Archives for March 2019

Day 813 Saturday March 30, 2019

583 Days to the 2020 election and 661 Days to Inauguration Day

Three Words: Agency, Transparency, Transactional

I know what one of them means. The other two, I’m not so sure. I’ve been hoping to ferret out their meanings when used in a sentence, but no luck.

When someone says the people of so and so need more agency or were given agency – what does that mean? Because I don’t really understand the word I may not be using it properly. 

Transparency as in “we need more transparency,” means tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s kind of an upgraded term from some older term. That reminds me of George Carlin’s routine on “shell shock” the World War I term that every war gets a bigger and wordier term for the same thing. In this case they’ve gone the other way and shrunk it down to one word from many. Not sure I like it, but I think I understand the word and how it is used.

Then there’s transactional. Trump is transactional. Jared Kushner is even more transactional. In fact, he’s the most transactional person the Saudis have ever met and they are deeply alarmed by this and I take it from the context of what I’ve read that being transactional is bad, being very transactional is very bad. Therefore Trump is bad, but Jared is worse. Now, if I only fully understood what that meant. Ah me.

But first, some clarity. William Barr, the now Attorney General, has issued what is called a two page letter, which is more like one and a half, and if you take out the address headers is more like one, to clarify what his four page, actually three and a half page, earlier letter was supposed to be and not to be (Hey, wouldn’t that make a great line in a play “to be and not to be”? It’s close. Needs a little tweaking. (Not tweeting: or twerking. Ha, I’m a riot.) :::))) )

William Barr’s new letter was issued to clarify his last letter. His last letter has been called a summary by some. Mr. Barr has made clear in his new letter that his old letter was not a summary but was in fact a summary, his new letter is a not a summary either, but is a summary. For some reason, and let me summarize, some people ain’t taking this shit. I think Mr. Barr wants agency and is hoping via this transaction to be transparent but he’s not. This is so far beyond farce, tragedy, and the sublime ludicrous that it’s hard to find puffed up words to express the utter stupidity of this. I would like it a whole lot better if they all put on Kabuki masks, Samurai outfits, and acted out their parts on a stage with giant drums and a dragon.

Okay, going to look up agency then use it in a sentence … 

def – (number 2) “action or intervention, especially to produce a particular effect,”

“a thing or person that acts to produce a particular result.”

Hum, producing a particular effect by an action, intervention, person or thing – huh?

“William Barr’s writing summary letters are agency of outrage…” Not quite right.

“The agency of Barr’s writing summary letters has produced outrage..” Better?

Okay, let’s do transactional … 

(The last time I saw transactional used a lot was when the book “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” came out and they talked about Transactional Analysis. Which is the interaction between two or three people. Oh wait was that “Games People Play”? Yeah, think so. Both are great books and everybody should read them. (That’s the kiss of death.))

def – transactional: 1) “relating to the conducting of business, especially buying and selling,”

2) “relating to the exchange of social evolution.”

Okay, so definition number 2 is the one I’ve know about. Definition number 1 is the one that relates to Jared and Donald. In other words, they’d sell their grandmother into slavery to make a deal. The implication I’ve gotten from how transactional has been used recently is that the person involved wants to make a deal (ie buying and selling) without regard for long term consequences. 

In another fascinating tidbit of news it’s been reported that Trump has spent $4.5 million in facebook ads attacking people he doesn’t like. This is more than double what all the Democratic challengers have spent so far combined. These ads are highly targeted to his base. The ads reportedly are pure playground type bullying ads. They are mean, petty, and lacking any real content or positive suggestion. That is where we are. 

583 Days to the 2020 election and 661 Days to Inauguration Day

PS DC Taxi sign – Know Your Rights – “Passengers Have the Right to be Taken to Their Destination” Who knew?

 

 

Know Your Rights

Day 812 Friday March 29, 2019

584 Days to the 2020 election and 662 Days to Inauguration Day

Yesterday I wrote about:
The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Today I write about:
The Stupid, The Hypocritical, and The Insane
But first:
BACON

Yes, that’s right bacon. I had a dream. (Seems like that could be a good line for a speech, tense isn’t right…)
Most of the time when I dream they are very vivid and I know I won’t forget and by the time I wake up I can’t recall exactly what was going on, but I can tell you this – I’ve never dreamed about bacon before.
In this dream a bunch of people, me included, were debating whether we should have bacon at funerals. I think it was at funerals. I went with someone to the bathroom. On the way we had to go by trays of bacon already cooked. They were laid out on big flat baking sheets. We had to literally part the tables to get to the bathroom. It occurred to me at that moment in the dream, “What are we arguing about? Is it the cost of the bacon or is it who is going to cook the bacon?” It did not seem to enter into the dream whether bacon was the proper thing to serve at a funeral.
This led me to rethink something I had seen earlier in the day on facebook. It was a copy of a tweet by Rand Paul asking people to send him money so he could defeat socialism. Underneath the copy of the tweet the question was asked, Isn’t Rand Paul using socialism to ask people for him to defeat it? Indeed, he is/was.
So we can label that either stupid or hypocritical. With Rand Paul hypocritical seems to always fit better.

Then we get to the Republican attempts to once again repeal the Affordable Care Act and “replace it with something great.” They are now trying to throw out the whole law in the courts. The head of Trump’s reelection campaign outlined the strategy last night: first, repeal Obamacare, then put really smart people in a room to come up with a really great plan, and Congress will have to pass it because they will have a gun to their head and nothing gets done in Washington unless there’s critical deadline.

Okay, let’s review. The Republicans have tried to repeal the ACA almost 70 times and haven’t succeeded. The ACA was created by getting some really smart people who knew health care really well and putting them in a room. The plan was the one proposed by the very conservative Heritage Foundation. A plan they loved until a black man, a Democrat no less proposed it. The Dems also held open hearings, lots of them to get input. They reached across the aisle to include Republicans. They also based many of the practical parts of the ACA off the plan instituted in Massachusetts, by the Republican governor of that state Mitt Romney. In reaching across the aisle the Democrats and President Obama added most if not all of the concessions into the bill that the Republicans demanded. Then it came time to vote and not a single Republican went along with it.
After the bill was passed the Republicans bitched about it. What did they specifically point to? What did they not like? What did they say didn’t work and wasn’t working? Why the very things they wanted put in the bill.
That’s hypocrisy for you. It’s also stupid, maybe insane.
But wait, there’s more (hypocrisy, stupidity, and insanity.)

Let’s recall that the Republican idea of putting a bunch of really smart people in a room to figure out what to do has been there operating mantra for quite awhile. It was Paul Ryan’s. It was Trump’s election promise. It is also Howard Shultz’s plan.
When asked like the Iowa voter did of Chuck Grassley, “Why not fix what’s there?” They seem to have no answer other than it was done by the Democrats and to fix it would give a kudow to the Dems and they couldn’t do that.

The last time I know of in American history that a bunch of smart people were put in a room to figure out a plan was the Panic of 1907. There was no central bank at the time. The central banking function was being done by J.P.Morgan, not the company but the man himself. (Okay, and his bank of the same name.) Before that it had been done by Fiske and Gould until they got greedy overextended themselves and went bankrupt. In fact, if you go back through the history of our country before the Federal Reserve’s creation this country was in a perpetual cycle of boom and bust. (Something both Rand and Ron Paul ought to review to realize that their ideas on this are nuts, but that’s a different tenet of another story.)

In the Panic of 1907 many banks had over extended themselves. Morgan got all the bankers together and literally put them in a room and told them to come up with a plan. He sat outside the door and played solitaire and smoked cigars.
He was a big man. I think six foot seven and weighed 350 pounds. To be fat in that day was a sign of wealth, no one else could afford enough food to be fat. He also wore a beaver skin stovepipe top hat so all in all he must have cut a high wide swath when he walked. He was also driven. One time he climbed a roped runged ladder up the side of a ship. He had to because a lot of people were watching. Climb he did, with a cigar clamped in his mouth. He got to the top swung over the side and promptly collapsed.
The bankers came out with a plan. Morgan looked at it and said it was no good and sent them back into the room.
They came out with another plan. Once again, no good.
They came out with a third plan. He looked at it, said it would work, picked up the piece of paper, strode down Wall Street, went into the Stock Exchange, held up the paper and said he had the answer. Thus ended the panic.
We don’t have men like that anymore.

There are two important pieces to the put-smart-people-in-a-room scenario. One) they have to know about the subject they need to deal with. Two) there needs to be someone outside the door who keeps them in the room and knows even more than they do about the subject matter.
Given the people Trump has appointed, and given the people that Congressional Republicans have called on before for such tasks, there is little question in my mind that they couldn’t find a group of people to find their way out of an open paper bag.

So their plan, such as it is, is insane, because there is no plan. They have no smart people, and if they did they’d pick the wrong people for the task, and they certainly don’t have someone smarter than the bunch to lead.

What they will do is say the right things, criticize the other side, and then if they get in power appoint their plutocratic and religious bigots to do something. Either steal from us or constrict our freedoms depending on which group they put in place.

Can anyone name a time when the Republicans put a group of really smart people in a room and came up with a plan? How about a reasonable plan? I can’t. So why would we choose to let them try it now?

Moving on: The most depressing thing I saw while in Washington DC were groups of young students with some in their midst sporting new red sweatshirts or hats with Make America Great Again emblazoned on them. They were all young boys with that kind of smirky look like the kid who stood in front of the native American.
We need some t-shirts and hats with RESIST in cartouche style being sold.

584 Days to the 2020 election and 662 Days to Inauguration Day

PS Tintoretto “Paradise” 1583 at The National Gallery until July 7, 2019.

Day 811 Thursday March 28, 2019

585 Days to the 2020 election and 663 Days to Inauguration Day

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

First the Good, because we haven’t had much of that. Yesterday I went to the National Gallery of Art. In the West Wing they have a show on Tintoretto. If you’re a History of Art aficionado you know the name. He is one of the men responsible for the Italian Renaissance, the High Renaissance. I still remember my Jansen History of Art book that stated the Italian High Renaissance was due to six individuals, and Tintoretto was one of them.

However, his work got overshadowed in my mind by other names: Titian, Michelangelo, Da Vinci. 

Three of the six men were known to be gay. They were conflicted by their religion and their sexuality. Often tortured in their minds between their faith and their desire. Men of extreme talent and ability. Tintoretto  was Venetian. He was thirty years younger than Titian, in whose studio he first worked until the old master kicked him out. Tintoretto was brash, trained by fresco painters and furniture stainers who had to work quickly he brought these techniques to the studio and was not welcomed for it. He painted on canvas in oil when many were still painting on wood. His real name, Jacopo Comin (and most historians thought it Jacopo Robusti) was replaced by the nickname based on his father’s profession of dyer or tintore. He was the eldest of 21 children. (Yikes! His poor mom!) His motto which was painted on the wall of his studio said “Michelangelo’s drawing and Titian’s color.” Indeed the lumpy muscled figures are pure Michelangelo but the colors jump out at you. A master, like Michelangelo, of foreshortening he often draped wax figures to understand how the cloth would look, and he used candles in a small cardboard boxes to understand how the light would play. 

The work is startling brilliant, and the National Gallery has most of his major works. Some are painted on walls and can’t be moved, but most of the rest? They have them here. If you are interested in the Italian Renaissance, this show is not to be missed. And make sure you go downstairs to see the drawings and go past the fountain upstairs to see the two large paintings that aren’t in the main exhibit area.

The Bad – How many headlines have appeared in the last few days that are just darn discouraging?

Betsy DeVos cuts all the funding for Special Olympics. It’s one third of the amount we’ve spent protecting Trump while he plays golf. Yet she has allotted over three times the amount the Special Olympics costs to those phony schools, charter schools, which is another way to drain money from public education and give it to individuals trying to make a buck or to some phony Christian school. (Of course, in Betsy DeVos’ defense some think she is so stupid that she may not have realized that is what was being done.)

AG Barr has gone against legal practice and precedent with his issuing a four page letter with his conclusion about what Mueller found and now he’s stalling in handing over the full report or any part of it.

The Trump administration will not defend the law of the land when it comes to Obamacare thus eliminating 21 million from coverage and another 131 million will have hugely increased medical costs.

Trump wants to put a proven economic idiot on the Federal Reserve Board.

And so it goes …

The Ugly – See the Bad above, and below.

Perhaps the most discouraging thing I saw yesterday was young kids on field trips and some were wearing MAGA hats or sweatshirts. Very sad. 

As I watched and listened to all this ugliness I asked myself this question, “Who was supposed to tell us, the American People, that we were under attack?” Whose job was that? The President? The head of the Joint Chiefs? Someone in intelligence? In Justice? The Congress? 

Forget about the potential criminal implications, we were under attack. All these people in government knew it and kept their mouths shut. No one said the theater is on fire, why? Don’t we need a procedure that keeps us informed as to how bad the attacks are? 

In other news, the Freshman in Congress are making their mark and thank god. They are speaking up. Not like the old guard. 

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has been shown saying essentially, Hey, the Green New Deal is cheaper than waiting and we will pay one way or the other. It has also been pointed out that the top twenty folks in both the House and the Senate that have received money from the oil and gas industry are all Republicans, save one. So the opposition to the Green New Deal has nothing to do with politics, or facts. It has to do with being bribed.

Tom Malinowski asked Mike Pompeo what’s to like about Kim Jong Un? Pompeo begged him not to make this political. What? Malinowski pointed out that North Korea is the most communist regime on the planet and the president likes Un (or is it Kim? Who cares?) What’s to like? All Pompeo could do was beg for mercy. 

These supposed conservative Republicans are all tough talking until the light is shown on them and then they cry like little puppies.  

I say make ‘em cry. 

585 Days to the 2020 election and 663 Days to Inauguration Day

PS The Trump Hotel sign: before and after. Who would do such a thing as to spit on that sign?

 

Day 809 Tuesday March 26, 2019

587 Days to the 2020 election and 665 Days to Inauguration Day

The Barr Report

The Barr Report

The Barr Letter

Robert Mueller handed in his report to the Attorney General. 

And the Attorney General, hand picked for the job because he wrote a letter saying he didn’t believe in the whole investigation has written a four page letter about what Mueller found.

This letter contains two sentence fragments from the Mueller Report and the AG’s conclusion.

For some reason Republicans who have had nine investigations of Hillary Clinton want to investigate her again as does Trump, but they are perfectly satisfied with the Mueller Report not being made public and are ready to “move on.”

The Dems and 97% of the country want to see the Mueller Report. 

The central question of Russian interference in our 2016 election is the core issue of Robert Mueller’s report and whether Trump or his associates colluded with the Russians. 

We are told by the man who didn’t believe in the investigation before he became AG that there was not enough to charge anyone with collusion. However, he did mention that Mueller said he couldn’t exonerate the president either. This when run through the Trump-o-meter came out as “total exoneration,” which makes me wonder if Donald Trump has ever said anything that didn’t contain a lie. I think his old lawyer John Dowd was right. The guy just can’t help himself. “Let Trump be Trump” means “I gotta lie. It’s what I do.”

Meanwhile the new guy Trump wants to appoint to the Fed. The one who was the genius behind Sam Brownback’s conservative economic miracle in Kansas that ran that economy into the ground, he has said he doesn’t really know how the Fed works. Well, that’s honest. He has been called an idiot by some, and they were conservatives. This is the guy who might be diddling with our economy. I gotta hand it to the Donald. He can always find a way to make a situation worse.

The FAA is under the leadership of an acting whatever they call it and that guy is a Boeing man, who has been found to steer contracts to his old employer. Meanwhile the over the 737 Max continue. For some reason people are a little on edge about putting those planes back in service. They were the build out of the 737, which was the build out of an earlier plane. The safety features that you could get on the Max cost extra, so some companies didn’t buy them. Also, the training was an on an ipad and didn’t necessarily include the “if the plane goes into a nose dive turn off the auto trim” suggestion.

Viking had a ship loss power and folks had to be evacuated off a rolling boat in the North Atlantic, making others cancel their reservations. Bummer.

Going back to the Mueller Report. Some folks want to know some pretty specific questions about Mueller’s report, like “How many pages is it?”

The House has demanded the whole report by April 2. Glad they didn’t ask for April Fool’s Day.

587 Days to the 2020 election and 665 Days to Inauguration Day

PS The Mississippi River at Baton Rouge.