a moment of reverence for the
Jewish faith — and for the Temple that was once its beating heart — that
would have been unthinkable for most of the preceding two millennia.
If John XXIII was the “good pope” who set in motion the great shift in the
church's relations with the Jewish people, John Paul II was the great pope
who made it undeniable and irrevocable. The pope from Poland, a land with a
deeply rooted history of hostility to Jews, made it his goal to expunge
antisemitism from the Church of Rome, proclaiming it a sin and a desecration
of Christianity.
It wasn’t only Catholics who grieved when John Paul died, or who have reason
to remember him with gratitude and admiration on this centennial of his
birth.
The enemies of Prop 209
In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, a ballot measure
accurately named the California Civil Rights Initiative. By a 55% majority,
they amended their state’s constitution to put an end to state-sponsored
discrimination on the basis of race or gender. Proposition 209 required
California's government to get out of the business of quotas, preferences,
and set-asides — to stop judging its citizens by the color of their skin,
and focus instead on the content of their character, the level of their
ability, and the merit of their claim.
The University of California's freshman class in 2019 was the most racially
diverse ever, without recourse to quotas or preferences.
I was following the story at the time, and was struck by the fact that the
organizers of Proposition 209 were mostly political amateurs linked by a
principled commitment to colorblindness. They shared the view of Thurgood
Marshall, who was the NAACP’s chief litigator during the battle against Jim
Crow segregation, that “classifications and distinctions based on race or
color have no moral or legal validity in our society.”
The opponents of Proposition 209, on the other hand, included some of the
savviest political operators in California, from then-San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown to the National Organization for Women. Well-heeled left-wing
organizations, such as the Ford Foundation and the California Teachers
Association, poured vast sums into defeating the proposed amendment.
Opponents of the California Civil Rights Initiative were vicious in their
denunciation of the measure. One Los Angeles city councilor compared it to
Mein Kampf . A state senator smeared Prop 209’s chief sponsor, a black
businessman and University of California regent named Ward Connerly, in
nakedly racist terms: “He’s married to a white woman. He wants to be white.
. . . He has no ethnic pride.”
But Proposition 209 had one great advantage. It was written in language so
clear and compelling that every voter in California could understand it:
“The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment
to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or
national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or
public contracting.” Most Californians agreed with that injunction — equal
opportunity for all, quotas for none — and added it to their state’s
constitution.
Now a group of California legislators want to repeal Prop 209. They have
introduced legislation to once again make it legal for college admissions,
government hiring, and public contracting to be governed by racial and
gender quotas.
The repeal legislation, known as Assembly Constitutional Amendment 5 (ACA-5)
, contains a lengthy preamble that paints a doleful portrait of life in
California without racial quotas: “reduces the graduation rates of students
of color . . . . a devastating impact on minority equal opportunity and
access to California’s publicly funded institutions of higher education . .
. . diversity within public educational institutions has been stymied . . .
. a decreased likelihood of ever earning a graduate degree, and long-run
declines in average wages.”
But Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member
of the US Commission on Civil Rights, argues that Prop 209 “has been good
for Californians — of all races,” and that ACA-5’s proponents are
deliberately misstating the data. By eliminating racial preferences, she
wrote in a RealClearPolitics column on Saturday, the 1996 Civil Rights
Initiative did away with the pressure to admit minority students to
competitive institutions their credentials hadn’t prepared them for. As a
result, “the number of underrepresented minority students at [the University
of California at] Berkeley decreased significantly.”
But those students didn’t just disappear. Most were accepted at other
campuses of the prestigious UC system — based on their own academic records
rather than their skin color. On several UC campuses, their numbers
increased. More important, their performance improved dramatically.
Data from UC-San Diego (one of the more elite UC campuses) illustrate what
happened.
In the year immediately prior to Proposition 209’s implementation, only one
African American student in the entire freshman class was an honor student.
Following implementation, a full 20% of African American freshmen were. That
was higher than the rate for Asian Americans (16%) and extremely close to
the rate for whites in the same year (22%). Even more impressive, the number
of under-represented minority students in academic jeopardy collapsed.
A further debunking of ACA-5 comes from Wenyuan Wu of the Asian American
Coalition for Education. Writing in the Orange County Register, she laid out
just how effective Proposition 209 has been at boosting enrollment and
graduation rates for underrepresented minorities.
In the University of California system, four-year graduation rates of
underrepresented racial minorities rose from 31.3% during the 1995-97
period, preceding Prop 209, to 36.6% during 1998-2000, then to 43.3% during
2001-03. In 2014, underrepresented racial minorities’ four-year graduation
rate rose to a record high of 55.1%. The six-year graduation rate has fared
even better: 66.5% in 1998 and 75.1% in 2013.
What is true of minority graduation rates is equally true of minority
admissions.
Minority admissions at UC exceed those of 1996 both in absolute numbers and
as a percentage of all admissions.
Latino admissions went from 15.4% (5,744 students) in 1996 to 23% (14,081)
in 2010; Asian-American admissions rose from 28.8% (11,085) to 37.47%
(22,877), while black admissions from 4% (1,628) to 4.2% (2,624). In 1999,
underrepresented racial minorities’ enrollment at the UC system stood at a
meager 15%, while in 2019 this figure increased to 26%. ACA-5’s claim that
“since the passage of Proposition 209, diversity within public educational
institutions has been stymied” is simply untrue.
Last summer, the University of California system admitted the largest and
most diverse class of freshmen in its history — without resorting to quotas.
Fully 40% of the new undergraduates, reported the Los Angeles Times, were
from “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups; white students accounted
for just 22% of the freshman class.
The enemies of Proposition 209 have tried several times to get it overturned
by friendly courts, but were repeatedly shot down. The California Supreme
Court twice upheld the ban on racial preferences, overturning municipal
ordinances that attempted to establish race- and gender-based preferences in
government contracting. In 2012, the Ninth Circuit US Court of Appeals,
generally regarded as the most liberal of the federal appellate courts,
upheld Proposition 209 as well.
California paved the way for the adoption of similar colorblind mandates in
Michigan, Nebraska, Washington, and Arizona. Other states should follow
suit. The Golden State is is often pointed to as an example of social
looniness gone amok, but enshrining the California Civil Rights Initiative
in the California constitution was an example of the opposite: In the
nation's most multiracial, multiethnic state, voters 24 years ago pulled the
plug on race- and sex-based affirmative action, one of the great wrong turns
of American social policy. In doing so, they brought nearer the day when
government no longer prefers some of its citizens over others because of
their physical characteristics. ACA-5 would undo that noble achievement.
Californians had better make sure that doesn’t happen.
GE: “We’re No. 7!”
Stock in General Electric dropped to a new low last week, sinking at week’s
end to $5.49 a share. In nominal dollars, that’s about what it was worth 30
years ago (much less, of course, if adjusted for inflation). And it is just
a small fraction of the nearly $30 a share it was going for in January 2016,
when Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker and Boston Mayor Marty Walsh were
patting themselves on the backs — to the lusty cheers of many in the media —
for having coaxed GE to shift its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to
Boston’s Fort Point Channel district.
At the time GE’s move to Boston was announced, its market capitalization
(the standard measure of the value of a publicly traded company) was about
$270 billion. That instantly qualified GE as the most valuable company in
Massachusetts. It debuted on the Globe 25 Index — a listing of the 25
biggest companies headquartered in Massachusetts — at No. 1, and by a wide
margin.
And there it perched, high above its peers. Until, like Humpty Dumpty, it
had a great fall.
GE is no longer the biggest fish in the Massachusetts corporate sea. It isn’t
the second-biggest. It isn’t the third-, fourth-, fifth-, or sixth-biggest.
Its market cap on Friday was $49.9 billion, putting it at No. 7, narrowly
edging Boston Scientific Corp., which was in the No. 8 spot with a market
value of $49.7 billion.
To be sure, many businesses are hurting now amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but
GE’s fall from its Olympian heights began long before anyone had heard of
coronavirus. Baker and Walsh were tickled with themselves when they
succeeded in luring GE to Boston with a package of taxpayer-funded
incentives worth as much as $150 million in subsidies, abatements, training
funds, site improvements, and property acquisition costs. “We won Powerball
today,” Walsh exulted at the time, while Baker serenely gave his assurance
that doling out those rich bribes — er, incentives — to GE would prove to be
“a good investment for Massachusetts and . . . Boston.”
They wouldn’t have said those things had they known how hard and fast GE was
about to fall. Nor, I presume, would they have been willing to gamble
taxpayers’ money on a company that would prove unable to keep its pledge to
put up a new headquarters building and hire hundreds of new employees.
Needless to say, Baker and Walsh didn’t know that GE was about to plunge
down a hole and lose four-fifths of its value. Government officials never
know what the future will bring for the companies they spend so lavishly to
lure to their states and cities. Which is why those subsidies shouldn’t
exist in the first place. (To be fair, some of those financial inducements
were tied to performance benchmarks; since GE didn’t meet them, it didn’t
collect the benefits.)
“If subsidizing GE turns out to have been a losing bet,” I wrote in 2017,
when the company was already in trouble, “it will join a long roster of
other losing bets. Massachusetts officials have repeatedly gambled with
public dollars to entice companies to move to the state (or to keep local
firms from leaving). They defend their wagers with happy talk of the jobs to
be created or the cutting-edge industries to be established. Yet in case
after case — Intel, Evergreen Solar, Nortel Networks, Fidelity Investments ,
Organogenesis — the promised jobs don’t appear, or the company doesn’t
survive, or the forgone tax revenue is never made up.”
A few years ago, the Pioneer Institute, a Boston think tank, crunched the
data on the rich subsidies paid to the state’s biotech industry, an
initiative begun in 2009 under Governor Deval Patrick and continued under
Baker. Of the 250,000 new jobs promised, Pioneer found, 95% never
materialized. Between 2009 and 2016, as private-sector employment in
Massachusetts grew by more than 15% (ah, those were the days!), the biotech
sector — despite being nurtured with more than $650 million in government
subsidies — grew by just 0.1%.
I wish nothing but success and prosperity to GE, its shareholders, its
employees, and all who depend on it for their own welfare. I earnestly hope
its fortunes turn around. But I also hope not another penny in government
handouts goes to GE, or to any other private company.
The takeaway from General Electric’s plunge from No. 1 to N0. 7 isn’t that
state and local governments should do more homework before they bet public
funds on private companies they think will grow. It is that they shouldn’t
be making such bets in the first place. Governors, mayors, and legislators
aren’t smarter than the marketplace. They are no more infallible at picking
commercial winners and losers. Pouring public funds into the coffers of
favored private companies isn’t economic development. It’s crony capitalism,
and a betrayal of the public trust.
Enjoy reading Arguable? Please tweet the good word to your followers!
Subscribe to BostonGlobe.com
ICYMI
In Sunday’s column, I weighed in (again ) on the Democratic veepstakes,
making the case that Joe Biden should select Florida Rep. Val Demings as his
running mate. True, she isn’t as famous as some of the senators on Biden’s
list. But Demings would bring great assets to the national ticket: She is a
black woman who grew up in real poverty, and rose to become the chief of
police of Orlando. With a 27-year career in police work, Demings would
reassure moderate blue-collar voters that a Biden administration would bring
seasoned experience to law and order issues. Her voting record in Congress
is, for a Democrat, middle-of-the-road. Her home state is a crucial
Electoral College battleground. And her personal life is wholesome, likable,
and scandal-free.
My subject last Wednesday was the Logan Act and why that 221-year-old
federal statute should be repealed. Enacted during John Adams’s
administration, it essentially makes it a crime for a private citizen to
meet with foreign officials and oppose the policies of the incumbent
president. No one has ever been convicted of violating the law, or even
indicted under it since the 19th century. It is never used for legitimate
national security reasons. Its sole function is to criminalize policy
differences and be wielded as a cudgel against political opponents. The
Logan Act has been invoked to attack everyone from Henry Ford to Jane Fonda
to Gen. Michael Flynn. It’s pernicious and un-American, and ought to be
expunged once and for all.
Stay in touch on social media: Click the links to follow me on
Twitter(@jeff_jacoby) or at Facebook.
Correction: In my post about Richard Feynman in last week’s Arguable, I
inadvertently got two dates wrong. Feynman was born in 1918, not 1911. And
the space shuttle Challenger disaster occurred in 1986, not 1984.
The last line
“Our dead brothers still live for us, and bid us think of life, not death –
of life to which in their youth they lent the passion and joy of the spring.
As I listen, the great chorus of life and joy begins again, and amid the
awful orchestra of seen and unseen powers and destinies of good and evil our
trumpets sound once more a note of daring, hope, and will.” — Oliver Wendell
Holmes, Jr., Memorial Day oration before Civil War veterans, Keene, N.H.
(May 30, 1884)
________________________________________
Thank you for reading Arguable. If you liked this newsletter, why not
forward it to a friend? If a friend forwarded it to you, why not eliminate
the middleman? To subscribe for free, click here.
I always welcome feedback — cheers, jeers, and otherwise. Let me hear from
you: My e-mail address is ***@globe.com (or just reply to this
newsletter). Arguable will take next week off in observance of Memorial Day.
Enjoy the rest of May, and look for a new Arguable early next month.