Knowing full well that President Biden has no control over the price of gas or inflation, just as no president really does, because they are under the control of corporations whose goal is profits for the company and dividends for the investors, with the pittance that is left over for those who actually made those profits, the GOP likes to push a false narrative, one they demand not be applied when a president is Republican under the same conditions.

To this they have added the current preventable shortage of baby formula brought on the Covid disruption of supply lines and when one of three major formula producers in the United States responsible for 40% of baby formula had to shut down production and recall several brands of formula due to possible bacterial contamination.

 This is not under any president’s control. The best a president can do is deal with and solve the problem.

Various members of the GOP jumped in demanding action, blaming Biden, and using the crisis as a Biden administration American Baby vs Foreign Baby choice, ignoring that by federal law the Biden administration is obligated to provide baby formula to the babies of detained illegal immigrants.

Governor Abbott of Texas claikmed,

“As parents face the nightmare of a nationwide formula shortage, the Biden Administration is happy to provide baby formula to illegal immigrants coming across the southern border”

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York a pro-Trumper who claims voter fraud in the 2020 elections, calls Democrats pedophiles, and promotes replacement Theory tweeted,

“Joe Biden continues to put America LAST by shipping pallets of baby formula to the southern border as American families face empty shelves.”

“America’s parents are struggling to find any spare baby formula on the shelves … while Biden has plenty reserved for illegal immigrants. Now that’s America Last,”

came from GOP Representative Dan Bishop.

The GOP demands that something be done, and while they are running around making nose, President Joe Biden invoked the Defense Production Act of 1950 to boost the supply of formula from US manufacturers, the law that Trump was loathe to invoke when the Covid pandemic began.

Representative Jahana Hayes introduced HR 7791 to help families using benefits under the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program more access to baby formula which is presently limited to certain kinds and brands that WIC recipients can purchase. To help prevent a future shortage, the bill also requires that formula manufacturers establish contingencies to prevent supply disruptions.

Representative Rosa DeLauro introduced HR 7790 address the ongoing baby formula crisis in the form of increased funding for the Food and Drug Administration, proposing a $28 million cash infusion to help the FDA address the current formula shortage and prevent future supply chain issues.

Something was getting done.

Then, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise urged a Republican no vote on the latter bill claiming Speaker Nancy Pelosi was pushing the bill forward “in hopes of covering up the administration’s ineptitude by throwing additional money at the FDA with no plan to actually fix the problem, all while failing to hold the FDA accountable.”

In spite of Republicans voting 192 (out of 208) against the  emergency spending bill to help unaborted babies, HR 7790 passed

Although when it came to HR 779, the Access to Baby Formula Act enough Republicans crossed the aisle to [ass the bill on a 414 “yes” votes, there were nine stand outs who voted “No”,  GOP Representatives Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Louie Gohmert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene with lesser notables Chip Roy, Andy Biggs, Thomas Massie, and Clay Higgins.

Although he is in Seoul, Korea, Biden signed the Access to Baby Formula Act of 2022, and announced the first flights of “Operation Fly Formula” to deliver roughly 1.5 million bottles of formula from Switzerland to Indiana for distribution would take place this weekend.

The fate if the other bill is uncertain now that it heads to the senate.

Senate GOP Whip John Thune of South Dakota has stated that key senators in his party have not “looked that closely” at it yet. He and other Republicans have said they don’t think more funding for increasing the number of FDA inspection staff, providing resources for personnel working on formula issues, helping the agency stop fraudulent baby formula from entering the US marketplace, and improve data collection on the formula market.

From these votes, especially in the House, the Right to Life party is very selective in who gets that Right.

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This is for all those with Irish ancestry who, for some reason, have joined the Fox News, conspiracy, replacement theory bandwagon as if this is new and our own ancestors were not dehumanized by it or that even present generations of Irish Americans did not have their lives affected by the past in some way.

Would your family be where it is today if someone in your past was not a victim of the actions that responded to this theory?

Sadly, one of the reason’s that the Fox News Replacement Theory has a veneer of acceptability is because it is a battle of the not White against all white people, even the ones who were not acceptable until someone else came along, the Brown people.

It is one thing to have millions of people coming to the country by way of boats from Europe, on April 17, 1907, an all-time daily high of 11,747 immigrants helped make that year the highest on record with a total of 1,004,756 arrivals, but totally another for fewer to be coming by land from Central America. You see, being White and coming by boat is far more acceptable to being Brown and coming by land.

But remove the veneer of acceptability, and it is clear this is just a new application of the old idea of racial replacement that White people once applied to other White people.

Replacement Theory shares something with a most of the “theories” that claim “The Other” will play havoc with society, that is, if they fail in their original application, they will be applied to a new target with the same certainty that it will happen this time, though.

Gay men and Lesbians in the military would ruin the whole military/industrial Complex and would threaten unit cohesion. When Don’t ask/Don’t Tell was rescinded and that did not happen, it was moved over to Transgender people who will do that, just like it had been guaranteed when the military was integrated by President Truman prior to the Gays.

Replacement Theory first came up when the ships started bringing the Irish on the Famine Ships.

Not only were they not welcomed, these were Catholic Irish coming to a land “owned” by the Protestant English, but this animosity was expressed in Protestant led deadly riots in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and the appearance of the “Irish Need Not Appy” signs.

In 1837 a fire engine company in Boston on the way back to the station after a fire met an Irish funeral procession and just drove the wagon on through it. In the ensuing fight, the firemen rushed into the nearby Irish neighborhood and attacked the homes. It took the mayor, local teamster horses, and a newly formed military company to end it.

The Protestant militias back then called themselves the “Know-Nothings” because whenever asked about something they had obviously done, the pat denial was, “I know nothing”.

The Irish were coming in such numbers, it was only a matter of time before the lower strata Irish with their less human ways would replace the proper Americans, the WASPs.

That cute little Leprechaun with the chin whiskers and pronounced upper lip that shows up everywhere including classrooms filled with children every March, began as a chimpanzee dressed in stereotypical Irish clothing because the Irish were considered no better than monkeys.

A famous example of fending off this “replacement” was in Louisville, Kentucky in 1855 when George D. Prentice, a newspaper editor there, rallied his readers against the “most pestilent influence of the foreign swarms,” which resulted in Louisville’s “Bloody Monday” attack on an Irish neighborhood with 50 confirmed deaths, several having been shot while trying to escape the flames of their torched dwellings into which the Irish were either forced to remain or be thrown back into if they tried to escape.

On an early May Sunday in 1854, John Orr, the self-styled “Angel Gabriel”, dressed in white robes, blew a trumpet and led a mob of protesters across the bridge from Chelsea into East Boston. The mob smashed church windows, vandalized the Irish homes, and physically attacked residents with fists and bricks. “Angel Gabriel” led these purges often that year usually beginning by standing on the steps of a church or city hall ranting about the Irish and the “evils of popery”, often protected by the “Wide Awakes”, a secret paramilitary club of disgruntled working-class men drawn to the man protecting them from a threat.

Their war cry was “Wide awake” chanted like “Jews will not replace us” for intimidation purposes as they marched through Irish neighborhoods as its cry was for the good people, the real Americans, to wake up and see that the replacement was happening, and members sported patriotic clothing emblazoned with the number 67, George Washington’s age when he died.

On this Sunday in 1854, Orr’s followers, numbering over a thousand, met the Irish locals who knew they were coming. The riot was broken up by police.

Originally viewed as a fringe dweller, over time even respectable people began to believe Orr’s replacement theory about the strangers washing ashore and the need to keep the Irish and their “foreign influence” under control and did so by organizing such “benevolent” societies as the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner and the American Protestant Society whose members had to be Protestants born in the United States, “native Americans”, and publishing magazines and newspapers such as  the Signal, the Republican, the Protestant, and the Order of United Americans.

They claimed to be defenders of the Constitution and protectors of freedom, and employed conspiracy theories such as the claim that the Irish come to America to infiltrate and contaminate it, a secret plot for a Catholic takeover.

They even had what today would be considered gang signs and handshakes.

By the mid-1850s, the Wide Awakes and the other “benevolent” societies numbered nearly 1 million people believing that this country should only be for the “native Born”.

During a meeting of East Boston business leaders, Samuel W. Hall, son of a prominent shipbuilder, and others drafted a list of proposed laws they hoped to pass if Know Nothing candidates won the upcoming elections, and one such law was that Catholics  “shall not be permitted to hold any (federal) office.”

In 1854, Know Nothing candidates swept elections across the United States bringing seven governors and nearly 50 congressmen into office.

Once in, the Know Nothing politicos engaged in voter suppression.

To get elected, groups, such as the East Boston group, Hall’s group, authorized $2,500 to buy votes, Know Nothing gangs patrolled the polls with weapons demanding to see naturalization papers, threatening those who looked or sounded foreign, and inciting riots in Cincinnati, New Orleans, St. Louis, and Chicago.

In Massachusetts, the governor, the entire state senate, and all but four state representatives were Know Nothings and went full steam ahead passing laws that only native-born citizens were eligible for federal office, only native-born Protestants could represent the United States overseas, foreign-born residents could not vote until they had lived here for 21 years with a literacy test for all voters, and the King James Bible became required reading in state schools.

To the chant of “send them back“, the poor Irish were deported to Ireland or Liverpool.

The motto of the nativists was,

“Americans must rule America”.

Their leaders capitalized on the fears of disaffected working-class urban dwellers who worried about losing jobs to the newcomers, and their publications asked and answered their own question to the masses,

 “Why are you poor?”

With

“competition of foreign cheap labor.”

However, after a time it was found that many Know Nothing candidates were political newcomers unskilled at actually running things, and this began to attract plenty of opposition which included Abraham Lincoln who once wrote a friend about the dangers of these people wanting our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, to now say,

“All men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners and Catholics.”

Over time all the fear of replacement was shown to have been wrong. The Irish joined in the Great American Salad Bowl and did not diminish it but made it better.

We then moved on to the Jews who became the threat, and when things changed because the Holocaust had us question how exaggerated our ignorance was and how dangerous that could become and the Evangelicals found that an end of the world/arrival of Christ the King scenario called for supporting Israel, we  moved on to the Mexicans, the Chinese, and the Indians (both types).  

One major irony to all this is that while Abraham Lincoln, the founder of the Republican Party opposed the No Nothings and their activities, the party he fathered has become the No Nothings.

Their Wide Awakes decry those who are “woke”.

Their claim that their spewing does not lead to action, is belied by the facts of history.

The false Replacement Theory is not new, just reapplied.

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Tonight, May 18, 2022, the senior class of North West Classen High School in Oklahoma City, Ok will be graduating.

It is the last of the week-long series of graduations for all the high schools in the city, and it seems fitting that NWC would be the last, and, therefore, most remembered graduation. You may have liked all the songs in the show, but there is a good chance you remember the last song best.

Although discussions to add Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to the city’s school district policies on bullying, harassment, and nondiscrimination had begun slowly and rather quietly as the topic in the Buckle of the Bible Belt was an awkward one for most, it became very public and complicated when the principal of the high school overreacted to the first piece of positive information for the Gay students that was hung in accordance with the spirit of the policy on nondiscrimination as school policies applied to all students, listed or not, as was established by the district’s own committee on equal rights, by taking it, somehow, as a personal attack on him and a political move detrimental to him and the school and was joined in this by assistant administrators who saw being Gay-Positive might ruin their chances of advancement.

For the 10 years out of the twelve that it took to move the school district administration, the 10 superintendents (there was an amazing turnover as each failed to be the expected miracle), an amazing number of mid-level administrators who came and went with surprising frequency, and 3 principals, rather than let the topic be discussed in the central administration building, school administrators assumed the roles of the defenders of the status quo, and with each poor choice of action, they would double down to erase the memory of one mistake by committing a worse one.

Although it was slowly becoming obvious that the main administrators of the district might have begun acknowledging the importance of the addition of these words to policies but were just trying to find a way to do it or pass it down the road to someone who would, in such a way it did not come with political and religious related problems. They wanted to save face.

After 12 years during which time people had gone before the School Board to, among other things, advise that if they did not extend protections for the Gay students in the district for the correct reason, being responsible for the safety, wellbeing, and education  of all students in  its schools, they should do it for the self-serving reason of avoiding litigation when, after all the times people appeared before the School Board and read from reports and offered statistics to justify the need, if a child were to be harmed, a parent could point to the many times the board simply chose to ignore the facts.

At least do it to avoid future litigation.

And, so it was, that in December 2009, after the passage of the Michael Shepherd law, the board sat at the dais and marveled at all the information they had accidentally come across individually, on their own, over the weekend explaining their legal standing according to this law and decided to finally do what it had been asked to do for years, claiming they had come to this moment totally by accident and totally on their own. Much of their newly self-discovered reports and statistics had a familiarity to them as they were merely read from what had been handed to each board member over the years.

So, tonight the students from the high school which for some unexplained reason chose to be the major battlefield a war that wasn’t the one they thought was being fought.

 With this final graduation the 25-year chapter from a request in 1997 to this night comes to a close as the Oklahoma City Public Schools class of 2022 graduates as the first class of any school system in that state having had Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity in school policies their whole educational career without any of the predicted problems having taken place.

When the last graduate of NorthWest Classen High School is handed a diploma, that will end one chapter, and this milestone will become the status quo.

CONGRATULATIONS NWCLASSEN KNIGHTS CLASS OF 2022.

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I was at a local gathering to register disagreement with the draft decision of SCOTUS on a woman’s right to choose the other day in solidarity with those meet in towns and cities throughout the country doing the same. Although I am hopeful that the young people chose to go into Boston where the crowd would be bigger and the event more exciting and newsworthy, but certainly not every young person went there, or could get there, so there should have been more of a presence at this local event.

The sad reality was that the majority of those participating were beyond child-bearing age for women, or very dependent on things advertised on the internet and post prime-time TV hours for sexual performance enhancers for the men, or in my case being a cisgender, white, Gay male in my seventies, not personally relevant at all.

Combined, there were two groups of people present, the young under 50 crowd who had had the right to choose over their whole lives, and those who had helped in getting the right to choose in their youth, perhaps their whole lives up to that point, and enjoyed that right in their time only to see the work of their youth for the sake of future generations being erased.

As far as any personal interest, abortion was irrelevant to me before, during and after Roe v Wade but it did affect friends and family and it was incumbent on me to be an ally, I expect the same from friends and family, after all.

And so, there I sat. I bring a lawn chair now after years of rallies, marches, stand-outs, and strikes, and, why not? A few very young kids were very polite and attentive assuming this old guy was somehow chair ridden and great deference should be shown to such a one. The shocked look on their faces when I stood up at the end of the event, had me have to turn and ask if they had never seen a miracle before.

Although the event, stand out, was organized by a women’s organization whose interest was obviously on the loss of choice, I was there for the protection of the unenumerated rights, the ones that some SCOTUS justices believe should not be honored as they are not specifically mentioned in the U.S. Constitution like religious expressing and the right to bear arms.

I was there to defend the Nineth Amendment,

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

Obviously, the Founding Fathers, among them Ben Franklin who published an abortifacient formula in his math book, knew that there were a number of rights that did not come readily to mind, and people might realize them in the future.

This idea of more rights than can be listed was consistent with the Declaration of Independence where in it is stated we are

“Endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights”,

and here they chose not to list them all, but chose to give three examples while acknowledging the existence of many more,

“that AMONG these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

The problem with accepting that the Founding Fathers acknowledged that there were more rights than they could think of by stating there were more and the people retained them, knowing time, circumstances, and humanities growth would uncover more, but the Second Amendment only mentions arms, obviously in accordance with the understanding of what arms were at the time, but there is no acknowledgement that this amendment applies to any future development of arms as there is no mention of the possible existence of arms further developed than what they knew of. In one Amendment they were clear that further possibilities exist, in the other, they seemed settle on things remaining arms-wise as they were.

 Like the Nineth does.

The elders, the majority of those in attendance, although most never having met each other before assembling, had lived similar lives in one regard, activism.

Most of the people I was with came of age in the late sixties, early 1970s and spent their adult lives working for social justice and to help people have their rights recognized whether directly connected to them or not.

Since 1973 the women present had had the right to choose, and for some they were adults before they got it. Some were active in the fight and continued to have to be each time this right was challenged.

The rest have always had the right.

A woman’s right to choose is not my issue, but the rights of Gay people and many rights just assumed by people to be there and will continue to is. I am concerned for the claim that only rights enumerated in the Constitution should be recognized as rights.

It wasn’t an obsession and it wasn’t a career, but I spent 45 years of my adult life fighting for my rights and by extension those of the born and yet to be born, and in various places got to enjoy what rights had been gained where I was at the time I was there, and, moving back to Massachusetts, have enjoyed in my retirement the full rights I fought for and still would be if I was living in other places not in dribs and drabs depending on where some locale was and how far along the rights continuum it was, but all at once and pretty routine at that.

Where my relationship to my rights had been a battle, they had now become the status quo

Like the others gathered who knew people who gave their lives to the cause, I know many people who have died before something they had worked for was attained, and some who lost it all to repressive laws, but the fight was known and the sacrifice clear.

And the sacrifices were made.

However, after all that, to see what you have won for yourself and others born and yet to be taken away so the experience of rights was short lived, almost attained by reaching the accepted age, or from this point on not to be enjoyed gain by anyone, hurts.

And those gathered were hurting, first because of what will not be there for their progeny, and second, for the years of their adult life they spent fighting for something meaningful and a benefit to generations yet to come whose meaning was erased by the vote of four people who lied to get on the Supreme Court.

What was to be and what was coming is not to be now.

The elders will live their days remembering what was won and how their lives were better for it, but for how long? Not as long as the people under fifty who will have fewer rights than their parents and grandparents. Using abortion as an example, most of the people I was with were not fighting for their right to choose. They were there to fight for those who are young and yet to come whose right to choose they had won and are being taken away.

They were there to protest the return of conditions that existed before Roe v Wade, and know will be hard for those who have no idea what it was like and might not be wholly ready for what is to come.

.They see that along with the loss of the right to choose which existed for 50 years and through whose lifetime they benefited, as I see the long fought for rights for Gay people having been won and enjoyed for an even shorter time will have to be fought for to get restored while some locations got to enjoy most rights longer and others were seeing the future as bright, until now, there are many unenumerated rights taken as a given that ca now be taken away.

They have lived and seen what the young are facing and still do not like it.

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Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said he worried about declining respect for institutions and the rule of law because “It bodes ill for a free society.”

He was mad because people did not accept the leaked draft ruling that would end a woman’s right to choose and acted like spoiled children who did not get their way.  People needed to accept the fact that institutions do not always, nor should they be expected to “give you only the outcome you want, or can be bullied” into.

People should learn to “live with outcomes” even the ones they do not agree with, like the results of a popular vote, for instance.

Take his own wife with whom, I assume, he has conversations and with whom, I also assume, Clarence is familiar.

Although having a known history of working for conservative causes a number of which have been cases before the Supreme Court her husband sits on, Ginni Thomas was also a major player in what led up to the January 6, 2021 insurrection by her helping with organizing a pro-Trump gathering just south of the White House, and attending the pre-siege “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6.

After the 2020 election victory of Joe Biden she communicated often with then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, discussing strategies to overturn the election results, and putting pressure on congressional Republicans to overturn the election because she and others did not agree with the results of how the majority of us had voted.

She was an active participant in the effort to overturn the election.

When those who, like her, did not want to accept the outcome of the election took their case to the Supreme Court, Mr. Ginni Thomas was one of the nine justices hearing the case. He was also the only vote in favor of Trump in a second case related to disclosing important information to Congress.

Now we are getting to see and hear texts and audio recordings that pretty much explains why Clarence may have been covering for his wife.

In this case it is not spoiled brats not getting their way that bodes ill for society. it is the hypocrisy in the Supreme Court upon which people sit who repeatedly committed acts of  perjury under oath to get a seat on a Court that is supposed to be based on truth in order to pack the court to get a desired outcome that others are being lectured about needing to mature up and accept, and the wife of a Supreme Court Judge having been involved in devising ways to undo the will of the people with which she did not agree knowing cases created this way would end up before her husband to be voted on and decided by her husband  being seen by an intelligent citizenry that is doing that .

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