My sleep schedule has been screwed up for about 6 months now, and I'm trying to get somewhat back to a regular rhythm. On the plus side I do tend to write well early in the morning, so hopefully that keeps being a thing.

These days I've realized that I'm not going to make everybody happy, and if I take stances, I will make people angry. I didn't used to be strong enough to accept that. I used to believe that it was possible to make everybody happy. That of course is the position of the Democratic Party, which believes that if we all sing fucking Kuhmbaya and fill our meaningless consumer driven lives with the proper representation, we will all get to the land of milk, honey and consumer goods.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ]

be motivated by:

1. Personal politics of each Justice; and

2. Reducing the number/kinds of cases that can come before the federal judiciary. IF Chief Justice Marshall can correctly be criticized for grabbing power for the federal judiciary when the nation was young, then later Justices can be criticized for their reluctance to exercise their power.

And, as we have seen from the FISA courts created by a Democratic Congress under President Carter, federal judges are highly unlikely to take it upon themselves to contradict the Executive or Congress when it comes to what does or does not constitute a matter of national security, especially if the nation is at war at the time (and when has the US not been at war lately?).

Readers, please note two things:

A. The emphasis on IF in number 1, above.

B. That I am not saying any of the above is correct or desirable or, for that matter, incorrect or undesirable--or, more significantly, constitutional or unconstitutional.

C. A federal court's deciding that something does not violate the Constitution does not, of course, mean it must be done. Elected officials still could have ended internment.

D. Germans and Italians were also interned, though in far, far fewer numbers than Japanese.

E. In my personal opinion, which has zero relevance, all the internments violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Side note: The person responsible for carrying out FDR's internment orders as to Californians--from where the majority of interned Japanese were snatched--was California's Attorney General. That office was then held by one Earl Warren, who went on to be a Republican Vice Presidential candidate and one of the most liberal justices even to sit on the bench of the Supreme Court. And then, to head the Warren Commission, at the behest of LBJ, who apparently convinced Warren that his duty to his country required him to head the Commission.

When asked what decision of his he regretted most in his eight years as President, Eisenhower cited nominating Warren, who was Chief Justice when the Court decided Brown v. Board of Education .* According to Warren's autobiography, at a Republican fundraiser, Eisenhower remarked to Warren something like, "See, Earl? These are not bad people. They just don't want their little girls sitting next to some big gorilla." Or very similar words. (I read that excerpt on the internet years ago, but have not been able to find it again recently. I should probably buy the autobiography second-hand and check for that quote for myself.)

*But see this footnote to Warren's wiki article: Eisenhower biographer Jean Edward Smith concluded in 2012 that "Eisenhower never said that. I have no evidence that he ever made such a statement."[100] Nonetheless, Eisenhower privately expressed his displeasure regarding some of Warren's decisions, while Warren grew frustrated at Eisenhower's unwillingness to publicly support the Court's holding in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1961, when Eisenhower was asked whether he had made any major mistakes as president, the former president responded "yes, two, and they are both sitting on the Supreme Court."

I'm proud my family interceded on behalf of Pete Seeger whose fiancee was part Japanese, and saved her from the internment camps.

... in the fall of 1942, Seeger, who was then 23 years old, wrote a letter of protest to the California chapter of the American Legion. It was to the point:

Dear Sirs –

I felt shocked, outraged, and disgusted to read that the California American Legion voted to 1) deport all Japanese after the war, citizen or not, 2) Bar all Japanese descendants from citizenship!!

We, who may have to give our lives in this great struggle—we’re fighting precisely to free the world of such Hitlerism, such narrow jingoism.

If you deport Japanese, why not Germans, Italians, Rumanians, Hungarians, and Bulgarians?

If you bar from citizenship descendants of Japanese, why not descendants of English? After all, we once fought with them too.

America is great and strong as she is because we have so far been a haven to all oppressed.

I felt sick at heart to read of this matter.

Yours truly,

Pvt. Peter Seeger

I am writing also to the Los Angeles Times.

Military intelligence officers across the country began probing Seeger and his background. They searched police records in various locales (and found nothing). They discovered that a House committee had come across his name twice while investigating subversives in the pre-war peace movement. They secretly read his mail, including letters from his Japanese American fiancee, Toshi Ohta, who was living in New York City. The investigators were concerned that Ohta was working for the Japanese American Committee for Democracy, which promoted the American war effort but was considered by the military gumshoes to be a Communist-influenced group. In one letter to Seeger, Ohta said she suspected that the combination of Seeger’s past work with the Almanac Singers, a group of lefty folk singers who sang mostly pro-labor songs, and his relationship with her would prevent him from being deployed overseas. She wrote, “Not that I mind that…from the danger point of view…But what good is your going through all this training and having the government spend so much money on you…if they don’t allow you to use it.” Seeger, several days later, wrote to his grandmother: “It is possible that I am being held here because of my former connections with the Almanac Singers and because of my engagement to a Japanese-American, but I doubt it. I have never tried to hide either fact.”

Early in the investigation, an officer at Keesler Field interviewed Seeger, who noted that he was puzzled that he had not been deployed as an aviation mechanic, given that he had completed his training. Seeger pointed out that he played the five-string banjo well and requested that he be assigned to the Special Services Department, which provided entertainment for the troops. Seeger was asked about Ohta, and he informed the officer that her father was a Japanese refugee who had come to the United States because he disagreed with the militarists of Japan. Seeger said Ohta’s father had been given the choice of being executed in Japan or leaving the country. He told the officer that the Japanese American Committee for Democracy sought to demonstrate that Japanese Americans were loyal citizens and that its sponsors included Albert Einstein and author Pearl Buck.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/12/pete-seeger-fbi-file/

Stay warm everybody!

was horrified that I hadn’t known before that. I learned about Anne Frank in junior high school (no middle school then), but had no idea about my own government’s injustice and racism so recently. Considering what we did to the Native Americans and African Americans, I shouldn’t have been so shocked.