Kirk Douglas – Issur Danielovich, born 1916 – I always associated with Burt Lancaster as two typical American action men in youth but came to appreciate them in later life for the range of roles they played. Saw Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” (in the Astoria, Lochee – what about a pic some Saturday ?) in 1962, thought it quite brilliant and with a powerful emotional kick – and read later that it was one of his favourite films.
Always torn between glad to know he lived so long, but sad to learn he had suffered a bad stroke some years ago.
There seem to be no other photographs on line, Cairnallochy. My granny lived in Lochee and I think they went there and to the Rialto, which was farther up the road. Apparently, my grandad, who died before I was born, loved the cinema…incidentally, from a stroke.
Pic 1 – Interesting to see this published by John Murray – ahead of his time in publishing so many great works. I stand in awe. And Cassandra – so appropriate today.
Pic 10 – Cilla Black (orig. Priscilla White) before the nose job and BBC ‘superstar’ status – gone but not forgotten.
Pic 14 – Watt Bros. general store, Glesca. Gone but not forgotten.
Pic 16 – A wummin seeing if she’s got enough tae buy the Beezer annual for a wean’s Christmas present. Tidings of comfort and joy…an a that.
“stating in 1993 that Thatcher had “put the ‘great’ back into Great Britain” during her 11 years as prime minister from 1979 until 1990—despite the widespread unpopularity of Thatcher and her government in Black’s native Liverpool.”
Also
” Black was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom”
I read a piece by a journalist who had been a fan and who had been absolutely overwhelmed when her boss asked her to do an interview with Black in the 2000s.
She (Black) arrived REALLY late, and when the journalist gave her a bottle of champage she looked at it disdainfully and left it on the table at the end of the interview.
She didn’t really answer the journalist’s questions, just ranted on, name dropping all over the place about big stars she’s worked with.
The journalist went into the interview worshipping her and left thinking what a pompous cow she was.
I remember hearing too that she was a huge fan of Thatcher. And I believe she made no effort to hide it on stage. I wonder how many fans THAT lost her.
As for the 200 people who signed a “don’t leave” letter, as I recall a fair few of them didn’t even live in the UK and so weren’t in the least affected by the outcome.
So right about John Murray, Andi. The three fat volumes – each of more than 1,000 densely type-set pages – were published in 1849? How much of a market could there have been? I picked them at a flea market in South Africa many years ago. Checking the flyleaf, I see the price was 40 rand. At current exchange rates, that’s about two quid. Even at rates 30 years ago that would have been eight quid at worst.
Wonder who’d owned it over the years? Only one indecipherable name on the flyleaf dated 1953. At least it gives Ed chapter and verse on the chequered Cassandra, as he put it the other day.
If you do go to the link…don’t forget to click on the pictures to enlarge them to get an idea of the interior of the building ( the last picture in the row shows a Czeck street sign outside in Sauchiehall Street)
In an election season, phony O/T news stories generated by the American right wing media machine as an “October Surprise” for the purpose of character assassination must be commented on.
Washington Post: “Trump touted this shiny new toy at his Iowa rally on Wednesday night. He referenced the now-widely discussed New York Post story, which “reports” that Hunter Biden received emails from a Ukrainian executive that supposedly show he arranged access to his father, Joe Biden.”
“Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump shouted, claiming those emails are a “smoking gun.”
Of course the right wing crazies of Iowa in their bright red MAGA caps went wild. But the “story” has hardly caused a blip in the mainstream media campaign coverage. It’s just another Trump swipe at the Biden family that has Rudy Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s fingerprints all over it. So far, Biden family character assassination has only earned Trumpy an impeachment trial. (Steve Bannon, now under federal indictment for fraud, started boasting about having Hunter Biden’s hard drive weeks ago.)
Washington Post: “Trump’s fake new Biden scandal has a deeper purpose. Bannon revealed it” :
Vanity Fair: “EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW THE HUNTER BIDEN-NEW YORK POST STORY CAME TOGETHER REEKS………The supposed “smoking gun” that wasn’t manages to involve Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and suspected Russian agents. ”
Wiki: “The [New York] Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch’s ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias. In 1980, the Columbia Journalism Review stated ‘New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem—a force for evil.'”
The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton…..the guy whose picture is on the $10 bill…….and was in one of the boats with George Washington and his rebel army that crossed the Delaware River to attack the British at Trenton in 1776. Sadly, Rupert Murdoch turned Alex’s paper into tabloid trash.
Tris…..Yes it is! I think that Rupert may have pursued the NY Times and the Washington Post at one time or another, but ended up buying the Wall Street Journal. The Journal (established 1889) has a reputation for fine news pages and a right wing business-oriented editorial page. It seems to have avoided being trashed by Murdoch. The Times (1851) is publicly traded, but has been controlled by the same family for five generations. The Washington Post (1877) was controlled by the Graham family for many years, but sold out to Jeff Bezos (the Amazon billionaire) in 2013. Bezos has apparently taken a mostly hands off policy toward the Post.
Fun facts…….the Old Gray Lady (Times) fought off color photography until 1997 when it ran its first color photograph. On September 14, 1987, the Times printed the heaviest ever newspaper, at over 12 pounds (5.4 kg) and 1,612 pages.
I remember that heavyweight edition of the NYT, Danny, because I got it… I was living in Greenwich Village at the time, and had a subscription. Lord knows how many trees were felled on my behalf. A newspaper that heavy is sheer insanity.
Ed…….that’s amazing! I’m glad to have that confirmed. I quoted the comment from Wiki, and then wondered if it could really be true. A publication of 1612 pages is after all a huge book. It’s mentioned in this story in the Washington post about a 5.4 pound, 591 page Times edition in 2015.
Couldn’t get past the paywall, Danny, but I have no reason to disbelieve you! At least half of every edition got thrown out unread – straight down the garbage chute, no recycling then – and it was actually rather difficult to find the continuation of stories because you’d get a paragraph on the front page and then have to search through occasionally incorrect page references to see the rest…
Ed…..I always hate to start reading the front page and then go searching for the continuation. I dealt with the Times paywall for a while, (1o free articles a month I think) and then a friend of mine who subscribes to the print edition told me I could piggy back on his subscription for free access to the digital edition. (Times now allows one additional digital access for each print subscriber.) Convenient for access to the archives and such things.
I’d forgotten that the Times never had the funnies. The Sunday Times crossword is a big deal for crossword puzzle enthusiasts I think.
The Saturday Telegraph must have come close in recent years , although slimmed down more recently. Was strolling around village in middle England on a Sat morning some years ago as a paper boy struggled past with bulging bag on his bike. Gasped “bloody Telegraph” as he laboured past me.
Won money on DT crossword a few years ago and man phoned some time later to invite us to subscribe. Wife said we subscribe to the National and he said “what’s that then?”. 😉
Cairnallochy……The digital edition of the Telegraph has a stricter paywall than the Guardian. I can get articles in the Guardian by just registering my email address, but for most articles I Google in the Telegraph, they say they want me to send them money for a digital subscription. 😉
I think papers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have to be really careful not to allow political bias get in the way of their reporting.
Far too much is at stake. Far too many rich/important people could lose money if badly advised by these papers.
Tris……The Financial Times is widely cited here by various news media. I had an English/English Literature/Journalism professor who had contempt for most American print media. For periodicals, she said that only Harpers and the Atlantic were quality publications of their ilk, and then among newspapers, she had good words for the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Interestingly, she said that the Christian Science Monitor was a fine paper on a par with the Times, etc. I think that the Monitor no longer publishes a print edition, but may still have a digital edition.
The tech giants are running foul of S230 by censoring what they consider to be “fake news”. By censoring they can no longer claim to be a “conduit” and a facilitator of free speech, they are actively removing anything they dont like. So they supress Biden, Hillary and Obama stories but facilitate anti Trump rhetoric. There is also a newspaper, not sure but may have been NYTimes, who published Trumps tax returns even though that is illegal but refuse to run negative stories about Biden, Clinton or Obama.
I can see the tech giants being shut down, split up, taken over by the US Government., don’t think any penalties can be levelled at a newspaper for not publishing a story, however they can be fined for illegally publishing someones tax returns, and if they turn out to be fake returns, not that I know, then that would exacerbate the penalties.
Tris…….In the states, the right wing radicals (which now define Trump’s Republican party) have effectively destroyed the norms of civil discourse essential for the functioning of a democratic society. So it’s hard to know when and where to try to answer the endless barrage of charges and counter-charges….lies and innuendo….that occur during a political campaign. Particularly one that has crossed the Atlantic and is being commented on in MNR.
So for me, a concrete charge involving specifics of the now-famous Hunter Biden in Ukraine right wing conspiracy theory…….(which led to a presidential impeachment)……can be and should be addressed and answered. I did reply to that, citing and providing links to mainstream media. On the other hand, crap like Biden fondling little girls is simply hateful character assassination that has now become so familiar, and I’d be lending it credibility if I dignified it with an answer. Nevertheless, look at where such casual mud slinging at a political opponent has led us. I’m sure you’re aware that Trump has refused to unequivocally denounce QAnon, a right wing hate group of conspiracy theorists that claims to be fighting for the safety of children from satanic Democratic pedophiles.
It’s not really that far from casual charges that your political enemies are molesting children, to the fevered insanity of QAnon. On another level, I lost a good friend recently (at least for this election cycle) when I simply got tired of his incessant, tiresome bitching about how all politicians are crooks and Washington is a cesspit of corruption and depravity. Opposition to government itself is a cornerstone of American right wing politics of course, and a promise to “drain the Washington swamp” is some of the craziness that got a two bit con-artist like Trump elected president in the first place. Trump and his administration will almost surely soon be consigned to the trash heap of history, but the craziness of the Trump cult of voters will remain with us. Whether democratic politics in the USA will survive in any recognizable form in the longer term is still an open question I think.
Over the years, right wing politics in its bizarre American incarnation at least, has seldom showed up on MR and MNR. So when Trumpism and Covid-denial shows up as it has now, I generally bite my tongue……well, I bite my typing finger……and do not respond. Same when I read about Biden being a child molester and all politicians being crooks. My typing finger is however in a terrible state from the teeth marks. 😉
The thing to do is to get yourself something else (less personally damaging) to bite on.
Munguin lets it float over his head, but that of course, could be the Moet!
I’m a bit scared for the world right now. In the three important countries, Xi has become a “president for life”; it appears that any opposition to Putin is poisoned, and Trump has already indicated, in what some people herald as the greatest democracy on Earth, that he won’t go peacefully, if he loses an election (rather like one of those African president who cling on to office and then flee to somewhere else when they are ousted). The Supreme Court appointment of a very young judge for life… maybe 50 years… only days before an election is an affront to democracy by anyone’s standards and more typical of aforementioned dictator that an American president.
Of course that’s not all that is frightening. The warming of the planet for whatever reasons, is changing our world, and the virus that has changed all our lives in the past year is going nowhere.
In the relatively unimportant (in world terms) UK, the London government has decided that in order to do what IT wants to do with Britain, whatever the hell that is, it will break ties with its closest partners and allow god knows what to descend upon us …and blame the other side for not giving them what they want.
To lighten the mood, this is hilarious, but not really that far from the truth.
Everywhere, it seems, chaos reigns. And the only REAL leaders are either too small to be effective or, in the case of Germany, on the verge of retirement.
As far as accusations of sexual impropriety are concerned., I think people need to be very careful who they accuse of what.
It’s impossible not to be aware of some of these things but people, news outlets and even worldwide media empires such as that of Munguin may be sued for repeating unproven allegations.
Which is why I’d appreciate guardedness in any such comments when they have to be made, along with the word “allegedly” as appropriate.
Munguin says you should probably be like him and employ someone to do your typing for you. It saves so much trouble.
Tris……….The thread about the trade deal negotiation is really very funny. The UK’s idea of compromise is right up there with the American right wing Trumpies.
He’s hilarious, Danny. I thought it might cheer you. What a set of loonies… and yet, it’s still all the EU’s fault. Apparently they are far too stupid and foreign to see that Dom always gets his way… as he should, because he’s British.
That was really very clever Tris! More and more, the Brexit people remind me of Trump. Not just that xenophobic right wing nationalism showed up almost simultaneously in the UK and the USA, but that the proponents of both will lie to your face in a way that contradicts what you see with your own eyes and/or can deduce with a modicum of critical intelligence. Somewhere I recall a politician….maybe it was a Brexit referendum slogan……to the effect that when the UK withdraws from the EU, then the UK will hold all the bargaining cards. One small country withdraws from a large multi-national economic union, and this gives the small country economic bargaining power??? So day is night and up is down because a politician says so? Trump does it every day of course.
I think the particularly unpleasant Gove said that… but there were others that same the same sort of stuff.
It was utterly delusional…as was their ignoring of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Take back control of the borders, but leave the land border open? EH????
It’s come to a pretty pass when a pathetic creature like Biden is the only hope!
He appears to be exhibiting symptoms of dementia, hardly knowing where he is, or having difficulty remembering his lines, it’s bordering on pensioner abuse!
It never much surprises me when a British party can’t find any clever people to lead them.
Look at the three British parties and you are left open mouthed at some, really most of, their leadership choices.
But would you not have though that in the much larger USA and only two paries, they might have found two people better than Trump and Biden, or Trump and Clinton.
But looking back at the massive field of candidates for the Democrats, the best they could do was choose him. I’m not being ageist, but I seriously think that he’s, at 78 too old to be starting a four year term at what is a tough job (if you are going to do it well).
There were better people in the field.
And why oh why did a proper Republican not challenge Trump?
Mmm. Interesting perspective Danny. You appear to have been practicing the art of deflection.
However why is the FBI’s top kiddy porn investigator, Joshua Wilson, issuing a subpoene for Hunter Biden’s laptop. https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/status/1317849887438966784
Look a squirrel nothing to see here.
Only a few more links to establish and then
“Red shoes meets Pied piper”
Here’s short report dated yesterday (16 October) from the coronavirus blog in the Dutch newspaper de Krant, Kangaroo: https://archive.vn/KUDDe. “De Krant” means “The Newspaper” in Dutch, not that that’s a criticism. Google translate works OK on the text. They seem to be seeing the same sort of surge starting that we are here in Scotland.
I had a look for Dr. Elke de Klerk but couldn’t find one in The Netherlands, which is not to say she doesn’t exist; the only mentions I’ve found are to do with the conspiracy group you mentioned. There is one over the border, though, in Belgium.
“conspiracy group I mentioned”. I have got to laugh at the use of adjectives, adverbs and other inuendo to try and debunk the truth, when the real conspiracy is staring you in the face, but to quote Mark Twain ” it is easier to deceive someone than it is to convince them they have been deceived”. This is the problem, refusal to believe the real evidence as it would mean admitting that what one perceived to be true, is a lie, I get that, especially as the scale of the deceit is enormous.
I have referenced several sources includiing the UK Gov. (I wouldn’t trust them with my stuffed 🐧) and other articles which have concluded that the coronavirus is just the flu/cold and that the pcr test is giving massive false positives. Even the president of Tanzania checked it by swabbing a papya, a goat and a pigeon and all came back positive.
The WHO is now saying that lockdowns are not the answer. Probably because it gave out false information at the start.
I guess despite all efforts it is going to take an enormous information shock to change peoples perception, that is probably why they are dripfeeding the public with the real news despite the continued censorship by the main stream media and tech giants. Believe me it will be an enormous shock, so horrendous there will be widespread psychological issues in society because of it. By me providing information, with references, I am hoping that my friends on this blog will avoid that fate. Alas they seem to be stuck 🙊🙉🙈
Just watched the begining of a longer version of that snippet and you’re correct she is “from the Netherlands and also has a practice in Belgium as a GP”. Quote from her.
Number 6 is in Kilconquhar – or Kineuchar as we call it locally. Only milepost I know that tells you where you are by using a zero. Anyone seen another one?
There’s another near Guardbridge on the road up to Strathkinnes but no zero. Sadly I’ve lost the photo I took of it but it’s visible on Google Streetview.
I have been told that the cast iron caps of the milestones were collected in at the beginning of WW2 in case the might help an invading army. They were stored, and after the war the then Fife County Council, which was based in Cupar, had them restored and replaced. Fife Council still looks after them. Perhaps there were more elsewhere that were destroyed. The unique thing about the Kilconquhar one is the zero.
William Shatner unilaterally stops trade with UK from 1st January. Looks like Brexit will boldly take us where we’ve not gone before!
to absorb or we would have to raise prices considerably. Unfortunately unless something happens to change that we will suspend accepting orders from the UK at https://t.co/RXigeY1iOJ starting January 1st. I’m sorry.🤷🏼♂️
Yea, I read about that.
It appears that the the online shop is complaining that they have to pay £1000 to the Uk government to register with them and get necessary paperwork to export to the UK. They are further annoyed that the UK Government expect them to either add VAT to the price or absorb it. Either way they have to collect the VAT and send it to the UK tax man, the Revenue and Excise.
I don’t know the detail…don’t know whether it’s the reality of exporting to the UK post no deal brexit, or whether it’s some scare story.
It surely can’t be true that the UK Government are expecting overseas traders to file a VAT return with the Revenue and Excise and send on the money! I see an opportunity here for a certain amount of non-compliance, not to mention difficulties with enforcement and recovery in foreign jurisdictions .
Particularly, Jake, as no one will have thought of that.
However, now that it has been brought to their attention, through the good offices of yourself and this august and widely read publication, they will doubtless take steps to find some friend of Liz Truss who will set up a company with capital of £3, 25, no staff, no premises and the articles of association of a chip shop, to deal with it in their usual efficient manner.
Shhhhh…. Munguin says can you get him some After Eights. He’s partial to them and is understandably incandescent that Dom is going deprive him of them.
Thought 17 might be Lochee but it has changed so much with the construction of the “bypass” that I struggle to recognise specifics or even the direction in which the photographer is facing. Not up for much travelling at moment – or indeed in future – but hope to get back for a look.
It was a real treat to see the advert for the Austin Healy there. It reminds me of my days in Kirkintilloch seeing Moira Anderson speeding around town in one that she got from the company as part of a deal for doing musical adverts for them. One day she was going for a spin through Lennoxtown and up to Strathblane when she hit a pheasant which almost smashed the windscreen. She laughed about it afterwards but my neighbour told me she was quite shaken by the incident and couldn’t face eating venison again even though she knew that that particular meat comes from deer. The whole idea of eating game repelled here ever since. Even today when dining out in the most exclusive restaurants in the Isle of Man, she will politely refuse any game dish on a tasting menu. The picture above of Douglas on the Isle of Man includes the site of one of her favourite establishments where she and her husband dine on a regular basis. I am not permitted to name it, because la belle chanteuse does not wish to be mobbed by admirers while dining there, often enjoying a repast of crab consommé followed by rabbit stew.
Ahh! No. 8 is from my home patch.
XS4764 is a six-wheeled Albion Valkyrie PR145 with Cowieson bodywork.
New to Young’s of Paisley in July 1938 it was acquired by Strachan’s of Ballater in April 1945, becoming no. 18 in their fleet. (there was sister vehicle XS4404 also acquired from Young’s).
Looking rather nondescript in this image (these vehicles were hammered during the war years when both vehicle and road maintenance was minimal) it was withdrawn from service in January 1953.
Sadly I can’t recall the drivers name. 😀
For anyone else sad enough to be interested there’s a lovely video produced by the Deeside local history group which name-checks a number of drivers and conductors any number of which MAY have manned (womanned?) said vehicle!
Thanks for the video, Roddy. It reminded me of the mid 1950’s when we used to stay in an old bus on a site that belonged to the Coilacreich Inn. It had been converted as accommodation and was known as ‘Cookie’s bus’. I noticed in the video a document signed by George Cook as PSV licence holder. Could there be a link? Could it have been an old Strachan’s vehicle?
I’ll look through the family photos to see if the bus is in there.
Funnily enough when I was a lad back in the late ’50s we also used to holiday near Ballater – Glenmuick – but never staying in anything as exotic as a bus. I wish!
However I do remember cycling up the Braemar road near Coilacreich (never having the luxury of a car, we cycled everywhere) and seeing, low down among the trees on the left hand side, what appeared to be several old buses.
I never had the opportunity of a closer look but it would be perfectly possible that they would have been retired Strachan’s vehicles.
I have a fleet list of all vehicles ever operated by Strachan’s, also a little publication of Ballater memories by local man Ian Cameron. The Albion picture featured today is actually in my personal Strachan’s ‘library’ so didn’t require much detective work!!!
Well… I mean… why does Munguin pay you to be his bus correspondent if you can’t even remember a simple thing like that. Look sharp my boy or it’s the jotters!
On the subject of pay….. I am in receipt of one bouncing Czech.
bouncey-bounce-bounce.
Not what one was led to expect!
If this link works (?), this should show the sister vehicle in better days in original livery. (given the location, probably brand new & awaiting delivery)
The driver was called Ferdinand du Maurier and he was from Torphins. He was a great fan of Moira Anderson and went to her concerts when she was touring with Ozzy Osbourne and Deathsnake.
Sorry I’m going o/t again but many of you will be interested – National has a wee interview with Wee Ginger Dug’s human.
“Then just to prove he is a fighter with humour and words, Paul revealed: “My left leg’s so useless I’ve decided to call it Michael Gove. It’s completely insensible, it doesn’t do what I tell it and it’s getting in the way of my independence.
“The worst symptom I have just now is constant nausea, but then you’d be f***ing sick if you were in bed with Michael Gove.”
As that’s Trumpolini up there, this isn’t going to be OT after all.
Spotted just now, this: “During his campaign rally in Georgia Friday night, President Donald J. Trump threatened to “leave the country” if he should lose the 2020 presidential election to his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.”
Oh dear, what a tragedy that would be (not)!
Actually, I think it’s actually pretty likely that he will leave the US before the handover in January, because he knows he’s going to be in huge legal trouble if he stays, even if he pardons himself for all his federal crimes or resigns and gets Pence to do it. NY state are investigating his tax records back to however long they can go back to, and it’s very obvious that he’s guilty as sin for massive tax evasion, fraud and false declarations.
Maybe he’ll make some cozy arrangement with one of the disgusting dictators he’s been cozying up to… not North Korea, I wouldn’t think, but there’s a number of places he could go where the strongman / strongmen in charge would shield him from any attempt to extradite him even if they have an extradition treaty in place.
It would find it vaguely amusing if he were to choose somewhere he put on his list of Muslim ban countries.
Interesting news Ed! I’ve more or less tuned out the presidential campaign by now, so Trump says things at his freak show rallies that I don’t hear about. I do wonder if, as a private citizen, he actually would go to prison…..on New York state charges, even he does self-pardon for federal crimes. Hard for me to believe that a billionaire former president would ever get sent to prison. On the other hand, he is detested in New York, and Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo would certainly not pardon him.
It’s more likely that he’ll step down five minutes before the appointed time and get the newly elevated Veep to do the pardoning for him, Tris, though he may have persuaded himself that he has the right to do anything he damn well pleases, rather like the Westminster regime and Parliament when they decide they’ve inherited the divine right of kings.
One of the attractions of the idea of having Pence do the pardoning is that they would go down in history with Pence as the President with the shortest time served in office, even shorter than the 31 days served by the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, who caught a cold which turned into pneumonia and killed him. I wonder: did they have coronavirus back in 1841? Anyway, the idea must surely appeal to the President’s sense of showmanship.
I hope they do make orange makeup available to him in prison. That way his face would at least match his jumpsuit.
Yeah. Imagine that Pensce did pardon him and then had to live with the doubt that God would see it as a reasonable thing for him to have done, what with Trump being a lair and a cheat and serial philanderer, and at one point saying that he was the second coming…
Imagine Pence living out his days worrying that hellfire was waiting him and getting closer by the day.
Or maybe Pence doesn’t believe a word of that and just mouths it to buy votes from the south.
Ed….That Mike Pence trick might work, although it would surely be challenged in the courts. The original constitution didn’t really say very much about Vice Presidential succession, so the precedents set with the death of William Henry Harrison and the succession of his VP John Tyler, became the de facto law of the land by precedence. It was immediately clear that there would be no sitting Vice President until the next election…….which as it turned out was effectively Harrison’s entire term…..minus 31 days. Although at some point there was a formal line of succession after the VP, the problem of not having a sitting VP after he moves up to the presidency was not fixed until the 25th amendment in 1967.
And then people realized a problem with THAT. The 25th amendment specifies that the sitting president appoint a VP when a vacancy occurs……subject to Congressional ratification. So when Richard Nixon’s first VP Spiro Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to taking cash bribes in brown envelopes while governor of Maryland, Nixon got to appoint a new VP. The issue was that Nixon was by then far along in the Watergate scandal and was under attack as a crook. SO…….Nixon was appointing the man who would be in a position to pardon him if he left office by impeachment or resignation. SO was there a backroom deal between Nixon and Gerald Ford?……..that is, did Nixon appoint Gerald Ford Vice President with the quid pro quo that Ford would pardon him if he had to leave office?
So Nixon did have to resign and sure enough, Ford DID give him a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he DID commit or MIGHT HAVE committed. Maybe there was a corrupt quid pro quo between Ford and Nixon, or maybe Ford was just the 24 karat idiot that he seemed to be. Anyway, everyone else of significance in the Nixon administration served serious prison sentences EXCEPT for Nixon himself who appointed the man who pardoned him.
Fun fact……who was the only president of the United States who was never ELECTED to EITHER the Presidency or the Vice Presidency? Answer: Gerald Ford.
I hear a (possibly apocryphal) story that Ford did a radio interview once and at one point said “…when I was elected President …”, to which the interviewer responded, steelily, “Mr. President, you were never elected President”.
Tris…..A plain text reading of the constitution does not indicate that there’s any limitation on the executive power to pardon. That would suggest that the power to pardon is absolute. Maybe the founders didn’t even imagine that someone would pardon himself, but one view is that if they didn’t mean for that to happen, they should have said so. I see no reason that Trump wouldn’t do it, and then it would be challenged in the courts and the Supreme Court would have to rule.
… One of the things about this supreme court thing, Danny, is that once appointed, they can’t readily be sacked. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
So having snagged the nice little number for themselves, they have no further interest in buttering up a president, especially one on the way out… and probably more intertest in protecting their reputation as a lawyer?
Tris…..OH YES! One of the enduring ironies of American history involves Supreme Court Justices who are appointed by presidents for their favorable political leanings, who get on the court and proceed to write legal opinions contrary to what the president intended. It drives presidents mad when liberals become conservatives or conservatives become liberal as soon as the judges they appoint are on the bench and immune from politics. It’s happened to many presidents….FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush, etc.
Supreme Court Justices……like all federal judges…….can only be removed by impeachment, for gross misconduct. A trial in the Senate……just like a presidential impeachment, is required. So it happens VERY VERY rarely for any federal judge. The only Supreme Court Justice to ever be impeached was Associate Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. The House of Representatives passed Articles of Impeachment against him; however, he was acquitted by the Senate. So no Supreme Court Justice has ever been removed from the high bench in all of American history.
…which proves only that American Supreme Court justices have always been either a remarkably honourable and upstanding bunch, or far too many of them have been allowed to get away with proverbial and metaphorical murder by venal and nakedly self-serving politicians in return for political and other favours.
Ed…..most notably the venal and self-serving Republicans who got the 2000 Florida recount case out of the Florida court’s jurisdiction to the US Supreme Court, where the decision in Bush vs Gore ordered a stop to the Florida recount and effectively APPOINTED George W. Bush president on a straight party line “vote” of 5 Republican Justices to 4 Democratic Justices.
Which Trump is now angling to emulate, Danny, or top. It’s so nakedly self-interested and hypocritical that I can’t understand not being repelled by it, after all the claptrap the Republicans talked when they wouldn’t even give Merrick Garland a hearing.
Well Ed, we Democrats ARE repelled by it. The Merrick Garland thing gripes Democratic souls. And now the hypocritical flip flop to ram through a Republican Justice in what are probably the closing days of the Trump administration. Thing is, it’s all perfectly legal and constitutional, and we know after all that hypocrisy is the mothers milk of politics in pursuit of political gain.
I just wish that the Democrats could find it in their souls to use raw political power to screw the Republicans as skillfully as the Republicans screw the Democrats. As it is, the Democrats are left muttering about how unfair and hypocritical it all is. As if righteousness and fair play had anything to do with politics. Truth is, even as a Democrat, I sort of admire the Republicans for behaving the way political parties should behave. That is, advance the interests of your party and screw the opposition……while staying within the limits of the law. I just wish that Democrats could learn to be as mean and self-serving as the attack dog Republicans.
You mean be as mean and hypocritical as the Republicans, Danny? I fear that they might win an electoral battle or two, but they’d lose the argument and lose their soul.
Ed……Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not opposed……in principle…..to political parties acting honorably and politicians telling the truth. Many Democrats do however despair that acting honorably and telling the truth has resulted in Democratic loss after loss (in elections for the Presidency, for Congress, for Governorships, and for State legislatures) to the political slash and burn tactics of the right wing Republicans. Political parties serve no purpose if they can’t FIRST get elected to public office. Thus……the call that the Democrats should become as mean and vicious as the attack dog Republicans. THEN…….when you win elections and assume political authority, you are free to tell the truth and act honorably in service to your people. Bernie Sanders and the young radical lefties of the Democratic party would rather be right than the president. What does that get them? Seats at the inauguration of political moderate Joe Biden……maybe!
Well, it seemed to lose them some of their old followers… and the new ones, who imagined them to be Tories, went back to the Tories once they ditched a succession of leaders as unappealing as Haig, Duncan Smith and Howard.
There’s a principle that people can’t serve as judges in court cases involving themselves: it would be an irremediable conflict of interest. Whether that would trump (see what I did there) a narrow, textual reading of the Constitution would have to be up to the Supreme Court, I suppose – but that wouldn’t stop the whole situation being fundamentally absurd.
Ed….I like your “irremediable conflict of interest” argument against an absolute power to pardon oneself. That case will be a circus if Trump brings it about. Even greater than the circus that will be erupting over Obamacare and a potential rehash of Roe vs Wade by the newly constituted conservative court.
We shall see if he does get his just deserts, Danny, though the new administration would have to be visibly and punctiliously hands off in prosecuting him – à la différence de ce vieux crapaud William Barr.
Dunno about the “billionaire” either: as Trump is the one who says so, and has resisted providing any documentary proof of the fact, it is pretty safe to assume that he doesn’t actually have all that much money. Which is why he’s such a notorious cheapskate and financial deadbeat. We should not forget he’s run every business venture he’s ever had into the ground, and gone bankrupt.
With Trump, the image and the reality are two different things entirely, it’s not just empathy or any of the gentler emotions that he doesn’t do, it’s authenticity as well.
Ed……Yes, we have no idea how much money Trumpy has. But apart from personal wealth, I have a feeling that the great and the good who have worked the corridors of power are not really very likely to ever find themselves in an orange prison jump suit. They will always have important friends with influence in high places to help them. And I’m not sure that’s really a bad thing in the case of a president. As soon as the first ex-president faces prosecution and imprisonment, it will then be open season on all future ex-presidents by their political enemies. We’ve seen that now in the use of impeachment as a political tool. There had not been an impeachment since 1868, then the Democrats went after Nixon, the Republicans went after Clinton, and the Democrats went after Trump.
So whatever Trump is guilty of, I suspect it will not serve our democracy well if he faces trial after his presidency. I think the Democrats went bat shit crazy when Trump was elected, and they proceeded to try to overturn the will of the people and the workings of the electoral college. I almost don’t care what he was guilty of, I know that the Democrats just wanted him gone. And that’s not good for our democratic republic. My Democratic friends can pretend that they were all worked up by that call to Ukraine as an illegal act, but in fact their real goal was to cancel out the results of the 2016 election.
For that reason, I’m actually opposed to any post-presidential prosecution of Trump…..federal or state…….however much of a corrupt asshole he was and is. It’s simply bad for the republic and our fractured politics. I’ll never forget how the Democrats wanted Obama to investigate DubYa Bush for all sorts of things after his presidency including the lies he told about the WMD justification for war. I think it would have been madness to investigate and prosecute Bush. Although the far lefties in the party were out for DubYa’s blood, Obama was sensible enough to ignore them.
I differ a bit from you in my analysis of that impeachment, Danny. My American former colleagues were outraged not so much by the result of the election but by the President’s lies and misconduct, and by the knowledge that the result had been influenced by a concerted campaign against his opponent on social media, shored up by ridiculous and unjustifiable hearings set up to investigate nothingburgers that were already known to be nothingburgers.
As for Bush and Blair (and Cheney and Rumsfeld and other dramatis personæ), I think they should have been subject to international justice, but we all know that was never going to happen. The US refusal to have anything to do with the International Criminal Court should be seen in that light. The principle of aut iudicare aut dedere – either try, or render up – means that countries’ judicial authorities should either try their own (international) offenders themselves or surrender them to face justice elsewhere, so it’s no surprise that exceptionalist regimes dislike the idea. We can see it in the same light as the Westminster regime’s antipathy to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), even when They’re not sure at any given moment which one They’re talking about.
The principle shared by right-wing regimes in both England and the US is that their institutions – government / legislature / executive – are superior to anyone else’s, and they can’t deal with criticism, however constructive: how very dare Johnny Foreigner try to tell Us what to do when it should be the other way round! The very idea!
And you can see where it’s got them: in the UK it’s Brexit in the middle of a pandemic with no trade deal and the EU being blamed because all the remaining members of the EU cannot accept that England should be allowed to break international law and renege on its obligations just because they’re British – it’s not quite the same with America, because Trump prefers to behave like a sub to nasty dictatorial doms – no, not Dom Cummings, Tris, though then again… for whatever perverse or criminal reason. Regardless, America is not making itself any friends at the moment – not ones you’d want to be seeing hanging with, anyway.
Ed…..I agree with what you say about Trump. He is stupid and evil and has been a disaster as president. But being stupid and evil is not illegal, much less an impeachable offense. Being a posturing demagogue who tells lies all the time is not illegal either. Neither is character assassination of your political enemies using social media. In short, I can’t see anything he’s done that could be successfully prosecuted as a felony in a criminal court, and I think that the standards for impeachment and removal from office should be even higher than that……because it subverts the will of the people in a duly constituted election. Short of the most heinous crimes imaginable, I think that the results of a democratic election are sacrosanct. Trump was elected, and if the people chose a stupid, evil, demagogue and madman, then that’s just tough. He’s what the voters chose and they don’t get to change their minds. After four years they get a try at removing him, and not before.
I don’t know anything about the European Courts. But I DO know how much I disdain the posturing European pacifist lefties who periodically have a big announcement that some sort of committee they’ve appointed has decided that the American president is a war criminal and he is to present himself at some asshole European Court for trial……forthwith!
I could go farther and say that I’m not fond of the political tactic of branding political leaders as war criminals, even though they are democratically elected and are following the laws of the country they serve. This was true of Bush and Cheney, and for that matter the problem of Tony Blair following DubYa Bush’s war policy was simply to elect a different government. I hated Bush’s wars and that he and Dick Cheney lied about their justification. But Bush and Cheney were elected by the people and what they did was legal under the laws and constitution of the United States They were not ANY kind of criminals, much less war criminals…….IMHO. 😉
At this point, I always mention the irony of the people who gave us WWI and WWII and for that matter, the British and European Empires, lecturing Americans about peace and justice and human rights. Having said all this, I know that the peace loving European lefties WILL continue to piss me off with regularity…..LOL.
Yes I’ve more or less lost whatever original point I was making, but I never miss an opportunity to express my disdain for European Human Rights courts which summon American presidents to “justice.” Allow me to say……GEEEEZE!
The war criminal thing. Was the Iraq War legal under the American Constitution? How do the United Nations Charter and international stand in relation to the Constitution and the US, and how does the US stand in relation to international law?
As founder members of the UN and Permament Members of the Security Council, the US and the UK should have been bound by the Charter of the United Nations in the matter of waging war. To oversimplify, they never got the necessary majority in the Security Council to go to war in Iraq in 2003. When other countries do that sort of thing, the US and the UK have traditionally come down hard on them.
The Iraq War which was declared on specious grounds in 2003 was not lawful under international law; by going ahead with it anyway, the two leaders of the “Coalition of the Willing” was setting a terrible example for the rest of the world. It is a lesson which Putin in particular has taken to heart, and China’s territorial annexations in the South China Sea should be understood in that light as well.
I feel sorry for Colin Powell, because he was, I believe, duped into giving the Security Council the briefing presenting the false evidence that served as grounds for going to war. I have to believe that he was duped as we know him to be a man of honour. I was in the Security Council chamber when he gave that briefing, and I watched his face. As I understand it, he feels lasting shame, guilt and embarrassment over that event, on his own behalf and that of his country. It’s no surprise to me that he’s come out in support of Biden in this year’s presidential election, for Trump is much, much worse than Dubya ever was. No one could even think of accusing Bush II of gross moral turpitude or of being a Russian stooge, for example.
War crimes are among those crimes which are subject to what is called universal jurisdiction, meaning that alleged war criminals may be prosecuted by any judiciary anywhere in the world. That’s another thing that became part of the system of international law since the founding of the UN after WWII and in the context of the Nuremberg trials. It’s precisely because of WWII that the European States, with the exception of the UK now and other with far-right, authoritarian governments, are keen on trying to enforce it. Similarly, it is not European governments which are directly responsible for trying to bring politicians to book for “universal jurisdiction” crimes: democracies are supposed to have independent judiciaries, after all. William Barr’s antics at the US Department of Justice are sufficient proof of why this is a Great Good Thing! Currently in Europe, the Polish regime in particular has been coming under fire for messing with its justice system. It’s a splendid piece of doublethink, actually, that the dominant party there is called the Law and Justice Party. Similarly, the Republicans in the US have always been known as the Law and Order Party. So what is this I’ve been hearing about the Thin Blue Line, or do I mean Back the Blue?
I haven’t been following the situation in Hungary with nearly the same degree of attention as I have paid to Poland’s problems, which is for my own personal and family reasons. That aside, I believe strongly that the charges levelled against political figures in both the UK and the US should have been taken seriously in both those countries: instead of just laughing them off, or appealing to a history that is irrelevant to the matters in hand, they should have been subject to due legal process to determine whether there was a case to answer. Aut iudicare, aut dedere, right? Again, to simply ignore such things sets a terrible example: if the US or the UK wants to prosecute a citizen of another country for a “universal jurisdiction” crime, why should the government of that country cooperate if the US does not reciprocate? Who benefits from allowing a culture of impunity to develop among the world’s (rich and) powerful?
I repeat that it’s precisely because of WWII and the post-war international legal order that resulted from it that the European States are so keen on this multilateral approach and on enforcing the provisions of international law that are supposed to be binding on them. Sovereignty, that much used, abused and misunderstood concept, does not mean doing whatever the hell you please whenever you choose to do it. It’s a principle that is as true for States as it is for us all as individuals. By subjecting themselves to international law, countries agree that their sovereignty is not infinite. That conflicts with the exceptionalist positions and philosophies of the Westminster regime – which I go on about ad nauseam both here and elsewhere – and the notion that the electoral decisions of the American people, particularly when the democratic legitimacy of that system is so iffy anyway, should apply to and in the rest of the world.
That exceptionalist, do-as-I-say-don’t-do-as-I-do view of international law and of who should be bound by it is sometimes called extraterritoriality. The US in particular is wont to pass legislation which American legislators seem to think should apply not just to the US but worldwide. There were moves afoot at one point to ban representatives of all companies which did business with Cuba from entering the US (this was a couple of decades ago now, if I remember correctly). The EU in particular pushed back in an unusually muscular way for them: the US was informed that, if they tried to enforce the ban, the EU would reciprocate by banning all representatives of American companies which did not do business with Cuba from entering the EU. I believe that particular provision is still on the books, but has quietly been buried, so to speak. This too is not good for confidence in and respect for the law.
Americans would rightly be mad as hell if Scotland, or anywhere else, tried to enforce its laws on US citizens for acts that were not a crime in the US; it would be at least as absurd as if Florida, say, were to attempt to impose Florida law on Alaska. I heard representatives of the US at various international forums being rebuked for their country’s extraterritorial pretensions, and rightly so; as I said, the US seems to be particularly prone to this. I don’t remember any other country being rebuked for that kind of assault on other countries’ sovereignty. The “universal jurisdiction” crimes do not contradict the principle that domestic laws do not apply extraterritorially, because they are in international law, which is supposedly applicable to all States. The regimes and ruling elites in many countries pay no heed to such things unless they have to, but that is no excuse for founder members of the United Nations and Permanent Members of the Security Council doing it.
Extraterritoriality, i.e., the (attempted) unilateral imposition of a State’s own legal standards on others elsewhere is rather a feature of imperial-minded Powers. The rest of us try to go by the general principle that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, that might alone does not make right. We have to wonder too quis custodiet ipsos custodies… as founder members of the UN and leaders of the victorious Allies in WWII, if the UK and the US are not going to live up to the standards of behaviour on the world stage which they themselves set, why should anyone else? As it is, they have forfeited some if not all of their right to criticize, or take action against, other States’ bad behaviour.
Let me try to draw an analogy. As state law is binding on people in that state, Federal law is binding on the whole US and those who live in it (and US citizens overseas in the matter of taxation, among others). To go up a notch, international law is supposed to be binding on the States which are members of the international community, and in fact usually become binding on all States worldwide when so many States sign up to things that they become part of international law – no one State has a veto, basically, or we’d never get anywhere.
As for Trump… if Michael Cohen went to jail for acting on his instructions, Trump should too; maybe the notion of command responsibility is reflected in US law somewhere. I would think it would be. In any event, Trump should have been removed from office under article 25 for his gross incompetence, moral turpitude., and manifest unfitness for the office he holds. I wonder… I don’t think anyone seriously challenged Gerald Ford’s right to serve as President, even though he was a bit of a joke; Mike Pence, rot his soul, was duly elected as Veep, and I can’t imagine anyone challenging his legitimacy if Trump were thrown out or stood down.
After the shenanigans in the election of Dubya over Al Gore thanks to a packed Supreme Court’s decision over the election count in Florida, and after Trump, who lost by over 3 million votes, taking power by virtue of the electoral college rather than the popular vote, I’m sure there must be many Americans who believe that the US electoral system needs to be changed. From an outsider’s viewpoint too it seems odd that federal elections are operated by the individual states under differing conditions.
Lindsay Graham was right about Trump – before he mysteriously did a 180 to spend his metaphorical life with his metaphorical nose in the metaphorical president’s arse. The American people were right too about Trump when they voted, most of them, for the other candidate for President. But while that would be a necessary condition for the opposition party to try to overturn the result of the election, it’s not a sufficient one, and I’m sure people do realize that; also, they respect the Constitution, most of them.
However, it’s not simply or even mainly a partisan thing to want the man himself out, as the (ex-)Republicans among the never-Trumpers and in the Lincoln Project prove. The reason for wanting him out is that he’s not just incompetent and unfit, he’s a conman and a criminal – and worse, he’s a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. The embarrassment to the US and the damage he inflicts on its international standing is bad enough, actually, on its own to warrant getting rid of him. He should have been ousted by his own people and party under article 25. His misdeeds and malfeasances far exceed those of Nixon, who was told by his own party to go because he would most certainly been impeached in the Senate if the case had gone ahead.
I’m sorry I can’t give you the Washington Post on this, because it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the Guardian on the Senate report on the 2016 presidential campaign and Russian interference in it: https://archive.vn/UXowX. I would submit that if Barack Obama had been the President named in that report (or the Mueller report, or in the many and varied reports from the US intelligence agencies), the Republicans would have been all over him like flies on – uh – excrement, and what is more, the Democrats in both the House and the Senate would have been too. Obama would most certainly have been impeached for it, if his own people and party had not themselves already forced him to stand down. I don’t believe he would have been granted a pardon for it either. As it is, we can accept, can we not, that Trump really is a metaphorical piece of shit?
Ed….Thanks for that essay. There is only one thing…..involving Donald Trump…..that I would disagree strongly with, and a couple of other comments I would make, without necessarily implying strong dissent from your position. You have after all, already forgotten more than I will ever know about the United Nations Charter, the European Court of Justice, and international law generally. Nevertheless, I have strong opinions that are unencumbered by facts or any real knowledge of the subject.
Lots of things were happening about the time that Bush-Cheney took office in 2001, that involved three presidential administrations and various Acts and resolutions of Congress. George W. Bush had a score to settle from his daddy’s 1991 Gulf War, which had ended unsatisfactorily without an armistice and with Saddam Hussein remaining in a strong position of power, and Bill Clinton had signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. By 2oo1, Dick Cheney and the neocon war hawks of the Republican Party were newly in power, and bad things were going to happen. I was young and not paying much attention, but I’ve reviewed two Wikipedia articles which satisfy me that a series of Congressional acts and resolutions, along with the approval of the president, make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…….as disastrous as they turned out to be……..sufficiently “lawful” for any and all American purposes.
Still, war might have somehow been avoided if the 9/11 attack hadn’t happened in 2001. I don’t have the impression that the Brits quite understood the trauma that this event inflicted. I wonder what the British government would have done if the two most prominent buildings in central London had been reduced to rubble, and a plane had been deliberately crashed into Whitehall, and another plane was known to have targeted Buckingham Palace but accidentally failed in its mission. That was exactly what happened in the United States in New York and Washington.
What is legal for the USA is what is done in Washington pursuant to the political authority which flows from the American constitution. International law as construed in the big building on the East River up in New York City and by the International Court of justice in The Hague is nice to have on your side, but it’s not terribly relevant in Washington when overwhelming American interests are deemed to be at stake.
Anyway, that’s what I mean about an action being “legal” according to the laws and constitutions of nations. As for “international law” in the form of “crimes against peace”, “war crimes”, and “crimes against humanity”, that is, as far as I’m concerned, more honored in the breach than in the observance.
At the end of World War II, the four victorious powers were faced with the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, who should have been properly tried for their crimes by German courts. But there was no German government, and no surviving German judiciary, so the Allied powers decided to write up some new laws, and then stage show trials to convict and execute the Nazis for crimes that weren’t crimes when they “committed” them…..at least crimes not punishable outside of Germany. I think maybe the Americans were primarily pushing this “judicial” approach. I believe that Churchill’s more sensible proposal was to simply line the Nazi leaders up against a wall and shoot them. Summary executions would probably have been more in line with the traditions of warfare, and would have avoided the time and expanse of the show trials, which were in fact displays of international power politics all dressed up in judicial robes.
I understand that the brand new “crimes” ginned up at Nuremberg were merged into the framework of the United Nations, and became today’s much ballyhooed “war crimes” of “international law.” This is the disreputable history that leads otherwise sensible people to periodically demand that the President of the United States present himself at The Hague for “trial.”
And finally, my general disdain for posturing about “war crimes,” finally brings me to Tony Blair, whose name I mentioned. OK….YES…..Tony Blair’s government followed DubYa Bush into war (wars of self-defense in the view of Americans after 9/11 I would argue), and that surely was a bad idea. And if, as a political tactic, you want to denounce Blair in harsh terms…..that’s more than OK with me. However, I do know a REAL war crime and a REAL war criminal when I see them…….for example, Hitler and the Nazi genocide…..the very people the victorious Allied powers of WWII conjured up the term at Nuremberg to describe. I would insist that Nuremberg certainly DIDN’T have the likes of DubYa Bush and Tony Blair (and the Iraq War policy of his Labour government) in mind! I know demonization for political purposes when I see it, and I know a subliminal Hitler reference when I see it. If people want to so freely throw around the war crime rhetoric for their own political purposes, I feel that I’m being played, and that in so doing, it diminishes the evil acts of the real war criminals of Nuremberg. I get it that many people of a pacifist persuasion want to identify every war as a crime. Some I suppose would try to sort out wars of aggression from wars of national defense. But when I look at the mess of Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m not joining either parade. It was and is a complicated mess.
Now for Donald Trump:
“The reason for wanting him out is that he’s not just incompetent and unfit, he’s a conman and a criminal – and worse, he’s a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. The embarrassment to the US and the damage he inflicts on its international standing is bad enough, actually, on its own to warrant getting rid of him.”
Hmmmmm……No! I’m not persuaded. None of those things even come close to justify overturning the outcome of an American election.
Yes, Trump is evil and stupid and has been a disaster as president. He has seriously damaged international agreements and alliances and has insulted world leaders. He is a self-confessed sexual predator. He libels and slanders his political opponents. He might well be indicted for certain federal and state crimes if he were a private citizen.
But as regards his tenure in office, I don’t care! He was elected by the American people according to the provisions of the American constitution, and the outcome of an American election is the sacred voice of the people. It is not to be circumvented except in very special and severe circumstances.
Article II – Section 4, US Constitution:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Wiki:
The Constitution limits grounds of impeachment to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. The precise meaning of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined in the Constitution itself.
“High crimes and misdemeanors”, in the legal and common parlance of England in the 17th and 18th centuries, is corrupt activity by those who have special duties that are not shared with common persons.
Since impeachment effectively overturns the outcome of an election, I would personally demand the most stringent definition of the term “high crimes.” He hasn’t committed treason by any judicial understanding of the term, or bribery, and I’d define a high crime to be something like murdering the Governor of California.
Although the Republicans have trivialized impeachment by charging Bill Clinton with Oval Office sex, and the Democrats trivialized impeachment by charging Trump of making a phone call to Ukraine; political partisanship has saved the republic and the presidency by blocking both actions in the Senate.
Amendment XXV – Section 4:
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
“Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”
The 25th Amendment clearly implies a physical disability of the president. (Perhaps a serious mental illness might qualify if medically verified.) That some Democrats have ginned up the idea that the president’s cabinet……..acting in concert with BOTH houses of congress…….could carry out a palace coup against the will of the president, according to the provisions of the 25th Amendment, says a lot about how desperate and crazy some of them have become. And of course, how determined they are to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.
That Trump is evil and stupid and incompetent does not disqualify him from the office of the presidency, and is irrelevant to his tenure in that office. He’s in the White House until January 20, 2021, and the Democrats need to get over it.
The good news is that the election is only 14 days away, and Biden’s poll numbers in the swing states are holding steady. The bad news is that the poll numbers are uncomfortably close to those of Hillary Clinton on this date in 2016. She was in a strong position, and the Democrats thought they had it in the bag that year.
I’m not up to replying in full to your very interesting and well-argued response, Danny, but let me just pick out a couple of things.
One is the fallacious connection that was drawn between 9/11 and Iraq. There was no connection. Those of us who knew anything about the ideologies of Sadam Hussein and the Ba’ath party on the one hand and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda on the other knew that the very idea was absurd. Similarly, the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were faked: I was present when the oral reports of the leaders of the weapons inspection teams were delivered at UNHQ. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the counterpart was the so-called Dodgy Dossier – I’m sure Tris and many other Munguinites will remember it.
Second, though international law is frequently honoured more in the breach than the observance by tinpot despots, authoritarian and democrats-in-name-only around the world, that’s not an excuse for the countries which put the original principles by which they wanted the world to operate post-WWII, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, to deliberately break them. The legal provisions which States sign up to when they put their names on international treaties are supposed to be binding on them – and despite the resistance of certain States, or rather, their governments, to putting those principles into practice, the alternative is to return to the law of the jungle that gave us WWII in the first place. It’s not what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation fought for.
WWII taught Europeans what can happen when States start throwing their weight around without a moral compass. It terrifies many of us to see it happening again. It is a feature of both the Westminster regime and the American system of government that they have fucked-up ideas about the rules not applying to them, even when they have signed up to them. Narrow nationalism, might makes right, exceptionalism – they’re all extremely dangerous. We need America to be a beacon of hope, freedom and democracy – and it’s ceased to be that. To all our detriment.
Last point: the principle is aut iudicare, aut dedere. When charges are laid, they should be properly investigated, not simply laughed off. The alternative is impunity. None of the international judges I have known were wild-eyed radicals of any kind, by the way – just thought I’d put that in – I did work for a time in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in its Appeals Chamber in The Hague, which it shared with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
Ed….Tris….A nice political ad I think! Michael Steele is a Republican. He was Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Tris….A negative ad about Trump, but not as really nasty as some of the Lincoln Project ads are. Timed for the posting of mail-in ballots. As of today, two weeks before election day, more than 35 million people have already voted. Looks like more than half of the total ballots will already be voted before election day. On track to be the heaviest vote in a century.
I remember the news coverage on Ken Clarke at the time. He pissed off the Tories and had the whip withdrawn, but still got a Tory peerage in the Lords.
Ed…..Thanks for the reply. I’ve had my say, so just a couple of comments.
My comments were not intended to re-litigate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for that matter to seriously address what is and is not a war crime. I really only intended to explain what I meant by a legal (or lawful) war……from an American perspective. My paragraph about 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was only intended to illustrate the American mindset at the time. Of course Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but after hostilities began, and after the insurgence dragged on endlessly, even after after DubYa had proudly declared “Mission Accomplished,” Bush and Cheney played up the idea of a continuing “War on Terror” to great political effect. The result was that the two wars tended to merge in the American mind, and very few Americans had the slightest doubt that they were both fully justified, whatever that justification really happened to be. I did point out that the roots of the Iraq War went back to the elder Bush’s Gulf War of 1991 and Bill Clinton’s Iraq Liberation Act of 1998…..both long before 9/11. And yes of course, Bush and Cheney lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction. On the other hand, I seem to remember that Saddam Hussein was occasionally less than fully transparent and cooperative on the matter. I could be wrong on that……..maybe he was just being an arrogant son of a bitch for the fun of it. But he DID seem to work at getting on the bad side of the Americans. Maybe not the smartest thing in the world if you’re really trying to avoid war.
I don’t really know much about international law and the Hague Court, but I’m persuaded that they’re not something that the military brass in the Pentagon spend much time worrying about when planning military action somewhere in the world. Yes……the business of American presidents being ordered by posturing left wing European peace groups to appear at The Hague to be tried as war criminals IS a pet peeve of mine. I should just laugh off such silliness of course……..but from an American perspective Europeans DO seem to sometimes have an “attitude” about Americans……just sayin.’ 😉
And I’ll freely admit that my pet peevishness extended across the pond when all the war crime and war criminal rhetoric was being directed at Tony Blair for hooking up with American war policy. Maybe I’m to believe that the British really are in all that much of a tizzy about the technical definition of a war crime, but as I said, I’m pretty sure that most of the commotion was from people who want to identify ALL wars as crimes and all Prime Ministers who pursue a war policy as a war criminal…….ESPECIALLY if they join in an American war. 😉
Peevishness aside, this is not to say that I don’t have some fundamental reservations about the provenance of war crime criteria that arose from the Nuremberg tribunal. From the beginning at Nuremberg there was a conflict between a natural law based jurisprudential philosophy verses Austinian legal positivist propositions. In his opening address to the tribunal, chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, (Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court,) argued for the validity of the trials based on a concept of justice predicated upon an assertion of an absolute right and wrong. Conversely, U.S. federal judge, Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. in “Nuremberg: A Fair Trial?,” published in the April, 1946, issue of The Atlantic, argued that despite the immoral acts committed by the defendants, the trials did not cohere with established legal principles, such as the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. I believe that Wyzanski was on firm ground here regarding the ex post facto problem. By contrast Jackson advanced a tortured argument involving Germany’s participation in pre-World War II international conventions which “prescribed certain restraints as to the treatment of belligerents” and “certain immunities for civilian populations.” Jackson is clearly arguing natural law theory here, as it was classically advanced by St. Thomas Aquinas. Wyzanski’s arguments on the other hand comport with John Austin’s legal positivism which draws a distinction between morality and law. Austin distinguishes between “laws set by God to” humans and “laws set by men to men.” As regards the prohibition on waging wars of aggression for example, Wyzanski argues that, despite Jackson’s references to international declarations, “the body of growing custom to which reference is made is custom directed at sovereign states, not at individuals.” Per Wyzanksi, no international declaration explicitly forbade individuals from aiding in “waging an aggressive war,” and therefore, the charge against individuals aiding in waging an aggressive war is an ex post facto law.
So I would argue that war crimes laws as we know them today are at a minimum fatally flawed in their origins……both in terms of constitutional principles and fundamental legal theory. In short, they need a lot of work before we should go around accusing politicians of being war criminals……notwithstanding that such an accusation may be little more than a thinly disguised political tactic aimed at Hitleresque demonization.
😉
The Wyzanski article “Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent”…..The Atlantic, April, 1946:
“If in the end there is a generally accepted view that Nuremberg was an example of high politics masquerading as law, then the trial instead of promoting may retard the coming of the day of world law.”
Danny, you obviously have more of a historical legal background on this than I do!
I’m a bit feeble at the moment, unfortunately. Sorry about that, I can’t do your comments justice.
Ex post facto laws are a problem, of course, and I’m generally in agreement that retroactivity is not something to be encouraged. The Westminster regime has had a bad record on that recently; there’s at least one occasion I can think of when the Supreme Court found that the Government of the UK had been in gross violation of something or other, so They went back and changed the law retroactively to allow them to commit some crime or other. (Bit of editorializing there.)
On the whole Nuremberg thing – my simple conclusion is that for crimes such as genocide you cannot get away with arguing that it was legal at the time. I had no qualms of conscience about and no doubt of the legality of trying Slobodan Milošević and members of his regime and armed forces, or those behind the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
I do believe there’s a need to improve the behaviour of governments everywhere. The problem of major Powers behaving badly and in violation of their international treaty obligations is compounded by that bad example it sets. It causes them to lose the moral high ground, and makes any attempts to stop other countries following their example hypocritical. The phrase “moral hazard” is usually applied in the context of debt forgiveness, but there’s a much more fundamental hazard in trying to force others to abide by laws and principles which you habitually breach yourself.
Do you remember the outcry when India developed the bomb? I was doing the records of the nuclear disarmament commission before that happened – can’t remember offhand which particular name that one had – and with my own ears heard Mr. India say that that was precisely what India was going to do if there was no further progress on nuclear disarmament among the nuclear-weapon States, a message which I am sure had already been delivered to all the relevant countries individually. All outbursts of shock and horror from those States, and disavowals of responsibility (and complicity), when India actually did carry out a nuclear test were therefore disingenuous to say the least…
As for trying American (and any other President) in international courts for international crimes, we shouldn’t forget that the principle is aut iudicare, aut dedere – which is why I return to the point that if such charges are laid, they should be put before the relevant authorities of an independent judiciary to determine if there is any case to answer. In any case involving extradition, this is a necessary procedure. It allows the extraditing authorities to place conditions on the extradition; for example, most States will not extradite alleged offenders to the US without guarantees that they will not be subject to the death penalty, which is illegal in most States.
I’m rambling. I’d better close here. Have you voted already, Danny?
Some interesting information among those hits. There are roads that I have driven along hundreds of times without noticing the milestones. It seems the council is looking after them but, sadly, some have been vandalised.
Number 17 lochee high street w.m.low ( wullie low ) taken over by Tesco I think.
The photo is in the northerly direction
The church spire in the background is just beyond where Woolworths was , the clock hanging off the building further up the street on the same side as w.m.low is right above woollies .
Yeah, I think it was Tesco. I have a vague memory of them. I remember Woollies being there, of course. Before that it was a church.
The one of Methvin Street was called the kirk in the field because it had a few inches of grass at the front and back.
It was sold to a housing developer and mysteriously had a fire. I imagine no one would really want to live there, right opposite a noisy pub. I’m not of course suggesting the two things were in any way connected. No, Sir!
The Aberdeen branch of Wm. Low was the source of the typhoid epidemic in 1964. It wasn’t good publicity but I don’t remember it actually caused them to close.
Tins of corned beef from Argentina contaminated with cholera from contaminated process water was to blame, if I remember correctly. Still, the canning process should have killed any bacteria; things in cans are supposed to be sterile, or they will eventually inflate and even explode from the gases released by bacterial activity. Very nasty. Terrible pong too.
Thanks Ed. As for my “historical legal background,” I can only say that 15 minutes of Googling can work wonders. 😉
You asked if I’ve voted. As it happens, I got my mail-in ballot yesterday, and am marking it as we speak. I’ll post it tomorrow. It’s now 11 days to election day, and about 50 million people have already voted…..in person or by mail. It’s a record early vote so far. More than half of the total ballots….80 million of the probably 160 million total ballots that are expected……will already have been voted by election day. The 2020 vote may end up being the biggest voter turnout in a century. Here’s the Jackson County Missouri ballot to peruse (if it can be opened……..or if not clickable, maybe the link will open if copied and pasted into a browser.)
I see that in Missouri we have five presidential choices, including the Libertarian , Green, and Conservative party candidates. After careful consideration, I decided on the Biden-Harris Democratic ticket. I eliminated Trump-Pence from consideration pretty quickly, and Jorgensen, Hawkins, and Blankenship lacked the necessary name recognition for me….LOL.
Hacking and bringing down an entire American federal election would be a problem for an enemy, since there is no such thing as a federal election in the USA, and the fragmented system of 50 state elections would do Rube Goldberg proud. The state elections are carried out according to 50 different sets of election laws, administered by more than 3,000 counties……which in many states don’t even use the same kinds of voting systems……from hand marked, human counted paper ballots, to hand marked, computer read and tabulated paper ballots, to voting machines with electro-mechanical levers, to computer touch screens. Once upon a time in Florida (and Missouri and many other states,) we had computer punch cards which produced the now-famous “hanging chads.” Punch cards quickly fell out of fashion in 2000, in the Florida Bush-Gore election that would have done a third world dictatorship proud. 😉 And everyplace that uses mechanical or digital systems ALSO has paper ballots available to use in case the machines break down. State courts and judges are sitting into the evening of election day to handle legal petitions to sort things out in case something falls apart in some precinct of some county. And out of this system that spans six time zones from the Atlantic coast to the far Pacific, the news media (usually) figures out by early morning who has been elected President and what the makeup of the new House and Senate will be.
So back to my ballot! There’s no Senate race in Missouri this year, so the only other federal office to be voted is for Congressman (member of the House of Representatives) to be elected from our congressional House district. Then there’s the state offices….Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and Attorney General. And then the vote for State Senator and State Representative to the Senate and General Assembly of the Missouri state legislature. And then, here in Kansas City and its local jurisdiction, we have the Jackson COUNTY offices to be voted…..down to “Sheriff” of the county.
And then…….we have have a whole bunch of Missouri judges who, after being on the bench for a while, have to be approved by the voters to be retained. I see that we have a Missouri State Supreme Court Judge up for retention this year. On the judges……who I’ve usually never heard of……..I always vote for retention, unless they’ve been in the news after being discovered in a hotel room with a woman not their wife, AND/OR been caught accepting large cash bribes in brown paper envelopes. As for the political offices, I just always vote Democrat, even if I don’t actually know the names. I figure Democrats are a better class of people, and the graft and corruption will at least be kept to a minimum.
And that brings us to two State Constitutional Amendments and two “Questions” to be decided this year. I’ll have to go to our local newspaper website to figure out how I should vote on those. The second “Question” is interesting…..the very last item on the ballot.
Question No. 2 : “Shall Jackson County, Missouri, remove the statues of Andrew Jackson now located outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City and the Historic Truman Courthouse in Independence?”
What WILL I decide about those Andy Jackson statues? Seems like Andy deserves a statue or two in a Missouri county that was named after him. He was after all a hero in the War of 1812, fighting the British redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans. He went on to two terms in the White House and is the founder of the modern Democratic Party…..a branch of the old Jeffersonian Party, the Democratic-Republicans. BUT, Andy was an Indian fighter who killed more Native Americans than British redcoats. So his reputation has taken a terrible beating of late, particularly among the native tribal peoples, even though his face is still on the $20 bill. DECISIONS…..DECISIONS…….Maybe it’s time for Andy’s statues to go. 😉
Mitt Romney has already voted in Utah and says he didn’t vote for Trump. He didn’t say who he voted for though.
Trump and Biden had their second and last debate last night. Trump was on better behavior than he was in the first debate, and Biden managed to avoid any major gaffes. The polling still looks favorable for Biden-Harris. 😉
Do you get a week off work to do all that voting, Danny?
I’m a little embarrassed that, at the very most, we only have two votes to cast at any one time in Scotland’s elections.
One for our constituency member and one for what I suppose it a bit like the English house of dreary old folk, but considerable more democratic: List members, who, to an extent, balance the imbalances of First Past the Post in a multi-party system.
On one occasion, when there was, on the same day, a vote for the parliament in London, people were supposedly so confused by the multiplicity of pieces of paper (well, 3 actually) that the English authorities decided never to have another election where we had to vote again for two different parliaments.
Dim or what!
And I think that it’s cool to be able to vote for judges. It’s a pity you don’t get a say on the Supreme Court lot that your betters decide for life.
It’s good to know, though, that the multiplicity of systems in 50 states should fox clever old Vlad the Impaler and his hot-shot-bots.
Doubtless he’d like to see Trump returned as he’s such a walkover. Tell him his hair looks good and he’s yours!
Euch… I just read that back and… yeah…euch.
As for statues. Always a hard one.
I can understand that folk wouldn’t necessarily want to have to look daily at statues of people with chequered histories. I know we live in different times, but in my opinion it was never right to kill the indigenous population. Nor of course was it right for them to kill off the settlers. Killing people sucks.
But he is part of history. What you gonna call Jacksonville? Empty Plynthville? LOL
But yes, they have done it elsewhere. There are no statues to Hitler in Germany; no statues to Hoxha now in Albania, nor Stalin in the ex Soviet block. Well, not on the streets. They are moved to museums though. Because we should never forget them, in the (vain) hopes we will never have their likes again
Personally I’m not a big fan of statues. There are some in Dundee and I don’t have much of an idea who they are. But Old Victoria, who never visited and only allowed tributes from those and such as those in the city to be given to her when she graciously allowed her royal train to stop for 10 minutes in Dundee takes pride of place outside one museum.
Tris……We don’t even get a DAY off work to vote, much less a week. Election day is a regular work day, although some employers may make an allowance for a long lunch hour to vote.
There’s a lot to be said for simpler ballots If som.ething can be voted on, it’ll show up on an American ballot. But as you observe, the very complexity and multiplicity of the American system of voting, as administered by over 3,000 counties in 50 states, would surely defeat old Putin if he tried to take it all down in one grand computer hack. Even Americans have a hard time figuring it out.
I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve ever got to vote on whether or not to remove statues. Andy Jackson’s name is everywhere of course, and he has tons of statues around the country, so he wouldn’t miss a couple in Missouri. 😉 Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, shows him on a rearing horse. The White House Historical Association says: “A statue of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans occupies the center of Lafayette Square. Erected in 1853, it was the first bronze statue cast in the country and the first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs.”
While Trumpy was cowering in the White House bunker during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the protesters got ropes around old Andy and tried to pull him down. But the statue survived.
BTW…..Jackson was the last president who served in the revolution. He was a young teenager in George Washington’s continental army.
Missouri ballots are only average size as state ballots go. Politically active Californians are famous for not trusting the politicians in Sacramento to govern the state. So California ballots get loaded up with constitutional amendments, initiatives, referendums, propositions, etc, in addition to all the state, federal, and county offices. I think California judges are voted on, or otherwise confirmed, in some way too. So California ballots are sometimes almost the size of a newspaper. One of the reasons that California is famously slow in its election returns.
I couldn’t help thinking of the statue commemorating Peter the Great in Petersburg commissioned by Catherine the Great and erected in 1782. The Soviets didn’t take it down, fortunately, however much they loathed the Tsars.
Ed…….Very interesting! It appears that the White House Historical Association may have erred in saying that Jackson’s Lafayette Square statue was the “first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs.” Since the Jackson statue dates from 1853, that would make it much later than the Peter the Great statue of 1782. Maybe it’s a technicality about “balanced solely…on hind legs,” since the Peter statue seems to have some supporting structure at the base of the bronze structure at the rear.
Maybe the Missouri statues issue showed up as a ballot “Question” because the state legislature didn’t want to touch such a controversial issue. Jackson county was named after Jackson of course, but at the same time, we are in an era when removing offending statues……mostly the statues of Confederate Civil War generals in the south, is a big controversial issue. Jackson is detested by Native Americans for his role in the early Indian wars, his advocacy and approval of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, his refusal to obey and enforce Supreme Court decisions that favored the Cherokee Nation, and the forced removal of the Cherokee and other tribes from their ancestral lands in the South to “Indian Territory” in what became in 1907, the State of Oklahoma. The Indian removals of the 1830’s, mostly during the Jackson and Van Buren (who was Jackson’s VP) administrations , and later removals into the 1850’s is collectively called the “Trail of Tears.” Jackson had called for an American Indian Removal Act in his first State of the Union address in 1829. Thousands of Cherokee died of exposure, disease, and malnutrition on the forced overland march from Georgia to present day Oklahoma. (Oklahoma was red clay soil, poorly suited for agriculture, but on top of a pool of oil that rewarded the Cherokee handsomely in modern times. Today the tribe owns and operates profitable gambling casinos on tribal land.)
Jackson was the 7th president; he served 1829-1837, and lived long enough (1845) to be photographed.
This is the earliest known photograph of the Jackson statue in Lafayette Square dated c. 1855. It is taken from the White House side looking toward Saint John’s Episcopal Church on H Street. This is the church where Trump had his picture taken holding a Bible, after having the park cleared of protesters with tear gas.
PS: Andrew Jackson is viewed by some today to have been been a sociopath who should have been on meds (had they existed at the time.) Guess what president Trumpy most admires……Andrew Jackson of course. His portrait now looms over the Oval Office.
In a radio interview, Trump declared that Jackson had a big heart and was “REALLY angry” about the Civil War. (Which occurred 16 years after Jackson’s death.) Then he (Trump) quoted Jackson as SAYING, about the Civil War, “There’s no reason for this.” What an endless stream of gibberish comes out of his mouth! Here is the radio interview comment:
About Donald Trump as Civil War historian…….Stephen Colbert: “One rarely hears this: ‘In fairness to Andrew Jackson'” 😉
I like the descriptive nicknames they used to give kings and queens and rulers. Ivan the Terrible was actually a complimentary name as I understand it. He was powerful (AKA “Terrible”) in his opposition to the enemies of Russia. (Or maybe that’s just what they told him it meant. 😉 )
In fact, Danny, it is possible that, given that the language of the Russian Court was French, the word “Terrible” translated as
Formidable, Tremendous, Great.
It’s an odd word in French as it can mean “awful” or “fantastic”.
Funny lot, the French. They are foreign, you know!
Or maybe he was terrible in the English sense, as you say, to enemies of Russia.
Tris……Your suggestion about its meaning to the French speaking Russian aristocracy sounds likely. The important thing was probably that he not consider it a personal insult. 😉
Well… Danny, Tris, he’s known in Russian as Иван Грозный (Ivan Groznyy), and “groznyy” does mean terrifying, cruel, threatening, minatory, menacing, formidable (in the English sense, not the French) – shake-in-your-boots awful, not pleased amazement awesome.
MUNGUIN'S NEW REPUBLIC 
Pic 19 is Kirk Douglas, American actor.
Pic 11: I have an unlikely affection for the Isle of Man — Em and Pee spent their honeymoon there.
Before I was born, of course.
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I went once and rather liked it.
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Kirk Douglas – Issur Danielovich, born 1916 – I always associated with Burt Lancaster as two typical American action men in youth but came to appreciate them in later life for the range of roles they played. Saw Douglas in “Lonely Are the Brave” (in the Astoria, Lochee – what about a pic some Saturday ?) in 1962, thought it quite brilliant and with a powerful emotional kick – and read later that it was one of his favourite films.
Always torn between glad to know he lived so long, but sad to learn he had suffered a bad stroke some years ago.
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http://www.scottishcinemas.org.uk/scotland/dundee/astoria.html
There seem to be no other photographs on line, Cairnallochy. My granny lived in Lochee and I think they went there and to the Rialto, which was farther up the road. Apparently, my grandad, who died before I was born, loved the cinema…incidentally, from a stroke.
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Pic 6 should be easy to locate.
Initially, I thought it was the one you put up last week, but I see it is different.
I remember looking out for milestones when I was a bairn.
A trip to the beach meant St. Andrews.
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Yes. Having seen last week’s milestone, Martin sent me his rather cleaner example. I’ve never seen them anywhere else.
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Pic 1 – Interesting to see this published by John Murray – ahead of his time in publishing so many great works. I stand in awe. And Cassandra – so appropriate today.
Pic 10 – Cilla Black (orig. Priscilla White) before the nose job and BBC ‘superstar’ status – gone but not forgotten.
Pic 14 – Watt Bros. general store, Glesca. Gone but not forgotten.
Pic 16 – A wummin seeing if she’s got enough tae buy the Beezer annual for a wean’s Christmas present. Tidings of comfort and joy…an a that.
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Apparently, Cilla was a rather unpleasant woman in real life.
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She was a Thatcher fan
“stating in 1993 that Thatcher had “put the ‘great’ back into Great Britain” during her 11 years as prime minister from 1979 until 1990—despite the widespread unpopularity of Thatcher and her government in Black’s native Liverpool.”
Also
” Black was one of 200 public figures who were signatories to a letter to The Guardian expressing their hope that Scotland would vote to remain part of the United Kingdom”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cilla_Black
So no, I’m not keen on Black or indeed White!
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Interesting.
I read a piece by a journalist who had been a fan and who had been absolutely overwhelmed when her boss asked her to do an interview with Black in the 2000s.
She (Black) arrived REALLY late, and when the journalist gave her a bottle of champage she looked at it disdainfully and left it on the table at the end of the interview.
She didn’t really answer the journalist’s questions, just ranted on, name dropping all over the place about big stars she’s worked with.
The journalist went into the interview worshipping her and left thinking what a pompous cow she was.
I remember hearing too that she was a huge fan of Thatcher. And I believe she made no effort to hide it on stage. I wonder how many fans THAT lost her.
As for the 200 people who signed a “don’t leave” letter, as I recall a fair few of them didn’t even live in the UK and so weren’t in the least affected by the outcome.
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So right about John Murray, Andi. The three fat volumes – each of more than 1,000 densely type-set pages – were published in 1849? How much of a market could there have been? I picked them at a flea market in South Africa many years ago. Checking the flyleaf, I see the price was 40 rand. At current exchange rates, that’s about two quid. Even at rates 30 years ago that would have been eight quid at worst.
Wonder who’d owned it over the years? Only one indecipherable name on the flyleaf dated 1953. At least it gives Ed chapter and verse on the chequered Cassandra, as he put it the other day.
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It’s Edyukayshunal John. I’ve handled a copy that was printed in 1880, so it was worth a reprint or two.
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At first glance I though #16 wiz the queen. But then I saw the purse…
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LOL.
I’m sure she never pays for anything.
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I’m guessing but is No. 16 a stall at the Barras?
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You’re right.
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Watt Bros…either Sauchiehall Street/Hope Street Glasgow or in the Czech city of Brno.
https://www.lostglasgow.scot/posts/watts-all-this-about-406
If you do go to the link…don’t forget to click on the pictures to enlarge them to get an idea of the interior of the building ( the last picture in the row shows a Czeck street sign outside in Sauchiehall Street)
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It was Sauchiehall Street. I’ll look at the link tomorrow when I’m on the PC. Thanks!
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Pardon me for being O/T I’ll just leave this here with no comment.
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In an election season, phony O/T news stories generated by the American right wing media machine as an “October Surprise” for the purpose of character assassination must be commented on.
Washington Post: “Trump touted this shiny new toy at his Iowa rally on Wednesday night. He referenced the now-widely discussed New York Post story, which “reports” that Hunter Biden received emails from a Ukrainian executive that supposedly show he arranged access to his father, Joe Biden.”
“Joe Biden has been blatantly lying about his involvement in his son’s corrupt business dealings,” Trump shouted, claiming those emails are a “smoking gun.”
Of course the right wing crazies of Iowa in their bright red MAGA caps went wild. But the “story” has hardly caused a blip in the mainstream media campaign coverage. It’s just another Trump swipe at the Biden family that has Rudy Giuliani’s and Steve Bannon’s fingerprints all over it. So far, Biden family character assassination has only earned Trumpy an impeachment trial. (Steve Bannon, now under federal indictment for fraud, started boasting about having Hunter Biden’s hard drive weeks ago.)
Washington Post: “Trump’s fake new Biden scandal has a deeper purpose. Bannon revealed it” :
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/15/trumps-fake-new-biden-scandal-has-deeper-purpose-bannon-revealed-it/
Vanity Fair: “EVERYTHING ABOUT HOW THE HUNTER BIDEN-NEW YORK POST STORY CAME TOGETHER REEKS………The supposed “smoking gun” that wasn’t manages to involve Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon, and suspected Russian agents. ”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/10/hunter-biden-new-york-post-story-reeks
Wiki: “The [New York] Post has been criticized since the beginning of Murdoch’s ownership for sensationalism, blatant advocacy, and conservative bias. In 1980, the Columbia Journalism Review stated ‘New York Post is no longer merely a journalistic problem. It is a social problem—a force for evil.'”
The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton…..the guy whose picture is on the $10 bill…….and was in one of the boats with George Washington and his rebel army that crossed the Delaware River to attack the British at Trenton in 1776. Sadly, Rupert Murdoch turned Alex’s paper into tabloid trash.
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I guess you could say the Murdoch did something similar with “The Times” in London.
And the Mad Barclay Brothers did the same with “The Daily Telegraph”, presumably to increase sales and put across their political views.
I’ve always thought it was a pity to lose good objective journalism to profit making.
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Tris…..Yes it is! I think that Rupert may have pursued the NY Times and the Washington Post at one time or another, but ended up buying the Wall Street Journal. The Journal (established 1889) has a reputation for fine news pages and a right wing business-oriented editorial page. It seems to have avoided being trashed by Murdoch. The Times (1851) is publicly traded, but has been controlled by the same family for five generations. The Washington Post (1877) was controlled by the Graham family for many years, but sold out to Jeff Bezos (the Amazon billionaire) in 2013. Bezos has apparently taken a mostly hands off policy toward the Post.
Fun facts…….the Old Gray Lady (Times) fought off color photography until 1997 when it ran its first color photograph. On September 14, 1987, the Times printed the heaviest ever newspaper, at over 12 pounds (5.4 kg) and 1,612 pages.
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I remember that heavyweight edition of the NYT, Danny, because I got it… I was living in Greenwich Village at the time, and had a subscription. Lord knows how many trees were felled on my behalf. A newspaper that heavy is sheer insanity.
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Ed…….that’s amazing! I’m glad to have that confirmed. I quoted the comment from Wiki, and then wondered if it could really be true. A publication of 1612 pages is after all a huge book. It’s mentioned in this story in the Washington post about a 5.4 pound, 591 page Times edition in 2015.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2015/09/14/new-york-times-sends-out-5-4-lb-sunday-newspapers/
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Couldn’t get past the paywall, Danny, but I have no reason to disbelieve you! At least half of every edition got thrown out unread – straight down the garbage chute, no recycling then – and it was actually rather difficult to find the continuation of stories because you’d get a paragraph on the front page and then have to search through occasionally incorrect page references to see the rest…
And no funnies. What a swiz!
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Ed…..I always hate to start reading the front page and then go searching for the continuation. I dealt with the Times paywall for a while, (1o free articles a month I think) and then a friend of mine who subscribes to the print edition told me I could piggy back on his subscription for free access to the digital edition. (Times now allows one additional digital access for each print subscriber.) Convenient for access to the archives and such things.
I’d forgotten that the Times never had the funnies. The Sunday Times crossword is a big deal for crossword puzzle enthusiasts I think.
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Aye, Ed. You’re better off with Munguin’s Republic… or so he says anyway!
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The Saturday Telegraph must have come close in recent years , although slimmed down more recently. Was strolling around village in middle England on a Sat morning some years ago as a paper boy struggled past with bulging bag on his bike. Gasped “bloody Telegraph” as he laboured past me.
Won money on DT crossword a few years ago and man phoned some time later to invite us to subscribe. Wife said we subscribe to the National and he said “what’s that then?”. 😉
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Read the further detail – er, no ! – but a delivery round for a paper boy in the shires must have come to hundreds of pages.
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Still, think of the muscles it gave him for when he started to date!
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Ha ha. I’ve not bought a paper for a long time, but i vague memories of Sunday newspapers that were massive and most of them went straight in the bin.
LOL. The Daily Telegraph hadn’t heard of the National…well, I never. 🙂
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Cairnallochy……The digital edition of the Telegraph has a stricter paywall than the Guardian. I can get articles in the Guardian by just registering my email address, but for most articles I Google in the Telegraph, they say they want me to send them money for a digital subscription. 😉
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I think papers like the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times have to be really careful not to allow political bias get in the way of their reporting.
Far too much is at stake. Far too many rich/important people could lose money if badly advised by these papers.
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Tris……The Financial Times is widely cited here by various news media. I had an English/English Literature/Journalism professor who had contempt for most American print media. For periodicals, she said that only Harpers and the Atlantic were quality publications of their ilk, and then among newspapers, she had good words for the Times, the Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Interestingly, she said that the Christian Science Monitor was a fine paper on a par with the Times, etc. I think that the Monitor no longer publishes a print edition, but may still have a digital edition.
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So if you don’t like Trump is it compulsory to like creepy Joe with his predilection for fondling wee girls and his hilariously corrupt son Hunter?
I just keep it simple – they’re all corrupt arseholes.
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I don’t like Biden either. He was a poor choice.
I have never heard, though, of his being creepy with wee girls. I know he had to apologise to an older woman about his “hands on” approach.
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Youtube have pulled most of it but put in “creepy joe biden”.
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The tech giants are running foul of S230 by censoring what they consider to be “fake news”. By censoring they can no longer claim to be a “conduit” and a facilitator of free speech, they are actively removing anything they dont like. So they supress Biden, Hillary and Obama stories but facilitate anti Trump rhetoric. There is also a newspaper, not sure but may have been NYTimes, who published Trumps tax returns even though that is illegal but refuse to run negative stories about Biden, Clinton or Obama.
I can see the tech giants being shut down, split up, taken over by the US Government., don’t think any penalties can be levelled at a newspaper for not publishing a story, however they can be fined for illegally publishing someones tax returns, and if they turn out to be fake returns, not that I know, then that would exacerbate the penalties.
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Tris…….In the states, the right wing radicals (which now define Trump’s Republican party) have effectively destroyed the norms of civil discourse essential for the functioning of a democratic society. So it’s hard to know when and where to try to answer the endless barrage of charges and counter-charges….lies and innuendo….that occur during a political campaign. Particularly one that has crossed the Atlantic and is being commented on in MNR.
So for me, a concrete charge involving specifics of the now-famous Hunter Biden in Ukraine right wing conspiracy theory…….(which led to a presidential impeachment)……can be and should be addressed and answered. I did reply to that, citing and providing links to mainstream media. On the other hand, crap like Biden fondling little girls is simply hateful character assassination that has now become so familiar, and I’d be lending it credibility if I dignified it with an answer. Nevertheless, look at where such casual mud slinging at a political opponent has led us. I’m sure you’re aware that Trump has refused to unequivocally denounce QAnon, a right wing hate group of conspiracy theorists that claims to be fighting for the safety of children from satanic Democratic pedophiles.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/20/qanon-conspiracy-child-abuse-truth-trump
It’s not really that far from casual charges that your political enemies are molesting children, to the fevered insanity of QAnon. On another level, I lost a good friend recently (at least for this election cycle) when I simply got tired of his incessant, tiresome bitching about how all politicians are crooks and Washington is a cesspit of corruption and depravity. Opposition to government itself is a cornerstone of American right wing politics of course, and a promise to “drain the Washington swamp” is some of the craziness that got a two bit con-artist like Trump elected president in the first place. Trump and his administration will almost surely soon be consigned to the trash heap of history, but the craziness of the Trump cult of voters will remain with us. Whether democratic politics in the USA will survive in any recognizable form in the longer term is still an open question I think.
Over the years, right wing politics in its bizarre American incarnation at least, has seldom showed up on MR and MNR. So when Trumpism and Covid-denial shows up as it has now, I generally bite my tongue……well, I bite my typing finger……and do not respond. Same when I read about Biden being a child molester and all politicians being crooks. My typing finger is however in a terrible state from the teeth marks. 😉
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I kinda feel the same way. Danny.
The thing to do is to get yourself something else (less personally damaging) to bite on.
Munguin lets it float over his head, but that of course, could be the Moet!
I’m a bit scared for the world right now. In the three important countries, Xi has become a “president for life”; it appears that any opposition to Putin is poisoned, and Trump has already indicated, in what some people herald as the greatest democracy on Earth, that he won’t go peacefully, if he loses an election (rather like one of those African president who cling on to office and then flee to somewhere else when they are ousted). The Supreme Court appointment of a very young judge for life… maybe 50 years… only days before an election is an affront to democracy by anyone’s standards and more typical of aforementioned dictator that an American president.
Of course that’s not all that is frightening. The warming of the planet for whatever reasons, is changing our world, and the virus that has changed all our lives in the past year is going nowhere.
In the relatively unimportant (in world terms) UK, the London government has decided that in order to do what IT wants to do with Britain, whatever the hell that is, it will break ties with its closest partners and allow god knows what to descend upon us …and blame the other side for not giving them what they want.
To lighten the mood, this is hilarious, but not really that far from the truth.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1304778986782961669.html
Everywhere, it seems, chaos reigns. And the only REAL leaders are either too small to be effective or, in the case of Germany, on the verge of retirement.
As far as accusations of sexual impropriety are concerned., I think people need to be very careful who they accuse of what.
It’s impossible not to be aware of some of these things but people, news outlets and even worldwide media empires such as that of Munguin may be sued for repeating unproven allegations.
Which is why I’d appreciate guardedness in any such comments when they have to be made, along with the word “allegedly” as appropriate.
Munguin says you should probably be like him and employ someone to do your typing for you. It saves so much trouble.
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Tris……….The thread about the trade deal negotiation is really very funny. The UK’s idea of compromise is right up there with the American right wing Trumpies.
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He’s hilarious, Danny. I thought it might cheer you. What a set of loonies… and yet, it’s still all the EU’s fault. Apparently they are far too stupid and foreign to see that Dom always gets his way… as he should, because he’s British.
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That was really very clever Tris! More and more, the Brexit people remind me of Trump. Not just that xenophobic right wing nationalism showed up almost simultaneously in the UK and the USA, but that the proponents of both will lie to your face in a way that contradicts what you see with your own eyes and/or can deduce with a modicum of critical intelligence. Somewhere I recall a politician….maybe it was a Brexit referendum slogan……to the effect that when the UK withdraws from the EU, then the UK will hold all the bargaining cards. One small country withdraws from a large multi-national economic union, and this gives the small country economic bargaining power??? So day is night and up is down because a politician says so? Trump does it every day of course.
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I think the particularly unpleasant Gove said that… but there were others that same the same sort of stuff.
It was utterly delusional…as was their ignoring of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. Take back control of the borders, but leave the land border open? EH????
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ekna9XBXgAQajqz?format=jpg&name=360×360
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https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ekna9InW0AA4i7K?format=jpg&name=360×360
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It’s come to a pretty pass when a pathetic creature like Biden is the only hope!
He appears to be exhibiting symptoms of dementia, hardly knowing where he is, or having difficulty remembering his lines, it’s bordering on pensioner abuse!
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It never much surprises me when a British party can’t find any clever people to lead them.
Look at the three British parties and you are left open mouthed at some, really most of, their leadership choices.
But would you not have though that in the much larger USA and only two paries, they might have found two people better than Trump and Biden, or Trump and Clinton.
But looking back at the massive field of candidates for the Democrats, the best they could do was choose him. I’m not being ageist, but I seriously think that he’s, at 78 too old to be starting a four year term at what is a tough job (if you are going to do it well).
There were better people in the field.
And why oh why did a proper Republican not challenge Trump?
You’d have thought that a massive party
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Mmm. Interesting perspective Danny. You appear to have been practicing the art of deflection.
However why is the FBI’s top kiddy porn investigator, Joshua Wilson, issuing a subpoene for Hunter Biden’s laptop.
https://mobile.twitter.com/atrupar/status/1317849887438966784
Look a squirrel nothing to see here.
Only a few more links to establish and then
“Red shoes meets Pied piper”
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Kangaroo, it’s Russian disinformation.
https://archive.vn/DDQyX
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Agree, and his son has an “underage predeliction”, like father like son.
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Allegedly!
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Here take a shot at Rudy, seems genuine to me. If I was a US citizen I would be concerned as this transcends politics.
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In the Netherlands there is NO Pandemic, it’s just a flu! WHO knew, eh, who knew?
2min 20s video for those WHO have a poor attention span
https://mobile.twitter.com/EatlovePray11/status/1316778274983419904
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Here’s short report dated yesterday (16 October) from the coronavirus blog in the Dutch newspaper de Krant, Kangaroo: https://archive.vn/KUDDe. “De Krant” means “The Newspaper” in Dutch, not that that’s a criticism. Google translate works OK on the text. They seem to be seeing the same sort of surge starting that we are here in Scotland.
I had a look for Dr. Elke de Klerk but couldn’t find one in The Netherlands, which is not to say she doesn’t exist; the only mentions I’ve found are to do with the conspiracy group you mentioned. There is one over the border, though, in Belgium.
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“conspiracy group I mentioned”. I have got to laugh at the use of adjectives, adverbs and other inuendo to try and debunk the truth, when the real conspiracy is staring you in the face, but to quote Mark Twain ” it is easier to deceive someone than it is to convince them they have been deceived”. This is the problem, refusal to believe the real evidence as it would mean admitting that what one perceived to be true, is a lie, I get that, especially as the scale of the deceit is enormous.
I have referenced several sources includiing the UK Gov. (I wouldn’t trust them with my stuffed 🐧) and other articles which have concluded that the coronavirus is just the flu/cold and that the pcr test is giving massive false positives. Even the president of Tanzania checked it by swabbing a papya, a goat and a pigeon and all came back positive.
The WHO is now saying that lockdowns are not the answer. Probably because it gave out false information at the start.
I guess despite all efforts it is going to take an enormous information shock to change peoples perception, that is probably why they are dripfeeding the public with the real news despite the continued censorship by the main stream media and tech giants. Believe me it will be an enormous shock, so horrendous there will be widespread psychological issues in society because of it. By me providing information, with references, I am hoping that my friends on this blog will avoid that fate. Alas they seem to be stuck 🙊🙉🙈
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Just watched the begining of a longer version of that snippet and you’re correct she is “from the Netherlands and also has a practice in Belgium as a GP”. Quote from her.
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Number 6 is in Kilconquhar – or Kineuchar as we call it locally. Only milepost I know that tells you where you are by using a zero. Anyone seen another one?
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I cam across one near Kingsbarns and another near Tayport.
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There’s another near Guardbridge on the road up to Strathkinnes but no zero. Sadly I’ve lost the photo I took of it but it’s visible on Google Streetview.
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I hadn’t lost it.
Now. I get Colinsbugh, Kilconquhar and Elie on one side. Guardbridge and Leuchars on the other. But where is New Ht?
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Is it not New pt meaning Newport on Tay?
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Well done, Gus.
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Yes, I think you are right, Gus. I read the ‘p’ and as ‘h’. I wonder if there is a computer font to match these stones.
It strikes me that somebody must be looking after them because they look recently whitewashed and the lettering touched up.
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Martin… over to you!!!
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No, never, East Neuker. Not a stone nor the modern day equivalent.
Anyone know if these milestones are anywhere else in Scotland other than NE Fife?
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I have been told that the cast iron caps of the milestones were collected in at the beginning of WW2 in case the might help an invading army. They were stored, and after the war the then Fife County Council, which was based in Cupar, had them restored and replaced. Fife Council still looks after them. Perhaps there were more elsewhere that were destroyed. The unique thing about the Kilconquhar one is the zero.
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Interesting and of course, sensible.
I remember reading that on the south coast of England they removed all road signs for the same reason.
I’m told that there used to be stones around Angus, but maybe they were never replaced after the war.
They are all but useless if you are in a car. Unfortunately !
I love the zero!
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O/t
William Shatner unilaterally stops trade with UK from 1st January. Looks like Brexit will boldly take us where we’ve not gone before!
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Yea, I read about that.
It appears that the the online shop is complaining that they have to pay £1000 to the Uk government to register with them and get necessary paperwork to export to the UK. They are further annoyed that the UK Government expect them to either add VAT to the price or absorb it. Either way they have to collect the VAT and send it to the UK tax man, the Revenue and Excise.
I don’t know the detail…don’t know whether it’s the reality of exporting to the UK post no deal brexit, or whether it’s some scare story.
It surely can’t be true that the UK Government are expecting overseas traders to file a VAT return with the Revenue and Excise and send on the money! I see an opportunity here for a certain amount of non-compliance, not to mention difficulties with enforcement and recovery in foreign jurisdictions .
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Particularly, Jake, as no one will have thought of that.
However, now that it has been brought to their attention, through the good offices of yourself and this august and widely read publication, they will doubtless take steps to find some friend of Liz Truss who will set up a company with capital of £3, 25, no staff, no premises and the articles of association of a chip shop, to deal with it in their usual efficient manner.
Sorted!
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I’m sure Mr Spock would have thought the whole exercise to be illogical!
Still…. Passeports Bleus, fabriqué en Pologne par une entreprise française!
Rule Britannia.
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PP….sorry to hear that. Perhaps a black market in Star Trek merchandise will develop which can take care of your needs. 😉
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I so wanted a ferengi head-dress thingy to wear on the front of my face as a mask.
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11 The Isle of Man was used to intern “aliens” during WW2.
Here is a documentary about it.
15 _ Shocking news -rationed!
17 – Lochee High Street.
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No.15 marcia. Prepare to apply for your 2021 ration book.
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I may be part of a smuggling group from January.
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Shhhhh…. Munguin says can you get him some After Eights. He’s partial to them and is understandably incandescent that Dom is going deprive him of them.
Watch out for Hard Munguin Rain, Dom!
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Would you be smuggling Ferengi headwear perchance?
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Oh dear…
Imagine a ration book prepared by a Cumming government.
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Imagine chocolate being rationed!
Yep, Lochee it was.
Thanks for the IOM documentary. I’ll watch it tonight.
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Thought 17 might be Lochee but it has changed so much with the construction of the “bypass” that I struggle to recognise specifics or even the direction in which the photographer is facing. Not up for much travelling at moment – or indeed in future – but hope to get back for a look.
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It’s changed beyond recognition.
It’s, to be honest, a bit of a dump now.
I hope things get better and you get back for a visit.
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It was a real treat to see the advert for the Austin Healy there. It reminds me of my days in Kirkintilloch seeing Moira Anderson speeding around town in one that she got from the company as part of a deal for doing musical adverts for them. One day she was going for a spin through Lennoxtown and up to Strathblane when she hit a pheasant which almost smashed the windscreen. She laughed about it afterwards but my neighbour told me she was quite shaken by the incident and couldn’t face eating venison again even though she knew that that particular meat comes from deer. The whole idea of eating game repelled here ever since. Even today when dining out in the most exclusive restaurants in the Isle of Man, she will politely refuse any game dish on a tasting menu. The picture above of Douglas on the Isle of Man includes the site of one of her favourite establishments where she and her husband dine on a regular basis. I am not permitted to name it, because la belle chanteuse does not wish to be mobbed by admirers while dining there, often enjoying a repast of crab consommé followed by rabbit stew.
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Brilliant!!!!
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Ahh! No. 8 is from my home patch.
XS4764 is a six-wheeled Albion Valkyrie PR145 with Cowieson bodywork.
New to Young’s of Paisley in July 1938 it was acquired by Strachan’s of Ballater in April 1945, becoming no. 18 in their fleet. (there was sister vehicle XS4404 also acquired from Young’s).
Looking rather nondescript in this image (these vehicles were hammered during the war years when both vehicle and road maintenance was minimal) it was withdrawn from service in January 1953.
Sadly I can’t recall the drivers name. 😀
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Bet you’d have no problem remembering the conductress…
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LOL, good one, John!
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Maggie Blair. Obviously.
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😉
Sadly not, before my time, our lives overlapped by barely a year & anorak tendencies yet to develop..
However on the last ever Strachan’s run from Braemar to Aberdeen, driver & conductor were Bill Grant and Maggie Brown.
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For anyone else sad enough to be interested there’s a lovely video produced by the Deeside local history group which name-checks a number of drivers and conductors any number of which MAY have manned (womanned?) said vehicle!
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Nothing sad about having an interest, Roddy. What’s sad is when someone doesn’t have an interest!
Nice video. I see they went to Balmoral Castle, I guess in case the royals needed a bus?
That snow in January 1960 was a bit fierce though.
The music was agreeable too!
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Thanks for the video, Roddy. It reminded me of the mid 1950’s when we used to stay in an old bus on a site that belonged to the Coilacreich Inn. It had been converted as accommodation and was known as ‘Cookie’s bus’. I noticed in the video a document signed by George Cook as PSV licence holder. Could there be a link? Could it have been an old Strachan’s vehicle?
I’ll look through the family photos to see if the bus is in there.
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It’s great the way AOY brings back memories for people.
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Funnily enough when I was a lad back in the late ’50s we also used to holiday near Ballater – Glenmuick – but never staying in anything as exotic as a bus. I wish!
However I do remember cycling up the Braemar road near Coilacreich (never having the luxury of a car, we cycled everywhere) and seeing, low down among the trees on the left hand side, what appeared to be several old buses.
I never had the opportunity of a closer look but it would be perfectly possible that they would have been retired Strachan’s vehicles.
I have a fleet list of all vehicles ever operated by Strachan’s, also a little publication of Ballater memories by local man Ian Cameron. The Albion picture featured today is actually in my personal Strachan’s ‘library’ so didn’t require much detective work!!!
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Sounds like good holidays, Roddy.
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🙂 🙂 🙂
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Well… I mean… why does Munguin pay you to be his bus correspondent if you can’t even remember a simple thing like that. Look sharp my boy or it’s the jotters!
Seriously, amazing detail.
One is impressed!!!
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On the subject of pay….. I am in receipt of one bouncing Czech.
bouncey-bounce-bounce.
Not what one was led to expect!
If this link works (?), this should show the sister vehicle in better days in original livery. (given the location, probably brand new & awaiting delivery)
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/FKlsZjSCZQMDMHVwdZJ7mvMGdkYAO8Zx8OxDi7peOruGDNuUpPGMs9QxmRHN83zZoKT0RyP2kc9Z-mCeME80cESWcsH4DyJpcD-bZaenwb99Egnxcc75F6NDg3fO1uGuJqLsZYtH1xEfc9WGxVR3JkFQas99A9mAP6s6STBO0g
They built some impressive machines just before the war.
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You’re not supposed to bounce on the Czech, nor swing on the Poles… nor, for that matter, put Icelanders in your G+T.
Struth, says Munguin, you can’t get the staff these days!
The photoworks perfectly and it’s a very handsome bus.
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The driver was called Ferdinand du Maurier and he was from Torphins. He was a great fan of Moira Anderson and went to her concerts when she was touring with Ozzy Osbourne and Deathsnake.
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can I have some of what you’re on?
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You might want to think twice about that, Roddy.
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I guess, I mean the world is surreal enough without need of artificial stimulous.
I mean BoJo for PM? really??? – makes Beauregard almost seem plausible.
( almost 🙂 )
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Maybe HE’LL be the next PM?
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Who topped the bill?
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Sex Pistols.
Moira’s ‘punk’ era.
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🙂
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LOL.
I grew up in sunny, romantic, palm-fringed Lenzie – I don’t think I knew at the time that Moira Anderson lived locally.
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The moths have been at my vast erudition, you see.
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You never know with Moira Anderson. She pops up everywhere!
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Sorry I’m going o/t again but many of you will be interested – National has a wee interview with Wee Ginger Dug’s human.
“Then just to prove he is a fighter with humour and words, Paul revealed: “My left leg’s so useless I’ve decided to call it Michael Gove. It’s completely insensible, it doesn’t do what I tell it and it’s getting in the way of my independence.
“The worst symptom I have just now is constant nausea, but then you’d be f***ing sick if you were in bed with Michael Gove.”
https://www.thenational.scot/news/18801413.wee-ginger-dug-writer-paul-kavanagh-health-hospital/
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LOL… very funny.
Get well soon, Paul.
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As that’s Trumpolini up there, this isn’t going to be OT after all.
Spotted just now, this: “During his campaign rally in Georgia Friday night, President Donald J. Trump threatened to “leave the country” if he should lose the 2020 presidential election to his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.”
Oh dear, what a tragedy that would be (not)!
Actually, I think it’s actually pretty likely that he will leave the US before the handover in January, because he knows he’s going to be in huge legal trouble if he stays, even if he pardons himself for all his federal crimes or resigns and gets Pence to do it. NY state are investigating his tax records back to however long they can go back to, and it’s very obvious that he’s guilty as sin for massive tax evasion, fraud and false declarations.
Maybe he’ll make some cozy arrangement with one of the disgusting dictators he’s been cozying up to… not North Korea, I wouldn’t think, but there’s a number of places he could go where the strongman / strongmen in charge would shield him from any attempt to extradite him even if they have an extradition treaty in place.
It would find it vaguely amusing if he were to choose somewhere he put on his list of Muslim ban countries.
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Putin will put him up, maybe.
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Interesting news Ed! I’ve more or less tuned out the presidential campaign by now, so Trump says things at his freak show rallies that I don’t hear about. I do wonder if, as a private citizen, he actually would go to prison…..on New York state charges, even he does self-pardon for federal crimes. Hard for me to believe that a billionaire former president would ever get sent to prison. On the other hand, he is detested in New York, and Democratic New York governor Andrew Cuomo would certainly not pardon him.
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I wonder if you can get orange make up in a New York jail…
Seriously, could a president actually pardon himself for Federal crime?
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It’s more likely that he’ll step down five minutes before the appointed time and get the newly elevated Veep to do the pardoning for him, Tris, though he may have persuaded himself that he has the right to do anything he damn well pleases, rather like the Westminster regime and Parliament when they decide they’ve inherited the divine right of kings.
One of the attractions of the idea of having Pence do the pardoning is that they would go down in history with Pence as the President with the shortest time served in office, even shorter than the 31 days served by the ninth President, William Henry Harrison, who caught a cold which turned into pneumonia and killed him. I wonder: did they have coronavirus back in 1841? Anyway, the idea must surely appeal to the President’s sense of showmanship.
I hope they do make orange makeup available to him in prison. That way his face would at least match his jumpsuit.
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LOL…
Yeah. Imagine that Pensce did pardon him and then had to live with the doubt that God would see it as a reasonable thing for him to have done, what with Trump being a lair and a cheat and serial philanderer, and at one point saying that he was the second coming…
Imagine Pence living out his days worrying that hellfire was waiting him and getting closer by the day.
Or maybe Pence doesn’t believe a word of that and just mouths it to buy votes from the south.
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Pence isn’t just a whited sepulchre, he’s a white-haired whited sepulchre. And a hypocrite.
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Ed….That Mike Pence trick might work, although it would surely be challenged in the courts. The original constitution didn’t really say very much about Vice Presidential succession, so the precedents set with the death of William Henry Harrison and the succession of his VP John Tyler, became the de facto law of the land by precedence. It was immediately clear that there would be no sitting Vice President until the next election…….which as it turned out was effectively Harrison’s entire term…..minus 31 days. Although at some point there was a formal line of succession after the VP, the problem of not having a sitting VP after he moves up to the presidency was not fixed until the 25th amendment in 1967.
And then people realized a problem with THAT. The 25th amendment specifies that the sitting president appoint a VP when a vacancy occurs……subject to Congressional ratification. So when Richard Nixon’s first VP Spiro Agnew resigned and pleaded no contest to taking cash bribes in brown envelopes while governor of Maryland, Nixon got to appoint a new VP. The issue was that Nixon was by then far along in the Watergate scandal and was under attack as a crook. SO…….Nixon was appointing the man who would be in a position to pardon him if he left office by impeachment or resignation. SO was there a backroom deal between Nixon and Gerald Ford?……..that is, did Nixon appoint Gerald Ford Vice President with the quid pro quo that Ford would pardon him if he had to leave office?
So Nixon did have to resign and sure enough, Ford DID give him a blanket pardon for any and all crimes he DID commit or MIGHT HAVE committed. Maybe there was a corrupt quid pro quo between Ford and Nixon, or maybe Ford was just the 24 karat idiot that he seemed to be. Anyway, everyone else of significance in the Nixon administration served serious prison sentences EXCEPT for Nixon himself who appointed the man who pardoned him.
Fun fact……who was the only president of the United States who was never ELECTED to EITHER the Presidency or the Vice Presidency? Answer: Gerald Ford.
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Wow… that sounds seriously corrupt, Danny.
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I hear a (possibly apocryphal) story that Ford did a radio interview once and at one point said “…when I was elected President …”, to which the interviewer responded, steelily, “Mr. President, you were never elected President”.
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Tris…..A plain text reading of the constitution does not indicate that there’s any limitation on the executive power to pardon. That would suggest that the power to pardon is absolute. Maybe the founders didn’t even imagine that someone would pardon himself, but one view is that if they didn’t mean for that to happen, they should have said so. I see no reason that Trump wouldn’t do it, and then it would be challenged in the courts and the Supreme Court would have to rule.
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… One of the things about this supreme court thing, Danny, is that once appointed, they can’t readily be sacked. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
So having snagged the nice little number for themselves, they have no further interest in buttering up a president, especially one on the way out… and probably more intertest in protecting their reputation as a lawyer?
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Tris…..OH YES! One of the enduring ironies of American history involves Supreme Court Justices who are appointed by presidents for their favorable political leanings, who get on the court and proceed to write legal opinions contrary to what the president intended. It drives presidents mad when liberals become conservatives or conservatives become liberal as soon as the judges they appoint are on the bench and immune from politics. It’s happened to many presidents….FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Bush, etc.
Supreme Court Justices……like all federal judges…….can only be removed by impeachment, for gross misconduct. A trial in the Senate……just like a presidential impeachment, is required. So it happens VERY VERY rarely for any federal judge. The only Supreme Court Justice to ever be impeached was Associate Justice Samuel Chase in 1805. The House of Representatives passed Articles of Impeachment against him; however, he was acquitted by the Senate. So no Supreme Court Justice has ever been removed from the high bench in all of American history.
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Oh well, if his supermajority goes against him to protect their legal integrity… tough, eh!
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Tris……Yep! That’s the way it works. 😉
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…which proves only that American Supreme Court justices have always been either a remarkably honourable and upstanding bunch, or far too many of them have been allowed to get away with proverbial and metaphorical murder by venal and nakedly self-serving politicians in return for political and other favours.
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Ed…..most notably the venal and self-serving Republicans who got the 2000 Florida recount case out of the Florida court’s jurisdiction to the US Supreme Court, where the decision in Bush vs Gore ordered a stop to the Florida recount and effectively APPOINTED George W. Bush president on a straight party line “vote” of 5 Republican Justices to 4 Democratic Justices.
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Which Trump is now angling to emulate, Danny, or top. It’s so nakedly self-interested and hypocritical that I can’t understand not being repelled by it, after all the claptrap the Republicans talked when they wouldn’t even give Merrick Garland a hearing.
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Well Ed, we Democrats ARE repelled by it. The Merrick Garland thing gripes Democratic souls. And now the hypocritical flip flop to ram through a Republican Justice in what are probably the closing days of the Trump administration. Thing is, it’s all perfectly legal and constitutional, and we know after all that hypocrisy is the mothers milk of politics in pursuit of political gain.
I just wish that the Democrats could find it in their souls to use raw political power to screw the Republicans as skillfully as the Republicans screw the Democrats. As it is, the Democrats are left muttering about how unfair and hypocritical it all is. As if righteousness and fair play had anything to do with politics. Truth is, even as a Democrat, I sort of admire the Republicans for behaving the way political parties should behave. That is, advance the interests of your party and screw the opposition……while staying within the limits of the law. I just wish that Democrats could learn to be as mean and self-serving as the attack dog Republicans.
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You mean be as mean and hypocritical as the Republicans, Danny? I fear that they might win an electoral battle or two, but they’d lose the argument and lose their soul.
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Ed……Don’t get me wrong. I’m certainly not opposed……in principle…..to political parties acting honorably and politicians telling the truth. Many Democrats do however despair that acting honorably and telling the truth has resulted in Democratic loss after loss (in elections for the Presidency, for Congress, for Governorships, and for State legislatures) to the political slash and burn tactics of the right wing Republicans. Political parties serve no purpose if they can’t FIRST get elected to public office. Thus……the call that the Democrats should become as mean and vicious as the attack dog Republicans. THEN…….when you win elections and assume political authority, you are free to tell the truth and act honorably in service to your people. Bernie Sanders and the young radical lefties of the Democratic party would rather be right than the president. What does that get them? Seats at the inauguration of political moderate Joe Biden……maybe!
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In a way, Danny, that was more or less the philosophy of New Labour as articulated in his autobiography by one of the architects, Peter Mandelson.
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And that turned out very badly in the end, Tris, if you ask me, and even if you don’t.
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Well, it seemed to lose them some of their old followers… and the new ones, who imagined them to be Tories, went back to the Tories once they ditched a succession of leaders as unappealing as Haig, Duncan Smith and Howard.
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There’s a principle that people can’t serve as judges in court cases involving themselves: it would be an irremediable conflict of interest. Whether that would trump (see what I did there) a narrow, textual reading of the Constitution would have to be up to the Supreme Court, I suppose – but that wouldn’t stop the whole situation being fundamentally absurd.
The hazards of blind constitutional originalism…
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Ed….I like your “irremediable conflict of interest” argument against an absolute power to pardon oneself. That case will be a circus if Trump brings it about. Even greater than the circus that will be erupting over Obamacare and a potential rehash of Roe vs Wade by the newly constituted conservative court.
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We shall see if he does get his just deserts, Danny, though the new administration would have to be visibly and punctiliously hands off in prosecuting him – à la différence de ce vieux crapaud William Barr.
Dunno about the “billionaire” either: as Trump is the one who says so, and has resisted providing any documentary proof of the fact, it is pretty safe to assume that he doesn’t actually have all that much money. Which is why he’s such a notorious cheapskate and financial deadbeat. We should not forget he’s run every business venture he’s ever had into the ground, and gone bankrupt.
With Trump, the image and the reality are two different things entirely, it’s not just empathy or any of the gentler emotions that he doesn’t do, it’s authenticity as well.
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As long as the don’t exile him to Scotland.
I hear he wants to build another golf course here.
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It would amuse me to see all the greens converted into footings for wind turbines, and all the sand in the sand traps used to make the concrete.
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Superb idea!
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Ed……Yes, we have no idea how much money Trumpy has. But apart from personal wealth, I have a feeling that the great and the good who have worked the corridors of power are not really very likely to ever find themselves in an orange prison jump suit. They will always have important friends with influence in high places to help them. And I’m not sure that’s really a bad thing in the case of a president. As soon as the first ex-president faces prosecution and imprisonment, it will then be open season on all future ex-presidents by their political enemies. We’ve seen that now in the use of impeachment as a political tool. There had not been an impeachment since 1868, then the Democrats went after Nixon, the Republicans went after Clinton, and the Democrats went after Trump.
So whatever Trump is guilty of, I suspect it will not serve our democracy well if he faces trial after his presidency. I think the Democrats went bat shit crazy when Trump was elected, and they proceeded to try to overturn the will of the people and the workings of the electoral college. I almost don’t care what he was guilty of, I know that the Democrats just wanted him gone. And that’s not good for our democratic republic. My Democratic friends can pretend that they were all worked up by that call to Ukraine as an illegal act, but in fact their real goal was to cancel out the results of the 2016 election.
For that reason, I’m actually opposed to any post-presidential prosecution of Trump…..federal or state…….however much of a corrupt asshole he was and is. It’s simply bad for the republic and our fractured politics. I’ll never forget how the Democrats wanted Obama to investigate DubYa Bush for all sorts of things after his presidency including the lies he told about the WMD justification for war. I think it would have been madness to investigate and prosecute Bush. Although the far lefties in the party were out for DubYa’s blood, Obama was sensible enough to ignore them.
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I differ a bit from you in my analysis of that impeachment, Danny. My American former colleagues were outraged not so much by the result of the election but by the President’s lies and misconduct, and by the knowledge that the result had been influenced by a concerted campaign against his opponent on social media, shored up by ridiculous and unjustifiable hearings set up to investigate nothingburgers that were already known to be nothingburgers.
As for Bush and Blair (and Cheney and Rumsfeld and other dramatis personæ), I think they should have been subject to international justice, but we all know that was never going to happen. The US refusal to have anything to do with the International Criminal Court should be seen in that light. The principle of aut iudicare aut dedere – either try, or render up – means that countries’ judicial authorities should either try their own (international) offenders themselves or surrender them to face justice elsewhere, so it’s no surprise that exceptionalist regimes dislike the idea. We can see it in the same light as the Westminster regime’s antipathy to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), even when They’re not sure at any given moment which one They’re talking about.
The principle shared by right-wing regimes in both England and the US is that their institutions – government / legislature / executive – are superior to anyone else’s, and they can’t deal with criticism, however constructive: how very dare Johnny Foreigner try to tell Us what to do when it should be the other way round! The very idea!
And you can see where it’s got them: in the UK it’s Brexit in the middle of a pandemic with no trade deal and the EU being blamed because all the remaining members of the EU cannot accept that England should be allowed to break international law and renege on its obligations just because they’re British – it’s not quite the same with America, because Trump prefers to behave like a sub to nasty dictatorial doms – no, not Dom Cummings, Tris, though then again… for whatever perverse or criminal reason. Regardless, America is not making itself any friends at the moment – not ones you’d want to be seeing hanging with, anyway.
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Ed…..I agree with what you say about Trump. He is stupid and evil and has been a disaster as president. But being stupid and evil is not illegal, much less an impeachable offense. Being a posturing demagogue who tells lies all the time is not illegal either. Neither is character assassination of your political enemies using social media. In short, I can’t see anything he’s done that could be successfully prosecuted as a felony in a criminal court, and I think that the standards for impeachment and removal from office should be even higher than that……because it subverts the will of the people in a duly constituted election. Short of the most heinous crimes imaginable, I think that the results of a democratic election are sacrosanct. Trump was elected, and if the people chose a stupid, evil, demagogue and madman, then that’s just tough. He’s what the voters chose and they don’t get to change their minds. After four years they get a try at removing him, and not before.
I don’t know anything about the European Courts. But I DO know how much I disdain the posturing European pacifist lefties who periodically have a big announcement that some sort of committee they’ve appointed has decided that the American president is a war criminal and he is to present himself at some asshole European Court for trial……forthwith!
I could go farther and say that I’m not fond of the political tactic of branding political leaders as war criminals, even though they are democratically elected and are following the laws of the country they serve. This was true of Bush and Cheney, and for that matter the problem of Tony Blair following DubYa Bush’s war policy was simply to elect a different government. I hated Bush’s wars and that he and Dick Cheney lied about their justification. But Bush and Cheney were elected by the people and what they did was legal under the laws and constitution of the United States They were not ANY kind of criminals, much less war criminals…….IMHO. 😉
At this point, I always mention the irony of the people who gave us WWI and WWII and for that matter, the British and European Empires, lecturing Americans about peace and justice and human rights. Having said all this, I know that the peace loving European lefties WILL continue to piss me off with regularity…..LOL.
Yes I’ve more or less lost whatever original point I was making, but I never miss an opportunity to express my disdain for European Human Rights courts which summon American presidents to “justice.” Allow me to say……GEEEEZE!
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Well actually, Danny…
The war criminal thing. Was the Iraq War legal under the American Constitution? How do the United Nations Charter and international stand in relation to the Constitution and the US, and how does the US stand in relation to international law?
As founder members of the UN and Permament Members of the Security Council, the US and the UK should have been bound by the Charter of the United Nations in the matter of waging war. To oversimplify, they never got the necessary majority in the Security Council to go to war in Iraq in 2003. When other countries do that sort of thing, the US and the UK have traditionally come down hard on them.
The Iraq War which was declared on specious grounds in 2003 was not lawful under international law; by going ahead with it anyway, the two leaders of the “Coalition of the Willing” was setting a terrible example for the rest of the world. It is a lesson which Putin in particular has taken to heart, and China’s territorial annexations in the South China Sea should be understood in that light as well.
I feel sorry for Colin Powell, because he was, I believe, duped into giving the Security Council the briefing presenting the false evidence that served as grounds for going to war. I have to believe that he was duped as we know him to be a man of honour. I was in the Security Council chamber when he gave that briefing, and I watched his face. As I understand it, he feels lasting shame, guilt and embarrassment over that event, on his own behalf and that of his country. It’s no surprise to me that he’s come out in support of Biden in this year’s presidential election, for Trump is much, much worse than Dubya ever was. No one could even think of accusing Bush II of gross moral turpitude or of being a Russian stooge, for example.
War crimes are among those crimes which are subject to what is called universal jurisdiction, meaning that alleged war criminals may be prosecuted by any judiciary anywhere in the world. That’s another thing that became part of the system of international law since the founding of the UN after WWII and in the context of the Nuremberg trials. It’s precisely because of WWII that the European States, with the exception of the UK now and other with far-right, authoritarian governments, are keen on trying to enforce it. Similarly, it is not European governments which are directly responsible for trying to bring politicians to book for “universal jurisdiction” crimes: democracies are supposed to have independent judiciaries, after all. William Barr’s antics at the US Department of Justice are sufficient proof of why this is a Great Good Thing! Currently in Europe, the Polish regime in particular has been coming under fire for messing with its justice system. It’s a splendid piece of doublethink, actually, that the dominant party there is called the Law and Justice Party. Similarly, the Republicans in the US have always been known as the Law and Order Party. So what is this I’ve been hearing about the Thin Blue Line, or do I mean Back the Blue?
I haven’t been following the situation in Hungary with nearly the same degree of attention as I have paid to Poland’s problems, which is for my own personal and family reasons. That aside, I believe strongly that the charges levelled against political figures in both the UK and the US should have been taken seriously in both those countries: instead of just laughing them off, or appealing to a history that is irrelevant to the matters in hand, they should have been subject to due legal process to determine whether there was a case to answer. Aut iudicare, aut dedere, right? Again, to simply ignore such things sets a terrible example: if the US or the UK wants to prosecute a citizen of another country for a “universal jurisdiction” crime, why should the government of that country cooperate if the US does not reciprocate? Who benefits from allowing a culture of impunity to develop among the world’s (rich and) powerful?
I repeat that it’s precisely because of WWII and the post-war international legal order that resulted from it that the European States are so keen on this multilateral approach and on enforcing the provisions of international law that are supposed to be binding on them. Sovereignty, that much used, abused and misunderstood concept, does not mean doing whatever the hell you please whenever you choose to do it. It’s a principle that is as true for States as it is for us all as individuals. By subjecting themselves to international law, countries agree that their sovereignty is not infinite. That conflicts with the exceptionalist positions and philosophies of the Westminster regime – which I go on about ad nauseam both here and elsewhere – and the notion that the electoral decisions of the American people, particularly when the democratic legitimacy of that system is so iffy anyway, should apply to and in the rest of the world.
That exceptionalist, do-as-I-say-don’t-do-as-I-do view of international law and of who should be bound by it is sometimes called extraterritoriality. The US in particular is wont to pass legislation which American legislators seem to think should apply not just to the US but worldwide. There were moves afoot at one point to ban representatives of all companies which did business with Cuba from entering the US (this was a couple of decades ago now, if I remember correctly). The EU in particular pushed back in an unusually muscular way for them: the US was informed that, if they tried to enforce the ban, the EU would reciprocate by banning all representatives of American companies which did not do business with Cuba from entering the EU. I believe that particular provision is still on the books, but has quietly been buried, so to speak. This too is not good for confidence in and respect for the law.
Americans would rightly be mad as hell if Scotland, or anywhere else, tried to enforce its laws on US citizens for acts that were not a crime in the US; it would be at least as absurd as if Florida, say, were to attempt to impose Florida law on Alaska. I heard representatives of the US at various international forums being rebuked for their country’s extraterritorial pretensions, and rightly so; as I said, the US seems to be particularly prone to this. I don’t remember any other country being rebuked for that kind of assault on other countries’ sovereignty. The “universal jurisdiction” crimes do not contradict the principle that domestic laws do not apply extraterritorially, because they are in international law, which is supposedly applicable to all States. The regimes and ruling elites in many countries pay no heed to such things unless they have to, but that is no excuse for founder members of the United Nations and Permanent Members of the Security Council doing it.
Extraterritoriality, i.e., the (attempted) unilateral imposition of a State’s own legal standards on others elsewhere is rather a feature of imperial-minded Powers. The rest of us try to go by the general principle that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, that might alone does not make right. We have to wonder too quis custodiet ipsos custodies… as founder members of the UN and leaders of the victorious Allies in WWII, if the UK and the US are not going to live up to the standards of behaviour on the world stage which they themselves set, why should anyone else? As it is, they have forfeited some if not all of their right to criticize, or take action against, other States’ bad behaviour.
Let me try to draw an analogy. As state law is binding on people in that state, Federal law is binding on the whole US and those who live in it (and US citizens overseas in the matter of taxation, among others). To go up a notch, international law is supposed to be binding on the States which are members of the international community, and in fact usually become binding on all States worldwide when so many States sign up to things that they become part of international law – no one State has a veto, basically, or we’d never get anywhere.
As for Trump… if Michael Cohen went to jail for acting on his instructions, Trump should too; maybe the notion of command responsibility is reflected in US law somewhere. I would think it would be. In any event, Trump should have been removed from office under article 25 for his gross incompetence, moral turpitude., and manifest unfitness for the office he holds. I wonder… I don’t think anyone seriously challenged Gerald Ford’s right to serve as President, even though he was a bit of a joke; Mike Pence, rot his soul, was duly elected as Veep, and I can’t imagine anyone challenging his legitimacy if Trump were thrown out or stood down.
After the shenanigans in the election of Dubya over Al Gore thanks to a packed Supreme Court’s decision over the election count in Florida, and after Trump, who lost by over 3 million votes, taking power by virtue of the electoral college rather than the popular vote, I’m sure there must be many Americans who believe that the US electoral system needs to be changed. From an outsider’s viewpoint too it seems odd that federal elections are operated by the individual states under differing conditions.
Lindsay Graham was right about Trump – before he mysteriously did a 180 to spend his metaphorical life with his metaphorical nose in the metaphorical president’s arse. The American people were right too about Trump when they voted, most of them, for the other candidate for President. But while that would be a necessary condition for the opposition party to try to overturn the result of the election, it’s not a sufficient one, and I’m sure people do realize that; also, they respect the Constitution, most of them.
However, it’s not simply or even mainly a partisan thing to want the man himself out, as the (ex-)Republicans among the never-Trumpers and in the Lincoln Project prove. The reason for wanting him out is that he’s not just incompetent and unfit, he’s a conman and a criminal – and worse, he’s a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. The embarrassment to the US and the damage he inflicts on its international standing is bad enough, actually, on its own to warrant getting rid of him. He should have been ousted by his own people and party under article 25. His misdeeds and malfeasances far exceed those of Nixon, who was told by his own party to go because he would most certainly been impeached in the Senate if the case had gone ahead.
I’m sorry I can’t give you the Washington Post on this, because it’s behind a paywall, but here’s the Guardian on the Senate report on the 2016 presidential campaign and Russian interference in it: https://archive.vn/UXowX. I would submit that if Barack Obama had been the President named in that report (or the Mueller report, or in the many and varied reports from the US intelligence agencies), the Republicans would have been all over him like flies on – uh – excrement, and what is more, the Democrats in both the House and the Senate would have been too. Obama would most certainly have been impeached for it, if his own people and party had not themselves already forced him to stand down. I don’t believe he would have been granted a pardon for it either. As it is, we can accept, can we not, that Trump really is a metaphorical piece of shit?
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Ed….Thanks for that essay. There is only one thing…..involving Donald Trump…..that I would disagree strongly with, and a couple of other comments I would make, without necessarily implying strong dissent from your position. You have after all, already forgotten more than I will ever know about the United Nations Charter, the European Court of Justice, and international law generally. Nevertheless, I have strong opinions that are unencumbered by facts or any real knowledge of the subject.
Lots of things were happening about the time that Bush-Cheney took office in 2001, that involved three presidential administrations and various Acts and resolutions of Congress. George W. Bush had a score to settle from his daddy’s 1991 Gulf War, which had ended unsatisfactorily without an armistice and with Saddam Hussein remaining in a strong position of power, and Bill Clinton had signed into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. By 2oo1, Dick Cheney and the neocon war hawks of the Republican Party were newly in power, and bad things were going to happen. I was young and not paying much attention, but I’ve reviewed two Wikipedia articles which satisfy me that a series of Congressional acts and resolutions, along with the approval of the president, make the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan…….as disastrous as they turned out to be……..sufficiently “lawful” for any and all American purposes.
Still, war might have somehow been avoided if the 9/11 attack hadn’t happened in 2001. I don’t have the impression that the Brits quite understood the trauma that this event inflicted. I wonder what the British government would have done if the two most prominent buildings in central London had been reduced to rubble, and a plane had been deliberately crashed into Whitehall, and another plane was known to have targeted Buckingham Palace but accidentally failed in its mission. That was exactly what happened in the United States in New York and Washington.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_Iraq_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Afghanistan
What is legal for the USA is what is done in Washington pursuant to the political authority which flows from the American constitution. International law as construed in the big building on the East River up in New York City and by the International Court of justice in The Hague is nice to have on your side, but it’s not terribly relevant in Washington when overwhelming American interests are deemed to be at stake.
Anyway, that’s what I mean about an action being “legal” according to the laws and constitutions of nations. As for “international law” in the form of “crimes against peace”, “war crimes”, and “crimes against humanity”, that is, as far as I’m concerned, more honored in the breach than in the observance.
At the end of World War II, the four victorious powers were faced with the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide, who should have been properly tried for their crimes by German courts. But there was no German government, and no surviving German judiciary, so the Allied powers decided to write up some new laws, and then stage show trials to convict and execute the Nazis for crimes that weren’t crimes when they “committed” them…..at least crimes not punishable outside of Germany. I think maybe the Americans were primarily pushing this “judicial” approach. I believe that Churchill’s more sensible proposal was to simply line the Nazi leaders up against a wall and shoot them. Summary executions would probably have been more in line with the traditions of warfare, and would have avoided the time and expanse of the show trials, which were in fact displays of international power politics all dressed up in judicial robes.
I understand that the brand new “crimes” ginned up at Nuremberg were merged into the framework of the United Nations, and became today’s much ballyhooed “war crimes” of “international law.” This is the disreputable history that leads otherwise sensible people to periodically demand that the President of the United States present himself at The Hague for “trial.”
https://www.facinghistory.org/holocaust-and-human-behavior/chapter-10/establishing-nuremberg-tribunal
And finally, my general disdain for posturing about “war crimes,” finally brings me to Tony Blair, whose name I mentioned. OK….YES…..Tony Blair’s government followed DubYa Bush into war (wars of self-defense in the view of Americans after 9/11 I would argue), and that surely was a bad idea. And if, as a political tactic, you want to denounce Blair in harsh terms…..that’s more than OK with me. However, I do know a REAL war crime and a REAL war criminal when I see them…….for example, Hitler and the Nazi genocide…..the very people the victorious Allied powers of WWII conjured up the term at Nuremberg to describe. I would insist that Nuremberg certainly DIDN’T have the likes of DubYa Bush and Tony Blair (and the Iraq War policy of his Labour government) in mind! I know demonization for political purposes when I see it, and I know a subliminal Hitler reference when I see it. If people want to so freely throw around the war crime rhetoric for their own political purposes, I feel that I’m being played, and that in so doing, it diminishes the evil acts of the real war criminals of Nuremberg. I get it that many people of a pacifist persuasion want to identify every war as a crime. Some I suppose would try to sort out wars of aggression from wars of national defense. But when I look at the mess of Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m not joining either parade. It was and is a complicated mess.
Now for Donald Trump:
“The reason for wanting him out is that he’s not just incompetent and unfit, he’s a conman and a criminal – and worse, he’s a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. The embarrassment to the US and the damage he inflicts on its international standing is bad enough, actually, on its own to warrant getting rid of him.”
Hmmmmm……No! I’m not persuaded. None of those things even come close to justify overturning the outcome of an American election.
Yes, Trump is evil and stupid and has been a disaster as president. He has seriously damaged international agreements and alliances and has insulted world leaders. He is a self-confessed sexual predator. He libels and slanders his political opponents. He might well be indicted for certain federal and state crimes if he were a private citizen.
But as regards his tenure in office, I don’t care! He was elected by the American people according to the provisions of the American constitution, and the outcome of an American election is the sacred voice of the people. It is not to be circumvented except in very special and severe circumstances.
Article II – Section 4, US Constitution:
“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
Wiki:
The Constitution limits grounds of impeachment to “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors”. The precise meaning of the phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” is not defined in the Constitution itself.
“High crimes and misdemeanors”, in the legal and common parlance of England in the 17th and 18th centuries, is corrupt activity by those who have special duties that are not shared with common persons.
Since impeachment effectively overturns the outcome of an election, I would personally demand the most stringent definition of the term “high crimes.” He hasn’t committed treason by any judicial understanding of the term, or bribery, and I’d define a high crime to be something like murdering the Governor of California.
Although the Republicans have trivialized impeachment by charging Bill Clinton with Oval Office sex, and the Democrats trivialized impeachment by charging Trump of making a phone call to Ukraine; political partisanship has saved the republic and the presidency by blocking both actions in the Senate.
Amendment XXV – Section 4:
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”
“Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”
The 25th Amendment clearly implies a physical disability of the president. (Perhaps a serious mental illness might qualify if medically verified.) That some Democrats have ginned up the idea that the president’s cabinet……..acting in concert with BOTH houses of congress…….could carry out a palace coup against the will of the president, according to the provisions of the 25th Amendment, says a lot about how desperate and crazy some of them have become. And of course, how determined they are to reverse the outcome of the 2016 election.
That Trump is evil and stupid and incompetent does not disqualify him from the office of the presidency, and is irrelevant to his tenure in that office. He’s in the White House until January 20, 2021, and the Democrats need to get over it.
The good news is that the election is only 14 days away, and Biden’s poll numbers in the swing states are holding steady. The bad news is that the poll numbers are uncomfortably close to those of Hillary Clinton on this date in 2016. She was in a strong position, and the Democrats thought they had it in the bag that year.
So stay tuned….fingers crossed……..
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I’m not up to replying in full to your very interesting and well-argued response, Danny, but let me just pick out a couple of things.
One is the fallacious connection that was drawn between 9/11 and Iraq. There was no connection. Those of us who knew anything about the ideologies of Sadam Hussein and the Ba’ath party on the one hand and Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda on the other knew that the very idea was absurd. Similarly, the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq were faked: I was present when the oral reports of the leaders of the weapons inspection teams were delivered at UNHQ. Over on this side of the Atlantic, the counterpart was the so-called Dodgy Dossier – I’m sure Tris and many other Munguinites will remember it.
Second, though international law is frequently honoured more in the breach than the observance by tinpot despots, authoritarian and democrats-in-name-only around the world, that’s not an excuse for the countries which put the original principles by which they wanted the world to operate post-WWII, “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, to deliberately break them. The legal provisions which States sign up to when they put their names on international treaties are supposed to be binding on them – and despite the resistance of certain States, or rather, their governments, to putting those principles into practice, the alternative is to return to the law of the jungle that gave us WWII in the first place. It’s not what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation fought for.
WWII taught Europeans what can happen when States start throwing their weight around without a moral compass. It terrifies many of us to see it happening again. It is a feature of both the Westminster regime and the American system of government that they have fucked-up ideas about the rules not applying to them, even when they have signed up to them. Narrow nationalism, might makes right, exceptionalism – they’re all extremely dangerous. We need America to be a beacon of hope, freedom and democracy – and it’s ceased to be that. To all our detriment.
Last point: the principle is aut iudicare, aut dedere. When charges are laid, they should be properly investigated, not simply laughed off. The alternative is impunity. None of the international judges I have known were wild-eyed radicals of any kind, by the way – just thought I’d put that in – I did work for a time in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and in its Appeals Chamber in The Hague, which it shared with the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.
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Ed….Tris….A nice political ad I think! Michael Steele is a Republican. He was Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, and Chairman of the Republican National Committee.
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Not unlike that happened when the Father of the House of Commons, Tory Ken Clarke said he would vote Liberal Democrat.
50+ years an MP, ex Health Secretary, Education Secretary, Justice Secretary, Home Secretary, Chancellor.
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Tris….A negative ad about Trump, but not as really nasty as some of the Lincoln Project ads are. Timed for the posting of mail-in ballots. As of today, two weeks before election day, more than 35 million people have already voted. Looks like more than half of the total ballots will already be voted before election day. On track to be the heaviest vote in a century.
I remember the news coverage on Ken Clarke at the time. He pissed off the Tories and had the whip withdrawn, but still got a Tory peerage in the Lords.
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He along with 21 others, including many former ministers, were ejected from the party after they refused to vote with Johnson.
I’m not sure that Clarke is sitting as a Tory in the House of the Living(ish) Dead.
He may be a “crossbencher”, or maybe he stuck with the Liberal Democrats.
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Ed…..Thanks for the reply. I’ve had my say, so just a couple of comments.
My comments were not intended to re-litigate the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or for that matter to seriously address what is and is not a war crime. I really only intended to explain what I meant by a legal (or lawful) war……from an American perspective. My paragraph about 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, was only intended to illustrate the American mindset at the time. Of course Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but after hostilities began, and after the insurgence dragged on endlessly, even after after DubYa had proudly declared “Mission Accomplished,” Bush and Cheney played up the idea of a continuing “War on Terror” to great political effect. The result was that the two wars tended to merge in the American mind, and very few Americans had the slightest doubt that they were both fully justified, whatever that justification really happened to be. I did point out that the roots of the Iraq War went back to the elder Bush’s Gulf War of 1991 and Bill Clinton’s Iraq Liberation Act of 1998…..both long before 9/11. And yes of course, Bush and Cheney lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction. On the other hand, I seem to remember that Saddam Hussein was occasionally less than fully transparent and cooperative on the matter. I could be wrong on that……..maybe he was just being an arrogant son of a bitch for the fun of it. But he DID seem to work at getting on the bad side of the Americans. Maybe not the smartest thing in the world if you’re really trying to avoid war.
I don’t really know much about international law and the Hague Court, but I’m persuaded that they’re not something that the military brass in the Pentagon spend much time worrying about when planning military action somewhere in the world. Yes……the business of American presidents being ordered by posturing left wing European peace groups to appear at The Hague to be tried as war criminals IS a pet peeve of mine. I should just laugh off such silliness of course……..but from an American perspective Europeans DO seem to sometimes have an “attitude” about Americans……just sayin.’ 😉
And I’ll freely admit that my pet peevishness extended across the pond when all the war crime and war criminal rhetoric was being directed at Tony Blair for hooking up with American war policy. Maybe I’m to believe that the British really are in all that much of a tizzy about the technical definition of a war crime, but as I said, I’m pretty sure that most of the commotion was from people who want to identify ALL wars as crimes and all Prime Ministers who pursue a war policy as a war criminal…….ESPECIALLY if they join in an American war. 😉
Peevishness aside, this is not to say that I don’t have some fundamental reservations about the provenance of war crime criteria that arose from the Nuremberg tribunal. From the beginning at Nuremberg there was a conflict between a natural law based jurisprudential philosophy verses Austinian legal positivist propositions. In his opening address to the tribunal, chief prosecutor Robert H. Jackson, (Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court,) argued for the validity of the trials based on a concept of justice predicated upon an assertion of an absolute right and wrong. Conversely, U.S. federal judge, Charles E. Wyzanski, Jr. in “Nuremberg: A Fair Trial?,” published in the April, 1946, issue of The Atlantic, argued that despite the immoral acts committed by the defendants, the trials did not cohere with established legal principles, such as the constitutional prohibition against ex post facto laws. I believe that Wyzanski was on firm ground here regarding the ex post facto problem. By contrast Jackson advanced a tortured argument involving Germany’s participation in pre-World War II international conventions which “prescribed certain restraints as to the treatment of belligerents” and “certain immunities for civilian populations.” Jackson is clearly arguing natural law theory here, as it was classically advanced by St. Thomas Aquinas. Wyzanski’s arguments on the other hand comport with John Austin’s legal positivism which draws a distinction between morality and law. Austin distinguishes between “laws set by God to” humans and “laws set by men to men.” As regards the prohibition on waging wars of aggression for example, Wyzanski argues that, despite Jackson’s references to international declarations, “the body of growing custom to which reference is made is custom directed at sovereign states, not at individuals.” Per Wyzanksi, no international declaration explicitly forbade individuals from aiding in “waging an aggressive war,” and therefore, the charge against individuals aiding in waging an aggressive war is an ex post facto law.
So I would argue that war crimes laws as we know them today are at a minimum fatally flawed in their origins……both in terms of constitutional principles and fundamental legal theory. In short, they need a lot of work before we should go around accusing politicians of being war criminals……notwithstanding that such an accusation may be little more than a thinly disguised political tactic aimed at Hitleresque demonization.
😉
The Wyzanski article “Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent”…..The Atlantic, April, 1946:
“If in the end there is a generally accepted view that Nuremberg was an example of high politics masquerading as law, then the trial instead of promoting may retard the coming of the day of world law.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1946/04/nuremberg-a-fair-trial-a-dangerous-precedent/306492/
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Danny, you obviously have more of a historical legal background on this than I do!
I’m a bit feeble at the moment, unfortunately. Sorry about that, I can’t do your comments justice.
Ex post facto laws are a problem, of course, and I’m generally in agreement that retroactivity is not something to be encouraged. The Westminster regime has had a bad record on that recently; there’s at least one occasion I can think of when the Supreme Court found that the Government of the UK had been in gross violation of something or other, so They went back and changed the law retroactively to allow them to commit some crime or other. (Bit of editorializing there.)
On the whole Nuremberg thing – my simple conclusion is that for crimes such as genocide you cannot get away with arguing that it was legal at the time. I had no qualms of conscience about and no doubt of the legality of trying Slobodan Milošević and members of his regime and armed forces, or those behind the Rwanda genocide in 1994.
I do believe there’s a need to improve the behaviour of governments everywhere. The problem of major Powers behaving badly and in violation of their international treaty obligations is compounded by that bad example it sets. It causes them to lose the moral high ground, and makes any attempts to stop other countries following their example hypocritical. The phrase “moral hazard” is usually applied in the context of debt forgiveness, but there’s a much more fundamental hazard in trying to force others to abide by laws and principles which you habitually breach yourself.
Do you remember the outcry when India developed the bomb? I was doing the records of the nuclear disarmament commission before that happened – can’t remember offhand which particular name that one had – and with my own ears heard Mr. India say that that was precisely what India was going to do if there was no further progress on nuclear disarmament among the nuclear-weapon States, a message which I am sure had already been delivered to all the relevant countries individually. All outbursts of shock and horror from those States, and disavowals of responsibility (and complicity), when India actually did carry out a nuclear test were therefore disingenuous to say the least…
As for trying American (and any other President) in international courts for international crimes, we shouldn’t forget that the principle is aut iudicare, aut dedere – which is why I return to the point that if such charges are laid, they should be put before the relevant authorities of an independent judiciary to determine if there is any case to answer. In any case involving extradition, this is a necessary procedure. It allows the extraditing authorities to place conditions on the extradition; for example, most States will not extradite alleged offenders to the US without guarantees that they will not be subject to the death penalty, which is illegal in most States.
I’m rambling. I’d better close here. Have you voted already, Danny?
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Conan sent me a link about the Milestones of Fife for those who are interested.
https://www.google.com/search?q=milestones+of+fife&oq=milestones+of+fife&aqs=chrome..69i57.6567j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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https://www.google.com/search?q=milestones+of+fife&oq=milestones+of+fife&aqs=chrome..69i57.6567j0j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
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Some interesting information among those hits. There are roads that I have driven along hundreds of times without noticing the milestones. It seems the council is looking after them but, sadly, some have been vandalised.
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That’s sad they are a lovely reminder of the past.
I only noticed that first one becasue we were walking but youd never notice them driving.
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Number 17 lochee high street w.m.low ( wullie low ) taken over by Tesco I think.
The photo is in the northerly direction
The church spire in the background is just beyond where Woolworths was , the clock hanging off the building further up the street on the same side as w.m.low is right above woollies .
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Yeah, I think it was Tesco. I have a vague memory of them. I remember Woollies being there, of course. Before that it was a church.
The one of Methvin Street was called the kirk in the field because it had a few inches of grass at the front and back.
It was sold to a housing developer and mysteriously had a fire. I imagine no one would really want to live there, right opposite a noisy pub. I’m not of course suggesting the two things were in any way connected. No, Sir!
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The Aberdeen branch of Wm. Low was the source of the typhoid epidemic in 1964. It wasn’t good publicity but I don’t remember it actually caused them to close.
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Tins of corned beef from Argentina contaminated with cholera from contaminated process water was to blame, if I remember correctly. Still, the canning process should have killed any bacteria; things in cans are supposed to be sterile, or they will eventually inflate and even explode from the gases released by bacterial activity. Very nasty. Terrible pong too.
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Thanks Ed. As for my “historical legal background,” I can only say that 15 minutes of Googling can work wonders. 😉
You asked if I’ve voted. As it happens, I got my mail-in ballot yesterday, and am marking it as we speak. I’ll post it tomorrow. It’s now 11 days to election day, and about 50 million people have already voted…..in person or by mail. It’s a record early vote so far. More than half of the total ballots….80 million of the probably 160 million total ballots that are expected……will already have been voted by election day. The 2020 vote may end up being the biggest voter turnout in a century. Here’s the Jackson County Missouri ballot to peruse (if it can be opened……..or if not clickable, maybe the link will open if copied and pasted into a browser.)
Click to access Sample_Ballot-Rev_9-4_11-20REV.pdf
I see that in Missouri we have five presidential choices, including the Libertarian , Green, and Conservative party candidates. After careful consideration, I decided on the Biden-Harris Democratic ticket. I eliminated Trump-Pence from consideration pretty quickly, and Jorgensen, Hawkins, and Blankenship lacked the necessary name recognition for me….LOL.
Hacking and bringing down an entire American federal election would be a problem for an enemy, since there is no such thing as a federal election in the USA, and the fragmented system of 50 state elections would do Rube Goldberg proud. The state elections are carried out according to 50 different sets of election laws, administered by more than 3,000 counties……which in many states don’t even use the same kinds of voting systems……from hand marked, human counted paper ballots, to hand marked, computer read and tabulated paper ballots, to voting machines with electro-mechanical levers, to computer touch screens. Once upon a time in Florida (and Missouri and many other states,) we had computer punch cards which produced the now-famous “hanging chads.” Punch cards quickly fell out of fashion in 2000, in the Florida Bush-Gore election that would have done a third world dictatorship proud. 😉 And everyplace that uses mechanical or digital systems ALSO has paper ballots available to use in case the machines break down. State courts and judges are sitting into the evening of election day to handle legal petitions to sort things out in case something falls apart in some precinct of some county. And out of this system that spans six time zones from the Atlantic coast to the far Pacific, the news media (usually) figures out by early morning who has been elected President and what the makeup of the new House and Senate will be.
So back to my ballot! There’s no Senate race in Missouri this year, so the only other federal office to be voted is for Congressman (member of the House of Representatives) to be elected from our congressional House district. Then there’s the state offices….Governor, Lieutenant Governor, Secretary of State, State Treasurer, and Attorney General. And then the vote for State Senator and State Representative to the Senate and General Assembly of the Missouri state legislature. And then, here in Kansas City and its local jurisdiction, we have the Jackson COUNTY offices to be voted…..down to “Sheriff” of the county.
And then…….we have have a whole bunch of Missouri judges who, after being on the bench for a while, have to be approved by the voters to be retained. I see that we have a Missouri State Supreme Court Judge up for retention this year. On the judges……who I’ve usually never heard of……..I always vote for retention, unless they’ve been in the news after being discovered in a hotel room with a woman not their wife, AND/OR been caught accepting large cash bribes in brown paper envelopes. As for the political offices, I just always vote Democrat, even if I don’t actually know the names. I figure Democrats are a better class of people, and the graft and corruption will at least be kept to a minimum.
And that brings us to two State Constitutional Amendments and two “Questions” to be decided this year. I’ll have to go to our local newspaper website to figure out how I should vote on those. The second “Question” is interesting…..the very last item on the ballot.
Question No. 2 : “Shall Jackson County, Missouri, remove the statues of Andrew Jackson now located outside the Jackson County Courthouse in Kansas City and the Historic Truman Courthouse in Independence?”
What WILL I decide about those Andy Jackson statues? Seems like Andy deserves a statue or two in a Missouri county that was named after him. He was after all a hero in the War of 1812, fighting the British redcoats at the Battle of New Orleans. He went on to two terms in the White House and is the founder of the modern Democratic Party…..a branch of the old Jeffersonian Party, the Democratic-Republicans. BUT, Andy was an Indian fighter who killed more Native Americans than British redcoats. So his reputation has taken a terrible beating of late, particularly among the native tribal peoples, even though his face is still on the $20 bill. DECISIONS…..DECISIONS…….Maybe it’s time for Andy’s statues to go. 😉
Mitt Romney has already voted in Utah and says he didn’t vote for Trump. He didn’t say who he voted for though.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/21/politics/mitt-romney-trump-vote/index.html
Trump and Biden had their second and last debate last night. Trump was on better behavior than he was in the first debate, and Biden managed to avoid any major gaffes. The polling still looks favorable for Biden-Harris. 😉
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Do you get a week off work to do all that voting, Danny?
I’m a little embarrassed that, at the very most, we only have two votes to cast at any one time in Scotland’s elections.
One for our constituency member and one for what I suppose it a bit like the English house of dreary old folk, but considerable more democratic: List members, who, to an extent, balance the imbalances of First Past the Post in a multi-party system.
On one occasion, when there was, on the same day, a vote for the parliament in London, people were supposedly so confused by the multiplicity of pieces of paper (well, 3 actually) that the English authorities decided never to have another election where we had to vote again for two different parliaments.
Dim or what!
And I think that it’s cool to be able to vote for judges. It’s a pity you don’t get a say on the Supreme Court lot that your betters decide for life.
It’s good to know, though, that the multiplicity of systems in 50 states should fox clever old Vlad the Impaler and his hot-shot-bots.
Doubtless he’d like to see Trump returned as he’s such a walkover. Tell him his hair looks good and he’s yours!
Euch… I just read that back and… yeah…euch.
As for statues. Always a hard one.
I can understand that folk wouldn’t necessarily want to have to look daily at statues of people with chequered histories. I know we live in different times, but in my opinion it was never right to kill the indigenous population. Nor of course was it right for them to kill off the settlers. Killing people sucks.
But he is part of history. What you gonna call Jacksonville? Empty Plynthville? LOL
But yes, they have done it elsewhere. There are no statues to Hitler in Germany; no statues to Hoxha now in Albania, nor Stalin in the ex Soviet block. Well, not on the streets. They are moved to museums though. Because we should never forget them, in the (vain) hopes we will never have their likes again
Personally I’m not a big fan of statues. There are some in Dundee and I don’t have much of an idea who they are. But Old Victoria, who never visited and only allowed tributes from those and such as those in the city to be given to her when she graciously allowed her royal train to stop for 10 minutes in Dundee takes pride of place outside one museum.
It’s a place for pigeons to shit, I suppose.
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/JzLvwfg8maDFHARszC8uIYTydnfANENV_Ue3vBNaAMop_LlYCA2B94HBGeI8YN5HYVYqRCzERa6r4eGEhnjQAc3YdV8l4ycnOxcbedXnMAJMDS7GBGuNnMelsfo-Rtei9Dq0lmeJRjA
Good luck with the ballot.
If you get finished before bed time… sleep well!!!!
🙂
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Tris……We don’t even get a DAY off work to vote, much less a week. Election day is a regular work day, although some employers may make an allowance for a long lunch hour to vote.
There’s a lot to be said for simpler ballots If som.ething can be voted on, it’ll show up on an American ballot. But as you observe, the very complexity and multiplicity of the American system of voting, as administered by over 3,000 counties in 50 states, would surely defeat old Putin if he tried to take it all down in one grand computer hack. Even Americans have a hard time figuring it out.
I can honestly say that this is the first time I’ve ever got to vote on whether or not to remove statues. Andy Jackson’s name is everywhere of course, and he has tons of statues around the country, so he wouldn’t miss a couple in Missouri. 😉 Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House, shows him on a rearing horse. The White House Historical Association says: “A statue of Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans occupies the center of Lafayette Square. Erected in 1853, it was the first bronze statue cast in the country and the first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs.”
https://www.whitehousehistory.org/andrew-jackson-statue-lafayette-square
While Trumpy was cowering in the White House bunker during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, the protesters got ropes around old Andy and tried to pull him down. But the statue survived.
BTW…..Jackson was the last president who served in the revolution. He was a young teenager in George Washington’s continental army.
Missouri ballots are only average size as state ballots go. Politically active Californians are famous for not trusting the politicians in Sacramento to govern the state. So California ballots get loaded up with constitutional amendments, initiatives, referendums, propositions, etc, in addition to all the state, federal, and county offices. I think California judges are voted on, or otherwise confirmed, in some way too. So California ballots are sometimes almost the size of a newspaper. One of the reasons that California is famously slow in its election returns.
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I think in California, it might be an idea to take early retirement to vote. 🙂
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I couldn’t help thinking of the statue commemorating Peter the Great in Petersburg commissioned by Catherine the Great and erected in 1782. The Soviets didn’t take it down, fortunately, however much they loathed the Tsars.
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Ed…….Very interesting! It appears that the White House Historical Association may have erred in saying that Jackson’s Lafayette Square statue was the “first equestrian statue in the world to be balanced solely on the horse’s hind legs.” Since the Jackson statue dates from 1853, that would make it much later than the Peter the Great statue of 1782. Maybe it’s a technicality about “balanced solely…on hind legs,” since the Peter statue seems to have some supporting structure at the base of the bronze structure at the rear.
Maybe the Missouri statues issue showed up as a ballot “Question” because the state legislature didn’t want to touch such a controversial issue. Jackson county was named after Jackson of course, but at the same time, we are in an era when removing offending statues……mostly the statues of Confederate Civil War generals in the south, is a big controversial issue. Jackson is detested by Native Americans for his role in the early Indian wars, his advocacy and approval of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, his refusal to obey and enforce Supreme Court decisions that favored the Cherokee Nation, and the forced removal of the Cherokee and other tribes from their ancestral lands in the South to “Indian Territory” in what became in 1907, the State of Oklahoma. The Indian removals of the 1830’s, mostly during the Jackson and Van Buren (who was Jackson’s VP) administrations , and later removals into the 1850’s is collectively called the “Trail of Tears.” Jackson had called for an American Indian Removal Act in his first State of the Union address in 1829. Thousands of Cherokee died of exposure, disease, and malnutrition on the forced overland march from Georgia to present day Oklahoma. (Oklahoma was red clay soil, poorly suited for agriculture, but on top of a pool of oil that rewarded the Cherokee handsomely in modern times. Today the tribe owns and operates profitable gambling casinos on tribal land.)
https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/trail-of-tears
Jackson was the 7th president; he served 1829-1837, and lived long enough (1845) to be photographed.
This is the earliest known photograph of the Jackson statue in Lafayette Square dated c. 1855. It is taken from the White House side looking toward Saint John’s Episcopal Church on H Street. This is the church where Trump had his picture taken holding a Bible, after having the park cleared of protesters with tear gas.
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PS: Andrew Jackson is viewed by some today to have been been a sociopath who should have been on meds (had they existed at the time.) Guess what president Trumpy most admires……Andrew Jackson of course. His portrait now looms over the Oval Office.
In a radio interview, Trump declared that Jackson had a big heart and was “REALLY angry” about the Civil War. (Which occurred 16 years after Jackson’s death.) Then he (Trump) quoted Jackson as SAYING, about the Civil War, “There’s no reason for this.” What an endless stream of gibberish comes out of his mouth! Here is the radio interview comment:
About Donald Trump as Civil War historian…….Stephen Colbert: “One rarely hears this: ‘In fairness to Andrew Jackson'” 😉
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Trump really is a complete moron.
They shoulda stopped the Civil War by bombing all the airports, eh!
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LOL……perhaps he’ll look into a new career as a history professor if the election doesn’t go his way. 😉
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Harvard calls.
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Awful lot of Greats in Russia, eh?
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I like the descriptive nicknames they used to give kings and queens and rulers. Ivan the Terrible was actually a complimentary name as I understand it. He was powerful (AKA “Terrible”) in his opposition to the enemies of Russia. (Or maybe that’s just what they told him it meant. 😉 )
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In fact, Danny, it is possible that, given that the language of the Russian Court was French, the word “Terrible” translated as
Formidable, Tremendous, Great.
It’s an odd word in French as it can mean “awful” or “fantastic”.
Funny lot, the French. They are foreign, you know!
Or maybe he was terrible in the English sense, as you say, to enemies of Russia.
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Tris……Your suggestion about its meaning to the French speaking Russian aristocracy sounds likely. The important thing was probably that he not consider it a personal insult. 😉
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Well… Danny, Tris, he’s known in Russian as Иван Грозный (Ivan Groznyy), and “groznyy” does mean terrifying, cruel, threatening, minatory, menacing, formidable (in the English sense, not the French) – shake-in-your-boots awful, not pleased amazement awesome.
That’s how he’s remembered by the Russian people, anyway. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_the_Terrible.
Note to self: Refrain from playing chess.
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LOL. Ok. It was a guess on my part, Ed.
Seems Munguin might not have much liked him.
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Ed…….Seems to have been an unpleasant character for sure. 😉
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