Rick Kinnaird

Day 538

July 11, 2018 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Day 538 Wednesday July 11, 2018 1,040 Days to Go

I’m in Maine at my parents’ retirement home, which I inherited. It was their last home before they went to an elder care facility. We went to the Roosevelt camp in Canada before coming here. It was a place that FDR’s parents loved. Franklin went there as a boy and returned to it four times when he was President. Eleanor loved it too. It was one of the last places she visited before dying. In 1964 LBJ signed legislation that the U.S. along with Canada pay for a joint park administration.
Eleanor and Franklin were a little older than my parents, but we would say they were of “The Great Generation.” The generation that struggled through The Great Depression and defeated Hitler in WWII. After that they rebuilt Europe, discovered cures for all sorts of diseases and launched programs to help people earn more, and live healthier lives.
In short, they solved problems. They fixed things. They made the world a better place.

At the tiller of a trimaran — At the tiller “Don’t worry, I’m in control.”

Compare that to today.

We have a president who creates problems, breaks things, and makes people’s lives harder.

Recently, in the last three days, my right wing friends have been posting stuff about Trump and the Dems: how hard he’s working, how Republicans are for great stuff and the Dems aren’t, and how someone will always vote for Trump because he sent his planes to pick this guy up in Iraq when the government didn’t. The last thing is out and out false. Trump did no such thing. The comparison with the Dems is likewise flawed. The chart seems to omit that Republicans always run up the debt, can’t fix anything (like Puerto Rico), etc. etc. etc. As far as Trump working hard. Really? They showed he looked tired. Maybe all the lying is wearing him out.

As to the Supreme Court nominee, he is rated as the most conservative pick Trump could have chosen. The only one more conservative is Clarence Thomas.

That would make four justices that in my opinion should have never been put on the bench: Thomas for his sexual harassment, Alito for telling W he could ignore the law and write Executive Summaries that contradicted the law, Gorsuch for stealing Obama’s pick, and now this guy.
When you look at the way Roberts and his band have jumped through all sorts of legal stuff to come to wacky decisions it makes one loose faith in our court system. Let’s not forget the case that opened up the floodgates to dark money spilling into our campaign system. It was about a movie that was anti-Hillary (not from the last election but the one before that). They were to deem whether it was a political contribution. They instead went back to an earlier decision, one they were not asked about and overturned that case. And before Roberts they gave Florida to W, which he clearly didn’t win, and has now been shown he didn’t win, which allowed him to become President.

We are no longer solving problems and doing what is right, but creating them.

1,040 Days to Go

PS At the tiller of my yacht. As with all my yachts, I don’t own them. (The best boat to have is someone else’s.)

Day 535

July 8, 2018 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Day 535 Sunday July 8, 2018 1,043 Days to Go

How did we come to this?

Well, their are certain special interests that are having their way:

– The Christian conservatives are getting to push their agenda, which includes trying to outlaw abortion, privatize education and switch it to Christian schools, create the proper conditions for the apocalypse so that Jesus will come again and all the good people will be raised up to heaven.

– The Super Rich have gotten a massive tax cut.

– The corporate world has not only gotten tax cuts, but regulations lifted that restricted their poisoning the environment.

– The Russians have installed a puppet into the White House that is tearing apart our government.

All in all various interests have gotten what they wanted.

We are now witnessing the destruction of America, and these interests couldn’t be more pleased.

1,043 Days to Go

PS Moonrise over Cadillac Mountain. (Cadillac is slightly to the left. The highest light in the lower left is a car coming down from the Mountain. The bright light to the upper right is Venus.)

Day 533

July 6, 2018 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Day 533 Friday July 6, 2018 1,045 Days to Go

Scott Pruitt resigned. The head of the EPA is out. Here’s a quick quiz question, “Can you name anything that he did as head of the Environmental Protection Agency that protected the environment?” I can’t.

I can list things he did to destroy the agency, the environment, and to enrich himself, but do the actual job? No. Nahdah. Nothing.

He is being replaced by a crooked coal company executive. As they have been saying on the news, “the mission continues.” The mission to defang, obstruct, and ruin this agency. The one started by Nixon. Remember the reason the agency was started? A river in Ohio caught fire, and burned for days. Remember the pictures of the skylines of New York and Los Angeles? So obscured by the haze of pollution you couldn’t see them? Yeah, well let’s bring back the good old days. We’ve already started. We’ve told the power companies that they can push their sludge into our rivers. We’ve restricted employees in the agency from talking about climate change.

Will we survive? I think that is a very iffy proposition. Stephen Hawking had a show where he had volunteers guess how long they’d have to run given there was a series of Roman candles set to go off one after the other and each one represented 250,000 years of the Earth’s existence. (If you were of the fundamentalist Christian belief, like Mike Pense is, you’d need a very stubby candle, but if you are an informed person who takes the estimate of 4.5 billion years you’d need a lot more.) The candles were evenly spaced at four feet apart. The volunteers ran and ran and ran, none of their estimates came close. Exhausted they stopped running at 2.5 billion years or so.

It made me realize that when it comes to the Earth we as a race, as a species, are a mere sputter of the first Roman candle lit. I’ve heard that T-Rex is closer in time to us than it is to the Stegosaurus. When we are talking about this sort of time we aren’t even talking deep time. For radioactive elements to decompose it takes 10,000 years; for some it’s longer. We’ve created enough of that sort of garbage sitting around the world that any one of those places could destroy some or all of our environment. Will the Earth care? Naw.

Will Scott Pruitt and his cronies? Naw.

What about the rest of us?

1,045 Days to Go

PS My brother and The Crazy Canuck. Can you tell which is which?

Day 531

July 4, 2018 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Day 531 Wednesday July 4, 2018 1,047 Days to Go

Happy 4^th!

We are in Maine. The family house overlooks the Western Bay with Mount Desert Island, Cadilac Mountain, and Acadia National Park as our view. It’s a special place. My parents bought the place in the 1970s. It was a small cabin close to the water, which they expanded. Dad had the idea that solar would make sense one day. I had solar panels put on the roof last year thus fulfilling that idea.

It’s a special place. I got up this morning at 5:30 as the sun was beginning to come up. The water on the bay was so still that the reflection showed a the mountains bathed in an orange pink. As I said, it’s a special place. Tradition seems to come with being in Maine. We went to the Trenton Bridge Lobster Pound, where I introduced all four of “Peggy Kinnaird’s grandkids” to the woman who rings up the sales. She’s the daughter of the old guy who used to sit behind the counter. (He’s is featured on a large picture at the Bangor Airport) It brought tears to her eyes to see those kids. Alex at six foot five (or is it six?) almost touching the rafter standing behind the other three.

Today we’ll go to the baseball diamond in Bar Harbor for the blueberry pancakes and then watch the parade, complete no doubt with the tow trucks with clowns seated in tires hanging from the tow hook. (Then there was the year the local head shop rented a flatbed put a bale of hay on it and had a few long haired folks sitting around as Jimmy Hendrix’x Star Spangled Banner played on an endless loop.)

The old green general store, Butterfield’s, has been converted into a tee-shirt shop. I understand the great grandson is still alive, lives out on Route 3. I hope to go over and record the story of how the family got to Bar Harbor from Boston. His great grandfather at the personal request of Teddy Roosevelt helped Mr. Roosevelt get Boston behind the Rough Rider and as a reward he got a trip out west where he was dropped off by the train in the middle of nowhere in North Dakota. (I suspect that’s where Teddy Roosevelt Park is now.) He also somehow made enough money to leave Boston and sail “down east” (that’s where the term comes from – leaving Boston to go to Maine you sail down wind and to the east.) He set up his butcher shop in Bar Harbor. If you go into that old green building you can still see the overhead track where they brought the side of beef in to be butchered and put in the ice locker behind.

Last night I heard that Trump’s Supreme Court picks are between “hard-right” and “insane right.” Not a good choice for the country. Also, the intelligence analysts are saying that Trump is a spymaster’s dream as an asset. Easily manipulated by flattery or personal enrichment, knows nothing; what’s not to like? Big business, conservatives, and the Christian right have also realized that this is their chance to push their extreme agendas on the rest of us. The Roe vs Wade Supreme Court decision giving women the right to choose for themselves when it comes to reproductive rights is being talked about as if it had already been overturned, which given that all the jurists Trump is looking at are hand picked by the Federalist Society, a group dedicated to pushing right wing ideologues onto every open bench seat in the country is not a surprise. But that is only where the agenda of these people begin. It is the total enslavement of the general population by changing the rules. It is the curtailing of personal freedom and choice. It is the grabbing of power and keeping it.

The Federalist Society are “originalists.” They say they want to look at the Constitution as it was originally intended. If you take them at their word that would mean women would not have the right to vote, white men would rule, and the 2^nd Amendment would be used as originally intended – to allow slave owners to chase down and keep enslaved black people. The only question in my mind is how far will they be able to go? Part of this overall strategy is to weaken the Federal government and to take control of as many state houses as possible. At the state level is the easiest place to wield power because most people don’t pay attention to what the state government is doing. This allows those powerful interests to keep local government in check (look at Michigan and Flint) and to stop the Federal government from doing much. Why are they dismantling the Interior Department, the EPA, The FTC? Because they get in the way of allowing them, the powerful, to have their way. They hide their motives behind phrases and slogans. “Freedom” is a favorite. My own congressman, the nutty right winger and phony economist, Dave Brat is part of the “Freedom Caucus.” He was going on about getting rid of Obamacare so everyone could have “freedom to choose.” To choose between one price gouging health care plan and another is what he means. Or there’s the Supreme Court ruling saying that a person should be free to not have to pay union dues. It’s okay to get the benefit, but you don’t have to aid financially. This guts the unions; a key goal of the powerful interests. Unions, like true democracy, can be a pain in the butt. However, no one has come up with better ways to deal with these situations. Ever since Reagan went after the air traffic controller’s union membership in unions has been dropping, and they are now becoming inconsequential in the U.S. economy and surprise surprise so have the good paying jobs that they used to garner.

This is not an accident. When Hillary Clinton said “Vast Right Wing Conspiracy” she was correct. I don’t think most of us, including her, realized how big and evil it was or is today.

If you want to see what this cabal can do, look at Chile, where when Pinochet was dictator there, he managed to push through a new constitution, aided, abetted, and guided by some of these folks from the U.S. Their goal was to hamstring the federal government of Chile because as the old saying goes, “Some politicians won’t stay bought.” A new progressive candidate for president won in Chile a few years ago, and she discovered that a lot of the things she promised in her campaign couldn’t be done unless and until the constitution was changed. What are the Koch brothers pushing for? A constitutional convention.

Don’t be fooled. Don’t be cajoled into believing “that it will all work out.” There are evil people determined to bend our country’s system of government to their will, and they are succeeding. A friend of mine said that his grandparents were living in Germany when Hitler was coming to power. He said everyone knew Hitler was crazy, but by the time they decided to act; it was too late.

Our country and our way of life is being threatened like never before. We must stand up. We must fight. We must vote and get others to vote. For those who believe in the cult of Trump, I am afraid they are hopeless, or it will be “too late” before they realize.

1,047 Days to Go

PS The Western Bay, Maine, July 4^th 5:30am.

Day 526

June 29, 2018 by Rick Kinnaird Leave a Comment

Day 526 Friday June 29, 2018 1,052 Days to Go

I’ve been busy getting ready for a vacation. I’m now in St. Andrews by the Sea at The Algonquin Resort in New Brunswick, Canada. It’s a place I remember, by name, coming with my parents. At least, I think we stayed here. I can’t quite remember and nothing has sparked a memory. The Algonquin is one of those old world big imposing Victorian like structures. A 500 room cottage in the woods, with a golf course that would make any duffer drool. I’m sitting on a wide high ceiling porch overlooking the giant turn circle, sipping coffee and waiting for my wife to join me and then we’ll go to the buffet breakfast, served until eleven. We only have two nights here. I should have booked a week. You need that long to get accustomed to the pace.

Meanwhile, the news is a mixed bag, mostly dreadful. The only bright light is the young woman who won her primary challenge in New York. How did she do it? By realizing that the Democratic database was too clumsy and developing her own canvasing system that concentrated on getting new people registered to vote. Hopefully, others will copy her example. The database that I have used to canvas in the past five or six elections is terrible. It’s out of date and seems to waste my efforts. This time I told our candidate I’d do a fund raiser. I saw no point in wandering around a neighborhood doing door hangers in a helter-skelter fashion.

A Supreme Court Justice is retiring, which many lament saying he was the swing vote. What isn’t being talked about is the ties of his children with the Trump children and other right wing kids. But this is all part of the far right Koch brothers’ grand plan. The justices that Trump is looking at are all coming hand picked from The Federalist Society, a right wing very conservative group whose heroes are Ted Cruz and Anthony Scalia. They have in their sights the overturning of Roe vs Wade, and that’s just the beginning. Their true aim is to enslave the general population so that they can have cheap labor. This sounds harsh I know, but that’s the plan. They dress it up in fancy phrases, like freedom and liberty, but it is anything but that. They wish to enrich themselves at the expense of the rest of us – period. They believe they are entitled to it.

Part of this plan involves putting our government in so much debt that they will say we have to slash programs that help not only the poor, but the middle class: social security, medicare, medicaid, are all targets.

As one commentator said about Trump and his spending, he promised to distance himself from Obama’s debt, which he did. Obama had a debt of $400M. Remember Obama came in facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Trump inherited a relatively stable economy and has already run up a debt exceeding one trillion dollars. This gives people like Paul Ryan cover to say, “Oh gosh, we’ve got to cut social security, etc. etc. etc.”

In foreign policy, Trump has none. His idea of foreign policy is a photo op. He now is going to meet with Putin. For what reason? For a picture. This will help Putin show he’s a world leader. As one former diplomat said you have to realize that Putin orders people poisoned, beaten, and jailed. His goal is to disrupt democracies around the world. He is propping up a brutal dictatorship in Syria. He meddled in our election. He got Trump elected and he now manipulates him like a little puppet.

The King of Jordan, a former eye doctor who had the kingship thrust upon him, has learned how to handle Trump. Tell him he’s humble, praise him, give him gifts and praise. It’s all personal. Enrich Trump and he’ll do whatever you want. Sad but true.

Putin knows this. If you want to see a spy master work an asset, watch what Putin gets Trump to do. He already got Trump to cancel the annual war exercises with South Korea. What will he suggest at their meeting this time?

Our allies have to gird themselves for another round of insults, reverses, and god knows.

We are in tough times. The only light I see is a 28 year old woman who has beaten a political machine. She espouses universal health care, getting rid of I.C.E. She’s for abortion rights and other progressive initiatives.

Many folks are talking now about how Obama was too nice with the Republicans. I don’t think whomever comes to power next, will make that mistake. The Republicans have shown that they will lie, cheat, and bend the rules and traditions to the point of breaking to get their way. So what if it’s out of step with the majority of the country? They don’t represent the country. The represent the 1% or really the 1/10 of 1%.

Several years ago, before Trump, there was a survey of folks. They were asked if they were in the one percent. Twenty percent thought they were and 19% thought they would be one day. That’s 39% that believe they are in or will be in the 1%. That’s about the number Trump gets in support.

Some people still believe that Trump “must know something (they don’t)” or that “he’s a businessman (so he must have a good reason for doing it, that they don’t understand.)” I don’t know if it is possible to reach those folks. Trump has proven, and I have tried to document that he knows nothing. He is not a businessman. He is a con man, who has run a string of businesses that have enriched himself and his family, but no one else. Mark Cuban pointed out that the way you tell a really successful businessman is by how many other people he made rich. In Trump’s case there are none, only his family, and he did it by screwing others, by not paying his bills, by cheating and lying. Will the debt come due? It’s hard to say.

1,052 Days to Go