The First Step Act and Blackface

In Trump's state of the union address he cited The First Step Act as one of his administration's accomplishments (one of the very few actual accomplishments). This law is the first substantive criminal justice reform in many years, after decades of politicians running on a "lock them up and throw away the key" platform.

I say "his administration" instead of "his" because Trump was not the impetus for his administration's support of this bill.

It was Jared. Jared Kushner. The guy who does what Trump constantly fantasizes about (banging Trump's daughter, Ivanka). He's the one Trump assigned to do everything in his administration, from fixing all the computers in the White House to bringing peace to the Middle East.

Jared accomplished none of his other assignments, but he got this done, because it was personal. Jared's dad was thrown in jail for illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering. He was put there by Chris Christie, who was tossed off the Trump transition team by Jared's relentless character assassinations.

There have been similar laws passed around the country recently. Florida is going to allow former felons to regain their voting rights. This is especially important for African Americans who are often the victims of selective prosecution with the express intent of disenfranchising them.

So, there's a clear trend across the country to forgive people who have done wrong in the past, but have served their time, repented and made things right.

Which brings us to the white guys in Virginia who wore blackface. The governor, the attorney general and Republican majority leader in the state senate all confess to wearing blackface decades ago. It was extremely common, and many whites didn't think of it as racist: for them it was just another aspect of a costume, like wearing green makeup when dressing up as the Hulk or the Wicked Witch of the West.

These men are not accused of committing any crimes, only of doing something that really makes African Americans mad.

Wearing blackface was never a thing in Minnesota, where I live. No one ever did it. My only knowledge of the practice was in connection with Al Jolson singing in blackface in The Jazz Singer.  I always thought blackface was stupid, and that movie was looked down upon, but was unaware of the visceral reaction it produced in African Americans. (The Klan costume in Gov. Northam's yearbook photo is a separate issue. If it turns out that Northam was a closet Klansman, that's potentially disqualifying.)

But the question is, how long should someone be punished for having worn blackface?

If former felons are getting the right to vote after having served their sentences, shouldn't former blackface wearers have the right to serve in public office decades after doing something stupid in their youth?

Especially if they have spent the last 20 years showing no racist tendencies and advancing the cause of African Americans? These men may have been casual racists, but to be honest, we are all of us -- white, black, and everyone else -- casual racists: it's the human condition to categorize and stereotype the unfamiliar. But if they have repented of that casual racism decades ago, shouldn't they be forgiven their sins? Just as we're forgiving the sins of felons by returning their right to vote?

This situation is further complicated by the accusations made against the lieutenant governor, Justin Fairfax, a black man whom two women have accused of sexual assault. Many Democrats have called on Fairfax to resign, but these accusations also seem politically motivated to me.

This whole business seems to be orchestrated by a right-wing website intent on decapitating the Democratic leadership of Virginia to allow Republicans to steal the governorship.

If Democrats fall for this, every Southern white Democrat over the age of 30 will be automatically disqualified from serving in public office. Every male black Democrat will be automatically disqualified because there'll always be some woman out there who thought he was too forward or handsy. And every black female Democrat -- the only kind left after all the others have been eliminated -- will be depicted as a bossy, ball-busting feminist by their Republican opponents.

Meanwhile, Republican office holders who are explicitly racist to blacks and Latinos to this day will get a free pass, and Republican office holders who harass and assault women will continue to do so with impunity. And get reelected. Because Republicans don't even pretend to care about minorities and women.

So that's the choice: if Democrats reject every white politician for wearing blackface at some point in the distant past, and every black male for womanizing, they will automatically cede every election to racist, sexist Republicans who will do everything in their power to pass laws limiting the rights of blacks and Latinos to vote and women to get reproductive services and equal-paying jobs.

BWAHAHAHAHA!

I am a Republican voter. I just did our taxes.

The @GOP tax bill cost my family THOUSANDS of dollars this year on our return due to changes, thereby hitting us with the LARGEST tax increase of our lives.

We are middle-class homeowners, and you raised our taxes.

Infuriating!

— Dennis Jordan (@DennisMJordan) February 5, 2019

What the fuck did you expect, asshole? We told you and we told you but you stomped your feet, made up a bunch of nonsense about Hillary, and shouted about immigrants. Don't worry, though, we will take of you...like we always do...

Color and Diversity

This week I have learned that non woke white men (especially the older ones) are very sensitive about the issue of race. They fly into hysterical rages not unlike Joan Collins on the 80's show, Dynasty when confronted with the current reality of racism.

 As John Pavlovitz recently noted in his marvelous essay, The Extinction of the White American Dinosaur,

"These Jurassic, soon-to-be-amber-trapped relics, will act as if the very sky above them is falling, because in very real ways, it is. They will thrash and spit and bellow, in an effort to buy themselves a few more days and a bit more power...

The misogynistic, supremacist nostalgia of their dying glory days is dissolving, in the glorious refining fire of what is coming on the horizon: color and diversity and new and young and wide open."

Straight Outta Bugs Bunny

The exploding cigar is a tired old joke from Bugs Bunny era of cartoons. But the advent of vaping has sadly made it a not-so-uncommon occurrence:

William Brown had errands to run on a chilly Texas evening, and his grandmother was happy to lend him her light-blue Lincoln Town Car.

Brown stopped at a store selling vaporizer smoking pens outside Fort Worth on Jan. 27. He sat alone in the parked car, put his lips to a pen, and soon after, an explosion sent shards of metal into his face and neck, said Alice Brown, his grandmother.

He thrashed and fell out of the car, trying to regain his balance on the hood and trunk before collapsing, she said, according to evidence from the scene conveyed to her by authorities.

Brown, 24, held on for two days before he died at a hospital. The cause of death was listed as stroke after the carotid artery in his neck was severed by “penetrating trauma from exploding vaporizer pen,” the Tarrant County medical examiner found.

There were more than 2000 vape pen explosions between 2015 and 2017. A Florida man died last May. That should put to rest the idea that vaping is safer than smoking cigarettes. To be fair, exploding cell phone batteries also kill people. But cell phones don't have heating elements...

Companies like Juul are trying to sell kids on the idea that vaping is cool and is safer than smoking cigarettes. But it ain't so: nicotine itself is highly toxic. Under normal circumstances average vapers are unlikely to OD on nicotine; they're more likely to make themselves sick rather than killing themselves. However, it is possible: Russian composer Igor Stravinsky nearly died from nicotine poisoning from smoking cigarettes.

 A number of of people have died from drinking vaping liquid, including children. The sweet-smelling and colorful vaping liquid often reminds children of juice or candy. Juul makes mint, mango, cream and fruit flavored JUULpods, each of which contains an an entire cigarette pack's worth of nicotine.

Nicotine is still highly addictive, making vaping the "gateway drug" for cigarettes. 

And, even though vaping doesn't pollute your lungs with carbon monoxide and all those other nasty carcinogens omnipresent in tobacco, don't forget that nicotine is carcinogenic: nicotine metabolites are known carcinogens, and nicotine itself causes DNA damage and mutations, which are precursors to cancer.

Conservatives Are Trying to Make Democrats Commit Political Suicide

Pretty much every Democrat is demanding Governor Ralph Northam of Virginia to resign because of a picture that appeared in his medical school yearbook. It shows a man in blackface standing next to a someone in a Ku Klux Klan costume.

First off, this is out there because a white nationalist website is trying to nail him. The motive is clearly to turn other Democrats against him.

Northam hasn't helped himself by giving an inconsistent narrative. But it's quite possible that neither person in that photo is Northam. The yearbook was probably the very last thing on Northam's mind when he graduated from medical school. I never had anything to do with my high school yearbook. I never had my photo taken for it, or bought a copy, or ever saw one. So there might be a nasty surprise waiting for me there.

One of Northam's "friends" could have put that page together -- perhaps the same one who give Northam the nickname "Coonman." Speaking of that, why was Northam given that nickname? Was it because his white friends thought he was too friendly with African-Americans, and he didn't act racist enough for them?

The only thing we know for sure about this yearbook debacle is that we don't really know anything. People should investigate. Reporters should talk to the editor of the yearbook, and the person who laid out Northam's page. Their names should be in the front of the yearbook.

They should find the photographer, and the other person or persons in the photo. Because at least one of them is not Northam, and they could confirm or deny Northam's story.

It also seems that the yearbook staff at Eastern Virginia Medical School had a long history of racist claptrap, all on its own. It was still publishing photos of students in Confederate uniforms up until 2013, when the school dropped the yearbook over similar offensive photos. Obviously the yearbook staff was packed with racist losers, so it's quite possible Northam had nothing at all to do with his page 30 years earlier.

I also don't think white people, especially young white people, understand how offensive African Americans find blackface to be. The Klan costume everybody gets. But until recently, unless you had black friends that you were with when someone appeared in blackface, you'd never know how bad it makes them feel, because most white folks don't know the history.

But the larger issue is that no one is pure. Every one of us has some stupid or embarrassing thing that we did when we were in high school or college. Pretty much everyone said or did something racist, or called a white dude a cracker, or joined the wrong club, or misinterpreted a girl's friendliness and drunkenly groped her, or shoplifted cosmetics, or smoked too much weed, or "borrowed" a car, or got in a nasty fight and hurt someone seriously.

We all have done something completely out of character, and a mistake or two should not define or condemn us for the rest of our lives. To demand absolute and total purity from every person in politics is not only foolish, it is suicidal for a political party.

To wit, the man who would replace Northam, Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, has just been accused of sexually assaulting a woman in 2004. The source? The same white nationalist website that "outed" Northam. It's clearly a setup. They're poking the Democrats in the eye, showing how ridiculous their knee-jerk demands for purity in all things is.

Because if Democrats insist every person accused of racism or sexual misconduct or shoplifting resign immediately, there won't be anyone left in the party.

The Republican Party, the Russians and Howard Schulz are doing everything they can to get the Democratic Party to tear itself apart. Democrats shouldn't fall for it.

Al Franken was hounded out of the Senate this way. In retrospect, it was clearly a hit job by a bunch of conservatives who wanted to use women's anger in the #MeToo era to destroy an effective voice in the Senate. But because Al Franken was a good guy with a conscience and a sense of shame, he did what he thought was the right thing and resigned.

I don't know whether Northam should resign. We don't know enough to say yet. Did he go to school in a state with a racist past? Yep. Was he even in that photo, or have anything to do with that page? There's not enough evidence to say yet.

But we do know that if Democrats demand everyone with the slightest whiff of scandal resign in knee-jerk fashion, the party will cease to exist.

I'm not suggesting that they follow the Republicans' lead and give a pass to every pussy-grabbing, race-baiting scumbag. But you've got to give these things the time to let the truth shake out.

Democrats should investigate, and if Northam was complicit with race-baiting crap, they can demand his resignation.

But Democrats shouldn't let conservatives scumbags bait them into destroying each other. They should be taking out their anger on the white nationalists trying to torpedo Notham. These Breitbart-clone clowns are actively trying to harm African Americans, unlike this well-meaning Democratic governor who happened to go to a college with a centuries-long history of institutional racism.

What's the Rationale for Raising Taxes on Billionaires?

There's a lot of talk about raising taxes on the rich, with Elizabeth Warren announcing her candidacy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez engorging conservatives' ... ire, the peripatetic Bernie Sanders, and the backlash Howard Schulz has gotten for demanding Democrats genuflect before him and his billions.

The question, though, is why should we raise taxes on the rich. We don't want to punish people for simply being successful -- it's the American dream. Is there some underlying logic that would justify taxing billionaires at 70% or higher, as we did during the 1950s (which conservatives always look back at nostalgically as the pinnacle of American greatness)?

There is a long-standing tradition of taxing things that cause problems in society. For example, alcohol and tobacco. It's a way of punishing sins that we have found impossible to make illegal, but wish to discourage or minimize.

The case for taxing alcohol and tobacco is clear: alcohol is a dangerous drug, costing the country hundreds of billions of dollars in increased crime (40% of violent crimes are committed under the influence), automobile crashes, lost productivity and medical costs due to accidents and alcoholism. Tobacco costs billions of dollars in lost productivity (smokers are always on break), medical costs and causes millions of deaths due to cancer and emphysema. And it's the leading cause of home fires, costing hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

Gambling costs billions in lost productivity and embezzlement by gambling addicts. So we tax gambling heavily, or give government a monopoly on it, as with lotteries.

So one argument for taxing billionaires is that their lust for wealth causes problems, just like alcohol, tobacco and gambling. And sure enough, billionaires do cause many serious social problems.

Look at the Sackler family, the people behind Purdue Pharma, who were responsible for pushing prescription opioids and addicting millions of Americans, killing hundreds of thousands in the last decade.

Other pharmacy billionaires (like Martin Shkreli) have been jacking up the price of prescription drugs 10-, 20- and 100-fold, solely to increase profits. This forces millions of Americans into medical bankruptcies. Millions of patients are rationing their insulin and hypertension medications, and some have stopped taking them altogether, causing numerous complications and death in many cases. These guys are committing blackmail: your money or your life.

Oil, coal and pipeline billionaires keep denying that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. But we're already seeing the effects right now, today, with the drastically increased destructive power of extreme weather and the massive flooding that accompanies it.

Industrial agriculture billionaires have made farmers dependent on genetically engineered corn and soybeans, forcing them to spend themselves into the poorhouse buying seed and the chemicals required to poison weeds. These companies then sue farmers who try to plant seed from the grain they grow, the way farmers have for thousands of years. And now Donald Trump's tariffs have yanked the market out from under them.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter's Jack Dorsey have set Americans at each other's throats, severely damaged the free press and helped put a narcissistic man-child in the Oval Office.

Uber's Travis Kalanick has turned thousands of Americans into struggling "ride share" drivers, and made the lives of struggling old-school cab drivers a living hell, causing many to commit suicide.

Hedge fund billionaires buy companies in hostile takeovers, take out big loans against those companies, pay themselves big returns, run the business into the ground, declare bankruptcy, then bust the company up and sell the pieces, screwing all the employees and the people they borrowed money from.

Walmart and the entire fast-food industry pay workers peanuts and force them to work part-time, so they can avoid paying full-time benefits such as health care. Millions of Americans are working 60 to 80 hours a week, taking two or three different part-time jobs, and they still don't have enough money to live on.

Even relatively benign billionaires, like automobile execs, create social costs by increasing the demand for more and more freeways, and reducing the demand for much more efficient modes of transportation like mass transit. And large businesses in general increase government expenditures by requiring government spending on infrastructure like roads and ports, as well as schools for educating their future employees.

Pretty much every person or company who makes billions of dollars is incurring some kind of social cost that they're not paying for. So society should recoup that cost by taxing them at a compensatory rate.

In their lust for the almighty buck many billionaires ignore the problems their businesses cause. The things they do may not be explicit crimes, but their greed causes more social harm than all the two-bit crooks put together.

Greed is a sin. One of the seven deadly ones. And we should tax it.

The Billionaire Drug Pushers

There are several lawsuits against drug kingpins in the news of late. One is against "El Chapo" Joaquín Guzmán Loera, and is filled with stories of prison escapes, border tunnels, IT guys turning states evidence and raping 13-year-old girls.

The others are far more insidious. Legal action is being taken against giant drug companies, like Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin. This company is squarely behind the opioid epidemic. In 2007 Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty to a host of crimes that led directly to the addiction and deaths of thousands of Americans every year.

Recently more details have come out about why Purdue started the drug epidemic: it turns out the real villains in this story are the wealthy, self-entitled family of billionaires, the Sacklers, who serve on the board. They pushed the CEO and faceless corporate bean counters to push drugs to more and more victims.

The Sackler family, ever more greedy, demanded more aggressive sales tactics to hook more patients on OxyContin, while at the same time referring to their customers as "reckless criminals." Their other activities included:

• The spoils of OxyContin allowed the Sacklers, as board members, to vote to pay themselves more than $4 billion between 2007 and 2018. Figures for individual payments during those years are sprinkled throughout the lawsuit.
• Members of the family personally ordered Purdue to increase the sales force on a number of occasions.
• The family was directly involved in pushing for higher—and more dangerous—doses of OxyContin.
• For years, the McKinsey & Company consulting firm had worked with Purdue to come up with sales tactics. According to a redacted section, the consultants "had reported to Purdue on opportunities to increase prescriptions by convincing doctors that opioids provide 'freedom' and 'peace of mind' and give patients 'the best possible chance to live a full and active life.'"
• Board meetings for the US-based company were held in exotic and luxurious places, such as Bermuda and a castle in Ireland.
• Members of the Sackler family worked on a secret plan codenamed "Tango," which would have expanded Purdue's business into addiction-treatment drugs. [They wanted hook addicts coming and going.]
  
• Purdue employees actively tried to avoid the Sacklers because of their relentless and aggressive demands
• Richard Sackler allegedly sought revenge on an insurance company for dropping coverage of OxyContin amid the epidemic of abuse.
• The Sacklers allegedly knew about but did not report suspected cases of diversion and abuse by doctors.

A trial against another drug company, Insys, is in progress now. Insys resorted to more traditional drug pushing tactics: they hired a former stripper named Sunshine Lee to be the sales director. In addition to the old standard of bribing doctors to prescribe more opioids, they used more conventional drug pushing tactics. Sex:

In testimony Tuesday against the rest, former sales representative Holly Brown made the lap-dancing allegation against her former boss, Lee. Brown testified that in mid-2012 she, Lee, and other sale representatives took one Dr. Paul Madison to a club after a dinner event sponsored by Insys. Brown said that her superiors had told her to focus on Dr. Madison, who was known for prescribing a lot of opioids. She described his office as a “shady pill mill” in a “dingy strip mall in a not-so-nice area of town,” according to reports.

Brown recalled an encounter she witnessed that night between Lee and Madison, saying, “She was sitting on his lap, kind of bouncing around, and he had his hands all over her chest.’’

Lee, a former stripper, had no experience in the pharmaceutical industry before working at Insys, prosecutors noted. According to Bloomberg, court documents reveal that Insys whistle-blowers quoted Burlakoff as saying that “doctors really enjoyed spending time with [Lee]” and that she was “more of a closer.”

Brown echoed the idea, saying in her testimony that Lee played up her sexuality during sales pitches. She dressed in a “sexually suggestive manner’’ and “showed more cleavage than the average sales rep,’’ Brown said.

Prosecutors reported that Insys paid Madison at least $70,800 in “speaker fees.”

A border wall will do nothing to stop the biggest drug epidemic facing this nation: prescription drugs pushed by giant pharmaceutical companies and the rich fat cats behind them.

The Sacklers and Insys make the best argument yet for a 70% tax on billionaires. The country needs to be reimbursed for the death and destruction their unbridled greed wreaks upon the American people.

There is no global warming

Trump's Groundhog Day Stock Market Tweets

Vox is a great site. One of the services they provide is reading Donald Trump's tweets (so I don't have to), and remembering what he said in previous tweets.

Which is something that Trump is apparently incapable of. Trump has now bragged about the Dow hitting 25,000 at least three separate times. Most recently on Jan. 19, but also on July 14th and Jan. 4 of 2018.

As Vox points out, Trump is bragging that he has trashed the stock market, which has become extremely chaotic and/or stagnant since he started screwing up the economy with tariffs, government shutdowns, border invasions and other stupid pet tricks.

But what does this bragging over reaching the same milestone over and over and over again -- like Bill Murray waking up to "I Got You Babe" in Groundhog Day -- mean? There are two possibilities:

The first possibility is 1) Trump is clueless: he just doesn't remember that the market surpassed 25,000 at least twice before. He's a senile dotard, addled by Alzheimer's, who is unfit to be president.

Now, Trump uses Twitter so that he can communicate with his supporters completely unfiltered by the news media. In this way he escapes any and all fact-checking and he can completely ignore the truth, shaping reality to his whims.

So the other possibility is 2) Trump thinks his supporters are clueless. He doesn't think they can remember what happened six months or a year ago, and he brags about the exact same non-accomplishment repeatedly, even though the bragging reveals how totally disastrous his presidency is.

So, Trump's Twitter feed reveals either that he is a total idiot, or that he thinks his followers are gullible idiots.

Ironically, the thing that seems to irk Trump followers the most is that moderates and liberals think they're stupid for supporting Trump, yet  -- unless he is a total idiot his followers insist he is not -- Trump clearly thinks they are even stupider than the liberals do.

Trump is taking his followers' support for granted, constantly feeding them bullshit and treating them like idiot children.

When Trump's followers finally get fed up with him -- and they will: they got tired of being taken for fools by the Republican establishment for decades -- these people are either going to give up on politics forever, or march on Washington demanding Trump's head on an impeachment platter.

Four Bucks for Cheerios Is Not a Lot. Four Bucks for Starbucks Coffee Is Highway Robbery

Talking heads are shocked that Howard Schultz, the billionaire who owns Starbucks and is running for president as an independent, doesn't know how much a box of Cheerios costs.

Former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, amid a media tour rife with awkward moments, got stumped by Morning Joe on Wednesday when asked: “How much does an 18-ounce box of Cheerios cost?”

“An 18 ounce box of Cheerios? I don’t eat Cheerios,” the billionaire responded to host Mika Brzezinski.

When she revealed the price was four dollars, Schultz was shocked.

“That’s a lot,” he said.

To be honest, springing gotcha questions like this on billionaires is bogus: I didn't know much a box of Cheerios costs. We haven't bought Cheerios in years -- we make 1-minute oatmeal in the microwave. And I have no idea how much a box of oatmeal costs.

What's shocking is that Schultz is pretending to think that $4.00 for a box of Cheerios is a lot. Especially compared to how much coffee costs at Starbucks. Maybe Mika should have asked Schultz how much a Caramel Frappaccino costs.

That $4.00 box of Cheerios contains 18 servings, almost three weeks of breakfast. The cereal has actual nutritional value, including dietary fiber, which most Americans don't get anywhere near enough of.

Coffee at Starbucks costs between $3.00 and $6.00. For one serving. It's a frill, nothing but empty calories (most of them have 100 to 150 calories, some as much as 600!). Starbucks coffee has no nutritional value and is a huge drain on the American pocketbook -- more than a thousand dollars a year for regular customers. It's a huge waste of people's time, as millions go out of their way to stop at Starbucks, where they waste ever more time waiting in line for their orders.

Starbucks has also added drive-through windows at their stores, resulting in millions of gallons of wasted gasoline as people queue up, their engines idling as they wait for their orders.

Schultz made his billions selling people an overpriced luxury product that no one needs, that is actively harmful to the nation's productivity and health.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that this master of worthlessness is threatening to run for president as an independent. Such a run could siphon off just enough votes from the Democratic candidate to give Trump a second term.

No third-party candidate has ever won an election, but they have affected the results: Ralph Nader gave Bush the presidency in 2000. Ross Perot may well have given the election to Clinton. Twice. And Jill Stein drew enough votes away from Hillary Clinton in 2016 to give Trump the win in Wisconsin and Michigan, and if Stein hadn't run Pennsylvania might have gone to Clinton as well.

The last thing this country needs is another egocentric billionaire narcissist with no political or government experience running for president. We've already got one of those, and it's been a total disaster.

Yeah, It's Cold. And Yeah, It's Because of Climate Change

Every year we go through this: we have a cold spell and Donald Trump and all the climate change deniers gloat: "It's cold! There ain't no global warming!"

Yes, it's cold in the Midwest. As I write this it's -28 degrees in the Twin Cities, and the low was -30 degrees.

But if you look at other places, it's not cold. Why, in Anchorage, Alaska, it's 33 degrees above zero. And in Juneau, it's 39 degrees above zero.

It's 67 degrees warmer in Alaska than in Minnesota. How can that be?

Climate change.

Climate change has completely screwed up the jet stream. In the past the jet stream bottled up the cold air around the North Pole. Now that the arctic has warmed so significantly that the jet stream is weakened, and that cap of cold air at the pole is no longer stable. It wobbles around a lot, and now the "polar vortex" has slipped down into the Midwest.

But don't worry: this is temporary. By Saturday it'll be 39 in Minnesota, a swing of almost 70 degrees in just a few days.

Meanwhile, Australia is being roasted by record-setting high temperatures, over 120 degrees in some places. And 2018 was the fourth warmest year on record. The other three warmest years were 2016, 2017 and 2015.

When the four warmest years on record are the last four years, you just can't deny that the planet is getting hotter at a record pace. And the primary cause is the trillions of tons of greenhouse gases that we are putting in the air.

Assimilation Is Always the Goal

Tom Brokaw, a news anchor who's usually a hero to opinionators at the Washington Post, has come under fire for his comments about Hispanic assimilation. Brokaw said:

I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.

As Paul Waldman notes, this is basically a non-issue. Children of immigrants are all learning to speak English as a matter of course. And this isn't anything new: my grandfather came to the United States from Norway in 1905, and when my dad was born in 1933 they were still speaking Norwegian at home. My dad couldn't speak a word of English until he started school, but, just like the children of Latino immigrants today, he learned English quickly and was soon speaking like a native.

That's what kids do.

I grew up on the West Side of St. Paul, where there were a lot of Mexican immigrants. My best friend's dad was Mexican and his mom was a blonde, blue-eyed northern European. The kids on the corner were Mexican. All of them spoke English just like the rest of us.

I have several Hispanic acquaintances that I play volleyball with, and they all speak English with native fluency. We're in the process of building a house, and a fair number of the workers speak Spanish on the job. But all the ones I've engaged in conversation have no problem understanding English and answering my questions.

But there are still a lot of people who are freaking out every time they hear someone speaking Spanish at the grocery store. Wake up, people! Latino immigrants aren't the only ones to continue speaking their native language when they emigrate to the United States.

Almost every time I shop for groceries at Aldi, I come upon someone speaking Russian. The other day at volleyball two women were speaking Russian to each other. It's nothing to freak out about!

There are thousands of Asian restaurants in this country where the employees speak Chinese, or Korean, or Japanese in the kitchen. What's the big deal?

Services at synagogues often have prayers in Hebrew, and Latin was used in Catholic churches within the lifetimes of many of the people who are whining the loudest about assimilation.

Yet, a couple of years ago, some stupid woman bashed a Somali woman in the face with a beer mug for not speaking English. The irony of it: the adults were speaking in a foreign language so their own kids wouldn't understand.

When people come to this country they bring their languages, their customs, and their food. In the great melting pot of America we take the best imports and toss the rest.

That's how pizza and Kung Pao chicken have become as American as apple pie.

The vast majority of immigrant kids will forget their parent's native language and become monolingual like most Americans. Immigrants come to this country to become Americans, and they really want their kids to be accepted as Americans.. They fully intend to assimilate, and they're trying, but learning a new language is hard. When nativist jerks run around screaming "Speak English!" they're just making the assimilation process that much harder.

When I was in high school I volunteered at the Jewish Community Center to help Russian Jews emigrating from the Soviet Union adapt to life in the United States. ESL programs can really use native speakers to help learners practice their conversation skills.

If these people are so worried about recent immigrants assimilating, they should volunteer to help them learn English instead of just ranting.

Trump Finally Shows Some Spine

Everyone is on Trump's case these days. The Democrats, of course, are talking investigations and impeachment, but Anne Coulter is calling him the biggest wimp since George Herbert Walker Bush. Lou Dobbs says he caved on the wall.

But the fact is, by reopening the government Trump finally showed some spine. Trump has been letting racist know-nothings on the extreme right lead him around by the nose for the last ten years.  To court these nihilists, Trump has been forced to mouth idiotic nonsense, such as claiming Obama was born in Kenya, praising neo-Nazis after Charlottesville, pandering to dictators like Putin and Erdogan, screaming about walls and caravans, and claiming "Mission Accomplished!" with ISIS, when the terrorists are still killing people in Syria and bombing cathedrals in the Philippines.

Reopening the government was the first “presidential” action of Trump's administration, after years of craven pandering to racist dickheads. Trump finally manned up and broke out of the prison that talking heads like Coulter and Dobbs have put him in.

Of course, it happened 35 days after the stupidest and most cowardly and self-defeating action of Trump's entire presidency (worse than firing Comey): shutting down the government.

So instead of gloating that Trump caved, Democrats should reward him by opening serious discussions about border security. They should adopt the proposals that the experts who know what they're talking about have suggested. They should give Trump a little money for physical barriers (a few more in the right places are actually fine). But only if Trump makes a permanent deal on DACA, and not some phony temporary gimmick that he'll just threaten to yank out from under them the next time he wants something outrageous.

Trump could use this opportunity to become a real president, one who represents the entire country, not just the ever-shrinking population of old, white separatists and confederate apologists.

Of course, that won't happen. Trump is incapable of change: he's already threatening another temper tantrum, forcing a second shutdown or declaring a national emergency.

He's obsessed with looking strong and tough, but by having to bend over every time Coulter says "boo!" Trump is only showing that he is a stupid, weak, yellow-bellied, senile old fool who lets himself be controlled by people who despise everything that made America great.

Trump has confused anger with strength, hate with toughness, fear with vigilance. A strong leader is one who does right by the whole country, with an eye to the future, who bucks the demands of corrupt and moneyed malcontents who care only about enriching themselves and their own ilk.

Yesterday Was A Good Day

Why Can't Giuliani Make Up His Mind?

It sure does seem that Rudy Giuliani is a total idiot. One day he'll give an interview where he says that Donald Trump was trying to make a deal with the Russians from the day he announced till the day he won the election. This is tantamount to admitting Trump was making foreign policy decisions to benefit himself.

The next day Giuliani will say that was just hypothetical, and he was making assumptions about what Trump was saying, or that someone in his company might have been making deals, but there's nothing wrong with that, and anyway Trump was totally oblivious about what was going on with those deals in his own company, or the changes to the Republican Party platform to remove sanctions on Russia so that companies could make those kinds of deals without being charged with the same sorts of crimes that the Trump administration is hammering companies with that do business with Iran.

Which begs the question: if Trump has no idea what his company, or his campaign or his government are doing, and refuses to take responsibility for the actions they take in his name, why is he president?

One day Giuliani will say that Trump never told Cohen to lie to Congress about his Russia deals. The next day Giuliani will say that Trump and Cohen might have talked about Cohen's testimony before the hearings, implicitly admitting that Trump tried to get Cohen to fudge his testimony, but that there's nothing at all wrong with that.

Why is Giuliani talking at all? He clearly has no idea what anyone said or did, and he's just spouting his own suppositions. What kind of a lousy lawyer is he?

Is Giuliani senile, lying or just stupid? Yes, on all counts, but he has also assumed the same garbage-filled speaking style that Trump has: say everything, toss every wild theory out there, contradict himself endlessly, then deny everything in the hopes that the public will just throw up their hands in confusion and forget about it.

Then, when the truth comes out, and we know with absolute certainty that Trump really was trying to get dirt on Hillary from Russian hackers, and really was trying to cut a real estate deal with the Russians, the White House will say that this is old news, everyone always knew that Trump was talking to the Russians, and no one cares about it because he won the election anyway (pussy-grabbing!), so we just forget about the collusion, the backroom deals, and the conspiracies to sell out American foreign policy, NATO and our European allies so that Trump can plaster his name on a tower in Moscow and feel like big-boy dictators like Vovka and Un and Recep.

This is the strategy: lie, and lie, and lie and lie, and repeat the lie five different ways, and then come up with five new lies, and sow so much chaos and confusion that no one has any idea what went on, and hope that they just get tired of the mess and want it to go away.

The irony of it all is that the Russians were always playing Trump for a fool. They've been stringing him along for decades, dangling a shiny Moscow tower in front of him since the 1980s.

If Trump had lost the election, it's inconceivable that Putin would have given a prominent American politician -- an enemy of his state -- such an ostentatious symbol of power and wealth in the center of Moscow. It would make Putin look like he was giving loser Trump a consolation prize after Russian hackers failed to get him elected.

And if Trump won and Putin let him put up a tower in Moscow, it would make Putin look even weaker, rewarding the winner of the election from Russia's greatest foe with a huge Moscow propaganda blitz.

So this deal was never going to happen. Trump had to remain a reality show gadfly and backstage voyeur at his soft-core porn beauty contests to have any shot at Trump Tower Moscow. As soon as he won the Republican nominee any such deal was off.

But Trump was still going after the deal until election day. Only a greedy narcissistic sucker could actually believe that there was any chance in hell for that Moscow tower. Trump has got to be the worst deal maker in American history.

He can't negotiate his way out of a paper bag. Or a month-long government shutdown of his own making, as shown by the fact that all sides flatly rejected his Saturday proposal for ending the shutdown.

Trump's only negotiation tactic is a flat demand: my way or the highway. That's why the shutdown won't end. He doesn't have the slightest clue on how to negotiate a deal that benefits all sides. He views every deal as a zero sum, with the only acceptable outcome is him winning everything and the enemy losing everything.

And that's not how democracy works.

Even Trump's fans are getting tired of this stupid routine: the latest polls show that his voters are starting to blame him for the shutdown.

Which they should, because he claimed he would own the shutdown and never blame the Democrats for it. And then he promptly blamed it on the Democrats.

Trump is always trying to have it not just both ways, but every way, the sure sign of a con man and liar. I am still completely baffled that the Republicans in the Senate still have not realized they'll be going down the toilet with Trump when he finally gets flushed.

It seems the only way out is for Senate Republicans to save Trump from himself by passing a continuing resolution to fund the government with a veto-proof margin. Trump would sign the bill defiantly, saying that he would continue to fight for the wall tooth and nail, and then it will quietly die.

Just like it died during the two years that Trump and the Republicans had total control of the entire federal government, but never did anything to start building the wall, because no one actually wants the god-damned wall. It's just a hammer for Trump and white nationalists to pound Latinos and liberals with to make them squirm and scream.

But Senate Republicans are too cowardly to rear their crocodilian heads from the swamp, for fear that Trump's nihilistic supporters will primary them come re-election time.

What Are You Doing For Others?

Christmas 2018

This year my youngest sister, M, drove up from Texas for Christmas with her husband and two sons. Because my brother-in-law is Latino and my dad is a racist dick, we didn't spend the holiday at my parents' house as usual, but at my sister J's house instead.

This year M gave my mom a DNA test from Ancestry.com. Tests from 23AndMe.com and Ancestry.com have become a popular gift in recent years. They purport to help you find long-lost relatives by looking for genetic similarities, allowing you to fill in the gaps in your family tree.

While these tests may have provided some entertainment and insight, they have also caused a lot of problems and heartache. By this time, thousands of people have discovered that the man who raised them is not their real father, that mom cheated on dad or their mother was raped.

Entire family histories are being rewritten as people try to establish whether grandma really was Irish, or German, or American Indian. Elizabeth Warren has injected DNA testing into the presidential race.

Neo-Nazis are finding out that they're not as racially pure as they thought they were, and are not at all happy about it.

And family DNA tests are being used to find serial killers. The most famous of these is the Golden State Killer, who was found by investigators through a commercial online DNA database. Actor Patton Oswalt and his wife, Michelle McNamara, who was writing a book about the serial killer when she died in 2016, are largely responsible for keeping the public spotlight on the case.

Now, these DNA tests are nowhere near as accurate as the companies that sell them pretend they are. They've picked out a few genetic markers that are indicative of ethnicity, but because the databases are incomplete and genetic inheritance is random, these results are nowhere near definitive.

Anyway, on Christmas Eve M pulled me aside and in a grave whisper told me that, based on DNA testing and Ancestry.com, our maternal grandfather had lived under an assumed name.

She hadn't told our mom yet, and wanted it kept quiet. But she was clearly disturbed by the revelation.

We never knew anything about grandpa, except that he had come up from the South sometime in the 1920s. He came to live with us when my grandmother died of breast cancer in the 1960s. After her death he started drinking heavily, imbibing the "white lightning" he made on his hog farm, which had an outhouse and no electricity (though he did have a phone).

He collapsed one day and lost the use of his legs. I never knew exactly what the problem was, but now I'm guessing alcoholic neuropathy.

Ancestry.com connected M to a family in the South, and a genealogy tree with a man, AH, who'd gone missing in the 1920s. Photos of the man's nephews, who died years ago, were dead ringers for my grandfather.

According to the family history my sister dug up, AH was a moonshiner -- prohibition was still in effect in the 1920s. The cops broke up AH's still and were after him, but before he left town he tracked down one of the cops and shot him dead in a church.

How reliable is this narrative? Is it just a story someone made up to explain a missing uncle? And just how accurate are these DNA tests anyway?

Is it wise to ruin my mother's memory of her father, branding him a murderer after all these years? My sister hasn't mentioned any of this to my mom yet; she's still waiting on Ancestry.com for the results of my mother's DNA swab.

But why not just tell her now? If grandpa wasn't a murderer, she'll tell my mom because it's such an interesting story. And if he was, she's still going to tell my mom because why would she go through all this effort and expense to verify it, only to keep it a secret? She just wants to know.

But it really shouldn't matter to my mom. Despite the paltry jealousies of Old Testament and Greek gods, the sins of fathers should not be visited upon their sons and daughters.

At this point, the truth about my grandfather is purely academic. He's been dead for 25 years, and we'll never know what happened with absolute certainty, so whatever my sister finds out it won't change anything, except perhaps to cause my mother sorrow.

My grandfather's drunken actions almost a century ago have no bearing on my mother. Unless, of course, she knew about what he did and kept it a secret, or continued to say what a great guy he was after learning he was a murderous moonshiner.

Which brings to mind the hypocrisy of the Daughters of the Confederacy and other apologists for Civil War traitors. Confederate soldiers went to war to keep human beings enslaved. They either believed in slavery or were cowed by the slave masters who ran their states into committing treason against the United States and killing their fellow Americans.

The treason and defense of slavery by Confederate soldiers should not reflect poorly on their descendants. But by refusing to acknowledge their ancestors' crimes, Civil War apologists inherit their ancestors' crimes, branding themselves as liars, racists and traitors.

It's rather ironic that, if the story about grandpa is true, my father harbored a drunken murderer for more than 20 years. Yet he won't let the stable, solid, gainfully employed father of his own two grandsons into his house because he's Latino.

The New Hitler Youth

Ah, the new Hitler youth...so respectful of other cultures and veterans...


Get ready for a world of pain, boys! Your faces are all over the inter webs. It won't be long before people find out who you are...

Ah, the white male threatened...

Gillette ran this great ad about men being the best a man can be. Here it is...


For those of us that are secure and comfortable in our masculinity, it was a great message. But some older, white men aren't that way...especially the gun humper snowflakes. Man oh man, are they PISSED OFF!! Check this asshole out...

He might as well have a sign hanging around his neck that says WHITE MALE DINOSAUR THREATENED. I also like the fact that he's in a cotton field in a not so subtle racial dog whistle. They are so cute when they try to get all the attention and stuff, right?

I'm kinda hoping that these guys actually do try some sort of armed insurrection. Something tells me that President Pelosi isn't going to be too kind to them.

Neither will the gentlemen they will encounter in prison:)

No Fancy Words