GOP tax plans: Reaganomics redux

Thirty years and waiting, waiting, waiting . . .

"Look at the tyranny of party loyalty"

Everything one hears from the spineless creatures leading the Republican Party in control of both houses of Congress leaves the impression that they are far more focused on preservation of power of their party (which they may not have fully comprehended is actually no longer theirs) than they are about the good of the American people, rather than "my constituents."

Mark Twain’s view of party loyalty comes to mind:

“Look at the tyranny of party-- at what is called party allegiance, party loyalty-- a snare invented by designing men for selfish purposes-- and which turns voters into chattels, slaves, rabbits; and all the while, their masters, and they themselves are shouting rubbish about liberty, independence, freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, honestly unconscious of the fantastic contradiction; and forgetting or ignoring that their fathers and the churches shouted the same blasphemies a generation earlier when they were closing their doors against the hunted slave, beating his handful of humane defenders with Bible-texts and billies, and pocketing the insults and licking the shoes of his Southern master.”

Baltimore's Bonaparte: Founder of the federal "Bureau of Investigation"

A reform-minded lawyer from Baltimore, who happened to be Napoleon's grand-nephew, founded what became the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Attorney General under President Theodore Roosevelt, his reputation for integrity, honesty and courage should be the standard for his successor today.

 http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-price-0521-20170520-story.html

My recent columns in The Baltimore Sun

May 7, 2017

U. S.& Israel created our own enemies

http://baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bs-ed-price-0507-20170506-story.html

April 22, 2017

“Wars that have no end”

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-price-0423-20170422-story.html

April 9, 2017

Good news for real news

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-price-0409-20170408-story.html

March 24, 2017

Trump's 'shameful insult' to America's humanitarian values

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-price-0324-20170325-story.html

March 10, 2017

Baltimore Jack and the Playboy bunnies

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-baltimore-jack-20170311-story.html

March 3, 2017

Candidates have a history of meddling in foreign affairs

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bs-ed-foreign-interference-20170304-story.html

LBJ redux

Hey, hey Donald J.
How many lies did you tell today?

For those who are too young to remember (or too old, as the case may be), half a century ago at the height of the U. S. war in Vietnam under President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), marchers in the huge demonstrations against the war often chanted "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"

What's LBJ got to do with anything that's happening today, or could happen? Plenty, because Johnson was no stranger to alternative facts, including one awful departure from truth that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of American soldiers in Vietnam, along with hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese civilian casualties.

This was the lie that led to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of August 1964 approved by a compliant Congress in which Johnson's Democrats held majorities in both houses, based on false information about a North Vietnamese attack on U. S. Naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin,  developed by Johnson and his Defense Secretary, Robert McNamara, who years later acknowledged, "It never happened."

As McNamara described it in an attempt to apologize for the harm he had done to America, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution ""Gave complete authority to the President to take the nation to war."

The consequences were devastating. Within months, Johnson ordered massive bombing raids against the North and a massive escalation of U. S. troops in Vietnam: from 23,300 in 1964 to 184,300 in 1965, and a peak of 536,100 by 1968.

More than 58,000 Americans died in the Vietnam conflict.

Donald J. is no LBJ. In the realm of political experience and skill, LBJ was a giant; Donald J. is a shrimp. When necessary, LBJ was a skilled manipulator of facts and non-facts. Donald J. is not a skilled liar; he is just a liar, day-in and day-out, so it seems appropriate to call him out:

"Hey, hey, Donald J. How many lies did you tell today?

Queston is: How long will it be before a Trump lie has fatal consequences, if that has not already happened? And who will protect us from that?

Given the pusillanimous toady leading the U. S. Senate today and the blindly ambitious enabler leading the House of Representatives, protection by that branch of government seems undependable at least.

If America is to survive the fatal consequences of the excesses of Donald J. and his praetorian popinjays it probably will take the judiciary and the free press, both of which Donald J. has made it clear he fears and wants to invalidate or destroy.

This must not stand. Resist! Persist!

Who you callin' so-called?

So-called President Donald Trump, predictably, has called U. S. District Court Judge James Robart of Washington State a "so-called" Judge after Judge Robart issued a temporary nationwide ban on key parts of the Trump regime's order restricting immigration to the United States.

Since "so-called" suggests illegitimacy, it seems reasonable to ask who is the illegitimate one here?

Trump, America's insulter-in-chief, who assumed the Presidency after losing the popular vote by almost three million, is possibly the most illegitimate and certainly the most unpopular president ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Or, Judge James Robart, legitimately nominated by a Republican, President George W. Bush,  and legitimately and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate in a 99 to 0 vote in 2004.

Thank God for Judge Robart. Going forward our country may need to depend on such judges to protect against continuing assaults on citizens' rights to liberty and justice.

Important observations on the Trump regime's travel ban

Arnold "Skip" Isaacs, a friend and former colleague at The Baltimore Sun, where his assignments included postings in Latin America and Asia, has shared some wise and important observations concerning the crisis brought about by the Trump regime's acts against Muslims entering the United States.

I am proud to share his message here:

Dear friends --

A three-part message...

(1) I am not very comfortable tooting my own horn, but given current

headlines it seems appropriate to call your attention to a long report I

wrote a couple of years ago that touches on both Muslim American and

refugee issues. From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans

and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America is available online at

www.fromtroubledlands.net. Two chapters have particular relevance to the

present uproar over President Trump's immigration order: chapter II,

"The 9/11 Aftermath" and chapter V, "A Clash of Civilizations?" Another

looks at aspects of the refugee experience -- chapter IV, "Afghan

Americans: the Heritage of Trauma."

(2) Editorial comment: With this policy Trump has given a huge gift to

the Islamic State and other extremist fanatics. He validates their

message that the United States and its people are at war with the Muslim

world and Muslims need to defend themselves with violence. We will never

be able to quantify exactly how many more fighters they will enlist as a

direct result of Trump's action, but there is no possible doubt that it

will help their recruiting. Nor will we be able to count how many fewer

Muslims will join the anti-extremist side, but the number will certainly

be lower than it would have been without this disaster. The number of

Muslims in America who will trust and cooperate with law enforcement and

other public agencies to help find and head off possible violent

radicals will be lower, too. Trump's order will not make us safer; it

makes us significantly less safe.

I can't prove this either but I would make a substantial bet that the

immense majority of our own counter-terror professionals and those we

work with overseas understand that Trump has just made their job a lot

tougher, completely unnecessarily. Americans need to oppose his order as

strongly and publicly as possible not just for the sake of very

important values but for our safety as well. And the Americans who have

the most responsibility for that are the Republicans who control

Congress, who if they have any moral integrity and any grip on reality

will take immediate, decisive steps to reverse this policy and begin

repairing the damage it has done.

(3) Lastly, a few random facts:

-- The overwhelming number of violent terrorist acts inside the United

States after 9/11 were committed by U.S. citizens or permanent

residents. A disproportionate number of Muslim terrorists have been

native Americans who converted to Islam, not immigrants. The risk from

refugees is practically zero; a dozen or fewer cases involving people

with refugee status, out of more than three-quarters of a million

refugees admitted since 2001. And from everything I know, not all those

cases necessarily represent the scenario that anti-refugee rhetoric

promotes: a violent act committed by someone who slipped through the

refugee screening process. As I understand, they include some who did

not do anything violent but contributed funds to supposed terror

organizations overseas, and some who came as children with refugee

families. The number of cases that actually fit the anti-refugee script

is probably no more than three or four.

-- A look back at the wave of sweeping, repressive counter-terror

programs that were put into practice after 9/11 shows that they were

completely ineffective at finding terrorists. NSEERS, the post-9/11

registration program, did not lead to a single terrorism prosecution.

Neither did the years of extensive surveillance by the New York Police

Department in mosques and Muslim neighborhoods. (More about these in my

Troubled Lands paper.) The approach that Trump and his pal Stephen

Bannon and others around him apparently have in mind -- and have put

into practice with this astonishing order -- isn't just questionable as

a matter of logic. It's been tried and proven ineffective.

-- I won't make the case here but will add that the Islamophobia network

was producing fake news years before that term came into use. Its

"evidence" on things like the Muslim Brotherhood "stealth jihad" plan,

the unindicted co-conspirator story about the Council on

American-Islamic Relations, and the plot to impose sharia law is all

provably false -- not just disputed, but conclusively disproven. Stephen

Bannon, by the way, has been a big cheerleader for that crowd (Frank

Gaffney, Pamela Geller, et al) and I would bet is a channel for their

views to reach the White House -- which is REALLY bad news. No idea if

they had anything to do with this immigration order, but it seems

entirely possible.

OK, I'll stop. But I hope you'll pass this along anywhere it might

contribute to the discussion and that you'll find some way to support

opposition to Trump's disastrous order.

Thanks for your patience and best regards

Skip Isaacs

Cock-a-doodle-doo

Ted Chan, a colleague at The Baltimore Sun years ago, writes to alert me that Saturday, January 28, the second Saturday of the Trump presidency, is the first day of the Chinese Year of the Rooster:

“Fittingly, 2017 will be the Year of the Rooster. Puffed chest. Exaggerated Strut. Incessant, irritating noise. And Ruffled feathers!"

Obamanation to Abomination

Inauguration Day 2017:

America Moves From

 Obamanation to Abomination

Israel still gets $10 million a day

Consider some facts in the tempest blown up over President Barack Obama’s decision to allow passage of a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank and the part of Jerusalem occupied by Israel since it captured the territory from Jordan in 1967.

In allowing the resolution to pass, The United States effectively endorsed the position it has held with the rest of the international community, under all administrations -- Democrat and Republican -- that the settlements represent an illegal colonization of occupied territory and a real obstacle to peace between Israel and the Palestinians as envisaged under a so-called two-state solution.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has done everything he can to obstruct attempts by the Obama administration to get real negotiations going between the two sides, has condemned as “shameful” the Security Council resolution and the U.S. decision not to veto it. And certainly it’s true that his ability to resist real progress toward peace has been facilitated by a militant, corrupt Palestinian leadership.

So what impact will the U.N. resolution have on Israeli settlement activity?  Probably none. It will not stop Israel from expanding colonization. In fact, given the condemnation of the resolution and of President Obama from Donald Trump and his supporters, including some leading Democrats on this issue, settlement activity is more likely to accelerate.

And what of the notion that President Obama’s action represented an abandonment of Washington’s historic strong support for the State of Israel?

Answer: 38.5 billion dollars.

That’s the record amount the Obama administration agreed recently to give Israel over the next ten years in military aid. That works out to $3.85 billion a year, or more than $10 million a day from the U.S. taxpayer to the State of Israel -- $10 million a day, every day for the next 3,650 days. Israel has long argued that U.S. aid is not used to support activity the U.S. historically has opposed, like settlements, but getting $3.85 billion a year from the U.S. frees an equal amount from other revenue sources to pay for the settlements.

How much would that cost be? According to the Macro Center for Political Economics, a progressive Israeli think tank, the cost of support for the  “settlers and local governments running settlements” in 2015 totaled $368 million.

The U.S. gives that much in military aid to Israel in less than 40 days.

Chemi Shalev, a columnist writing in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, put it this way:

“In recent years, after President Obama desisted from efforts to advance the peace process, Netanyahu, his ministers and settler leaders had behaved as if the battle was over: Israel built and built, the White House objected and condemned, the facts on the ground were cemented in stone.

“You can have your cake and eat it too, the government implied: thumb your nose at Washington and the international community, build in the West Bank as if there’s no tomorrow and still get $38 billion in unprecedented [US] military aid.”

Gilding the tangerine

The New York Times today reports that it takes only six minutes for Alec Baldwin to make-up as Donald Trump for his performances on Saturday Night Live. That brings to mind an obvious recommendation for the Donald, who must spend at least two hours every morning arranging to look like himself:

Stop the Twitter assaults on Baldwin's performances and ask him how he does it. Once you're playing President of the United States you need to devote as much time as possible to the job.

On second thought maybe the less time he spends on the job, the better.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/20/arts/television/a-tangerine-wig-and-a-tightrope-walk-alec-baldwin-as-donald-j-trump.html?

Absurd, you say? What isn't absurd these days?

Annexation blowback

Donald Trump loves people who love annexation. One is Vladimir Putin who -- whether or not Trump noticed -- invaded and annexed Crimea. Others include the far-right of Israel, including most of the governing coalition, who believe they are entitled to annex the West Bank and the Golan Heights, captured from Jordan and Syria respectively in 1967 and illegally colonized in the last half-century by Israelis in large, modern communities called “settlements” as if they were some sort of frontier outposts. In that half century, every U. S. administration -- Republican and Democrat -- has held along with the rest of the international community, that the “settlements” are illegal under international law, specifically the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Trump’s acceptance of the Israeli hardline view on the settlement issue is manifest in his nomination yesterday of his friend, bankruptcy lawyer David Friedman, to be his ambassador to Israel. Friedman has been a forceful supporter of Israel’s right to settle and even annex the West Bank . He has compared Jews who challenge that position to “kapos,” as Jews who collaborated with the Nazis in concentration camps were called.

As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (adamantly not related to David) told CNN Friday morning, the Iranians must be popping champagne corks on Trump’s selection of David Friedman, hugely offensive as it will be to Iran’s bitter rivals, Saudi Arabia and Egypt whom Washington views as important allies.

But here’s a question:

Given Trump’s precedent-setting endorsement of annexation, what would his response be to an announcement by Chinese President Xi jinping that China now will annex Taiwan which after all was a part of China at least as far back as the Qing dynasty more than three centuries ago? And that he would take it back by force if necessary, just as Putin did in Crimea.

Or, how might Trump respond to Xi’s saying to him, “Look, it’s not the South U.S. Sea; it’s not the South Philippines Sea or the South Vietnam Sea. It’s the South CHINA Sea and we’re gonna do whatever we want there. See?!”

What, for that matter, might he say to his friend  Vladimir Putin if the Russian dictator were to demand the removal of all NATO troops from all countries near Russia that Moscow has historically claimed to be in its exclusive sphere of influence: such as the Baltic states and Poland. If we can put troops on the Russian border, why, then, would it not be reasonable for the Russians to put troops on our border with Mexico if Mexico decides it needs protection from Trump’s agents trying to collect on the cost of the wall?

Absurd, you say? Of course, but what isn’t absurd these days?

A suggestion for flag burners

     Don't burn the flag. Just fly it at half-mast for the duration.

Message to America from a Holocaust survivor and his son

     Speaking at a ceremony at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington, honoring the late Elie Weisel, one of the Nazi Holocaust's most famous survivors who came to America as a refugee 56 years ago, his son, Elisha, had this to say:

     "When Syrian refugees need our help, we must help them. When Muslims in our midst are made to feel that they won't have the same rights as the rest of us, we must embrace them. When children of hard-working, law-abiding undocumented immigrants fear deportation, we must insist on compassion."

     Elisha Weisel spoke standing in front of a wall etched with his father's observation that "One person of integrity can make a difference."

     True. And as no one knew better than Elie Weisel, one person of no integrity can make a difference, too. Horrifically.

Breitbart flakes v. Corn Flakes

Resist! Buy Corn Flakes. Buy Apple Jacks and Froot Loops (whatever the heck they are!)

From the Los Angeles Times:

The Breitbart News Network is seeing some of its advertisers head for the exit doors and is responding in typical Breitbart fashion: by going on the counteroffensive, labeling one of them as “un-American” and calling it a war on conservatism..   . 

Breitbart is fighting back at one of the advertisers — the breakfast cereal maker Kellogg Co. — by launching a Twitter campaign #DumpKelloggs that encourages its readers to sign a petition and boycott the maker of such favorites as Froot Loops and Apple Jacks.

On Wednesday, Breitbart placed an article about its #DumpKellogs campaign in the top slot of its homepage. By early afternoon, the article had drawn more than 6,000 reader comments, many in support of the boycott.

"Kellogg's decision to blacklist one of the largest conservative media outlets in America is economic censorship of mainstream conservative political discourse. That is as un-American as it gets,” Breitbart said in a statement.

For the full story, go to:

http://www.latimes.com/business/hollywood/la-fi-ct-breitbart-kelloggs-advertisers-20161130-story.html

More twaddle from the twit

Trump twitter twaddle on the discovery that the presidency may be more important than the Trump business empire:

I will be holding a major news conference in New York City with my children on December 15 to discuss the fact that I will be leaving my . . .

Great business in order to fully focus on running the country in order to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! While I am not mandated to . . .

do this under the law, I feel it is visually important, as President, to in no way have a conflict of interest with my various businesses. . .

. . . The Presidency is a far more important task!

Wow, Donald. Really? Or is it just all about the visuals?

The Latest Dynasty: Duck!

Well, we got rid of the Bush Dynasty. And we got rid of the Clinton Dynasty. And what'd we get? The Duck Dynasty. The Donald Duck Dynasty. Everyone: Duck!

Mencken, Gamaliel and the Donald

    By G. Jefferson Price III

   Almost a century ago, H. L. Mencken, the Baltimore journalist and great iconoclast of the early 20th century, predicted that “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

    Pundits remarking on the results of the just concluded presidential election have recalled Mencken’s prediction. “Moron” may be too gentle a designation for the frightening spectre that President-Elect Trump brings to the American political stage. But there are other, striking similarities between the American political condition today and the condition that existed when Mencken made his prediction.

      The moron prediction was the last line of a column that appeared July 26, 1920, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, a newspaper Mencken helped found, excoriating both candidates for president in the campaign of that year:  Republican Warren G. Harding and the Democrat James M. Cox, both politicians from Ohio, where Harding served as a U.S. Senator and Cox as governor.

    As in this year’s campaign, neither candidate in 1920 won his party’s nomination easily. Harding was nominated on the 10th ballot in a back room deal by the party bosses who picked him over 11 other candidates. Cox -- competing against 15 other candidates -- didn’t get the Democrat nod until the 44th ballot. There also was a third candidate in the presidential race, Eugene Debs, running for the fifth time as a Socialist from a federal prison cell where he was serving a 10-year sentence for violation of the Sedition Act of 1918 in his opposition to U.S. involvement in World War I.  Debs garnered 3.41 percent of the popular vote that year, similar to the 3.3 percent Libertarian Gary Johnson got this time around.

    And, the 1920 election occurred against a backdrop of events similar in some ways to the American condition of the past several years, including racial strife, fear of  terrorism and a growing trend toward isolationism following World War I.

     As in the recent election, neither of the two top candidates was particularly respected or revered. In that 1920 column, Mencken asserted: “It seems to be quite impossible for any wholly literate man to pump up any genuine enthusiasm for either of them. …  No one but an idiot would argue seriously that either candidate is a first-rate man, or even a creditable specimen of second-rate man.”

    Harding was a favorite whipping-boy of Mencken, who often referred to him by his middle name Gamaliel and the incoherence of his public expressions as “Gamalielese.”

  Mencken’s denunciation of Harding’s 1921 inaugural speech as “the worst English I have ever encountered” could easily apply to the evidence of an unhinged mind manifest in Mr. Trump’s Twitter twaddle: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean-soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm (I was about to write abscess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.”

     Mencken declared Harding’s comments were, as always,  directed at “the sort of audience that the speaker has been used to all of his life, to wit, an audience of small town yokels, of low political serfs, or morons scarcely able to understand a word of more than two syllables, and wholly unable to pursue a logical idea for more than two centimeters.”

     Harding won the 1920 election by a landslide with 404 electoral votes, and he was a very popular president until he and his administration were wracked with scandals, including the Teapot Dome scandal and revelations of his prolific extra-marital affairs with various women (sound familiar?), including one that produced a daughter a year before he won the presidency.

    Harding died in a hotel suite in San Francisco on Aug. 2, 1923, less than three years into his presidency. He was only 57 but suffered from various infirmities, including a heart condition that his doctors had warned him could be fatal if he persisted in his aggressive womanizing. There was some speculation Harding may have been poisoned. His wife, Florence, who was in the room when he died, refused to allow an autopsy.

    G. Jefferson Price III is a journalist who spent 35 years at The Baltimore Sun where he was a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist.

"Times They Are a Changin'" -- Not

 By G. Jefferson Price III

Fifty-three years ago, in the winter of 1963,  William Devereux Zantzinger , a 24-year-old white tobacco farmer from Charles County in Southern Maryland, appeared drunk at a socialite dance in a Baltimore hotel where he launched into a torrent of racist profanity and lashed several black hotel employees with a carnival-style cane he was carrying.

     One waitress whom he had caned several times, a 51-year-old mother of 11 named Hattie Carroll, slumped against the bar and gasped to her fellow employees, “This man has upset me so, I feel deathly ill.” Later that night she died at a hospital a couple of blocks from the hotel where she had been thrashed by  Zantzinger.

    This horrific moment of shame in Baltimore and American history came to mind last week when it was announced that Bob Dylan had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, because Dylan memorialized the incident in a song titled “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,” in his 1964 album “The Times They Are A Changin’”

         Dylan has been criticized for liberties he took with the facts of the Hattie Carroll case in his lyrics writing in the first verse:

“William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll

With a cane that he twirled round his diamond ring finger

At a Baltimore hotel society gath’rin’ . . . “

    Zantzinger, whose name Dylan misspelled, was originally charged with homicide but ultimately was convicted of manslaughter on evidence that Carroll  suffered from other longstanding health issues that were factors in her death, including an enlarged heart and hypertension. The Baltimore medical examiner ruled she had died of a brain hemorrhage.

    In another part of the lyric, Dylan incorrectly called Carroll the mother of ten rather than eleven, apparently because eleven didn’t fit the meter he wanted.

    Zantzinger, who also was also charged with assaulting two other black hotel employees with his cane, was fined $500 and sentenced to six months in prison, a sentence he served working in the kitchen at the Washington county jail in Western Maryland rather than the jail in Baltimore, where it was feared he would have been killed by local inmates, the majority of whom were black. The trial had been moved to Western Maryland from Baltimore where racial tensions had been running high even before the beatings of Hattie Carroll and her fellow employees.

 The court also showed its concern for Zantzinger’s economic wellbeing by allowing him to remain out on bail for two weeks between conviction and sentencing so he could harvest the tobacco crop at his 630-acre farm in Southern Maryland.

     The death of Hattie Carroll was in 1963, mind you; not 1863, but Zantzinger was of a mindset that never stopped yearning for the past when the white race was the master race, and the black race existed to serve it and to endure physical abuse and, yes, even death, in service to the white man.

   Other stories appearing in The Baltimore Sun alongside the June 20. 1963 report of Zantzinger’s trial offer up a good picture of where Maryland stood in the civil rights struggle. One article headlined “Prison Dining Integrated” reported “Negro and white inmates dined together without incident today as state prison officials went ahead with plans to integrate the Maryland Institute for Men.” Another article reported the owners of a Baltimore area amusement park  “declined an invitation from the Maryland Commission on Interracial Problems and Relations . . . to discuss the park’s segregation policy.”

    Five years later huge swathes of the city were in flames and the National Guard was trying to enforce martial law as protests following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King tore at the city’s economic and social fabric.

     Zantzinger’s  caning of blacks serving in the Emerson Hotel ballroom accompanied tongue-lashings filled with the vilest racist epithets. His appearance with his wife, Jane,  at the Spinster’s Ball, a charity event staged by Baltimore’s social prominenti of the day was preceded by similar behavior at a Baltimore restaurant where Zantzinger threw down double martinis and his wife loaded up on five double scotches, according to court testimony. The evidence that they were both utterly drunk seems to have been a factor in the court’s leniency.

    Nothing much was heard from or about Zantzinger until a quarter century later in 1991 when a local newspaper exposed the fact that he was continuing to collect rent -- more than $60,000 over a five-year period -- from poor blacks living in run-down shacks in a southern Maryland property he had once owned but which had long before been seized by Charles County for failure to pay taxes. These dwellings had no plumbing and did not even have outhouses.

    At a trial, Zantzinger pleaded guilty to more than four dozen charges related to the phony landlord actions. According to news reports of the time, he was fined $50,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison which apparently he served only at night.

    A Washington Post reporter went down to Charles County in 1991 to talk to people who knew Zantzinger. One friend, the late Michael Sprague, then representing Charles County in the Maryland House of Delegates, described Zantzinger as “a regular old Southern Maryland boy. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet.”

    The old mindset still hadn’t changed much. And one can just imagine which candidate for president would have been supported in this year’s election by Sprague and his good ole boy friend, William Devereux Zantzinger if they were alive today.

    Zantzinger died on January 3, 2009, 17 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States. Wherever he went in the afterlife one can only hope Hattie Carroll was there to make sure he didn’t get into her neighborhood.

    The Baltimore Sun obituary by Jacques Kelly and Frederick N. Rasmussen, noted: “For years, Zantzinger declined to answer questions about Dylan’s song, but he told Dylan biographer Howard Sounes in 2001: ‘He’s just a scum bag of the earth. I should have sued him and put him in jail. [The song is] a total lie.’”

    Sound familiar?

    G. Jefferson Price III worked at the Baltimore Sun from 1969 to 2004 as a reporter, foreign correspondent, editor and columnist.