Archives for January 2019

Day 755 Thursday Jan 31, 2019
641 Days to the 2020 election and 719 Days to Inauguration Day

Those of you who have been following my screeds will notice the new countdown figures. Somehow I got off in my countdown and I can’t tell you how that happened because I don’t know. But above are the all new and improved countdown figures.
Three things to talk about: Chris Christie, Howard Shultz, and the silly and the sublime.

Chris Christie was interviewed by Nicole Wallace about his book. I was surprised. He seemed normal and not the in-your-face sarcastic bully I’ve seen before. This doesn’t mean I don’t think he’d be a good candidate for the Republicans to put up for elective office, but still, I was surprised. He was quiet, respectful, and overall gave a good cogent interview. It reminded me of Robin Williams. I’ve heard that Robin Williams in one-on-one interviews was a quiet wonderful guy, but the minute another person came into the room a switch went off and he was on stage performing. I wondered if that was true, in some sense, with Christie. Is he a regular guy one-on-one, but when the circle grows does he become that sarcastic cynical defensive bully we’ve seen so often? Interesting data point, I’ll keep my eyes and ears open to see how this progresses. Moving on.

I also saw Howard Shultz interviewed on Morning Joe. He’s impressive, which I didn’t expect. He was hit rapid fire with questions and he answered them all well. In a nutshell his pitch is this: The system is broken and I think I can change things. I grew up in the projects and I’m a self-made billionaire. I’ve run a successful company and I think I can bring my expertise to government. If I were President I’d get the smartest people and put them in a room and tell them they have to figure it out. Also, we don’t need Elizabeth Warren style socialism. It’s not what the American people want. They want a more middle of the road moderate guy like me.

Howard Shultz is like a lot of folks I’ve heard over my life: sound good when you are in the room with them and when they leave you say to yourself, “Huh? What did they say?” In Shultz’s case I couldn’t help thinking, “Didn’t we hear this before?” Isn’t this what Trump promised to do? Get “the best people” and clean up the mess? Few business people do well in government. I think that’s because government is a different animal than business and most hard driving CEO types can’t stand trying to kick the whale down the road. They expect to give orders and people will jump. Obviously they haven’t run into a GS15 before. Not going to happen.
Shultz’s Billy Jack* approach doesn’t work. He has no experience in government so his “new approach” or “radical change” or whatever he is calling it is likely, imho, to not work. I heard someone say, “Go be a mayor or something like that. Do something and come back in a few years and we can talk.” In other words, prove yourself politically on a smaller stage first. Michael Bloomberg did that a Mayor of New York, but even he had troubles in government. Remember his attempt to limit the size of a soda you could buy? His reasoning, which I liked, was that if you limited the size of a glass of soda you could limit people’s sugar intake, even if they had free refills. Not earth shaking, pretty practical, at least I thought it would be good to try and see how it worked. Oh man, Jon Stewart ripped on Bloomberg night after night on the Daily Show. It was a “Don’t Tread on Me” kind of thing. Even that simple suggestion would have taken more finesse to get through than Michael’s ordering it.
Then Shultz went on that unions are not the answer that he built a huge company without them and that he gave his employees a piece of the pie and health care and all companies can do this sort of thing. Yeah? I’ve seen this before too. It’s the Phantom way of governing. For those of you who don’t remember that comic strip it featured a masked white guy who kept the jungle natives safe from the predations of the outside mainly white world. Many companies were founded by a visionary kind of person. They treated their employees well. They were down in the trenches with their people, but then … they left. They died, They moved on. They hired someone from the Harvard School of Business or the like. Then things changed. The person who had worked there 29 1/2 years and was looking forward to their thirty year pension got fired to save the company money. The workers started to get chipped away at, little by little. They got pissed off. Trust was gone.They tried to form a union, only to have the location close, or the people that were trying to do that got fired. Yeah. I’ve seen the movie before.
I’ve listened to CEOs talk about how “we are family.” The funniest one was an interview with the CEO of Walmart a few years ago. He was talking that stuff when the interviewer asked, “Why not pay everyone a dollar more an hour?” Oh, no, he said that would bankrupt the company. Really? Or don’t forget kindly old Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, he got taken to court over not paying overtime. He lost and had to pay. What did kindly old Sam say? “They made me write the checks, but if anyone cashes one I’ll fire them.”
Shultz on health care was same-o same-o, “I’ll get people smarter than me in a room and make them figure it out.” Haven’t we heard this before? Then he attacked Warren’s tax plan as too radical. Well, yeah. You’d lose some of your money under her plan. The argument against Warren’s plan (tax the ultra rich 2% on all their assets) is that it wouldn’t fund the government for more than two weeks. Really? Let’s try it. The other argument against any Democratic proposals on health care was “people don’t want to give up their health insurance plan they have now.” Again, I say, “Really?” Steve Schmidt, who has been working for Shultz for months parroted these talking points too. Of course, what Shultz and Schmidt are doing is leaving open what would replace the insurance as we have it now, and in the case of Warren’s proposal they aren’t offering anything substantive. So in the one case they are offering arguments that are empty on one side or the other of the proposition. (This in sales’ school is known as “The Ben Franklin close technique” where by you draw a T on a large piece of paper and put up all the pros of your plan and leave the other side blank. Or conversely, you put up all the cons of their plan and ask why would you want that?
So let me fill in the blanks. Two percent of a billion dollars is twenty million. Warren is suggesting that for every billion you have you have to give up twenty million annually. Hey, that’s what a bank trust department or Fischer investments charges. Is that so bad?
Let’s move on to the argument that people don’t want to give up their health insurance coverage that they have. Really? I’ve heard people don’t want to switch doctors, but their health insurance? Okay, lemme see if that’s true. What if I could offer you total health care coverage for half of what you are paying now? And what if your cost of prescriptions was reduced by 80%? Any takers? Wait, how can I make such an outrageous proposition? Well, most countries pay half of what we do for health care and it’s not only better in terms of outcomes, but it covers basically everything. Oh and the wait time argument? That’s the one Rush likes to say about the Canadian health care system. When I’ve asked Canadians (those are people who live in Canada and whom I know) they don’t know what I’m talking about. They aren’t aware of any wait times. I mean, yeah, a day or two, like you do here to see a doctor. And btw Canadian health care is not government run; it is government regulated.
I was talking to a guy down here that sold medical policies. One of the big problems he said was every local government has a health department and each has slightly different rules. Therefore, you can’t have a nationwide policy and you have to maintain lots of staff to keep track of it all. If you pull back and think about the overhead of all those little health departments with their rules and regulations and their staff, on a nationwide basis, it adds up.
As to the cost of drugs. I know from personal experience that I can buy the same prescriptions in Mexico for $400 that cost $2100 here. That’s 19% of what that drug costs here. Hum. Any takers?

On to The Silly and The Sublime:
Okay, I got nothing in the Sublime category, but it rhymes.
How about the Silly and the Dangerous.
First up, Sarah Sanders. Now that she is no longer giving daily lie sessions she has time to be interviewed by various news outlets. She’s appeared on Fox, but she’s also been interviewed by the Christian Broadcasting Network where she said that it was God’s will that Trump be president and the he (Trump, not God) is doing a heck of a job. (So we can all rest easy?)
Then there’s the intelligence folks. The head of some of the agencies were on Capital Hill yesterday presenting their Annual Threat Assessment. Shockingly, they are not in the Trump club of “Putin is my Pal.” In fact, they say quite the opposite, and they say China and Russia are working closer together than ever before – against the United States. They disagree with the president on Syria, China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran to name a few. They also say that Trump’s actions are dangerous and have put us in a weaker position world wide. It was also stated that Russia and China have infiltrated our gas pipeline systems and power grid. They could shut off parts of either one whenever they wanted to do so. What have we done in response? Nothing. Just like what we’ve done about our election systems.
Trump immediately attacked those folks. It is so bad, and so embarrassing that Chuck Schumer has asked that the DNI chief get hold of Trump and “educate him.” Oh boy. Good luck with that.
It has also been revealed that the Russians have gotten hold of some of the papers in the Mueller probe and have fabricated things that are derogatory to the probe. A Treasury official has been arrested for leaking some papers to a reporter.
There is also a report that Trump met with Putin secretly at the G20 Summit after saying he wasn’t going to do so. Hey, get this. It’s not the short little “Hi, How are you?” meeting it was claimed to be.
There is more and more evidence and more and more people and groups that are asking the question, “If Trump isn’t a Russian agent than what explains his behavior toward Putin?”
*Billy Jack was a movie starring Tom Laughlin as an ex-Vietnam vet who happened to have all kinds of crazy karate kicking skills. When the red necks started making fun of the hippies in town and Billy Jack stood up for them why he just had to go into the town green and circularly kick each redneck in the head with his foot. Laughlin ran as an independent for President. His pitch was “put me in charge, I’ll clean up the mess, then I’ll resign and the Vice-President can take over.” Somehow his message didn’t catch on.

And in Fantasyland the president is now making up figures on immigration. It appears that he tried to copy numbers from the right leaning America One News graphic about immigrants to this country, but he got the numbers and the overall meaning incorrect. Some might say he was lying, but I don’t think so, I’d say he’s delusional and incompetent.

641 Days to the 2020 election and 719 Days to Inauguration Day**

** Now with all new and improved countdowns!

PS The crescent moon with Venus this morning. Jupiter is out of the shot to the upper right.

Day 754 Wednesday January 30, 2019    840 Days to Go

I feel like I’m in the part of a really bad B movie where they are trying to show the narrator/protagonist is having a bad trip on drugs. There are quick flash cuts with disconnected dialogue and rain-bowed kaleidoscopic colors pulsing. Various voices are speaking. Certain bits of dialogue are repeated. Then there’s a shot of the person twirling around trying to get a grip. Luckily, for them, the next scene shows them waking up in a cold sweat clutching the sheets, breathing heavily and looking around. (They are asking themselves the question, which is never stated but R. Crumb’s COMIX repeatedly asked (and answered) “What does it all mean Mr. Natural?” (“It don’t mean shit.” says Mr. Natural.) )

Okay, Here we go. I’ve got three things swirling around in my brain:

1. A really bad tortured analogy that doesn’t make sense, like waking up from a dream that doesn’t make sense when you try to tell someone about it. That kind of “doesn’t make sense” thing. It involves Steve Mnunchin and a disconnected voice like that of the narrator of one of those doggie treat ads that is trying to funnel the thoughts of a dog wanting the doggie treat. That “Who’s a good boy?” voice and the dog going crazy saying, “Me! Me! Me! Gimme the treat! Ya ya ya gotta have it!”

2. The guy yelling in the background as Howard Shultz is trying to make the case for his running for president, “Go back to Davos you egotistical fuck!” (or something like that.)

3. How the Democratic presidential race for president is trying to be portrayed in regards to Harris, Warren, and AOC. 

And the conclusions I draw from the three themes above.

Let’s start with Steve Mnuchin. He apparently has said that for the second year in a row the Federal government will have to borrow a trillion dollars to cover the cost of the tax cut to the wealthy. “Who’s a good boy?” “Me! Me! Me! Gimme. Gimme. Gimme.”

Okay, this is the party that claims to be conservative, and fiscally responsible. How they get away with that is beyond me. The Republicans always since Eisenhower outspend the Democrats. As Bill Clinton said when Hillary was running the biggest complaint the Republicans have about the Dems is “they don’t clean up the mess fast enough.” There’s another more sinister interpretation, and that is that if the government spends so much money that they can’t borrow anymore the government will be forced to shrink. Then the Republicans can go after what they call entitlement programs. Things like food stamps and Pell Grants and the National Endowment for the Arts. Many of the people who espouse this view are also of the Christian view that there is a coming apocalypse and when that happens Jesus will come down from heaven and we will all be lifted up; or at least the good white people. To facilitate that, certain things have to happen, one of them was moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem. The idea being that if you can make the situation worse, then when it gets really bad a change will come that will be really good. I equate this to the old cartoon of the two guys in lab coats in front of the college double row of three blackboards all filled with equations and one of the fellows is saying, “and then a miracle happens.”

Or as the boss in Office Space says in a long drawn out breath, “Yeaaah, I’m going to have to disagree with you on that one.”

Let’s deal with former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz. He’s thinking of running for President as an independent. The guy yelling at him in the background summed it up really well. “Go back to Davos you egotistical billionaire.”  Frankly, I gotta hand it to Shultz, how was he able to make people get hooked on that crappy coffee? I mean there are a lot of coffee shops in this country. Why was his able to succeed spectacularly? I don’t get it. Didn’t get it, and probably never will. Shultz raises an interesting question that will, I think, define how a lot of the Democratic candidates will be portrayed by the media in this season of presidential lotto. But before we get to that let me point out that we have been warned about people like Shultz: billionaires who want to do good after making all their loot. That’s nice. However as Robert Kuttner points out in the title of his book “Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?” and Anand Giridharadas points out in his book “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World” and how the guy that yelled at Shultz – IF YOU THINK THE RICH ARE GOING TO SAVE YOU – FUGGETABOUTIT! That ain’t happening. Yes, they might do some good work. Look at Bill Gates. Yes they may buy a newspaper to keep it from going under – look at Jeff Bezos. But if you think for a second that they are willing to give up their wealth, or a substantial portion, the answer is no, no, NO! Giridharadas (he’s the youngish looking Indian guy with the whitish hair dyed and waxed straight up in a Guy Fierie style that appears on political talk shows from time to time) makes the point that what the rich are doing with their good intentions is co-opting the role that governments have traditionally played in certain sectors. While the idea sounds nice and we can all say, “Aw, isn’t that nice,” the problem is that the people, ie government, needs to do these things if we really want to preserve our way of life and not be beholding to some rich f,f,f,f….person. Kuttner looks at this problem through the lens of global capitalism. Companies – theoretically serve at the pleasure of the people. If you take a class in your local community college about “How to Start a Business,” you will be told that a company gets a license to operate within that political entity under a certain name. You have to apply for the name, register it, etc. You serve at the pleasure of the government entity blah blah blah. 

While this may be true for a nail or muffle shop, international businesses are different, so are football teams. Let’s start with football teams because most of us are more familiar with their rapacious behavior. Hey, we can also throw into the mix the Amazon search for a new headquarters or warehouse or whatever it was that had so many local cities begging like that dog in the ad for the treat. Or that great conservative wonky governor of Wisconsin, Scott “do I look like a dork on a motorcycle?*” Walker. 

*Yes, Scott. You look like a total dork. On or off a motorcycle.

What international businesses, huge business like Amazon and football teams all have in common is the ability to manipulate governments to give them incentives to come to that locale to do business. Why cities throw millions and billions at football owners to have something that ultimately costs their tax base bazillions of dollars is beyond me. The bigger the company, the bigger the government they can screw with. So there’s Scott Walker – poster boy for economic idiocy. Not only did he enact Koch brothers Sam Brownback type Republican economic plans that left the state in dire straits, but to make sure they’d be suffering for years to come he made a deal with Foxconn that will cost Wisconsin approximately $240,000 per every employee FoxConn hires. Look it up in wikipedia. The deal? You meet certain targets Foxconn and we’ll pay you $3.8 to $4.0 Billion dollars. FoxConn said it will initially hire 3,000 people going up to 13,000. FoxConn is known for making similar pronouncements in the past and not living up to them. Independent economists looking at the deal say that if all the terms of the deal are met Wisconsin might – might – break even by 2043. Good going Scotty! The other thing Foxconn is known for is putting nets around the tops of its building so employees can’t kill themselves diving off the top of the building and taking a header. I hope the Wisconsin plant provides a diving board, better known as a plank, for Mr. Walker. Okay, I’m dreaming. 

The point is that big companies can shift resources around faster than government entities can keep up with. They and rich individuals are loath to part with their money. In fact, both groups will go to extremes to hold onto their money. Companies have moved headquarters to remote islands. Rich individuals have stashed money in Panama. Why? To avoid losing any of their money. 

This is the point of Nancy MacClean’s book “Democracy in Chains.” It’s not enough to hide your wealth from the government, become the government and change the rules so you can keep your money. (This seems to be the cornerstone of what people call Libertarianism.) The thinking is that the voters are really out to get your money and you have to talk in circular patriotic terms that hide your real game plan, which is to so bind up the government that legislators can’t do anything about it, Hence, the idea of “chains.” In other words: you can’t depend on politicians and judges to stay bought so you gotta change the constitution so that it’s much harder for those individuals to take action against your wealth. These folks went down to Chile when Pinochet was in power and helped him push through a new constitution, which the current leader discovered when she wanted to make changes was not able to do so. Game, Set, Match.

Now we get to how the Democratic candidates are being portrayed by the right, the Shultzes of the world, and the press – all to the detriment of those candidates. Words that are being used to describe Warren, Harris, and AOC are: “radical,” “far left”, “too liberal,” and the most dreaded word of all “socialist.” Throw in a few phrases like “I don’t think the American people are ready to accept …” and we’ve got a smear campaign, a hit job, a piece of work that Lee Atwater or Roger Stone or Karl Rove would be proud of.

What has Warren said that is so radical? “Tax the Rich.”

What has AOC said that is so radical? “Tax the Rich.”

What has Harris said that is so radical? “Tax Relief for the Middle Class.”

Wow. Hum. Why would Warren say something like that? Oh. They have all the money. So, where else are you going to get it? And, btw, the rich have been tipping the scales in their favor a little bit each year since 1980, when Reagan got in.

Why would Cortez make the rather modest suggestion that a higher tax on that portion of income that is in a year over a huge amount? Because that’s what worked before under Eisenhower? (Naw, because it makes sense.)

Why would Harris suggest tax relief for the middle class? Because they’ve been getting screwed by the wealthy since Reagan.

Yet these ideas are called “too liberal” and someone like Shultz is saying he’ll do a more moderate plan. Like Trump before him, he’s rather vague on specifics or exactly how he would do any of this, but trust him. He grew up in the projects and clawed his way to the top of the most successful coffee shop chain in history. But as we saw with Mr. Art of the Deal’s success or claimed success – success in business does not necessarily translate to success in government. As I pointed out yesterday look to Coolidge (“the job of business is business”) or Trump (“You’ll get tired of winning”) to see the failure of those kind of people. 

Special note: yesterday I also included Hoover in with Coolidge and Trump. That isn’t fair to him. He was an engineer. He was very successful at keeping the people of Belgium and the Netherlands feed during their occupation by the Germans. People thought this success would translate into being a good President. Unfortunately, it did not. He, like Gerry Ford, was overwhelmed by the job of President. It also shows that a person can be successful in a singular endeavor and not be able to handle the multiple demands of a job like President of the United States.

After Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt came in. The country was in the worst economic condition it had ever been in. This was brought about by one huge factor – the tightening of credit by the banks in the early 1930s following the crash of the stock market in 1929. In other words, the economy went from bad to worse due to the rich not willing to contribute. FDR had to pry it out of them. He tried all kinds of things. We need an FDR now. 

PS A programming note: The 2020 election is November 3, 2020 – 642 Days away from today, January 30, 2019.

      Inauguration Day is January 20, 2021 – 720 Days away. 

      How I arrived at the figure of 840 Days to Go is a mystery to me. I assume I forgot to cross off the hundreds digit and reduce by one at some point and that maybe I did that subtraction error twice on the ten’s place, but I don’t know.

      Starting with my next screed the “840 Days to Go” will be replaced with (if it was today) with

     “642 Days to the 2020 election and 720 Days to Inauguration Day”

PPS Yakumo Bridge at Nagata Shrine, Kobe, October 1934 by Kawase Hasui at VMFA

642 Days to the 2020 election and 720 Days to Inauguration Day

Day 753 Tuesday January 29, 2019    841 Days to Go

I was going to call this post “Tidbits.” Then I thought “Weird and Wacky.”

How about “Weird and Wacky Tidbits”?

The problem is that what was weird and wacky has now become normal. 

In Shakespearean time there was the idea of a world order. There were seven spheres and they were all perfectly round. A comedy was when something got out of order. Like when a person woke up and fell in love with the first thing they saw. In Columbus’ time the belief was there was a giant mountain at the southern end of the world and from it flowed four rivers. When people look back at our time what weird belief will it be that we held? What things will seem a comedy because they are so out of order?

There were so many little things, that are actually big things but we don’t have time to do all of them justice. They were tumbling out on the news yesterday that upon reflection it’s hard to know what to make of it all. Much like Galileo and Leonardo, who did not have the benefit of scientific rigor; they just reported stuff. Jupiter has seven moons, water swirls in odd ways, etc. I too will report, but it’s hard to make sense of it all, to put it in a framework that comports with sense. In fact there seems little sense. It is without sense. There must be a word for this? This non-sense. I’ve got it! Nonsense! I’ve invented a new word! Nonsense. Wow. It’s already in the dictionary. That was fast.

And so it goes.

I’ll try to categorize where I can.

First, there’e DeWhiteGuyz Party, or DWG for short. It is made up of – you guessed it – white guys, and a token OGs (Other Guys) as well. Maybe some HCs (Hot Chicks) as well. (Okay, I’m really stretching here.)

But the world has gone mad, I tell you. Things are not as they seem. The order as we knew it is in chaos, and there are no super heroes around to save us.

Remember Paul Ryan? I love that guy. Looks like Eddie Munster all growed up. Says really vacuous things with a straight face. That’s okay. What gets me is he expects someone to believe him. And he keeps finding suckers, or he did. Maybe they knew all along that he was saying BS and didn’t care. That would make them cunning and smart. However, the evidence is piling up that that is not the case. It’s a case of the stupid and the blind chasing each other in circles. Maybe, there’s a cabal that rules the world that is directing everything from behind the green curtain? That may be true. At least, it’s more plausible than what has been going on out in the open. I mean when we are debating, like we are, if something is no longer a crime because the actions taken are done so right out in the open then we are in new strange territory, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Remember the tax cut? The one that was going to power the economy? The one that was going to keep the economy going by giving money to the rich – Sorry, to industry – so they could reinvest in America? The one that was going to keep the Obama economy climbing ever upward? The one that Paulie Ryan with his simplistic economic view and his hesitant pursing of the lips before he started babbling a bunch of fake Ann Randian philosophy and supposed government statistical data? Yeah. in essence the idea was give the rich more money and it will trickle down faster, remember that? Did it sound like BS to you at the time? Well, if so, you were right. 

Okay, here’s the deal, or here was the deal: “Give us $1.5 trillion, that’s $1,500,000,000.00, and we’ll revive the economy by investing in America. Didn’t work. Sorry. Well, at least we got $1.5T, see ya.”

Recent data by credible sources (ie not Fox Business) has shown that the tax cut had little or no effect on the economy. Huh. I wonder why giving companies that already had boatloads of cash and weren’t investing it in America more money didn’t work? 

Okay, here’s where it gets really really weird. Politicians are talking about taxes in an election season. First, rule number one, never talk about taxes in an elections season. Mention it only in passing after the election is won and you are trying to slip a little sumptin’ sumptin’ through the committee for your buds. This is standard operating procedure (SOP) for the DWG. Whoa! What happened? There’s not one tax plan being talked about, not two, but three? Three tax plans! WTF? Oh, they are all being discussed by women. This is really weird. And hey, none of the women can claim to be all white. WTF? WTF? Indian, Black, Latino, Indian. Wait that’s four. Yeah, Kamala is a twofer, and her Indian is different that Warren’s Indian so ya gotta put Indian in there twice.

 

Warren wants to tax the rich. Radical baby. No, that’s not the radical part. She wants to tax there total wealth, not just what they “earned” this year. Why? Well, she’s trying to help them. See 1/10 of 1% have as much wealth as 90% of us. That’s a ratio that says 1/1000 of X is equal to 900/1000 of X and that means if X is the pie there isn’t much pie left. Somehow that example really muddles the point. But we’ve all seen the movies where the rich become too rich and it takes a kid (girl, young person, guy wearing a spiffy aftershave) to overturn the tables of the money changers and rock the world (okay, maybe a dirty bare foot Jewish guy yelling he’s the messiah) to set the world on a new course.

So Warren has a tax plan. Harris has a tax plan, and AOC* has a tax plan. 

*Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez 

Two are running for president and one isn’t old enough to run, but in six years she will be! Hey listen, a bartender from Brooklynn has a better tax plan than a real estate developer from Manhattan (or is it the Bronx?) Oh wait he has no plan – forget him… or a white guy from Wisconsin.

Yeah, we are going to be talking about tax plans this election season! Pretty exciting. I think we should call it “rich welfare.” In that if you have too much money it is bad for you. You’ll do stupid things, think crazy thoughts and generally get yourself in trouble as you desperately try to hang on to every nickel. 

Let’s play Putin’s favorite movie for you, the end of Ghaddafi. The part where his fellow citizens literally rip him a new asshole. Or how about Sadam? Hey, that won’t happen here in America. Did you see the photo of Mussolini and his mistress hung by their heels in the town square? Or what about the hunting lodge of a guy named Frederick? Lots of antelope heads mounted on the walls. That didn’t stop some pissed off guy from shooting old Frederick in the back and starting World War I. Think of the children. I mean if you are so filthy friggin’ rich that the American dream of struggling to make it is a joke because you’ve already got more money than you can blow on crack and sex in one hundred lifetimes why bother? So reducing that amount of money for the little shits would be a good thing.

Dick Moves and Movies: 

It seems there is no end to the outrageous dick moves that the Republicans will resort to to try to screw things up. I love their chest pounding whining when not in power and their phony patriotism with their little cloisonné American flag lapel pins (Made in China) when not in power and Mitch’s “the American people won’t” whatever when he’s trying to gum up the works. 

But now we got a new one. Don’t seat any members on a committee so the committee can’t get to work and therefore can’t hand transcripts over to the Special Counsel, which might show the president is the lying, cheating, commie asset he appears to be. Great idea. This is a new one. The old ones of robbing the middle class, voter suppression, poll place closing in poor and black area, packing courts with right wing out of touch white guys, that’s your typical dickishness, but this? This is new. Like Trump, every time you think they’ve reached the bottom you find the barrel to be a bottomless pit of swill.

Now onto the movies! The President of the Untied States is reputed to have access to some of the best intel in the world, Heck, he’s got seventeen agencies that do that kind of stuff. They send him a report everyday. Wow. 

Did you know that women were getting bound with tape and thrown in the backs of cars to be driven across the border?

Did you know that these cars are super fast and can out run whatever our pathetic border patrol agents have?

Did you know that our agents have found prayer rugs in the middle of the desert?

 No?

Well, neither did any of those 17 agencies.

But the movie Sicario does! Here’s part of the promotional blurb:

critically acclaimed thriller filled with pulse-pounding suspense. After an idealistic FBI agent (Emily Blunt) is recruited by a government task-force official (Josh Brolin) to pursue a drug lord, she begins a perilous mission that forces her to question everything she believes—and pits her against a shadowy consultant

Right. Okay then. This is the only known place – this film – where women are bound with tape and thrown in the backs of cars, and where said cars can outrun the drug enforcement people at the border. and where prayer rugs were found in the middle of the desert.

My question is “How did our border patrol folks miss the prayer rugs?”

To think that the president of the United States is referring to events in a movie as if they are really true beggars the imagination of even the most cynical jaded script writer in Hollywood. I mean if you went to some producer with the “Hey, I got an idea” pitch and you told him (or her) “Imagine the President of the Untied States …” you wouldn’t make it too far. (“Believe me. “, “Why? [should I believe you?}”, “Believe me.” {old boy trick – keep repeating whatever] )

Then there’s Roger Stone, Jerome Corsi, Randy Radico, Paul Manafort, and I can’t remember who else in a circular firing squad of BS.  OMG! Gag me with a monkey wrench. Okay, Roger did nothing wrong. Except, for everything he’s done for the last forty years. And now there’s this indictment which lays out the very things he, Roger, says he didn’t do. I mean, really? We’ve got a bunch of chuckle headed conspiracists that will do or say anything and these are the people linking Trump and the rest of his crew to the Russians. Not that Trump hasn’t done his own linking with the Russians: in plain sight, behind closed doors, in hotel rooms, on TV. You name it Trump and his family members are awash in Russian oligarchs, bit players, spies, and Putin.

The best defense they have now, and this is openly being talked about is that they, Team Trump, are so inept that they couldn’t have possibly colluded because they aren’t smart enough. 

Meanwhile Mr. Art-of-the-Deal has been discovered to not only be a liar and really bad negotiator and doesn’t learn from the past (mistakes or otherwise) that he is threatening to shut down the government again. Is this more puffery? We have to ask the savant Ann Coulter. If she says it’s puffery then big Donnie will too. The figure are in as to the cost of the shutdown to the U.S. economy $11B. Not bad if that’s all it is. Hey, if it didn’t work before let’s do it again. btw In a closed door session with Republican Senators they told the president that if he tried that stuff again the vote would 70 against. We’ll see.

There’s more, a lot more in the tidbits department, but I’ve already forgotten what they are. It’s just washed over me.

Oh wait One more thing, I love this, from John Brennan:

“Your cabal of unprincipled, unethical, dishonest, and sycophantic cronies is being methodically brought to justice. We all know where this trail leads. If your utter incompetence is not enough to run you out of office, your increasingly obvious political corruption surely will.”

Hum, I wonder how he really feels about this? I hope he’s right.

Oh yeah, then there’s Howard Shultz, the former head of Starbucks. He says he might run as an independent. He’s got tons of money, created a string of coffee shops that over charge for crappy coffee that made him rich and many poor, and with no real political base he wants to spend his millions siphoning off votes from other candidates. His pitch? He’s a businessman. Wow. That’s worked so well. There were three (claimed to be) businessmen that have been president: Coolidge, Hoover, and Trump. How did that work out?

So, to summarize:

Our president can not separate fantasy from reality.

He’s surrounded himself with liars, cheaters, hucksters and third rate talent, and his policies and lack of any effort on his part other than a racist silly idea are ruining our country.

There are people who are rising up and joining together to take the country back.

 841 Days to Go

PS La Grande Odalisque, by Lalla Essaydi, VMFA

Day 751 Sunday January 27, 2019   842 Days to Go

Ann Coulter was on Bill Maher last night and as predicted she brought up stuff that was irrelevant to the conversation and that most people don’t know anything about as a means for justifying her position.

She also used a novel defense for why she was on your side (the other people that make up America, not the new immigrants, but everyone in Bill’s audience.) And she threw in a few alternate facts, which apparently must be true if you keep repeating them and don’t let anyone else talk. Am I right? Am I right? Am I right? Am I right? Geesh.

There was a dichotomy in her argument. Amazing, I know. Believe me on the one hand, but don’t believe that. What is this Meatloaf’s song repurposed? I do anything for this but I won’t do that?

Okay. Let’s get in the weeds. First she said people are pouring over the border. They aren’t. (She they are. No they aren’t, Yes, they are. No, they aren’t. Scaramuc Scaramuc. Wait he’s on the masked singer now right? No? It’s the other idiotic show? Oh. Got it.)

Okay, with no supporting evidence Ann claims “they” are pouring over the border and – wait for it – “they” are taking away your jobs, and, and, this is why your wages are low. To add to this she lathers on that she’s on your side, not the Koch brothers who are trying to let immigrants cross the border so they can employ them to clean out their horse stable or pools. No, sorry, do landscaping. And by the way walls work. Look at Israel. They have a wall to keep the mad Palestinian bombers out and it’s working!!! Yipee Kayay MFer!

Hold on. Wait a second. According to every government statistic I’ve seen no one is pouring over our borders. And as has been pointed out over and over again, most of the illegal immigration, if you want to call it that is from people overstaying their visas. Those folks tend to come by plane. Hey, I got it. Let’s shutdown all incoming flights. Oh, we tried that yesterday? Didn’t work? Hum.

It’s interesting that Ann points out that the walls Israel has erected work to keep out bombers from Palestine. In fact, what they do is to suppress the Palestinian population period. Most Palestinians work in Israel and they are now put through hell to get to their jobs if they can. When anything happens in a Palestinian area Israel invades and the first thing they do is to shoot out the water tanks on top of all the buildings. Why denying people water is a good idea is beyond me. Also, under various Israeli governments they have seized Palestinian land and since 1967 have been building on that land and kicking the people who lived there, sometimes for decades if not centuries, out. For some reason, this pisses people off. What happens? Well, every once in awhile a guy goes crazy in Israel and starts stabbing people. Somehow, and I can’t explain this, but those patchwork of walls and those shoot out water tanks strategy don’t stop those random pissed off knife attacks.

Why didn’t Ann use The Great Wall of China instead? Oh, it didn’t work? Right. Or how about those walls the people in Central Asia put up around their cities to stop Genghis Khan? Oh right, he built a bigger wall around their cities and then rained arrows and rockets down on them. Hum. Now, granted there are cases where walls have protected people. They are usually in cities, before modern artillery came into play. Role tape, the fall of Constantinople. Boom. One huge cannon and the wall was done.

Hey. Wait. That’s not the point is it? The wall works on our souther border. That’s the point right? Oh wait. There’s a hole that someone blew in that wall and drove cars and trucks through, just recently. No one was watching. Hum. Seems like a problem. Do we need a bigger better wall, or someone to watch the wall? 

Then there was no discussion of the damage this shutdown to protect us by building a wall causes to the country at large, but there was the comment that Trump ran on the slogan of building the wall and Mexico was going to pay for it. Coulter’s point was he should do what he promised. When asked about the Mexico paying for it she demurred and said he didn’t say they were going to pay for it right away. Then she mumbled about tariffs and indirect ways they would end up paying for it. Yeah. Right. But here’s where the argument gets bizarre. Not that it isn’t already, but hey, it can get bizarrer. When she was asked about the other things Trump said that were lies, fabrications, and wacky. They were dismissed as “puffery,” and “no one was seriously believing him.” Wait? What? It’s like the problem of the thermos bottle. It keeps cold things cold and hot things hot. How do it know?

Okay, so I guess we have to depend on the Ann Coulter of the right wing world to tell us which things are puffery and which we should shutdown the government for until we get them?

Meanwhile, we can consider the question of Trump and whether or not he’s a Russian asset. Given his behavior towards Russia and Putin, what else could one conclude? (Ann says the Soviet Union is gone so they aren’t a threat anymore. Okay. Case closed.)

There are also stories coming out that Mike Pence lied. When has he not? I mean is there anytime you can remember that anything Pence said was shown later to not only not be true but to be shown that he knew at the time he was saying this BS that it wasn’t true? It’s one thing to not tell the truth and not know that is isn’t true. That you can claim you were misinformed (He’s used that one.) Or that you didn’t know at the time, (I think, he’s used that one too.) But when you tell something that isn’t true and you know at the time it isn’t true, it’s a lie. Mike seems to excel in that department. This time it’s about Russia and his involvement, his lying about Mike Flynn, and Pence’s ties to Russia.

Oh yes, and there is the question about Roger Stone and WikiLeaks. This Coulter dismissed by asking how do we know it’s the Trump campaign he was helping and not his digging as an investigative reporter for InfoWars? Well, how do we know, indeed, Ann? How about this? There’s a twenty four page indictment listing the connections between Stone, Trump, the Trump campaign, Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, Guccifer 2.0 of the Russian GRU, and the go betweens Stone used to try to hide what he was doing? Nowhere in the indictment does it say that Stone was doing investigative reporting for perineum ass wipe promoter Alex Jones of InfoWars. I wonder why? Oh, I got an idea. Maybe, that’s because that wasn’t what he was doing? Because there is no evidence that he was being an investigative reporter? Because the only time he might have claimed to be an investigative reporter, and I don’t know if he has, is because he was trying to cover up what he was really doing?

On to Mike Pence. Mikey might be in trouble. Everyone seems to have forgotten that it was reported that Mike Pence was argued for as a running mate by Paul Manafort. Why? Not sure. There’s also a lot of “what did Mike know and when did he know it?” stuff. The second biggest liar in Washington after the president is the vice-president. I can’t think of a single time Mike has spoken on any substantive issue and not lied. 

This follows a trail of dirty dealing going back to his time in Indiana as governor. He and Kasich both used subterfuge, force, and underhandedness to close abortion clinics inn their states. Any All-American “gee I’m just a regular guy” stuff is bull shit. Now it’s come out that the state of Indiana had to spend twenty million dollars to clean up the old gas stations that the Pence family left behind. Hey, I’m sure it’s all legal. Nothing to see here.

In truly good news I turn to science. You know that wacky “belief” system that has revolutionized our lives. Alzheimer’s disease is a scourge that affects brain function, mainly in older people. A few weeks ago I read an article about a scientist who has not been able to get funding for the research he wants to do related to Alzheimer’s. In the scientific community the thinking is that a build up of plaque in the brain causes Alzheimer’s. There has been twenty or thirty years of research done with this as the underlying premise. This scientist asked himself if there might be some other cause because after all this effort there was little to show in the way of progress. He discovered that the brain seemed to be throwing a web over itself to defend itself from a bacteria and that the resulting plaque was left after the web went away, and presumably the bacteria had gone too. He couldn’t get funding because all the limited funding went to plaque research. Yesterday I read an article that said that gingivitis, the stuff that causes gum disease, is a bacteria and that researchers have found a similar bacteria in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s. They also have correlated that lab rats with gingivitis have a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s or is it the other way around? Or as our president would say if he read: Healthy Teeth – Healthy Brain.

Maybe we should check the White House staff for gum rot.

Just sayin’.

842 Days to Go

PS Temple of the Seven Dolls, Dzibilchaltún, Yucatan, Mexico

Day 750 Saturday January 26, 2019   843 Days to Go

Wow. Wow. What a day yesterday was. I was watching the news in the middle of the day and Hallie Jackson was bouncing between three different stories: The Shutdown, Roger Stone, La Guardia Airport being shutdown to incoming flights. She didn’t even have time to report on another story and that was that Paul Manafort was back in court.

So what does it all mean? One, and this is very important, watch The Godfather again, because there will be unending references to that movie until Stone is sent to jail for the rest of his life. Is he Luca Bracci or is he commenza? Or something like that.

Stone was in business with Manafort in the early days and is pictured years ago with Lee Atwater, before Lee found out he had brain cancer and began to repent. Manafort and Stone never repented. They liked doing dirty deals and unseemly things, and they each got rich doing it. Now the bill is coming due.

Other than that? I want to see the Nixon tattoo. Supposedly Stone has one on his back. How big is it? Is it the little one or is it huge and between the shoulder blades?

The indictment is what the legal commentators called “a speaking indictment,” which means that there is a lot of stuff in there to lay out a story of what happened. Why do it? Seems the reason is to lay the groundwork for other things to come and to make sure that the story is told to the public if perchance the Attorney General doesn’t release Mueller’s final report.

Stone says he’ll fight. That he won’t bear false witness against the president. blah blah blah. Hey. I got news for you Roger. You don’t have to. It’s all in your indictment. 

Whoa! The news just showed his tattoo.

Bill Maher said Ann Coulter will be on his show this week. She called Trump a wimp for caving. Yes, what a wimp. He gave in to reality. People like Coulter live in a self absorbed universe where they talk to each other and convince themselves of things that just aren’t true. I’ve talked and texted with people like this. It’s always the same: “You don’t understand,” they tell me. “Here are the facts,” as the point me to some article written in some publication I’ve never heard of. Then I google said publication and it’s a right wing conspiracy theory place or it’s owned by someone like that. If I try and show them something factual it’s “fake news” written by some liberal.

In essence what the argument comes down to then is a racist type of thing. By liberal they mean someone they don’t agree with and thus they need to attack the person, not the argument or the facts. The facts are also dismissed as being not true.

In the case of Stone, well, there’s this indictment. He says he did nothing wrong. Really? What do we know about Roger Dodger? Aside from having a lifelong career as a dirty trickster? He’s the only person in America that was talking to Russian GRU agents in the form of Guccifer 2.0 and Julian Assange. According to the indictment Stone was doing a lot more than just talking; he was coordinating. Not only that, but he was being asked “by a senior Trump campaign official” to find out what else Assange had and when it was going to be released. That senior campaign official was being directed to ask. The list of people that are senior campaign officials in the Trump campaign is pretty small. The list of people who could direct senior Trump campaign officials to do something is even smaller. I’d go out on a limb and say that list is one. Okay, at most three, and they all have the name Trump. Stone was using intermediaries to talk to Assange. Fellow conspiracist James Corsi and a guy named Randy Credico, who is a radio host, political gadfly and god knows what else. Corsi is known for his wacky books that make claims that there is a deep state, Obama wasn’t born in America, etc. You name the conspiracy and Corsi has written a book about it. Stone is in a similar belief system. When Corsi was confronted about this stuff, he’d say things like, “I never said that, what I said is there is a possibility that …” etc. etc. etc. (Look for Ann Coulter to say similar type things on Maher’s show – btw. And to wave “some facts” from a report or paper no one has heard of or seen before.)

So who ya gonna believe? I mean on the one hand we have a guy whose career has been dirty tricks, lying, and conspiracy theorizing and on the other you’ve got a former Marine, former head of the FBI, and lawyer who has settled some of the biggest cases in the last decade, who is heading up a group of the top lawyers in the country that write indictments and supporting evidence that is fact upon fact, and carefully written? For instance in the case of Paul Manafort’s legal brief why that laid out they were pulling out of the deal with him – it ran to 800 pages. Most of it was redacted, and they didn’t want Manafort to serve any extra time for it. Eight hundred pages! 

What is Stone betting on? Nothing. Maybe a pardon. 

Let us not forget that as a young man Stone was part of the plot hatched by Chuck Colson to kill or maime Daniel Ellsberg.  Colson hired the same guys that later broke into the Watergate to try and get close to Ellsberg as he spoke at the Lincoln Memorial. Stone was a young man and part of a fake protest designed to siphon off police from the Lincoln Memorial.

“Here we stand or here we fall

History won’t care at all

Make the bed, light the light

Lady mercy won’t be home tonight yeah”

Queen “Hammer to Fall”

844 Days to Go

PS Roger’s tattoo of Tricky Dick.