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The “Good Old Days”

It’s all becoming clear. The radical reactionaries who currently govern both the U.S. and Israel want to return to the “good old days” of the Crusades –those military campaigns fought in the “good old days” between 1095 and 1291 , when the religious warriors who battled Muslim rulers over the Holy Land, were promised spiritual rewards for slaying those who worshipped the wrong God.

In the United States, Pete Hegseth is trying to turn the Department of Defense into a Department of Holy War.

Several media outlets are reporting that former military officials, experts on religion and law, and veterans groups are expressing alarm over the worship services that Hegseth has instituted at the Pentagon, and his repeated description of the U.S. military as a force for Christianity. Hegseth makes no bones about his extreme fundamentalist views; he has prayed for U.S. troops to assert “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy,” saying: “We ask these things with bold confidence in the mighty and powerful name of Jesus Christ.”

Hegseth–along with many other members of Trump’s clown-car administration–has rather obviously never heard of the First Amendment, or the long line of Supreme Court decisions confirming its Separation of Church and State. That shouldn’t surprise us; it’s pretty clear that most of these grifters have never encountered the U.S. Constitution and that they are unable to grasp the concept of the rule of law.

If it has been hard to watch what has been happening to America since Trump was re-elected, it has been equally depressing to watch what Israel has become under Bibi Netanyahu. The destruction in Gaza was horrifying enough, and now the Guardian has reported that the Knesset has passed a law applying the death penalty to Palestinians convicted of lethal attacks.

The measure will allow courts to impose the death penalty without a request from prosecutors and without requiring unanimity, instead permitting a simple majority decision. Military courts in the occupied West Bank will also be empowered to hand down death sentences, with the defence minister able to submit an opinion.

For Palestinians under occupation, the bill closes off avenues for appeal or clemency, while prisoners tried inside Israel could have their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

Rights groups in Israel called passage of the law “an act of institutionalised discrimination and racist violence against Palestinians,” and the Israeli Association for Civil Rights has filed an appeal against the law with Israel’s supreme court. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the legislation as a breach of international law.

The law evidently would not apply to Israelis convicted of carrying out deadly attacks against Palestinians.

Britain, France, Germany and Italy expressed “deep concern” over the legislation, which they said risked “undermining Israel’s commitments with regards to democratic principles.” No kidding!

To call these situations appalling is an understatement. 

I am an American Jew who grew up proud of both my country and the pioneers who created the state of Israel. Back in eighth grade, I won an “I speak for Democracy” contest with an essay celebrating America’s constitutional democracy, and I have spent my professional life defending what I call The American Idea–the philosophy of the Declaration, Constitution and Bill of Rights. I took equal pride in my Jewish heritage, especially when public figures acknowledged the copious contributions of Jewish Americans to science, medicine, culture, and business– contributions that significantly exceed our percentage of the population. The fact that Stephen Miller is Jewish makes me want to throw up.

I used to cheer for Israel when that small country–among other things, a refuge for Holocaust survivors– fended off attacks by its neighbors, and as the years went on, I hoped for a two-state solution that would protect the safety and security of both Israelis and Palestinians. I could never have imagined that a people who had endured Nazi oppression–based upon religious and ethnic identity–would emulate the Nuremberg laws that had targeted Jewish, Roma and Black people for who they were.

If there is a moral to this story, it is that no group of people is monolithic. No identity or religion or nationality can claim special virtue. The oppressed can become oppressors; zealotry in the name of religion is just as sinister as rabid devotion to a political ideology.

The Crusades were not the “good old days.”

If there was one sentiment that pervaded NO KINGS day, it was the desire of ordinary Americans to get our country back from the fanatics, lunatics and cowards currently in office. I have to imagine that ordinary Israelis feel the same way.

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Indiana’s Incompetent Government

Apologies to readers who have the good fortune to reside elsewhere, but this post returns to the fiscal, civic and cultural disaster that is Indiana government.

I have repeatedly focused on our deplorable legislature, dominated as it is by “Christian” culture warriors who–at least according to my clerical friends– are anything but Christian. As I have repeatedly argued, many of them owe their positions to Indiana’s longstanding and extreme gerrymandering, and the evident inability of Hoosier Democrats to run candidates in districts supposedly “safe” for Republicans. (I think this is what pundits call giving up in advance…)

It would be unfair to focus solely on the legislature and ignore Indiana voters’ persistent elevation of manifestly unfit individuals to statewide positions of authority. The election of these men (and currently, they are all men) theoretically cannot be attributed to gerrymandering, since they run statewide–although I would argue that the state’s longstanding gerrymandering has successfully suppressed the Democratic vote. (Indiana has the second-worst turnout in the country.) As a result, over the years, more progressive voters simply haven’t shown up, allowing candidates who are (at best) mediocre to prevail, often against far more thoughtful and qualified Democrats.

As a result, sentient Hoosiers are embarrassed by out-and-proud Christian Nationalists like U.S. Senator Jim Banks, and infuriated by our other Senator, Todd Young, who clearly knows better, but routinely earns the gold medal in the “spineless and feckless” category.

According to recent polling, even Republican Hoosiers are experiencing buyers’ remorse over the 2024 victories of our Governor and Lieutenant Governor. Governor Braun’s approval ratings cluster in the high twenties, while the highest approval I’ve seen for Micah Beckwith–our embarrassing Christian nationalist Lieutenant Governor–was nine percent (other polls have shown him at seven.)

Then there’s the buffoon serving as Secretary of State.

Few Hoosiers even know who occupies the office of Indiana Secretary of State, but the intrepid Indiana voters who would vote for a turnip if had an R by its name have installed Diego Morales in that role. (He won despite the fact that he’d previously been fired from a staff position in that office for incompetence. But hey–he was better than a turnip…)

Since assuming office, Morales has generated sporadic news coverage for using taxpayer monies to travel, employ relatives and purchase a very expensive SUV–but none of those activities generated the chaos that has most recently ensued as a result of the office’s incompetence.

As the Indiana Capital Chronicle (among others) has reported,

Political candidates from around Indiana have been redoing paperwork for this spring’s primary ballot as confusion surrounds whether the secretary of state’s office properly processed those forms.

The turmoil stems from questions over whether staffers to Republican Secretary of State Diego Morales were correctly certified to accept sworn statements from candidates that they meet the legal requirements for the office they are seeking.

Morales maintains that his office followed state law, but that hasn’t stopped many Republican and Democratic candidates from refiling the two-page document this week at the Indiana Election Division office ahead of Friday’s deadline.

The trouble with the Secretary of State’s certification was first reported by political commentator and lawyer, Abdul-Hakim Shabazz. Candidates are refiling in order to avoid a situation in which a political opponent could assert that their candidacy hadn’t been processed correctly. While that wouldn’t automatically disqualify them, it would constitute an unwelcome issue.

Morales evidently appointed nine staff members as “special deputies,” giving them authority to authenticate candidacy forms during the filing period. “Those documents, however, include no official time stamp showing when they were filed by the office.” Evidently, that omission means there’s no way of confirming that those individuals were “special deputies” at the time they certified the declarations of candidacy.

Both Republican and Democratic officials are counseling their candidates to refile. The executive director of the Indiana House Democratic campaign arm advised all candidates to resubmit their forms if they originally did so at the secretary of state’s office, saying she was concerned that Morales’ office had “screwed this up before” by not properly filing its authorization paperwork, and that consequently, she didn’t trust them now.

So here we are in the Hoosier state. We have a legislature filled with culture warriors intent upon taking us back to the 1950s (or before), and state officials who range from self-identified Christian nationalists, to incompetents, to feckless, to those who are just “out of touch.”

And then we wonder why we have a brain drain. 

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ICE Barbie Says We Need Papers

Several years ago, when our older grandson was ten or eleven, my husband took him to New York, where he was most impressed by the museum at Ellis Island–especially the exhibit that explained the difference between America and many of the countries immigrants were leaving: in those repressive regimes, people could be stopped on the streets and required to produce their “papers.” 

In America, such tactics were scorned. We were a free people.

That grandson is now thirty-six, and the Trump administration is waging war on the  America celebrated in that exhibit. As the Daily Beast (among other outlets) has reported, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has defended the ICE agents who are stopping people on the streets and demanding that Americans prove their citizenship. When Noem was asked if she  supported allowing federal agents to violate people’s Fourth Amendment rights–they are asking Americans for papers without reasonable suspicion–she responded that “Every single action that our ICE officers take is according to the law and following protocols that we have used for years. They are doing everything correctly.”

Noem evidently slept through her high school government class…

Nor is this throwback to “bad” countries an anomaly. There are increasing  parallels with those “unAmerican” regimes. 

Lincoln Square recently compared remarks from a 1980 speech by Iran’s Khomeni with pronouncements from our increasingly fascist regime. 

Khomeini: Iran should not just be an Islamic republic but a clerical republic. The clergy should be the ruling strata…

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.): “I am a Bible‑believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘People are curious, what does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.’”

Khomeini: Revolution should come about in all the universities throughout Iran, so that the professors who are in contact with the East or the West will be purged, and so that the universities may become healthy places for the study of higher Islamic teachings.

Steve Bannon: “I’ve told President Trump … we have to go into these elite institutions, cut out all the money. That’s a bitch slap, right? They’ll start paying attention.”

Khomeini: The false teachings of the former regime should be abruptly stopped in universities throughout Iran because all the misery of the Iranian society during the reign of this father and son was due to these false teachings.

President Donald Trump: “For many years, tuition costs at colleges and universities have been exploding … while academics have been obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth. The time has come to reclaim our once great educational institutions from the radical Left, and we will do that.”

Khomeini: If we had a proper set-up in our universities, we would have never had a university-educated intelligentsia who during Iran’s most critical period are engaged in conflict and schism among themselves and are cut off from the people and are so negligent of what happens to the people, as though they do not live in Iran [shouts of “God is great!”].

Vice President J.D. Vance: “I think if any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

Khomeini: Most of the deadly blows which have been delivered to this society have been due to the majority of these university-educated intellectuals who have always regarded — and still regard — themselves as being great and have always said things — and still continue to say things — which only their other intellectual friends can understand, regardless of whether the people understand them or not.

Trump: “When I return to the White House, I will fire the radical Left accreditors that have allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.”

These parallels are especially ironic, given Trump’s sudden concern for Iranian protesters while encouraging his ICE thugs to violently attack protesters in America.

Add to that the administration’s increasing use of Nazi slogans . As the Guardian has reported, recent posts from the Labor department have included a video using the phrase: “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage.” a retread of the Nazi slogan: “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” (“one people, one realm, one leader”). Trump’s labor department has also published artwork that depicts only white male workers. “Its posts frequently cite “Americanism”, decry “globalism” and tout misleading claims that all US job gains under Trump have gone to “native born” Americans.”

They’ve gone way beyond dog whistles. As someone has told us “When people tell you who they are, believe them.”

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Cutting Through The Shutdown Blather

A government shutdown puts the commentariat–the pundits and pontificators who see themselves as arbiters of political discourse–into overdrive. Unfortunately, most of them are consumed with the more superficial “win/lose” questions: who will voters blame? How will public opinion shake out? Which personalities and parties will benefit, and which will be damaged? Who will blink first, and how long will this shutdown last?

I do a lot of reading, and I’ve seen very few efforts to take a step back and look at the “big picture,” but a couple of days ago, I encountered one. The Daily Prospect pointed out the stark reality of our current situation in a headline that read “The Government Has Been Shut Down for Months.”

The negotiations and debates are operating under the premise that appropriations to federal agencies are flowing today and will stop flowing tomorrow, and that this is something political leaders want to avoid. It’s hard to uncover any evidence that this is truly the case. The Supreme Court’s latest ruling definitively allows the Trump administration to cancel whatever funding they disfavor within 45 days of the end of the appropriation, without any approval from Congress. About 12 percent of the federal workforce has been terminated.

The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.

The article proceeded to provide evidence for its contention that we haven’t had a truly operational government since Trump assumed office; whatever is being “shut down” bears no resemblance to the government created by our Constitution and faithful to the rule of law.

Our inexplicably corrupt Supreme Court recently allowed Trump to rescind $4 billion dollars in foreign aid, but as the article pointed out, the Court hasn’t addressed the $410 billion that the administration has simply withheld from programs across the country–an amount representing close to half of all  fiscal year 2025 non-defense spending authorized by Congress. Those dollars have simply vanished,  with no explanation of how money is being spent or where that withheld spending is going.

Some 12 percent of the federal workforce has previously been terminated, and the OMB director, Russ Vought, claims a shutdown will allow the Office  to fire many more, despite the fact that a shutdown provides no actual legal authority to fire federal employees. (Legal authority is, of course, beside the point to members of this lawless administration– there was no legal authority to rescind or withhold appropriated spending without congressional approval, or put workers on extended administrative leave, or issue irrational Executive Orders, either.)

No one knows better than the current federal workers that we have no functioning government to shut down.

The Federal Unionists Network (FUN) has sent a letter  to the Democratic leadership, urging them to “reject any bad deal in the name of protecting federal employees.” The letter asserted that fighting Trump’s consolidation of power is more important. “A government shutdown is never Plan A. Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship. But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering,”

The letter, which agreed that the government is functionally shut down, outlined the “unprecedented harms” Americans are already experiencing from Trump’s deadly funding cuts, including to Social Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and from Trump’s attacks on independent science and data, agency closures without congressional input, and the decimation of labor.

Others have pointed out that passage of a budget–or a continuing resolution–is actually meaningless, since the administration will continue to ignore its provisions. Agreeing to a mechanism that purports to keep the government open would simply serve to normalize a dramatically abnormal situation–a situation in which a profoundly ignorant and increasingly mentally-ill President being manipulated by the White Christian Nationalists who authored Project 2025 routinely ignores Congress and his constitutional duties.

What is being shut down is the fantasy that we have a functioning government.

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