Mt. Holly: We Don't Need No Stinkin' Constitution

 

This message arrived from Team Kennedy this morning:

Friends,

Regarding Kennedy 24 Presidential Campaign plans for a campaign table on the public sidewalk in front of the Mt. Holly, New Jersey Post Office today:

We regret to inform you that the local authorities in Mt. Holly acted to violate our constitutional rights to free speech this morning. They demanded that we leave the area, as they insisted that their local codes took precedence over the U.S. Constitution. 

We had looked forward to meeting you today, but, unfortunately, that will not now be possible.

We will be consulting our attorneys about legal remedies that the Campaign will be pursuing, in response to this harassment.

Thank you for your support. 

Happy Birthday, George Hamilton!

 

 Actor George Hamilton is eighty-five years old today. In observance of his birthday, here’s a story about one of his early experiences:

“'When I was very young, twelve, I had a relationship with my stepmother,' he told the ladies of the View on Thursday.

 

"The tanned star released his memoir Don’t Mind If I Do on Tuesday which includes the revelation that he slept with the wife of his father, bandleader George 'Spike' Hamilton.

 

“It actually went on for a short period of time when I was twelve and then strangely enough when I was of age, and I was an actor in Hollywood, I met her again and she was as beautiful as ever and we had a sort of follow-up,' Hamilton said.

 

"The star of The Godfather Part III and Zorro, The Gay Blade said that his stepmother was about 28 or 30 at the time of the first sexual encounter.

 

“My father never knew about it, and it was a very strange thing. But it was very normal, in a strange – she didn’t make me feel bad about it,' Hamilton said on the program. It wasn’t dirty.'

 

"Hamilton said that his stepmother called it 'cuddling' and he didn’t feel abnormal about it.

 

“'I was molested?' he said. 'Damn, I’m down for it again.'” (from a October 17, 2008 Fox News story reprinted in Positive Memories by T. Rivas)

 

Note: until a couple years ago, the Wikipedia article about Hamilton read a bit differently. It claimed Hamilton described himself as a victim in his memoir, which in light of the above quotes is obviously not accurate. It also failed to mention that it happened more than once, and that Hamilton renewed the relationship as an adult. Evidently the previous editor of the article was more concerned with political and moral "correctness" than with factual correctness, something that is true of many pages on that site these days. Of course I fixed it.

Team Kennedy Is Adopting the Vote Pact Strategy #DRexit

 

For some time I've been urging independent politics activists, including fellow participants in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s presidential campaign, to adopt Sam Husseini's VotePact concept. I even came up with a new hashtag, #DRexit, to help popularize it. So I was thrilled last Sunday, during a national webinar updating people on the campaign's progress, to hear that they're going to do so, calling it Kennedy Match. Coincidentally, this is the same day Husseini posted a new article about this strategy on his blog.

The idea is that disaffected voters with opposite ideological leanings, who are frustrated by the sense that they're obligated to vote for a "lesser evil" to stop the "greater evil" and are blocked from taking effective action to seek something better, can team up to break with both establishment parties at the same time while leaving the balance between them unaltered. This has the added enormous advantage that it incentivizes people to step outside of their ideological comfort zone by developing dialogue and trust with people of different perspectives. Some guidance on how to do so may be found on the Braver Angels website.

This approach can also be seen as an application to electoral strategy of Robin Hanson's "tugging sideways" concept.