Stewie Generis

Winners and Losers

Yesterday I wrote that Trump is, in effect, above the law. My thesis was that fines and the threat of imprisonment have never had any mitigating effect on his behavior in the past, and that he simply ignores verdicts against him. I said that federal indictments wouldn’t negatively impact his plans to become president again, and will actually help him in his lifelong effort to cast himself as a victim, always being treated “unfairly”.

When I wrote that, I didn’t know what was actually in the indictment that had been handed down the previous evening, and suggested that the only real hope for some relief against Trump’s assault on the “rule of law” was that he might be charged under 18 U.S.C. § 2071(b), the penalty for which includes being disqualified from holding public office.

It didn’t happen. The indictment is now unsealed. He was charged with 37 counts of various aspects of mishandling sensitive documents, the penalties for all of which are just fines or possible imprisonment. If you haven’t figured it out yet, GOML is here to guide you: Trump isn’t going to jail for any of this, and anyway none of it will be fully resolved until well after the next election. His tried-and-true strategy of delaying, counter-suing, appealing and exhausting the resources of his pursuers will clearly prevail once more.

If a Democrat is elected, this will all be a side-show of some entertainment value, but no real impact on government (apart from any new MAGA-fueled insurrections, of course). And any Republican who gains the presidency will simply have their Justice Department drop the charges, which they are already claiming to be judicial overreach for what, in their view, is a violation equivalent to failing to return an overdue library book.

The more problematic reality if a Republican won would be that we’d have another Republican administration, with or without Trump, free to pursue all their nutty obsessions. Who knows what would rise to the top of their agenda? A war on libraries? A national dress code? Addressing climate change by deploying the Space Force to get rid of those pesky Jewish space lasers once and for all?

So what is the actual impact of these goings-on? Well, the first thing to note is that none of it will change anyone’s mind about Trump. In this already hyper-polarized environment, these proceedings are just gasoline on the fire.

The big winners? Trump and all the news outlets. Trump wins because he again has the only thing he really values – the limelight. All anybody is talking about now is Trump, Trump, Trump. Perfect bliss for the man-baby! He’s absolutely thrilled with his poll numbers now, which are spiking since the indictment.

And the news outlets win, both the pro-Trump and anti-Trump organizations, because they don’t really care about news at all or even know what it is anymore. The fact that you all know what I mean when I refer to pro- or anti-Trump news organizations is proof that “news” isn’t really what it used to be – objectively curated and reported. All they care about now is ratings because ratings translate to profits, and Trump is, in fact, a ratings machine. You may have already forgotten about the FoxNews/Dominion case, in which it was revealed that Fox knew all along that the “rigged election” story was nonsense, but since their viewers didn’t want to hear that, they promoted lies instead. This is the definition of “News” for profit.

The big losers? All the rest of us.

Donald Trump is, in fact, above the law

I’m writing this the morning after a federal grand jury indicted Trump on a number of counts of something or other, apparently related to violation of the Espionage Act and obstruction of justice. Another brilliant “first” for the man-baby! The charges are connected to the mishandling of classified documents at Mar-A-Lago, and the penalty for violating the Espionage Act is theoretically up to 10 years per count, although past violators have received much less.

Details of the charges will be known at some point, but it doesn’t really matter. The case will be tried in Florida, and if you think a Florida jury is going to put Trump in jail for five minutes, I know of a fantastic digital “investment” you’re sure to be interested in.

Without jail time, any other outcome is a victory for Trump, whatever the verdict.

Even if the impossible happened and he was sentenced to jail, he would never serve time because he would be president or dead by the time the tsunami of appeals he would file had been adjudicated. Also, becoming president would give him the ability to pardon himself, as he has already claimed the power to do, or simply instruct his Justice Department to drop the case. If some other Republican was president, say Pence or DeSantis or even Christie or Haley, that president would also pardon him. They have already gone on record as saying the indictment is inappropriate to begin with, and, as a glimpse into the near future, have all voiced support in one form or another for pardoning the January 6th insurrectionists.

And penalties other than jail, such as fines, are a joke. First of all, Trump started fund-raising off the indictment news five minutes after it hit, so if he ever did pay a fine, it wouldn’t be with his own money. And, of course, any payment would be explained as a convenience settlement of a nuisance case, rather than any admission of guilt. This is how the Bragg indictments for falsifying business records in New York will finally play out, months or years from now, in the unlikely event Bragg actually wins in court.

Secondly, he typically just refuses to pay fines, like so many other debts he’s incurred, knowing that no one will enforce payment. Who is going to knock on his door and turn out his pockets? Clarence Thomas? Trump has proven himself to be above the law simply by ignoring it.

This is how it is already working in the E. Jean Carroll rape case that Trump just “lost” in New York. Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, but, importantly, was not found guilty of raping her, and was fined a bit less than $5 million. So what does he do? The very next day he goes on CNN and defames her some more, repeating that her story is “fake”, etc., the very defamation he just got convicted of the day before!

And as for the $5 million? Carroll will never see a nickel of it. First of all his lawyers have already petitioned the court to reduce the fine to a couple of hundred thousand (which he will also refuse to pay), and have further moved to toss the whole case out. Their argument is that he couldn’t be guilty of defaming her by saying the rape story was fake since, in fact, rape was not proved at trial.

So what’s her next move – what can she do to stop the nightmare? She’s going to sue him again, this time asking for $10 million in damages. She will incur an additional metric shit-ton of legal fees, and even if she “wins” she will still be out of pocket. Trump doesn’t even pay his own lawyers, so there is no way he’ll pay hers. And then there’s the emotional cost of the aggravation and exhaustion incurred by dedicating the rest of her life to trying to get Trump to admit to anything at all.

It’s just another case of what we’ve been saying for years: Trump’s epitaph will be “Often caught, never punished”. He emerges from this stronger in the eyes of his adoring cult, a victim of headline grabbers and book floggers who are always trying to benefit from the glory of having been close to Trump, or as Trump would have it, making up a story about being close to him. And, after all, the only thing he was found “guilty” of was what he’s been bragging about doing for years, i.e. grabbing them by the you-know-what. Nothing to see here, folks, but the never-ending witch hunt. The unending persecution of Donald Trump is The Crime of the Century.

Trump is above the law. He actually revels in suing and being sued and has been involved in close to five thousand court actions in his career. You can indict him, impeach him, or whatever you want to do. He simply loves fighting, and never pays a price for it.

So is there any hope for the “justice” that many of us would like to see? Not really. Resistance is pretty much futile. I will throw out one remote possibility for you today, though. I’m not holding my breath and you shouldn’t either, but here goes.

Although threats of jail time and fines are worthless, there is one penalty that might make a difference and to which he might have some exposure. I’m talking about subsection (b) of 18 U.S.C. § 2071, which says that any custodian of a public record who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys (any record) shall be fined not more than $2,000 or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.” (Bolding is mine)

Wouldn’t you feel just a little bit better about the whole years-long clown show if somehow this could come to pass?

The Calling of Stewie

I’m now at the age where many of my peers are dealing with serious medical issues and too many have passed away. I’ve been pretty lucky so far, though my list of aches and pains gets longer all the time and it’s obvious that trend is unlikely to change. Seems like I’ve had more colonoscopies in recent years than is reasonable, particularly since they always tell me the same thing afterward: “You’ll be fine”.

I recently realized my circulation isn’t what it used to be, as I almost always get that “pins and needles” sensation in my left hand after an hour or so of bike riding. I could try tweaking the set-up of my bike to take some stress off the hands, I guess, but I also get the same feeling if I sleep on my hand “wrong”, and there’s not much I can do to modify my sleep set-up.

Anyway, it doesn’t seem like a big deal as I just have to shake out my hand for a couple of seconds and it’s back to normal. It happened the other night – I was sort of half awake and half asleep having a vivid dream in which my left hand had that numb feeling. I started to shake it out when I heard, very clearly, the words, “Matthew 12:13”.

I said (possibly out loud), “What!?” And for the second time, I clearly heard “Matthew 12:13”. Now I was fully awake. I thought, “Wow, that was weird!”

Although I do have a couple of bibles on my bookshelf, I virtually never consult them, much less actually read them, and I have no real familiarity with their various books, chapters and verses. But this incident made me want to investigate right away. I finished shaking out the pins and needles, stumbled over to the bookshelf, and opened my New Oxford Annotated Bible to Matthew 12:13, which says,

Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” So he stretched it out and it was completely restored, just as sound as the other.

Hmm. What to make of this? Coincidence? Someone “up there” trying to tell me something?

Does this dream/incident mean that if I accept Jesus as my personal savior (or whatever the correct protocol might be), then I won’t get any more pins and needles, no matter how long I ride the bike or how I might sleep on my hand?

Or maybe it means that I’ll be better situated somehow in the afterlife if I change my beliefs now? I’ve always felt about 95% sure I knew what happened when you died, and 100% sure that even if I was wrong about it, my guess was closer than what the clergy has historically warned about.

My guess is that after you die you will experience all the same sights, sounds, smells and other sensations that you experience between the time when your colonoscopy doctor says to the anesthesiologist, “OK, let’s get started” and when the recovery room nurse says, “Sir, are you awake? You’ll be fine”.

So I’ve never felt any real need to get on better terms with Jesus or anyone else who might want to communicate with me when I’m half asleep.

At first glance, the meaning Matthew 12:13 seems to be basically what the underlying theme of everything in the New Testament is, i.e. that one way or another you’ll be a lot better off if you have faith in you-know-who than if you don’t.

But it isn’t that simple. The context of the verse is that the Pharisees were trying to discredit Jesus by pointing out that he shouldn’t be fixing anyone’s hand on the Sabbath because healing is work and the commandments say not to work on the Sabbath. Jesus rebuts them with a couple of aphorisms and they go off in a huff to resume their scheming.

Anyway, the lesson of the whole incident is not that God will fix your hand if you ask Him. He’s God, not Santa Claus. No, the lesson is that God cares much more about the spirit of the law than the letter of the law. Doing good is more important than anything else no matter when you’re doing it, even if you bend a rule or two in the process.

Now, why exactly this message needed to be transmitted to me in this fashion, and who exactly was transmitting it, remains mysterious to me, at least for the moment. Who knows? Maybe it will all be revealed during my next colonoscopy.

In any case, I’ll be fine.

Broad Daylight of the Long Knives

Godwin’s Law says:

“As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person’s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi reference, increases.”

The idea has a corollary in Leo Strauss’s idea of Reductio ad Hitlerum, or “Playing the Hitler Card”, which, according to the Wiki, is “an attempt to invalidate someone else’s position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party. One example would be that since Hitler was against smoking, this implies that someone who is against smoking is a Nazi”.

Today, I am introducing Stewie’s Law, which says:

“When someone points out that a person is, in some important way, worse than Hitler, that person will be deemed not credible and a Nazi sympathizer, even when the point made is demonstrably true and the person making it is demonstrably not a Nazi sympathizer. The point will therefore be invalidated and ignored”.

And, when Stewie’s Law is used to defend the abhorrent Donald Trump, a corollary idea is often in play. Let’s call it “Incrementum ad Drumpfum”, or “Playing the Trump Card” to explain and excuse the inexplicable and inexcusable, resulting in the further accrual of power and wealth to Donald Trump.

OK, enough arcane academic references and made-up Latin phrases. Time for a little arcane history.

The Night of the Long Knives was a three day period in 1934 Germany when then-Chancellor Hitler ordered paramilitary units loyal to him, the SS and Gestapo, to murder his political rivals to consolidate his own power, making him the “supreme administrator of justice of the German people”, as he put it in a speech a few days later.

Estimates of how many perceived opponents were murdered range as high as 800 or more, and more than a thousand arrested. Hitler planned all this in secret, of course, calling it “Operation Hummingbird”, and carried out the crimes under cover of darkness.

Trump, on the other hand, commits many of his crimes out in the open, in broad daylight, insisting he has every legal right to do whatever it is and bragging about it all the while.

On January 6, 2021 he called paramilitary units loyal to him to attack the Capitol, fight like Hell, etc. etc. or they “wouldn’t have a country anymore”. The moronic Rudy Giuliani, then threw a little gasoline on the fire by exhorting the riled-up Trumpkins to “Trial by Combat”, whatever that’s supposed to be.

As with Hitler, Trump’s targets included some of his closest collaborators, as well as those who threatened him politically. Vice President Mike Pence was at the top of the list, singled out because of the disloyalty he showed (after four years of abject boot-licking) by not proclaiming that the already-certified electoral college vote was invalid.

The mob smashed into the Capitol and battled with police and security forces, causing many serious injuries and five deaths. Two other officers committed suicide shortly thereafter. As they flooded the offices in the building, they chanted “Hang Mike Pence”, and “Naaaaancy, where are you?”.

Can there really be any doubt that, had they found their targets, many of whom where cowering just steps away, murder would have ensued? If you believe the Supreme Leader has commanded you to do it, there is no fear of negative consequences. He’d just pardon everyone anyway.

A gallows had been hastily constructed outside for the purpose of lynching Pence. Think it’s all a joke?

Within days of the riot, impeachment articles had been drawn up in the House of Representatives for presentation to the Senate. You’ve probably already forgotten what happened next. Mitch McConnell, majority leader, asserted that the Senate would consider the articles only after a recess that would end on January 19th. In other words, he forced the issue to be tabled until arguments would occur only after Trump had left office.

Why is this important? Because it gave some (extremely thin) cover to Republican senators who were then able to cast their vote for acquittal based on the unconstitutionality of impeaching a no-longer-sitting President. They all said, “yes, of course Trump was guilty, but unfortunately our hands are tied by the technicality”.

This is extra-hypocritical, even for the party of unlimited hypocrisy, for many reasons, including that virtually all constitutional scholars agree that impeachment under these circumstances was completely legal. Moreover, a vote taken by those very same senators on the first day of the trial established that, yes, it was legal to impeach a President after he’s out and the proceedings could therefore begin.

None of it matters. Everyone understood that the fear these people have of Trump would trump (see what I did there?) morality, legality, and common sense in the end. They’re afraid of losing their jobs. That’s why only seven Republicans voted to convict, and only one of those, Lisa Murkowski, is running for re-election in 2022. The others have already experienced the blowback from their vote of conscience, which includes censure by their state parties.

On the subject of the fear of job loss, Nancy Pelosi made a great point. She said when she tries to recruit really good people to run for office, she often is told that they have many better opportunities than politics, including highly paid jobs currently held. She tells them, “yes, of course we understand that – we only want people who are highly skilled and in great demand to serve. You can always return to the private sector in great shape afterwards”.

Apparently, senate Republicans really have no better opportunities. Who else is going to give them a dedicated parking space at Reagan National Airport, or fantastic health care, franking privilege, extensive staff, etc. etc. They have to do and say whatever Trump wants them to if they want to hang on to all of that, no matter how it corrupts them.

So now, finally, to the application of Stewie’s Law. How is Trump worse than Hitler?

Hitler had a vision of what he wanted to achieve for the people of Germany and how he wanted to re-shape Europe. It was an insane, racist, murderous vison, but it was more than simply self aggrandizement and self-enrichment. Those things were a nice perk that followed, more or less incidentally, but they were not the motivation for all the lawlessness and depravity.

Although Trump’s rhetoric is similar to Hitler’s in its promise to Make America Great Again, it should now be crystal clear to all that there is ultimately no great vision for America here. The only real beneficiary of Trump’s “policies” is Trump. Everything he does, every word he speaks, every idea that pops into the mind of the Very Stable Genius, is driven by the desire for “Incrementum ad Drumpfum”.

And what use will all that power and wealth be put to in the end? Maybe finding a cure for malaria? Building libraries and hospitals? Endowing institutions of higher learning? Feeding the hungry?

No, the only use Trump’s wealth and power ever serves is the punishment and humiliation of his detractors. That’s it. I mean after all the toilets in Mar-a Lago have been upgraded to solid gold, of course.

Hitler used the regular kind, by the way.

Often Caught, Never Punished

That’s the story of Donald Trump’s life and the motto he relies on as he blunders through life, always “winning”.

You might think that with Twitter, the bully’s most powerful pulpit, no longer available to him, his ability to intimidate Congress and mainline nonsense into the veins of the mesmerized MAGA masses would be reduced. You’d be wrong.

What is it about this sociopath that makes him immune to criticism and beyond the reach of the law? He is so clearly a liar, a grifter, an imposter, and a danger to democracy. And yet, on he goes.

He is, among many other things:

The “billionaire” who hides his tax returns.
The “genius” who hides his college grades.
The “businessman” who bankrupted 3 casinos and lost over $1B in 10 years.
The “playboy” who pays for sex.
The “Christian” who doesn’t go to church.
The “philanthropist” who defrauds charity.
The “patriot” who dodged the draft and attacks veterans and their families.
The “innocent man” who refuses to testify.

Trump is the fool who knows more than all the generals, scientists, and diplomats, and yet is never called to answer for his misjudgments.

Many thought that, after the dust from this election season settled, the Republican crazy fever would finally break. They were overly optimistic, as always.

I can’t remember who said it recently, but it’s an interesting insight: “My greatest fear is not what will happen if Trump runs again and wins. It’s what will happen if he runs again and loses.”

The precedent has now been accepted. Whatever Trump commands, legal or illegal, is what we must accept. All bets are off.

Le Fin de l’Enfant

Or as Kurt, friend of the blog, recently put it, “Tweety est mort”.

Leaving

Today, it was the best of times. The perpetually aggrieved man-baby skulked off the presidential stage in a fog of fury, resentment, choler, and confusion. His Twitter, the bullhorn-sized baby-monitor from which there has been no escape or peace for over four years, had finally been disconnected. If only this had been done when we first called for it here three and a half years ago, perhaps the country would be a bit less inclined towards self-immolation now.

Biden managed to remain standing until inauguration day. Sadly, there were times when I wondered if he could or would.

His team is assembled and ready for work, chock-a-block with highly visible (and competent) LGBQT* folks, People of Color, and myriad others from the various veins and factions of political identity that have been flailing helplessly against the constant insults and mockery of the Trump “administration”.

Signals have been sent that many of Trump’s most misguided policy initiatives will be reversed on day one of the new administration. We will rejoin the Paris climate accords, rescind Trump’s Muslim travel ban, and so on. These “policies” achieved nothing of substance, yet somehow burnished Trump’s credentials among his huge cult as a heroic force, fighting against the feminization of all aspects of culture and for the reclamation of America’s lost freedoms. They were the refutation of Obama-era inclusiveness, one-worldism and concomitant loss of American Exceptionalism that had ruined the country from their point of view. Trump had “corrected” this for them, at least temporarily.

The incoming administration is setting the table anew for the accusations that the country has been stolen from its “rightful owners”, those middle-aged white men who, in a long lost and mostly-imaginary Eden, could feed their families with a single blue-collar paycheck without any needless back-talk or sass from the little woman, and without being called deplorable or racist or homophobic or anything else by people who never built anything with their own hands in their miserable, liberal lives. Only Trump understood them, they thought, though they never understood what he thought of them.

And it was the worst of times.

Gone, but not forgotten. Gone, but not gone. Trump is now more than ever the undisputed God of his mesmerized minions. Where he goes, they go. What he says he wants, they are commanded to do.

He leaves the stage with 400,000 already dead from Covid-19, clearly another media hoax meant to take him down, and one that he both scrupulously and unscrupulously ignored in the months after his election loss. Of course, he pretty much ignored it before then as well, apart from inciting violence against those who tried to fight the epidemic as best they could. Hard to remember now, but it was only one year ago that he confidently and condescendingly asserted that we had it under control, and that it was only one person coming from China. “It’s going to be just fine” he said then and many, many more times since.

Very early on, even before his 2016 election victory, we agonized here that the advent of Trump was the end of the thing that was America’s most important contribution to worldwide democracy and the rule of law: the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. He asserted that the election was rigged and would not accept the results (if he lost). When he won the electoral college vote but lost the popular vote by three million, he asserted that all those three million votes and many more had been illegally cast and that he actually won the popular vote as well. He launched an election fraud investigation to prove it all, which, two years later, of course yielded nothing. Remember, I’m talking now about the election he WON.

This time, he lost by over seven million votes and lost the electoral college vote as well by the same margin he called a “landslide” and a “shellacking” when it was in his favor. So the same fantasies and lies and poison from 2016 were amplified and refined, and injected into the bloodstream of not only the MAGA crazies, but also more than 75% of all previously “normal” voters who identify as “Republican”, not to mention their elected representatives in congress and their favorite infotainment outlets.

The handshakes, well-wishes, hopeful words, and many other traditions of continuity between administrations, large and small, have been trashed by Trump. In his final days, he did as much to impede the new administration and set it up for failure as he could think of to do, even sending the White House staff home so that there was no one to unlock the door when the Bidens arrived there. Trump remained true to himself, petty and vindictive until the last second.

There is no longer any reason for a foreign power to negotiate any sort of treaty with the U.S., as they now understand that what is agreed to by one administration is readily tossed out by the next. Same as in every war-torn kleptocracy around the world.

Russia has succeeded beyond its wildest imaginings in its project to discredit the idea that the U.S. is a shining example of democracy and that democracy is a system preferable or superior to any other.

Need some visual proof that the peaceful transfer of power is no more? On inauguration day, D.C. is an armed camp with more of our uniformed forces keeping people away from the “celebration” than are deployed around the world trying to keep peace in all the countries previously thought to be irredeemably hopeless and backward. Seven people are already dead from the rioting called for by Trump just two weeks ago while his own vice-president, absurdly loyal, obsequious and subservient to the end, was presiding over a ceremony to record the already-finalized electoral votes. That loyalty was rewarded by chants of “Hang Mike Pence” from the Trump-fueled mob, while the pathetic Pence cowered near by. His crime? He tried vainly to point out to Trump that he did not, in fact, have the authority to disenfranchise 150 million voters with the dropping of his gavel. Not good enough.

What now, now that the conspirators, instigators and enablers have been pardoned? What’s the next act in the ongoing tragicomedy that is Donald John Trump? I’m almost afraid to hit the “Post” button when I’m done writing this because of the strong possibility that, by the time you read it, something so much worse than what we’ve already seen will have rendered my words quaint and dated.

All I can tell you is that two things are certain. The first is that we will have no permanent relief from Trump and his incitement, with or without social media. The second is that the motto that Trump has lived by and cherished all his life and the one that really should be emblazoned on his family coat-of-arms will be shown to be true once more: “Often caught, never punished”.

I’ll leave you with this today. When Kurt said, “Tweety est Mort”, my first thought was what Eddie (Walter Brennan) asks Slim (Lauren Bacall) in “To Have and Have Not”:

“Was you ever bit by a dead bee? You know, you got to be careful of dead bees if you’re goin’ around barefooted, ’cause if you step on them they can sting you just as bad as if they was alive, especially if they was kind of mad when they got killed.”

We need to be careful where we step.

One way or another

Three months ago, I wrote that one way or another Trump would manage to stay in the oval office past inauguration day. I know many of you thought it was hyperbole, or, in the worst case, perhaps Trump would have to be “escorted” from the White House, like a trespasser, as Biden has suggested.

When Biden finally acquired the 270 electoral votes needed to win, most reasonable people in this country breathed a sigh of relief, imagining that the Trump era would now come to a close, with or without Tweety’s consent. And I, too, temporarily harbored hopes that my dire ruminations had been overly pessimistic and that, in the final analysis, the electoral machinery of our democracy would hold the man-baby to account. Even though congress, the courts, the military, the press, the intelligence agencies, and every other institution that we had placed our faith in over the last four years had failed to hold back the craziness, we thought the jig was finally up.

When Trump augmented his nutty Twitter pronouncements of victory with real actions, though, some doubts started to form among even the most optimistic of us. Denying the release of funds earmarked for the transition? Refusing to allow Biden access to security briefings necessary to keep us safe? Just the typical Trumpian tantrums and vengefulness, we thought.

Of course, no one really thought Trump could bring himself to concede and graciously wish his successor good luck on behalf of the American people, like every loser before him. But it wouldn’t matter, we were assured, since concession is simply a custom and not any sort of constitutional requirement. A new president would take office whether the outgoing one agreed to it or not. After all, no man is above the law, right?

Not so fast.

What no one really imagined was that the rank and file of the Republican party would fall into line with Trump’s fantasy, supported, of course, by FoxNews. With the usual exceptions of RINOs Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, no sitting Republican congressperson has dared call Biden “President-Elect”. The man-baby still has them all scared to death.

And if Senators and Representatives are willing to praise the Emperor’s fine clothes, does anyone imagine that the foot soldiers out in the provinces have the integrity, fortitude, or power to speak up and point out the obvious?

And this brings me to some actual scenarios by which Tweety will attempt to complete the final destruction of our democracy and install himself and his heirs as Supreme Leader For Life.

Here are a couple of possibilities, though no one can really predict (or even imagine) what a deranged sociopath might conjure up.

Try this one out: Trump persuades Republican-controlled legislatures in key swing states to declare that, as the propriety of the counts is in doubt, they must intervene and designate new (Trump) electors, potentially changing the final vote of the Electoral College. The Electoral Count Act of 1887 gives the legislatures considerable discretion in these matters and the Supreme Court will affirm the legality of it, citing constitutional provisions authorizing state legislatures to determine the mode of selecting electors.

Sounds about right. And if you don’t believe that one, how about this one:

Why do you think Trump fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper and several other top Pentagon officials, replacing them with “loyalists”? With only two months left to his regime, it seems pointlessly cruel and vindictive. Yes, of course it is cruel and vindictive, but not pointless. If you can remember only as far back as June (and no one will blame you if you can’t), Trump’s beef with Esper was that he refused to deploy military personnel to put down Black Lives Matter protests, thereby further infuriating the always-infuriated man-baby.

What Trump hopes is that his refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of the elections and the wishes of the 80 million citizens who want him gone will ultimately provoke widespread protests and demonstrations. With the help of a few false-flag provocateurs and, who knows, maybe the expertise of his Russian friends, violence will ensue. Fox will amplify the chaos and assert that the country is at risk of a coup. At this point, Trump’s military will enforce some flavor of martial law, and Presto! The Reichstag is burned to the ground.

These are just two scenarios. As we’ve often noted, there is nothing that Trump will not do. Remember, he is not only desperate to hold on to power, but he is also desperate to avoid criminal prosecution in New York once he is out. No turn of events can possibly surprise us at this point.

One way or another. Buckle up.

How many genders are there?

This was the question Joe Biden was asked by an Iowa college student today, and, of course, his answer got him in trouble. I say “of course” since getting him in trouble was the sole purpose of asking him in the first place. After all, it wasn’t as if the asker really didn’t know the answer and was just sincerely hoping Uncle Joe could enlighten her.

Now, I realize that all GOML readers are extremely woke, maybe even woker than anyone else, but I’ll bet most of you didn’t know the right answer to this question off the top of your heads any more than Biden did. In fact, I’ll bet most of you thought to yourselves, “well, the answer can’t possibly be two genders as that would be too obvious and not nearly tricky enough to embarrass a Democratic candidate”.

OK, so how many genders are there?

Well, before you have a chance to Google it and then pretend you knew it all along, I’ll give you a fighting chance with a multiple-choice test. Pick one:

A) 5

B) 58

C) 81

D) All of the above

The correct answer is “D) All of the above”. Click on the links given for A through C to find out how each is correct.

Biden’s answer in the moment was “At least three”, which you would think would satisfy the average Democrat, though “gender is a spectrum” is now the preferred way to skirt this silly trap. Obviously, the average Republican would mock him for saying anything other than, “Of course there are only two genders no matter what you hear on the fake news or in the lamestream media”. And mock they did.

If the asker was pro-Trump, you have to give her credit for scoring some points for her side. If she simply preferred one of the other Democrats now running and wanted to diminish Biden to aid her choice, it’s just depressing, not to mention stupid.

Earlier this year, I wrote a post that some read as some sort of endorsement of Biden. It wasn’t. I do not think Biden is the best choice we have for the next president. There are several, even many, other candidates still running who I would rather see leading the country, and I could name a few people who aren’t running as well. But our choice will not be which of these 20 should we elect. The choice will be Trump or one other person.

Single-issue voters on the left must abandon their narrow interests and pull together behind the strongest, i.e. most electable, candidate. Now is not the time for any potential Democratic voter to try to diminish any of the other candidates still standing. Even the most gender-clueless Democrat will serve the “I-only-care-about-gender-issues” voter better than Trump over the next four years.

Here at GOML, our view is that obviously any alternative would be preferable to Trump. But it is not up to us. It is up to the swing voters in a very few states, specifically white suburban and rural voters in a few mid-western states who voted for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016.

If you want to really get down in the weeds and find out why the electoral math makes this true, have a listen to this NYT podcast with Nate Cohn, who makes a convincing case that the election will be won or lost in Milwaukee, that Biden stands the best chance of anyone to beat Trump, and that the smart money is still on Trump.

The point of today’s post is simple if a bit harsh: if the issue that you care most about in life is not one that resonates with the farmers and blue collar voters in Wisconsin, you will ultimately make far more progress for your cause by just shutting up about it until after the election.

Trump will win again

Did you ever wonder how the President of the United States could stand up in front of a group of servicemen deployed in Iraq and say, “You just got one of the biggest pay raises you’ve ever received. You haven’t gotten one in more than 10 years — more than 10 years. And we got you a big one. I got you a big one”, when absolutely nothing in that statement is true?

Or how he could tell White House reporters , “We’re putting in a resolution some time in the next week and a half to two weeks [and] we’re giving a middle-income tax reduction of about 10 percent,” when no such legislation was pending and no lawmakers, Democrat or Republican, have any idea what he’s referring to?

These are just a couple of recent examples out of many thousands where Trump just made shit up, blathered or tweeted it, and has not only never been held accountable or even seriously questioned, but has gained politically while being supported by FoxNews and Republican lawmakers.

It’s baffling to anyone who expects the president to speak the truth as he understands it, or at least a deftly-spun version of it. It’s baffling to someone with principles, or someone who has any shame at all. It’s baffling to just about everyone except career grifters, pathological liars, and Donald Trump.

Once you fully understand that Trump has no principles or shame, and is a career grifter as well as a pathological liar, it’s possible to see the bizarre genius in his method.

It doesn’t matter to Trump if there is no actual pay raise or tax cut. What matters is that the people who are ultimately disappointed by the broken promise will understand that he isn’t the bad guy in this story. It’s someone else’s fault, you see, because Trump tried his best to deliver. He stood right in front of us and told us he would do these things. He fought for them. If he lost the fight, he can’t be blamed – he’s our hero and standard-bearer. It was Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, or Crooked Hillary, or that foreign-born illegitimate Muslim “president” that preceded him. Trump was the only one who ever tried to do the right thing! The liberals and the fake news media and George Soros conspired against him so they can implement their anti-American agenda!

Trump is ultimately going to win this silly “border wall” fight. Even if he loses. The important thing is to be seen as fighting hard against the forces that want to destroy America. And when the government finally does re-open, with or without his $5.7 billion, he’ll claim victory, insist the wall is already built and that Mexico paid for it, and so on. To his staff, he’s already said, “the country will not remember the shutdown, but it will remember that he staged a fight over his insistence that the southern border be protected.”

The brilliance of Trump is that he knows exactly which buttons to push and how to push them. And he doesn’t care who gets hurt or what’s best for the country or whether our system of government survives or if our position in the world is diminished to pariah/rogue state/laughingstock. He only cares that, in the end, he “wins”.

Earlier this week, there was a disturbing story about blatant racism in a GM plant in Ohio, complete with “whites only” bathrooms, nooses hung in the shop, wide use of the “n-word” during the workday, and all manner of threats and intimidation. This isn’t the Jim Crow south we’re talking about here, but the modern, corporate, industrialized heart of America. In 2019.

There’s a tendency for us here in the Northeast, or elsewhere in the Blue States, to shrug this situation off as an outlier, and believe that most Americans see it as abhorrent. This is where Trump has us beat. He knows this thinking is pervasive. He knows that just under the surface, the majority of Americans have no particular problem with the culture in that GM plant, but are too savvy to let on. Trump knows he can appeal to these people and how to do it.

It’s coming into sharper focus now exactly how and why Trump allowed Steve Bannon and the “alt-right” to influence him so strongly during the campaign and in the first year of his presidency. He heard what they were saying and understood the power of the message. He saw they were on to something big, and even if the most egregious manifestations of it cried out for his condemnation, he never capitulated.

Don’t believe me? Watch this clip from “American History X”, where the Edward Norton character whips up his disciples into a mini-Kristallnacht rampage against a Korean storekeeper.

The language, arguments, imagery, sense of grievance and “white nationalism” is exactly what comes through in Trump’s rhetoric about the southern border and the threats to “our country”. It could have been written by Steve Bannon and recited by Trump verbatim in any of his MAGA speeches about “The Wall”.

Every president we’ve ever had until the current one, from whatever part of the political spectrum, understood that this thinking is a low-grade infection that has always been present in the American body politic. And every one understood the importance of pushing back against it. It’s been 50 years since this kind of thing has represented a remotely viable political platform on the national stage (I’m thinking now of George Wallace in 1968), but even then it was thoroughly, if not unanimously, repudiated by the vast majority of Americans.

Something has changed. We are being led by a demagogue, a career grifter and pathological liar. Even if the Republicans in congress come to their senses and finally push back, a horrifying reality has been revealed: 60 million Americans thought and still think a Trump administration is a good thing. When he is finally dragged, kicking and screaming, from the Oval Office, they will still be our neighbors.

You may now get on my lawn

It took almost a year, but we’ve now said all we have to say.

We promise to return when someone new is the President of the United States, assuming there’s anything to return to.

all

Is this necessary?

At about 11:30 P.M. last night, I was in bed trying to not think about how fast a tweet-storm can turn into an actual fire-storm in the internet age. It took a while, but I had finally dozed off. At that exact moment, my cell-phone, which had been quietly charging on the other side of the room with the ringer and all “notifications” off, started blaring a loud, pulsing alarm, exactly like the sound which warns of impending nuclear doom in every nuclear doom movie you’ve ever seen.

Holy shit, I thought. The tiny-handed moron-baby has finally gone too far with his reckless improvised “policies”/bragging/tweeting/blathering/bullying.

I bolted upright and tried to find my glasses so I could see exactly what this emergency was and what I was supposed to do in response (as if there is anything at all you could ever do). I mean, why else would they be sending an alarm unless there was something for me to do about it, right?

Well, after stumbling around in the dark a while and accidentally kicking an already-terrified cat, I finally learned the nature of the threat. Some idiot woman 60 miles away had gotten into some sort of domestic thing with her idiot baby-daddy, and grabbed up her kid and went “missing”. Obviously, every sleeping citizen up and down the east coast needed to know about this immediately. A child was “in danger”! We must all wake up and, uh, do something about this!

Of course, a couple of minutes later they were found in the backyard and the “AMBER” alert was cancelled. Phew. All’s well that ends well, I guess. Best of all, Leeann Rickheit got a whole bunch of attention that she desperately craved. I even put her name in this paragraph so she can find it when she Googles herself four hundred times a day. Well done, Leeann.

leann

It took me about 25 minutes of searching the internet to figure out how to turn these “alerts” off on my Samsung Galaxy phone. Then I tried to go back to sleep, but it was difficult because I couldn’t stop thinking about how there might be no more Samsung in the morning. Or Kia. Or LG. Or South Korea.

On the plus side, at least I wouldn’t be woken up by the news.

Fire and fury, shock and awe

Yesterday, your Tweeter-in Chief responded to the news that North Korea now has the ability to hit New York with a nuclear weapon this way:

“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Bluff and bluster. Dumb and dumber.

It doesn’t matter one bit that North Korea would lose in a nuclear exchange with the U.S. Everyone else would lose, too.

We would lose plenty. Even if the fat lunatic running things in North Korea didn’t get a shot off, we would be saddled with a huge humanitarian crisis. Having broken it, we would own it, a lesson we apparently never get tired of not learning. Does the fat lunatic running things in the U.S. have a plan for “the day after”?

And if Kim Jong-un did manage to nuke a U.S. city, who will say that was a worthwhile cost to bear to shut him up?

men-babies

Our ally, South Korea, would lose more than anyone. Seoul is only 35 miles from the North Korea border. The damage to their population would be huge and the entire Asian and world economies would take an incredible hit.

China would face a huge immigration problem. Guam would be obliterated. The world would turn against us (even more than they already have, if you can imagine that). ISIS would be emboldened, and would achieve a huge proxy victory just by doing nothing.

I’m not even going to think about the environmental catastrophe that would result.

If you want to hear a very interesting analysis of the four possible approaches we have for dealing with this, and why none of them are good, have a listen to this.

Spoiler alert: the least worst option is to let the North Korean man-baby have what he wants.

The millions who enthusiastically voted for Donald J. Trump only nine months ago may be finding out very soon what a huge mistake they made.

LALALALA – I Can’t hear you!

A draft report on climate change has been completed by thirteen federal agencies and now awaits approval for public release from the Trump administration.

chimp

The report shows temperatures have risen drastically since 1980, and that Americans are feeling the effects right now. It contradicts statements made by the Trump administration, including citing the effects of human activity in the form of increased greenhouse gasses as the principal contributor. The authors base their findings on thousands of studies by tens of thousands of scientists.

According to the Failing New York Times, which has received a draft copy, the report states, “Evidence for a changing climate abounds, from the top of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans.” You can read the draft copy here.

We all eagerly await the response of President Jackass. Will he say something like, “When new facts come to light, it would be insane not to change your opinion”? Or perhaps, something like, “Given the universally agreed-upon conclusions of the best scientific minds in the world, we have decided to rejoin the Paris climate accord.”

He’s a reasonable guy after all, isn’t he? I mean, it’s a pretty dire situation not just for Americans, but everyone in the world – and we’re the most influential country in the world, right?

And even if reason and science and common sense aren’t enough for him to do the right thing here, wouldn’t it have political advantages as well? Nothing will shake the support he has from his “base”, and this would be the perfect opportunity to silence some critics and win over some new constituencies, right?

And it would be a great opportunity to show people that Steve Bannon isn’t really calling all the shots, and that those who say Bannon and Pruitt duped him into leaving Paris are all wrong about everything.

The Climate Change Denial Department here at GOML has officially gone on the record. The smart money is betting that man-baby will do what the man-baby always has done.

baby

Ken Starr, please be quiet.

The other day Kenneth Starr said that the investigation of Special Counsel Robert Mueller might be overstepping its bounds, and should not turn into a “fishing expedition”. He said the original “gravamen” of the investigation was Russian collusion in the election, and that it would be inappropriate to go beyond this question into other areas.

On hearing this, everyone who remembers Ken Starr’s years-long quest to find something, anything, that would reflect badly on Bill Clinton threw up a little bit in their mouths. CNN filed this story under the headline “Ken Starr killed irony today”.

For those too young to remember, Ken Starr was the “Independent Counsel” charged with investigating the potential wrongdoings of Bill and Hillary Clinton in a failed 1970’s real estate development called “Whitewater”. The Clintons lost money on this investment, there was never any wrongdoing found, and they were never charged with anything. There was no “there” there.

Starr was appointed to head a three-judge panel to investigate “the scandal” in 1994, just a year and a half into the Clinton administration. Even though there was never anything to it, Republicans were bound and determined to keep the travesty going, and Starr moved from one subject to the next until, with the investigation finally winding down in 1998, he got wind of some inappropriate sexual conduct between Clinton and an intern named Monica Lewinsky.

The Lewinsky scandal became a 24/7 cable news obsession in 1998, basically blocking out the sun and other real news for months on end. It led ultimately to Clinton’s impeachment trial for lying under oath about the nature of his relationship with Lewinsky. He was absolved and continued in office.

Today is the anniversary of the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The bombings were carried out by operatives of Osama bin Laden, and presaged the 9/11 attacks. 224 people were killed in the bombings, including 12 Americans, and 4500 were wounded.

On August 20, 1998, Clinton ordered a retaliatory attack on bin Laden’s sanctuary in Afghanistan and 70 missiles hit three al Qaeda sites there, killing 24 people, but not bin Laden. 13 missiles hit a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan, killing a night watchmen.

But because of the relentless and idiotic persecution of Bill Clinton by Ken Starr, who had clearly exceeded the “gravamen” of his original investigation, none of these events were regarded as particularly alarming or even newsworthy, and, tragically, none led to any increased effort to neutralize al Qaeda.

Instead, the events were reported, mainly but not exclusively by the young FoxNews network, as “wagging the dog”, meaning Clinton trying to create a distraction to get Monica Lewinsky off the TV for a day or two. A typical example of the coverage from the Washington Post:

Several Republicans yesterday raised the issue expressly. Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.) said: “After months of lies and deceit and manipulations and deceptions — stonewalling — it raised into doubt everything he does and everything he says,” Coats said.

Administration officials said yesterday they had anticipated criticism that Clinton was following a “Wag the Dog” strategy — so-named after the recent movie in which a president tries to draw attention away from a sexual scandal by staging a phony war — but had no choice but to ignore it.

Perhaps there is a legitimate discussion about Mueller’s scope to be had now, but Ken Starr should not be part of it. His past transgressions and current hypocrisy exclude him. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that without this biased, self-important, corrupt and disingenuous fool, we may well have succeeded in limiting al Qaeda’s ability to carry out the 9/11 attacks.

To Ken Starr, I would say, “Thanks for nothing and shut the fuck up.”

Mother of Exiles redux

On July 4th, I wrote about how America is still the greatest country in the world because of the ideals laid out in the founding documents and elsewhere, e.g. in the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. My point was, “If we come up short in trying to make those ideals reality, that’s one thing. But if we abandon them altogether, we are lost.”

The New Colossus described Lady Liberty as the “Mother of Exiles”, and for the millions who saw those words for the first time on entering New York harbor, it validated all the sacrifice, hardship, and uncertainty they had faced to make their way here.

liberty

Among those millions were the antecedents of Donald J. Trump and many others in the current administration, including Stephen Miller, the vile little worm who is “policy adviser” to your president.

miller

A couple of days ago, Miller was explaining the administration’s new immigration policy, which drastically reduces the number of legal immigrants we will accept, requires them to speak English, etc., and he got into an exchange with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who asked Miller if these new rules honored the spirit of Lazarus’ poem.

Miller took the opportunity to say,

“the poem that you’re referring to was added later. It’s not actually part of the Statue of Liberty.”

No duh. So what? It was added because that’s what the statue meant to us (and the world), and continued to mean for the next 115 years. Until now. Miller dismisses it as something like graffiti that needs to be cleaned off.

Maybe the time is now at hand when we can no longer claim to be the greatest nation on earth because of our ideals. Maybe we are now officially lost.

I have often said that the Germans, of all people, should not presume to provide moral guidance to anyone. Not for another hundred years or so, by which time the project of re-writing history to expunge their crimes will surely be complete. I have said that until then, they can just keep their teutonic pie-holes shut and let others criticize us.

Well, maybe their time has also come sooner than I imagined. Here are some images from their Rose Monday parades a while back. You decide.

Mooch, we hardly knew ye

Anthony Scaramucci is out as White House Communications Director, as we all know by now. The hiring of the Mooch to replace Reince Preibus, who had lost the confidence of his boss, resulted in the resignation of Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, who refused to work for the Mooch.

Spicer reportedly said that Mr. Scaramucci’s hiring “would add to the confusion and uncertainty already engulfing the White House.” What he actually said was closer to “this guy is a low-life scumbag from Queens and we’ve already got enough of those around here”.

mooch

The Mooch was recommended by that dynamic duo of king-makers and Tweety-whisperers, Jared and Ivanka, and had the “full support” of the President. For about a week. Given Tweety’s attention span, a week isn’t actually all that bad.

The Mooch became immediately famous for his profanity-laced descriptions of other White House notables, like Priebus (“a fucking paranoid schizophrenic”), and Bannon (“trying to suck his own cock”). But this isn’t really what Tweety objected to, as it’s basically the same language and attitude that he’s always been comfortable with. And anyway, none of his “base” was offended by the vulgarity because FoxNews didn’t report it, so they never knew about it.

It’s more likely that the Mooch’s knack for self-promotion and love of the limelight was what alienated Tweety, who doesn’t want anyone’s name in the news but his own.

The Mooch lost more than his job. He lost his family as well. His 38-year-old wife of three years, who was nine months pregnant, filed for divorce. She gave birth to a son while the Mooch was with the President at the now-infamous Boy Scout Jamboree speech, where Tweety bragged to an audience of kids about wild parties on yachts owned by rich friends of his.

The Mooch, on hearing of the birth, texted his wife, “Congratulations, I’ll pray for our child.” Texted? Wow. That says it all. Everyone knows you don’t text your wife when she gives birth! What a moron. Everyone knows giving birth calls for a tweet, not a text! No wonder she divorced him.

dierdre

The main contribution the Mooch was supposed to make to the White House was to stop all the “leaking” that’s been going on. But the leaking became worse. Everything was “leaked”. It just makes you wonder why everything is such a big secret to begin with. What was so awful that got “leaked” that sent the Mooch over the edge?

Welp, the big thing they wanted to keep secret was that Scaramucci was having dinner at the White House with Tweety, Melania, Sean Hannity, and the former Fox News executive Bill Shine. This was “leaked” to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, who tweeted (of course) about it.

The Mooch just about had a stroke when he saw that. He called Lizza in a rage and threatened to fire everyone in the communications office unless Lizza revealed who “leaked” it (as if Lizza would give a shit if he did). The Mooch said,

“You’re an American citizen, this is a major catastrophe for the American country. So I’m asking you as an American patriot to give me a sense of who leaked it.”

Wow. OK. Slow down, Mooch. If you think that citizens finding out that the President is conspiring with Sean Hannity is a “major catastrophe”, you’re the one who needs to brush up on patriotism.

The catastrophe is that they’re conspiring in the first place – the rest of us finding out about it is actually what the press is supposed to do. The press is supposed to be independent, remember? As Communications Director, that would be something you should be aware of, no?

Anyway, the Mooch is history now. It was fun while it lasted.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark

Today, two questions are of burning interest to defenders of “royalty” worldwide:

1. Why be only a prince and merely a Highness, but not a Majesty, without any status?

2. How can we explain to younger generations the usefulness of the monarchical system?

Here at GOML, the problems and concerns of “royals” have always seemed incomprehensible and quaint, and we have absolutely no idea what the answer to either of the questions might be, or, really, what they even mean.

But to Prince Henrik of Denmark, a life of bitterness and anger became his destiny when, in 1967, he married Queen Margrethe II and became the Prince of Denmark.

royal

“What’s the problem with that?”, I hear you asking. The problem is that’s not good enough – that’s the problem, OK? And Henrik is pretty chapped about it, as who wouldn’t be. It’s an insult and a slight. For half a century, people have been laughing up their sleeves at him, calling him “Hamlet” behind his back, and who knows what else.

What should have happened at the time of the marriage, according to Henrik, is that he should have been named “King Consort”. The way it is, he’s a “Highness” but not a “Majesty”. He has no status! This is bullshit!

He’s now 83 years old and has been steaming about this outrage for 50 years. Today he has announced that he will NOT be buried with his wife when he dies. According to the BBC, she has accepted his decision. An unconfirmed rumor is circulating that her actual words were, “He’s a royal all right, a royal pain in the ass. As far as I’m concerned, you can make him ‘King of the Nitwits’ and he can spend eternity in an unmarked grave.”

OK, I think that may have clarified the whole “Highness vs. Majesty” issue. As for the question of how to explain the usefulness of the monarchical system, well, that remains a mystery.

The water is rising

Al Gore has been making a lot of appearances lately in the effort to drum up interest in his new movie, called “An Inconvenient Sequel”, which is a follow-up to his Oscar-winning “Inconvenient Truth”.

I saw the trailer for it in a theater recently and it looks like an even more dire assessment of the effects of climate change, with a lot of documentation showing how predictions made in the first movie have been coming true. Here’s what the New Yorker has to say about it.

Obviously Gore hopes to get some of the people who stubbornly resisted acknowledging reality eleven years ago to wake up. Of course, this is not going to happen. “Science” is a liberal conspiracy, as everyone knows, and climate change is a hoax.

Gore got into a back-and-forth with a fisherman at a “town hall” event, where the fisherman claimed that if sea-level was rising, he would certainly see evidence of it and he doesn’t. The guy said his island was disappearing under water all right, but it was wave damage causing it, not sea level change. Gore tried to get him to see it was the same thing, but of course it was hopeless. Tweety called this guy up to congratulate him on his brilliant rebuttals.

eskridge

James Eskridge, empiricist

Anyway, Gore told the guy that he wouldn’t try to give him any comfort by citing scientists – there was no point – and that he was sorry for what was happening to him and his family. And he went on to tell this story:

It reminds me a little bit of a story from Tennessee about a guy that was trapped in a flood — he was sitting on the front porch and they came by in an SUV to rescue him and he said, no, the lord will provide.

And the water kept on rising. And he went up to the second floor and they came by the window in a boat and said come on, we’re here to rescue you.

He said, nope, the lord will provide.

And then he went on up to the rooftop as the water kept rising and they came over in a helicopter and dropped a rope ladder. He said, nope, the lord will provide.

Well, he died in the water and went to heaven and he said, God, I thought you were going to provide.

And God said, “What do you mean? I sent you an SUV, a boat and a helicopter.”

In the end, though, no one can convince anyone of anything anymore because no one is listening to anything but the sources that confirm their own beliefs and biases. Those who won’t allow science to provide them answers can get them from God in the end.

And, as the story implies, only at that point will they understand that God and science are one and the same.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

This Wapo timeline sheds a lot of light on the bogus Seth Rich story. You can find out everything you need to know about it elsewhere, e.g. this CNN piece, but basically FoxNews made up a story which they later “retracted” that a DNC worker named Seth Rich was actually the one to give Wikileaks stolen DNC emails, not the Russians, and that he was murdered in retribution for this. Maybe Hillary ordered the hit? Who knows.

Sean Hannity, arguably the most influential “newsman” in the country and regular dinner guest at the White House, was beating this drum for a long time.

The latest and most discouraging revelation about the whole thing is that Fox coordinated with the Trump White House and with Trump personally to put this lie out there.

Here the main points GOML takes away from it:

1. FoxNews is not “news” at all. Not even a little. The idea that they are either “fair” or “balanced” is and always has been quite absurd.

2. FoxNews is the propaganda arm of the Republican party in general, and an extension of the White House Communications Office in particular. It performs these functions in a way that even its most “biased” liberal counterpart would never even aspire to. In this particular instance, it made up a hurtful and completely false narrative in order to obscure some actual, true news that would have reflected poorly on their partner/client/boss/benefactor/whatever. It worked directly with the POTUS, whose approval they sought for the story and who coordinated its release.

3. Cries of “fake news” from your president are not just damaging to the journalistic profession (such as it is these days), but are also a misdirection away from actual made-up news, and a cynical de-valuing of both “truth” and “facts”.

In this particular case, charges of “fake news” against others are accompanied by the actual creation of lies which purposely, recklessly and unscrupulously defame an innocent man who was tragically murdered, and assure that justice will be harder for his survivors to obtain. Those survivors must now concern themselves not only with justice, but also vindication.

4. The leader of the free world is happy to randomly accuse, without any reason or evidence, a completely innocent person of releasing stolen DNC emails to Wikileaks, so that he can deflect attention away from the actual perpetrators, a foreign regime historically hostile to our interests and values – a regime that he admires and cultivates, apparently for personal gain.

5. A “news” outlet which is trusted by millions of people, and which is the primary influence on the way they exercise their franchise, is not simply “biased”, but hateful, anti-democratic, and yes, evil.

Tweets are not nothing

When your president impulsively blasts out some crazy nonsense via twitter, there is a certain amount of comfort to be taken in knowing that whatever it is can’t and won’t happen because it’s, well, crazy.

But he’s the President. He tweeted it. It’s not nothing. It’s what was going through his tiny orange brain at that instant, even if he contradicts it the next. And even though tweets don’t (yet) have the force of law, or even an Executive Order, they do have an effect. At the very least, they can be a not-so-subtle, direct, and important threat. At worst they may have real consequences, possibly unintended.

Tweety often threatened to arrest and deport millions of undocumented immigrants, mainly through Twitter. None of these threats took the form of any formal policy (though he did sign some Executive Orders, which provide “guidance” on enforcing current regulations), much less law, and it was unclear how much of the bold talk could ever really be implemented or pass legal muster.

But simply tweeting about it bypassed all that messy debate that goes with making law, and all that messy paperwork and interaction with agencies that are supposed to be part of making regulations. The President had tweeted something, and this was good enough for Immigration officers and police, many of whom agreed with the sentiment behind it. From this February NYT piece:

Gone are the Obama-era rules that required them to focus only on serious criminals. In Southern California, in one of the first major roundups during the Trump administration, officers detained 161 people with a wide range of felony and misdemeanor convictions, and 10 who had no criminal history at all.

“Before, we used to be told, ‘You can’t arrest those people,’ and we’d be disciplined for being insubordinate if we did,” said a 10-year veteran of the agency who took part in the operation. “Now those people are priorities again. And there are a lot of them here.”

Interviews with 17 agents and officials across the country, including in Florida, Alabama, Texas, Arizona, Washington and California, demonstrated how quickly a new atmosphere in the agency had taken hold. Since they are forbidden to talk to the press, they requested anonymity out of concern for losing their jobs.

The hoped-for effect was achieved just that quickly: illegal immigration apparently declined as many people feared heavy-handed treatment, legal or not.

When Tweety gives a speech to police about treating people they arrest less gently – don’t worry if they get a little bruised as you put them in the squad car – it has an effect. A lot of people wanted to hear something like that. Even if it’s followed by few hours of outrage on MSNBC and a few clarifying interviews with police chiefs assuring us that their policy will remain as respectful of law as always, you can bet there will be a few more bruises now. It’s inevitable.

When Tweety preposterously decreed over Twitter that transgender people will no longer be welcome in any role in the military, generals of all descriptions immediately emerged to explain that nothing will change until due process takes its course. But something will change. A chilling effect immediately takes effect and trans people will be less inclined to begin or continue a military career. Their numbers will be reduced simply by virtue of a tweet or two.

Tweety blames China for the rise of North Korea’s nuclear program. In a tweet. He thus creates a diplomatic problem. China will not ignore Presidential tweeting. They will adjust their behavior one way or another, irrespective of the diplomatic protocols of the past. Even if everyone agrees that such tweeting is not a substitute for the State Department, or treaty obligations, or existing back channel communications, tweeting is not nothing. It has a disruptive and possibly unintended effect.

Tweety is furious that the A.C.A. has not been repealed. He has repeatedly tweet-threatened to withhold payments known as “cost sharing reductions” to the insurance companies. This threat alone can de-stabilize the insurance markets and possibly have devastating effects on millions of people.

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Tweety is upset so it’s time to threaten the insurance companies, congress, and those who rely on their health insurance, in some cases to simply breathe.

And in this case, it is something that’s actually within the power of the president to do. It’s not an empty threat. And, as is his custom, Tweety tells us he’ll let us know what he’s going to do later in the week and that we’ll just have to “see”. No need for Congress or the Supreme Court. Just “we’ll see”.

Tweets are not nothing. A few crazy tweets is all it takes to make a mess.

Came for the Klimt, Stayed for the Gerstl

Today I made good on the promise I made myself back in February to see the Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II before September, when it will go to its new home, a private collection in China. See this post for the background of why this is interesting.

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The original Portrait of Adele Block-Bauer (the “Woman in Gold”) is spectacular, and seeing it in the same room with a collection of many other important Klimt portraits is pretty special.

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While at the Neue Galerie, I had a chance to see a fantastic exhibition of Richard Gerstl, who is virtually unknown to many today, but was a very influential Viennese artist who died at age 25 in 1908. Gerstl’s unique style preceded the German Expressionists and foreshadowed them. His work was original, intense and beautiful.

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Self portrait

He committed suicide by first stabbing and then hanging himself after being caught in flagrante delicto by Arnold Schönberg, with Schönberg’s wife, Mathilde.

Schönberg had asked Gerstl to give him painting lessons, as he had hoped to be able to supplement the meager income he had from composing music. Gerstl became close friends with the Schönbergs (a little too close, evidently), and their circle of artist and musician friends, and painted Mathilde many times.

After Gerstl’s suicide, his family hid away all his works in an effort to put the whole scandal behind them, which is why he is virtually unknown today.

Mathilde wrote a letter to Richard’s brother Alois, asking him to destroy anything he might find among Richard’s things that related to her:

Dear Herr Gerstl. – Many thanks for your efforts, I would have much liked to speak to you myself, but I am so poorly and down because of the tragedy, that I found it to be impossible. I certainly hope to speak to you, when we are all somewhat calmer. – I would only now ask you, if you should find something in Richard’s studio, that you suspect to belong to me, simply to destroy it. Please do not send me anything, it is all so terribly painful, and only reminds me of the tragic misfortune. -Believe me, Richard has chosen the easiest way for both of us. To have to live, in such circumstances, is very hard.
Be well, and as I said, I hope that I haven’t spoken to you for the last time. Yours
Mathilde Schönberg.

Only a small body of Gerstl’s work remains, and the exhibition at the Neue Galerie has many important pieces. I particularly like the portraits of his brother, his father and himself.

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father

self

Defending Trump

I really don’t know what to make of Scott Adams. As you know, he’s the creator of Dilbert (which I greatly enjoy), a prolific blogger and author, a trained hypnotist and many other things. He’s clearly a very intelligent guy.

Although he doesn’t come right out and say anything like “I think Donald Trump is a great president”, by the time you’ve assembled all his defenses of Trump and combined them with all his dismissals of Trump’s flaws, there’s just no other conclusion you could ever come to.

He was an early predictor of Trump’s success, a staunch defender (although he would probably prefer something like “explainer”), and, above all else, an admirer. Adams is interested in all aspects of “persuasion” and insists that Trump’s skill set in this area is so much better than anyone else’s that it’s hard to even measure it.

I used to spend more time on the Metafilter website than I do now, and I was always a little perplexed by their disdain for Adams, who is basically Persona Non Grata there. It was based mostly on his disregarding site rules and protocol. At one point he used another identity to argue for his own points (a little like Trump impersonating his own P.R. guy, now that I think of it), and also for some of his less politically-correct observations. But I always thought they were too hard on him.

After listening to Sam Harris’s conversation with Adams on his Waking Up podcast, though, I’m beginning to think Metafilter was right all along. In this conversation, Adams stretches credulity in his defense of Trump, all the while cleverly “agreeing” with the premise of various questions, like Trump is a liar. Basically Adams’ response is “So what?”, since he only lies about things that don’t matter, and anyway he always lies in “the right direction”, meaning everyone knows kind of what he meant and agrees with his ideas even when the facts he cites to support them are wrong.

In the podcast, Harris asks him a lot of questions I have always wanted to ask a Trump apologist, like how to explain Trump’s involvement with the obvious scam of Trump University. Basically Adams says it was a franchise operation and Trump can’t be expected to control every aspect of how his franchisees behave. Harris says, yes, but what about now that he knows it was a scam, and Adams has more and more unlikely explanations. I recommend you give it a listen. For me it started out as extremely interesting and gradually morphed into infuriating.

Adams explains the reaction of Trump-haters to the things Trump says and does as “confirmation bias” and “cognitive dissonance”. It’s hard to know how to defend yourself against these charges, but it’s interesting to listen to someone with real intelligence jump through hoops to defend Trump – assuming you’ve got your blood pressure meds nearby, that is.

Enjoy.

John Walker Lindh

I used to think Paul Theroux was a smart guy whose books I liked. Then I heard him being interviewed somewhere and was surprised at his British accent. “Is this guy a Brit?”, I wondered. “Why did I always think he was American?” Well, yes, he is in fact an American, born and raised in Medford, MA where he went to high school and then on to the University of Maine. After that, he joined the peace corps, and started a life of travel and travel writing, and ultimately settled in the U.K. where he started talking like the people around him, which I guess makes sense.

I suppose the British version of English is kind of like a second language to Americans, and it’s worth learning it if you live there, not only for the challenge but for increased acceptance by your neighbors. But most people are able to live abroad and speak the local language without losing the ability to speak the unaccented version of their first tongue. I have a cousin who has lived in Sweden for decades and doesn’t use English much, but also does not now speak English with a Swedish accent. I have another cousin who’s lived in Australia, also for decades, and does not greet me with “G’Day, mate” when she sees me.

I started to suspect Theroux was kind of a jerk, a self-hating poseur who wanted to appear to be something much more exotic than he actually is. A few months ago, I read an opinion piece by Theroux in the Failing New York Times that really cements this notion. In it, he explains what a naive 24-year old he was when he ran afoul of the Malawi authorities and was kicked out of the country and the Peace Corps as well. He explains that he had become

“…involved with a group of political rebels — former government ministers mostly — who had been active in the struggle for independence.”

And that he

“…performed various favors for the rebels, small rescues for their families, money transfers, and in one effort drove a car over 2,000 miles on back roads to Uganda to deliver the vehicle to one of the dissidents in exile. On that visit he was asked to bring a message back to the country. He did so, without understanding its implications. It was a cryptic order to activate a plot to assassinate the intransigent prime minister.”

So, first let me just say that driving a car over 2000 miles of back roads is not a “favor” – it’s a huge undertaking.

Theroux explained himself to his “de-briefing” interrogators at the State Department back home. He said he was just a silly idealistic kid, had gotten in over his head, and that history and events had “overtaken” him. The government realized they were dealing with a now-terrified moron, albeit one who seemed well educated, and let him go.

This story was prologue to Theroux’s defense of the “American Taliban”, John Walker Lindh, who Theroux sees as much like his own 24-year-old self: idealistic, naive, overtaken by events, and who now surely sees the error of his ways and is remorseful.

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In the piece, written in the last days of the Obama administration, Theroux was advocating that Lindh, who has now served 15 years of his 20-year plea-bargained sentence, should be given a pardon by President Obama and have his sentence commuted. As I said, Theroux seems like kind of a jerk, and we really don’t need to listen to his opinions on this. He may be missing the bigger picture here, as he did in Malawi.

Lindh is 36 now, and is scheduled to be released in two years. He will leave prison with an Irish passport, and, according to the U.S. government, “a stubborn refusal to renounce violent ideology”.

This piece in Foreign Policy paints a different picture from Theroux’s young, remorseful, innocent victim who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It cites a report of the National Counterterrorism Center from January of this year, which says that Lindh continues to advocate for global Jihad and continues to write and translate extremist texts.

The document says intelligence agencies have noted a high rate of recidivism among home-grown extremists, and claims that in March of last year Lindh “told a television news producer that he would continue to spread violent extremist Islam upon his release”.

Soon, it will be up to President Tweety to figure out what to do with “Johnny Jihad” on his release. It’s hard to imagine he’ll be as magnanimous as Paul Theroux would be, but you never know what Tweety might do.

At the time of his trial, Lindh apologized for fighting alongside the Taliban, saying, “had I realized then what I know now … I would never have joined them.” He said Osama bin Laden is against Islam and that he “never understood jihad to mean anti-American or terrorism.”

Lindh’s father said, “John loves America and we love America. God bless America.”

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We shall see.

Secretary of Something or Other

OK, kids, are you ready for a pop quiz?

One of the following things was actually said by Secretary of Energy Rick Perry this week. Two were said in presentations at which I’ve been present, and one was said to a reader of GOML recently. Which did Perry say?

1) “Our department does what the boss wants. We jump, he says how high.”

2) “It will be clear when I show you this chart. A picture tells a thousand stories.”

3) “Here’s a little economics lesson: supply and demand. You put the supply out there and the demand will follow.”

4) “Men can’t be virgins, because they don’t have a heimlich”.

Here’s a clue: Rick Perry got a D in “Principles of Economics” at Texas A&M. Yup, he was the author of the crazy upside-down version of “supply and demand” but, to be honest, it wouldn’t shock me to learn he’s said all of the others at some point.

perry

Perry was visiting a coal-fired plant in West Virginia and explaining why we should produce as much coal as possible, since there will be a demand for it no matter what. Or something. He may have been thinking of, “If you build it, they will come”, but it’s hard to know.

But here’s the thing. You can’t point out that this guy’s an idiot who doesn’t know anything about the area he’s in charge of, because you’d just be proving what everyone already knows, which is that you are an Eastern liberal elitist who thinks he’s smarter than people who support Trump. And also you hate America and don’t want to make it great.

And we all knew what he meant anyway, just as we all understand what the people who said the other three things in the quiz meant. He meant coal is good. And climate change is a hoax. No “real” American could disagree, so just keep your stupid “corrections” to yourself, mmm-kay?

In other cabinet-level news this week, 18 states are suing Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos for allegedly “unlawfully delaying new federal regulations designed to protect student loan borrowers from being ripped off by for-profit colleges and other schools.”

Onward.

Better wait for the internet to decide

Internet outrage is the fire that starts itself and can never be extinguished.

I’m not sure why I need to know this, but United Airlines screwed up again and had to apologize for something, and now the whole non-story has risen to the top of my news-feed. Again.

I’m sure you’ve already seen it, but here’s the summary anyway: a woman was flying on United with her two-year-old to Boston from Hawaii with a layover in Houston. She was required to buy a separate seat for the kid, which she did at a cost of almost $1000. Boarding for the Houston-Boston leg, a stand-by passenger was accidentally assigned the toddler’s seat, and the woman was told she’d just have to keep the kid on her lap for three and a half hours, because the flight was full and there was no other choice.

The gate agent screws up and everybody loses. The passenger mom had to have the kid on her lap (don’t worry, of course she’ll get her money back and more), and ZOMG, her left arm got numb! Lawsuit time. The standby passenger, who was going to be miserable in a tiny middle seat for hours no matter what, now has a squirmy kid on his neighbor’s lap the whole time. United Airlines loses because, once again, they have been shown to be the devil incarnate.

And the uncaring and rude flight attendant who had to give the complaining passenger the bad news (and who is almost certainly a serial killer on her off days), will have to be shamed and sanctioned. Forever.

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Of course, the whole sordid episode was immediately available on Whatever-Gram, so the entire world could rush to judgement, because it is absolutely essential that our hunger for outrage be fed several times a day.

And because the internet knew about it, well, that means it’s got to be front page news for the Washington Post and everyone else. That’s kind of the definition of “news” these days, especially if there’s video!

And because it’s United, a catalog of all their former transgressions has to be part of the story, complete with links and video of that guy who was dragged off and lost some teeth. Without that one, this new incident probably goes nowhere. Even the non-story of leggings-gate had to be dredged up.

Worst of all, United took five whole days to apologize. Five days! Monsters!

The reason they took so long was that they were waiting to find out what the Internet Justice League thought. Maybe it would come down on the mom for not making the best of a bad situation? Who knows – if they found something to dislike about her or her video, maybe she’d be the one to take the heat. All it would have taken was for her to mention the flight attendant’s weight, or maybe the stand-by guy’s, in her moment of frustration. Could have gone either way.

Like this one from a couple of days ago which was “trending”. A guy is unhappy about being in the exit row with a “plus-sized” person, who he thinks maybe couldn’t help others get out in an emergency, and therefore shouldn’t be there. He texts someone about it, believing the message to be private. She sees him doing it (and videos the whole thing, otherwise it’s not news), and the rest is history.

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She wins, he loses. Fat-shaming in private communication is way, way worse than eavesdropping. It’s way worse than anything, actually. That’s what the internet decided.

A specious and false notion

Tweetin’ Donny has determined that 44 of the 50 states are “hiding something”.

hiding

So many people hiding so much!

Actually only Colorado, Missouri, and Tennessee are willing to go along with this silly, paranoid, time-and-money-wasting hoax, which is clearly designed to distract everyone from Trump’s incompetence and lack of interest in actually doing his job, diminish the whole notion of “investigations” by putting this on the same plane as the Russian interference investigation, and, of course, fire up Trump’s base of “real” Americans.

Just to digress for a second on the “real” Americans thing, I don’t know that anything has made me angrier lately than hearing Mike Huckabee saying, “The media hates Trump more than they love America”. Really? It has to be one or the other? If someone points out Trump’s limitations they don’t love America? How about, “The reason someone hates Trump is exactly because they love America”.

Anyway, Colorado Secretary of State Wayne Williams couldn’t be more enthusiastic about Trump’s “very distinguished panel” and the vital role they’re playing for all of us. “We are very glad they are asking for information before making decisions,” he said. “I wish more federal agencies would ask folks for their opinion and for information before they made decisions.”

So it’s about being asked your opinion? Before decisions are made? Hmm. Well, I guess it is nice to be asked rather than told, but it’s that opinion of yours we’re criticizing here. Compare it to the opinion of the Secretary of State in Louisiana, Tom Schedler, a Republican, who said, “The President’s Commission has quickly politicized its work by asking states for an incredible amount of voter data that I have, time and time again, refused to release. My response to the Commission is, you’re not going to play politics with Louisiana’s voter data, and if you are, then you can purchase the limited public information available by law, to any candidate running for office. That’s it.”

Or the response of Mississippi’s Secretary of State, Delbert Hosemann, also a Republican: “My reply would be: They can go jump in the Gulf of Mexico, and Mississippi is a great state to launch from. Mississippi residents should celebrate Independence Day and our state’s right to protect the privacy of our citizens by conducting our own electoral processes.”

What is Mississippi hiding? How many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in Mississippi voted for Hillary Clinton? It’s true Trump won the state with one of his biggest margins of victory, 58.3% of the votes to Clinton’s 39.7%.

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But look at all the counties that went blue. There were 462,000 people in Mississippi that voted for Clinton. Illegals! Al Qaeda! Someone! There’s a crime being committed here, and we need to get to the bottom of it, where we are surely going to find Crooked Hillary. Lock her up!

So far, 44 states, the majority of which went to Trump in 2016, have refused to provide information requested by the Commission’s vice-chairman, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, many pointing out that the Commission seems to have a limited grasp of privacy laws.

Florida and Nebraska are still “reviewing” the request. Hawaii and New Jersey haven’t indicated what they will do. Six states haven’t yet responded to the request, but, of those, four have already said they won’t cooperate.

I wrote a blog post a few days after inauguration talking about Trump’s baseless assertions and the many legitimate studies that have been done in the past that have all come to the same conclusion: voter fraud is not an appreciable problem and there are practically no documented instances of it. The few documented instances from 2016 were cases where the perpetrator was a Trump supporter, perhaps trying to level the playing field against all those imaginary Clinton-voting illegals.

Here’s a WaPo piece describing nine real studies that have been done revealing that voter fraud is basically non-existent, including a five-year long study conducted by the Bush administration. I guess maybe the institutions and people that did this work (e.g. Dartmouth College, Loyala Law School, and the Iowa Secretary of State) weren’t as “distinguished” as Trump’s appointees. And here’s a nice summary from the Brennan Center for Justice at N.Y.U. debunking the whole myth of voter fraud.

Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, said, “This entire commission is based on the specious and false notion that there was widespread voter fraud last November. At best this commission was set up as a pretext to validate Donald Trump’s alternative election facts, and at worst is a tool to commit large-scale voter suppression.”

Yeah, but he’s a Democrat. He must be hiding something. And obviously he does not love America.

Mother of Exiles

Happy birthday, America! This is still the greatest country on earth.

It’s the greatest not because we have the best roads and bridges and airports. We don’t.

And not because we have the best healthcare system in the world, or the cleanest air, or even the best broadband internet or cell-phone systems. We don’t.

And not because we have the best education system or the highest literacy rate. We don’t.

And not because we have the highest standard of living in the world. We don’t.

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And not because we score very highly on the “Social Progress Index” which attempts to aggregate most of these measures, including medical care, sanitation, shelter, education, access to technology, life expectancy, personal rights, freedom of choice, and general tolerance. We barely squeak into the top 20.

And not because all twelve men who have walked on the moon were Americans. They were, but that’s not it at all.

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America may not be the best place to live, using any truly objective measure. And we may be causing as much misery in other parts of the world as we’re preventing.

Worst of all, we may not be living up to own ideals.

But it is those ideals that make us the best. If we come up short in trying to make those ideals reality, that’s one thing. But if we abandon them altogether, we are lost.

emma

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849, the fourth of seven children. She died at age 38 of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Her interest in her Jewish background and in the idea of Zionism was raised by the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, and the terrible anti-semitic pogroms that followed.

Tens of thousands of destitute Jews fled the “Pale of Settlement” because of these events and Emma tried to help them and advocate for them as much as she could. She helped establish the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York in order to give new arrivals useful training so they could have a way to support themselves in the new land.

Most of all, Emma Lazarus understood the vital importance of the American promise to these unfortunates and others, and the role it played in giving them a home and life itself. Her most famous poem, The New Colossus, was written to help raise money for the construction of a pedestal for the newly acquired Statue of Liberty, and, since 1903, has adorned the inner wall of the pedestal.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
MOTHER OF EXILES. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

liberty

In America, it doesn’t matter who your parents were, or where you came from, or how or even if you worship God. Everyone is free to pursue their interests and strive to achieve their goals. Everyone is protected by the same law and everyone has the same rights.

In America, anyone can become the President, the most powerful and influential position in the world. Even someone who has never held any elective office at any level. Even someone who is ignorant of all our history and traditions. Even someone who doesn’t understand the basic principles of our founding, or what “Mother of Exiles” means, or where it is inscribed, or who wrote the words, or why. Even a childish and vindictive demagogue who would use the privileges that have been freely given by our country to abuse and abolish those same privileges.

Tweetin’ Donny is president and they’re not

That’s basically the President’s only platform and message. You could sum it all up in two words: “Nyah nyah”.

He doesn’t know what’s in the Republican Health Care bill or care. He doesn’t know much of anything except “I won!”.

He thinks the presidency has two purposes only:

to punish those that dare to defy or criticize him in any way. He takes the “bully” part of “bully pulpit” literally, and
to enrich himself. No wonder he admires Putin so much.

At this point, the blame is squarely on FoxNews and the Republicans in Congress who keep pretending this is all normal, and in any way good for our country.

They have no reason not to push back now. FoxNews is in a ratings decline, now trailing CNN and MSNBC, and the congressman’s fear of losing to the riled up voters of Trump’s “base” should be diminished as even the low-information voters are tiring of Tweetin’ Donny’s antics.

It can’t go on this way.

Repeal and Replace

For seven years, Republicans have been howling about Obamacare. They’ve never stopped suing, appealing, and trying to weaken and overturn it for one second during that time. In all that time, they’ve never offered a better plan.

They’ve said it’s a job-killer, that it raises healthcare premiums, that it puts the government between you and your doctor. They’ve said it means you’ll have to stand before death-panels of government bureaucrats who will determine if you live or die. And worst of all, it has the name “Obama” right in it!

Meanwhile, tens of millions of people have health insurance with Obamacare that didn’t have it before.

It was only after the election that gave them control of both houses of congress and the presidency, that the Republicans added “Replace” to their promise to “Repeal”. Before that, it was just get rid of the A.C.A. and let the devil take the hindmost. And it was easier to stand on the sidelines and criticize than attempt to provide something useful to the American people, especially since the health care coverage of congress-people was assured in any case.

When they finally got the power to “Repeal” Obamacare, they realized they’d better come up with something to “Replace” it with after all. Otherwise their hypocrisy and blind obstructionism would be revealed for what it was.

What’s the biggest problem Republicans have claimed to have with Obamacare? The “Individual Mandate”, meaning it forces people to buy health insurance whether they want to or not. This was bad, because, you know, Freedom!

I’m going to leave aside the argument that the health of any individual affects the health of all. You may have the “freedom” to reject vaccines for contagious disease, but when you raise your own chance of getting them, you raise mine, too. And if you go uninsured to the Emergency Room for your care, well, you’re costing all of us anyway.

For the moment, I’ll just stay on the “evil” of asking you to pay for something you think you don’t need. In fact there are similar mandates all over the place that everyone accepts without complaint. It’s all part of a little thing we like to call “society”.

You can’t buy a car without buying car insurance. You have to pay into the Social Security system whether you want to or not. Your income tax is a “mandate”, forcing you to support all manner of things you object to, from military adventurism to plush benefits for those in congress, including a health care program better than any you’ll ever have. You have to pay property or other taxes to pay for schools whether you have kids or not, and a fire department even if you never have a fire. This list goes on and on – life is absolutely chock-a-block with Individual Mandates.

Republicans know full well that their objection to the “Individual Mandate” is a red herring, What they actually object to is any government program that supports people other than their own greedy selves.

Obamacare is paid for with a 3.8% tax surcharge on individual income over $125,000, thereby creating the dreaded “transferring of wealth”. Call me a communist, but it wouldn’t kill them to transfer a little wealth back to the have-nots after decades of the actual transfer going their way – creating the greatest disparity between rich and poor we’ve ever had and decimating the ranks of what used to be known as the “middle class”.

The problem now is that any effort to “Replace” will have the same effect. And, of course, there’s also the problem that their constituents don’t want to lose health coverage and don’t really want to see others lose it either.

So why insist on this pointless cruelty, when even the man-baby called their ideas “mean”?

Finally we come to the bottom of it all. The reason they keep going with this craziness is that they’ll lose their jobs if they don’t continue with their absurd crusade. The Kochs will see to it.

Do you think Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the cause of all the problems we have in this country? Think again.

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Best Sports Movies

I guess I mostly agree with a lot of the standard lists you’ll find looking around the net, but I also have major issues with some of the usual suspects. They’re generally too silly, too implausible, too worshipful, too something. But usually, it’s because the on-field stuff doesn’t cut it. Pride of the Yankees is in this category, as is A League of Their Own (I know, sorry). Also Bad News Bears, which, weirdly, makes many lists you’ll find out there.

To me a great a sports movie has to meet three criteria:

First and foremost, it must be a very good movie, irrespective of the subject matter. In other words, it has to be something that will draw in someone who thinks they hate sports or at least the particular sport the movie in question is about, and it has to keep them engaged throughout.

Second, at least one but preferably both of these things must be true: 1) the on-field stuff has to be completely authentic and believable to someone who is intimately familiar with the game and perhaps has played it at a high level, and 2) the off-field stuff has to be very accurate and make sense.

Third, the movie should be about something more than the sport itself, and being a good love story doesn’t count. It should leave you thinking about it the next day and for a long time after, and it won’t matter if the good guys don’t win the big game. Better if they come up short, actually.

There are very few movies that meet all three of these criteria, so if a flick gets two of the three, it makes my Top Ten, and if it gets one of the three, it gets an Honorable Mention.

So let me start with some Honorable Mentions, in no particular order.

1) Every single “30 for 30” ever made. I’ve seen them all and really like just about every one. Many of them could be in the all-time Top Ten, but I can’t put them there because they’re all documentaries so they really don’t have anything at risk for my Criteria #2. Also, it could be argued that they’re not really “movies” as they were made to be shown on TV, not in the theater, though this distinction is becoming more irrelevant every day.

Here’s a ranking done in 2013 that gives you a flavor, and here’s a more recent Top Ten. But you could pick any one randomly and not be disappointed. I just finished watching the 3-part four-hour long “Celtics/Lakers: Best of Enemies” and wasn’t bored for a second. Of course, that one was about something I did care about, so YMMV.

2) The Hammer. Little seen Adam Carolla project (his politics apparently exclude him from Hollywood promotion), that is very funny, has a heart, and will teach you something about boxing. See if you can find it somewhere – you’ll thank me.

3) North Dallas Forty. Nick Nolte is pretty convincing as a pro wide-out, and Mac Davis is good, too. The locker room and off-field stuff seems about right. Bo Svenson has the best line in the movie: when asking for a raise, “When I call it a business, you call it a game, and when I call it a game, you call it a business.” Tru dat.

4) Eight Men Out. The on-field stuff is not great, but it’s a decent movie about an interesting subject, and they get the gambling culture of the time right. Irritating “dixieland” sound track diminishes it, but worth a watch over all.

5) Mr. Baseball. Tom Selleck, who went to U.S.C. on a basketball scholarship, is clearly a good athlete who looks good swinging the bat, though he did strike out in his one at-bat in a Spring Training game for the Tigers. The subject of ex-Big Leaguers trying to hang on in Japan is a good one, and the movie is as much about Japanese culture as Baseball. Haven’t seen it in a while, but I remember it as meeting at least one and maybe two of my criteria for inclusion, so it’s here. Watch it and then remind me if I’m a moron with a poor memory.

6) The Natural. I’m usually not a big fan of magical interventions in sport, but this is very watchable and Redford looks right.

7) The Longest Yard. Burt Reynolds played college football at Florida State and looks very good here, which qualifies this flick for an Honorable Mention.

8) Field of Dreams. Hmm, maybe I like magical intervention in sports more than I thought, as that’s exactly what this is about. The baseball stuff is OK. James Earl Jones is not my favorite, but Kevin Costner always looks good tossing a ball around. Mainly, it’s a very well-made movie that draws you in. Oh, and good, realistic scenes in Fenway.

9) Major League. Charlie Sheen was a star pitcher and shortstop in high school, and is completely believable in this flick as a big-league pitcher (also as an outfielder in Eight Men Out). Tom Berenger and Corbin Bernsen also look right. This one is a bit formulaic, but scores well on Rotten Tomatoes, so worth a look I think.

10) Fever Pitch. Fantastic aerial pictures of Fenway Park and Boston. Gets the crazy Red Sox fan mentality right. Shot during the 2004 run that broke the 86-year-old Curse of the Bambino, with ending re-shot after it was already in the can, because there were actual miracles and a story-book ending better than the original screenplay. At bottom, kind of a silly movie, but I like it anyway.

OK, those were the Honorable Mentions . Now here are Stewie’s Top Ten sports movies – again, NOT in order of rank. Just random.

1) Breaking away. I don’t know enough about bike racing to tell you if they have it right here, but I think they do. A very good movie about more than just the sport, in this case town/gown conflicts and family expectations. Lots of good supporting performances.

2) Raging Bull. Many people put this on their all time Best-Movie-Ever-Made list, some even putting it first all time, so it obviously must be included on any Best Sports Movie List. DeNiro-Pesci interactions are brilliant, and Scorsese’s direction of the boxing scenes is extraordinary.

3) The Hustler and The Color of Money. Both well worth the watch. Jackie Gleason and Paul Newman both shot a mean stick in real life, so no coaching or stunt doubles needed in The Hustler. George C. Scott adds a lot, but The Great One steals the flick. In the Color of Money, Tom Cruise does a nice job, and the photography is awesome. Seems to me some real pool hustlers also appear in this one, adding back in any authenticity that Cruise subtracts.

4) White Men Can’t Jump. Wesley Snipes is not really believable as a playground B-ball player, though he does get the trash-talk right. Come to think of it, he wasn’t that believable as a baseball player in Major League, either. Woody Harrelson, strangely, is far more believable and sympathetic, too. A couple of NBA stars, notably Marques Johnson, bring the playground culture to life. Good story, good performances, good movie.

5) Bull Durham. Again, Kevin Costner looks good on a baseball field. The flick evokes life in the minors pretty well, I think.

6) Moneyball. Brad Pitt does a great job as a failed major league prospect and front office success. The subject is interesting, and the real-life clips are well-integrated in the story and add authenticity.

7) Bang the Drum Slowly. Robert DeNiro probably isn’t much of an athlete, but then neither was Bruce Pearson, the back-up catcher he plays here. Michael Moriarty is excellent, evoking Tom Seaver to me for some reason, and the off-field stuff is well done. Good story, performances, good movie.

8) Hoosiers. I like Gene Hackman and Dennis Hopper, so I was probably going to like this movie no matter what. Somewhat predictable story, though based on real events, so I shouldn’t complain about that. Nice portrayal of small-town basketball culture.

9) Chariots of Fire. Won “Best Picture” and is about sports, so, uh, yeah.

10) The Fighter. Christian Bale is brilliant as is Melissa Leo. Her litter of daughters is perfection. Evokes down-in-the-mouth Lowell, Mass. just right. Mark Wahlberg is excellent and more than believable as Micky Ward. And, for a change, good Boston accents all around (easy for Wahlberg, a tour-de-force for Bale).

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OK sports fans, where did I screw up and what did I leave out?

Health care for Grizzlies

Everyone knows the Trumps are the real conservationists, not like those phony climate science hoaxers. That’s why they need to shoot the last few large wild animals we have left. You know, to protect them.

But, really, why should these young heroes have to travel all over the globe to find big animals to assassinate, when there are still a few left alive right here in the good ole U. S. of A.?

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Well, we have some good news for you today. Very soon, they’ll be able to roll up on one of the few Grizzly bears left around Yellowstone and blow its brains out with a high-powered weapon from a safe distance, possibly from the comfort of a Humvee.

humvee

All this will be possible because the Trump administration is removing the Grizzly from the Endangered Species list after 42 years. In that time, the population of Grizzlies has managed to recover from the last 150 left alive to a whopping 700 now, and the man-baby and his pals figure that’s plenty. Who needs ’em? Do they vote?

Here’s some background about the joyous changes.

Here’s a pic of young Donnie checking out the latest in silencers. Definitely a necessary add-on.

Well, at least it will be a fair fight, not like what happened to Maxine, who was just sleeping when she was executed.

maxine

Our Civil War

No, not that one. A new “War Between the States” has been brewing for a long time and it’s heating up.

Your President was calling for “unity” at the congressional picnic the other day. He was referring to the baseball field shootings that seriously wounded Representative Steve Scalise, and the many expressions of bi-partisan feeling that followed. The message was certainly appropriate and much needed, particularly coming from this president, who seems to enjoy fighting with everybody more than just about anything else. Except maybe eating. (Yes, I know fat-shaming is a no-no, but I’m making an exception here. OK?)

tennis

So diplomatic. So presidential. So hypocritical.

The man who so solemnly called for much-needed unity had just come from taunting Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (on Twitter, of course), for losing the special election in Georgia. Not that she was running for anything in Georgia, but that doesn’t matter. The election had been thought of as a referendum on Trump’s popularity, but somehow turned out to be a referendum on Pelosi. At least it did in the estimation of FoxNews and, therefore, the man-baby.

She lost. So, of course, a good presidential twitter-taunting was in order as it always is for any loser. He could have simply praised and congratulated the winner, Karen Handel, but apparently that wouldn’t have been very satisfying. Or, apparently, very unifying.

But zinging Pelosi wasn’t enough. He had to include a dig against Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who will now be forever known as “Cryin’ Chuck”.

schumer tweet

Anyway, none of this is really new – we’re all now inured to Trump’s bullying and bellicosity. Amazing, but it’s true. We’re just worn down by it all and no one in Congress or on Foxnews will admit it’s a bad thing. They’re all abetting it and must share the blame for allowing it all to become “normal”.

Which brings me the the War Between the States. Texas vs. California, that is.

This article reports that California has now declared that it will not support travel to Texas. It says,

Last week, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed controversial legislation into law that allows child welfare providers — including faith-based adoption agencies — to refuse adoptions to hopeful parents based on “sincerely held religious beliefs.”

In response, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced Thursday that his state will prohibit its employees from traveling to Texas because Texas has enacted laws that, he said, discriminate against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individuals and their families.

Texas, home to the nation’s second-largest economy, joins California’s growing list of states — Alabama, Kentucky and South Dakota were added at the same time — to which state-sponsored travel has been curbed because of similar legislation.

The Blue vs. The Gray was bad, but we can at least understand why it happened. The Blue vs. The Red is just baffling.

Is this how we want to live? Who does it help? Can you imagine this happening during the administration of any other president?

Beyond Good and Evil

Remember Google’s slogan back when it was called Google?

“Don’t Be Evil”.

They dropped it in 2015 when they became a sub of the new company, Alphabet.

At that point, Google came under Alphabet’s umbrella “Code of Conduct“, which states in part, “Employees of Alphabet and its subsidiaries and controlled affiliates should do the right thing — follow the law, act honorably, and treat each other with respect.” Of course, it doesn’t cover cases where the law is ambiguous or where it simply hasn’t yet caught up to all the new possibilities in the ever-evolving tech world. As long as you follow the law, you don’t have to worry about “evil”.

I’m not sure dropping the old slogan was any kind of tacit permission for an employee to go ahead and be evil at that point, but it doesn’t much matter because the business practices that Google had in place from the get-go were already deep into a gray area that could easily qualify as “evil” in the estimation of many. In other words, their definition of “evil” was sufficiently fungible as to be meaningless in the context of a code of conduct.

I’m thinking of this today because I saw a headline link (on my Google News feed – where else?) that said, “Google will stop scanning your GMail messages to sell targeted ads.” As you may have forgotten, the extremely popular, “free”, web-based GMail service has been scanning the content of every message you’ve sent or received from day one, trying to figure out how to better target you for ads it wants to sell. At least, that’s the explanation they’ve given for this practice, as if that in itself wasn’t already “evil”.

Do you care? Did you have any expectation of privacy when using GMail? Does someone in the employ of the U.S. Postal Service “scan” your mail to see how it might “serve you better”? Would you be upset if they did?

Anyway, they’re not going to do it anymore. You’re probably thinking that the outcry from angry users finally convinced them to live up to their stupid slogan. But, no, that’s not it at all. They’re allegedly not going to look at your emails anymore because,

“the practice has made it difficult for Google to find and retain corporate clients for its cloud services business, according to Diane Greene, Google’s cloud division head, who spoke with the Financial Times. This is due to general confusion over Google’s business tactics and an overall apprehension to trust the company with sensitive data.”

They’re going to stop doing an evil thing because it’s costing them money. That’s pretty much what Nietzsche was saying, right?

nietzsche

President Jackass obstructs justice. Again.

So today the man-baby came clean about not having any recordings of his conversations with James Comey. That in itself could be newsworthy, as Trump virtually never “confesses” to anything.

Actually, he didn’t “confess” this time either, but rather indicated that it was all a bluff to influence Comey’s testimony before congress – meant to keep him “honest” – and he bragged about how well it worked.

Hang on a second while my head stops spinning. There, OK. Let’s see if I have this right.

The President of the United States fired the Director of the F.B.I., James Comey, and then explained on national television that he did so because he was unhappy with the investigation of Russian meddling in the election, and wanted to somehow end it. He thereby confessed to committing Obstruction of Justice.
The President of the United States then tweeted a veiled threat about having recordings of his discussions with Comey before Comey was to testify before Congress.
The President of the United States is now bragging about not actually having any such recordings after all, but being successful in his attempt to influence Comey’s testimony (by “keeping him honest”), thereby committing Obstruction of Justice. Again.

The President of the United States appears to be a bit clueless about some of the basics of what is and is not appropriate for him to say. Actually, he appears to be a complete jackass.

As always, though, the people who need to understand this don’t care and aren’t listening.

trump blather

What’s with all the Pelosi hate?

In the aftermath of the most recent Democratic Party failure, the defeat of Jon Ossoff in the special election for Georgia’s 6th congressional district seat, I’ve seen approximately 10 zillion articles explaining the result as a repudiation of Nancy Pelosi.

The winner, Karen Handel had campaigned heavily on the made-up notion that Ossoff was a Pelosi admirer and therefore must be defeated. Here is an “explanation” piece about the Georgia election entitled “Nancy Pelosi is not where we need to go”, that says, in part,

Nancy Pelosi is not where we need to go. She’s failed leadership. While she might be doing some great things in her district, the truth is she’s the person who’s been leading this front that we’ve been running on for years, so she has to go as leadership.

What she’s doing isn’t working. She’s the leadership, it’s failed and, ultimately, it’s her responsibility.

Her name alone is apparently some sort of dog whistle about what’s wrong.

What’s going on? Maybe it’s because I don’t follow politics as closely as I should, but I am completely unaware of the damage Pelosi is doing and has done to America that makes her so radioactive. I mean, I get it, she’s the Minority Leader in the House, so she’s perhaps the most “powerful” Democrat left standing at the moment, but is that it?

Obama and Hillary are out of the picture (though Trump is still campaigning against both of them), so, um, we have to pretend Nancy Pelosi is the devil?

As far as I can make out, the knock on Pelosi is that she is from San Francisco, and that’s enough. That makes her “cosmopolitan” and not really “American”, a member of the 1% not like the rest of us, and someone who is heavily immersed in the “culture” that San Francisco represents, i.e. “progressive”. She therefore is the poster-child for Everything That’s Wrong With America.

The comments section of the piece linked above has many mentions of Pelosi. All agree that she is the problem, but they’re all over the map about why. This one explains she’s not strong enough:

Time to face the facts, the Democrats are all but uselessly ineffective. They don’t have the machine, the rigged districts not the balls to deal with the GOP. It’s like watching a Girl Scout go up against The Hell’s Angels. Is it lack of guts, naivte, or just ineptness? Whatever it is, they can’t save us from even the likes of trump. An inconsequential bunch of flower children unable to stand up to real force. Step one, get some spokespersons. Nancy Pelosi may well be a brilliant strategist or diligent soldier but she is not the bulldog we need to hear from. Reserved and well spoken work best when the enemy knows you can actually bring something, other than shaming words, to the fight. They don’t see it. Take the gloves off or just go home, we don’t need anymore of your empty kumbaya pleading. It’s a knife fight, get up, get ready and go to battle!

While this one says she has the wrong focus:

I agree that Ms. Pelosi has to go. She is too closely aligned with Identity politics that panders (not addresses) to every minority concern. We as a nation must begin to break free of identifying ourselves as Liberals or Conservatives.

They don’t agree on why Nancy Pelosi is the problem, but they agree that she is. And from the Republican point of view, Nancy Pelosi is the gift that keeps on giving.

I really don’t get it, which, I guess, is why Trump is president and so many of us are wondering how it could happen.

You can’t stop free enterprise

Trump’s proposed budget includes steep cuts for many programs designed to help low-income Americans, the homeless, and others who need shelter. It keeps one program, though, and of course that program benefits Trump personally.

It’s a housing subsidy that pays landlords directly, and Trump has a 4% stake in a Brooklyn building that’s part of the largest subsidized housing development in the country. According to his recent financial disclosures, this position earned him $5 million between January 1, 2016 and April 15, 2017.

It doesn’t matter whether Trump is still personally involved with this investment in any way or whether he personally saw to it the subsidy wouldn’t be cut, though I would imagine that both are true given his long track record. What matters is that this is the very definition of “the appearance of a conflict of interest”, and the reason it is so important that elected officials avoid it by divesting such holdings. Except Trump, who has divested nothing.

starrett

Starrett City, Brooklyn

I simply do not understand why this one crazy bully is immune from standards that everyone in this country has been held to for years, irrespective of political affiliation.

Some prescient fretting about Trump’s “divestment” strategy in this WaPo piece from just before inauguration.

Another potential boost for Trump’s revenue could come if HUD reverses a 2007 decision in which the agency blocked owners from selling the property as Brooklyn’s real estate market boomed.

Trump clashed at the time with Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other opponents of the sale, who accused owners of seeking to make money at the expense of poor tenants. “You can’t stop free enterprise,” Trump told the New York Daily News. “This is not Communist China.”

pockets

Let’s go to the movies

Or not.

When was the last time you actually saw a movie in a theater? I’d need a very good excuse to get me to go to the nearest 13-Plex, and it’s been a long time since I had one. I finally broke down and went to see “The Martian” a couple of years ago, not because I was dying to see Matt Damon stranded on Mars, but because I wanted to finally see whether I thought 3D was a worthwhile innovation. It isn’t.

If I wanted to go back to the same place today, my choices would be: “Transformers: The Last Knight” (3D), “Cars 3” (3D), “Wonder Woman” (3D), “The Mummy” (3D), “Captain Underpants”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales”, “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2”, etc. You get the idea.

These are not movies so much as they are theme-park promos, product placement vehicles, and transparent attempts to separate teens and pre-teens from their allowances. They are either “sequels” to previous successful efforts, screen versions of comic books, or full-length cartoons.

transformers

It all started in June of 1975, when “Jaws” was released. Prior to that, motion pictures were generally understood to be art which may or may not have commercial value. After “Jaws”, movies were understood to be commercial products which may or may not have some artistic merit.

In the years since “Jaws”, the “artistic” part has disappeared. You cannot get a picture made today without a strong business case, “bankable” stars, and an extensive plan for foreign distribution rights and subsequent DVD or Pay-TV revenue. All that matters is how much money can be made for the investors. The hell with “art”.

“Jaws” cost $12 million to make and recouped that and more in two weeks. In two months, it passed the record-holding $86 million made by “The Godfather”, and became the first ever to gross $100 million. It was the biggest money-maker ever seen. By 2013, it had grossed $470 million, of which $260 million was in North America. And now, the huge profits made by “Jaws” are just a basic expectation for studios and investors. By 2013, 127 films had surpassed its revenue totals.

You can’t get a “small” picture made any more and, if you go ahead and make one yourself, there’s no place to get it shown. Real estate prices in cities where there may still be a market for “film” are too high for independent theater operators.

The rise of “home theater” and ubiquitous content availability via the internet have further hastened the final demise of the movie theater.

But, as Joni Mitchell once said, “something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.” There’s plenty to watch on my screen at home. Whatever I want whenever I want it, actually. It’s nice. Convenient. Comfortable.

With a little effort, I can even find real movies to watch.

When Yankees-Red Sox meant something

It’s a little hard to remember now, but years ago it was a pretty common to see bench-clearing brawls between the Yankees and Red Sox. Catchers Carlton Fisk and Thurman Munson absolutely hated each other. Bill Lee vs. Mickey Rivers. Graig Nettles vs. Everybody. You could almost bet something unusual would go down whenever the two teams met. One brawl at Fenway Park was a little different, though.

It happened forty years ago yesterday. With Fred Lynn on first base, Jim Rice tried to check his swing off the Yankees’ Mike Torrez, but accidentally hit a blooper that dropped in front of right-fielder Reggie Jackson. Jackson came in a little casually to get it, waving off second-baseman Willie Randolph who had gone back for it. Rice took advantage of Jackson’s lack of hustle to steam into second with a double. He hadn’t meant to swing at all, but, hey, those things happen, and it should have resulted in Rice on first. But, because of Jackson, this time he was on second. Manager Billy Martin went ape-shit.

He came out to take Torrez out of the game, calling for Sparky Lyle, and, while he was at it, sent Paul Blair in for Jackson. Embarrassed in front of 35,000 Red Sox fans (who always had plenty to say to Reggie even when things weren’t crazy), the astounded and insulted Jackson went at Billy as soon as he reached the dugout.

This dramatization from “The Bronx is Burning” shows what happened next, with actual footage interspersed with re-created dialog:

Trying to explain the rivalry in those days to someone who was unaware of it wasn’t easy. They’d say, “so, you mean it’s like Harvard vs Yale”, and you’d have to say, “No, more like Israel vs. Palestine”.

When Massachusetts native Jerry Remy was traded to the Red Sox from the Angels in 1978, Carlton Fisk, a New Hampshire guy, was the first to welcome him home. A couple of Remy’s Angels team-mates had been traded to New York at the same time, and when the Yankees played the Red Sox for the first time that year, Remy went over to old friend Mickey Rivers during warm-ups to say “hi”. Fisk ran out and grabbed Remy and told him, “We don’t talk to those guys”.

It’s different now. When you’re getting paid $15 million, you can’t afford to break a fingernail, much less dis-locate your shoulder, while shoving an opposing player. And anyway you really wouldn’t want to beef with someone that, in the free agent era, might very well be your team-mate next year, or maybe even later this year.

Free agency changed everything. Before 1975, the players were the property of the team, and could expect to spend their whole career with whoever owned their contract, unless they were traded away first, often without their advance knowledge or consent.

The Reserve Clause, which codified this indentured servitude, was overturned in 1975, mainly through the efforts of the director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Marvin Miller, now enshrined in the Hall of Fame. During Miller’s time in that job the average salary of an MLB player rose from $19,000 in 1966 to $326,000 in 1982. Jim Bunning was instrumental in getting Miller the job, and Miller talks about him in this piece, which says,

And to find Jim Freaking Bunning at the center of this relatively progressive piece of history is a little like learning that Dick Cheney once ran guns to the Sierra Maestras.

Now, the pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction. Now, it’s all about the players and their money. The economics of the game has changed and so has the game itself. The players are the big winners and, in IMHO, the fans are the big losers.

Back then, it was about more than money. It’s gonna be a while before we see anything like this again:

Dylan’s Nobel lecture

So now Bob Dylan is being accused of plagiarizing the lecture that the Nobel Committee forced him to give as a condition of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature. He didn’t care about the prize to begin with and he didn’t want to give the lecture. But everyone told him to just go ahead and do it because it would be better for everybody if he did, and the “controversy” of his “snubbing” them by not showing up at their ceremony would be set aside once and for all.

So he put together a speech explaining his influences, starting with Buddy Holly, and going on to describe how three books he read in grammar school stayed with him and inspired a lot of his writing: Moby Dick, All Quiet On The Western Front, and The Odyssey.

The accusation is that he took a lot of phrases from the SparkNotes summary of Moby Dick to make his point. This “outrage” is laboriously documented in a Salon piece.

Oy vey.

First of all, how many new ways are there to summarize the plot of Moby Dick? If you came up with something yourself today, completely your own original ideas, there’s no chance someone else hasn’t expressed the very same ideas before using many of the very same words.

Of course Dylan went to some summary source to check his memory of a book he read sixty years ago before grudgingly performing this compulsory exercise for the Nobel people! How could it be otherwise? Should he have attributed SparkNotes in his Nobel lecture? Would that satisfy the critics or just open him up to other “criticism”?

Is he being accused of plagiarizing any of the work for which the prize was conferred? If he paraphrased or simply lifted some words from SparkNotes in the lecture, does that diminish his body of work or influence on culture? Do I care about this at all? No, no, and hell no.

Everything we see and hear now must be framed as controversy, or, even better, a scandal. Everything must be presented as a clash of adversaries. The internet demands it. The revenue model of “news” demands it. Our poor attention span demands it. If it’s an old white guy we’re trashing, so much the better, and so much easier for everyone involved.

Can we not give Bob Dylan a pass after all these years? Just this once? He’s Bob Fucking Dylan, for God’s sake.

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