Category: Outrage

Here’s what will happen next

The President of the United States has made it clear to White Supremacists, Neo-Nazis, and their sympathizers that they have a friend in the White House, that their voice is welcomed in the national discourse, that their concerns will not be marginalized. They will have a seat at the table and equal time as needed to make their points.

You’re probably wondering how the Republic can now endure. Clearly, we have reached a historic precipice and whatever happens next will impact us all for years to come. Whatever principles we thought we were fighting for in World War II have been abandoned, and new principles are taking their place. Clearly, there is no longer any doubt that Donald J. Trump is unfit and must be removed from office, one way or another.

It’s all a bit unnerving and I’m sure you’d like a little guidance as we stare into the abyss.

Well, you’ve come to the right place. Due to the exceptionally clear internet weather we have recently been experiencing, plus the well-known GOML clairvoyance on issues such as these, we can now tell you exactly what will happen next. Ready?

Nothing.

Exactly nothing will now happen to Donald J. Trump.

This latest firestorm will not occupy our attention as long as “Obama Tapped My Wires” or “Grab Them By The Pussy”. The news cycle has already started to move on with the van attack in Barcelona, followed by some exceptionally absurd tweeting from you-know-who about how General Pershing soaked his bullets in pig’s blood, thereby scaring Muslims out of terrorism for 25 years (carefully adding that you won’t find this in “some” history books. The fake ones, I guess.).

It’s now Tweety’s favorite time: time to “fight back”. No one does it better or enjoys it more.

fight

Re: Charlottesville, the subject has already been changed. Instead of discussing why the former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan is congratulating the President on his courage, honesty and support, we will discuss whether Robert E. Lee occupies an important place in American history. Controversial!

Instead of asking why Tweety thinks counter-protesters are as bad as Nazis, or why he thinks they had no permit to assemble when they did, or why he is saying there were “many good people” supporting the “Unite the Right” rally when he can’t point to a single one, we will debate whether the “Alt-left” is a terrorist threat.

And right on cue, a State Senator from Missouri has stepped into the snare, saying she wished Trump would be killed. See? What’d we tell ya? The left is worse than the right! Nazis get very unfair treatment from the Fake News.

The goalposts have already been moved. There will be some hours of discussion where much evidence is produced that Tweety was right all along – that some people on the left are as bad as any on the right, that those who wish to honor our confederate past have been improperly silenced and bullied, that the fake media is fake, etc. etc.

Oh, and I almost forgot – the mayor of Chicago is now being asked to remove statues of George Washington because “It’s time”. Just like the Tweeter-in-Chief predicted! Now who’s the idiot, huh?

Political cover has already been granted to the professionals. Anodyne statements condemning racism and anti-semitism have been issued by former presidents and current congressmen. So brave! Seriously – was anyone going to issue a statement saying racism and anti-semitism weren’t really so bad? The President is not mentioned by name, except by the handful of usual suspects who are then personally attacked and dismissed as envious losers.

James Murdoch wrote a “personal letter” about it and pledged a million dollars to the Anti-Defamation League. Steve Cohen, a Democratic congressman from Tennessee says he will file articles of impeachment.

It’s all whispering in the hurricane, kids. Tweety is immune from such trifles. To quote the man himself, “Watch!”

As is to be expected, Tweety is already on the record with his own all-purpose condemnations of racism, thereby inoculating himself from his own disease and preemptively refuting evidence to the contrary.  As always, he has made sure that he has said something, however vague, that can prove he was correct from the get-go about anything and everything that might come up. The man has never been wrong once.

Apart from lack of any movement on the real issue here (bringing the Tweety era to a close), there actually will be some positive changes on the ground, although mainly only symbolic ones which will not stop the “free speech vs. hate speech” debate treadmill we just stepped on. Some Confederate monuments will finally be removed and some planned “Unite the Right” events will be cancelled. We repeat: Not The Point.

And late night comics are doing some great work. I particularly like this Jimmy Kimmel rant. Enjoy.

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.

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.

Do not become deceased

When dealing with the police, that should always be Rule #1: Do Not Become Deceased.

The woman in Minnesota who became deceased last week after calling police about what she thought might be an attack behind her home can be forgiven for not keeping this rule in mind. She was from Australia and perhaps was not aware of her duty in this instance.

deceased

Since she failed to follow this common sense rule, she was unable to resolve the issue that she originally called about. Maybe there had been a rape behind her home as she suspected, or perhaps something else. We’ll never know now. What happened when the police responded to her call was explained by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension this way:

“Upon police arrival, a female ‘slaps’ the back of the patrol squad. After that, it is unknown to BCA agents what exactly happened, but the female became deceased in the alley.”

Clearly, the woman should not have become deceased at this time, and perhaps the incident that she called about could have been resolved had she been more careful about meeting this obligation.

This unfortunate lapse has led to the resignation of the Minneapolis Police Chief, and the placing on “administrative leave” of two Minneapolis police officers, which is clearly a tragedy that could have been avoided.

So remember, kids, if you think you might need to call the police for some reason, be sure you are prepared to meet your obligation to not become deceased. If you can’t do that one simple thing, well, there’s just no point in calling them at all.

 

 

Please be advised…

We are apparently now living under a new form of government, the name for which is yet to be coined. It has major elements in common with “kakistocracy”, “kleptocracy”, and “plutocracy”, but none of those terms describe it precisely. “Idiocracy” doesn’t quite get the essence of it either. Neither does “dictatorship”, at least not yet.

But the ground is shifting beneath us daily, and could tilt more completely to any of these designations at any time. And then shift and veer more towards another, or something totally different the following day. I’m leaning towards “Twitterocracy” as the most accurate for now, given recent events.

Two quick examples from just yesterday make good indicators of this new paradigm.

The first is the President of the United States, using his own internet account, and with no consultation with anyone else, impulsively “Tweeting” an attack on a U.S. Senator in his own party, for casting a vote that he disapproves of.

lisa

This is an insidious change in our national discourse. Murkowski, and every other congressperson, is not an employee of the president, and not appointed by him. Each member of the legislature is part of an institution meant to exercise power equal to that of the presidency. Like all representatives, Murkowski was chosen by the people at home, and directed to vote their conscience and her own, which she has done. In choosing to attack someone this way, Tweety is talking directly to those who elected Murkowski, using the bully pulpit to undermine her.

He is also playing with fire, as there will certainly be someone back home who will now regard Murkowski as “the enemy” who lets the country down. And, since the normal way of doing things is clearly obsolete, that person may not bother waiting for the next election to express his displeasure. What I am saying is that Tweety is recklessly inciting the mob here, and there may be tragic consequences, which of course Tweety will deny responsibility for.

And he’s choosing to attack an ally, a member of his own party, and someone whose support he will certainly need going forward! His idea is to bypass the usual methods of persuasion, like calling her on the phone, or inviting her to lunch, or asking the Majority Leader to give her a message from him, or a million other more civilized options that historical protocol offers. Or simply accepting that she voted her conscience and that this is how our system works. Instead, he has decided that bullying works best. For him.

If Mitch McConnell were actually a leader in any sense of the word, this is where he would draw the line. He would tell Tweety, publicly and sternly, to lay off members of his caucus and to do his own job and let the Senators do theirs. But he is not a leader.

All this comes after days of Tweety similarly attacking his own Attorney General, someone he hand picked for his loyalty and seemingly blind support just months ago. Attacking Jeff Sessions as “weak”, etc., is also unprecedented, not to say nutty, just like so many things Tweety has done. I’m tempted to say “everything” he has done, actually, as I’m having trouble thinking of a single example of Tweety observing presidential protocol or tradition. At least, in this case, the A.G. is someone he appointed, not someone elected by others. But that in no way justifies this method of showing displeasure.

Tweety has had many, many opportunities to talk to Sessions face-to-face about his complaints, as they were both in the same building at the same time on several occasions. But Tweety was holed up in “his private residence”, apparently in a FoxNews-induced trance. He chose to shame and humiliate and antagonize Sessions publicly instead. Sessions, it turns out, isn’t even on Twitter, so not only wasn’t the barrage meant for his ears only, it wasn’t meant for his ears at all. At least not directly.  WTF?

The second example is Tweety “deciding” that transgender people are no longer welcome in the military. He woke up in the morning, “consulted with his generals”, picked up his Twitter, and blasted away.

trans

“Please be advised…? Thank you.” That’s it? That’s all it takes now to disrupt the lives of thousands? That’s all it takes to change policy? No bills passed in congress after a spirited debate? Not even an Executive Order? Just 140 characters randomly blasted out to the world?

“Please be advised…”?

What’s next?

“Please be advised that from today forward, you will drive on the left hand side of the road. Thank you.”

“Please be advised that vegetables will no longer be allowed in grocery stores. Thank you.”

“Please be advised that your existing plumbing systems may no longer be used. If you choose to use water, you may purchase approved brands only. Thank you.”

water

Folks, we’re in uncharted territory here. I don’t know if this form of government has a name yet. Any suggestions?

Pardon me

It’s official. Everything you thought you knew about how our government works is wrong. Also, politics, international relations, the press, law enforcement, and every other aspect of public life.

There was a time Before Tweety (B.T.) when Republicans took Reagan’s dictum that you never spoke ill of another Republican to be an immutable law. Trump proved that that was not true.

There was a time B.T. when you knew a presidential candidate would have to produce his medical records to prove he was fit and that he wasn’t insane. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., it was thought a candidate was required to produce his tax returns to assure the electorate that he was honest, to gauge his charitable giving, and to show if there were any conflicts of interest. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., it was thought that, if elected, you had to divest your business interests and put assets in a blind trust to avoid conflicts and to free you to concentrate on the work of the people. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., Russia was understood to be a power hostile to our ideals and way of life, and impeding our ability to make it available to others around the world. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., the F.B.I., C.I.A., and other intelligence-gathering agencies were thought to be working to help us defend ourselves against all manner of attack and subversion. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., it was thought that the role of the press was crucial in shedding light on ambiguous policies and ethical lapses, and that at regular intervals they would be able to ask the questions of those in power that citizens were owed the answers to. Trump proved that that was not true.

B.T., it was thought that the President was not above the law, and that ultimately he must answer to congress and the courts. We thought the resignation of Richard Nixon proved this. Congress had the power to try him for high crimes and misdemeanors, and, when he saw they were going to do just that, he cut his losses as best he could and resigned in disgrace.

Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford issued a presidential pardon (Proclamation 4311) that granted Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes he might have committed against the United States while president. It was controversial because many people thought it was a subversion of our system of checks and balances, and because they wanted to see Nixon tried and punished like any other citizen, which they thought they knew to be the way things should be.

But Ford thought it would serve the country better to just move past the ugliness that Nixon had created in the Executive branch, and that civility and public trust would be restored faster by just ending the agony. Maybe he was right.

Even Nixon never thought that he could escape his persecutors by simply pardoning himself. Why resign and wait for his successor to do it? Why not just do it yourself and retain the presidency and skip all the shame? Why not?

Even Nixon could see that it would be an insane abrogation of the power of the presidency and the public trust to attempt such an audacious and dystopian gambit. Even Nixon saw that it made no sense in the context of the American system.

Everyone could see this was obviously true, and for Nixon to pretend it wasn’t would be to affirm the accusations of his most vicious detractors: it would prove he was an insane megalomaniac, a narcissist with no understanding of the principles American government and justice, and no respect for the citizenry.

But Trump has now proved that even this is untrue. He has pronounced that he has the absolute right to pardon aides, family members, and, yes, even himself. And like everything Trump, he may able to justify it all with some sloppy wording in some statute, some missing comma, some failure to include language that no one ever conceived would be needed, some atom of ambiguity that turns everything his way. In this piece, the Failing New York Times asks the question, “Could Trump pardon himself?”, and answers:

This is not clear. The only limitation explicitly stated in the Constitution is a ban on using a pardon to stop an impeachment proceeding in Congress, and the only obvious implicit limitation is that he cannot pardon offenses under state law.

And like everything Trump, having asserted it or tweeted it or even thought it makes it true enough for his followers and for those who feel they benefit somehow by letting this slow-motion dismantling of our social and political institutions continue.

We thought we knew that a president was “only” a president, and not a dictator, a king, an emperor, a pharaoh, or a God. Trump is proving that even that is not true.

trumpgod

 

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.

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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.

This can’t go on

It’s just not normal. How can we go on pretending it’s normal? Or that it’s OK in any way? Are we so stunned by the rapidity of the change? Are we so ignorant of our own history and principles? Are we so consumed by partisanship that we must ignore the bizarre and outlandish, the inappropriate and outrageous, when it comes from our “team”?

The President of the United States tweeted this on Monday:

courts are political

He was upset because his “Travel Ban” has to be ruled on by a court before it can be made law, and he indulged in one of his now-standard early-morning “tweet storms”, or maybe “twitter tantrums”  describes it better.

tweets

These outbursts do not serve his interests in any way, and certainly do not serve our country’s interests. He is discrediting our system of justice. Who does that help?

The President of the United States has declared that the courts are “political”.

Is this what should now be taught to schoolchildren?

The President cannot, must not, say this. Even if it were true, which, God help us, it better not be, he cannot say this.

He is saying that our system of checks and balances is a sham.

He is saying the idea of an independent judiciary is a sham.

He is saying that any judicial appointment he makes is political.

He is saying that he expects “Republican” judges (there better not be such a thing!) will rule against Democrat plaintiffs, and vice versa.

He is saying he expects any judge he appoints to rule in his favor no matter what the law says.

He is saying that decisions made in his favor are also tainted, just as those that he doesn’t like.

He is saying that any decision passed down by the courts is made not on the basis of legal precedent or constitutional law, but on political grounds.

He is saying that no court decision is justice, but rather politics, so you are right to question decisions you don’t like, or to simply reject and ignore them. They do not carry the weight of “law”, but only “politics”.

He is saying the power of the presidency is not tempered or augmented by the judiciary, but that it is in opposition to it.

He is saying the courts do not function to protect us and our principles, but, like the media and any other institution that questions him, are the enemy. Until you co-opt them for your own team.

He is saying the rule of law is a fiction.

He is saying he does not like or trust our system of government.

He is saying that the authority of the courts and judges is not real.

The President said this. The sitting President of the United States.

Those who admire and trust him will certainly modify their thinking based on his “teachings”, and some will modify their behavior as well. There will be consequences.

FoxNews will “debate” the merits of these statements. They will repeat and support them, perhaps with minor modifications and explanations, rather than go against their “team”, thereby amplifying the effect and compounding the damage.

Those who see Trump for the impulsive, ignorant, narcissistic jackass he is can only shake their heads, yet again, in dismay and wonderment. Or possibly speak out, only to then be accused of God-knows-what by the other “side”. Liberalism? Political correctness? Defeatism? Anti-Americanism? Terrorist sympathies?

Where’s the outrage?

Obstruction of Justice + Treason = ?

A few days ago, the President of the United States admitted to the crime of Obstruction of Justice on national television. In an interview, he told NBC’s Lester Holt that he fired the Director of the F.B.I., James Comey, because he was frustrated by the investigation into Russian meddling in the election, which he said wasn’t real but rather made up by Democrats who lost an election they should have won.

This is Obstruction of Justice, an impeachable offense.

He left out the part about how it was the very same Comey’s timely revelations about the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails that tipped the scales of the election. It’s hard to remember now, but the reason everyone was so upset about which email account Clinton used was that she might reveal classified information to our nation’s enemies, e.g. Russia. Even though no such information was revealed, Trump repeatedly called for Clinton to be “locked up” for her imagined crimes.

But with Trump, Obstruction of Justice is like everything else. Nothing. Republicans in Congress said he had a right to fire whoever he wants (not if it’s Obstruction, he doesn’t), that it’s all smoke and no fire, and so on.

Only four days ago, I wrote,

By next week it will all be forgotten, replaced in the “news” by stories about the selection of the new F.B.I. director, who, by the way, will certainly be loyal to Trump. Or by some other craziness, maybe the new investigation into voter fraud, led by a proponent of Voter ID laws. Or more likely by something we just can’t see coming right now. Your assignment: come back here in a week and add a comment about what it turned out to be!

Well, don’t bother. It didn’t take a week and we already have the answer. Yesterday, we learned that the President revealed highly classified information to the Russians in that meeting that only the Russian news agency was allowed to cover. He was bragging to the Russians about all the “great intel” he gets every day (Really? Who’d have imagined?). The WaPo article says,

The information the president relayed had been provided by a U.S. partner through an intelligence-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, officials said.

The partner had not given the United States permission to share the material with Russia, and officials said Trump’s decision to do so endangers cooperation from an ally that has access to the inner workings of the Islamic State. After Trump’s meeting, senior White House officials took steps to contain the damage, placing calls to the CIA and the National Security Agency.

This is Treason, also an impeachable offense.

To summarize, Trump wanted to lock up Crooked Hillary Clinton because she couldn’t be trusted to keep our secrets out of Russian hands, and applauded James Comey for revealing that the F.B.I. was investigating her handling of emails, an investigation which ultimately resulted in nothing.

In a fit of petulance, he then fired Comey for investigating the Russian hacking of the very emails we’re talking about, because it might be revealed that his campaign staff colluded with the Russians. Such a firing is unjustified, improper, and completely without precedent.

He then disclosed highly classified information directly to our enemies on his own. Personally. To the Russians. While standing in the Oval Office. With the Russian State News Agency present.

Does any of this matter to the “No Regerts” crowd? Nah. As everyone knows, Trump is Draining the Swamp and Making America Great Again. Lock Her Up. That’s what matters. When his current 88% approval rating with those who voted for him starts to drop, then maybe something will be done about all this. But there’s apparently nothing that could ever have that effect, so don’t hold your breath.

Obstruction of Justice + Treason = Nothing.

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Cox and Comey

Last night, our unhinged president fired the head of the F.B.I., James Comey, allegedly for his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, something Trump had often praised Comey about even in the very recent past. Is there anyone who actually believes this nonsense?

Comey is currently leading an investigation into the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russian hackers, and everyone understands that the reason he was fired was to put a chill on that investigation.

It’s pretty funny that Trump was “acting on the advice” of the Justice Department, i.e. on Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the very Trump Campaign people who apparently colluded with the Russians (and then lied about it under oath). You may not remember that connection, because the whole “Obama tapped my wires” thing blew it right off the internet, and therefore off of all other news sources, as well.

The best part is the short letter Trump sent to Comey telling him he was gone. It contains just three paragraphs, the second of which is truly bizarre:

While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgement of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau. 

Huh?

Anyway, the entire world immediately saw the parallel here to the Saturday Night Massacre, in which Richard Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was  leading the Watergate investigation. This led to the resignations of Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus on October 20, 1973. This was the turning point for the Nixon Presidency and he resigned from office some months later, when he saw his impeachment was certain.

ARP 12 1974, APR 14 1974; Archibald Cox; Among Harvard visitors.; (Photo By Ernie Leyba/The Denver Post via Getty Images)

The hashtag #TuesdayNightMassacre blew up on social media with many people exulting that this was certainly the beginning of the end for the man-baby, and that, like Nixon, he would ultimately be on the road to impeachment.

trump-nixon

Not so fast, kids.

There is a huge difference between the Saturday Night Massacre and the Tuesday Night Massacre, and it is one that means Trump will not be impeached. Not until after 2018, anyway. At the time of the Cox firing, the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives.

Impeachment happens only if a simple majority of the House votes for “Articles of Impeachment”. And then a two-thirds majority of the Senate must vote for impeachment, after hearings presided over by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. All of these offices are controlled by Republicans, and all their constituencies love Trump.

A second somewhat less important difference is that, back then, there were also a handful of Republicans who understood that our country and the rule of law are, in fact, more important that partisan politics. That’s not the case today. Virtually every Republican congressman who was asked about the firing last night, said something like it was “time for a change” or “the F.B.I. head serves at the pleasure of the President.”

Even the ones that have in the past demonstrated some independence, like Maine’s Senator Susan Collins, who said,

“The Justice Department was really understaffed for a long time, it took a while for the attorney general to be confirmed and his deputy was just confirmed I believe a week or so ago, and it’s the deputy who is a career prosecutor who had been designated to do the analysis so the FBI director’s actions and came up with the recommendation.

“The president did not fire the entire FBI. He fired the director of the FBI. And any suggestion that this is somehow going to stop the FBI’s investigation of the attempts by the Russians to influence the elections last fall is really patently absurd. This is just one person, it’s the director, the investigation is going forward both at the FBI and in the Senate Intel Committee in a bipartisan way. SO I don’t think there’s any link at all.”

But, on the bright side, assuming there is anything left to salvage of our government two years from now, and assuming Democrats can regain the House, Trump’s impeachment is now inevitable. Big assumptions.

The mid-term elections are more important now than ever before. I hope all the Bernie voters and Jill Stein voters can grasp all this and do the right thing.

 

Arkansas on a spree

So Arkansas has executed four people in the last eight days, after not executing anyone for twelve years. Wow.  This is really a disgrace.

lethal

Before I tell you why I think this is a disgrace, let me make most of you angry by telling you what my cousin Screwie Generis thinks. Screwie is a lot smarter than I am, and he thinks the death penalty is just fine. Here’s how he responds to some of the standard objections to the death penalty.

1.  “It’s cruel and unusual”.  Perhaps, but then almost everything about our prison system is cruel and unusual, starting with the absurdly high incarceration rate itself, and going all the way up to using prison as a warehouse for all our deinstitutionalized mentally ill. There is no logical basis for singling out the death penalty for its cruelty or unusualness.

2. “It’s used disproportionately against people of color”. This is not an argument to end the death penalty – it is an argument to use it more often on white offenders. The question isn’t what color the murderer is, but whether he committed a capital offense.

3. “It might make you feel better, but it won’t bring back the victim”. Exactly! Nothing can bring back the victim. Life imprisonment can’t do it. A slap on the wrist can’t do it. No punishment you can invent will bring back the victim. The point of capital punishment is that actions have consequences, and this is the correct price to be paid for ending someone’s life.

4. “It doesn’t deter crime”.  Nonsense.  It deters the shit out of the guy you’re executing. No more stabbing the corrections officers for you, sonny boy. Anyway, if deterrence was the main objective of capital punishment or any other punishment, we’re doing it all wrong.  You’d have to start by performing the punishment where those you’d like to deter can see it – in the public square or on TV, for example.

5. “It’s not justice, it’s revenge.” It’s both. But so what if it was just revenge? Why is that not an adequate justification? And, again, isn’t any other punishment also “revenge”?  The more important question is, did the guy commit the crime or not?

6. “It’s costly.” Quite beside the point. Everything we do as a society, both the right things and the wrong, has costs. This argument belongs somewhere else. Are you challenging me to think of a cheaper way to kill someone? Because I can do it if you are.

7. “The state has no right”. Hmmm.  What “right” does the state have to do anything at all? There are plenty of people out there who think the state has no right to collect income tax, to designate National Monuments, to seize land by eminent domain, or to do many other things that we now allow it to do. The state has whatever “rights” we grant to it.

8. “What if you execute the wrong guy?” OK, now you’re making sense. You cannot execute someone if there is any chance whatever that he is the wrong person. You just can’t do it. The Innocence Project has done some great work in this area, though I’m a bit puzzled by how Barry Scheck can use DNA to free both the innocent and the guilty (remember O.J.?)   It’s a really horrible thought that even one innocent person was ever put to death. But, again, this is less an argument against capital punishment than an argument against convicting innocent people. It would also be horrible (maybe even worse!) for an innocent man to spend his life in prison. But, yes, I get it: if you find out someone is innocent, and you haven’t yet executed him, you can release him. The standard for capital punishment cannot be the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard that got him convicted, but must be raised to “without a molecule of doubt”.

9. “The murderer is a changed man – he’s rehabilitated and no longer the same guy who committed the crime”. Again, so what? I’m no longer the same guy I was when I (did something) 20 years ago. But I still did it. It still has repercussions for someone else. Can you just murder someone and say, “Hey, that was last week – I’ve grown!” and be absolved?  Should we give Poland a call and tell them to leave this guy alone?

10. “The poor guy has the I.Q. of a dust mite – he doesn’t know right from wrong.” He doesn’t know right from wrong, but you want to let him go free? No thanks.

11. “You must take the perpetrator’s background into account – he had a terrible upbringing and it’s understandable why he did the things he did.”  Puh-leeeze! First, tons of people had rough upbringings and did not choose to kill anyone.  In making this argument, you are denying free will, and, well, we’ll just have to agree to disagree on whether we have free will. But more importantly, think of the implications if we go along with it! You’re saying we have to set the murderer free because his step-father put cigarettes out on his chest when he was nine, and he can’t be held responsible for his actions. Fine. Release him. And when he does it again, you have to release him again because the back-story hasn’t changed. You’ve made the punk into James Bond – he has a license to kill.

Whew. OK. Enough from Screwie. But at this point you’re probably asking why, if I think Screwie’s arguments defending capital punishment merit repeating here, did I start by saying that what Arkansas is doing is a disgrace.

Arkansas is executing these guys because their supply of the lethal drugs that they use for executions is nearing its expiration date, and they think they might have trouble getting more.

Screwie might be able to convince me that there are valid reasons to defend capital punishment, but I can’t be convinced that running low on poison is one of them.

 

The customer is never right

In corporate America today, the transformation is almost complete. The big ones are just about done eating the little ones. How many options does the consumer really have now when choosing a bank? Or an internet/cell/TV provider? Or an airline that flies a particular route? Even the grocery stores are coming under the the control of the increasingly few corporate parents.

As consumers have their choices reduced, and as companies who built their business on great customer service are acquired by companies that didn’t, the whole notion of trying to do right by the customer is becoming obsolete.

If you need to call Intergalactic Cable because they just added another $15 to your monthly bill for no apparent reason, you’ll soon realize the effort required to get that money back will cost you a lot more than $15 in time, effort and aggravation.

You wade through a maze of voice menus and finally arrive on “hold” listening to a recorded voice tell you repeatedly that your call is important to them. Your call is not important to them. It’s a giant pain in the rear end and they hope you just go away. But don’t forget to pay your bill promptly to avoid penalties.

When someone finally does answer, you soon realize they are entry-level employees in the Philippines or India or somewhere else where labor is cheap. They read from a script, often in an accent you have trouble comprehending. They have no authority to address your issue. They try to sell you additional “services”. Would you like to enroll in their auto-pay program? They’ll just go right into your account every month without you needlessly worrying about the details. So convenient!

You may be transferred and transferred again to other “customer service” people who also cannot help you. Sometimes you wind up back with the department you started with, but with a different person. Each step along the way requires you to provide extensive identifying information before you start all over trying to explain the problem. You’re fortunate if, after all this, you aren’t simply disconnected. And if you do achieve the goal you started out with – getting that $15 removed – you feel like you’ve won the lottery. But that $15 will reappear in two months and you can decide then if you’d like to repeat the experience.

If you’re dim enough to ask your insurance company to give you some money when you discover your car has been dented in the parking lot while you were shopping, your rates will be raised. The business model amounts to “you give us money, we give you nothing”.

The customer is not always right. The customer is a sucker to be fleeced.

The corporation has several constituencies that need to be served, and their interests conflict. First and foremost, management must be taken care of. The C-level few will get their obscene compensation packages whether the company does well or not, whether the products are faulty or not, and whether the customers complain or not.

After they’ve had their turn at the trough, the shareholders may or may not get some return on their investment, then the employees may or may not get some consideration, and then comes the customer. The customer gets nothing.

We’re supposed to feel good when we read a story like this one about Wells Fargo clawing back $75 million from two executives. Two! This is after six months of them  “investigating” themselves about the fraud which saw two million fake accounts created and 5300 employees fired. See, it was the employees who were actually the guilty ones! Why did these two jokers get paid so absurdly in the first place? Why does it take a media firestorm to get rid of them, and another to get some of the loot returned?

Here’s a piece  from last July that puts the nine-figure compensation of failed Yahoo CEO, Marisa Mayer, “in perspective”. She’s gone now. What would they have had to pay her if she actually did what they hired her to do, i.e. finally turn the company around?

You only get “accountability” from the guys at the top after they’ve exhausted all their other options. This week’s United Airlines fiasco is a case in point. First came the statements from the top about how procedures were followed and how proud they are of their employees. Then there was some talk about how they weren’t really the bad guys, because, see, it was actually law enforcement that screwed up. Then there was the obligatory blaming of the customer – he was “defiant” (as opposed to what?). Then there were some lukewarm “apologies” for having to “re-accommodate” some passengers (none of whom had actually been accommodated in the first place).

DC: Airline Industry CEO's Speak At Chamber Of Commerce

Only after it became clear that this wasn’t going away, that there would be lawsuits, that the paying customer was assaulted (lost his front teeth and was concussed!), that CEO Oscar Munoz is finally using some more-or-less appropriate language. As part of this mea culpa, he also said “It’s never too late to do the right thing,” Actually, after you’ve knocked out your customer’s teeth, it is a little late.

But if you believe for a minute that any of this is sincere, that it’s anything other than pathetic attempts at damage control, well, you’re the perfect customer for United Airlines and all the other mega corporations for whom competition in our “free-market” economy is not a worry.

Anyway, I started writing this because today I read something about the airlines overbooking policies that bothered me. I wrote the other day that it seemed to me that, since you pay for your ticket when “reserving” it these days, the airlines will have their money whether you fly or not, and that the overbooking policy now is nothing more than an opportunity for them to sell the same seat twice. The article I read today said no, not exactly, because when people who purchased a refundable ticket don’t fly, they might get their money back and then the airline loses.

First of all, I’m not worried about the airline “losing”. They’re doing fine. Second, I’d need to see some statistics about how many of the no-shows actually bought refundable tickets, because they often cost twice as much or more than the non-refundable ones. And third, the airlines have already protected themselves against the possibility of losing money on no-shows. The full-fare customers who did fly have simply paid an insurance premium for something that didn’t happen. It’s all profit for the airline, and loss for the customer.

So what’s the takeaway here? Uh, I’m not sure. We’ve gone pretty far down the road of corporate consolidation to turn that ship around at this point. And I think we can rule out hiring Marisa Mayer to fix things, or anyone at Wells Fargo. But, beyond that?

Bernie for President in 2020?

 

 

OK, this time United is wrong

The other day we wrote about internet outrage, and how it has a life of its own, even when it’s based on incorrect information. It was about United Airlines making some teenagers change their clothes before boarding, and the story blew up before people realized that there was another piece to the puzzle and maybe United wasn’t really wrong.

Well, today United is in the news again, and this time it looks like they really screwed up. They overbooked a flight as is their practice, assuming that some passengers will be no-shows. The concept is that they should be able to sell the seats when this happens, rather than lose revenue on the no-shows. Every now and then, they get caught if there aren’t enough no-shows, and they have to bribe someone to wait for another flight.

This happened in Chicago the other day, and they had four more passengers than seats on a flight to Louisville. Three people agreed to fly later, but one guy, who U.A. had determined should be the fourth, didn’t want to get off the plane. They would end up getting the police to come on the plane and physically drag the guy out of his seat and off the plane, literally kicking and screaming.

As we often say here at GOML, in the internet age there is usually more to the story than meets the eye. But there are three things about this whole deal that makes United look bad to me, if the story stands as is.

The first is the whole “overbooking” practice. In the old days, you used to be able to “reserve” a ticket and pay for it when you showed up at the airport. If you didn’t show, the airline didn’t get the money and the seat went empty. But now, you always pay for the ticket when you “reserve” it. In other words, you’re not reserving it at all – you’re buying it. If you don’t use it, the airline still has your money. Yes the seat goes unoccupied for that flight, but the airline hasn’t lost anything. Overbooking is now a way for the airline to get paid twice for the same seat. Am I wrong about this? Someone please correct me if so.

Second, the airlines’ ticketing agreement allows them to refuse boarding to passengers under lots of different scenarios, including overbooking. Fine, but they hadn’t refused boarding to this poor guy. He was already settled into his seat when the whole thing blew up. If you’re overbooked, you know it before boarding begins, and you can straighten it out in the gate area. No? You might have someone pitch a screaming fit there, but it beats a viral video of a guy being pulled out a seat that he paid for on a flight he needs to take. You would have thought they were taking him to the electric chair.

And third, this whole thing happened because United discovered they had four employees who they needed to get to Louisville. They were non-revenue-passengers (remember “nonrevs” from the whole dress-code incident?). So they throw off the paying customers to make way for their employees? This did not sit well with the other passengers who were seated near the “victim”, and they berated and shamed the U.A. nonrev employees who did fly.

Now there may yet be a twist that absolves United here – I have an open mind. Maybe the four employees were pilots who had to get to Louisville to fly a transplanted heart to its new owner. Maybe United knew that a plane-full of asthmatic orphans would be waiting on the ground for eight hours, or something, if they didn’t get this crew down there, and they figured “the greatest good for the greatest number”. I don’t know.

But, at first blush, this does seem like corporate greed and contempt for customers. To the barricades! Down with the Patriarchy!

You better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone.

It’s all happening so fast, now. You don’t see it coming. Or maybe you do, but there’s nothing you can do about it. And the weird, dystopian reality is that millions of people think it’s a good thing.

Just yesterday, three huge steps in the wrong direction were taken while our attention was focused elsewhere.

Maybe you were busy watching the  Devin Nunes shit-show. Or maybe you were pondering Trump’s brazen abdication of responsibility to his daughter and son-in-law, neither of whom is any more qualified for any of it than the man-baby himself, and neither of whom was elected, vetted, or approved by anyone but daddy.  Or maybe you’ve been marveling at Trump’s voracious appetite for spending our money on golf. After criticizing Obama for playing too much golf and asserting he wouldn’t have time for it, he’s spending money on golf at a rate eight times that of Obama.

No, none of that. Here are three other outrages that took place virtually unremarked just yesterday, and I’m not even sure they are the only three.

1. President Trump Risks the Planet.

With a stroke of his pen, Trump undid all Obama’s climate change initiatives in the name of bringing back jobs to the coal industry. Oy vey. Where to begin on this one? I suppose you could start with my observations of just a few days ago.

As we’ve said before, those jobs aren’t coming back in any case. But at least now the operators won’t have to spend any money on compliance, so, you know, finally they’ll be able to afford those solid gold toilet seats on their Gulfstream G5’s. Nice, right?

jet

The miners that are still on the job can get back to work on that black lung thing they’ve got going, and, if Trump has his way, do it without health insurance. And the rest of us can laugh at how we didn’t fall for that Chinese hoax called “climate change”.

2. Congress blocks effort to get Trump’s tax returns.

Why? How does this make sense? Wouldn’t the Republican lawmakers want to assert just a little independence? Grab back just a little piece of the power assigned to the legislative branch that they’ve so eagerly abandoned? Clear the air on that Russia thing and other conflicts once and for all? Set and maintain a precedent that we’ve followed for decades so that future abuses, perhaps by their opponents, would be made less likely? Nah.

And all for fear of an attack-tweet from a toxic clown who’s going to drag them down anyway.

3. Your internet browsing history is now for sale without your permission or knowledge.

Huh? Wasn’t this something law enforcement needed a warrant to obtain? Wasn’t this the kind of thing the whole Snowden exposé was about?

It’s bad enough that all those lowly wage-slaves at your I.S.P. can chuckle about how you downloaded a movie illegally, or googled your high-school crush, or “anonymously” commented on some anti-Trump blog, or purchased sex-toys. Or whatever the hell you did that you assumed other people wouldn’t know about. Medical or financial information you thought was yours? No, it now belongs to them and anyone they sell it to.

Yes, they have every search term, every mouse click, every everything already packaged up and ready to go.  In the past, they couldn’t do it without your permission. Now they can. Now it’s a profit center for them to grow. Better think twice next time you press “enter”.

The Times They Are A-Changin’.

Let them eat diamonds

Monday today – I’m too lazy to write something thoughtful. So, instead, here is some random anti-Trump sentiment for your enjoyment.

The Meals on Wheels program could be saved if Melania Trump would stay at the White House for just 20 days.

trump lion

diamonds

Another way to put the NEH cuts in context:

trump wall

Trump on 60 Minutes: “There’s just so much to be done, so I don’t think we’ll be very big on vacations, no.”

Trump’s golf trips in his first two months cost the same as funding Meals on Wheels for over four years.

Jerry: “He wasn’t a pigman, was he?”  Kramer: “No! Just a fat little mental patient!”

trumpgolf

Trump aid Sebastian Gorka turns out to be a Nazi.

trumpnazis

Bloomberg sums it up nicely:

bloomberg

 

 

So this is how it will be

There will not be a single normal day in the next four years.

Each and every day will be consumed by controversy and acrimony. There will be no time to hash out whether something Trump tweets is actually true before the next spectacle begins, and no point in doing so.

If you think a tweet is nuts and clearly untrue, you are a “cuck” and you need to get out of the way of the TrumpTrain, which is accomplishing things much faster and better than any administration ever, and running like a finely tuned machine.

No one who really needs to hear that something wasn’t true after all is listening or cares. It’s just fake news from the lying enemy media. America will be great again very soon. In fact, it’s already great again.

The President of the United States made up a crazy, paranoid lie about his predecessor, and impulsively tweeted it out to the world. Having done that, he says only, “No further comment until a Congressional investigation has been done” to avoid having to elaborate or clarify or justify.

He sends Sean Spicer into the predictable fire, but Spicy’s got nothing. When asked about the crazy tweets, he says only,  “If we start down the rabbit hole of discussing some of this stuff, I think that we end up in a very difficult place.” No shit!

Spicer seems to be forgetting it was the POTUS that started us down the rabbit hole and put us in this very difficult place. But why? Why in the world would he do it? Is there any up-side other than getting Jeff Sessions’ lying under oath off the font page? Is that all there is behind this unbelievable breach of protocol, etiquette, and sanity? Just the gaining of a day or two of political cover?

But, amazingly enough, it doesn’t matter at all. It seems there will be no consequences to putting the lie out there where it marinates, unverified, and becomes true for millions just for having been said by “President” Trump.  Republicans simply shrugged.

Anyway, it’s day-old news now which means it’s not news at all. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are focused on their new health care bill, which should, in a normal world, be the focus of the news. There is no mention on my Google news feed today about yesterday’s outrage.

So what’s next from President Crazypants?

Today we’re on to the new, “revised” Muslim travel ban. It has already made us forget all about Obama “tapping”.

Which made us forget all about the Attorney General,  Jeff Sessions, lying to Congress under oath.

Which made us forget all about the imagined “Swedish terrorism last night”.

Which made us forget all about the absurd Mar-a-Lago security circus.

Which made us forget about the botched Yemen raid and how “They lost Ryan”.

Which made us forget all about the enormous cost to taxpayers for Trump family travel.

Which made us forget all about the unconscionable exclusion of the Failing New York Times, CNN, and others from a press briefing.

Which made us forget all about the anti-democratic “Media is the enemy of America”.

Which made us forget all about the stupefying “Legal system is broken” for ruling against the original travel ban.

Which made us forget all about the loony and incompetent Flynn lying about Russian meetings and resigning.

Which made us forget all about the delusional “three million illegal votes cast”.

Which made us forget all about the unprecedented Kellyanne Conway hawking Ivanka crap during a FoxNews interview.

Which made us forget all about the xenophobic and silly provocation of the original travel ban on Muslims.

Which made us forget all about the fictional “electoral landslide”.

Which made us forget all about how we’ll be paying for the alleged “wall” after all.

Which made us forget all about the spectacle of a sitting president refuting and diminishing the intelligence agencies over Russian hacking.

Which made us forget all about the fanciful “record crowds” at the inauguration.

Which made us forget all about the disheartening Conway saying Trump wouldn’t release his taxes after all.

I know I probably have the order of these events wrong, and I know I left out many, many others that had their turn completely preoccupying the media for a day or two. I can’t help it – my head is spinning. I have no desire to thoroughly research all the craziness, chaos, controversies, and straight-up bullshit we’ve endured in the first few weeks of Trump.

I’m not even going to go back to before the election when there was so much to digest/refute that we never actually got to ask Trump a real policy question. I suppose the answer would have been drowned out by the chants of “Lock Her Up” anyway.

And of course all the scandals of Trump’s business career are just irrelevant ancient history now. For the masochistic among you, here’s a summary from The Atlantic.

The force and weirdness of the Trump hurricane since winning the election is just too much. It’s a completely unprecedented (unpresidented?) perversion of perhaps the most critical of our three branches of government, the Executive, and it  has greatly accelerated the disappearance of cohesion and decency in our political life.

Each day we think, OK this is it – this is the one that’s so crazy we all have to stop, sort through it, and take action on it while everything else is on hold. But then tomorrow comes and we have to put it aside for the new one.

It has finally dawned on me that this is how every day of the next four years will be. There will not be one Trump-free day. Not one day in which we can just relax and try to forget what’s happening and what’s happened.

We’re already exhausted. God help us when the first real international crisis hits, or the first big terrorist attack, or another financial implosion, or an ecological disaster, or anything else that cries out for a real president to actually lead us.

 

 

 

When will enough be enough?

I’ve just about forgotten all about Trump’s many and various displays of petulance, incompetence, ignorance and insanity of the last week or two. Something about no security precautions at Mar-a-Lago, I believe. Maybe a terrorist attack in Sweden? Kellyanne Conway said something or other that resulted in a week-long time-out. Signed something that’s going to screw up the environment, I think. Flynn something something. “See you in court” over what, now? A few others I just can’t remember at all.

It’s just exhausting. At least one outrage a day that, in normal times, would have blown up the media for six months, 24/7.  But with the man-baby, if it’s more than a day old, it doesn’t count anymore. Never happened. Never said it.  Don’t need you Soros-funded political hacks rooting around trying to dredge up ancient history. It hurts Our Country.

Today’s craziness tops them all (until tomorrow, that is). Yesterday, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the tiny-handed clown amped up his attacks on the press (and threw in the FBI for good measure), repeating that they are “the enemy of the people” and criticized as “fake news” any anonymously-sourced reports that reflect poorly on him. Note that anything that reflects positively on him is real news.

He backed this up later with another of his Executive Tweets:

OK, we’ve heard all this before. Nothing new to see here, people. Just move along.  But the CPAC blast was quickly followed by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer,  barring the Failing New York Times, CNN, and other organizations Trump doesn’t like from his daily press conference.

Folks, we’re in uncharted waters here. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Really, how long until the Brownshirts are in the streets?

Trump just does not understand how this country is set up. He quite obviously has never read the constitution and has no idea what the limits of presidential power are meant to be. Or the importance of an independent judiciary.  Or a free press.  This is what happens when you elect a businessman-in-chief who has never held elective office of any kind ever. You get a guy who cannot tolerate any sort of disagreement and feels he can punish anyone who doesn’t toe the line.

He’s warring with the courts, the intelligence agencies, the press, our historic allies, business executives that don’t praise him sufficiently, all members of either party in congress that show any hesitation. Everyone who doesn’t praise and flatter him.

It’s almost funny. Trump has vowed to punish “leakers” now, though he loved and encouraged Wikileaks just a few months ago, and openly invited the Russians to hack away at his opponents.

To me, what really illustrates Trump’s lack of understanding about the role of the press is his saying that news organizations should not publish stories with anonymous sources.  Journalists have fought this battle many times over the years and always won. It’s quite obvious why no one would ever talk to the press about any wrongdoing if they had to have their name revealed. In the Trump era, this is more important than ever, since you would immediately lose your job and be attacked relentlessly on the internet.

Here’s a deal for you, man-baby: you reveal the name of your special investigators that found all that “unbelievable evidence” in Hawaii about Obama’s real birth certificate, and we’ll consider having this idiotic discussion about anonymous sources again for the millionth time.

Standing by…

Well-poisoners win again

In this post from before the election, I was marveling at the willingness of Trump’s inner circle to support and tirelessly explain any idiotic half-baked bullshit that suddenly and without warning erupted from the man-baby’s twitter. From the post:

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

When I wrote that, I didn’t really believe that anyone would actually take a job actually poisoning an actual well. Especially their very own actual well. How wrong I was.

Last week, the tiny-handed one signed legislation that would roll back the “Stream Protection Rule”,  to prevent it from “further harming coal workers and the communities that depend on them.” See, Obama, or as most apparently know him, the illegitimately-elected Kenyan Muslim devil,  thought he’d try to curtail the coal industry’s long-time practice of freely dumping their mining wastes down the hillsides of Appalachia, creating a hellish moonscape of many of the towns below. And poisoning their water.

With his characteristic impulsiveness, thoughtlessness and boasting, Trump claimed the rule had been costing “many thousands of jobs” because of the expense incurred cleaning up the mess.

This Failing New York Times editorial lays it out, but the gist is that the rule may have cost 260 mining jobs a year, but that those were offset by new jobs created to assure compliance.

It’s just an outrage, not just because it’s exactly the kind of thing you knew this idiot was going to do, but because it was done essentially out of sight as the massive clouds of chaos emanating outward from Trump at all times block the sun and the real news. There’s just no time or energy to pay attention to many of the things that we really should.

This comment on the piece hits the nail on the head,

The good news? You get to keep your job.  The bad news? Your job is going to poison your family.  Welcome to the Art Of The Deal. Maybe you should have read the book before you voted.

The fact is that the coal jobs won’t be coming back anyway, because there has been a gradual shift globally towards natural gas and the coal market has shrunk. From the editorial:

Trump might as well have been signing a decree that the whaling industry was being restored to Nantucket.

The point of today’s screed is that we got the government we deserved. Just like everyone else all over the world that stands by and lets the worst have their way.

Here’s the thing: Trump doesn’t care about the environment or jobs or abortion or immigration or anything else. The only thing he cares about is adulation, up-votes, attention, flattery, and “winning”. If there were more of those things to be had in imposing  tighter restrictions on the coal industry, that’s what he’d do.

I don’t know how it can ever happen and I’m not optimistic, but for this disastrous course we’re on to be changed, Trump must be made to believe there are more of us that will love him if he behaves differently than if he doesn’t.

Our enemy

It’s getting scarier.

I don’t see how this ends well for anyone. Even impeachment means violence in the streets and a further shredding of the fabric of our democracy. The man-baby will go down swinging, inciting the crazies directly via Twitter. We’re never going to be free of this lunatic, and the damage he causes will be permanent.

And we all know who controls the media, right?

jews

After he mobilizes the military to deport everyone that looks different from him, perhaps the media will be next. They should be, after all, if our tiny-handed president says they’re the enemy.

generals

Well, at least he’s getting the right guidance from his trusted advisers. They’ll surely put him on the right course.

manbaby3

Maybe a little rest and relaxation will clear his head.

vacations

Mar-a-Lago Situation Room

There is a highly secure “Situation Room” at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, where he and his aides can figure out how to respond to fast-breaking crises like North Korea test-firing a missile in the neighborhood of Japan. It’s cleverly disguised as a public dining room. So seemingly blatant breaches of security are not breaches at all, but the normal kind of activity to be expected in any highly secure area. Or something.

As should be obvious to all at this point, Trump is an insane clown who has no knowledge of how the government works, or diplomacy, or security, or, really, anything other than how to be the center of attention at all times. It’s pointless to criticize an insane clown or attempt to hold an insane clown accountable for the insane things he does because, after all, he’s insane. Also, the miasma of free-flowing insanity around the clown at all times is so dense, you couldn’t possibly pick a good starting place or even prioritize it all or try to respond to any of it in a rational manner.

This Failing New York Times piece points out that Democrats are lamenting  “the fact that the national security incident played out in public view”. “There’s no excuse for letting an international crisis play out in front of a bunch of country club members like dinner theater,” Nancy Pelosi tweeted.

In this one, the scene at the Mar-a-Lago Situation Room is described and Trump is likened to the Rodney Dangerfield character in Caddyshack: “a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention.”  It goes on, “But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath.”

From the article:

The news conference took place after Mr. Trump held a meeting with Mr. Abe and their entourages out in the open in the club dining terrace, examining documents and talking on a commercial cellphone as guests drifted by and took photos, servers reached over the papers to deposit the entree, and Mike Flynn, his national security adviser, held up his phone, on flashlight setting, so everybody could get a good look.

It apparently never occurred to Mr. Trump, Mr. Flynn or Steve Bannon, another member of the National Security Council, who also trained his cellphone on the paperwork, that holding a cellphone camera over these documents might allow foreign adversaries and hackers to get “some pretty good pictures,” too. Cellphones aren’t allowed even in secured areas of the White House. Yet there they all were, playing Situation Room in the open air, for a random crowd in Palm Beach, Fla.

None of this surprises me, or probably anyone else, at this point. It’s Trump being Trump. And by tomorrow, we’ll be on to the next insanity and this will be tossed on the heap of scandals never to be revisited.

I just want to point out one quick thing here before we move on to God-Knows-What: when she was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton used a private email account to send her aides information like changes to her calendar. She is therefore unqualified to be president and should be arrested, tried, convicted, and, if Trump’s “base” has anything to say about it, hanged.

Is there a double standard at work here? No, of course not. You can’t seriously compare the actions of a sane competent woman to those of an insane incompetent clown.

In other news, the fees to join the Mar-a-Lago “club” have doubled to $200,000 since Trump won the election, but he is absolutely not benefiting financially in any way from holding office. Or something.

Dartagnan beat me to it

You’re assignment today is to read this short piece on the Daily Kos.

I was going to write something along the same lines, but there’s no need – Dartagnan beat me to it and laid it all out perfectly.

It starts by pointing out that 9/11 turned Bush’s presidency around. His popularity early in his term was terrible, but soared after the attacks. 9/11 gave him cover to launch a disastrous war that had been planned before the attacks, and also to throw off constraints on presidential power.

It goes on to say that everyone knows an attack is coming at some point now, and Trump is doing everything possible to provoke it while laying the groundwork for blaming others (the courts).

It will be much worse this time around for a variety of reasons including the fact that Trump conflates national interest with his own self-interest.

Anyway, just go read it and report back here tomorrow.

Conflicts, shmonflicts

Many have noted that Trump’s wild flurry of executive orders and personnel changes is actually the implementation of every nutty thing he promised during the campaign. He’s fulfilling his mandate and doing the things he said he’d do, we’re told. Only a lot faster and more recklessly than anyone had imagined.

So no one should be surprised about the “Extreme Vetting” travel ban on people from seven predominantly Muslim countries. This is something he campaigned on heavily from the beginning. “Something’s going on” he said more than a year ago, and he vowed to prevent Muslims from entering the country “until we figure it out”.

On Trump’s web site in December, 2015, he states his intention of curtailing Muslim immigration.

“…it is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life. If I win the election for President, we are going to Make America Great Again”

His supporters loved this fresh new talk after years of FoxNews criticizing Obama for refusing to say the words “radical Islam”.

And he’s never deviated from the intent or the specific language. “I am establishing new vetting measures to keep radical Islamic terrorists out of the United States of America,” Trump said during the signing at the Pentagon after the swearing-in of Defense Secretary James Mattis. “We don’t want them here.”

But after all this explicit talk and action about keeping Muslims out, the Trump team is walking it all back a bit. There was so much outrage and chaos resulting from the ban, and so much criticism from even some of his own supporters, that they felt it was necessary to now explain that the ban wasn’t about religion at all. See, there are several Muslim countries not affected by the ban, so the critics are just full of it and creating fake news.

Here’s a map showing countries affected by the ban.

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As everyone knows, Saudi Arabia is the beating heart of “radical Islam”. Apart from being the location of the holiest sites in Islam, Mecca and Medina, it’s where the poisonous Wahhabi orthodoxy was born and allowed to flourish. It’s where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from. You’d think Saudi would be number one on the extreme vetting priorities list.

The usual explanation here is that our oil interests override our security interests, and the Saudi Royals are actually our allies in the fight against terrorism (some allies!), since Al Qaeda regards them as apostates and the ultimate obstacle to establishing their “caliphate”.

But in the Trump era, none of that matters. What matters is where Trump’s business interests are.  What’s notable about the big Muslim countries not affected by the ban is that Trump has business interests in all of them, and no interests in the seven countries affected.

In Saudi Arabia, Trump has several LLCs, according to his most recent financial filings (four of nine have apparently been closed) , and two in Egypt. Also omitted from the list are Turkey, India, and the Philippines, all countries where Trump has businesses. Same with the U.A.E. where Trump’s name is on a golf course and residential developments.

People are completely sick of Trump already. His approval ratings, according to Gallup, dropped eight points in his first week in office.

When the inevitable impeachment proceedings finally begin, they will focus on these conflicts of interest and others. The fact that Trump is manifestly unfit for office by temperament, qualifications, experience, and mental health are the underlying causes, of course, but it will be the conflicts of interest that bring him down in the end.

Just as Trump was unable to “pivot” from being a candidate to a president, he is also unable to change from being a businessman to an elected representative. To him, the business of America is just another profit center for the Trump  organization. He just doesn’t get it.

 

 

Extreme vetting for armed toddlers

Just keepin’ it real: in America, you are ten times more likely to be shot by an armed toddler than by an illegal Islamic jihadist immigrant.

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At 4:42 P.M. yesterday, your president signed one of his beloved executive orders. This one prevented all refugees from entering the U.S. for 120 days, barred Syrian refugees indefinitely, and blocked entry into the United States for 90 days for citizens of seven predominantly Muslim countries: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Green card holders from those countries would also be denied re-entry pending a case-by-case review.

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J.F.K. Airport

At international airports,  hundreds of people who had unknowingly boarded their planes hours earlier were denied entry to the U.S. on landing. Families were separated, people with legitimate and important business we’re placed in custody. Demonstrations erupted and lawsuits were filed. The Department of Home Security issued statements. Judges issued temporary rulings. No one really understands what it all means at this point.

Well done, man-baby. Your insatiable desire to be the center of attention and to see your name on every media outlet all day every day has been satiated for a couple of hours. You have given the giant snow-globe we all now live in a vigorous shake, and you can rest for a while while others float about and try to regain control of their lives.

Chaos,  the essential ichor without which the man-baby cannot function,  is abundant for now. How, exactly, making everyone in the world hate us more every day will result in increased safety for Americans at home and abroad is anyone’s guess.

Watching the coverage on MSNBC, one got the idea that there might be riots in the streets and that perhaps impeachment was possible by the end of the day. If you flipped over to FoxNews, however, you would be unaware of the crises – they just weren’t covering it.

In any case, the president will do what he wants. Those closest to him know him to be an honorable, wise, intelligent, prudent guardian of American values. They love him unconditionally, and trust him to do what’s best for all of us. If you doubt it, just watch this short clip to glimpse the devotion.

As good as true

So the man-baby is calling for a “major investigation” about the imaginary voter fraud that’s been bothering him. He claims there were 3 -5 million votes cast illegally for Hillary Clinton in the election (and none cast illegally for him).

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As with most of what Trump blathers and tweets, there are absolutely no facts on which to base these fantasies. There are no “studies”,  no news reports (other than a couple of instances where people voted twice for Trump), and certainly no real support from other Republicans, who once again have to either nod their heads at his crazy assertions or hunt down a molecule or two of honesty or courage. Always a challenge for them.

And, of course, it immediately came to light that Trump’s daughter Tiffany was registered to vote in two states, as was senior strategist Steve Bannon, and Treasury Secretary pick Steve Mnuchin. Oh, and also son-in-law and Senior Advisor Jared Kushner as well as Press Secretary Sean Spicer.

There have already been nine investigations on this issue, and none have found any problems. In fact, the opposite was found: only four verifiable cases of voter fraud out of 130 million votes cast. I guess maybe those investigations weren’t “major” enough.

If you believe Trump is actually playing chess at the Grand-master level, you might think that what this is really about is the creation of more stringent voter ID laws down the road, which everyone understands will benefit Republican candidates in future elections.

If you believe, as I do, that the man-baby doesn’t have the attention span needed for chess, and that there’s actually no evidence he knows how to play checkers either, then you’re left with a couple of possible explanations for this weirdness.

One is that it’s just inconceivable to him that people don’t love and respect him as much as they should, so he creates a narrative that explains the apparent disconnect, usually involving crimes or conspiracy, and always involving “unfair” treatment.

Another is that this is yet another example of the Master Distracter at work. Today we’re not talking about Russian shenanigans, conflicts of interest, nepotism, or anything we should be.  Dilbert was on point today.

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I think that’s a big part of what’s going on here, as well as one other thing: once you assert it and repeat it a few times, it’s as good as true. We’ve talked about Trump’s use of the Big Lie  before, and also how he’s not tweeting at you or me but at his base of 60 million believers. For them, it doesn’t matter if there are actually any studies, or, if there are, what they might find. For Trump’s minions, voter fraud is already a real thing because Trump said it was.

It’s already as good as true.

 

Dignity, always dignity

This Business Insider article says that Trump is setting the bar too high for himself. They say that by promising too much in the way of Making America Great, he sets himself up for failure if he doesn’t deliver. In his inauguration speech, he says, for example, “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now”, and Business Insider asks, what if it doesn’t?

They miss an obvious point about the man-baby, and one they’ve actually made themselves. In this article they describe how Trump lives on the 68th floor of a 58-floor building. See, he thought it would have more value if it was ten floors taller, so he just added them in the brochures. It was a lot cheaper and faster to do it that way than to actually build the ten missing floors. Or to simply state the obvious that you’ve gone and built a 58-floor building.

The point is, that if the carnage doesn’t end, whatever that means, the man-baby will simply assert that it has. This is how he will Make America Great.

It’s getting harder to remember who Trump is amidst all the promises of who he will be, what he’s actually done in his life versus what he says he will now do, the reality of his lies and amorality  when the fantasy of strength and courage has been projected on him so relentlessly. And he is, after all, now the 45th President of the United States. I’d like to forget it all, too.

I’ll just light one candle in the immense darkness here for old times’ sake.

Dignity: Donald Trump bodyslams, beats and shaves Vince McMahon at Wrestlemania XXIII.

missu2missu3

Morality: Donald Trump was forced to sell the Miss Universe Organization – which also includes sister scholarship programs Miss USA and Miss Teen USA – in 2015 after his incendiary comments about Mexicans drove away broadcasters NBC and Univision. Trump owned the pageant for nearly two decades, during which time he would have had the opportunity to come into contact with nearly 4,000 beauty queens.

atlantic-city

Service: Trump’s Atlantic City bankruptcies explained.

Leadership: Trump University delivers. Not.

lawsuits

Honesty: Trump has been involved in some 4000 lawsuits in his 30-year career, at least 75 of which are still open as his term in office begins. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

trump-china-mugs

Transparency: the Make America Great mugs are made in China.

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Confidence: Trump poses as his own P.R. guy. You can’t make this stuff up.

I could go on about the Trump Shuttle,  Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, and more, but I’m running out of pixels.  Here’s the complete list of all Trump’s business failures, for the curious.

Can we see your Tax Returns? Nope.

Will you be divesting potential conflicts of interest? Don’t have to.

Can we at least see a real medical report, because, uh, maybe you’re clinically insane? Let me think. No.

But at least the long national nightmare of peace and prosperity that was the Obama administration has come to an end. America will be made great again.

Bread and Circuses

One of the big reasons Republicans hate Obamacare (or any program designed to benefit others) is that Democrats typically want to fund it with higher taxes on the richest among us. The wealthy ask, “Why should the government take our money so that someone else can avoid paying their fair share?”

The argument seems to make some sense at first, until you realize that no one benefits from government handouts and subsidies more than rich people. There are a million examples, big and small, in the tax code alone, from reduced capital gains taxes to capped Social Security deductions to generous estate tax treatments. But there are reasonable discussions to be had around these issues that don’t always center on the greediness of the upper crust.

There are plenty of other examples outside the tax code as well. Defense contractors, private prison operators, for-profit “education” operations whose customers get government loans, oil companies who lease public lands for exploration or other operations, and many many others are producing healthy balance sheets for private citizens with the taxpayers’ money providing the income. Again, the picture is somewhat clouded by arguments that these businesses provide something necessary to the taxpayer, and they do it better than the government itself could, so quit with all the whining already.

And, of course, our beloved man-baby has been one of the best of all time. Bankruptcies, bond issues that were worthless, tax breaks, and more have all taken advantage of the taxpayer to line one individual’s pockets.  He’s quoted in this New York Times article about it all as saying,   “Atlantic City was a very good cash cow for me for a long time.”

Of course, there were other suckers hurt by Trump’s “business” in Atlantic City beside the taxpayers: the banks who loaned him money, the morons who invested in TRMP stock, the contractors and their subs who did work for Trump and never got paid, etc. It was more than simply a direct transfer of public money to the man-baby.

If you’re looking for a truly egregious example of ultra-rich people directly lining their pockets with the taxpayers’s  money, with no accountability and no real benefit returning to the people, pro sports has you covered. And the N.F.L. is the worst of the worst.

In 2005, city planner Judith Grant Long  published years of research on the topic. The abstract says,

Governments pay far more to participate in the development of major league sports facilities than is commonly understood due to the routine omission of public subsidies for land and infrastructure, and the ongoing costs of operations, capital improvements, municipal services, and foregone property taxes. Adjusting for these omissions increases the average public subsidy by $50 million per facility to a total of $177 million, representing a 40% increase over the industry-reported average of $126 million, based on all 99 facilities in use for the “big four” major leagues during 2001. For all 99 facilities, these uncounted public costs total $5 billion.

But that research is now almost 20 years old, and things are a lot worse now. Richard, a good friend of the blog, alerted us to this eye-opening article in the Atlantic, How the NFL Fleeces Taxpayers. It talks about stadium-building and other subsidies to a 30-member group of billionaire owners, and it’s worth your time to give it a read.  Here are some pull quotes to pique your interest:

Twelve teams have turned a profit on stadium subsidies alone—receiving more money than they needed to build their facilities.

Taxpayers fund the stadiums, antitrust law doesn’t apply to broadcast deals, the league enjoys nonprofit status, and Commissioner Roger Goodell makes $30 million a year. It’s time to stop the public giveaways to America’s richest sports league—and to the feudal lords who own its teams. 

Roger Goodell has become the sort of person his father once opposed—an insider who profits from his position while average people pay.

In Virginia, Republican Governor Bob McDonnell, who styles himself as a budget-slashing conservative crusader, took $4 million from taxpayers’ pockets and handed the money to the Washington Redskins, for the team to upgrade a workout facility. Hoping to avoid scrutiny, McDonnell approved the gift while the state legislature was out of session. The Redskins’ owner, Dan Snyder, has a net worth estimated by Forbes at $1 billion. But even billionaires like to receive expensive gifts.

Taxpayers in Hamilton County, Ohio, which includes Cincinnati, were hit with a bill for $26 million in debt service for the stadiums where the NFL’s Bengals and Major League Baseball’s Reds play, plus another $7 million to cover the direct operating costs for the Bengals’ field. Pro-sports subsidies exceeded the $23.6 million that the county cut from health-and-human-services spending in the current two-year budget (and represent a sizable chunk of the $119 million cut from Hamilton County schools). Press materials distributed by the Bengals declare that the team gives back about $1 million annually to Ohio community groups. Sound generous? That’s about 4 percent of the public subsidy the Bengals receive annually from Ohio taxpayers.

It goes on and on. Hospitals close and stadiums open. School districts suffer and football prospers. Those things and lots more will make you hate the N.F.L.

Wikipedia defines “Bread and Circuses” this way:

“…a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics, the phrase is used to describe the generation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace.”

This weekend, two circuses are on offer. Friday, the man-baby will be inaugurated as the 45th president of the U.S., and Sunday the two teams who will play in Super Bowl LI two weeks later will be decided.

I was planning on ignoring the inauguration as much as possible, and enjoying the football as much as possible. It’s getting a little harder to keep them separate in my mind.

Feel-good story, right?

New England Patriots’ Martellus Bennett seems like a good guy to me. The big Tight End is smiling and relaxed whenever I see him interviewed on TV, and, for me, it helps that he’s picked up some of the slack created by the season-ending injury to the best player in the NFL, Rob Gronkowski. For all you Patriots-haters out there (and I know who you are), we’ll just concentrate on his Good Works for now.

He wrote a children’s book, “Hey A.J, it’s Saturday!” based on his own family with the title character being his daughter. It is the first of a planned “Hey A.J.” series.

hey

He described the book this way, “The stories are just adventures we have around the house that I recreated through stories. A.J. is this girl who ends up making a mess all the time, you know, but everything comes to life. She uses her imagination in several different scenarios, so it’s pretty cool.”

In June, he went to the Tobin school in Roxbury to read his book to the kids there, and they were thrilled.

bennett

The school doesn’t have enough books and no budget for them. They tried an on-line fundraiser, but it hasn’t really gone anywhere. Out of desperation, the teacher of the class Bennett had read to tweeted him this week asking for help. She was hoping he’d re-tweet the plea and maybe raise some money that way. He asked her what they needed and she told him $2500. He reached into his own pocket and gave them $3000. Problem solved. What a guy!

Let’s take a step back, though. We have a public school here, where the teachers are very poorly paid and often used their own meager resources to buy supplies for the kids.  They tried raising money online. They reached out to friends and got lucky in this case. It’s so unusual, it made the news. What about all the other cases with no happy ending? Isn’t this something our Department of Education should be working on?

Not in the Trump era. Betsy DeVos will be our new Education Secretary if she gets confirmed, and you can bet she will. DeVos has a very complex financial picture that, in the now-forgotten era of pre-Trump ethics, would be subject to time-consuming scrutiny by the Office of Government Ethics for potential conflicts prior to confirmation hearings.

But the O.G.E. is being pressured to forget all that. They’ve written an unprecedented letter to the Senate committee they report to, saying the review is far from complete. They accused the GOP of rushing Trump cabinet confirmations.

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A tempest in a teapot, right? Not for the kids of the Tobin School. Betsy DeVos is a billionaire political operative who has used her family’s vast Amway fortune (a huge pyramid scheme, BTW) to influence education in Michigan. She doesn’t like public schools. She would like to privatize education through Charter Schools and religious education. She will undermine public education programs and further dilute a limited pool of federal education dollars by funding school choice voucher programs.

And, apart from her ideological inappropriateness,  DeVos has real conflict of interest issues. She owns shares of K12 Inc., a company whose core business is the management of public for-profit online charter schools.

Her operation feels a little bit like Trump University to me – profits first and the Hell with substance. The New York Times wrote a piece in 2011 about a school managed by the company:

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Nearly 60 percent of its students are behind grade level in math. Nearly 50 percent trail in reading. A third do not graduate on time. And hundreds of children, from kindergartners to seniors, withdraw within months after they enroll.

By Wall Street standards, though, Agora is a remarkable success that has helped enrich K12 Inc., the publicly traded company that manages the school. And the entire enterprise is paid for by taxpayers.

Education Week also wrote about a K12 Inc school just a couple of months ago:

 “for five years in a row, the Hoosier Academies Virtual School had been failing.”

“It had been assigned an ‘F’ grade from the state of Indiana every year it had been open except its first, when it had garnered a ‘C.’”

 Despite more than a decade of state investigations, news media reports, and research that have documented startling failures and gross mismanagement in full-time online schools, the sector—dominated by two for-profit companies—continues to expand, spreading into new states and enrolling more students.

Betsy DeVos  is personally invested in this failure and was at the end of a funnel that took tax dollars dedicated to public schools and transferred them to Wall Street.

Martellus Bennett took money out of his own pocket to put it where Betsy DeVos would like to take it right back out to put it in hers.

Still feeling good?

Do we need a two-state solution?

There’s a place where the population is perpetually at war with itself. Two opposite world-views are tearing the place apart.  Two cultures are colliding. Battle lines are drawn and both sides are dug into their positions more obstinately than ever.

An entrenched culture that did things its same old way for centuries is being displaced by an alien culture with different values. The first group is not well educated or “cosmopolitan”. They are conservative, religious, rural, agrarian, patriarchal, and resistant to change. They see the intruders as over-educated, cosmopolitan, liberal, infidels, urban, industrial, matriarchal, and changing things that shouldn’t be changed.

I’m speaking, of course, of North Carolina. Can the two sides there live together?  Must one be absorbed by the other? Or must they be divided into two states to keep the peace?

North Carolina has been in the news a couple of times this week. First, their legislature met in a last-minute behind-closed door session and passed laws limiting the power of the incoming governor, a Democrat who, after a very close election, is replacing a Republican incumbent. The laws are unprecedented and assure that Republicans will retain power.

This news is really troubling and makes North Carolina seem like a crazy, out-of-control, and very un-American place. If you are a Republican, a Democrat is your enemy, disguised as your neighbor and fellow citizen. If he somehow wins an election, a way must be found to thwart him anyway.

The other news story out of North Carolina was that its legislature met for nine hours, also in a closed door session, and decided not to repeal the absurd “Bathroom Bill”, or HB2, that has been costing the state’s economy a lot of money, and making North Carolina an object ridicule for many people. The bill says, among other things, that you have to use the bathroom corresponding to the sex indicated on your birth certificate.

For people who don’t have much of a stake in this and don’t follow such things very closely (i.e. most of us), HB2 seemed like an absurd and gratuitous shot at the LGBT community, coming out of nowhere and a “solution” to an apparently non-existent problem. Yes, we get that some people are not entirely comfortable using a particular bathroom. And we also get that others would be uncomfortable if they switched.

But is anyone’s life going to be made miserable/tolerable by the passage/repeal of this stupid thing? Can’t these issues be resolved by individuals as needed? Will they have armed guards checking birth certificates at the entry to public restrooms in NC now? Has anyone been arrested over this? Has there been an epidemic of wrong-bathroom use that has harmed the population?

In short, WTF is this really about?

Well, to the supporters of the law, it’s about some things the Civil War was about, and most things the presidential election was about. The federal government was trying to impose its will on the state. Liberals were forcing their agenda on conservatives. People who believed there was no difference between men and women and gender was a made-up thing were bullying people who didn’t. Outsiders were disrupting a traditional way of life that locals liked just fine.

It started in April 2014 when the feds issued “guidance” on sexual assault for schools that receive Title IX funding. The guidance was that “Title IX’s sex discrimination prohibition extends to claims of discrimination based on gender identity or failure to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity” and that “the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the parties does not change a school’s obligations”

In other words, transgender people are protected from discrimination under the law.

A few months later LGBT leaders also sought to extend Charlotte’s non-discrimination ordinances to include some new protected classes: marital and familial status, sexual orientation, and gender identity and expression. The City Council ultimately votes 7-4 to add the language to the ordinances.

In March, 2016, Republican legislators convene a special session to overturn the Charlotte ordinance. They go far beyond the bathroom issue and, in one day, enact HB2, a bill that basically nullifies every nondiscrimination ordinance ever passed by any local government in the state.

Reactionaries gonna react.

The war of words escalates and positions harden. The ACLU files suit against NC. Bruce Springsteen cancels a concert. The Justice Department tells the Governor that HB2 violates civil rights law. The Governor sues the Justice Department. The NBA announces it will relocate its 2017 All-Star game. The U.S. District court rules in favor of a UNC transgender student who wants the system to refuse to enforce HB2. The NCAA announces it will move scheduled championships to other states. Corporations announce they are reconsidering North Carolina as a site for their operations.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are potentially lost to the North Carolina economy. What to do? Should they repeal HB2? And by doing so give in to the Muslim-Socialist agenda of the illegitimate president, just for a couple of dollars? Tough one.

This week they held a special session of the legislature to discuss repeal. Republican state law-makers and Democratic leaders in Charlotte had apparently struck a deal under which the city would repeal the local ordinance, and in return, state lawmakers would repeal HB2.

But the repeal failed and we’re back to where we started: it’s a Civil War that cannot be won. This time it’s not the Blue and Gray, but the Blue and Red. One side can never convince the other of the rightness of its own position and wrongness of the other. No compromise is possible. Brother against brother. Which side are you on?

 

 

 

Gravity is just a theory

Right. Newton’s Theory of Gravitation is a theory. It attempts to explain a phenomenon which we can all easily observe.  Everyone agrees that something, let’s call it “gravity”, keeps us from flying up into the air willy-nilly.  Even mentally ill people.  Even religious fundamentalists.  Even, and here I’m on thinner ice, Republicans.

Let’s not confuse ourselves by saying gravity is “just” a theory, or the jury is still out, or reasonable people disagree, or whatever.

I can find you a “scientist” who is willing to go on record as saying that tobacco has not been proven to be a risk factor for cancer.  It takes some doing, but, if you start with the Tobacco Institute, you can get it done.  Since some people who smoke don’t, in fact, get cancer, it’s “just” a theory (supported by a mountain of evidence).

It’s a little harder to find a scientist who will say human activity is unrelated to the observable phenomenon of climate change, but there are apparently 27 of them that have been identified.

I won’t question their integrity here by revealing who is paying for their “research”.  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is the overwhelming majority of scientists agree that human activity is accelerating climate change.

This, of course, makes no difference to most Republicans, or to the president-elect, and certainly not to his transition team aide, Anthony Scaramucci.  Speaking on CNN, Scaramucci said that the scientific community “gets a lot of things wrong”.

He said,  in the past “there was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat”, and  “there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world.”

OK, there’s really no point in arguing with the willfully ignorant.  I get that.  But let me just get one quick point in here.  It is simply not the case that there was “overwhelming science”  showing the earth was flat or the sun revolved around it.  There was overwhelming superstition and religious conviction that these things were true.  The mission of science is to either prove or disprove them.

He said the “Trump team wanted common sense solutions – non-ideological”.

That’s the heart of the problem right there: to these idiots, science is ideological.  And why shouldn’t they think that?  After all, if you can fund a scientific study that shows tobacco is not so bad, well, that kind of proves science is for sale, right?

Who knows?  With enough funding, maybe we can disprove the Theory of Gravitation.  And we’ll all fly away.

Are you now or were you ever…

A communist? A homosexual? A Conscientious Objector? A climate scientist?

Wait. A climate scientist? I mean we all recognize the other accusations (in the form of “questions”) from the McCarthy era, but not the “crime” of being a climate scientist.

In the McCarthy era, they hauled you before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked you these questions. It didn’t really matter what you said because they already had you based on some meeting you’d been to or someone you’d been associating with.

But then they asked you who else was there, who your friends are, who influenced you, and so on. They wanted you to name names. It was the worst thing you could do, and yet there wasn’t much point in refusing. If you refused to answer, you would go to jail for contempt of congress and you’d lose your job and become a pariah. If you answered, you’d be shamed, lose your job and become a pariah, but, hopefully, not go to jail. You were blacklisted either way. And they already knew the names you were naming.

Describing the times years later, Arthur Miller said,

It was a ritual of humiliation –  conspiracy was the name for all opposition. And the reformation of the accused could only be believed when he gave up the names of his co-conspirators. Only this ritual of humiliation, the breaking of pride and independence, could win the accused readmission into the community

In today’s terms, the country had been delivered into the hands of the radical right, a ministry of free-floating apprehension toward anything that never happens in the middle of Missouri. It is always with us, this anxiety, sometimes directed towards foreigners, Jews, Catholics, fluoridated water, aliens in space, masturbation, homosexuality, or the Internal Revenue Department. But in the 50s any of these could be validated as real threats by rolling out a map of China. And if this seems crazy now, it seemed just as crazy then, but openly doubting it could cost you.

Sounds like a lot things happening today. But naming names of scientists? Was this a thing back then?

Not then, no. But it is now. From a piece in the Christian Science Monitor:

Donald Trump’s transition team has sent a list of 74 questions to the Energy Department (DOE), asking, among other things, for the identity of all employees and contractors involved in international climate meetings and domestic attempts to cut carbon emissions.

The questionnaire specifically asked for the names of all DOE employees who attended the United Nation’s annual climate talks for the past five years, employees who helped develop the President Obama’s social cost of carbon metrics, and which programs are essential to President Obama’s Climate Action Plan.

All of which raises concerns that Trump’s administration will target employees involved in Obama-era policies that the president-elect spent his campaign promising to dismantle, including the Paris Climate Agreement, Clean Power Plan, and various other DOE and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulations.

“This feels like the first draft of an eventual political enemies list,” said a Department of Energy employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal by the Trump transition team, told Reuters. “When Donald Trump said he wanted to drain the swamp it apparently was just to make room for witch hunts and it’s starting here at the DOE and our 17 national labs.”

The Republican Party has been the anti-science voice of America for a long time now. They’ve opposed stem cell research, put forward “creationist” curricula in schools, and some have even opposed vaccination. And, of course, they’ve advanced the notion of climate change as a left-wing hoax.

So far, scientists themselves have not been sanctioned for their work. So far.

Oy vey.

Sounds OK in English, doesn’t it?

Hail Victory! Hail Trump!

alt-right-nazi-salute

A group of clean-cut young Americans who love their country are enthusiastic about the incoming administration and want to make our country great – what’s wrong with that?

Don’t you want to make our country great, too? Are you opposed to making our country great? Are you opposed to our government? Maybe you aren’t very patriotic. Maybe you’re on the wrong side of the conflict here. Maybe you’re an enemy of America. Better watch yourself.

A perfectly normal young American guy, Richard Spencer wants to make America great again. Just like the incoming president does. Why should a fine young man like this have to keep his enthusiasm to himself? Isn’t he just saying the obvious, the thing we’re all thinking – that white lives matter?

spencer

It’s not like he’s some sort of evil fanatic, is it? I don’t see any weird little mustache or anything, do you?

Who can argue with his principles? Like he said, “America was until this past generation a white country designed for ourselves and our posterity. It is our creation, it is our inheritance, and it belongs to us.”   Or, “Our dream is a new society, an ethno-state that would be a gathering point for all Europeans. It would be a new society based on very different ideals than, say, the Declaration of Independence.”?

Spencer has every reason to  expect our new president to start in on the changes we need to make. This is what was promised during the campaign and this is why we voted for him.

And Trump has already done everything he could possibly do to discourage any inappropriate speech, so let’s get started. As Kellyanne Conway said on PBS Newshour last night, “Trump has been very clear in disavowing” any inappropriate speech.

Nothing left to say after that, right?

Hail Victory! Hail Trump!

Twidiot Tweets Twaddle

For the love of God. What a thin-skinned man-baby we’ve elected. The smartest thing his people ever did, or should I say tried to do, was to get Trump to stop tweeting for just a couple of days. But it didn’t take. Trump just can’t help himself

Obama isn’t gone and I already miss him. To my knowledge, he never rose to the ample bait that FoxNews chummed out continuously for eight years. He would have been right to point out the falsehoods they spewed, to say that they weren’t a “news” organization at all, to accuse them of weakening the power and prestige of the office with their nonsense. But he had the dignity and self-control not to.

If he had taken issue with them, it would have been through back channels, or perhaps indirectly by referring to the right wing media in general. But never impulsively. Never in the middle of the night. And certainly never on Twitter.

Trump has chosen to create and escalate an absurd spat with the New York Times, even before taking office. There is nothing at stake for him in this, nothing to be gained. He’s no longer trying to persuade people to vote for him. If it’s not just  a reflexive narcissism or some misplaced sense of outraged victimhood,  it’s hard to understand his motive.

It’s a lot like the name-calling of opponents during the primaries, or the constant threatening of lawsuits against detractors. It puts people on the defensive and creates a chilling effect for any future coverage or interaction. This would be the kind of “long game” that Trump admirers might suggest is actually his brilliance at work, that has proven effective in the end as is evidenced by his election. I don’t think so. I think he’s just a man-baby. And a twidiot.

It creates a “tone at the top” of his organization that spills out all around him.  Many have been struck by the “sore winner” vibe coming from Trump Tower. Eliot A. Cohen noted it. Corey Lewandowski had an  epic meltdown on election night because Clinton wasn’t conceding fast enough.

The NYT has reported nothing inaccurate (unlike Fox). If something ultimately is shown to be inaccurate, they’ll retract it without having to be shamed into it or sued. They’re not The National Enquirer. But the colicky man-baby can’t be soothed when it comes to the NYT. This WaPo piece points out 30% of Trump’s post-election tweets have been shots at the NYT.

And true to his playground-bully roots, he often includes his favorite epithet. If you liked “Lyin’ Ted” or “Crooked Hillary”, you’ll love “The Failing New York Times”. Is this “presidential”? Is this good for the country? Is it good for Trump? Can’t anyone stop it?

Melania? Jared? Ivanka? Kellyanne?

There must be someone who can finally  deliver the simple message:  Put. The Twitter. Down.

Meet the Shadow-President-Elect

His name his Jared Kushner. He was Trump’s closest adviser during the campaign, has now taken over the transition, and, if Trump gets his way, will soon have Top Secret clearance and will be sitting next to Trump during national security briefings.

Now, it’s clear that someone has to pay attention during security briefings (and all matters that require learning something), since Trump has an extremely short attention span, no capacity for study or preparation, and prefers to make decisions based on intuition, which, unfortunately, changes from minute to minute and seems mostly to reflect the views of the last person he talked to. But Jared Kushner?

The younger Bush was similar to Trump when it came to learning and paying attention, and he delegated almost all the heavy lifting to Dick Cheney. A lot of people initially took comfort in the fact that Cheney was a serious political player, a man of “gravitas” with a very impressive resume, including being a congressman, Secretary of Defense, and of course, Vice President. He already had Top Secret clearance, so he didn’t need to bend any laws to get it. But despite the qualifications and gravitas, the shadow presidency of Dick Cheney was a disaster.

Kushner is as unqualified to hear national security briefings as Trump. Our 1967 anti-nepotism laws specifically make him ineligible, but if anyone thinks that will prevent Trump from getting his way, well, no. Let’s just hope the son-in-law has a better attention span than the father-in-law.

In any case, we are about to have both a manifestly unqualified president and a manifestly unqualified shadow president as well. This can’t be good.

Kushner is Trump’s son-in-law, married to daughter Ivanka.  He’s a lot like Trump was at his age – inherited real estate money, had help getting into good schools, and partnered with his father on almost all things. It’s not clear what his business “successes” might be, but then he’s only 35 years old. He has no government experience and certainly no gravitas.

As with Trump, family loyalty and alliances are what matter to Kushner, and, like Trump, he’s a vindictive little shit. Look forward to four years of settling scores, real and imagined. It has already started with the gutting of Chris Christie’s transition work over the last couple of months. Christie may be a Trump supporter, but he’s on Kushner’s enemies list because he prosecuted Kushner’s sleazebag father  and put him in jail in New Jersey. Therefore Christie must be punished, diminished, and his work must be scrapped.

Anyway, if you thought that Trump would have the good sense to surround himself with vetted experts and experienced operatives, you were mistaken. What you saw in the campaign is what you’ll be getting for the next four years.

If you thought, as Obama suggested, that the seriousness of the office has a way of sobering you up and making you understand the importance of the task at hand, it looks like that, too, is in doubt. Your new shadow-president is Jared Kushner.

 

Time to play “Stupid or Liar”.

Chris Christie’s Bridge-gate defense is that he knew nothing about it – his overzealous underlings did it on their own and never told him a thing.

It’s a pretty standard defense in both the corporate world and in government. In the Wells Fargo fake-account-creation scandal, the guys at the top said they had no idea what 5300 employees were tasked to do. Same with the VW emissions thing (two engineers did it), the Enron collapse (Ira Fastow did it), Iran-Contra (Ollie North), Watergate (everyone but Nixon), and a million others.

The guy at the top, who has obscene amounts of money or power, is the direct beneficiary of the wrong-doing, but can’t be expected to know any of the details of what exactly his wealth or power is based on.

First, let’s just clear one thing up – the guy at the top always knows and approves of whatever it is. Even Reagan, who literally didn’t know where he was at times near the end of his term, would have been briefed. Whether he actually “knew” is a distinction without a difference.

In Christie’s case, it’s just preposterous. Of course he knew and approved the closing of lanes on the George Washington bridge. For five days! Even if you accept the absurd notion that Bridget Anne Kelly and Bill Baroni cooked the whole thing up and put it in motion without their boss’s OK, Christie has to know on day two of the five when the telephone lines all melted down from the complaints.

But that’s all beside the point. What I want to say here is that taking refuge in the “I didn’t know” defense is a horrible idea. Why? Because not knowing about this sort of shit is a greater indictment than knowing.

Why are you the guy at the top if you have no control of those under you? Why are you corporate moguls paid hundreds of millions of dollars if you have no clue about what your organization is up to? And are we expected to vote for you politicians so that we may be governed by your underlings for whom we did not vote, and with whom you apparently don’t communicate?

In denying knowledge and accountability, you invite us to choose whether your epitaph should read “Stupid” or “Liar”. Those are the only two possibilities. And the answer is always “Liar”.

Well poisoners and the unfocused group

Everyone knows Trump is a loose cannon. The weird thing is that this is apparently exactly what has endeared him to his fans. They admire him because he “says it like it is” and “unlike politicians, he doesn’t run every comment or position by a focus group”.

I guess that’s right. It’s the opposite of a focus group – call it the unfocused group. First he tries it out on the whole world – just lets it fly. Then, if needed,  he refines it.  If he gets more down-votes than up, he might walk it back, reverse course, deny the whole episode, ignore, double down, or simply move on to the next outrageous blast.

Just yesterday, I wrote,

There is no filter between his brain and his mouth or his Twitter. No thought goes unsaid. No tweet is edited or refined or even delayed while he counts to ten

Well, today his handlers finally took his Twitter away.   Now, any proposed tweet must be vetted by Hope Hicks before the “send” button is hit. Finally. To paraphrase The Beach Boys, it’s been fun fun fun.

As Obama rightly pointed out in response, if he can’t be trusted with Twitter, he can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. But there’s no reason to believe that this latest proof of the obvious will have any impact. We’re beyond that. Les jeux sont faits.

What’s interesting to me in all this is what exactly Hope Hicks, Kellyanne Conway and the rest of his non-family inner circle are thinking. Why are they there?

The obvious answer is that they’re getting paid well and that, win or lose, they’ll have lucrative positions in the coming Empire of Hate. The only other possibility is they think Trump would make a great president and they’re doing it for love of country, so let’s just stick with the Empire of Hate thing for now.

It reminds me of what the loggers always say when asked about the advisability of clear-cutting the old-growth forests – “we need the job”. And when the forest is all gone? Well, at that point they’ll look for another job. But, really, why wait?

I would ask Kellyanne Conway, is there no job so vile and immoral that you wouldn’t do it for a price? If I doubled your salary and gave you the “job” of poisoning all your neighbors’ wells, would you take it? And do it with that infuriating fake smile?

I think I understand what drives Trump and Steve Bannon, but I’ll never understand the well-poisoners.

The New Republic explains Trump

The Pro-Trump Intellectuals Who Want to Overthrow America

What a crock.

How about this instead: Just as digital technology has disrupted and redefined all other endeavors and professions – journalism, retail, travel, cab drivers, stock brokers, classified advertising, yard sales, radio broadcasting, telephones, photography, pornography, and so much more – it has also changed what it means to be a politician.

Trump does not need a war chest of hundreds of millions to press his case (or should I say his venomous babbling) via TV ads on networks that no one watches any more. He doesn’t need Gallup polls when he has “likes”, “upvotes”, and “followers”. He only needs his cell phone and Twitter. All is said in 140 characters. All is transient, forgotten, contradicted, amplified, and transmogrified seconds later in the next tweet. Nothing is vetted. Facts, or as the Straussians prefer, “truth”, matters not.

Idiocracy has given way to Twitterocracy. The death of the printed word signals the birth of Trumpism. Give the worst instincts and impulses of everyone and anyone a platform and megaphone equal in power and authority to the New York Times, and let the devil take the hindmost.

“Bill Clinton did it, too, but worse”.

A. Bill Clinton is not on the ballot.

B. We already paid a high price for Clinton’s antics. Gore couldn’t run on the accomplishments of Clinton’s eight years because of the indiscretions, so we wound up with Bush instead.

C. “Why are you upset with me when you gave Bill Clinton a pass?” A pass? WTF are you talking about? They fucking IMPEACHED the guy!

D. Actually, “they” didn’t impeach him, Republicans impeached him, i.e. the same people now defending Trump. Democrats didn’t much care about personal things then and they don’t much now. It’s the Republican hypocrisy that’s at issue.

E. “My transgressions were words, Bill’s were actions.” Again, we agree we won’t vote for Bill Clinton in this election. But, to be clear, your words were bragging about your actions.

F. Clinton’s transgressions might have been a sin, but yours were a crime. Clinton’s “victims” were all in love with him – the sex was consensual. In your case, we’re talking about assault. None of your accusers consented. You, sir, are a pig.

G. “It’s just locker room talk”. Yeah, no. Not really. I’ve been in a few locker rooms over the years and I’ve never heard any one say. “I wish I had a lot of money so I could grab strangers by the pussy and they’d just let me.” Maybe that’s what they’re saying in Brunei or Riyadh or some such. I don’t know. But I’ve never heard it here.

H. And if I ever DID hear that said in a locker room, the last thing I would think is  “By Jove, that fellow should run for President!”. The first thing I would think would be, “Christ, what an asshole.”.