This week's items: the Optimist;a noted passing; neo-isolationism; ballot box safety; freedom of the press; commitment to freedom; military preparedness; urban battlefields; more Central American refugees; political myths; the Western alliance; July 1948; home-grown refugees; ducking the issue?; Putin and Trump in Helsinki.

Optimist, 8 July. This week's link.  Bone marrow 16 years ago for the child that was now the flower girl at her wedding.
     National Donor Day is February 14th. Have you "marked" your driver's license (you can in CO and other states) or otherwise signified that you are will to be a donor?
     A "found mother," now 100 who lived only 80 minutes away. A very different kind of loving family.
     Remember that 8' x 3' stolen bike sign in NYC. These and other stories.

A noted passing. Claude Lanzmann was the producer of the much praised 9 1/2 hour documentary, Shoah, the unflinching examination of the Holocaust. In his Washington Post obituary, Harrison Smith wrote,

To many critics, Lanzmann’s work was an unflinching rejoinder to Theodor Adorno, the German philosopher who declared, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” With “Shoah” (1985) and five companion films that followed, Lanzmann made movies that seemed to come further than any other director — perhaps any other artist — in capturing the enormity of the Holocaust.

     Movie critic Roger Ebert wrote, “There is no proper response to this film. It is an enormous fact, a 550-minute howl of pain and anger in the face of genocide. It is one of the noblest films ever made. ... It is not a documentary, not journalism, not propaganda, not political. It is an act of witness.”
     Fittingly, Lanzmann's last Holocaust-related documentary, "The Four Sisters," was released the day before he died.

Trumps's isolationism. Economics-oriented columnist, Robert J. Samuelson, does not think President Trump's neo-isolationism will not work.

The great delusion of Donald Trump’s presidency is that we can thrive by embracing nationalism even though major economic and political events are increasingly driven by international forces. Trump is an isolationist in an era of globalism. It won’t work.

     All else aside -- good and bad -- about the president's personality and tendencies, Samuelson says, " 'Make America Great Again' is a brilliant slogan that captures a nostalgic urge to resurrect an allegedly more glorious past." But, really, is America's "beautiful, great" past possible in today's radically changed world? A return to a nostalgic past would seem to be a fond desire for much of Trump's supposed base. But, is that not just a pipe-dream?
     Two examples. You cannot turn back America's ethnic clock. Census Bureau figures consistently confirm that the birth rate among America's legal non-whites is out-pacing that of Anglo families, who are having too few children. Neither, can you turn back the economic clock to a less prosperous past. "Since 1960 the average income (gross domestic product per person) has roughly tripled after adjusting for inflation. In 2017, that was $59,484." Much of America's current "middle class" has not kept up.

Safety of the coming November mid-term elections.  Just how safe are our 51 voting systems? (Remember? The good news, we have federalism; the bad news, we have federalism! Hence, 51+ voting systems: 50 states + Washington, D.C. and overseas territories) In an article from the Christian Science Monitor, Warren Ritchey examines this question. For openers, consider just one state's experience: “ 'We average 100,000 scans on our [computer] systems a day,' Missouri’s secretary of state, Jay Ashcroft, told a recent Senate panel examining election security. He was referring to unauthorized probing of the state's networks."[emphasis added]
     In CO, our secretary of state was one of few overseers of a state's voting system that who could confidently say, "We're safe here."

Annapolis, MD. Long-time columnist Leonard Pitts (Miami Herald) reflects on the killings of five employees at the Annapolis Capital Gazette amidst today's confrontational climate of real vs. fake news. Many citizen may not realize that He notes,

... it seems fitting that we're having this discussion now. This week, after all, we celebrate the 242nd birthday of these dysfunctional, disjointed and disunited States. So it's a good time to remind ourselves that there's a reason the Founders made the press the only profession protected by name in the Constitution. They understood its critical role as the people's watchdog.

Freedom is hard to imagine without a free, courageous, unvarnished press.

Enduring commitment. Dana Milbanks notes, "Every 75 years or so in our history, Americans have renewed their commitment to freedom." Consider: 1789, Founding Fathers', Bill of Rights; 1863, Lincoln's "a new birth of freedom"; 1941, FDR's "Four Freedoms." Now in 2018, Who, what?

Military unpreparedness. DOD officials (USAF and USN) are concerned about -- and baffled -- by recent unexplained problems experienced by American fighter pilots. This has added to questions of our fighter air forces' preparedness (USAF, USN, and USMC).

Today's urban battlefields. It used to be that war was largely "rural," fought outside the city. Increasingly, though, the front lines are urban, largely in an nation's densely settled slums. The tragic resulting rise in casualties comes as no surprise. Antônio Sampaio writes, "We are [now] in a world grimly reminiscent of that predicted by Marxist urbanist Mike Davis in 2006, where, “Night after night, hornetlike helicopter gunships stalk enigmatic enemies in the narrow streets of the slum districts, pouring hellfire into shanties or fleeing cars. Every morning the slums reply with suicide bombers and eloquent explosions.”

Nicaragua. As is well known, more than a few immigrants fleeing Central America have arrived at "The Wall" or found their way into America. The Trump administration is not dealing well with this mini-crisis. Orlando J. Pérez writes in Foreign Policy that recent election-related actions taken by Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega may unleash another round of violence and send more refugees fleeing northward.

The upcoming Russian summit meeting. George Will considers President Trump's recent summit the Kim Jong Un to have been a largely lackluster, empty photo-op. Will is not at all optimistic about what the president can expect in dealing with President Putin, an even more experienced, steely-eyed unflinching autocrat.

As the president prepares, if this time he does prepare, for his second summit, note all that went wrong at the first. If he does as badly in his July 16 meeting with Vladimir Putin in Finland as he did with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, the consequences could be catastrophic. [emphasis added]

 Will notes that

Nicholas Eberstadt, [American Enterprise Institute] writing in National Review (“Kim Wins in Singapore”), says the one-day meeting was for the United States 'a World Series of unforced errors.' The result was that North Korea 'walked away with a joint communique that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] ministry of foreign affairs.'

     The assessments by Eberstadt and Trump are about as far apart as you can get. Were they talking about the same meeting? "Singapore was, Eberstadt believes, probably the greatest diplomatic coup for North Korea since 1950 and a milestone on 'the DPRK’s road to establishing itself as a permanent nuclear power.' ”
     If Kim was the concert master, then Putin will be the not-to-be-outdone maestro, both autocrats know full well how to "play" our narcissistic president/deal-maker.

The three myths of politics. E.J. Dionne believes we Americans, being normal human beings, are clinging to three major disproved myths. All are incorrect, he says.

First, that political polarization is primarily a product of how elites behave and not the result of real divisions in our country.

Second, that a vast group of party-loathing independents can be mobilized by anti-partisan messages.

Third, that Republicans and Democrats are becoming increasingly and equally extreme, so they should be scolded equally.

 Dionne makes reference to Alan I. Abramowitz’s latest book, “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation, and the Rise of Donald Trump.”

"Over the past two decades,” [Abramowitz] writes, “the proportion of party supporters . . . who have strongly negative feelings toward the opposing party has risen sharply. A growing number of Americans have been voting against the opposing party rather than for their own....When politicians are nasty to the other side, they are mirroring the attitudes of their supporters. Polarization, in other words, is not just an elite thing. It reflects deeply held opinions among voters themselves.” 

     Are too many people, including Dionne, Abramowitz, and yours truly, living in our bubbles? Not hearing, not critically considering, not responsibly responding to what others are saying? Ya' think?

The Western alliance. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, many assumed that the Western Europe, the EU and NATO were "home free." Most certainly, the US had worked to create all this partly in its own self-interest. And, indeed, the rapid expansion of NATO and the EU into Eastern Europe and the Baltic seemed to underscore a more placid future.
     Alas and alack,

"[Today t]he mood before the NATO summit in Brussels on July 11th and 12th is poisonous. As President Donald Trump accuses the Europeans of bad faith and of failing to pull their weight, they accuse him of crass vandalism....Even if the two summits pass off without controversy—as they might, given how Mr Trump delights in confounding his critics—the differing priorities, divergent beliefs and clashing political cultures will remain. The Western alliance is in trouble, and that should worry Europe, America and the world.

Defense spending levels, the Iranian nuclear deal, bias for/against Israel, trade policies, R&D spending, cyber security, political meddling. All are concerns for the future of the alliance.

July 1948. George Marshall and his plan. The audacious -- and successful -- plan to rebuild Western Europe as named for him. The joint efforts kept the Soviets penned in Eastern Europe behind Churchill's "Iron Curtain." This 70-year edifice is now under siege by the country that helped create it. The USSR may be dead, but a revitalizing Russia has taken its place. In 2018, Vladimir Putin is as determined to stir the pot as was Joseph Stalin in 1948.  

Justice Kennedy's last hurrah. In the New York Review of Books, David Cole allows that the Supreme Court in Trump v. Hawaii contented itself with lecturing, but declined to hold the president accountable for unconstitutional acts.
     Monday evening, President Trump announced he had nominated Appellate Justice Brett Kavanaugh to succeed Justice Kennedy. Let the jousting begin!
     In his op-ed, David French, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, for one, thinks Trump should have nominated Appellate Justice Amy Coney Barrett. French said Barrett "is 'a mother of seven kids, an outspoken Christian and a graduate from a 'normal' non-Ivy League law school [albeit Notre Dame]'...The base-motivating, electrifying pick was right there, in the palm of his hand. Then he went establishment." You know: male, white, Ivy League....

Putin and Trump. David J. Kramer has these "before" the Helsinki summit thoughts, about the "con" he believes will occur. He believes that Putin can be expected to

• praise and flatter Trump, follow the Kim Jong Un model that worked;
• blame all of the current US - Russian problems on Obama, which is the ongoing Trump theme;
• agree with Trump's "wrecking ball" approach to the past 70 years of international order, which can only be to Russia's advantage.

Kramer: "We can only hope that Trump’s unpredictability proves this dire forecast wrong. And, if none of that works, well, Putin has some [beautiful Crimean] beachfront property he can offer Trump."

Thank you for reading.