Photo of the Day: New England Autumn Comes to Central Park
The trees don’t know there was just an election. The trees are just being trees.
Chickadee Prince
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Donna Levin on Meeting Joe Biden: Little Did I Know
I met Joe Biden. He wouldn’t remember, and I’m a little surprised that I do, given the yawning lacunae in my recollections of that period: It would have been in the fall of 1976 or the spring of 1977, and he was in his first term as the U.S. senator from Delaware.
Memory is the both the Play-Doh and the Swiss cheese of the brain. It’s also the Whack-a-Mole and the Tilt-a-Whirl. That is, in less whimsical terms, and, as I have already hinted, there are a few pieces missing.
Here’s what I know: When I was twenty-two, I started my second year at Hastings College of the Law, a second-tier law school that has just been elevated in stature by the election to the vice presidency of Kamala Harris, a fellow alumna.
My father was a graduate of Berkeley Law, which until early 2020 was called “Boalt Hall.” The name “Boalt” was dropped when the racist history of its namesake was uncovered. I digress, but only for the first time.
Dad took a great interest in my law school career—much more than I did, as it turned out—and as soon as I got my schedule, he came rushing over to look. “You have Professor Kagan for corporations. I was in his class!” (The exclamation point is mine. Dad is a low-key guy.)
Back then, when electric typewriters were the ne plus ultra of office technology, many Ivy League and other elite law schools forced their professors to retire at age sixty-five. The Hastings administration had no such rule, and they recruited from this unemployment line such accomplished educators that they had one of most impressive faculties in the United States, if some of the worst teeth. The members of the resulting teaching staff were called “the Sixty-Five Club.”
I knew about the Sixty-Five Club, but not about its origins until I started writing this piece. We are sticking, in part, with the theme of memory, because who needs memory when we have Google? I learned that the Sixty-Five Club was the brainchild of David Ellington Snodgrass, which is a name I plan to use for a fictional character, though I’ll drop one of the “L”s so I don’t get sued. Snodgrass didn’t deserve that last name (who would, short of a convicted felon?) but he deserves a lot of credit for seeing past what he called “statutory senility.”
Mandatory retirement has disappeared from academia (though I just read an article by a sixty-four-year old who argues for its reinstatement—boy, the arguments you can enter into when you have a search engine), and the last member of the Sixty-Five Club died in 2001.
That was how Professor Kagan ended up at Hastings, after being forced him to retire—from a job he hadn’t wanted in the first place. My dad has never let facts interfere with a good story, but according to him, at least, Kagan had been a partner in a high-powered, competitive law firm, when he had a heart attack in his late thirties. His doctors insisted that he leave the intense world of corporate law for something less stressful, and that’s how he ended up teaching.
I was pleased to have made this new connection with our family history, and the great name of Levin, subsistence farmers in the Pale of Settlement for generations. At the first opportunity, I introduced myself to Prof. Kagan as the daughter of one of his former students.
A week later he had another heart attack. I can be glib about this, because he recovered and eventually returned to teaching, but I’ve always wondered if the shock of realizing that an entire generation had passed since he’d been forced to leave law practice for his health might have brought it on.
I don’t remember the name of the professor who took over for the rest of the semester. I don’t remember the names of any of the other profs I had that year—all male, except for one adjunct faculty member who gave lectures on personal injury and promised you an A if you sat in on twenty hours of personal injury litigation—twenty hours that cemented my decision never to practice law. I do remember, though, that Kagan’s replacement was friends with a youngish senator, Joe Biden, who came to talk to us.
Okay, so it wasn’t like we had cappuccino together, and discussed what group qualifies as a “suspect class” for purposes of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (I assure you that the term “transgender” had not entered the discussion in 1976 or 1977), But it was a small classroom, and I was sitting in front, only a few feet away.
I’m sure Mr. Biden would be as relieved as the turkey he’ll pardon next November to learn that he made an impression on me as likable, modest, and smart. Beyond that, I don’t remember what he talked about, and if I still had my notes, they would most likely document the number of calories I’d consumed that day. But I’ve always wanted to have a good reason to write “little did I know,” and here’s my chance.
Also my chance to say that I’m glad that, in the end, the American people didn’t hold Mr. Biden’s age against him.
^^^
Donna Levin is the author of four novels, all of which are available from Chickadee Prince Books. Her latest novel, He Could Be Another Bill Gates, is available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or at the bookstore right across the street from your home. Please take a look.
Design by Steven S. Drachman from an image by Ulleo/Pixabay
Your Sunday Jazz Age Funnies: Boob McNutt, from 1926
Are you tired of election coverage? Whether you are a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter, or a “pox on all your houses” kind of person, we welcome you to Audere.
We think maybe it is the time to sit down and relax with a stupid comic strip from almost a hundred years ago — from an era when the nation had recently recovered from a terrible plague and a fraught politics, and was enjoying a wild expansion and some great parties.
So here is Rube Goldberg’s “Boob McNutt,” the second worst name for a comic strip (after “Boner’s Ark”), about a regular guy in the Jazz Age, with an oddly gorgeous flapper wife.
^^^
Editor’s Note: Contribute, if you wish, to Comic Book Plus.
Halleluyah
Halleluyah, with drum and dance
Halleluyah, with strings and pipe
Halleluyah, with cymbals sounding
Halleluyah, with cymbals resounding
Let every soul say Halleluyah,
Halleluyah!!
^^^
Note: This prayer of gratitude reflects the opinion of the Audere editorial board, and not necessarily the writers of Audere, or the authors of Chickadee Prince Books. But outside of the CPB/Audere office in Brooklyn, there is a lot of cheering, singing and celebratory car horns.
Donald Trump takes leaf out of autocrat playbook by falsely declaring victory before all votes counted
Natasha Lindstaedt, University of Essex
In the months leading up to US election day, it was predicted that Donald Trump would not accept the results if he lost, would cast doubt over the legitimacy of mail-in voting and would try to declare a victory before all votes had been counted. So far, he has done two of three.
These predictions were made easier by taking Trump’s words at face value. Trump had falsely claimed that mail-in ballots would be purposely sent to Democrats and not Republicans. He also spent months delegitimising the vote-by-mail process, even trying to defund the US Postal Service in efforts to derail Democrats, who were more likely to vote by mail.
In a press conference from the White House early in the morning on November 4, Trump said he would go to the Supreme Court to stop votes being counted. Equally concerning was his early, false declaration of victory, and his incorrect claim to have won in states that had not been called yet, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.
The early declaration
While Trump’s manoeuvres are a rare occurrence in a liberal democracy, calling elections early is a hallmark of non-democratic regimes – and particularly presidential ones. As my own research, one of the notable trends in authoritarian regimes is that they have adopted democratic institutions in order to prolong their power while paying lip service to international and domestic demand for “democracy”.
International observers have made it more difficult for autocrats to engage in outright fraud since the cold war ended. This has meant that autocrats have had to figure out ways in which to win elections without stealing them in obvious ways, or engaging in electoral malpractice rather than electoral fraud. In addition to the usual tricks of physically harming the opposition, controlling media narratives and stacking electoral commissions with lackeys, authoritarian leaders are also quick to declare victory in close elections.
In the case of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was quick to declare himself the winner of the 2018 June presidential election, even before all the votes were counted or the results ratified by the electoral commission. Erdoğan represents one of the most glaring cases of executive aggrandisement and democratic backsliding, as the country has seen its civil liberties threatened and the judiciary politicised.
In 2013, when there was not a full consensus that Venezuela was firmly authoritarian, the political heir to Hugo Chávez, Nicolas Maduro, narrowly won the presidential election by less than two percentage points. Maduro was quick to declare victory, leaving the opposition crying foul and demanding a recount. In 2018, Maduro “won” by a much larger margin, but again the opposition called into question the validity of the results.
Another example is Côte d’Ivoire, currently in the middle of a turbulent election cycle. An opposition boycott of the race led to victory for the president, Alassane Ouattara, with 94% of the vote according to provisional results announced on November 3.
Read more: Côte d’Ivoire’s turbulent past remains front and centre in presidential poll
In 2013, it was former Ivorian president, Laurent Gbagbo, who controversially declared an early victory with 51% of the votes – despite earlier results pointing to a 54% share for Ouattara, then the opposition challenger. The discrepancy was due to the Gbagbo-backed Constitutional Council annulling the results in opposition strongholds. Violence ensued and eventually, Gbagbo paid a price for this and was put on trial at the International Criminal Court – though later acquitted.
Mastering electoral manipulation
There have also been many cases of early electoral victories declared in Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union. This is a region that has mastered electoral manipulation and the creation of false narratives about the level of support of presidential incumbents. In Belarus, for example, Alexander Lukashenko has tended to declare victory by a large margin, but in 2020 protests erupted in August disputing the validity of the result.
Incumbents elsewhere have also refused to accept electoral results. In the case of the Gambia, long-time leader Yahya Jammeh would not concede after he narrowly lost the presidential election in December 2016 to Adama Barrow, citing “abnormalities”. Jammeh then appealed to the country’s supreme court for the results to be annulled and sent in armed soldiers to take control of the electoral commission. Jammeh only surrendered after Nigeria, Senegal and Ghana deployed troops.
Some observers of American politics are bracing themselves for unrest in the aftermath of the 2020 election. With Trump given an early impressive lead in some key swing states due to in-person voting being counted first, the election may be disputed no matter who the winner is.
Part of the problem is Trump’s refusal to support the counting of all the votes, something that is antithetical to democracy. As presidential elections are often emotional, high-stakes affairs, delegitimising the counting process puts the US at risk of greater instability in the next few weeks, and deeper questions about the strength of its democracy in the face of a leader who openly challenges democratic norms and processes.
^^^
Natasha Lindstaedt, Professor, Department of Government, University of Essex
Image Samantha Sophia, Unsplash
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Aaron Leibel, on having a daughter in the Israel Defense Forces
In an earlier post, I wrote about daughter number one Lauren’s service in the IDF. Debra, daughter number two, also did her army service, but it was much more complicated.
She had returned to America with Bonnie, her sister Abby and me when she was 16, at the end of her sophomore year in high school. She had no legal obligation to return to be drafted, because she hadn’t received her first in a series of call-up orders from the army before we left the country.
But Debra says she never had any doubt that she would go back to do her service. It wasn’t patriotism, she says. Rather, being in the IDF was part of life in Israel. All her friends and acquaintances would do it, and she knew she would join them.
For some reason, by going to summer school the year we arrived and the following year completing the 11th grade — she and her sister, Abby, spent that first year as students at the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, Md. — she would have enough credits to graduate without going to the 12th grade.
So she graduated a year early and spent what should have been her 12th-grade year at Montgomery College. The 30 credits she earned were considered the equivalent of having passed the bagrut exams — a series of grueling tests that Israeli youngsters need to pass to be admitted to university.
She returned to Israel in July and worked as a waitress in the cafeteria in the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), waiting to be called up. She was supposed to be drafted in September. But the army had not finalized her physical profile by that fall, and so her induction was postponed to February. That was very fortunate because had she gone in in September, she wouldn’t have met Nadav — one of her instructors in a course she took, who later became her husband.
Female soldiers then did three weeks of basic training, but after 10 days, she and other trainees left for a three-month-long course in Intelligence.
At the completion of the course, she was assigned to a base in the Negev for the remainder of her time in the IDF. Her job required a good knowledge of English. That’s all she will allow me to say. (Lauren also was in Intelligence, stationed at the main IDF facility in Tel Aviv. After more than 30 years, she still refuses to tell me what she did.)
Prior to her induction, Debra lived in our apartment in Jerusalem with Lauren and her boyfriend Dror, soon to become Lauren’s husband. After she met Nadav, Debra spent most of her leave from the army at his parents’ house.
She was classified as a hayelet bodida, a lone soldier, someone serving without his or her parents living in the country.
The army provided those soldiers some extra benefits to try to compensate for the absence of their loved ones. For example, Debra got a free but time-limited telephone call to her parents once a month. While taking her course, she and her fellow soldiers got to go home every Friday and Saturday. She was permitted to leave the base two hours before the others — the rationale being that she would have to do shopping for herself for Shabbat. Because the other soldiers would return to the base with baskets of food from their doting parents, she was allowed, as compensation, the privilege of having a toaster in her room.
The more substantive benefits included a salary that was almost twice as large as her fellow soldiers. However, she notes, the sum of money was nonetheless very small, inadequate for paying for housing had she been forced to do that.
She also received three weeks a year to visit us. The first year, we came to Israel for Lauren’s wedding and the visit was in the Jewish state. The second year, Debra came to our house. (This extra three weeks vacation had a downside. She was told that would have been named a mifakedet [literally, commander, but maybe better translated as team leader] in her unit were it not for those extra three weeks off.)
All in all, Debra’s very glad she served in the IDF. Not only did she meet her husband, but those years put her on the path to her current life.
^^^
Veteran journalist Aaron Leibel writes for The Jerusalem Post and Washington Jewish week. He is the author of the acclaimed memoir, Figs and Alligators: An American Immigrant’s Life in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, available from Amazon in Kindle and paperback, Barnes and Noble, and at every local bookstore in the U.S. and Canada.
Stoking Chaos, Trump Campaign Lies to Supporters That It Has Won Pennsylvania as President Tweets ‘Stop The Count!”
With Democratic nominee Joe Biden edging closer to a possible electoral victory as the last states move to finalize their results, President Donald Trump emerged from an overnight hiatus from Twitter on Thursday morning by declaring in a 9:12 am ET all-caps message: “STOP THE COUNT!“
While the electoral map maintained by the Associated Press as of this writing shows Biden leading the contest with a 264 to 214 lead over the Republican incumbent—and the key states of Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina still in play—the Trump campaign was sending false emails to its supporters Thursday morning claiming it had won Pennsylvania, even though his official lead was narrowing as legitimate mail-in ballots continued to be counted, many of which are considered likely to be from Biden voters.
“We have won Pennsylvania,” the Trump campaign falsely claimed in a fundraising email sent at almost the same time as Trump’s tweet.
As the Trump campaign has spread lies about the effort in key states to count the vote, supporters of the president—as Common Dreams has reported here and here—have been showing up at ballot counting centers trying to intimidate election officials and echoing the president by demanding that the processing of the vote be stopped.
Far from an isolated incident, the entire Trump campaign apparatus now appears aimed at delegitimizing a potential Biden victory that looks increasingly likely.
“Mail-in ballots have led to total and complete CHAOS,” reads a separate Trump campaign fundraising email sent in the early morning hours Thursday. In a misleading fabrication, the email claims that, “They are finding Biden votes all over the place. So bad for our Country, and for the MILLIONS of voters who want to know the results.”
Another one stated: “The Left will try to STEAL this Election! I’m calling on YOU to step up & FIGHT BACK.”
“The Democrats are trying to STEAL the Election,” the campaign told supporters in yet another email, sent Wednesday night. “We will never let them do it. Votes cannot be cast after the Polls are closed!”
As election experts have made clear, there have been no votes “cast” since polls closed in states on Tuesday night. What is happening is that legitimately-cast votes—a mix of early voter mail-in ballots, absentee ballots, and provincial ballots—are being counted by state election boards, and that process takes time.
Despite that, it appears Trump’s lie-infested messaging is getting through to his supporters loud and clear. As the AP reports Thursday:
“Stop the count!” the Trump supporters chanted in Detroit. “Stop the steal!” they said in Phoenix.
The protests came as the president insisted without evidence that there were major problems with the voting and the ballot counting, especially with mail-in votes, and as Republicans filed suit in various states over the election.
Wearing Trump gear, the Phoenix protesters filled much of the parking lot at the Maricopa County election center, and members of the crowd chanted, “Fox News sucks!” in anger over the network declaring Joe Biden the winner in Arizona.
Though the effort to undermine the election and call into question the results is being done brazenly and blatantly by the president, progressives like former labor secretary Robert Reich have been urging the nation to remain vigilant against such a threat to the nation’s democratic foundations:
“No matter what Donald Trump says, your vote counts,” tweeted the progressive advocacy group Indivisible on Thursday following Trump’s latest tweet. “Trump and the GOP have been trying to cast doubt on the integrity of our elections because they’re scared of us winning.”
^^^
This article by Jon Queally, staff writer first appeared on Common Dreams.