the attitude with arnie arnesen the Tues edition April 21
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Arnie Arnesen
Apr 20, 2026, 7:46:11 PM (2 days ago) Apr 20
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The attitude with arnie arnesen
opening thoughts: Lyn Ekedahl poem Words aren't enough
opening thoughts: Lyn Ekedahl poem Words aren't enough
producers: Dave Scott and Stephanie Collins
on Clarence Thomas now I can despise Clarence for his lies and his rewrite of history as well as his judicial decisions that claim to be based on his originalist agenda that seeks to dismantle the modern administrative state, overturning liberal precedents, restrict federal power..."His judicial philosophy emphasizes self-reliance (except if you are a corporation), a color-blind Constitution, expanded gun rights, and reduced government intervention in civil society. (except when it comes to controlling women's bodies and forcing religion into the public sphere)"
Here is what Clarence claimed as history: "The speech is ostensibly bemoaning the progressive movement of the early 20th century, but the New Republic’s Matt Ford has a fantastic piece about how his history is completely wrong. Thomas claims that the American progressive movement was founded by Wilson and imported from Germany, neither of which is true. It was a reaction to corporate abuses and corrupt governance and horrific things like child labor and environmental destruction. It was an organic, grassroots movement, but Thomas says it was a top-down push to suppress individual liberties and put the government in charge of everything. That is a false, libertarian counterhistory that has no basis in reality. The justice also asserts that progressivism led to the worst atrocities of the 20th century, including Nazi Germany, Stalinism, and Mao, and draws a straight line from that to progressivism today"
and at the New Republic that share the story of Thomas' speech ends this way: If one wants to be truly cynical, there is something awfully convenient for Thomas about marking the turn of the twentieth century as the point where things went awry. As I’ve noted before, the Gilded Age was an era of widespread public corruption, extraordinary wealth disparities, and excessive concentrations of corporate power. “The century of progressivism,” Thomas claims, “did not go well.” For whom? By the mid-twentieth century, progressive reforms (and, later, the New Deal laws that built upon them) helped Americans reach higher standards of living than they could have imagined. Progressivism’s ideological successors helped overthrow Jim Crow laws and expand the Constitution’s protections for millions of Americans.
The only ones who really lost out were America’s wealthiest citizens, who had to give up their plutocratic control over government. In our current revival of the Gilded Age, they now hope to restore it with Thomas’s help. I found it almost amusing when Thomas castigated others for “fall[ing] prey to the enchanting siren songs of flattery” and being “enticed by access to things that were previously unavailable to them” when arriving in Washington, D.C.
“My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today,” Thomas had told the audience at the start of his speech, referring to the GOP megadonor who spent the last 20 years gracing Thomas with fancy vacations, personal gifts, and other forms of largesse that went unreported on public-disclosure forms. Among them were luxury yacht trips, more than $100,000 for a portrait of Thomas at Yale Law School, starting funds for Ginni Thomas’s political organization, and much more. No wonder the justice prefers the Gilded Age. https://newrepublic.com/article/209183/clarence-thomas-history-progressivism-speech
No Guardrails for Trump’s Dark Triad. https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/04/17/no-guardrails-for-trumps-dark-triad/
his unpublished piece: DEFENSE SPENDING SPIRALS OUT OF CONTROL
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 60 cities…two fine, fully equipped hospitals. This is not a way of life at all…. It is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” (President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1956, “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors.)
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of War!” (Pope Leo XIV, April 16, 2026)
Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter were graduates of U.S. military academies and, perhaps as a result, understood the limits and constraints on the use of force. They did not engage in the type of planning that led to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Johnson’s Vietnam, Reagan’s Granada, Bush II’s Iraq, Obama’s Afghanistan, and now Trump’s Iran.
With the exception of one fatality in Lebanon in 1958 and eight U.S. servicemen in Iran in the unsuccessful hostage rescue mission, no U.S. forces lost their lives in combat operations during Eisenhower and Carter’s three terms in office.
With the exception of Carter, Eisenhower’s successors ignored his warning about the “potential” for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power”—his reference to the need to control military influence over national security policy. The largest defense budget in U.S. history is strengthened by the budgets of the Veterans Administration ($490 billion), intelligence ($115 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($118 billion). Even before this year’s increased spending, the United States devoted more to military spending than the rest of the world. Moreover, the increases in defense spending would add $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
Trump’s defense budget for 2027, which requests $1.5 trillion, demonstrates what Eisenhower’s warnings were all about. Trump’s budget would make $73 billion in cuts to environmental, education and health research programs. The Department of Health and Human Services would lose $15 billion, primarily in federally funded medical research. Another $15 billion would be cut from combating climate change, eliminating funds that improve clean energy and reduce harmful emissions. The cuts to non-defense spending amount to cuts of more than ten percent.
The cuts in non-defense spending require gutting and cutting a huge range of domestic programs that millions of Americans rely on every day. Trump’s budget fully eliminates HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program and its Fair Housing Initiatives program. The Food for Peace program will be gone along with the Job Corps. NIH funding will lose $5 billion; FEMA $1.3 billion; humanitarian assistance $2 billion; NASA science and research programs $3.4 billion. The Environmental Protections Agency, which is being gutted under its director, Lee Zeldin, will lose more than half of its budget; the Department of State, which barely exists, will lose more than 30% of its budget; HHS will lose over $100 billion or more than 10% of its budget.
Russell Vought, the budget director, stressed that the goal for spending was driven by ensuring that the United States “continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military, and described the domestic cuts as targeting wasteful or “woke” spending in order to “achieve real savings.” There is no discussion of why the U.S. must be so powerful, particularly in view of its unequaled power projection capabilities the world over and its unequaled geographic superiority due to friendly borders and the protection afforded by two oceans. The goal of military supremacy must be reexamined.
The mainstream media, particularly the Washington Post, emphatically supports the wasteful increase for defense. In January, a Post editorial called the 50% increase a “bargain,” and argued that the “nation cannot afford” more “non-defense spending.” Last week, a Post editorial argued that the United States hs the “technical prowess and financial ability to maintain its military preparedness around the world. It would be a shame if the country simply chose not to do it.”
The mainstream media make no attempt to justify the deployment of U.S. troops in more than 150 countries, the counter-terrorism operations in nearly half of the world’s nations, or the 700 military facilities the world over. At the same time, the media exaggerate the threat of so-called “strongmen” such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, who are not threats—let alone existential threats—to the United States or to U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea in the Indo-Pacific or to NATO countries in Europe. The armed dominance of the United States has caused more turmoil over the past 50 years than the so-called strongmen.
But there is one strongman to worry about—the one here at home. Defense spending will not help us with a president who is trying to establish absolute authority over all federal government agencies and to weaken the institutions of higher education, the media, and the law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has given far too much support to the excesses of the Trump presidency.
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies…a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 60 cities…two fine, fully equipped hospitals. This is not a way of life at all…. It is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” (President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1956, “The Chance for Peace” delivered before the American Society of Newspaper Editors.)
“Enough of the idolatry of self and money! Enough of the display of power! Enough of War!” (Pope Leo XIV, April 16, 2026)
Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Jimmy Carter were graduates of U.S. military academies and, perhaps as a result, understood the limits and constraints on the use of force. They did not engage in the type of planning that led to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs, Johnson’s Vietnam, Reagan’s Granada, Bush II’s Iraq, Obama’s Afghanistan, and now Trump’s Iran.
With the exception of one fatality in Lebanon in 1958 and eight U.S. servicemen in Iran in the unsuccessful hostage rescue mission, no U.S. forces lost their lives in combat operations during Eisenhower and Carter’s three terms in office.
With the exception of Carter, Eisenhower’s successors ignored his warning about the “potential” for the “disastrous rise of misplaced power”—his reference to the need to control military influence over national security policy. The largest defense budget in U.S. history is strengthened by the budgets of the Veterans Administration ($490 billion), intelligence ($115 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($118 billion). Even before this year’s increased spending, the United States devoted more to military spending than the rest of the world. Moreover, the increases in defense spending would add $7 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years.
Trump’s defense budget for 2027, which requests $1.5 trillion, demonstrates what Eisenhower’s warnings were all about. Trump’s budget would make $73 billion in cuts to environmental, education and health research programs. The Department of Health and Human Services would lose $15 billion, primarily in federally funded medical research. Another $15 billion would be cut from combating climate change, eliminating funds that improve clean energy and reduce harmful emissions. The cuts to non-defense spending amount to cuts of more than ten percent.
The cuts in non-defense spending require gutting and cutting a huge range of domestic programs that millions of Americans rely on every day. Trump’s budget fully eliminates HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program and its Fair Housing Initiatives program. The Food for Peace program will be gone along with the Job Corps. NIH funding will lose $5 billion; FEMA $1.3 billion; humanitarian assistance $2 billion; NASA science and research programs $3.4 billion. The Environmental Protections Agency, which is being gutted under its director, Lee Zeldin, will lose more than half of its budget; the Department of State, which barely exists, will lose more than 30% of its budget; HHS will lose over $100 billion or more than 10% of its budget.
Russell Vought, the budget director, stressed that the goal for spending was driven by ensuring that the United States “continues to maintain the world’s most powerful and capable military, and described the domestic cuts as targeting wasteful or “woke” spending in order to “achieve real savings.” There is no discussion of why the U.S. must be so powerful, particularly in view of its unequaled power projection capabilities the world over and its unequaled geographic superiority due to friendly borders and the protection afforded by two oceans. The goal of military supremacy must be reexamined.
The mainstream media, particularly the Washington Post, emphatically supports the wasteful increase for defense. In January, a Post editorial called the 50% increase a “bargain,” and argued that the “nation cannot afford” more “non-defense spending.” Last week, a Post editorial argued that the United States hs the “technical prowess and financial ability to maintain its military preparedness around the world. It would be a shame if the country simply chose not to do it.”
The mainstream media make no attempt to justify the deployment of U.S. troops in more than 150 countries, the counter-terrorism operations in nearly half of the world’s nations, or the 700 military facilities the world over. At the same time, the media exaggerate the threat of so-called “strongmen” such as Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un, who are not threats—let alone existential threats—to the United States or to U.S. allies such as Japan and South Korea in the Indo-Pacific or to NATO countries in Europe. The armed dominance of the United States has caused more turmoil over the past 50 years than the so-called strongmen.
But there is one strongman to worry about—the one here at home. Defense spending will not help us with a president who is trying to establish absolute authority over all federal government agencies and to weaken the institutions of higher education, the media, and the law. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has given far too much support to the excesses of the Trump presidency.
opening thoughts two:
The Parents of Minab School Children Killed in US Bombing Write to Pope Leo XIV
Iranian parents whose children died in the February 28 U.S. strike have written Pope Leo XIV a letter of thanks — and the phrases they quote back are his own. The White House has yet to apologize. https://www.thelettersfromleo.com/p/the-parents-of-minab-school-children
The parents close their letter with the only thing left to ask.
“Our children will never return home again to build a better tomorrow, but the prayer of us bereaved fathers and mothers is that your message to ‘lay down weapons’ is heard. We ask you to continue to be the voice of the voiceless children and strive to reopen ‘all paths of dialogue,’ so that no more weapons are built, and no father or mother anywhere on this earthly sphere is forced to whisper a nighttime lullaby over the cold tombstone of their child.”
An American pope has been heard by Iranian mothers and fathers. In Washington, his words are still waiting.
part two:
Sanders Leads Launch of ‘Worker Power’ Movement to Fight ‘Status Quo Economics’“Unless we fundamentally transform our economic and political systems, the worst is yet to come,” Sen. Bernie Sanders warned.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
KEEPING THE POT STIRRED SO SCUM DOESN'T RISE TO THE TOP - Anonymous
D. ARNIE ARNESEN
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Host of "The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen"
D. ARNIE ARNESEN
15 Rumford Street
Concord NH 03301
nha...@gmail.com
(C) 603-321-7654
Host of "The Attitude with Arnie Arnesen"
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