Journalism blog dedicated to stories that either receive little attention in the media or don't get the attention they deserve. With the exception of outrageous conduct that screams for condemnation, all Bullwork of Democracy reporting strives to be unbiased. Tweeting @cccheney
President Jimmy Carter delivers his State of the Union Address to Congress in 1978. /Image via CNN.com
Here we go again.
Forty years ago, Jimmy Carter was elected president after running his campaign as a political outsider. A majority of Americans voted for the Georgia Democrat in 1976, but Carter struggled throughout his presidency to assemble majorities in Congress to support his legislative agenda.
After the 1976 election, the Democrats controlled the U.S. House and Senate, but they did not want to play ball with Jimmy.
Last night, Donald Trump was elected president after running his political campaign as the ultimate outsider, often clashing with prominent members of his own party. A plurality of Americans voted for the New York Republican, but Trump will face a challenge at least as great as the biggest hurdle that hobbled Carter: Governing in Washington after insulting the Washingtonians.
In the 2016 election, Republicans have retained control of the House and Senate. Now, we will see whether GOP lawmakers will play ball with The Donald.
With the broadcast of "The Choice 2016" this week, the PBS Frontline crew has produced yet another outstanding investigative report on the Democratic and Republican candidates for president of the United States.
Editor's Note: Bullwork of Democracy was founded on the firm belief that an informed citizenry is a bulwark of democracy. As much as morally and professionally possible, this one-man-show blog strives to provide information, not advice. Although this post amounts to an endorsement of Hillary Clinton for president, the focus is mainly on why I am voting for the New York Democrat, not advice to other voters.
From the beginning of Donald Trump's presidential campaign, the most redeeming quality of the real estate magnate's candidacy has been his candor.
For millions of voters who are frustrated over a host of unmet challenges such as decades-long economic stagnation for all but the wealthiest Americans, Trump openly sharing his mind has been refreshing.
I am grateful Trump revealed his thoughts during the GOP primary season, rather than reading carefully vetted remarks off a teleprompter. If Trump had been under the influence of Paul Manafort, Stephen Bannon, and Kellyanne Conway from the beginning of his presidential campaign, the public likely would be unaware that the New York Republican is an uninformed and bigoted narcissist with strongman tendencies more fitting for dictatorship than democracy.
(A special thank-you to fellow Granite Stater Corey "Let Trump Be Trump" Lewandowski, who led the Manhattan-based businessman's GOP presidential primary run until he was fired on June 20.)
Elections are about choices.
In November, I will not choose to vote for the Libertarian Party's Gary Johnson or the Green Party's Jill Stein. The stakes are high in this election, with policy challenges galore, including racial tensions, crumbling infrastructure, foreign and domestic terrorism, healthcare reform, and North Korea's growing nuclear weapons arsenal. For me, Johnson and Stein represent pointless protest votes compared to the risks associated with a Trump presidency.
Clinton is clearly my best pick.
For a centrist who is admittedly left-of-center, there are many reasons for me to vote for the Democrat. To name a few, I favor finishing the healthcare-reform job President Obama started with the Affordable Care Act, I favor Democratic president's appointees to the Supreme Court, and I favor the Democratic Party's commitment to environmental protection.
There are even more reasons for me to vote against Trump.
A lot of folks are frustrated and angry. I get it. Getting ahead, one of the essential ingredients of The American Dream, has become a struggle for 99 percent of the people in most parts of the country.
But I cannot have a hand in the risky bet of handing the White House keys to Trump.
While it is admittedly hard to peer into the heart and soul of any politician polished enough to seek the presidency, I believe Trump revealed himself during the hotly contested Republican primary:
Trump taints Mexicans
Regardless of whether Trump is racist, he is a race-baiter
Trump maligns Muslims
Trump mocked disabled New York Times reporter
Draft-dodger Trump belittles sacrifice of U.S. prisoners of war
Trump loves himself
Trump's loose nukes policy in Asia
Trump treats women like caveman
Trump banking on ignorance
Trump's view of black people is jaded and faded
Trump is clueless about important topics
Trump tells Big Lies
STOCK UP ON POPCORN: The presidential debates should be revealing, but PBS Frontline's "The Choice 2016" documentary on Clinton and Trump set to broadcast on Sept. 27 at 9 p.m. EST should lay the candidates' shit bare.
North Korea tests a ballistic missile in December 2012, deploying "an object" in Earth's orbit, according to the North American Aerospace Defense Command. The three-stage rocket could be capable of delivering a warhead to Alaska or the West Coast of the United States. /Image via AP
City-buster nuclear bomb: Check!
Intercontinental ballistic missile: Check!
Miniaturized nuclear warhead: In development.
With Friday's test of a Hiroshima-scale nuclear bomb, North Korea has firmly staked the totalitarian country's claim to nuclear-power status. The South Korean military estimates the explosive yield of the blast at about 10,000 tons of TNT. The nuclear bombed dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 packed 12 to 15 kilotons of explosive yield, leveled 90 percent of the city and killed 80,000 people in a flash.
The nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945 reduced the city to rubble. Dubbed "Little Boy," the American nuclear bomb had about the same explosive force as the atomic device that North Korea tested last week, according to the South Korean military. /Image via www.nbcnews.com
North Korea has either successfully tested or is actively developing enough elements of a fully capable nuclear-weapons arsenal that the time has come to seriously face the reality that the world's most powerful totalitarian nation will soon be threatening at least half the Earth with atomic Armageddon.
With last week's Earth-shaking blast at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site, the Orwellian regime of Kim Jong-un in Pyongyang has proven the ability unleash Hiroshima-scale destruction with atomic bombs. To become capable of threatening at least half the world with thermonuclear blackmail, all that North Korea has to prove now is the ability to miniaturize atomic bombs to equip nuclear-tipped missiles.
The North Korean military is actively developing and testing missiles capable of delivering nuclear warheads to regional neighbors such as Japan, including truck-mounted and submarine-fired ballistic missiles. Just as disturbingly, a North Korean statement on last week's atom bomb test says the outcast country can produce "at will, and as many as it wants, a variety of smaller, lighter and diversified nuclear warheads of higher strike power."
The Kim regime's intercontinental ballistic missile capability ambition is also nearly within grasp, with multiple tests of the three-stage Unha-3 missile, including the successful delivery of a payload into space in December 2012. While it is unclear whether the Unha-3 is presently capable of accurately delivering a warhead to Alaska or the U.S. West Coast, which includes the technological challenge of a nuclear-tipped warhead's fiery plunge into the Earth's atmosphere from space, the Russians proved with Sputnik in 1957 that the ability to place satellites in orbit is a relatively small technological step away from launching nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
According to North Korea state news agency Rodong Sinmun, these images show a successful test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile in August 2016. The North American Aerospace Defense Command confirmed and assessed the missile's 300-mile trajectory, which was tracked from the North Korean coast east toward Japan. /Image via CNN
The maturation of North Korea's nuclear weapons program begs an existential question: How do you contain a rogue totalitarian regime that is capable of incinerating the cities of its regional neighbors and half the world? The containment policy that most of the international community has relied upon for more than half a century to limit the North Korean regime's threat to the rest of humanity is on the verge of collapsing.
The governments of regional and world powers such as China, Japan, Russia and the United States can either rise to this challenge, or humanity will slip back into the nuclear-weapons-fueled terror of The Cold War.
The bodies of Confederate soldiers are strewn along Hagerstown Turnpike after the Battle of Antietam in September 1862. /Photo by Alexander Gardner
I am uniquely positioned to gaze into the maw of the gaping divide between the law enforcement community and the African American community.
My father, who I love very much, is a retired Marine and arch conservative. He is an unwavering supporter of law enforcement who views the Black Lives Matter movement with disdain and suspicion.
My wife, who I love very much, is is an African American and champion of racial equality. She has experienced racial injustice perpetrated by public officials including law enforcement officers. My wife views the police with disdain and suspicion.
The events of the past week--including the fatal police shootings of two black men and the equally barbaric fatal shootings of police officers in Dallas--reflect divisions in American society that are as deep and wide as they were in the years leading up to The Civil War.
If America fails to address the legacies of racial injustice such as police brutality directed at people of color, the nation is at grave risk of unleashing a downward spiral into a level of countryman vs. countryman violence at a scale not seen since the Civil War. If America fails to address the country's gun violence problem, law enforcement officers fearing for their lives will continue to kill civilians in unjustified shootings. If Americans do not stand in unity with all of their countrymen regardless of race, gender, sexuality, political partisanship, religious beliefs and a host of other relatively petty sources of divisiveness compared to our essential role as citizens of a great democratic nation, we will have no one but ourselves to blame for the crumbling of our society.
The events of the past week are so sad.
The problems facing our country are so apparent.
But like so many Southerners and Northerners in the prelude to The Civil War, most Americans are blind to the bloody carnage that is threatening to explode in their faces as the country careens into the current perilous corner of the nation's history.
"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." -President Abraham Lincoln
A shooting victim is carried away from the Pulse nightclub on June 12, 2016. With 49 killed and more than 50 wounded, the Islamic-extremist terrorist attack in Orlando, Fla., is the most deadly mass shooting in U.S. history.
People on U.S. terrorist watch lists can buy military-style assault rifles.
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the most deadly Islamic-extremist terrorist incidents on U.S. soil have been carried out with semi-automatic firearms. These "lone wolf" attacks--including the mass shootings in Santa Barbara, Calif., and Fort Hood in Texas--have emerged as a the primary Islamic-extremist terrorist threat in the United States.
Unless there are commonsense limits on gun ownership, terrorist mass shootings and other gun violence carnage will continue to rage across the country.
In 2002, legendary boxer Muhammad Ali visits Kabul, Afghanistan, as a peace ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund and the World Food Program. Ali died June 3 at a hospital in Scottsdale, Ariz. He was 74. /Reuters photo by Radu Sigheti
Muhammad Ali is the greatest boxer of all time, but he also was a master of the English language. Here are some of his all-time greatest quotes:
"I hated every minute of training, but I said, 'Don't quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.'"
"He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life."
"I know where I'm going and I know the truth, and I don't have to be what you want me to be. I'm free to be what I want."
"If you even dream of beating me you better wake up and apologize."
"Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even."
"Age is whatever you think it is. You are as old as you think you are."
"Wars of nations are fought to change maps. But wars of poverty are fought to map change."
"I've made my share of mistakes along the way; but if I have changed even one life for the better, I haven't lived in vain."
"To be able to give away riches is mandatory if you wish to possess them. This is the only way you will be truly rich."
"No one knows what to say in the loser's locker room."
"It isn't the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it's the pebble in your shoe."
"The man who has no imagination has no wings."
"I am an ordinary man who worked hard to develop the talent that I was given. I believed in myself, and I believe in the goodness of others."
"My principles are more important than the money or my title."
"I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world."
Six years ago, drinking alone late at night in his Hampton, N.H., apartment, Amy Spec. Christopher Journeau took his own life. He suffered from PTSD linked to his combat duty during the Iraq War. /Family photo
Help a veteran surmount the psychological impacts of war. Read the PTSD-tinged story of Army Spec. Christopher Journeau.
More than a dozen skinned cats hang on hooks at the Yulin Meat Festival in China. The People's Republic also has a massive dog meat trade, with as many as 20 million canines slaughtered annually for human consumption. /Reuters image
On the timeline of human evolution, civilization has existed for the blink of an eye.
There may be no better illustration of humanity's relatively brief development of civilization than the Yulin Meat Festival. Humane Society International has documented this horrific celebration of the dog-and-cat meat trade in China. But if anyone wants to confirm the existence of this extreme barbarism in the 21st century, all they have to do is Google search images of the festival. Warning: These photographs are unbearable if you have a semblance of a conscience.
Depending on which distant ancestral species you pick for homo sapiens, the human brain is rooted in an evolutionary timeline about 3 million years deep. Humans have been developing the trappings of civilization such as written language for about 40,000 years, which is a figure that generously considers cave paintings as a form of written communication. In other words, humanity and its bipedal forebearers have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth as savages.
The mass slaughter of humans' primary animal companions in China--and the rest of humanity turning a blind eye to the practice--reflects who we are as a species. It is not a pretty picture.
Astronomer Carl Sagan was one of the most influential scientists and teachers of the 20th century. Millions of people around the world gained insights about the universe, and their place in it, from his television series "Cosmos" on PBS. /NASA image
Genius, compassion and humility are the keys to survival for humanity in the Atomic Era.
Carl Sagan possessed these priceless qualities in enormous quantities. In 1990, he urged NASA to spin Voyager I around to capture an image of Earth before the spacecraft left our solar system. That image of the "pale blue dot" where humanity will stand or fall inspired Sagan's genius, compassion and humility to reach astronomical proportions.
Sagan's words in the three-minute video below pack more wisdom than most of us will accumulate in a lifetime.
