#galusha grow

[antebellumite]

Antebellum Miscellaneous Casting 2/?

Before i continue i feel like it needs to be said that i actually dont know what any of these peoples acting styles are like, so this is 90% vibes 7% faceclaim and 3% concentration of will, so:

Matthew Daddario as Alexander Hamilton Jr.

Rebecca Hall as Sarah Polk

Emily Blunt as Lucretia Clay

Evan Rachel Wood as Margaret Eaton

Natalie Dormer as Floride Calhoun

Ben Barnes as Galusha Grow

Adam Driver as Roger B. Taney

Tom Cruise as John J. Crittenden

Luke Evans as Lawrence Keitts

Benedict Cumberbatch as Jefferson Davis

Sophie Nelisse as Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Jennifer Lawrence as Varina Davis

Chris Pratt as Horace Greeley

Jared Padalecki as Anson Burlingame

and

Mitt Romney as Franklin Pierce

[wikiuntamed]

On this day in Wikipedia: Thursday, 31st August

Welcome, Benvenuto, Willkommen, Selam 🤗 What does @Wikipedia say about 31st August through the years 🏛️📜🗓️?

31st August 2021 🗓️ : Death - Mahal (actress) Mahal, Filipino comedian and actress (b. 1974) "Noemi Tesorero (December 29, 1974 – August 31, 2021), known professionally as Mahal, was a Filipino actress, comedian and vlogger. Noted for her childlike roles, she had dwarfism and a giggly personality...."

31st August 2018 🗓️ : Death - Carole Shelley Carole Shelley, British-American actress (b. 1939) "Carole Augusta Shelley (16 August 1939 – 31 August 2018) was an English actress who made her career in the United States and United Kingdom. Her many stage roles included Gwendolyn Pigeon in The Odd Couple and Madame Morrible in the original Broadway cast of the musical Wicked. She won the Tony..."

Image by Photographer-Henry Grossman

31st August 2013 🗓️ : Death - Jan Camiel Willems Jan Camiel Willems, Belgian mathematician and theorist (b. 1939) "Jan Camiel Willems (18 September 1939 – 31 August 2013) was a Belgian mathematical system theorist who has done most of his scientific work while residing in the Netherlands and the United States. He is most noted for the introduction of the notion of a dissipative system and for the development of..."

31st August 1973 🗓️ : Death - John Ford John Ford, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1894) "John Martin Feeney (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973), known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director. He was one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed..."

Image by Los Angeles Daily News

31st August 1921 🗓️ : Birth - Raymond Williams Raymond Williams, Welsh author and academic (d. 1988) "Raymond Henry Williams (31 August 1921 – 26 January 1988) was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some..."

Image by GwydionM

31st August 1823 🗓️ : Birth - Galusha A. Grow Galusha A. Grow, American lawyer and politician, 28th Speaker of the United States House of Representatives (d. 1907) "Galusha Aaron Grow (August 31, 1823 – March 31, 1907) was an American politician, lawyer, writer and businessman, who served as 24th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1861 to 1863. Elected as a Democrat in the 1850 congressional elections, he switched to the newly organized..."

Image by Matthew Brady and Levin Corbin Handy

31st August 🗓️ : Holiday - Christian feast day: Paulinus of Trier "Saint Paulinus of Trier (died 358) was bishop of Trier and a supporter of Athanasius in the conflict with Arianism. At the Synod of Arles (353) he was targeted by the Arians, and was exiled to Phrygia, being effectively singled out by the Emperor Constantius II. He died in exile five years later,..."

Image licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0? by Stefan Kühn

[todayinhistory]

February 6th 1858: Brawl in the House of Representatives

On this day in 1858, in the early hours of the morning, a fight broke out in the U.S. House of Representatives. The altercation began between Laurence Keitt of South Carolina and abolitionist Galusha Grow of Pennsylvania. The two had been engaged in a particularly fraught debate over the Kansas controversy. Since the passage of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, the territory had become a hotbed of sectional violence between Northerners and Southerners who rushed to the area to claim the land as free or slave respectively. Keitt and Grow were debating the merits of the Lecompton Constitution, the pro-slavery document drafted by the fraudulently-elected Kansas convention that President Buchanan wanted Congress to support in order to admit Kansas as a slave state. Keitt had a history of involvement with violence in the halls of Congress. In 1856, he prevented others from coming to the aid of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner as he was savagely beaten by South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks. The 1858 conflict began when Grow crossed to the Democratic side of the chamber to consult a colleague, causing Keitt to become incensed and call Grow a ‘black Republican puppy’. Grow shot back calling Keitt a 'negro-driver’, and with that the House descended into an open brawl. The Speaker and Sergeant-at-Arms, wielding the ceremonial mace, failed in their attempts to restore order. The fight finished in a particularly absurd manner, with Wisconsin Representative John Potter pulling the toupee from Mississippi Representative William Barksdale’s head, causing the floor to erupt in laughter when he put it back on the wrong way round.

“Hooray, boys! I’ve got his scalp!” - What Potter supposedly said when he seized Barksdale’s wig

[recommendedlisten]

Recommended Listen is doing its best to keep its head afloat with the albums you need to hear, but the struggle of 2022 has been that it’s on something else entirely with its level of highlights coming into our lives on a near-weekly basis. What used to be one or two albums a week has become at least five as the norm. It very much seems like most artists and labels sat on their homework over the past two years until it became safer to support it live on tour (and even now, is it?)

Anyhow, Recommended Listen is expanding this edition of Listen to These to lighten the load in fitting in everything worth acknowledging, and that may likely be the case again going forward. As usual, full album reviews and past recaps for anything you may have missed can be found here and here.

Beach House - Once Twice Melody [Sub Pop]

We can’t take Beach House for granted, and in a year where great new music has been in such frequency, you can imagine that their double album opus Once Twice Melody might be a lot to ask of listeners in the content overload age. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally definitely have nailed down singularity with their style at this stage in their career, but their eighth studio album is perhaps their most definitive sensation of instantaneous synesthesia and mind-and-physical-nature-altering music they’ve produced yet. Embellishing their dream-pop elixir with strings and psychedelic portals to worlds beyond worlds, Once Twice Melody is well worth its lengthy travel all while promising a kind of transcendence only the Baltimore duo hold the key to.

Once Twice Melody by Beach House

Drug Church - Hygiene [Pure Noise Records]

No matter the medium, Drug Church vocalist Patrick Kindlon is in no shortage of big, combustible thoughts for listeners to blow their minds to, and on the long-awaited sophomore effort from the band -- which has now solidified itself as a fully fleshed and muscled force with guitarists Nick Cogan and Cory Galusha, bassist Pat Wynne and drummer Chris Villeneuve -- they lay on the fire heavily. On the heels of last year’s excellent Tawny EP, Hygiene does an even deeper dive into art, our toxic culture, and disconcerted thoughts, and indulges their ugliest sides with their own mortar of grungy, brutalist anthems. Yet, Hygiene is also polished and sounds massively scaled to turn miles of cities into parking lots, and if there were ever an anti-hero post-hardcore who could go big and do a lot of good in burning it all to the ground, Drug Church would be it.

Hygiene by DRUG CHURCH

Maneka - Dark Matters [Skeletal Lightning]

Devon McKnight has led the great underground punk band Grass Is Greener, played guitar in the always cantankerously colorful Speedy Ortiz, and as his own solo outlet as Maneka, put a face behind the feedback. Dark Matters, his second full-length, is a special one, though, that witnesses McKnight coming into his own by focalizing the experience of being Black and an artist within spaces still very primarily designed around Caucasian comfort, and throwing out the creative rule book in the process. We hear his voice loudly, but so do the songs resonate just as well whether they reflect a polymathic ear that seamlessly fuses together every generational facet of indie rock, punk, mercurial hip-hop, and shade of goth in between.

Dark Matters by MANEKA

Mitski - Laurel Hell [Dead Oceans]

The world Mitski reenters the frame into with Laurel Hell is a very different one than where she last left us with the indie pop grandeur that was her acclaimed third album in 2019′s Be the Cowboy. Global problems aside, the scene -- background and foreground included -- which her persona enters has changed with it, with her audience now being absorbed into TikTok culture and the mythology behind her artistry growing with it. Nevertheless, Mitski has made Laurel Hell an understated statement for a reason, with it being a more patient listen that holds on quieter moments longer in order for its vivid realizations in full color as well as its emotional connect to be heard only by those who continue to listen even if she were to fall off the face of the Earth again.

Laurel Hell by Mitski

ROSALÍA - MOTOMAMI [Columbia Records]

Following her sophomore breakout in 2019′s El Mal Querer, ROSALÍA has never stopped working in releasing videos, singles, or working in collaboration with culture shaping forces like the Weeknd, Bad Bunny, and Cardi B to make her metamorphosing style of global art-pop into music that translates over beyond hipster cred status and into the common pop culture conscious. With MOTOMAMI, the Spanish superstar gets there by rewriting every genre language as her own, and tapping into what has come to define her work in atypical, oft morbid, oft horny songwriting. This time, it’s meticulously produced with a consumer-friendly edge in its presentation that is incomparable to everything else in today’s landscape. The future of reggaeton, hip-hop, pop, and even traditional Spanish folk balladry is right here in one world where ROSALÍA is the all-creator.

Star Party - Meadow Flower [Feel It Records]

Star Party would probably be a favorite of Kurt Cobain and Sonic Youth if they existed a few decades earlier, and they’re doing what so few indie punk bands today are overlooking. What the duo of Carolyn Brennan and Ian Corrigan sonically create is something harder-edged in its fast trashing energy, yet with a dreamy siren sound in their melodies as well as the way words move through the rash of reverb and primal drum machines that offset its frayed edges as both loud and soft. On their debut full-length Meadow Flower, spring meets an instantaneous climactic point in the way the band gives noise pop a new bloom and never lets off the pedal (even in this wild gas price economy!) because it’s all a self-created alternative energy.

Meadow Flower by Star Party

Vein.fm - The World Is Going to Ruin You [Closed Casket Activities]

The World Is Going to Ruin You, and not just because it’s the truth, but that’s the energy of the devastation Vein.fm create on their sophomore effort. To anticipate some level of destruction from the Greater Boston area metalcore band was a known following 2018′s breakthrough debut Errorzone, but this album also hears the band hungry to maximize it while scaling the levels of ungodliness like their peers Code Orange and Knocked Loose in uncovering dark corners in their heavy artillery where they may be able to push the genre beyond its comforts with influences of industrial, electronic, and modern post-hardcore (see: “Fear In Non Fiction” featuring Thursday’s Geoff Rickly) surmounting.

This World Is Going To Ruin You by Vein.fm

[todaysdocument]

Roll Call Tally on the Expulsion of Preston Brooks, 7/14/1856

After Preston Brooks beat Charles Sumner nearly to death with a cane in the Senate chamber, the House voted on whether to expel him from Congress. They failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed. 

Series: General Records, 1791 - 2010

Record Group 233: Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 1789 - 2015

Transcription:

July 14. 1856

On LD Campbells 1st Resn from Sel Com

THIRTY-FOURTH CONGRESS

FIRST SESSION

335

[column one]

YEA | NAMES. | NAY.

A.

|William Aiken...S.C. | 1

1 | Charles J. Albright...Ohio. |

| James C. Allen...Ill. | 2

2| John Allison...Penn. |

B.

3 | Edward Ball...Ohio |

4 | Lucian Barbour...Ind. |

|David Barclay [struck through] |

| William Barksdale...Miss. | 3

| P.H. Bell...Texas. | 4

5 | Henry Bennett...N.Y. |

| Hendley S. Bennett...Miss. | 5

6 | Samuel P. Benson...Me. |

7 | Charles Billinghurst...Wis |

8 | John A. Bingham...Ohio |

9 | James Bishop...N.J. |

10 | Philemon Bliss...Ohio |

| Thomas S. Bocock...Va. | 6

| Thomas F. Bowie...Md. | 7

| William W. Boyce...S.C. | 8

11 | Samuel C. Bradshaw...Penn. |

| Lawrence O'B. Braneh...N.C. | 9

12 | Samuel Brenton...Ind. |

| Preston S. Brooks [struck through]...S.C. |

13 | Jacob Broom...Penn. |

14 | James Buffinton...Mass. |

15 | Anson Burlingame...Mass. |

| Henry C. Burnett...Ky. | 10

C.

| John Cadwalader...Penn. | 11

16 | James H. Campbell...Penn. |

|John P. Campbell [struck through]...Ky. |

17 | Lewis D. Campbell...Ohio |

| John S. Carlile...Va. | 12

| Samuel Caruthers [struck through]...Mo. |

| John S. Caskie...Va. | 13

18 | Calvin C. Chaffee...Mass. |

| Thomas Child, jr [struck through] ...N.Y. |

19 | Bayard Clarke...N.Y. |

20 | Ezra Clark, jr...Conn. |

21 | Isaiah D. Clawson...N.J. |

| Thomas L. Clingman...N.C. | 14

| Howell Cobb...Ga. | 15

| Williamson R.W. Cobb...Ala. | 16

22 | Schuyler Colfax...Ind. |

23 | Linus B. Comins...Mass. |

24 | John Covode...Penn. |

| Leander M. Cox...Ky. | 17

25 | Aaron H. Cragin...N.H. |

| Burton Craige...N.C. | 18

| Martin J. Crawford...Ga. | 19

| Elisha D. Cullen [struck through]...Del. |

26 | William Cumback...Ind. |

D.

27 | William S. Damrell...Mass. |

| Thomas G. Davidson...La. | 20

| H. Winter Davis...Md. | 21

28 | Timothy Davis...Mass. |

29 | Timothy C. Day...Ohio. |

30 | Sidney Dean...Conn. |

| James W. Denver...Cal. | 22

31| Ale["xander" struck through] De Witt...Mass. |

[Column Two]

YEA. | NAMES. | NAY.

32 | John Dick...Penn. |

33 | Samuel Dickson...N.Y. |

34 | Edward Dodd...N.Y. |

| James F. Dowdell...Ala. | 23

35 | George G. Dunn...Ind. |

36 | Nathaniel B. Durfee...R.I. |

E.

37 | John R. Edie...Penn. |

| Henry A. Edmundson [struck through] ...Va. | 1

38 | Francis S. Edwards...N.Y. |

| John M. Elliott...Ky. | 24

39 | J Reece Emrie...Ohio. |

| William H. English...Ind. | 25

| Emerson Etheridge...Tenn. | 26

| George Eustis, jr...La. | 27

| Lemuel D. Evans...Texas. | 28

F.

| Charles J. Faulkner...Va. | 29

| Thomas T. Flagler [struck through]...N.Y. |

| Thomas B. Florence...Penn. | 30

| Nathaniel G. Foster...Ga. | - 31

| Henry M. Fuller [struck through] ...Penn. |

| Thomas J. D. Fuller [struck through] ...Me. |

G.

40 | Samuel Galloway...Ohio. |

41 | Joshua R. Giddings...Ohio. |

42 | William A. Gilbert...N.Y. |

| William O. Goode...Va. | 32

43 | Amos P. Granger...N.Y. |

| Alfred B. Greenwood...Ark. | 33

44 | Galusha A. Grow...Penn. |

H.

| Augustus Hall...Iowa. | 34

45 | Robert B. Hall...Mass |

46 | Aaron Harlan...Ohio. |

| J. Morrison Harris...Md. | 35

| Sampson W. Harris...Ala. | 36

| Thomas L. Harris...Ill. | 37

| John Scott Harrison...Ohio. | 38

47 | Solomon G. Haven...N.Y. |

| Philemon T. Herbert...Cal. |

48 | John Hickman...Penn. |

49 | Henry W. Hoffman...Md. |

50 | David P. Holloway...Ind. |

51 | Thomas R. Horton...N.Y. |

52 | Valentine B. Horton...Ohio. |

| George S. Houston...Ala. | 39

53 | William A. Howard...Mich. |

54 | Jonas A. Hughston...N.Y. |

J.

| Joshua H. Jewett...Ky. | 40

| George W. Jones...Tenn. | 41

| J. Glancy Jones...Penn. | 42

K.

| Lawrence M. Keitt...S.C. | 43

| John Kelly...N.Y. | 44

55 | William H. Kelsey...N.Y. |

| Luther M. Kennett...Mo. | 45

| Zedekiah Kidwell...Va. | 46

56 | Rufus H. King...N.Y. |

57 | Chauncey L. Knapp...Mass. |

58 | Jonathan Knight...Penn. |

59 | Ebenezer Knowlton...Me. |

60 | James Knox...Ill. |

61 | John C. Kunkel...Penn. |

[Column Three]

YEA. | NAMES. | NAY.

L.

| William A. Lake...Miss. | 47

62 | Benjamin F. Leiter...Ohio. |

| John Letcher...Va. | 48

| James J. Lindley...Mo. | 49

| John H. Lumpkin...Ga. | 50

M.

| Daniel Mace [struck through] ...Ind. |

| Alexander K. Marshall...Ky. | 51

| Humphrey Marshall...Ky. | 52

| Samuel S Marshall...Ill. | 53

63 | Orsamus B. Matteson...N.Y. |

| Augustus E. Maxwell...Fla. | 54

64 | Andrew Z. McCarty...N.Y. |

| Fayette McMullin...Va. | 55

| John McQueen...S.C. | 56

65 | James Meacham...Vt. |

66 | Killian Miller...N.Y. |

| Smith Miller...Ind. | 57

| John S. Millson...Va. | 58

67 | William Millward...Penn. |

68 | Oscar F. Moore...Ohio. |

69 | Edwin B. Morgan...N.Y. |

70 | Justin S. Morrill...Vt. |

71 | Richard Mott...i o |

72 | Ambrose S. Murray...N.Y. |

N.

73 | Matthias H. Nichols...Ohio |

74 | Jesse O. Norton...Ill. |

O.

75 | Andrew Oliver...N.Y. |

| Mordecai Oliver...Mo. | 59

| James L. Orr...S.C. | 60

P.

76 | Asa Packer...Penn. |

| Robert T. Paine [struck through] ...N.C. |

77 | John M. Parker...N.Y. |

78 | John J. Pearce...Penn. |

79 | George W. Peek...Mich. |

80 | Guy R. Pelton...N.Y. |

81 | Alexander C.M. Pennington. N.J. |

82 | John J. Perry...Me. |

83 | John U. Pettit...Ind. |

| John S. Phelps...Mo. | 61

84 | James Pike...N.H. |

| Gilchrist Porter...Mo. | 62

| Paulus Powell...Va. | 63

85 | Benjamin Pringle...N.Y. |

86 | Samuel A. Purviance...Penn. |

| Richard C. Puryear...N.C. | 64

Q.

| John A. Quitman...Miss. | 65

R.

| Edwin G. Reade...N.C. | 66

| Charles Ready...Tenn. | 67

| James B. Ricaud...Md. | 68

| William A. Richardson [struck through] ...Ill. |

87 | David Ritchie...Penn. |

| Thomas Rivers...Tenn. | 69

88 | George R. Robbins...N.J. |

89 | Anthony E. Roberts...Penn |

90 | David F. Robison...Penn. |

| Thomas Ruffin...N.C. | 70

| Albert Rust...Ark. | 71

[Column Four]

YEA. | NAMES. | NAY.

S.

91 | Alvah Sabin...Vt. |

92 | Russell Sage...N.Y. |

| John M. Sandidge...La. | 72

93 | William R. Sapp...Ohio. |

| John H. Savage...Tenn. | 73

94 | Harvey D. Scott...Ind. |

| James L. Seward...Ga. | 74

95 | John Sherman...Ohio. |

| Eli S Shorter...Ala. | 75

96 | George A. Simmons...N.Y. |

| Samuel A. Smith...Tenn. | 76

| William Smith...Va. | 77

| William R. Smith...Ala. | 78

| William H. Sneed...Tenn. | 79

97 | Francis E. Spinner...N.Y. |

98 | Benjamin Stanton...Ohio. |

| Alexander H. Stephens...Ga. | 80

| James A. Stewart...Md. | 81

99 | James S.T. Stranahan...N.Y. |

| Samuel F. Swope...Ky. | 82

T.

| Albert G. TAlbott...Ky. | 83

100 | Mason W. Tappan...N.H. |

| Miles Taylor...La. | 84

101 | James Thorington...Iowa. |

102 | Benjamin B. Thurston...R.I. |

103 | Lemuel Todd...Penn. |

104 | Mark Trafton...Mass |

| Robert P. Trippe...Ga. | 85

105 | Job R. Tyson...Penn. |

U.

| Warner L. Underwood...Ky. | 86

V.

106 | George Vail...N.J. |

| William W. Valk [struck through] ...N.Y. |

W.

107 | Edward Wade...Ohio. |

108 | Abram Wakeman...N.Y.

109 | David S. Walbridge...Mich. |

110 | Henry Waldron...Mich |

| Percy Walker...Ala. | 87

| Hiram Warner...Ga. | 88

111 | Cadwalader C. Washburne, Wis. |

112 | Ellihu B. Washburne...Ill. |

113 | Israel Washburn, jr...Me. |

| Albert G. Watkins...Tenn. | 89

114 | Cooper K. Watson...Ohio.|

115 | William W. Welch...Conn. |

116 | Daniel Wells, jr...Wis. |

| John Wheeler...N.Y. | 90

117 | Thomas R. Whitney...N.Y. |

118 | John Williams...N.Y. |

| Warren Winslow...N.C. | 91

119 | John M. Wood...Me. |

120 | John Woodruff...Conn. |

121 | James H. Woodworth...Ill. |

| Daniel B. Wright...Miss. | 92

| John V. Wright...Tenn. | 93

Z.

| Felix K. Zollicoffer...Tenn. | 94

[end columns]

MAY 21, 1856

NATHANIEL P. BANKS, JR., of Massachusetts, Speaker.

ex [sideways]

Y 121

N 95

[ruminativerabbi]

Looking Forward/Looking Back

And so a new era begins in our nation! Will the Biden years, whether four or eight of them, lead to healing in a nation so riven that many of the chasms that divide us—some racial, others political, still others ethnic or economic—feel truly unbridgeable? Will they feature an end to the COVID-era that has so radically altered the way we live and do business in our land? Will they bring a rededication to the kind of environmentally sound public policy that could possibly head off the crises that will otherwise visit the planet with increasingly frequency and ferocity if we choose to put blinders on and then recklessly to barrel ahead into uncharted waters without any clear sense of how to address even the issues that threaten us the least overtly, let alone those that are the most prominent? Will the recent hopeful developments in the Middle East serve as the prelude to the kind of complex reconfiguration that will, at long last, make Israel into a nation tied at least as profoundly to neighbors and local friends as to distant allies in North America and, when the wind blows in the right direction, Europe? (And will such a rebalancing of alliances lead finally to a just resolution of the Palestinians’ plight in a way that both serves their own best interests and Israel’s?) All of these questions are in the air as we pass from the Trump era to the Biden years, definitely from the past to the future and ideally from a period characterized by unprecedented (that word again!) incivility and fractiousness to one more reminiscent of the nation in which people my age and older remember growing up.

To none of the above questions do I have a clear answer to offer. But I do feel hopeful—and that hope is born not merely of wishful thinking (or not solely of it), but also of a sense that we have come to a point in our nation’s history at which the task of re-dedicating ourselves to the bedrock notions that underlay the founding of the American republic in the eighteenth century is crucial. But no less crucial is ridding ourselves of some of the fantasies we have been taught since childhood to accept as basic American truths.

There are lots to choose from, but today I would like to write about one of my favorite American fantasies, the one according to which Americans have always treated dissent graciously, enjoying national debate without acrimony and finding in principled dialogue the most basic of American paths forward. According to that fantasy, Congress exists basically to house friendly co-workers whose disagreements can and do yield the kind of dignified compromise that in turn serves as a path forward that all their constituents can gratefully travel into a bipartisan future built on our collective will to live in peace and learn from each other. Hah!

We have had in our past instances of violent altercation, including some in the very halls of Congress that were besieged by insurrectionists on January 6. Forgetting them won’t necessarily condemn us to reliving them. But keeping them in mind will surely help us find the resolve to avoid them. As we enter the Biden years, we need to look with clear eyes on that part of our history and, instead of ignoring it, allow it to guide us forward into a different kind of future.

First up, I think, would have to be the 1838 murder of Congressman Jonathan Cilley (D-Maine) by Congressman William Graves (Whig-Kentucky). This one did not take place in the Capitol, although that’s where the party got started. The backstory is so petty as almost to be silly, yet a man died because of that pettiness. Cilley said something on the floor of the House that irritated a prominent Whig journalist, who responded by asking Graves to hand deliver a note demanding an apology. Cilley declined, to which principled decision Graves responded by challenging Cilley to a duel, which then actually took place on February 24, 1838 in nearby Maryland. Neither was apparently much of a marksman. Both men shot twice and missed. But then Congressman Graves aimed more carefully and shot and killed Congressman Cilley.

To their credit, Congress responded by passing anti-dueling legislation. But that only kept our elected representatives from murdering each other, not from behaving violently. For example, when Representative Preston Brooks (D-South Carolina) wanted to express his disapproval of the abolitionist stance of Senator Charles Sumner (R-Massachusetts), he brought a walking cane with him into the Capitol on May 22, 1856, and beat Sumner almost to death. The account of the beating on the website of the United States Senate reads as follows: “Moving quickly, Brooks slammed his metal-topped cane onto the unsuspecting Sumner's head. As Brooks struck again and again, Sumner rose and lurched blindly about the chamber, futilely attempting to protect himself. After a very long minute, it ended. Bleeding profusely, Sumner was carried away.  Brooks walked calmly out of the chamber without being detained by the stunned onlookers.” The rest of the story is also instructive: Congress voted to censure Congressman Brooks, whereupon the latter resigned and was almost immediately re-elected to the House by his constituents in South Carolina. He died soon after that (and at age 37), but his place in history was secured! Sumner himself survived and spent another eighteen years in the Senate.

I’d like to suggest that all my readers who felt totally shocked by the events of January 6 to read The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War  by Joanne B. Freeman, a professor of history at Yale University, that was published in 2018 by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. I read the book when it came out and thought then (and still do think) that it should be required reading for all who imagine that, as I keep hearing, the use of violence and, even more so, the threat of violence “just isn’t us.” It’s us, all right. And Freeman’s book proves it a dozen different ways. As readers of my letters know, I read a lot of American history. But I can hardly recall reading a book that so thoroughly changed the way I thought of our government and its history.

And then there was the brawl in the House in 1858 that broke out when Laurence M. Keitt (D-South Carolina) attempted to strangle Galusha Grow (R-Pennsylvania) in the wake the latter speaking disparagingly about of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford to the effect that Black people were by virtue of their race excluded from American citizenship regardless of whether they were enslaved or free. The House was, to say the least, riven when Keitt went for Grow’s throat. And what happened next, Freeman writes, “was a free-for-all right in the open space in front of the Speaker’s platform featuring roughly thirty, sweaty, disheveled, mostly middle-aged congressman in a no-holds-barred brawl, North against South.” Keitt, who threw the first punch, was already known as a violent man: it was he, in fact, who took out his gun and threatened to kill any member of Congress who was part of the effort to save Charles Sumner’s life in the attack on him by Preston Brooks mentioned above.

These are the thoughts I have in my heart as the nation enters the Biden years. We have a history of violence, incivility, and public rage. What happened on January 6 was, yes, an aberration in that no one supports—or, at least, supports openly—the use of violence to make a point in the Congress. But that was not something new and shocking as much as it was a return to an earlier stage of our nation’s history, a kind of regression to the days in which violence was the language of discourse, an age in which it was possible for one member of the House openly to attempt to strangle another and then to suffer no real consequences at all. And just to wrap up the story, Representative Keitt later joined the Confederate Army and was killed on June 1, 1864 at the Battle of Cold Harbor near Mechanicsville, Virginia.

That we can renounce violence, embrace civility, listen to opposing viewpoints carefully and thoughtfully, debate with courage and respect for others’ opinions, and behave like grown-ups even when we are unlikely to have our way in some matter of public policy—I know in my heart that we can do that. Last week, I wrote about three different instances of armed insurrection against the federal government. This week, I’ve written about the use of threats of violence, and violence itself, at the highest level of government. I could go on to note that, of our first forty-five American presidents, there have been either successful or unsuccessful assassination attempts against a full twenty of them…and that that list includes every president of my own lifetime except for Dwight Eisenhower. We cannot renounce our American propensity to settle things with our fists by making believe that violence is not part of our culture. Just the opposite is true: it was part of our past and it certainly part of our present. Whether it will be part of our future—that is the question on the table. The insurrectionists who entered the Capitol on January 6 were convinced they were acting in accordance with American tradition. There’s something to that argument too…and that is why it is so crucial now that we all join together to renounce that part of our past and then to move ahead into a future characterized by mutual respect, respectful debate, and a deep sense of national unity born of pride in the best parts of our past, confidence in the present, and hope in the future.

[historysisco]

On This Day in History February 6, 1858: If you thought that tensions in American politics were running high and surprised that punches have yet to been thrown, check out this historical tidbit. In an ongoing session of Congress a brawl breaks out between multiple members of Congress started by insults and blows thrown by Pennsylvania Republican Galusha Grow and South Carolina Democrat Laurence Keitt. The reason for the melee? The debate over the Kansas Territory’s pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution. 

According to the post The Most Infamous Floor Brawl in the History of the U.S. House of Representatives February 06, 1858 from the History, Art and Archives webpage of the House of Representatives website:

More than 30 Members joined the melee. Northern Republicans and Free Soilers joined ranks against Southern Democrats. Speaker James Orr, a South Carolina Democrat, gaveled furiously for order and then instructed Sergeant-at-Arms Adam J. Glossbrenner to arrest noncompliant Members. Wading into the “combatants,” Glossbrenner held the House Mace high to restore order. Wisconsin Republicans John “Bowie Knife” Potter and Cadwallader Washburn ripped the hairpiece from the head of William Barksdale, a Democrat from Mississippi. The melee dissolved into a chorus of laughs and jeers, but the sectional nature of the fight powerfully symbolized the nation’s divisions. When the House reconvened two days later, a coalition of Northern Republicans and Free Soilers narrowly blocked referral of the Lecompton Constitution to the House Territories Committee. Kansas entered the Union in 1861 as a free state.

For an interesting blow-by-blow breakdown of the Congressional Capitol Combat, I suggest you read Jeff Nilsson’s Beatings, Brawls, and Lawmaking: Mayhem in Congress from the Saturday Evening Post dated December 4, 2010 

It makes you wonder with the sizzling hot political climate surrounding the Trump administration, if our representatives in Congress will engage in some fisticuffs in the near future. We’ll have to wait see.

For Further Reading:

Beatings, Brawls, and Lawmaking: Mayhem in Congress by Jeff Nilsson from the Saturday Evening Post dated December 4, 2010

[si-national-portrait-gallery]

Galusha Aaron Grow, McClees & Vannerson, c. 1859, Smithsonian: National Portrait Gallery

Size: Image/Sheet (oval): 18.9 × 13.5 cm (7 7/16 × 5 5/16") Medium: Salted paper print

https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_S_NPG.87.42.40

[mapsontheweb]

Countries of Origin of Paternal Ancestors of Speakers of US House of Representatives

Germany

1 Frederick Muhlenberg 1789-1791, 1793-1795

50 Newt Gingrich 1995-1999

53 John Boehner 2011-2015

England

Jonathan Trumbull Jr. 1791-1793

3 Jonathan Dayton 1795-1799

4 Theodore Sedgwick 1799-18o1

6 Joseph Varnum 1807-1811

9 John Taylor 1820-1821, 1825-1827

18 Robert Winthrop 1847-1849

19 Howell Cobb 1849-1851

26 Theodore Pomeroy 1869

37 Frederick Gillett 1919-1925

39 John Garner 1931-1933

43 Sam Rayburn 1940-1947, 1949-1953, 1955-1961

France 5

Nathaniel Macon 1801-1807

Wales

7 Henry Clay 1811-1814, 1815-1820, 1823-1825

17 John Davis 1845-1847

Scotland

8 Langdon Cheves 1814-1815 10 Philip Barbour 1821-1823

Northern Ireland

12 John Bell 1834-1835

20 Linn Boyd 1851-1855

22 James Orr 1857-1859

27 James Blaine 1869-1875

Ireland

13 James Polk 1835-1839

47 Tip O’Neill 1977-1987

54 Paul Ryan 2015-

Luxembourg

51 Dennis Hastert 1999-2007

Italy

52 Nancy Pelosi 2007-2011

Unkown*

11 Andrew Stevenson 1827-1834

14 Robert Hunter 1839-1841

15 John White 1841-1843

16 John Jones 1843-1845

21 Nathaniel Banks 1856-1857

23 William Pennington 1860-1861

24 Galusha Grow 1861-1863

25 Schuyler Colfax 1863-1869

28 Michael Kerr 1875-1876

29 Samuel Randall 1876-1881

30 Joseph Keifer 1881-1883

31 John Carlisle 1883-1889

32 Thomas Reed 1889-1891, 1895-1899

33 Charles Crisp 1891-1895

34 David Henderson 1899-1903

35 Joseph Cannon 1903-1911

36 Champ Clark 1911-1919

38 Nicholas Longworth 1925-1931

40 Henry Rainey 1933-1934

41 Joseph Byrns 1935-1936

42 William Bankhead 1936-1940

44 Joseph Martin Jr. 1947-1949, 1953-1955

45 John McCormack 1962-1971

46 Carl Albert 1971-1977

48 Jim Wright 1987-1989

49 Tom Foley 1989-1995

*It is likely that the paternal ancestors of all these speakers originated in the British Isles

[mrhenryharrell]

Fighting Climate Change with Trees in Bennington, VT

Wikimedia Commons/Todd Hatch (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers)

Evan Lawrence

As nature-based solutions to address climate change gain more and more attention, Climate Advocates Bennington 350VT has set itself the goal of planting at least 1,000 trees in and around the southwestern Vermont town this year.

“The plan was inspired by a report last July that found planting 2 billion trees could prevent the worst effects of climate change,” said Climate Advocates member Naomi Miller. Reforestation groups have proposed planting 2 billion trees world-wide. Spurred by massive fires in the Brazilian rain forest and Australia, the World Economic Forum in Davos in January set a new goal of 1 trillion trees (1t.org), or 128 trees for every person on Earth.

How many trees go in the ground around Bennington this year will depend on how much money the group raises, Miller said. The first planting of six trees will be a ceremonial Earth Day kick-off at 2pm on Sunday April 19th at the Shaftsbury homestead of Jonas Galusha, the fifth governor of Vermont.

Other sites will probably be planted in the fall. A privately owned farm in North Bennington has committed one or two acres, Miller said. The site is being reviewed for how many trees it can support, but Miller said it could take “maybe 500.” Volunteers will plant “a carefully chosen mix of hard and softwoods,” guided by the succession of how the tree species sequester carbon, she said. Softwoods grow and fix carbon faster but have relatively short lives. Hardwoods grow more slowly but live longer and take up much more carbon over their lifetimes.

The Vermont Veterans Home in Bennington has expressed interest in being a site and is discussing details with the group, Miller said. They’ve heard from other landowners who are eager to participate.

Climate Advocates is working with the Bennington County Conservation District and the Vermont State Lands forester to determine which trees will grow best where, Miller said. The seedling trees will come from a local nursery, so that carbon emissions from transportation are minimized.

The project is not only about reforestation but also about building community and community resilience, Miller said. “You need no tree planting experience to volunteer,” she said.

To raise funds, Climate Advocates; Bennington College; Queer Connect Inc., a local LGBTQ advocacy group; and Vermont Arts Exchange planned to sponsor a concert by folk singer and activist Holly Near on March 21 at Bennington College. Proceeds after expenses were to support the tree planting project, but the concert was canceled due to concerns about the coronavirus epidemic. Organizers hope to reschedule for some time next year.

For more information and to offer support, visit www.climateadvocatesbennington.org, Climate Advocates Bennington 350VT on Facebook, or contact project coordinator Barbara True-Weber at (802) 681-7236 or trueweber@gmail.com.

Evan Lawrence is a free-lance writer in Cambridge, NY specializing in sustainability, environmental, and health topics.

Many thanks to our Sponsors:

Fighting Climate Change with Trees in Bennington, VT posted first on Green Energy Times

[stevefoxe]

Everything I Read in 2016

For the third year in a row, I logged every novel, short story collection, poetry compilation, graphic novel, and collected edition of monthly comics I read, excluding individual monthly comics (on which I continued to fall catastrophically behind) and anything I read (and reread, and reread again) for my day job. My only big change? A lot of these books were read on my iPad Mini. And a good number were for my gay book club (you can guess which ones). 

If you don’t yet keep track of your reading, you should start in 2017. It’s your best bet for hitting a reading goal, and for folks like me who read a ton, it’s a nice way to recall books that otherwise departed your memory.

For the tl;dr crowd, here are my Top 13 for the year, in the order in which I read them:

On Writing, Stephen King

Binti, Nnedi Okorafor

The Girls, Emma Cline

I Am a Hero Vol. 1 & Vol. 2, Kengo Hanazawa

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz

The Hero: Book Two, David Rubín

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders (I read an ARC)

A Choir of Ill Children, Tom Piccirilli

Habitat, Simon Roy

Prez Vol. 1, Mark Russell, Ben Caldwell, Domo Stanton

Bones of the Coast, edited by Shannon Campbell, Jeff Ellis, Kathleen Jacques

(New X-Men Omnibus was a re-read, or it would be up here.)

The rest is below the jump!

I don’t really feel like dumping on anything this year. I definitely got burnt out on comic anthologies, and I hated A Little Life, but the good outweighs the bad. Below is the full list, divided by month, followed by a few statistics and an evaluation of my 2016 reading goals as established last January. 

[A note on comics: I feel guilty that I’ve left off colorists and inkers, as they contribute so much to a book, but I defaulted to cover credits while logging my reading and don’t have most of these books on-hand to fix it now.]

January

The Amazing World of Gumball: Fairy Tale Trouble, Megan Brennan, Katy Farina, Jeremy Lawson

Adventure Time: Masked Mayhem, Kate Leth, Bridget Underwood, Drew Green, Vaughn Pinpin, Meredith McClaren

Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland, Kim Newman, Maura McHugh, Tyler Crook

On Writing, Stephen King

Binti, Nnedi Okorafor

The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by John Joseph Adams & Joe Hill

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Kai Ashante Wilson

February

Planet Hulk, Sam Humphries & Marc Laming

Future Imperfect, Peter David & Greg Land

Hail Hydra, Rick Remender & Roland Boschi

House of M, Dennis Hopeless & Marco Failla

Marvel Zombies, Si Spurrier & Kev Walker

Old Man Logan, Brian Michael Bendis & Andrea Sorrentino

The Girls, Emma Cline

The Gilded Razor, Sam Lansky

March

Civil War, Charles Soule & Leinil Francis Yu

New X-Men Omnibus, Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Phil Jimenez, Ethan Van Sciver, Igor Kordey, Marc Silvestri, Keron Grant, Chris Bachalo, John Paul Leon, Bill Sienkiewicz, Leinil Francis Yu

The Eye of the Cat, Elejandro Jodorowsky & Moebius

All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders

Beyond Anthology, edited by Sfé Monster & Taneka Scott

A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Patricia Lockwood

April

 I Am a Hero Vol. 1, Kengo Hanazawa

The Nameless City Vol. 1, Faith Erin Hicks

Ody-C Vol. 1, Matt Fraction & Christian Ward

Lovecraft Country, Matt Ruff

Husk, Rachel Autumn Deering

New World: An Anthology of Sci-Fi & Fantasy, edited by C. Spike Trotman

Chainmail Bikini: An Anthology of Women Gamers, edited by Hazel Newlevant

Broken Frontier, edited by Frederik Hautain & Tyler Chin-Tanner

Love in All Forms: The Big Book of Growing Up Queer, edited by Serafina Dwyer

Wonder Woman: Earth One Vol. 1, Grant Morrison & Yanick Paquette

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, Benjamin Alire Saenz

The Hero: Book Two, David Rubín

The Girl With All the Gifts, M. R. Carey

Regular Show: Noir Means Noir, Buddy, Rachel Connor, Robert Luckett, Wook Jin Clark

Night Air, Ben Sears

Revenger: Children of the Damned, Charles Forsman

Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link

May

Dark Engine Vol. 1, Ryan Burton & John Bivens

Disney Kingdoms: Seekers of the Weird, Brandon Seifert, Karl Moline, Filipe Andrade

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Aimee Bender

Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire

Mr. Splitfoot, Samantha Hunt

Fire Shut Up in My Bones, Charles M. Blow

Revival Vol. 1, Tim Seeley & Mike Norton

The Fireman, Joe Hill

Colder: Toss the Bones, Paul Tobin & Juan Ferreyra

The Fly: Outbreak, Brandon Seifert & Menton3

Faker, Mike Carey & Jock

What If? Infinity, Joshua Williamson, Mike Henderson, Riley Rossmo, Mike Norton, Jason Copeland, Goran Sudžuka

June

Hawkeye vs. Deadpool, Gerry Duggan, Matteo Lolli, Jacopo Camagni

Outcast Vol. 3, Robert Kirkman & Paul Azaceta

Lady Killer Vol. 1, Joelle Jones & Jamie S. Rich

The Fiction, Curt Pires & David Rubín

The Amazing World of Gumball Vol. 2, Frank Gibson, Tyson Hesse, Paulina Ganucheau

Arcadia, Alex Paknadel & Eric Scott Pfeiffer

Black Market, Frank J. Barbiere & Victor Santos

Dream Thief Vol. 2, Jai Nitz, Greg Smallwood, Todd Galusha

Contest of Champions Vol.1, Al Ewing & Paco Medina

The Infinity Gauntlet, Dustin Weaver & Gerry Duggan

The Amulet, Michael McDowell

The Dark Half, Stephen King

The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Steve Moncuse & Art Adams

Steven Universe: Too Cool for School, Ian Jones-Quartey, Jeremy Sorese, Asia Kendrick-Horton, Rachel Dukes, Josceline Fenton

Bob’s Burgers: Medium Rare, overseen by Loren Bouchard

Bob’s Burgers: Well Done, overseen by Loren Bouchard

Zombie, Joyce Carol Oates

Kare-Kare Komiks, Andrew Drilon

Night Sky With Exit Wounds, Ocean Vuong

The Witcher: House of Glass, Paul Tobin & Joe Querio

X-Men: No More Humans, Mike Carey & Salvador Larroca

Cold Moon Over Babylon, Michael McDowell

July

Black Hand Comics, Wes Craig

Disappearance at Devil’s Rock, Paul Tremblay

B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth: The Devil’s Wings, John Arcudi, Mike Mignola, Lawrence Campbell, Joe Querio, Tyler Crook

B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth: Flesh & Stone, John Arcudi, Mike Mignola, James Harren

Abe Sapien: Sacred Places, Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Sebastian Fiumara, Max Fiumara

Abe Sapien: A Darkness So Great, Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Sebastian Fuimara, Max Fiumara

Hellboy & the B.P.R.D. 1952, Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Alex Maleev

Lobster Johnson: Get the Lobster!, Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Tonči Zonjić

Green River Killer: A True Detective Story, Jeff Jensen & Jonathan Case

The Witcher: Fox Children, Paul Tobin & Joe Querio

Children of the Night, John Blackburn

Frankenstein Underground, Mike Mignola & Ben Stenbeck

My Best Friend’s Exorcism, Grady Hendrix

August

The Well, Jack Cady

Angel Catbird Vol. 1, Margaret Atwood & Johnnie Christmas

Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders

September

Fellside, M. R. Carey

The Twilight Children, Gilbert Hernandez & Darwyn Cooke

Veil, Greg Rucka & Toni Fejzula

Negative Space, Ryan K. Lindsey & Owen Geini

Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Vol. 1, Alex De Campi, Chris Peterson, Simon Fraser

Bitch Planet Vol. 1, Kelly Sue DeConnick, Valentine De Landro, Robert Wilson IV

Ody-C Vol. 2, Matt Fraction & Christian Ward

Tampa, Alissa Nutting

Clive Barker’s A-Z of Horror, compiled by Stephen Jones

The Missing, Sarah Langan

Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Vol. 2, Alex De Campi, Federica Manfredi, Gary Erskine

Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Vol. 3, Alex De Campi, R.M. Guera, Chris Peterson

Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight Vol. 4, Alex De Campi, Mulele Jarvis, John Lucas

Audition, Ryu Murakami

Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show, Suehiro Maruo

In the Miso Soup, Ryu Murakami

October

Ghosts, Raina Telgemeier

Anya’s Ghost, Vera Brosgol

One Week in the Library, W. Maxwell Prince & John Amor

A Choir of Ill Children, Tom Piccirilli

The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter

I Am a Hero Vol. 2, Kengo Hanazawa

The Beauty Vol. 1, Jeremy Haun & Jason A. Hurley

The Creepy Case Files of Margo Maloo Vol. 1, Drew Weing

November

Gerald’s Game, Stephen King

Call Me By Your Name, André Aciman

Invisible Republic Vol. 1, Gabriel Hardman & Corinne Bechko

Roche Limit Vol. 1, Michael Moreci & Vic Malhorta

What Belongs to You, Garth Greenwell

Roche Limit Vol. 2, Michael Moreci & Kyle Charles

Roche Limit Vol. 3, Michael Moreci & Kyle Charles

One-Punch Man Vol. 9, ONE & Yusuke Murata

One-Punch Man Vol. 10, ONE & Yusuke Murata

Habitat, Simon Roy

December

Beowulf, Santiago García & David Rubín

The Oath, edited by Audrey Redpath

Star Wars: Tales From the Far, Far Away, Michael Moreci, Tim Daniel, Ryan Cady, Phillip Sevy, etc.

Prelude to Bruise, Saeed Jones

Grief is the Thing With Feathers, Max Porter

Tomie Deluxe Edition, Junji Ito

Krampus!, Brian Jones & Dean Kotz

Fantasy Sports Vol. 2, Sam Bosma

The Beauty Vol. 2, Jeremy Haun, Jason A. Hurley, Mike Huddleston, Brett Weldele, Stephen Green

Prez Vol. 1, Mark Russell, Ben Caldwell, Domo Stanton

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe, Ryan Q. North & Erica Henderson

Love is Love, edited by Marc Andreyko

Joe Golem Vol. 1, Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, Patric Reynolds

Baltimore: Cult of the Red King, Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, Peter Bergting

Abe Sapien: The Burning Fire, Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Max Fiumara, Sebastian Fiumara, Tyler Crook

Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire, Neil Gaiman & Shane Oakley

Bones of the Coast, edited by Shannon Campbell, Jeff Ellis, Kathleen Jacques

Total: 

140 Books (up from 128 in 2015 and 87 in 2014)

Breakdown:

39 Novels or short story collections (down from 43 in 2015 and 44 in 2014)

98 Graphic novels/collected editions of comics (up from 84 in 2015 and a measly 42 in 2014)

3 Books of poetry (triple the 2015 and 2014 counts!)

About 35 Books written or edited by female authors (up from 20 in 2015 and 16 in 2014; note that I’m only counting writers and editors, not artists, and I’m counting books, not unique authors)

Roughly 19 books by (known-to-be) non-white authors (down from 30 last year but up from 9 in 2014...but both this year and last were inflated by multiple entries from manga creators)

...and at least 16 books written or edited by queer and trans authors. 

So...any suggestions for 2017?

[antebellumite]

Background Congressmen!

[tinyhouseexpedition]

FREE Online Tiny House Summit

FREE Online Tiny House Summit!

Keynote Speaker: Tiny House Expedition's Alexis Stephens

Crafting Community in a NIMBY World

I want to start a tiny house community? But where to begin? This talk will explore the diversity of tiny house communities across the US. An in-depth look at various existing community models— the pros, the cons, legalities and feedback from the neighbors.

About the Tiny House Summit

Awesome (and growing) Line-up of Keynote Speakers:

Alexis Stephens, Abel Zimmerman Zyl, Macy Miller, Andrew Bennett, Andrew Odom, Becky Elder, Brad Kittel, Chris Galusha, Chrissy Bellmyer, Damon DesChamp, Darin Zaruba, Darren Hughes, David & Jeanie Stiles, Felice Cohen, Hari Berzins, Jake & Kiva, Jay Shafer, John & Finn Kernohan, Kelly Hart, Keri Fivecoat-Campbell, Pat Dunham, Saul Rip Hansen, Thom Stanton, Tracey Powell, Valerie Cook & Tim Boffe, Vera Struck, and Zack Giffin. 

Inspiring Community Presentations:

Anyone who want to can submit to present a live session during the Summit on a tiny/small-related topic. Including “Powering Your Tiny House With SOLAR!” by Michael Chance, “Airbnbing Your Tiny House” by Sarah Murphy, “How to Downsize and De-Clutter Before You Go Tiny” by Jenn Baxter, and “Urban Voluntary Simplicity: How to Downsize Your Living Space Without Leaving the City” by Terry K. Kudos to each of them! And you can add your name to this list, just visit the Summit community network at TinyIsBeautiful.com and look for the directions to submit a session proposal (http://tinyisbeautiful.com/page/submit-to-present).

Insightful Webinars! 

“Webinar - Drilling Down on Tiny House as DIY (Do It Yourself),” with Jake & Kiva, Domenic Mangano, and Tracey Powell “Rubi Builds a Tiny House on Wheels as Senior Project.” You’re going to love her practical, thoughtful, and detailed description of building her own tiny house.

Check out the community site, TinyIsBeautiful.com:

The updated list of current keynote speakers.

The webinar recordings.

A great reading list of books about tiny houses and tiny/small living!

The community presentations that are going to be given during the Summit (and the form to propose your own presentation if you want).

Forum discussions areas to communicate with other members of the network.

Your own profile page, plus the ability to upload photos and/or videos, to create specialty groups, or to blog.

[newstfionline]

The Violence at the Heart of Our Politics

By Joanne B. Freeman, NY Times, Sept. 7, 2018

Mike Huckabee waxed historic this week while denouncing protesters who interrupted Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. “Clear the room or start caning them when they open their yaps!” he tweeted, making a backhanded reference to the most famous caning in American history: the 1856 attack on Senator Charles Sumner. Outraged by one of Sumner’s antislavery speeches, Preston Brooks of South Carolina brutally beat him to the ground in the Senate chamber a few days later, stopping only when his cane broke.

Clearly, the United States has a long and storied history of polarizing crises. The 1960s was one such time, as were the late 1790s; in both cases, Americans of opposing politics turned on each other with violent outcomes. The 1850s were even more severe. The period’s raging debate over slavery fractured political parties, paralyzed the national government and divided the nation. In time, this struggle tore the nation apart.

In many ways, the crisis of the 1850s played out on the floor of Congress, the focus of national politics for much of the 19th century. A forum for national debate with the power to decide the fate of slavery, it became a bullpen for sectional combat, with armed clusters of Northerners and Southerners defending their interests with fists and weapons as well as legislation.

Some of the furor wasn’t slavery related; antebellum America was inherently violent, as was its politics, and Congress is a representative institution. The mighty oratory of the 1830s and ‘40s was accompanied by an undercurrent of brute force. Threats and fistfights were part of the political game, and congressmen sometimes put such violence to legislative purpose.

More often than not, such bullies were Southerners or Southern-born Westerners. So-called fighting men promoted their interests and silenced their foes with insults, fists, canes, knives, pistols and the occasional brick, giving them a literal fighting advantage over “noncombatants,��� who were usually Northerners. Sumner’s brutal caning was far from the only violent incident in Congress.

In fact, in the course of researching how the culture of politics changed after the 1790s--the subject of my first book--I uncovered roughly 70 physically violent political confrontations between 1830 and the Civil War, most of them in the House and Senate chambers, a few on nearby streets and dueling grounds. Fistfights, shoving matches, weapon wielding, mass brawls: Largely forgotten now, these clashes show a momentous political struggle unfolding in real time.

Initially, most of the fighting centered on matters of personal honor, party loyalty or regional pride. Take, for example, the 1838 duel between Representatives Jonathan Cilley, a Democrat from Maine, and William Graves, a Whig from Kentucky. Although their duel had dire consequences, it was sparked by little more than political name-calling in the House. When Henry Wise, a Virginia Whig and a notorious bully, suggested that an unnamed Democratic congressman was corrupt, Cilley leaped to the defense of his party. Wise then did what bullies were wont to do: He tried to silence his opponent by taunting him with a duel challenge and then declaring him too cowardly to fight. Like many a Northerner, Cilley faced a difficult choice. Should he ignore Wise’s taunts and risk dishonoring himself and his constituents by proxy? Or should he risk fighting a duel and be ostracized by his constituents for engaging in a barbaric Southern practice?

In the end, Cilley opted to fight, though not with Wise. Because of the niceties of the code duello, and a chain of Whigs who took offense at Cilley’s actions, he ultimately fought a duel with Graves, who had done nothing more than hand Cilley a message from a far more belligerent Whig. Cilley and Graves liked each other fine; there was no ill will between them. But for the sake of their regions, their states, their parties and their reputations, both men felt compelled to fight a duel, and only one man survived it. Cilley was 35 years old when he died.

The growing immediacy of the problem of slavery made matters worse. Congressional brawling increasingly pitted North against South, fracturing national parties across sectional lines and rendering routine congressional violence far less tractable. Westward expansion set off a desperate debate over the slavery status of new states, and Southern congressmen defended their slave regime by attempting to silence antislavery advocates with threats and violence.

Take, for example, Representative John Dawson, a Democrat from Louisiana. Dawson routinely wore both a Bowie knife and a pistol, and he wasn’t shy about using them in the House, particularly when someone dared to attack slavery. In 1842, when Thomas Arnold, a Whig from Tennessee, defended John Quincy Adams’s right to discuss antislavery petitions, Dawson strutted over to Arnold with his knife plainly visible and threatened to cut his throat “from ear to ear.”

Dawson went even further three years later in what may well be the all-time greatest display of firepower on the floor. When the Ohio abolitionist Joshua Giddings gave an antislavery speech, Dawson, clearly agitated, positioned himself in front of Giddings, vowing to kill him, and cocking his pistol. Four armed Southern Democrats immediately joined him, which prompted four Whigs to position themselves around Giddings, several of them armed as well. After a few minutes, the pistoleers sat down. But the potential for bloodshed was very real.

The 1854 debate over the Kansas-Nebraska Act made matters worse. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had drawn a virtual line across the country separating the free North from the slaveholding South. The Kansas-Nebraska Act seemingly undid that compromise, enabling future states to decide slavery’s fate on their own through popular sovereignty. Not surprisingly, debate over the act raised the passions of the slavery debate--and congressional violence--to new heights.

The press amplified the crisis. In their efforts to rouse public sentiment for or against the act, newspapers promoted conspiracy theories about sectional plots to seize control of the Union. Antislavery papers argued that an organized “Slave Power” was trying to spread slavery throughout the Union by stifling Northern opposition. Pro-slavery papers insisted that Northern aggressors were trying to isolate and destroy the slaveholding South. New technologies like the telegraph broadcast these accusations with ever-increasing speed and reach throughout the nation, and did just what editors and reporters hoped they would do: outrage the public and encourage them to fight for their rights and demand the same of their congressmen.

The Republican Party was born of this furor. The arrival of a Northern antislavery party in Congress caused violence to spike. Dedicated to fighting the Slave Power, Republican congressmen did their duty, confronting Southerners as never before, and Southerners replied in kind. Sumner’s caning was of a piece with this wave of violence. Slavery supporters saw his raging antislavery rhetoric as proof of Northern attempts to degrade and subjugate the South. Antislavery advocates, in turn, saw Brooks, Sumner’s attacker, as part of a Slave Power plot to dominate the North. Joined with some recent assaults on Northern congressmen and the rising intensity of antislavery efforts, for Northerners and Southerners alike, the caning seemed to prove the existence of a sectional conspiracy to seize national control.

One House brawl in 1858 shows such thinking in action. During an overnight debate about slavery in Kansas, Galusha Grow--a feisty Pennsylvania Republican--raised an objection while standing amid Southern Democrats. One of those Democrats--the equally feisty Laurence Keitt of South Carolina--immediately took offense, insisting that Grow object on his own side of the House. When Grow declared that it was a free hall and he could do as he liked, Keitt stalked over to Grow, mumbling “We’ll see about that,” and grabbed his throat in preparation to throw a punch. Grow responded by slugging Keitt hard enough to knock him flat.

A horde of Southern Democrats--many of them armed--immediately rushed toward the combatants, some to calm things down, others to attack Grow, a living embodiment of Northern aggression. Seeing the rush of Southerners, a stream of Republicans--some of them also armed--raced to the point of conflict, leaping onto chairs and desks in their hurry to save a fellow under fire. The end result was an enormous brawl in front of the House speaker’s chair featuring punching, shoving and tossed spittoons.

To onlookers in Congress and the country alike, the implications of the Grow-Keitt rumble were clear: North and South had gone to war in the House chamber. Congressmen on each side assumed that the other side was angry, overbearing and itching for a fight. This distrust was no back-of-the-mind matter of speculation. It was immediate. Both sides jumped into action in seconds. And the public shared these suspicions. By the late 1850s, Northerners and Southerners alike were urging their congressmen to fight--literally--for their rights. Some Northerners even gave guns to their congressmen, who were less likely to carry arms than their Southern colleagues. Distrustful of each other and of Congress’s ability to contain their struggle, Americans were prepared for open combat in the Capitol.

The lessons of this breakdown are severe. It shows what can happen when polarized politics erodes the process of debate and compromise at the heart of republican government. Americans lose faith in their system of government and ultimately lose faith in one another. Splintering political parties can’t contain the damage. Violence begins to seem logical, even necessary. And the press can fuel this distrust with conspiracy theories and extremist spin; the antebellum press wasn’t in the business of objectivity--and it mattered.

The destructive power of the press becomes even more marked when spread with new technologies. In the 1850s, the telegraph confronted Americans with a steady stream of virtually instant information: contradictory, confusing, overlapping and inaccurate, it scrambled and intensified the political climate. Today, social media is doing the same. At its heart, democracy is a continuing conversation between politicians and the public; it should come as no surprise that dramatic changes in the modes of conversation cause dramatic changes in democracies themselves.

If Congress’s checkered past teaches us anything on this score, it teaches this: A dysfunctional Congress can close off a vital arena for national dialogue, leaving us vulnerable in ways that we haven’t yet begun to fathom.

Joanne B. Freeman is a professor of history and American studies at Yale, a co-host of the history podcast “BackStory” and the author of the forthcoming book “The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War.”

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Never Trumpers Will Want to Read This History Lesson

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=6031

Never Trumpers Will Want to Read This History Lesson

“I was educated a Democrat from my boyhood,” a Republican delegate confided to his colleagues at Iowa’s constitutional convention in 1857. “Faithfully, I did adhere to that party until I could no longer act with it. Many things did I condemn ere I left that party, for my love of party was strong. And when I did, at last, feel compelled to separate from my old Democratic friends, it was like tearing myself away from old home associations.”

As often seems the case today, American politics in the 1850s were nearly all-consuming and stubbornly tribal. So it was hard—and bitterly so—for hundreds of thousands of Northern Democrats to abandon the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy.

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Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts.

Today, a small but influential cadre of Republican elected officials, strategists and policy experts faces a similar choice. Heirs of Ronald Reagan, they have grown to believe that their party has also degenerated into something ugly and undemocratic—hostile to science and fact, rooted in an angry spirit of racial and ethnic nationalism, enamored of foreign strongmen and hostile to American institutions, and so fundamentally estranged from the nation’s founding values that it poses an existential threat to American democracy.

During the presidential campaign of 2016, and for the better part of the past two years, these Never Trumpers could plausibly speak of extracting their party from the grip of white nationalism and angry populism. Now, with midterm elections approaching—with broad majorities of the GOP electorate firmly in the president’s thrall and the Republican Congress all but fully acquiescent to the White House—such talk is fanciful.

Like that Iowa delegate in 1857, today’s Never Trumpers face a stark choice: passively acquiesce to the further ascent of Trumpism, or switch parties and play a vital part in stopping it.

If they do choose the latter, they might be surprised at the result: Like the GOP’s founding generation, in the process of leaving a party they once loved, today’s Never Trump Republicans might also free themselves from partisan dogmas that have lost relevance in the current age. At the same time, they might find Democrats demonstrating a new spirit of flexibility and accommodation—leading to a new unity that could cure the country of some of its worst ills.

***

From the late 1820s through the 1840s, Americans split their political loyalties between two parties, Whigs and Democrats, that disagreed on a host of economic and political questions including a national banking system, tariffs, infrastructure spending, monetary policy and workers’ rights. Both parties enjoyed strong bisectional support and, for the most part, conspired to keep slavery out of the national dialogue.

That changed in 1854 when Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which organized the Kansas and Nebraska territories in preparation for the construction of a midwestern link to a planned transcontinental railroad. At the insistence of Southern Democrats who initially balked at supporting the bill, Stephen Douglas, chairman of the Committee on Territories and chief author of the bill, inserted a “popular sovereignty” provision allowing the residents of the two territories to decide for themselves whether to permit slavery. Kansas and Nebraska were part of the Louisiana Purchase, and as such they fell under the provisions of the Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery above the 36’30” parallel. In one quick motion, Douglas and his Democratic colleagues obliterated a longstanding arrangement between the North and the South and reintroduced the slavery question into American politics.

The backlash was swift. The Kansas-Nebraska Act created “a deep-seated, intense, and ineradicable hatred” of slavery, observed the editor of the New York Times. It wasn’t just that the ruling Democratic Party had repealed the Missouri Compromise. It also seemed intent on flouting any law or tradition that stood in the way of slavery’s extension into the territories. William Pitt Fessenden, a Whig senator from Maine, spoke for many Northerners when he called the Kansas-Nebraska Act “a terrible outrage. … The more I look at it, the more enraged I become. It needs but little to make me an out & out abolitionist.”

The introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Act snapped the cords that bound many Northern voters to the two political parties and introduced a period of extreme volatility and excitement. For all intents and purposes, the Whig Party—which for reasons unrelated to the slavery issue had been in a state of slow decline—ceased to exist, while throughout the North, Democrats suffered massive defections by both voters and officeholders. At hundreds of political meetings around the country, antislavery activists abandoned their political bases for new “fusion” tickets uniting antislavery “Conscience” Whigs and “anti-Nebraska” Democrats, who opposed the Whigs on most policy questions but thought slavery was a dangerous social and political system. In some states, these fusion tickets were called Anti-Nebraska, Democrat-Republican or Free-Soil. In Ripon, Wisconsin, on February 28, 1854, several dozen residents of the surrounding county converged on the town’s simple, one-room, wood-frame schoolhouse to forge a new political party. They called themselves Republicans, and the name soon stuck.

Former Democrats-turned-Republicans weren’t disgusted simply by the imposition of “popular sovereignty” in territory that should, by their estimation, have been free. They also watched as their former party perverted the very idea of free elections and democratic process. In the Kansas territory, “border ruffians,” led by Missouri’s Democratic senator, David Atchison, moved in and out of Kansas with impunity—stuffing ballot boxes, visiting violence on free state settlers and attempting to tilt the scales in favor of slavery. “You know how to protect your own interests,” Atchison declared. “Your rifles will free you from such neighbors. … You will go there, if necessary, with the bayonet and with blood.” “If we win,” he promised, “we can carry slavery to the Pacific Ocean.” Although antislavery voters probably made up a healthy majority of the population, the slave forces stole a series of territorial elections, leading the Free Soilers to establish a shadow government in Lawrence, Kansas.

Tensions had already started to boil over when Atchison’s ruffians “sacked” and pillaged the free-state capital city, destroying the local Free-Soil newspaper office and laying ruin to the Free State Hotel, which housed the shadow legislature. Days later, on May 19, 1856, Charles Sumner rose on the Senate floor to denounce the “crime against Kansas.” The day after his speech, as Sumner attended to routine paperwork on the Senate floor, Congressman Preston Brooks entered the chamber and set upon him with a metal-tipped cane. The senators’ desks were bolted to the floor, making it impossible for Sumner to escape from his seat. Writhing in pain, he wrenched the desk up with his knees and collapsed on the bloodstained carpet. His injuries nearly killed him, and it would be four years before he could return to normal duties in the Capitol. As for Brooks: He enjoyed the full-throated support of Southern Democrats and the quiet approval—or at least non-disapproval—of his Northern party brethren who remained faithful to their party.

The incident soon became known as “Bleeding Sumner,” and it created a political firestorm. The symbolic importance of the crime was arresting. Southern Democrats and their fellow travelers up North were no longer content to employ violence and terrorism in Kansas. Now they had brought their war of aggression into the halls of Congress. “The South has taken the oligarchic ground that Slavery ought to exist, irrespective of color,” the New-York Tribune intoned, “that Democracy is an illusion and a lie.”

In the course of defecting to the new Republican Party, many former Democrats came to look back with disgust on the ways by which Southern Democrats had enforced rigid, doctrinaire support for slavery for decades. Starting in the 1830s, when Congress instituted a “gag rule” barring debate or discussion of the peculiar institution, the Democratic majority blithely tramped over the First Amendment rights of white Northern congressmen in the defense of chattel slavery

A onetime Democrat from Ohio—and future Republican congressman—put the matter in sharper relief when he complained that “we have submitted to slavery long enough, and must not stand it any longer. … I am done catching negroes for the South.” Hannibal Hamlin, a Democratic senator from Maine, lamented that “the old Dem. party is now the party of slavery. It has no other issue, in fact, and this is the standard on which [it] measures every thing and every man.” Hamlin soon switched parties and served as vice president in Abraham Lincoln’s first term.

It’s unclear whether the politicians were leading their constituents, or vice versa. The congressional district in Pennsylvania that antislavery Democrat David Wilmot and his Democrat-turned-Republican successor, Galusha Grow, represented had delivered a plurality of 2,500 votes to Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Pierce in 1852. Four years later, Republican nominee John C. Fremont won the district with 70 percent of the vote and a plurality of 9,000. (Grow would go on to serve as House speaker.) Throughout most of the North and Midwest, Democrats were reduced to minority status overnight. Defections were so profound in Illinois that a former Whig observed that “the men here who have been regarded as the elite of the Democratic party are now with us for the Republican ticket.”

That roster of Illinois ex-Democrats included Lyman Trumbull, who in early 1855 won just five votes in the legislature’s first-round balloting for the United States Senate. The incumbent Democrat, James Shields, won 41 votes, and Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig turned Republican, led with 45—just shy of the 51 votes needed to secure election. Lincoln understood that Trumbull’s holdouts were “men who never could vote for a whig.” Over the course of several roll calls, he began bleeding support to Trumbull, while the Democrats swapped Shields out for the popular incumbent governor, Joel Matteson. Fearing that some of the anti-Nebraska Democrats might reunite with their party and send Matteson to the Senate, Lincoln instructed his Whig supporters to fall in line with Trumbull.

***

Political accommodation between ex-Whigs and ex-Democrats didn’t come easy. It required men like Lincoln to set aside personal ambition in the interest of defeating the slave power. It required Whigs to vote for ex-Democrats, even when the Jacksonians were in the minority. But on balance, it required considerably more of ex-Democrats.

In 1948, the historian Michael Hasseltine suggested that the Republican Party was “little more than an enlarged Whig party disguised in a new vocabulary.” That’s a vast oversimplification, but it’s undeniable that former Whigs outnumbered former Democrats, and that each camp eyed the other warily. In Connecticut, former Democrats led by Gideon Welles and John Niles determined to prevent the state Republican organization from devolving into “but another phase of Whiggery.” For their part, ex-Whigs like David Davis of Illinois disdained former Democrats-turned-Republicans as “a perfect oligarchy with a maw ready to swallow everything.”

Republicans fundamentally agreed on two things: That slavery must not be extended into the territories, and that the Democratic Party was a dangerous, anti-democratic institution that must be ground out throughout the North. That left much room for disagreement and compromise over the tariff, monetary policy and the powers of the federal state. Ultimately, though, the Civil War compelled former Democrats to make the greater compromise, a point well-illustrated by hundreds of millions of Union greenbacks issued by Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and signed by Francis Spinner, treasurer of the United States. Both were former hard-money Democrats.

The war greatly expanded the federal state in ways that ex-Democrats might once have found unconscionable. To raise, arm, feed and move the Union Army, the Republican administration and Congress introduced new taxes, expanded the federal debt and engaged in inflationary monetary policies that would have made Andrew Jackson turn in his grave. In the 1870s—with the question of slavery settled and civil rights for freedmen at least theoretically embedded in the Constitution—some ex-Democrats returned to their fold. Many did not. Those who returned to their party were unsettled not only by the seeming permeance of Whig economic policies that they had accepted as a wartime expedient, but also by political corruption that seemed the natural byproduct of the GOP’s close relationship with industrialists and manufacturers who had prospered on government contracts under the Lincoln, Johnson and Grant administrations.

***

Ex-Democrats in the 1850s and 1860s didn’t have to become Whigs. They were able to join a new political party—albeit one dominated by former Whigs.

The shrewdest of today’s Never Trump Republicans realize that they face only one clean choice, and it is, of course, more jarring: Become Democrats or, like the prominent GOP strategist Steve Schmidt, become independents and support Democrats. Third parties have rarely taken flight in American history, and when they have, they rarely stay airborne for long.

Like the Iowan who felt as though he were “tearing [himself] away from old home associations,” Never Trumpers will find it a bitter pill to swallow.

But history offers them some consolation.

In the process of abandoning their party allegiance, most Democrats-turned-Republicans disenthralled themselves from political prejudices that no longer made much sense. In Congress, they avidly supported distinctly Whiggish policies like the Homestead Act, the Land-Grant Agricultural and Mechanical College Act and the Pacific Railroad Acts, all of which established a foundation for the country’s post-war economic growth. On some level, the war catalyzed this political realignment. But something equally fundamental may also have been at play: Having concluded that their former Whig enemies shared their fundamental commitment to the good of the nation, ex-Democrats freed themselves to imagine a larger space for political collaboration.

So too can Never Trumpers and Democrats in 2018 find common cause. Relative to other center-left political parties in the developed world, the U.S. Democratic Party is more center than left. It’s the only American political party that has seriously attempted to develop market-based policies to expand health care access (the Affordable Care Act), address climate change (cap and trade) or upgrade the nation’s deficient infrastructure (an infrastructure bank.

As recently as the 1990s and early 2000s—before their party devolved into a spirit of revanchism—center-right Republicans used to compromise with center-left Democrats to address systemic challenges like children’s health care, tax policy and environmental protection. There’s no reason they can’t do so again, within the framework of an enlarged and more ideologically diverse Democratic Party.

If Never Trumpers are truly alarmed by Democrats’ recent embrace of single-payer health care and universal community college, they should become Democrats and develop market-based solutions to big, systemic problems. That would also require that Democratic voters understand their role in forging a new majority: They must pitch a larger tent and accommodate a broader range of ideas and perspectives. Some of them might be forced to make sacrifices like Lincoln’s and step aside in favor of former Republicans where circumstances demand it.

In the same way that former Democrats in the 1850s had to climb their way out of an intellectual foxhole, Never Trumpers in 2018 must arrive at some political accommodation—and quickly. Having devoted so many years and decades to denouncing theoretical and rhetorical incursions on personal liberty—usually in the form of taxes or regulations that Democrats support—many Republicans have been slow to recognize the very tangible and real-world danger of a thuggish central state under their own party’s control: the knock on the door at night, the separation of children and parents, congressional show trials, the erosion of civil society, the autocratic leader forcing private companies into submission, the state-run television station that insists the weather is bright and sunny when everyone can see that it’s raining.

This late in the game, you can be Never Trump or Never Democrat. But you can’t be both.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of former U.S. Treasurer Francis Spinner.

Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing editor, is the author of Building the Great Society: Inside Lyndon Johnson’s White House. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

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It’s time for our weekly Diamond Comics Shipping List! While this coming week may be a little light on Transformers, IDW is releasing some interesting titles like The Transformers: The Complete All Hail Megatron, My Little Pony: Legends of Magic, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Ghostbusters II, DuckTales, and more! All coming your way for November 15th!

TRANSFORMERS COMP ALL HAIL MEGATRON TP

Shane McCarthy (A) Guido Guidi

After at last succeeding in defeating the Autobots, the Decepticons set about ruling our planet with an iron fist. Their forces invade and control New York and, before long, they manage to cripple the United States. It’s a war between the U.S. armed forces and a giant species of technologically advanced killing machines–a war that suddenly becomes incredibly one-sided! Meanwhile, the battered and broken Autobots struggle to survive a forced exile on their dead homeworld of Cybertron. Defeated by an unknown traitor in their midst, the Autobots struggle to maintain their trust and unity… and nothing short of a miracle will save them from utter extinction! Collects All Hail Megatron #1-16, as well as Transformers Spotlight: Blurr, Transformers Spotlight: Jazz, Transformers Spotlight: Cliffjumper, Transformers Spotlight: Drift, and Transformers Spotlight: Metroplex.

MY LITTLE PONY LEGENDS OF MAGIC #8

Jeremy Whitley (A/CVR A) Tony Fleecs (CVR B) Brenda Hickey

The group of legendary ponies continues to grow as Rockhoof and Mage Meadowbrook join the group! Each faces unique challenges that will require the help of their peers before disaster strikes! •   New friends and new magic!

MY LITTLE PONY FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC #60

Erik Burnham, Tom Waltz (A/CVR B) Tadd Galusha (A/CVR A) Dan Schoening

Leonardo and Winston face formidable foes in the form of ferocious frogs! •   A special coming-of-age issue!

TMNT GHOSTBUSTERS II #3

Erik Burnham, Tom Waltz (A/CVR B) Pablo Tunica (A/CVR A) Dan Schoening

As the teams split up to evade their spectral pursuers, Michelangelo and Peter Venkman enter a dimension populated by anthropomorphic animals… including Turtle Ghostbusters!

TMNT ONGOING #76

Tom Waltz, Kevin Eastman (A/CVR A) Damian Couceiro (CVR B) Kevin Eastman

“Invasion of the Triceratons” Part 1 of 5. A small force of armed extra-dimensional Triceratons have arrived in the heart of NYC! Will the Earth welcome them or destroy them? •   The start of a major new story arc!

DUCKTALES #3

Joey Cavaleri (A) Luca Usai, Giuseppe Fontana, Graziano Barbaro, Andrea Greppi, Roberta Zanotta (CVR A) Marco Ghiglione, Dario Calabria (CVR B) Giuseppe Fontana

Woo-oo! The adventures of everyone’s favorite Duck Family continue with two more stories based on the hit new Disney Channel animated series! Scrooge and company match wits with the ghost of Nostradogmus! Plus, can they solve the terrifying secret of the Pumpkin People?

IDW Comics Shipping List for November 15th! It's time for our weekly Diamond Comics Shipping List! While this coming week may be a little light on Transformers, IDW is releasing some interesting titles like…