Archives for July 2019

Day 926 Saturday July 20, 2019

471 Days until the 2020 election and 553 days until the Inauguration

“Calm Yourself, 

Believe in Yourself, 

Stick to your Routine,

Smash it Home.”

I lead with Ms Rapinoe’s words. Why? Well, I need a new motto. Seeing as how some people could not stomach the idea of coitus with our president, even if it was in a pejorative sense, I thought this would be better. Plus you could show up at a Trump event and strike the Rapinoe Victory Pose and imagine (I’m thinking Alice Restaurant movement style here) if it was a huge bunch of people at every rally, every public event striking that “T” pose. Standing there, one arm slightly above shoulder height and one below, so there was no doubt what you were doing, standing; looking at the daises? 

Don’t like people kneeling for the National Anthem? How about a hard core group standing looking at you with their arms out? GOAL!!!!! (Fuck Trump)

Where was I?

Oh yes. that’s not all. I want you to imagine. (I’m now up to the 1980s and John Lennon.) Imagine. 

What would the Inauguration parade and celebration of President Williamson be like? President Marianne Williamson, spiritual advisor to Oprah and the stars? Ah yes. I see purple. I see LOVE. (Please stack the “LO” on top of the “VE” ala Richard Indiana (Maybe a little Roy Lichtenstein too? Large print comic graphic of a woman’s face close up, 1940s bob, weeping, cartoon bubble saying, “I can’t believe Marianne won!”)

Then there are just a whole salad bowl of other things that went on. But – I must believe in myself! I must “smash it home.” 

So Smash I Will. I Am, I Am.

First off there was Thomas Friedman in his NYT article asking the question, “Are the Democrats trying to lose the election by suggesting Medicare for All?” In his version of this, the Dem folks want to end private insurance and FORCE everyone onto a government health care system.

Then there’s Shields and Brooks on PBS. I’ve always found what they say to be a bit – I dunno – not quite right. I think they both represent the middle of the road nostalgia of politics, each from a slightly different perspective. Brooks has that smug superior smile and always seems to say something negative about the Democrats. When Obama was President he would say after one year’s State of the Union that Obama was being too expansive and not detailed enough. The next year he’d say Obama was “small bore” and read off a “laundry list” of things. Shields on the other hand always throws in a “remember” statement. At least Shields makes some interesting points. I’m sure if you asked those two who they’d like to see running, and winning, for president this time Shields would say, “Biden,” and Brooks would say none of them were any good but if he had to pick it would be a moderate Republican in the mold of Papa Bush and Ronald Reagan. When pressed to name that person he’d probably say Ted Cruz, or Jim DeMint.

What Shields and Brooks and Thomas Friedman seem to be stressing is the idea the the Democratic candidates for President could move too far to the left and endanger their chances of winning the presidency. Okay, fair enough, let’s look at what’s causing this concern.

During the first debate the candidates were asked if they’s support Medicare for All. Every candidate but one or two raised their hands. This led the New York Post (I think it was that esteemed super market tabloid) to print the picture of them all raising their hands with the headline “Who Wants to Lose the Election?” Ha ha. Pretty funny. Commentators then jumped all over it saying many people (the figure is now pegged at 170 million) don’t want to give up their current insurance. The logic went that Medicare for All would force everyone to give up their existing health care. Blah blah blah.

Most of the candidates clarified their positions to something like this, “We wont get to Medicare for All right now, but I believe that is where we are headed. Right now we would have a public option and it would compete with the private insurance options. Over time it would become obvious that the public option is better and cheaper and the private insurance would go away.”

But why state the this when you can hammer on something else?

Good God.

Then Shields said something interesting. “Remember” he pointed out that John Boehner said in the twenty five years he was in Congress he never remembered the Republicans ever putting forward a health care plan. 

Wow. Twenty five years. Twenty five years, and not one proposal. Wait, didn’t Paul Ryan say they were working on one? Yup. What happened? Nothing. Hold on didn’t Donald Trump say he’d scrap Obamacare and put all these really smart people in a room and come up with a better plan? Yup. What happened? Nothing. 

Okay, so if you’re a “realist” or a betting person or a complete flake what do you bet the chances of the Republicans or the Libertarians or anyone besides a Democrat doing something about health care in this country is possible? I give it a big fat ZERO. Some say get rid of Obamacare and start over. Are you kidding? Remember the “people don’t like you messing with the health insurance they have?” argument. People like Obamacare. People like their company insurance plan, or so they say. Once they see a better cheaper alternative private health insurance will either die or radically change.

Speaking of radical change, pundits say we, the electorate, don’t want radical change. I disagree. How has playing it safe worked out? How is it that a refugee from Somalia who is elected to Congress and wears a wacky white head piece knows more about our government than our president or members of his party?

In other startling “who could have seen this coming?” news: Hate Crimes have Been on the Rise for the Last Two Years – in our country. Gee, I wonder why? There’s a web site that white nationalists are flocking to, calling for the killing of our political leaders. Hum. Maybe we should do something about that? Like maybe we need to protect our Congress people?

In other startling news: We can now see how many opioid pills were sold down to the pharmacy level over the last five or ten years. Geez, billions of pills. 

And there are all those guns out there. Pills, Hate Crimes, Guns – Welcome to America. And people ask me if I’m afraid to go to a foreign country? I tell them, “At least they aren’t shooting their school children.” Yeah, what about protecting our children. Gun violence is now what? The second most likely way a child in school will die. Forget duck and cover in case of a nuclear attack. Now it’s run and hide in case of an active shooter.

And in other not so startling news George Nader is indicted, again, on sex crimes. This time, like last time, and the time before, and the time before that, and the time before that it involves underage boys and sex: sex trafficking, for the purposes of sex, and pornography. Nader is the “Lebanese businessman” who arranged various meeting for Trump folks including Erik Prince’s meeting in the Seychelles. Nader is mentioned over 100 times in the Mueller Report, and the Trump folks during the height of the campaign took multiple meetings with him. 

What do I think of all this? I know, you want to know, so here goes: 

1) The Trump folks wanted balance. Jeff Epstein had the molesting little girls covered, so who was going to molest the little boys? Certainly, not the Catholic priests, not for Trump, maybe a televangelist hell fire and brimstone type, but Catholics – not so much.

2) You know I haven’t run “We’ll get the best people” through the Trump-O-Meter. I wonder what will come out. Wait for it…”We’ll get the WORST people” Amazing. Who could have guessed? (Well, Hillary Clinton told us exactly what we were going to get. But who wanted her President? Oh three million more people than wanted Trump? Who knew? And it took the efforts of the National Enquirer, the Federal government (Mr. Comey), the Russian government, WikiLeaks, and the illegal campaign contributions to keep women silent, and and the hiding of Trump’s tax returns and other illegal activities by Trump and associates to defeat her. Let’s not forget the purposeful denying people access to voting and the systematic breaking of voting machines and not having enough ballots by Republican operatives and the denying people the right to vote by any means necessary.)

You know Trump not only gets the worst people. He manages to get the worst people in multiple bad ways and areas of expertise. Be it fore flushers, grifters, and con people (I want to include women like Ivanka here), or be it sleazeball media types, or right wing lunatics, pundits, or neo-nazis, or corporate shills Trump finds them.

If you put out a call through out the nation and said, “Bring me the worst, the dregs, the deceitful, the bottom of the barrel” could we have done worse? Unfortunately, with Trump there is no bottom. Amazingly, he can always sink lower. 

“Calm Yourself, 

Believe in Yourself, 

Stick to your Routine,

Smash it Home.”

471 Days until the 2020 election and 553 days until the Inauguration

PS Sunrise, Boropudur, Indonesia. 

A new dawn, a new day…

Day 925 Friday July 19, 2019

472 Days until the 2020 election and 554 days until the Inauguration

I was going to talk about the sad state of our union and the world. How the chiselers and fore flushers are not only chipping away at our democracy but at our planet. As I made my coffee I turned on the TV. There was a retrospective on Our sending a man to the Moon. I heard John Kennedy speak. “We choose to go to the Moon, not because it is easy, but that it is hard.” His words still send a shiver down my spine. He united us with his dream. The accomplishments of the Apollo program united not just the nation but the world. One sixth of humanity watched Neil Armstrong make that historic step.

Now?

On the eve of this day I listened to our president deny the very thing he had done the night before. Repeatedly lie. This after listening that afternoon to the acting Director of Homeland Security say he hoped, hoped, that what they were doing would stop the flow of immigrants. This despite all evidence to the contrary. He lied about what was going on at our southern border. I had to turn it off.

Then I learned why the Bureau of Land Management is being uprooted and moved to Colorado. A fat faced shill for the oil and gas companies has been moved in as the acting secretary of the Interior and he lives in Colorado. This fact and the fact that the Trump administration may have successfully gotten rid of anyone in the department of Agriculture that is telling the truth has emboldened them to get rid of anyone who might protect our public lands. Remember the last secretary? Ryan Zinke? Yeah, the guy who insisted that they fly his personal flag on the Interior building anytime he was there? The guy who rode a horse to work the first day? The guy who had to resign amid a bunch of personal scandal? His replacement is cut from similar cloth.

One of Trump’s cronies wants to build a 28,000 home community in Benson Arizona, population 5,000, complete with golf courses, in the desert, where they don’t have enough water now. Imagine what 28,000 homes and a bunch of golf courses will do to the area? Bureau of Land Management folks have been saying they need to study the situation more. Not anymore! They’ve been told to get in line and shape up. Get with the program. 

A while back I talked about the Roman Republic and how it ended up falling to the tyranny of a single man, an emperor. Once you get that kind of strong man government it’s hard to get rid of it. In the case of Rome, it took 700 years and then chaos for many centuries after. One of the big causes of the fall was people chipping away at the institutions. Everyone taking their little piece, and not supporting what they had. After all, as far as they knew the Republic had been there for as long as they lived, why should it  change? They’ll just grab a little bit for themselves. Who’s going to notice? 

I’ve mentioned a buddy of mine who said his grand parents grew up in Germany, Prussia, actually, as Hitler was coming to power. “They all knew he was crazy, but when they decided to act it was too late.”

I heard an interview yesterday with a scientist who has studied the water situation on the Indian subcontinent. Much of that area depends on the glaciers in the Hindu-Kush. You know, where Mount Everest is? Yeah well the glaciers are melting. By 2100, in the best case scenario 50% of the glaciers will be left. More likely only 30%. Farmers also depend on ground water. However, with “modern” techniques they have had to go deeper and deeper to find water. This has multiple effects. Roots of plants can no longer reach the water table and die, and oh yeah, they eventually will run out of water from the ground. The melting glaciers mean less water from them. The overall effect? Well, it’s already a problem. The six countries that depend on this water are already squabbling over it. Imagine what will happen when two nuclear armed countries are facing little or no water?

Meanwhile in uplifting news, Ilan Omar went home to her crime infested hell hope, called Minnesota, and was met by a large cheering crowd.

Megan Rapinoe was interviewed in the back of last week’s Time magazine, which I finally got around to looking at. 

I will leave you with her words.

“Calm Yourself, 

Believe in Yourself, 

Stick to your Routine,

Smash it Home.”

472 Days until the 2020 election and 554 days until the Inauguration

PS The author practicing his Megan Rapinoe victory pose. GOALLLLL!!!!!! 

Day 923 Wednesday July 17, 2019

474 Days until the 2020 election and 556 days until the Inauguration

Will our government survive until we can get this guy out of office?

Several days ago the deadline for scientists at the Department of Agriculture to make up their minds as to whether they were going to move to Kansas City on their own dime, to report to a building that does not exist had come. Clearly, this is a plan designed to destroy this part of agriculture. These scientists have been on the forefront of agricultural research for decades. It was their group that developed penicillin in huge batches for WWII and provided our soldiers with a big advantage over their enemy. If Trump gets away with this, that agency’s research arm will be gone.

I have not heard the status of that fight at this time, but before I could I saw yesterday that he is now at it again. This time it’s the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). He’s “reorganizing” the department, moving them out of Washington to Colorado. 

Who is really behind this? 

Trump isn’t that smart.

Is it Bannon or his ghost?

In the case of the hateful racist stuff at the border we know it’s Stephen Miller, but here? I don’t know.

Yes, Bannon said he wanted to reduce the administrative state. So are we going to get rid of all the scientists in the government? Are we going to abandon our position as the world leader in scientific research? 

Let me suggest something. Let’s put a few sand flies infected with leishmaniasis in the offices of Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. You may not have heard of leishmaniasis. It is a parasite. It likes to eat the soft tissue of humans, notably, the ear lobes, nose, and cheeks. In other words “It eats your face off,” not figuratively, but literally. 

This parasite has been confined to remote parts of the tropics until recently when cases started showing up in Texas that were people who had never been to those places in the world where this sand fly was present. It turns out that scientists (oh those scum!) had determined that this particular sand fly is carried by the Brown Wood Rat and that said rat had moved north due to warmer weather conditions (Some would call it climate change.)

Guess where you can get treated for leishmaniasis? 

There is only one place.

The U.S. government. NIH to be specific. 

Hey, let’s save a few bucks and get rid of those pesky scientists too, okay?

Steve? Stephen? What are you saying? You know if you had some lips left you might be able to talk.

474 Days until the 2020 election and 556 days until the Inauguration

PS Maine? No. The San Juans.