It's time to get @AlFranken off the bench so he can come back to doing what he does better than any other Democrat: taking down right wing blowhards. #BringBackFranken pic.twitter.com/fphaB3sG9K— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 8, 2018
Wednesday, September 12, 2018
Bring Back Al Franken
Saturday, September 08, 2018
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?
Remember back when we had an articulate and sane president? It's only been a couple of years but still it was nice to see 44 completely fucking own 45 in the speech below. Even better, he called out the Republicans with this corker of a line.
Got a lot of good Republican friends here in Illinois, but over the past few decades, the politics of division, resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.
Yep. Exactly. He went on...
This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics, systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, and minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi. Or my birth certificate. Rejected science. Rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president.
None of this is conservative. I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical.
Double yep. Here is the best line of the whole speech.
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?
The simple fact that Trump and his minions can't say this shows how far fucking gone they are.
Here is the full transcript of the speech.
Here is the video.
The score?
Obama 1,000,000, Trump/Republicans 0
Got a lot of good Republican friends here in Illinois, but over the past few decades, the politics of division, resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.
Yep. Exactly. He went on...
This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics, systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, and minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi. Or my birth certificate. Rejected science. Rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president.
None of this is conservative. I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical.
Double yep. Here is the best line of the whole speech.
How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?
The simple fact that Trump and his minions can't say this shows how far fucking gone they are.
Here is the full transcript of the speech.
Here is the video.
The score?
Obama 1,000,000, Trump/Republicans 0
Thursday, September 06, 2018
Politically Incorrect Round 2
Donald Trump made his pitch to voters by claiming that he was "politically incorrect." By that, he and most conservatives mean that they like to insult and demean people based on their gender, ethnicity or physical disability.
Like, say, Trump opening his presidential campaign by claiming Mexicans are rapists, constantly calling women fat pigs, his Megyn Kelly "blood coming out of her wherever" comment, or his mocking of reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition.
That isn't being political incorrect. That's just childish, rude and uncivil behavior.
But now that Trump is in office, he's constantly clamoring for real political correctness.
Take Colin Kaepernick and hundreds of football players who kneel during the national anthem. They are politically incorrect. Trump wants them fired for not toeing the party line, the very definition of political correctness.
Take those demonstrators protesting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination that Trump is constantly calling "a disgrace" (I assume Trump means the protesters, not the nomination -- but who knows?). They are politically incorrect.
Take the four or five books about the political situation in the White House that Trump claims are "fake news," and whose authors he is threatening to sue for libel. Those books are politically incorrect.
A libel suit is a completely idle threat, because A) Trump is a public figure, and B) if he actually went to court the defense would get to call witnesses, including Trump himself, and they would all have to testify under oath. Which Trump is incapable of doing because a) he is a pathological liar, and b) his senility-addled memory is so corroded that his only answers would be "I don't remember."
Take that editorial written by a White House senior staffer for the New York Times, which says that Trump has to constantly be handled behind his back to prevent the country from bumbling into nuclear catastrophe from his incompetence.
That's politically incorrect in the most literal sense: the entire White House staff is forced to directly work against the petty whims of a president who is intentionally trying to drive the country into chaos.
"Politically correct" came into common usage in the early 1900s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, who demanded political correctness from party members: comply or die.
Trump and his conservative enablers want to enforce that sort of real political correctness on America by trying to bully them into saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays," by harassing, threatening, attacking and trying to silence the press, constantly attacking gay and transgendered people, and by sacrificing women on the altar of anti-abortion politics by literally forcing them to bear children against their will. It's like Nazi Germany's eugenics program in reverse.
"Politically incorrect" gained wide currency when Bill Maher hosted a show by that name on Comedy Central in 1993. Maher, one of Trump's biggest critics, has since moved his gig to HBO and renamed it Real Time with Bill Maher.
If only Trump had misappropriated Maher's politics, not just his catch phrase . . . .
Like, say, Trump opening his presidential campaign by claiming Mexicans are rapists, constantly calling women fat pigs, his Megyn Kelly "blood coming out of her wherever" comment, or his mocking of reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition.
That isn't being political incorrect. That's just childish, rude and uncivil behavior.
But now that Trump is in office, he's constantly clamoring for real political correctness.
Take Colin Kaepernick and hundreds of football players who kneel during the national anthem. They are politically incorrect. Trump wants them fired for not toeing the party line, the very definition of political correctness.
Take those demonstrators protesting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination that Trump is constantly calling "a disgrace" (I assume Trump means the protesters, not the nomination -- but who knows?). They are politically incorrect.
Take the four or five books about the political situation in the White House that Trump claims are "fake news," and whose authors he is threatening to sue for libel. Those books are politically incorrect.
A libel suit is a completely idle threat, because A) Trump is a public figure, and B) if he actually went to court the defense would get to call witnesses, including Trump himself, and they would all have to testify under oath. Which Trump is incapable of doing because a) he is a pathological liar, and b) his senility-addled memory is so corroded that his only answers would be "I don't remember."
Take that editorial written by a White House senior staffer for the New York Times, which says that Trump has to constantly be handled behind his back to prevent the country from bumbling into nuclear catastrophe from his incompetence.
That's politically incorrect in the most literal sense: the entire White House staff is forced to directly work against the petty whims of a president who is intentionally trying to drive the country into chaos.
"Politically correct" came into common usage in the early 1900s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, who demanded political correctness from party members: comply or die.
Trump and his conservative enablers want to enforce that sort of real political correctness on America by trying to bully them into saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays," by harassing, threatening, attacking and trying to silence the press, constantly attacking gay and transgendered people, and by sacrificing women on the altar of anti-abortion politics by literally forcing them to bear children against their will. It's like Nazi Germany's eugenics program in reverse.
"Politically incorrect" gained wide currency when Bill Maher hosted a show by that name on Comedy Central in 1993. Maher, one of Trump's biggest critics, has since moved his gig to HBO and renamed it Real Time with Bill Maher.
If only Trump had misappropriated Maher's politics, not just his catch phrase . . . .
Monday, September 03, 2018
Too Damn Old
If there's one thing we should have learned about the election of Donald Trump (and Ronald Reagan), it's that there should be a mandatory retirement age for presidents.
Reagan, famously, was suffering from Alzheimer's even before he left office at the age of 77. Trump, at only 72, is clearly suffering from some sort of cognitive deficit (probably Alzheimer's, which his father died of).
So it's ridiculous when we read articles like this one, saying that John Kerry "is not ruling out" a presidential run.
John Kerry would be 77 on inauguration day in 2021. That's too old. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 77-year-old man is 9.9 years. Seems okay, right? Until you realize that the last 10 years of your life are the most precarious, filled with heart attacks, strokes, atherosclerosis, cancer, blindness, deafness, dementia and broken bones that occur in rapid succession until one of them kills you.
To make things worse, John Kerry lost the last time he ran, and he was never a charismatic candidate to begin with. He got the nomination because it was basically "his turn." Other elderly potential candidates aren't much better off.
Bernie Sanders would be 79, with a life expectancy of 8.8 years. At that age, there's a 5.3% chance of him dying in his first year, a 5.9% chance in the second, a 6.5% chance in the third and a 7.2% chance in the fourth year.
That's too damn old. Sanders would spend every single day of his presidency dealing with serious health issues.
Elizabeth Warren would be 71. As a woman her life expectancy would be 15.7 years. She's probably still too old, but based on the numbers, it's a reasonable risk. But at that age a woman's bones are usually very brittle: a fall coming down the stairs of Air Force One could literally kill her.
And it's not just death and dementia that are the issue. Yes, the elderly have a great deal of experience. But they also have difficulty assimilating new information, have slow reaction times, do not handle stress well, and suffer from diminished hearing and vision.
The elderly cannot even get a good night's sleep, and drugs that induce sleep only make things worse, as was highlighted when George H. W. Bush was discovered using Halcion.
A sleep-deprived septuagenarian should not have their finger on the nuclear button.
Therefore, the Constitution should be amended to put a mandatory retirement age on the president and members of the Supreme Court. The age of 70 seems like a good number.
It's unlikely that such an amendment will never happen, though Trump may be the impetus we needed to get it passed. So voters and parties should simply reject elderly candidates out of hand.
Lest you complain about age discrimination, the Constitution is fine with age limits on office holders: members of the House must be at least 25, senators must be at least 30 and the president must be at least 35. The Founders deemed people younger than those ages not competent to be president.
Before the advent of modern medicine retirement age wasn't really an issue: if you weren't physically and mentally fit to be president, you just died. But medical treatment has extended the human life span beyond the age at which one is competent to be president.
If you can be too young to be president, you can certainly be too old.
One could argue that a candidate who passes a rigorous physical and mental examination should be able to serve longer. The problem with this is that there are no real standards for what is required of a president.
The Montreal Cognitive Assessement administered to Donald Trump proved he could copy a cube, name a camel, rhino and lion, and knew what time 11:10 is. Wow. He's a stable genius!
When I was younger I thought the idea of mandatory retirement was wrong. But now that I'm 61 and have more elderly friends, I know first-hand that no 75-year-old is fit to be president, and certainly no 80-year-old is. I have known many septuagenarians -- some of them stronger and fitter than myself -- and six months later they were dead from a stroke or a heart attack.
People at that age should be out golfing, or puttering in the garden or bouncing grandchildren on their knee. Not setting trade policy, or trying to run a war in Afghanistan. Or having Twitter beefs with NFL players.
Reagan, famously, was suffering from Alzheimer's even before he left office at the age of 77. Trump, at only 72, is clearly suffering from some sort of cognitive deficit (probably Alzheimer's, which his father died of).
So it's ridiculous when we read articles like this one, saying that John Kerry "is not ruling out" a presidential run.
John Kerry would be 77 on inauguration day in 2021. That's too old. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 77-year-old man is 9.9 years. Seems okay, right? Until you realize that the last 10 years of your life are the most precarious, filled with heart attacks, strokes, atherosclerosis, cancer, blindness, deafness, dementia and broken bones that occur in rapid succession until one of them kills you.
To make things worse, John Kerry lost the last time he ran, and he was never a charismatic candidate to begin with. He got the nomination because it was basically "his turn." Other elderly potential candidates aren't much better off.
Bernie Sanders would be 79, with a life expectancy of 8.8 years. At that age, there's a 5.3% chance of him dying in his first year, a 5.9% chance in the second, a 6.5% chance in the third and a 7.2% chance in the fourth year.
That's too damn old. Sanders would spend every single day of his presidency dealing with serious health issues.
Elizabeth Warren would be 71. As a woman her life expectancy would be 15.7 years. She's probably still too old, but based on the numbers, it's a reasonable risk. But at that age a woman's bones are usually very brittle: a fall coming down the stairs of Air Force One could literally kill her.
And it's not just death and dementia that are the issue. Yes, the elderly have a great deal of experience. But they also have difficulty assimilating new information, have slow reaction times, do not handle stress well, and suffer from diminished hearing and vision.
The elderly cannot even get a good night's sleep, and drugs that induce sleep only make things worse, as was highlighted when George H. W. Bush was discovered using Halcion.
A sleep-deprived septuagenarian should not have their finger on the nuclear button.
Therefore, the Constitution should be amended to put a mandatory retirement age on the president and members of the Supreme Court. The age of 70 seems like a good number.
It's unlikely that such an amendment will never happen, though Trump may be the impetus we needed to get it passed. So voters and parties should simply reject elderly candidates out of hand.
Lest you complain about age discrimination, the Constitution is fine with age limits on office holders: members of the House must be at least 25, senators must be at least 30 and the president must be at least 35. The Founders deemed people younger than those ages not competent to be president.
Before the advent of modern medicine retirement age wasn't really an issue: if you weren't physically and mentally fit to be president, you just died. But medical treatment has extended the human life span beyond the age at which one is competent to be president.
If you can be too young to be president, you can certainly be too old.
One could argue that a candidate who passes a rigorous physical and mental examination should be able to serve longer. The problem with this is that there are no real standards for what is required of a president.
The Montreal Cognitive Assessement administered to Donald Trump proved he could copy a cube, name a camel, rhino and lion, and knew what time 11:10 is. Wow. He's a stable genius!
When I was younger I thought the idea of mandatory retirement was wrong. But now that I'm 61 and have more elderly friends, I know first-hand that no 75-year-old is fit to be president, and certainly no 80-year-old is. I have known many septuagenarians -- some of them stronger and fitter than myself -- and six months later they were dead from a stroke or a heart attack.
People at that age should be out golfing, or puttering in the garden or bouncing grandchildren on their knee. Not setting trade policy, or trying to run a war in Afghanistan. Or having Twitter beefs with NFL players.
Sunday, September 02, 2018
Saturday, September 01, 2018
Trump Supporter Kills Liberal
The last installment of Sacha Baron Cohen's amazing Showtime series, "Who Is America?" aired its final episode last Sunday and it was fucking brilliant. Check out what he got Trump supporters to do.
Yes, that's right, the are fingercuffing a Trump doll in the hopes of looking liberal enough to infiltrate left wing terrorist cells. Later in the segment, Cohen tells the guy on the right to press a button to kill one of the liberals they tagged and the asshole does it.
As I've said many, many times, Trump supporters want to kill liberals. That's how much hate and anger these people have inside of them.
Good thing Gitmo is still open. We're going to need it:)
Yes, that's right, the are fingercuffing a Trump doll in the hopes of looking liberal enough to infiltrate left wing terrorist cells. Later in the segment, Cohen tells the guy on the right to press a button to kill one of the liberals they tagged and the asshole does it.
As I've said many, many times, Trump supporters want to kill liberals. That's how much hate and anger these people have inside of them.
Good thing Gitmo is still open. We're going to need it:)
Friday, August 31, 2018
What Trump Really Thinks About His Base
The core of Donald Trump's base is conservative Southerners. Without them breathing down the necks of incumbents, Trump would be completely powerless.
But what does Trump actually think of Southerners? His shabby treatment of Jeff Sessions, the preeminent Southerner in his cabinet, tells you exactly what Trump thinks:
Seized by paroxysms of anger, Trump has intermittently pushed to fire his attorney general since March 2017, when Sessions announced his recusal from the Russia investigation. If Sessions’ recusal was his original sin, Trump has come to resent him for other reasons, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can’t stand his Southern accent and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television — in part because he “talks like he has marbles in his mouth,” the president has told aides.Yes, Donald Trump thinks Southerners are stupid. He doesn't like Sessions because he talks dumb, and he doesn't have an elite edumacation. Trump clearly thinks that Sessions is a chump because he adheres to the Southern culture of honor, a concept wholly foreign to the narcissistic Trump.
Trump ran his entire campaign blasting "the elites," by which he meant other Republicans, other rich people, the media and Democrats. His pitch to the voters was that the "elites" think they're so smart but we know they're not.
Yet Trump brags endlessly about how smart he is, how high his IQ is, how brilliant his uncle was, and how elite his schools were.
Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business. They're not bad schools, but they sure as hell aren't Harvard or Stanford or MIT or even Yale. And he only got into Wharton because the admissions guy was his brother's pal, and his daddy was rich.
It's obvious Trump thinks his supporters are idiots, so eager for phony praise that they'll swallow any lie. Bragging that people would vote for you even if you shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue is not a compliment. Blind fealty to a murderer implies that his followers have the intellect and morals of a mafia stooge, and that Trump is a mafia don.
Trump clearly thinks he owns these people, that they are his chattel. He demands adulation from his political serfs, even as he publicly derides them.
In February of 2016 Trump smirked, "I love the poorly educated." Given his long history of dissing anyone who doesn't have an elite Ivy League education, what he was really saying was, "I love stupid people. They're so easy to con."
Trump's real opinion of his supporters is starting to leak out, and sooner or later he will blow a gasket and really let them have it. My guess is that when his poll numbers really start to tank, falling to, say, 70% unfavorable nationwide and only 50-50 among Republicans, this senile old crank will crack and unleash a Twitter tirade that will alienate even the hard-core white supremacists.
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Rudy Giuliani Is a Romanian Foreign Agent
You would think that after several Trump lackeys have been nailed for being unregistered foreign agents that current members of the administration would be sensitive to the conflicts of interest and inherent corruption of lobbying for foreigners at the same time they're drawing a salary from the US government.
You would be wrong. Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been caught lobbying for corrupt Romanian politicians:
This raises several questions. Why is Giuliani doing this? Who is paying him to promote corruption in Romania? Did Trump approve of this? Does Trump have any connection to the people who are paying Giuliani? (Interesting side note: Trump almost exclusively hire Romanians to work at Mar a Lago.) Is Giuliani also lobbying American officials to back off on their support for the anti-corruption drive in Romania? Is Giuliani registered as a foreign agent?
The optics of this are terrible. Romania was one of the most corrupt countries in the Soviet bloc back in the day. Its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, tried to flee the country in 1989 amidst the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes. He was captured, tried for genocide and executed.
Now the US president's personal lawyer is fronting for the same kind of corrupt scumbags.
People used to the think of Giuliani as "America's Mayor" because he expressed the anguish everyone felt after 9/11. But he became a two-dimensional caricature when he started running for president, where he failed miserably. No matter what the question, Giuliani's response was always "9/11! 9/11!"
Giuliani then became a one-dimensional shyster selling ridiculous nonsense on television in defense of his corrupt master, spouting nonsense like, "Truth isn't truth!" and "Trump didn't collude and even if he did it isn't a crime!"
And now Giuliani descending even lower on the evolutionary scale, to some kind of slime mold, by cashing in on his connection to the president to help corrupt foreigners stay out of jail.
This is the guy used to brag about putting corrupt mafia dons in jail. Now he spends all his time trying to get them off.
You would be wrong. Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been caught lobbying for corrupt Romanian politicians:
President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, wrote a letter criticizing an anti-corruption drive [supported by Trump's own] State Department.Giuliani is using his position as Trump's lawyer to derail Romania's drive to eliminate corruption, and at the same time directly sabotaging the Trump administration's own policy on this issue.
The Romanian reaction to the letter — which Giuliani said was written for pay in his capacity as a consultant — was the most concrete indication yet that the Trump administration’s freewheeling approach to ethics and business conflicts is having an effect not only inside the United States, but on U.S. allies as well.
A State Department official told The Washington Post: “Rudy Giuliani does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy.” Giuliani, for his part, has insisted that he is a private citizen and was not speaking on behalf of the Trump administration. But that is not the way the letter was received in Romania, where critics of the anti-corruption drive seized on it as an endorsement from a senior official who has Trump’s ear.
This raises several questions. Why is Giuliani doing this? Who is paying him to promote corruption in Romania? Did Trump approve of this? Does Trump have any connection to the people who are paying Giuliani? (Interesting side note: Trump almost exclusively hire Romanians to work at Mar a Lago.) Is Giuliani also lobbying American officials to back off on their support for the anti-corruption drive in Romania? Is Giuliani registered as a foreign agent?
The optics of this are terrible. Romania was one of the most corrupt countries in the Soviet bloc back in the day. Its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, tried to flee the country in 1989 amidst the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes. He was captured, tried for genocide and executed.
Now the US president's personal lawyer is fronting for the same kind of corrupt scumbags.
People used to the think of Giuliani as "America's Mayor" because he expressed the anguish everyone felt after 9/11. But he became a two-dimensional caricature when he started running for president, where he failed miserably. No matter what the question, Giuliani's response was always "9/11! 9/11!"
Giuliani then became a one-dimensional shyster selling ridiculous nonsense on television in defense of his corrupt master, spouting nonsense like, "Truth isn't truth!" and "Trump didn't collude and even if he did it isn't a crime!"
And now Giuliani descending even lower on the evolutionary scale, to some kind of slime mold, by cashing in on his connection to the president to help corrupt foreigners stay out of jail.
This is the guy used to brag about putting corrupt mafia dons in jail. Now he spends all his time trying to get them off.
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Finally: a Modicum of Justice
It looks like decades of cops shooting unarmed black boys and men with impunity is slowly coming to an end:
Yeah, it's hard being a cop. But it is the height of hubris -- and stupidity -- to fire a rifle into a fleeing car when you have no idea whatsoever who is in the car or what they might have been doing before you came on the scene.
This is a serious problem with cops: they automatically assume that anyone leaving the scene is guilty of something. They don't seem to get that the best way to avoid being shot is to immediately leave any place where there are trigger-happy people with guns.
A white former Texas police officer was found guilty of murder on Tuesday for fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager last year as the boy left a house party in a car full of teenagers.This case makes clear the real reason cops shot people: it's not that they're afraid for their lives, or the lives of others. They're angry because they're being disobeyed and they don't want to "let those cocksuckers get away."
Roy Oliver was fired from the Balch Springs Police Department days after the April 2017 shooting. Oliver killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards after the then-officer fired into a moving car carrying five black teenagers leaving a local house party. Edwards was in the front passenger seat.
Oliver testified during the Dallas County trial that he opened fire after seeing the car move toward his partner. He says he thought his partner was in danger. But his partner told jurors he didn’t fear for his life and never felt the need to fire his weapon.
Prosecutors said Oliver fired after the vehicle passed Gross.
Yeah, it's hard being a cop. But it is the height of hubris -- and stupidity -- to fire a rifle into a fleeing car when you have no idea whatsoever who is in the car or what they might have been doing before you came on the scene.
This is a serious problem with cops: they automatically assume that anyone leaving the scene is guilty of something. They don't seem to get that the best way to avoid being shot is to immediately leave any place where there are trigger-happy people with guns.
Sunday, August 26, 2018
Trump's North Korea Deal Is an Utter Failure
Remember a couple of months ago, when Donald Trump returned victorious from Singapore, claiming that he saved the world from nuclear annihilation by getting North Korea to denuclearize? Well, that's not happening.
The other day he told his secretary of state to cancel his trip to North Korea. North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper responded with this:
Such acts prove that the U.S. is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime which deserves merciless divine punishment in case the U.S. fails in the scenario of the DPRK’s unjust and brigandish denuclearisation first.And guess who Trump blames for the failure of these talks? You guessed it: China.
We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the U.S. as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face.
On Friday, President Donald Trump canceled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's trip to North Korea, citing the lack of progress on denuclearization and blaming China. "Because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization," Trump tweeted.
Trump is right. His trade war with China is undermining diplomatic efforts to denuclearize North Korea, as well as other US objectives.
Trump promised Americans that a trade war would be "good and easy to win." While the trade war may be hurting China more than the US, tariffs are also taking a toll on American soybean farmers and businesses that rely on Chinese imports. Experts expect American consumers to be hit hard if the reciprocal tariffs keep escalating.Think about it: North Korea has been China's loyal ally and proxy for almost seven decades. Trump has spent the last two years alternating between belligerent racist screeds against the Chinese, and insincere, phony fawning praise of their autocratic communist leaders.
Trump might as well have tweeted, "I kicked China in the nuts and now they won't help me take down North Korea! Waah!"
Why would China help Trump?
This is a genius in the art of the deal? This is why Trump has been divorced twice and his current wife doesn't even want him to touch her in public: he has no idea how to motivate human beings with anything other than threats and phony praise.
Trump doesn't get it. China is a dictatorship with an iron-fisted control over its population. Its leaders control all social media and ruthlessly censor and imprison dissenters. Its leaders have direct control over all Chinese industry and economy. They have life-time appointments and never have to stand for election.
Despite years of trying to undermine the free press, wanna-be dictator Trump cannot muzzle his critics. Americans disapprove of his leadership two to one, in large part because he conspired with a foreign power to steal an election in direct contravention of the Constitution. His congressional allies are facing a crushing defeat in the polls in several weeks, and Trump himself may well be impeached when the depths of his treason and perfidy are documented.
The Chinese leaders will still be there long after Trump and his cronies are long gone. He cannot intimidate them with mafioso-style tactics from the New York real estate market.
In the meantime, the Chinese can weather any trade war Trump tries to throw at them, especially considering how Trump has alienated all our other allies: Europe, Asia, South America, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. Even Putin is mad at Trump because he is powerless to stop sanctions against Russia, precisely because he conspired with them.
Trump has unilaterally given up any leverage he might have had over the Chinese with his blundering bravado.
Trump's meager popularity and hold on power hinge completely on keeping the small percentage of rabid racists and misogynists in the Republican Party entertained. The fact is, Trump is only hanging on by a thread, and not just because his criminality is coming to light. His incoherent policies are already hurting his base more than they are hurting China, who can just sell their goods to the rest of the world.
A serious economic downturn -- the inevitable outcome of his foolish trade war -- will kill his presidency. One slip of the tongue -- say, Trump admitting on tape that he thinks his voters are fucking morons who are so stupid they would support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue -- will alienate his base and cut the legs off his presidency.
Then Republicans in congress, most of whom Trump has insulted or embarrassed in one way or another, will turn on him "like a bitch," as he would phrase it.
Americans love to root for the little guy, which Trump somehow -- against all reason -- managed to cast himself as in the reality show that was the 2016 election.
The corollary is that Americans love to kick bullies when they're down. And Trump is the biggest bully this country has ever seen. When he falls, the people supporting him now will be the ones denouncing him the loudest.
Saturday, August 25, 2018
Friday, August 24, 2018
Trump Is Just Another Mafia Thug
The Republican Party is officially no longer a political party, but an organized criminal gang, like the mafia.
You need look no further than Donald Trump, who is literally the Don of the Republican Party, for evidence of this fact.
He has never sounded presidential, but the other day he showed his true stripes.
“I know all about flipping, for 30, 40 years, I’ve been watching flippers,” he said in a Fox News interview. “I have seen it many times,” he continued, leaning in toward Earhardt. “I have had many friends involved in this stuff. It’s called flipping, and it almost ought to be illegal.”Trump is supposed to be a real estate developer, so you'd think that the "flipping" he's talking about is buying property at one price, and then turning around and selling it for a much higher price. The practice of flipping was a major factor in the Great Recession, and yes, it almost ought to be illegal.
Except that's not what the Don is talking about. No, Trump is talking about the extremely common legal tactic of getting underlings involved in criminal activities to provide testimony against their bosses in exchange for lesser sentences.
Wait a second -- Trump has "many friends involved in this stuff?" Why does the president of the United States have so many crooked friends prosecuted based on the testimony of underlings? What kind of people has he been palling around with?
When the New York Times reported that White House counsel Don McGahn had been interviewed for 30 hours by the the special counsel's legal team, Trump sounded like an irate mobster:
The failing @nytimes wrote a Fake piece today implying that because White House Councel Don McGahn was giving hours of testimony to the Special Councel, he must be a John Dean type 'RAT.' But I allowed him and all others to testify - I didn't have to...A 'RAT?' A John Dean type 'RAT'? As you may recall, John Dean told the truth and provided critical testimony that helped remove a corrupt and criminal president:
Dean pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice before Watergate trial judge John Sirica on October 19, 1973. He admitted supervising payments of "hush money" to the Watergate burglars, notably E. Howard Hunt, and revealed the existence of Nixon's enemies list. Archibald Cox, Watergate Special Prosecutor, was interested in meeting with Dean, and planned to do so a few days later, but Cox was fired by Nixon the very next day, and it was not until some time later that Cox was replaced by Leon Jaworski. On August 2, 1974, Sirica handed down a sentence to Dean of one-to-four years in a minimum-security prison. However, when Dean surrendered as scheduled on September 3, he was diverted to the custody of U.S. Marshals, and kept instead at Fort Holabird (near Baltimore, Maryland) in a special "safe house" holding facility primarily used for witnesses against the Mafia.That's funny: Michael Cohen, like Dean, just admitted supervising illegal payments of "hush money." This time it was to Trump's mistresses, to prevent their stories surfacing in the media just before the 2016 election.
The net is closing around Trump. The other day Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to several crimes, indicating that Trump had directed him to commit them. Three people close to Trump have been granted immunity to prosecution in exchange for their testimony: David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher, another Enquirer executive, and Allen Weisselberg, the CFO of the Trump Organization.
Weisselberg has been working for the Trump family since the 70s, and he knows where all the financial bodies are buried.
The other day I suggested that Republicans in the House and Senate should threaten to release Trump's tax records unless he resigns from office, and have his successor pardon him and all his cronies before the Mueller investigation dug any deeper. With Weisselberg's cooperation it may already be too late for Trump.
Now we have word that the Manhattan DA is looking into pressing charges against the Trump Organization. Trump and the Republican Party won't be able to pardon his way out of that.
Think about that name, "The Trump Organization." Most legit real estate developers have names like Brookfield Asset Management, Simon Property Group, Prologis, Ventas, Boston Properties, and so on.
But Trump's company sound like some mafia front. And it's no wonder. Trump has a long history of dealing with the mobs that controlled the New York construction industry, had Russian mobsters living in Trump Tower, got a sweetheart real estate deal from a Russian oligarch, and associated with mobsters in Atlantic City with his failed casinos.
Trump's election is one of the worst things that has ever happened to this country. Ironically, Trump's election is also the worst thing that ever happened to the Republican Party -- and him.
If he hadn't been elected he could have continued on his corrupt and merry way, and gotten away with it all. But he just had to open his big fat mouth and invite the Russians to hack Hillary's emails in front of the entire world.
What a moron.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Where's the Fox News Outrage Over Nazi Rapist?
Remember when Donald Trump started his campaign by claiming Mexicans were rapists?
Remember when, after a woman was killed by a right-wing nutjob with a car in Charlottesville, Donald Trump said that some of the Nazi sympathizers were "very fine people?"
Well, here's a story on NPR about a Nazi sympathizer who is a serial rapist that was finally tracked down by DNA on GEDmatch, a public genealogy website:
The story doesn't mention the Nazi connection at all, but the photo of the suspect with a large swastika on his chest tells you all you need to know.
Now, if this guy had been a Muslim or a Latino immigrant, Fox News would be screaming bloody murder about the dangers of open borders, immigration from the Middle East and BUILD THE WALL!
But since this is a good old white boy with a giant swastika tattoo, we're all just going to ignore the obvious: not only are the alt-right Nazi sympathizers murderous racists, they're also sexist, misogynistic rapists.
And this guy is not alone. A hell of a lot of alt-right Nazi sympathizers are misogynists and "incels," involuntary celibates. These men attack women because they won't, for some odd reason, have sex with misogynistic dicks like them. It's not fair! they complain. It's my right to have sex with any woman I see!
There have been multiple murder sprees in the United States and Canada committed by incels, who have killed dozens of people because they're incensed that women find whining angry white men with bad breath and BO somehow unattractive.
The alt-right is luring incels into their movement. As they sit in their parents' basements, stewing in their own testosterone, whining about not getting any, they are baited into Nazi chat rooms that stoke their anger against women, then have that anger switched toward Latinos, blacks and Jews.
To paraphrase Donald Trump's campaign announcement: White supremacists are causing lots of problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. They're killers.
When the president of the United States openly spouts racist propaganda and brags about sexually assaulting women, then publicly praises groups that want to eject all American citizens of non-European ancestry to create an ethnic white homeland, he is emboldening the worst people in this country, giving them a green light to start a war against women and minorities.
Remember when, after a woman was killed by a right-wing nutjob with a car in Charlottesville, Donald Trump said that some of the Nazi sympathizers were "very fine people?"
Well, here's a story on NPR about a Nazi sympathizer who is a serial rapist that was finally tracked down by DNA on GEDmatch, a public genealogy website:
For more than 10 years, police In Fayetteville, N.C., had been trying to identify a serial rapist. They had tied him to at least six rapes in the same neighborhood between 2006 and 2008. They called him the "Ramsey Street Rapist."
He attacked one woman while she was jogging; in other cases, he broke into apartments. He usually wore a hoodie, and he had facial hair. Victims reported musky breath and bad body odor.
Police had uploaded his DNA into a national law enforcement database. They generated composite images of what he might look like. They tied him to a Peeping Tom case, also unsolved. No luck.
"We were able to obtain his DNA and get it off to the state crime lab, and we got a match yesterday," Lt. Somerindyke said Wednesday. He laughed slightly, on the verge of tears. "I'm sorry, I'm just glad we got the guy."
The story doesn't mention the Nazi connection at all, but the photo of the suspect with a large swastika on his chest tells you all you need to know.Now, if this guy had been a Muslim or a Latino immigrant, Fox News would be screaming bloody murder about the dangers of open borders, immigration from the Middle East and BUILD THE WALL!
But since this is a good old white boy with a giant swastika tattoo, we're all just going to ignore the obvious: not only are the alt-right Nazi sympathizers murderous racists, they're also sexist, misogynistic rapists.
And this guy is not alone. A hell of a lot of alt-right Nazi sympathizers are misogynists and "incels," involuntary celibates. These men attack women because they won't, for some odd reason, have sex with misogynistic dicks like them. It's not fair! they complain. It's my right to have sex with any woman I see!
There have been multiple murder sprees in the United States and Canada committed by incels, who have killed dozens of people because they're incensed that women find whining angry white men with bad breath and BO somehow unattractive.
The alt-right is luring incels into their movement. As they sit in their parents' basements, stewing in their own testosterone, whining about not getting any, they are baited into Nazi chat rooms that stoke their anger against women, then have that anger switched toward Latinos, blacks and Jews.
To paraphrase Donald Trump's campaign announcement: White supremacists are causing lots of problems. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. They're killers.
When the president of the United States openly spouts racist propaganda and brags about sexually assaulting women, then publicly praises groups that want to eject all American citizens of non-European ancestry to create an ethnic white homeland, he is emboldening the worst people in this country, giving them a green light to start a war against women and minorities.
Wednesday, August 22, 2018
How the Republican Party Can Save Itself
With the conviction of Paul Manafort and the guilty plea of Michael Cohen (as well as five other guilty pleas from Trump campaign operatives), it is clear that Donald Trump is a crook.
Cohen claims to have information that proves Trump knew about and encouraged Russian hacking of Americans. From everything else we know about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyers and hackers, it is clear that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to steal the 2016 election.
The Republican Party seems bound and determined to go down with the Trump ship, but there is a way out if the rats desert the sinking ship.
It has long been totally obvious that Trump is a feeble, deranged old man. He proves it every day with his unhinged rants and tweets, his never-ending golf vacations and the infantile prattle he spouts at his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies.
The Republican leadership needs to round up the cabinet, read them the riot act, and then go to Kelly and demand that Trump resign due to "serious medical issues." Trump doesn't have to admit that he's senile or mentally incompetent. He can claim that he has nephritis, or atherosclerosis, or preeclampsia (yeah, he can't have that, be he sure as hell doesn't know it).
If Trump refuses to resign, the cabinet should Twenty-Five him for mental incompetence. If they don't have the guts, the Republican Congress should threaten the ultimate: no, not impeachment proceedings. Releasing Trump's tax returns.
Like Al Capone, Trump's tax evasion and money laundering will be his undoing. He will be charged with thousands of crimes in federal and state courts, and will never get out from under an avalanche of indictments.
Because if the Republicans continue to condone the behavior a president who lies all day and every day, stole an election, is a puppet of a Russian dictator, repeatedly assaulted women sexually, they are likely to lose big in November.
If Trump resigns before November, his successor can pardon him and all his cronies for all their crimes. The Mueller investigation will end. Our long national nightmare will be over. Republicans will look like they stood up to a petty and senile tyrant, and will have a decent shot at holding on to Congress.
But if they let Trump stay in office, Republicans may lose both the House and the Senate, and then Democrats will be in charge. Trump will try to use executive pardons to cover up his crimes, and then he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. There will be hearings 24/7 in the House and Senate, and hundreds of Republican cabinet members and office holders will be tainted by their connections to Trump.
It will make the Watergate hearings look like Romper Room.
At that point the country will be in great danger of exploding, and with the Russians, Iranians and Chinese all trying to sabotage our democracy on social media, who knows what craziness they'll whip right-wing nutjobs into.
The Republicans can save this country -- and themselves -- if they dump Trump right now.
Cohen claims to have information that proves Trump knew about and encouraged Russian hacking of Americans. From everything else we know about the infamous Trump Tower meeting with Russian lawyers and hackers, it is clear that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian spies to steal the 2016 election.
The Republican Party seems bound and determined to go down with the Trump ship, but there is a way out if the rats desert the sinking ship.
It has long been totally obvious that Trump is a feeble, deranged old man. He proves it every day with his unhinged rants and tweets, his never-ending golf vacations and the infantile prattle he spouts at his Nuremberg-style campaign rallies.
The Republican leadership needs to round up the cabinet, read them the riot act, and then go to Kelly and demand that Trump resign due to "serious medical issues." Trump doesn't have to admit that he's senile or mentally incompetent. He can claim that he has nephritis, or atherosclerosis, or preeclampsia (yeah, he can't have that, be he sure as hell doesn't know it).
If Trump refuses to resign, the cabinet should Twenty-Five him for mental incompetence. If they don't have the guts, the Republican Congress should threaten the ultimate: no, not impeachment proceedings. Releasing Trump's tax returns.
Like Al Capone, Trump's tax evasion and money laundering will be his undoing. He will be charged with thousands of crimes in federal and state courts, and will never get out from under an avalanche of indictments.
Because if the Republicans continue to condone the behavior a president who lies all day and every day, stole an election, is a puppet of a Russian dictator, repeatedly assaulted women sexually, they are likely to lose big in November.
If Trump resigns before November, his successor can pardon him and all his cronies for all their crimes. The Mueller investigation will end. Our long national nightmare will be over. Republicans will look like they stood up to a petty and senile tyrant, and will have a decent shot at holding on to Congress.
But if they let Trump stay in office, Republicans may lose both the House and the Senate, and then Democrats will be in charge. Trump will try to use executive pardons to cover up his crimes, and then he will be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. There will be hearings 24/7 in the House and Senate, and hundreds of Republican cabinet members and office holders will be tainted by their connections to Trump.
It will make the Watergate hearings look like Romper Room.
At that point the country will be in great danger of exploding, and with the Russians, Iranians and Chinese all trying to sabotage our democracy on social media, who knows what craziness they'll whip right-wing nutjobs into.
The Republicans can save this country -- and themselves -- if they dump Trump right now.
Monday, August 20, 2018
Sexual Assault Is a Transmissible Disease, and Donald Trump Is a Carrier
Right-wing trolls are gloating that the #MeToo movement has been discredited by the latest revelation involving Asia Argento. But it just shows that sexual assault is a sexually transmitted disease that infects and spreads from one person to another, like HIV or chlamydia:
This news comes on the heels of the revelation that the Catholic Church covered up the sexual abuse of thousands of children in Pennsylvania (which is only one of dozens of such scandals, from Boston to Minnesota to South America).
One priest abusing 10 children doesn't produce just 10 victims. It produces 10 first-order victims, then maybe 20, or 50, or 100 second-order victims when those children commit the same crime against others, and then hundreds more third-order victims as the parents, wives, and children of direct victims are stricken by the terrible anguish when they learn the awful things their loved ones have done, or what has been to their loved ones.
That's why we can't let one groping go unchallenged or one rape unprosecuted. If their crimes aren't exposed predators continue to assault more victims, spreading the disease, producing more predators and more victims.
Just the other day a man was found guilty of sexually assaulting a sleeping woman (specifically, fondling her vagina) on a Spirit Airlines flight. He now faces life in prison. The number of sexual assaults on planes nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017.
Since Donald Trump explicitly bragged about grabbing women by the pussy you have to wonder: is Trump's election responsible for this specific assault as well as the general increase in these crimes on airplanes?
That's the sort of conclusion conservatives have always jumped to whenever Democrats have done something dodgy. But Trump's Republican and evangelical enablers just sheepishly mumble, "He denies it," when they know full well he did it because he bragged about doing it.
How many women and children are being assaulted right now because Trumpist dickheads think that they should be able to get away with whatever the president does? After all their moralizing about God and morality, Republicans and evangelicals have shown they believe in neither.
The Italian actress and director Asia Argento was among the first women in the movie business to publicly accuse the producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. She became a leading figure in the #MeToo movement. Her boyfriend, the culinary television star Anthony Bourdain, eagerly joined the fight.It has long been known that child survivors of sex abuse often turn into perpetrators. It's irrelevant whether victims do this because they hurt and want someone else to hurt, or because they think the behavior is normal. It's an evil cycle that should be stopped dead in its tracks.
But in the months that followed her revelations about Mr. Weinstein last October, Ms. Argento quietly arranged to pay $380,000 to her own accuser: Jimmy Bennett, a young actor and rock musician who said she had sexually assaulted him in a California hotel room years earlier, when he was only two months past his 17th birthday. She was 37. The age of consent in California is 18.
This news comes on the heels of the revelation that the Catholic Church covered up the sexual abuse of thousands of children in Pennsylvania (which is only one of dozens of such scandals, from Boston to Minnesota to South America).
One priest abusing 10 children doesn't produce just 10 victims. It produces 10 first-order victims, then maybe 20, or 50, or 100 second-order victims when those children commit the same crime against others, and then hundreds more third-order victims as the parents, wives, and children of direct victims are stricken by the terrible anguish when they learn the awful things their loved ones have done, or what has been to their loved ones.
That's why we can't let one groping go unchallenged or one rape unprosecuted. If their crimes aren't exposed predators continue to assault more victims, spreading the disease, producing more predators and more victims.
Just the other day a man was found guilty of sexually assaulting a sleeping woman (specifically, fondling her vagina) on a Spirit Airlines flight. He now faces life in prison. The number of sexual assaults on planes nearly doubled from 2014 to 2017.
Since Donald Trump explicitly bragged about grabbing women by the pussy you have to wonder: is Trump's election responsible for this specific assault as well as the general increase in these crimes on airplanes?
That's the sort of conclusion conservatives have always jumped to whenever Democrats have done something dodgy. But Trump's Republican and evangelical enablers just sheepishly mumble, "He denies it," when they know full well he did it because he bragged about doing it.
How many women and children are being assaulted right now because Trumpist dickheads think that they should be able to get away with whatever the president does? After all their moralizing about God and morality, Republicans and evangelicals have shown they believe in neither.
Friday, August 17, 2018
Gun Humper Sucks Dick
Like millions of Americans, I've been ROTFLMFAO at Sacha Baron Cohen's newest masterpiece, Who Is America? He has completely demolished multiple gun humpers and MAGA drones over the course of five episodes.
But his best takedown was last Sunday when he got Dan Roberts to suck a dick. Here it is.
Fucking, Priceless.
But his best takedown was last Sunday when he got Dan Roberts to suck a dick. Here it is.
Fucking, Priceless.
Keeping It Local
The Democratic Party is finally getting the message: keep it local.
I've been saying this for years. If they want to win and keep it sustainable, they need to mimic what the GOP did from 2010 forward and focus on winning at the grass roots level with candidates that live in the districts. Find the little league coach or the den mother and get them to run.
Currently, there is a high amount of motivation to run given who resides in the White House so we are seeing a lot of first time candidates and a renewed interest in civic participation. This is a fantastic development that needs to carry forward in perpetuity if we want to make sure that the alt right never gains power again.
The election this fall is looking brighter and brighter every day.
I've been saying this for years. If they want to win and keep it sustainable, they need to mimic what the GOP did from 2010 forward and focus on winning at the grass roots level with candidates that live in the districts. Find the little league coach or the den mother and get them to run.
Currently, there is a high amount of motivation to run given who resides in the White House so we are seeing a lot of first time candidates and a renewed interest in civic participation. This is a fantastic development that needs to carry forward in perpetuity if we want to make sure that the alt right never gains power again.
The election this fall is looking brighter and brighter every day.
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Is America Heading Down the Same Path as Turkey?
Turkey, once a promising country in a region dominated by corrupt dictators and theocratic despots, is going down the drain.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the visionary who broke Turkey out of the doldrums, putting many reforms in place after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, rising from the ashes of World War I and making strides toward the West.
For example, though Turkey was a majority Muslim nation, Atatürk made it a secular and democratic republic. Atatürk replaced the Arabic script previously used for Turkish with Latin, which is far better suited to the language.
It wasn't all smooth sailing. Turkey's military staged regular coups whenever civil leaders strayed too far from Atatürk's vision.
That is, until Turkey's current president gained power. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become an autocratic dictator with the popular support of the people in the name of "Islamization." The military attempted a coup against Erdogan in 2016 and failed to oust the dictator. He has since purged the government, schools and universities of anyone not loyal to him, jailed thousands of people (including some Americans), and consolidated more and more power in his own hands.
My wife and I visited Turkey in the 1990s, when it was in the grip of horrible inflation, ranging from 60-100% a year. In 1996 one dollar was worth 100,000 lira.
When we went to exchange money we learned that Turks didn't use banks: on payday they went to currency exchanges and converted their lira to dollars, then went to exchange them back when they needed cash. Converting to dollars prevented their wages from being drained into nothing by inflation.
People remember those awful times, and they credit Erdogan with ending the economic decline of the country in the 2000s. That's why they keep giving him greater dictatorial powers.
But it's not working anymore. Turkey is again in the grip of rampant inflation. At the start of this year the revalued lira was worth about 25 cents. Now it's worth 15 cents.
Erdogan is blaming the United States and other foreign countries for all his problems. In response to Trump's tariffs, Erdogan has called for Turks to boycott American products; in particular, electronics like Apple's iPhone.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Donald Trump is using the despot's playbook, just like Putin and Erdogan. Trump blames foreigners for all our problems. Trump clamors for the "Christianization" of the United States (though Trump is the least Christian of any president). Trump claims he is the only one who can fix things, and that he has the power to do whatever the hell he wants, be it levying tariffs on foreign steel, boycotting American companies like Harley Davidson, cutting secret deals with criminals like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, or grabbing women's pussies.
The United States hasn't been hit by rampant inflation. Yet. But many Americans are already heading into bankruptcy because of Trump. American farmers are being hammered by his economic policies. He has effectively dismantled the consumer protection bureau, allowing predatory lenders to pillage American pocketbooks. His sabotage of the health insurance market is driving up rates and reducing coverage for many Americans, who will go broke and die when they can no longer get insurance. His promises to reign in drug prices were all lies.
Wage growth in the United States has been flat or negative for the last 18 years, and Trump's policies (such as the gigantic tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations) have seen workers' wages shrink even more as CEOs use Trump's tax giveaway to take for themselves and shareholders even bigger pieces of the pie, while drastically ballooning the US deficit.
At some point the huge national debt the Trump tax cuts is creating will blow up in our faces. At that point the Republicans will demand that we cut Social Security, Medicare and social services, crushing less-educated whites and the elderly. Ironically, the people most affected by Trump's disastrous policies will be his core voters. (Minorities are already screwed, so their lot will change little from here on out.)
More and more the United States seems to be going down the same path that Turkey, Russia, and South American banana republics have gone down.
The question is: why are Republicans and the voters who elected him letting this clown get away with it?
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was the visionary who broke Turkey out of the doldrums, putting many reforms in place after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, rising from the ashes of World War I and making strides toward the West.
For example, though Turkey was a majority Muslim nation, Atatürk made it a secular and democratic republic. Atatürk replaced the Arabic script previously used for Turkish with Latin, which is far better suited to the language.
It wasn't all smooth sailing. Turkey's military staged regular coups whenever civil leaders strayed too far from Atatürk's vision.
That is, until Turkey's current president gained power. Recep Tayyip Erdogan has become an autocratic dictator with the popular support of the people in the name of "Islamization." The military attempted a coup against Erdogan in 2016 and failed to oust the dictator. He has since purged the government, schools and universities of anyone not loyal to him, jailed thousands of people (including some Americans), and consolidated more and more power in his own hands.
My wife and I visited Turkey in the 1990s, when it was in the grip of horrible inflation, ranging from 60-100% a year. In 1996 one dollar was worth 100,000 lira.
When we went to exchange money we learned that Turks didn't use banks: on payday they went to currency exchanges and converted their lira to dollars, then went to exchange them back when they needed cash. Converting to dollars prevented their wages from being drained into nothing by inflation.
People remember those awful times, and they credit Erdogan with ending the economic decline of the country in the 2000s. That's why they keep giving him greater dictatorial powers.
But it's not working anymore. Turkey is again in the grip of rampant inflation. At the start of this year the revalued lira was worth about 25 cents. Now it's worth 15 cents.
Erdogan is blaming the United States and other foreign countries for all his problems. In response to Trump's tariffs, Erdogan has called for Turks to boycott American products; in particular, electronics like Apple's iPhone.
If this sounds familiar, it should. Donald Trump is using the despot's playbook, just like Putin and Erdogan. Trump blames foreigners for all our problems. Trump clamors for the "Christianization" of the United States (though Trump is the least Christian of any president). Trump claims he is the only one who can fix things, and that he has the power to do whatever the hell he wants, be it levying tariffs on foreign steel, boycotting American companies like Harley Davidson, cutting secret deals with criminals like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, or grabbing women's pussies.
The United States hasn't been hit by rampant inflation. Yet. But many Americans are already heading into bankruptcy because of Trump. American farmers are being hammered by his economic policies. He has effectively dismantled the consumer protection bureau, allowing predatory lenders to pillage American pocketbooks. His sabotage of the health insurance market is driving up rates and reducing coverage for many Americans, who will go broke and die when they can no longer get insurance. His promises to reign in drug prices were all lies.
Wage growth in the United States has been flat or negative for the last 18 years, and Trump's policies (such as the gigantic tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations) have seen workers' wages shrink even more as CEOs use Trump's tax giveaway to take for themselves and shareholders even bigger pieces of the pie, while drastically ballooning the US deficit.
At some point the huge national debt the Trump tax cuts is creating will blow up in our faces. At that point the Republicans will demand that we cut Social Security, Medicare and social services, crushing less-educated whites and the elderly. Ironically, the people most affected by Trump's disastrous policies will be his core voters. (Minorities are already screwed, so their lot will change little from here on out.)
More and more the United States seems to be going down the same path that Turkey, Russia, and South American banana republics have gone down.
The question is: why are Republicans and the voters who elected him letting this clown get away with it?
Monday, August 13, 2018
Is Trump's Voter Fraud Vice-Chair Stealing an Election?
Last year Donald Trump created a commission to look into voter fraud, but it was disbanded without doing anything. The commission had asked the states to give the federal government sensitive voter information, and all the states had refused to hand over the data because it violated privacy laws.
That included Kansas, where the vice-chair of the commission, Chris Kobach, is secretary of state, where his duties include overseeing elections.
The commission worked for months trying to prove that there was some sort of systemic vote rigging, but they could find only a minuscule number of cases of intentional fraud, and most of those were Trump voters pulling one scam or another.
Kobach is now running for governor of Kansas, and is locked a primary battle that has yet to be decided. The two candidates are separated by a few hundred votes.
Immediately after the primary suspicious things were happening with the vote totals. County totals tallied locally didn't match county totals entered by Kobach's employees, giving Kobach hundreds of extra votes.
Kobach recused himself on Friday, but his deputy, Eric Rucker, a political appointee, is running the show.
Rucker is making decisions that favor Kobach: he's telling poll workers to throw out provisional ballots cast by unaffiliated voters, after those voters were instructed to cast provisional ballots by poll workers.
He's also trying to throw out mailed-in ballots that were received the day after the election because they don't have postmarks. “The thing that really ticks us off is that for all intents and purposes, it’s the Postal Service that’s disenfranchised that voter. And shame on them.”
No, this hack is trying to disenfranchise voters and throw the election to Kobach. None of Kobach's partisan hires should be making decisions in this election. They have inherent conflicts of interest, and they should recuse themselves.
This episode illustrates the real kind of voter fraud that occurs in this country: legislators who make confusing laws and place onerous restriction on voters, poll workers who may or may not intentionally give voters bad advice casting their votes, and government officials who preferentially discard absentee and provisional ballots based on whether they will swing the election their way.
That included Kansas, where the vice-chair of the commission, Chris Kobach, is secretary of state, where his duties include overseeing elections.
The commission worked for months trying to prove that there was some sort of systemic vote rigging, but they could find only a minuscule number of cases of intentional fraud, and most of those were Trump voters pulling one scam or another.
Kobach is now running for governor of Kansas, and is locked a primary battle that has yet to be decided. The two candidates are separated by a few hundred votes.
Immediately after the primary suspicious things were happening with the vote totals. County totals tallied locally didn't match county totals entered by Kobach's employees, giving Kobach hundreds of extra votes.
Kobach recused himself on Friday, but his deputy, Eric Rucker, a political appointee, is running the show.
Rucker is making decisions that favor Kobach: he's telling poll workers to throw out provisional ballots cast by unaffiliated voters, after those voters were instructed to cast provisional ballots by poll workers.
He's also trying to throw out mailed-in ballots that were received the day after the election because they don't have postmarks. “The thing that really ticks us off is that for all intents and purposes, it’s the Postal Service that’s disenfranchised that voter. And shame on them.”
No, this hack is trying to disenfranchise voters and throw the election to Kobach. None of Kobach's partisan hires should be making decisions in this election. They have inherent conflicts of interest, and they should recuse themselves.
This episode illustrates the real kind of voter fraud that occurs in this country: legislators who make confusing laws and place onerous restriction on voters, poll workers who may or may not intentionally give voters bad advice casting their votes, and government officials who preferentially discard absentee and provisional ballots based on whether they will swing the election their way.
Friday, August 10, 2018
The Con Job of the Century
If you thought the con job of the century was Donald Trump getting elected, you'd be wrong.
No, getting thousands of people to drive for Uber is the con of the century. Because driving for Uber is just driving a cab. And that's one of the worst jobs you can get.
Think about it. The wages are terrible, the hours are terrible, the customers are terrible (drunken, puking morons). In many cities the number of cabs is regulated by controlling the number of medallions issued, making it possible to eke out a living by keeping the number of cabs down to what the local population can support.
But any clown with a car can drive for Uber, which means the number of competitors is determined only by the gullibility of people who mistakenly think they can get rich driving a cab. Uber drivers are "independent contractors" who supply their own cars, pay for the gas, the maintenance, their cell phone bills. If they sit idle for two hours, waiting for fares that never call, they don't make a dime.
The only difference between driving a cab and driving for Uber is that some overvalued high-tech company in Washington takes a big cut out of every fare, instead of staying in the local economy.
What's the running joke in every movie where someone gets into a cab? An immigrant driver who can barely speak English.
And that's because driving a cab is a terrible job. Immigrants get all the terrible jobs in America: the vast majority of dishwashers, hotel maids, meat packers, roofers and cabbies are immigrants, because Americans just won't do them.
I came to this realization while watching an ad for Uber, in which the company's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, apologizes for Uber's past dickishness, promising the company's "culture" has changed. Uber's former CEO, Travis Kalanik, was kicked out a year ago for pushing his employees to wantonly violate laws and regulations in cities across the country, screw over the company's drivers as wage slaves, and blithely ignoring pervasive sexual harassment.
Driving a cab, or an Uber, doesn't have to be terrible. All these jobs should pay enough to live on, and to save up for a down payment on a house, and to help put your kids through college. But Uber pays its employees peanuts, because they've conned people into thinking that driving a cab is somehow a lucrative gig.
New York is cracking down on Uber, capping the number of drivers in the city and setting a minimum pay rate per trip. That may barely squeak Uber drivers out of the hole, but Uber will never give their drivers a decent wage: the company thinks of its employees as just another bot that can be replaced by another bot.
And that next bot will be a self-driving car. Anyone who bought a car thinking that driving for Uber was a long-term investment was taken by the con man of the century, Travis Kalanick.
No, getting thousands of people to drive for Uber is the con of the century. Because driving for Uber is just driving a cab. And that's one of the worst jobs you can get.
Think about it. The wages are terrible, the hours are terrible, the customers are terrible (drunken, puking morons). In many cities the number of cabs is regulated by controlling the number of medallions issued, making it possible to eke out a living by keeping the number of cabs down to what the local population can support.
But any clown with a car can drive for Uber, which means the number of competitors is determined only by the gullibility of people who mistakenly think they can get rich driving a cab. Uber drivers are "independent contractors" who supply their own cars, pay for the gas, the maintenance, their cell phone bills. If they sit idle for two hours, waiting for fares that never call, they don't make a dime.
The only difference between driving a cab and driving for Uber is that some overvalued high-tech company in Washington takes a big cut out of every fare, instead of staying in the local economy.
What's the running joke in every movie where someone gets into a cab? An immigrant driver who can barely speak English.
And that's because driving a cab is a terrible job. Immigrants get all the terrible jobs in America: the vast majority of dishwashers, hotel maids, meat packers, roofers and cabbies are immigrants, because Americans just won't do them.
I came to this realization while watching an ad for Uber, in which the company's new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, apologizes for Uber's past dickishness, promising the company's "culture" has changed. Uber's former CEO, Travis Kalanik, was kicked out a year ago for pushing his employees to wantonly violate laws and regulations in cities across the country, screw over the company's drivers as wage slaves, and blithely ignoring pervasive sexual harassment.
Driving a cab, or an Uber, doesn't have to be terrible. All these jobs should pay enough to live on, and to save up for a down payment on a house, and to help put your kids through college. But Uber pays its employees peanuts, because they've conned people into thinking that driving a cab is somehow a lucrative gig.
New York is cracking down on Uber, capping the number of drivers in the city and setting a minimum pay rate per trip. That may barely squeak Uber drivers out of the hole, but Uber will never give their drivers a decent wage: the company thinks of its employees as just another bot that can be replaced by another bot.
And that next bot will be a self-driving car. Anyone who bought a car thinking that driving for Uber was a long-term investment was taken by the con man of the century, Travis Kalanick.
Trump Gets His Inlaws into US with Chain Migration
“CHAIN MIGRATION cannot be allowed to be part of any legislation on Immigration!” the President tweeted.Well, now his in-laws are American citizens because of chain migration.
President Trump has repeatedly and vehemently denounced what he calls “chain migration,” in which adult American citizens can obtain residency for their relatives.
On Thursday, his Slovenian in-laws, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, became United States citizens in a private ceremony in Manhattan by taking advantage of that same family-based immigration program.
Asked if the Knavses had obtained citizenship through “chain migration,” their lawyer, Michael Wildes, said, “I suppose.”
He said chain migration is a “dirtier” way of characterizing what he called “a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification.”
Melania Trump had sponsored her parents for their green cards, Mr. Wildes said in describing the process by which the Knavses had become United States citizens. “Once they had the green card, they then applied for citizenship when they were eligible,” he said.
Even as his in-laws were going through the process, Mr. Trump was denouncing it. In November, he tweeted, “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”
And, of course, both Trump's mother and paternal grandfather came to the United States as a result of chain migration.
Now let's see what kind of dirt Trump would sling if the Knavses were the family of his political opponents. Dirt provided by Town and Country in a puff piece on Melania's family:
- The Knavses speak Slovenian with their grandson, Barron. Why can't they speak English, like real Americans?
- Viktor was a card-carrying member of the Yugoslav Communist Party. He had a collection of Mercedes sedans and a Maserati. That doesn't happen in a communist country unless you're well-connected insider.
- Viktor got another woman pregnant, agreed to marry her, then demanded she get an abortion, then claimed he couldn't be the father, and then a court-ordered blood test showed he was. He fought court orders to pay child support all the way to the highest appellate court. Nice guy, huh?
- Melania also got her sister into the United States with chain migration as well.
- Next thing you know, Melania will try to bring her illegimate half-brother into the country. Where will it end?
- Her parents are in their 70s, and will be a drain on the country's medical system after Trump is impeached.
It's sheer hypocrisy for Donald Trump to slam the door on everyone else's family after he got his wife's in-laws into the country.
Wednesday, August 08, 2018
Republicans Are Already Committing Election Fraud
A House race in Virginia reveals the Republican strategy for beating the Democrats, which they got from the Russians in the 2016 election. Keep Democrats bickering with each, and put up phony independent candidates to split the Democratic vote, even if you have to break the law to do it:
A special prosecutor was appointed Tuesday to investigate claims that aides to Rep. Scott W. Taylor (R-Va.) illegally forged signatures to help an independent candidate get on the ballot, hoping to give their boss an edge over his Democratic challenger in the midterm elections.With their email hacks and social media manipulation the Russians stoked divisions in the Democratic Party, in particular, inciting hatred against Hillary Clinton among Bernie Sanders supporters.
Aides to Taylor, a freshman lawmaker from Virginia Beach, collected signatures for independent candidate Shaun Brown, who analysts say could siphon votes away from Taylor’s Democratic challenger, Elaine Luria.
The Russians also backed Jill Stein's candidacy, splitting away Green-leaning Democrats. Here's a picture of Jill Stein with Vladimir Putin and Michael Flynn, Trump's discredited national security advisor.
Republicans have used the Greens to sabotage Democrats in the past; in particular, Al Gore lost in 2000 to Bush because of Ralph Nader and the Green Party (the GOP spent money to push Nader's candidacy in 2000 and 2004). The irony, of course, is that if Nader hadn't run, Gore would have won Florida, and Gore would have set us a climate policy that the Greens actually wanted.
Instead we had Bush and now Trump, in large part thanks in part to Green candidates Ralph Nader and Jill Stein.
It is often said that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Progressives can't expect everything to happen at once. Change at the national level is incremental, and unity is even more important ever since the Republicans stole a Supreme court seat in 2015.
We have to elect Democrats to ensure that the House and the Senate have Democratic majorities, even if those Democrats aren't all as progressive as we might want. Our representatives should represent the people of their districts, and if those districts are slightly right of center, their legislators should be Democrats who are slightly right of center.
If the Republicans retain their majorities, Trump will cement his lock on the Republican Party and turn this country into banana republic owned and operated by corporations and the wealthy.
Kids Sue Donald Trump
The federal government attempted to have the case thrown out because of lack of evidence (!) and they also tried to see the evidence that the plantiffs are going to present before the trial even started. SCOTUS rejected both claims.
This could be a very interesting case. The plaintiffs allege that the United States government's affirmative actions caused climate change, violated the youngest generation's constitutional rights to life, liberty, and property, and failed to protect essential public trust resources. The facts of climate change are going to be presented in court and entered into the public record. The evidence is overwhelming that it is man made and indeed threatening constitutional rights.
I realize there have been many liberals wringing their hands over the conservative tilt of the court. But this case shows that all of the SCOTUS justices, conservative or liberal, know the law better than any of the rest of us. If anything, dogmatic conservative who refuse to accept reality should be worried about SCOTUS. Their unicorn fart fantasy of turning this country into a conservative paradise ain't gonna happen with Brett Kavanaugh or anyone else on their list.
The law is not on their side.
Monday, August 06, 2018
Friday, August 03, 2018
The Pope Ups the Pro-Life Ante
There are people who pretend to be pro-life, and then there are the people who really are pro-life. Pope Francis is the real deal:
I may not agree with the Catholic Church on everything, but it has overcome many of its hypocritical deficiencies and is generally a force for good.
This is definitely not the case with American evangelicals and Republicans. They claim to be pro-life, but they're constantly on the warpath, clamoring for more military spending, more guns on the street, applying the death penalty to more cases, torturing suspects in military internment camps, and constantly attacking minorities and immigrants.
Take the governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts. He's supposedly a Catholic, but when the state of Nebraska repealed the death penalty in 2015, the Roman Catholic governor used his family fortune to bankroll a referendum to reinstate it.
American evangelicals and Republicans are all phonies. They claim to be so morally superior to the rest of us, yet they voted in droves for known sexual predators like Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
These are the same people who keep clamoring for more "religious liberty" in the United States, but what they really want to do is insult, ostracize, beat up and eventually drive out all gays and Muslims.
These self-proclaimed moral majoritarians in the White House and Republican statehouses shred the ten commandments every day.
The only reason Republicans oppose abortion is so that they can sucker single-issue Catholics into voting for them. Because people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore and all the other Republican toads embody everything that good Catholics despise.
Back in the day Republicans demanded that the Catholic Church excommunicate Democrats who supported a woman's right to choose (which is not the same as favoring abortion).
Perhaps the Catholic Church should excommunicate all the Republicans who endorse the death penalty, clamor for the torture of suspects, spread the cancer of handguns, and deny the basic human rights of immigrants and minorities.
Pope Francis has declared the death penalty wrong in all cases, a definitive change in church teaching that is likely to challenge Catholic politicians, judges and officials who have argued that their church was not entirely opposed to capital punishment.
Before, church doctrine accepted the death penalty if it was “the only practicable way” to defend lives, an opening that some Catholics took as license to support capital punishment in many cases.The Catholic Church has a long history and hasn't always been on the side of the righteous, but in the last sixty or seventy years the Church has become more consistent on the sanctity of life. It, of course, opposes abortion, but generally favors reasonable reasonable restrictions on handguns, opposes war in all its forms, and vigorously advocates for the poor, minorities, immigrants and victims of terrorism and government oppression.
I may not agree with the Catholic Church on everything, but it has overcome many of its hypocritical deficiencies and is generally a force for good.
This is definitely not the case with American evangelicals and Republicans. They claim to be pro-life, but they're constantly on the warpath, clamoring for more military spending, more guns on the street, applying the death penalty to more cases, torturing suspects in military internment camps, and constantly attacking minorities and immigrants.
Take the governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts. He's supposedly a Catholic, but when the state of Nebraska repealed the death penalty in 2015, the Roman Catholic governor used his family fortune to bankroll a referendum to reinstate it.
American evangelicals and Republicans are all phonies. They claim to be so morally superior to the rest of us, yet they voted in droves for known sexual predators like Donald Trump and Roy Moore.
These are the same people who keep clamoring for more "religious liberty" in the United States, but what they really want to do is insult, ostracize, beat up and eventually drive out all gays and Muslims.
These self-proclaimed moral majoritarians in the White House and Republican statehouses shred the ten commandments every day.
The only reason Republicans oppose abortion is so that they can sucker single-issue Catholics into voting for them. Because people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore and all the other Republican toads embody everything that good Catholics despise.
Back in the day Republicans demanded that the Catholic Church excommunicate Democrats who supported a woman's right to choose (which is not the same as favoring abortion).
Perhaps the Catholic Church should excommunicate all the Republicans who endorse the death penalty, clamor for the torture of suspects, spread the cancer of handguns, and deny the basic human rights of immigrants and minorities.
Put Them In Gitmo
If you want to know just how fucking sick and dangerous Trump supporters are, look no further than this recent story about Alex Jones (a regular Trump adviser along with Sean Hannity) and the Sandy Hook families.
In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.
Yep. That's right, folks. It's not merely enough that Mr. Pozner has to live with the death of his child. He also has to live under constant threat from Trumpsters who think that the Sandy Hook shooting was "fake news" and that the parents are crisis actors. These are the people that used to be outliers and now they are part of the mainstream Republican party. For further evidence of this, take a look at this photo taken at a recent Trump rally.
Trump supporters believe that their dear leader is fighting a war alongside a hero named "Q" against a deep state menace that includes the media. Check out how CNN's Jim Acosta was treated at the event.
These people are dangerous. They are domestic terrorists. They need to be Gitmo'd.
Now.
In the five years since Noah Pozner was killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., death threats and online harassment have forced his parents, Veronique De La Rosa and Leonard Pozner, to relocate seven times. They now live in a high-security community hundreds of miles from where their 6-year-old is buried.
Yep. That's right, folks. It's not merely enough that Mr. Pozner has to live with the death of his child. He also has to live under constant threat from Trumpsters who think that the Sandy Hook shooting was "fake news" and that the parents are crisis actors. These are the people that used to be outliers and now they are part of the mainstream Republican party. For further evidence of this, take a look at this photo taken at a recent Trump rally.
Trump supporters believe that their dear leader is fighting a war alongside a hero named "Q" against a deep state menace that includes the media. Check out how CNN's Jim Acosta was treated at the event.
These people are dangerous. They are domestic terrorists. They need to be Gitmo'd.
Now.
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Not All Cop Shootings Are Worthy of Protest
Marchers in Minneapolis are blocking trains to protest the death of Thurman Blevins, who was shot and killed by cops responding to a call about a man drinking and randomly firing a pistol. Video of the encounter shows (though not very clearly) that Blevins had a gun, which was found at the site, along with a bullet casing.
There have been countless cases where police have killed a black man for no good reason, and the African-American community has a right to be extremely angry about their treatment at the hands of law enforcement.
Philando Castile should not have been killed. Michael Brown should not have been killed. Trayvon Martin, though not shot by cop, should not have been killed. Walter Scott, Eric Courtney Harris and Akai Gurley should not have been killed, and in their cases the killer cops were actually convicted.
An awful lot of cops seem to be on a power trip, and start shooting at anyone who disobeys them or runs away, even if it's not clear they've done anything wrong. Many cops think that fleeing is a sign of guilt, when the reality is that being near anyone with a loaded handgun exponentially raises your odds of being killed -- especially black men near cops.
Sometimes the cops even shoot black men who are lying on the ground obeying their orders with their hands up. So it's easy to understand why black men run when the cops show up: they get shot no matter what they do, so they might as well take a chance on running.
But the Blevins case does not seem to be worthy of protest because of his erratic behavior:
According to the 911 caller, that man was "intoxicated," and "walking around shooting off his gun," which the caller labeled a "silver nine millimeter." The caller says the man shot his gun into the air and the ground, and hadn't hurt anyone, and that he was carrying a bottle of Amsterdam gin.So, yes, it's a tragedy that Blevins was killed. But like most Shakespearean tragedies, it was of his own making.
What if the cops had just let him run away? He might have gone home and sobered up. Or he might have shot his girlfriend, or his mother, or robbed a liquor store and killed the clerk, or went to work and killed six people. You can see how cops feel that they just can't win, no matter what they do.
The reality is, cops don't only kill black men. Last month in Chaska, a Minneapolis suburb, cops responding to a 911 call killed a sixteen-year-old white boy who was acting erratically, threatening his mother with knives and a bat.
Justine Damond, a white woman reporting a rape last year, was killed by a Minneapolis cop who almost took his partner's head off when he fired at her through the squad car window.
And just few days ago in Aurora, Colorado, cops killed Richard Black, an elderly man who had just shot and killed a naked crazy man who'd broken into his house and attacked his grandson. The responding officers mistook the grandfather, who had a conceal carry permit, for the assailant because he was armed.
Which just proves that the NRA is dead wrong: guns do not make you safer. Blevins is dead because he had a gun. Black is dead because he had a gun. And most of the others are dead because cops thought they might have guns.
Cops are on a hair trigger all the time because so many guns flood the streets of America. Every time they approach someone sitting in a car, or in their house, or walking on the street, they face a real danger of being shot. But that still doesn't justify trigger-happy behavior.
African-Americans are killed by cops at twice the rate as whites. This is a horrible injustice. Cops who kill black men without justification should be fired and charged with murder. Cops should not be able to use the "I was afraid so I shot him" defense: they're trained professionals who are paid to make the right decision about deadly force, and should be held to a higher standard.
But protesters should choose their causes more carefully to avoid cheapening the effect: not every black man killed by the cops is a martyr.
Some are just dangerous, drunken idiots shooting up the neighborhood.
Wednesday, August 01, 2018
Tuesday, July 31, 2018
Monday, July 30, 2018
Milk: Republicans Against Regulations, Except When They Aren't
Dairy farmers and cattle ranchers are not happy. There's been a steady rise in the number of vegans and vegetarians, and the search for alternatives to milk and meat is threatening their bottom lines.
One of the big battlefields is naming. For decades people who are allergic to dairy products have turned to things like soy milk. As veganism goes mainstream, people are looking for alternatives to animal products, and soy milk is increasingly popular.
But a lot of people are allergic to soy, or don't like how it tastes. And so the marketplace has responded with almond milk, coconut milk and even oat milk.
Republicans have been screaming about reducing regulations for years, and the Trump administration has been rolling back environmental regulations like crazy.
So how does FDA in the Trump administration respond to the thriving growth in plant-based dairy alternatives? By hammering the burgeoning industry with regulations!
The Food and Drug Administration signaled plans to start enforcing a federal standard that defines “milk” as coming from the “milking of one or more healthy cows.” That would be a change for the agency, which has not aggressively gone after the proliferation of plant-based drinks labeled as “milk.”Now this is ridiculous. Soy milk has called that for at least thirty or forty years, and coconut milk has been called that for centuries.
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb talked about the plans this week, noting there are hundreds of federal “standards of identity” spelling out how foods with various names need to be manufactured.
The thing is, no one ever calls soy milk just plain "milk." It's always got the "soy" in front of it. So there's never any confusion.
But dairy farmers are guilty of hypocrisy: feta cheese is properly made of sheep's and/or goat's milk. Many people who are allergic to dairy products can eat feta.
In the United States producers usually make fake feta, using cow's milk, which means people with dairy allergies can't eat it. In Europe feta is a protected designation, and to be called feta, the cheese must be made the traditional way in Greece, essentially giving Greece a trademark on the word feta, the way the Champagne region in France has a lock on champagne. Thus, American cheeses can't be sold in Europe under names like feta, parmesan and gorgonzola.
American dairy farmers want to sell completely phony feta and parmesan in Europe, but are trying to prevent the sale of clearly labeled soy milk.
The Trump administration wants to use government regulation to pick winners and losers in the war between soy milk producers and dairy farmers. Typical Republican hypocrisy.
For meat producers there's an even bigger problem coming down the pike. Some vegans don't eat meat because of the cruel conditions under which animals are raised, and the huge environmental costs: cows produce enormous amounts of methane, contributing to global warming. Large corporate farms create toxic lagoons filled with cow and hog manure. Spills from these lagoons are responsible for killing millions of fish across the country every year.
Meat production is also horrendously inefficient; per gram of protein, animal protein uses 6-10 times as much water as plant-based protein. It also takes a long time to raise large animals like cattle and hogs. Animal husbandry for food production is not sustainable with larger and larger human populations.
So scientists are looking at alternatives, like "cultured meat." Meat is just animal muscle tissue, which can now be grown in a test tube. It's basically cloning muscle tissue.
This would use drastically fewer resources. It would eliminate the need for factory farms where animals are packed into tiny cages their entire lives, making it cruelty free. There would be no urine or feces produced, so there would be no toxic manure lagoon spills. There would be no need for slaughterhouses, which are notoriously dangerous to work in and basically require immigrants to staff them, because Americans simply refuse to work in these awful, awful jobs. And it would be far more sanitary, since there would be no dirty animals or slaughterhouse workers touching the meat.
But meat producers are already trying to ban calling cultured muscle tissue products "meat," again using FDA regulations to thwart their competition.
Which is totally ludicrous: these products are genetically identical to meat. You can make a rational argument for disallowing the term soy milk -- I actually have no problem with the FDA making soy milk producers call it a "soy beverage." But cultured meat is meat, even more than lunch meat, or sausage or hamburger are meat.
Have you ever eaten a hot dog? Or a bologna sandwich? Or even a turkey sandwich? Most of these "meats" have utterly no resemblance to real meat.
Most days I have a turkey sandwich for lunch. However, this is a misnomer: the texture and flavor of "turkey breast" lunch meat is nothing like a real turkey breast. Based on its texture and appearance it seems that they render it into a slurry, add preservatives and water, compress it in a tubular mold, slice it and then package it in plastic.
In real turkey, like you have on Thanksgiving, you can tease apart the fibers in the meat and tell that it was actually a muscle at one point. But most every kind of prepackaged lunch meat is a solid, textureless blob of animal protein.
Just like cultured meat.
Hamburgers, hot dogs and sausage are even less like real meat than cultured meat, because they don't use all muscle tissue. They include all kinds of animal byproducts (muscle, gristle, organs, fat, lips, snouts, etc.), ground up together into a product that has no resemblance to the texture of real meat.
Republicans claim to be against regulation, but they aren't. In their view, the purpose of regulation is to stifle competition, not to protect consumers from unsafe products or predatory monopolies.
Typical Republican hypocrisy.
Friday, July 27, 2018
Wednesday, July 25, 2018
"Fixing" Problems He Caused
The thing about Donald Trump is that he constantly is causing his own problems. He does something really stupid, then does something that he thinks "solves" the problem he caused in the first place.
Most of the time he causes political problems for himself with his constant lying, but this habit has much larger consequences that endanger the entire economy and risk nuclear war.
For example:
A while back Donald Trump started making bellicose tweets and threatening to nuke North Korea. Then Trump did an about face, had a meeting with the dictator that runs the joint, Kim Jong Un, proclaiming how smart and how much Little Rocket Man loves his country. Trump got nothing from North Korea and publicly gave a petty dictator a blowjob.
Trump adopted Kim's position that the United States and North Korea should pursue "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," which basically means that Trump will retreat from South Korean peninsula, abandoning our allies.
Trump brags he saved us from nuclear war -- the one he threatened to start.
A while back Trump started a trade war with China and our allies. Other countries are now retaliating. The trade war is hurting companies like Harley Davidson, but even the threat of a trade war was killing American farmers who export soybeans to China. So the other day Trump announced that he would spend billions of dollars to subsidize farmers hurt by the idiotic trade war that he started. It's nothing short of a bribe to make them overlook how much he's screwing them over.
Months ago Trump tore up the deal to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions, which was reached by international consensus. The other day Iranian President Rouhani said, "America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars." That's a pretty conciliatory thing for an Iranian to say, considering that most every time an Iranian says "America" it's preceded by "Death to."
But Trump responded with a blistering all-caps Twitter tirade threatening to destroy Iran if they ever threaten the United States again.
Which is almost exactly what Trump did when Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke the United States. And then Trump turned around and had a summit meeting with Kim and has since had nothing bad to say about the petty little dictator, who by all reports is still developing nuclear capabilities (according to the Wall Street Journal).
And the stupid thing is, Iran is going to continue to yammer "Death to America" and Trump will do nothing about it, because Trump is stupid and weak, and is Putin's puppet. Putin uses Iran and Hezbollah to indirectly attack the United States, usually through Israel. (This eternal antagonism is intentional and mutually beneficial because it keeps the conservatives in power in all involved countries: Russia, Iran, Israel, and the United States.)
Trump desperately wants a "win" with Iran to make Obama look bad. As he did with North Korea, Trump will sell out any- and everyone to make himself look good.
So what did Putin and Trump talk about in Helsinki? None of his advisors seem to know.
I'd wager that Putin agreed to let Trump start a fake beef with Iran. Then Putin will come to the United States later this year and "broker" a fabulous new agreement with Iran, solving the problem that Trump will cast as Obama's fault.
The agreement will keep the status quo exactly as it is. Iran will sell oil, and continue to ramp down their nuclear program. It will make Putin look great, and Trump will bask in his master's glow.
And again, Trump will "fix" a problem that he caused in the first place.
Trump is just a transparent con man. A piece of trash who changes his story almost every hour.
First he asks Russia to hack the Democrats. They do. Trump's son, son-in-law, security advisor, campaign manager and other campaign surrogates meet dozens of times with Russian ambassadors, lawyers and spies. Republican and NRA operatives like Paul Erickson were literally sleeping with Russian spies like Maria Butina.
Then Trump wins the election and denies Russia messed with it. He blames a 400-lb fat guy sitting naked on his bed (could that be projection?). Pressed, all his experts constantly acknowledge Trump is lying. Then Trump grudgingly admits Russia interfered. Then he flip-flops on this ten more times, back and forth, back and forth, looking like a mendacious, feeble-minded nitwit embarrassing himself and everyone who works for or supports him.
In Helsinki Trump fawns all over the man who ordered the hacking of our election, the man who made Trump president. Reporters ask Putin if he wanted Trump to win and if he helped him. Putin says yes!
And days later Trump insists that Russia wants Democrats to win, even though Putin publicly endorsed Trump while getting a blowjob from him in Helsinki.
And then, to top it all off, Trump orders the IRS to eliminate the requirement that PACs report the identity of their donors, opening the floodgates for foreign money into American elections. The governor of Montana has already sued over this.
Why did Trump do this? He wants the Russian money, of course: he's notoriously cheap. But it's also quite possibly a false-flag operation in the works. Russia and other countries will secretly fill Trump campaign coffers, while making a few small donations to Democratic PACs, funneling through innocuous intermediaries, which will conveniently be "discovered" by WikiLeaks at some embarrassing point in the fall campaign.
Trump will then say, "See! I told you Russia wanted the Democrats to win! Nyah, nyah!"
This man is a traitor. Each day that Republicans let this piece of garbage sit in the Oval Office they blacken their souls as collaborators in treason.
Most of the time he causes political problems for himself with his constant lying, but this habit has much larger consequences that endanger the entire economy and risk nuclear war.
For example:
A while back Donald Trump started making bellicose tweets and threatening to nuke North Korea. Then Trump did an about face, had a meeting with the dictator that runs the joint, Kim Jong Un, proclaiming how smart and how much Little Rocket Man loves his country. Trump got nothing from North Korea and publicly gave a petty dictator a blowjob.
Trump adopted Kim's position that the United States and North Korea should pursue "denuclearization of the Korean peninsula," which basically means that Trump will retreat from South Korean peninsula, abandoning our allies.
Trump brags he saved us from nuclear war -- the one he threatened to start.
A while back Trump started a trade war with China and our allies. Other countries are now retaliating. The trade war is hurting companies like Harley Davidson, but even the threat of a trade war was killing American farmers who export soybeans to China. So the other day Trump announced that he would spend billions of dollars to subsidize farmers hurt by the idiotic trade war that he started. It's nothing short of a bribe to make them overlook how much he's screwing them over.
Months ago Trump tore up the deal to limit Iran's nuclear ambitions, which was reached by international consensus. The other day Iranian President Rouhani said, "America should know that peace with Iran is the mother of all peace, and war with Iran is the mother of all wars." That's a pretty conciliatory thing for an Iranian to say, considering that most every time an Iranian says "America" it's preceded by "Death to."
But Trump responded with a blistering all-caps Twitter tirade threatening to destroy Iran if they ever threaten the United States again.
Which is almost exactly what Trump did when Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke the United States. And then Trump turned around and had a summit meeting with Kim and has since had nothing bad to say about the petty little dictator, who by all reports is still developing nuclear capabilities (according to the Wall Street Journal).
And the stupid thing is, Iran is going to continue to yammer "Death to America" and Trump will do nothing about it, because Trump is stupid and weak, and is Putin's puppet. Putin uses Iran and Hezbollah to indirectly attack the United States, usually through Israel. (This eternal antagonism is intentional and mutually beneficial because it keeps the conservatives in power in all involved countries: Russia, Iran, Israel, and the United States.)
Trump desperately wants a "win" with Iran to make Obama look bad. As he did with North Korea, Trump will sell out any- and everyone to make himself look good.
So what did Putin and Trump talk about in Helsinki? None of his advisors seem to know.
I'd wager that Putin agreed to let Trump start a fake beef with Iran. Then Putin will come to the United States later this year and "broker" a fabulous new agreement with Iran, solving the problem that Trump will cast as Obama's fault.
The agreement will keep the status quo exactly as it is. Iran will sell oil, and continue to ramp down their nuclear program. It will make Putin look great, and Trump will bask in his master's glow.
And again, Trump will "fix" a problem that he caused in the first place.
Trump is just a transparent con man. A piece of trash who changes his story almost every hour.
First he asks Russia to hack the Democrats. They do. Trump's son, son-in-law, security advisor, campaign manager and other campaign surrogates meet dozens of times with Russian ambassadors, lawyers and spies. Republican and NRA operatives like Paul Erickson were literally sleeping with Russian spies like Maria Butina.
Then Trump wins the election and denies Russia messed with it. He blames a 400-lb fat guy sitting naked on his bed (could that be projection?). Pressed, all his experts constantly acknowledge Trump is lying. Then Trump grudgingly admits Russia interfered. Then he flip-flops on this ten more times, back and forth, back and forth, looking like a mendacious, feeble-minded nitwit embarrassing himself and everyone who works for or supports him.
In Helsinki Trump fawns all over the man who ordered the hacking of our election, the man who made Trump president. Reporters ask Putin if he wanted Trump to win and if he helped him. Putin says yes!
And days later Trump insists that Russia wants Democrats to win, even though Putin publicly endorsed Trump while getting a blowjob from him in Helsinki.
And then, to top it all off, Trump orders the IRS to eliminate the requirement that PACs report the identity of their donors, opening the floodgates for foreign money into American elections. The governor of Montana has already sued over this.
Why did Trump do this? He wants the Russian money, of course: he's notoriously cheap. But it's also quite possibly a false-flag operation in the works. Russia and other countries will secretly fill Trump campaign coffers, while making a few small donations to Democratic PACs, funneling through innocuous intermediaries, which will conveniently be "discovered" by WikiLeaks at some embarrassing point in the fall campaign.
Trump will then say, "See! I told you Russia wanted the Democrats to win! Nyah, nyah!"
This man is a traitor. Each day that Republicans let this piece of garbage sit in the Oval Office they blacken their souls as collaborators in treason.
Tuesday, July 24, 2018
Saturday, July 21, 2018
Updating Godwin's Law
Does Godwin's law need to be updated? Yes, I think it does given that we live in an age with Donald Trump and his insanely irrational supporters. Thankfully, Mike Godwin himself agrees as well.
By all means cite GL if you think some Nazi comparison is baseless, needlessly inflammatory or hyperbolic. But Godwin’s Law was never meant to block us from challenging the institutionalization of cruelty or the callousness of officials who claim to be just following the law. It definitely wasn’t meant to shield our leaders from being slammed for the current fashion of pitching falsehoods as fact. These behaviors, distressing as they are, may not yet add up to a new Reich, but please forgive me for worrying that they’re the “embryonic form” of a horror we hoped we had put behind us.
Yep.
By all means cite GL if you think some Nazi comparison is baseless, needlessly inflammatory or hyperbolic. But Godwin’s Law was never meant to block us from challenging the institutionalization of cruelty or the callousness of officials who claim to be just following the law. It definitely wasn’t meant to shield our leaders from being slammed for the current fashion of pitching falsehoods as fact. These behaviors, distressing as they are, may not yet add up to a new Reich, but please forgive me for worrying that they’re the “embryonic form” of a horror we hoped we had put behind us.
Yep.
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