To The 19th Century and Beyond!!

The Unraveling of Donald Trump

Coming as a shock to no one, Donald Trump is unraveling.

Even before Corker’s remarks, some West Wing advisers were worried that Trump’s behavior could cause the Cabinet to take extraordinary Constitutional measures to remove him from office. Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment—the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?” According to a source, Bannon has told people he thinks Trump has only a 30 percent chance of making it the full term.

30 percent, eh? I put it at even less.

Trump's behavior of late reminds me a great deal of all those right wing bloggers and commenters that used to post on my site. Overly dramatic and emotional...offended by everyone and everything...touchy to the point of paranoia...in short, right wing snowflakes.

Why Bad Cops Aren't Fired

Finally, a bad cop has been fired:

A Salt Lake City police detective was fired and his supervisor demoted Tuesday for their roles in the arrest of a nurse who was manhandled and shoved screaming into a squad car as she tried to protect the legal rights of an unconscious patient.

Detective Jeff Payne was fired and James Tracy, his watch commander, was demoted two ranks from lieutenant to officer after an internal review by the Salt Lake City Police Department found their actions toward the nurse violated department policy and undermined public trust.

This is good thing, but it's not enough: the watch commander is the one who ordered the subordinate to arrest the nurse. Now they're sending him back out on the street?  The guy should be out on his ear, no matter how many years of seniority he has. Clearly, the higher-ups don't want the guy to lose his pension for making a mistake that, in their minds, any cop could make.

The question is, will Payne stay fired? Because, all too often, cities that fire bad cops are forced to rehire them:

Since 2006, the nation’s largest police departments have fired at least 1,881 officers for misconduct that betrayed the public’s trust, from cheating on overtime to unjustified shootings. But The Washington Post has found that departments have been forced to reinstate more than 450 officers after appeals required by union contracts.

Most of the officers regained their jobs when police chiefs were overruled by arbitrators, typically lawyers hired to review the process. In many cases, the underlying misconduct was undisputed, but arbitrators often concluded that the firings were unjustified because departments had been too harsh, missed deadlines, lacked sufficient evidence or failed to interview witnesses.

The arbitrators protecting bad cops are there because union contracts force arbitration. It's exactly the thing that Republicans complain about every time the subject of unions come up. "Oh, unions protect lazy and incompetent employees. They're terrible!"

But apparently not all unions. After gaining control of the legislature and governor's office in Wisconsin Republicans gutted most public sector unions in the state. Except for the police and fire fighters unions. They got special treatment because they supported Scott Walker, though Walker claimed it was for "public safety:"

"There is an inequity, that's for sure," said Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association. "But everybody knows that police and firefighters didn't create that inequity."

Gov. Scott Walker and fellow Republicans in the state Legislature changed the law last year, saying they needed to cut costs without endangering public safety by risking police and firefighter strikes in reaction to the statute.

This seems to be clear violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing equal treatment before the law, and worse, an explicit acknowledgment that Republicans are caving in to threats of extortion by ornery cops and fire fighters.

I can understand that politicians are leery of crossing the police unions because they depend on them for enforcing their decisions. But it makes no sense to have a police force that tolerates corruption, incompetence and wanton murder by cops.

Almost as importantly, these cops cost cities and counties hundreds of millions of dollars every year when courts award damages for the illegal actions of bad cops.

Not all cops are bad. Not by a long stretch. But when cities are forced to keep the bad ones on the payroll, it's got to be disheartening to to the good cops. And little by little, the ethos of corruption gains hold, until all the good cops can't take it anymore and just leave.

Through a Foreign Lens

Netflix has been creating a lot of original content lately (notably the Marvel series and some offbeat comedies and dramas), but they've also been adding content from foreign countries. I majored in Russian and haven't used the language much in 40 years, so I decided to work on my comprehension of the spoken language by watching a couple of Russian TV shows. I also took in a Norwegian series in which Russia has a large role. These are all subtitled, not dubbed.

Nyukhach ("Sniffer")
This is a standard police procedural/cop buddy show that's basically a ripoff of Elementary. The main character is a consulting detective who has a superpowerful sense of smell. He can enter a room and tell how many people were there, how many times a gun was fired, the genders of the room's occupants, their age, their hair color and what they ate for breakfast.

Nyukhach is a cold fish. He wears nose plugs most of the time to avoid the constant assault on his sense of smell. He won't shake your hand. He wears gloves all the time. He's arrogant. He has a terrible relationship with his ex and his son. Whenever he stubs his toe or drops something he says, "tvoyu mat'", which means "your mother," with the same connotation it has in English, though the subtitles usually translate it as "damn."

His buddy is an officer in a special police unit. He's a regular guy and a ladies man. In the first season he's banging every woman he meets. In the second season he can't get any. A cold, hyper-competent female forensic scientist is hired who won't give him the time of day. He hits on a woman who tells him that she will only date rich men. The boss's secretary got married, got pregnant and left. He's all alone now.

Besides the dead body of the week, there's an underlying arc that deals with a secret vigilante group that can somehow control people remotely, forcing them to murder specific targets and then commit suicide.

The most striking aspect of the series is its treatment of women: they are either sex toys, harridans, bitches or victims. The writers tried to redeem themselves in the second season by making the women more independent and sympathetic, but it still comes off as sexist and misogynist.

This was a Ukrainian production set in an unnamed Russian city, presumably Moscow or St. Petersburg. Production quality is similar to any modern American series.

Mazhor (Silver Spoon)
This is another police procedural, cop buddy series with a love triangle thrown in. The main character is the son of a Russian oligarch. The kid is a total screwup. When he gets into a fight with a cop (causing the cop to lose his gun), his father pulls some strings and forces him to make a decision: become a cop or be cut off completely. Naturally, Mazhor is put into the same unit of the cop whose gun he lost.

There are several layers of conspiracies and several arcs in this series: the ongoing love triangle between Mazhor, his boss (a female police captain), and her boyfriend. There's the death of his mother -- she supposedly died in a car accident when he was a kid, but now that he's on the police force he's finding out that it might have suicide or murder. There's strife between Mazhor and his father, other oligarchs, his rich, drug-addled pre-cop pals.

There's even a funny bit where one of Mazhor's cop buddies falls in love with a rich girl whose daddy is a big Putin supporter. He makes the guy sign a marriage contract that includes requirements that the first-born child be a boy and be named after the president.

Once you get past the preposterousness of the premise, the characters in this series are more sympathetic. Mazhor starts out as a despicable rich oligarch brat, but over time he grows into a decent guy and a competent investigator. He slowly wins over his coworkers.

The series makes no bones about the corruption of the oligarchy and the police in Russia. It's right in your face, all the time. The series has comedy, pathos, drama and vengeance, and shows that a certain amount of self-reflection is allowed in Putin's Russia. There are even some pop-culture references to American movies ("I'll be back"). Almost all the songs played during montages are in English.

This is a Russian production set in an unnamed Russian city, presumably Moscow based on the license plates of the cars.

I actually learned something from this show: in recent years there was a huge police reform. The police force was called the "militsia" until 2011, when it was reorganized and renamed the "politsia." Thousands of bad cops were fired and pay was raised in an attempt to eliminate corruption by reducing the need for cops to take bribes. I also learned the slang term for cop: myent, pronounced with great disdain.

This show is more idiomatic and grittier than Nyukach. It's more engaging emotionally and plot-wise. Both are rather predictable, but that's no different than any American series.

Everyone in the cast of these two shows is white, with the exception of a minor character who appears to be Asian -- perhaps Kazakh. Everyone appears to be Russian, with the exception of a few Georgians and Caucasians (Chechens, probably), who are criminals, bums or drunks.

The third season of the show is currently in production, presumably coming to Netflix in the next year or so.

Occupied
This political thriller takes place in Norway. When the Green Party prime minister shuts down North Sea oil production in favor of an all-electricity economy using nuclear power plants fueled by thorium, the Russians kidnap him and give him an ultimatum, occupying Norwegian oil fields and refineries until oil production is resumed. All with the blessing of the EU and the United States.

After an assassination attempt on the Russian ambassador, things quickly go bad. The Norwegians are abandoned by their NATO allies, who are cowardly and venal and just want the oil. A terrorist resistance starts to grow, aided by traitors inside the administration.

The main characters are the prime minister, a reporter, the security minister, the prime minister's bodyguard (who becomes an investigator and is the main action hero), the Russian ambassador, and the bodyguard's and reporter's wives. In contrast with the Russian series, the women characters are basically equal to the men. The main Russian characters are multi-dimensional, some are kind, clearly trying to make the best of a bad situation; the real villains are off in Moscow, never to be seen. One of the main Norwegian characters is of African descent.

This series appears to have been inspired by Russia's invasion of Crimea, viewed through the lens of the German occupation of Norway in WWII. Though never explicitly referenced in the show, the term "Quisling" -- meaning a collaborator or traitor -- immediately came to mind when the prime minister agreed to the occupation. It was coined after Vidkun Quisling became the prime minister after Hitler's 1940 invasion of Norway.

About half the dialog is in Norwegian, with some Russian (mostly non-native Russian accents), and a lot of English. English is used whenever Norwegians speak with the Russians or the Europeans, and when they're watching the BBC. Norway is clearly a bilingual country, with everyone speaking English with native proficiency.

Only the first season of the show is available on Netflix, leaving you in a cliffhanger. The second season will be broadcast later this year, though I'm not sure when it'll come to Netflix.

This show came out in 2015, before Russia's interference in the American election and before Trump started talking about abandoning our NATO allies. If I had seen Occupied before Trump I would have felt slandered as an American by the insinuation that America would let Russia occupy an American ally like Norway.

But it seems the Norwegians know the Americans better than the Americans know themselves.

The Case of Major Hering

Harold Hering was a major in the Air Force. He had served twenty-one years in the Air Force, serving five tours in Vietnam as a helicopter rescue pilot. 

In 1973 Hering was a Minuteman missile crewman -- one of the guys who turns the key to launch an ICBM. During a training session he asked a simple question: "How can I know that an order I receive to launch my missiles came from a sane president?"
Hering's story has been told and retold several times. First in a Harper's article in 1978. Then on Slate in 2011. Then again in the Washington Post last August.

This question is particularly relevant today considering that an angry man-child is currently sitting in the Oval Office threatening to start a nuclear war with another angry man-child sitting in a Pyongyang bunker in constant fear of being assassinated by the CIA.

Richard Nixon was president in 1973, and his sanity was frequently in question. This was partly intentional because of his "Madman Theory:" by acting irrational and volatile he would engender fear that he would do something crazy. But by 1973 the Watergate story was coming out, and stories of Nixon's true behavior proved he actually was unbalanced. And a crook.

For asking whether there was any guarantee that the president was sane, Hering was discharged from the military. He never got an answer. He became a truck driver.

Now, it's easy to see why the Air Force doesn't want launch officers second-guessing their orders: without obedience to orders the military hierarchy collapses.

But in the Nuremberg trials after WWII Nazi soldiers were convicted of war crimes, even though they were "just following orders" when they incinerated millions of innocent civilians in concentration camps. Nuremberg established several legal principles, including:

"The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him."

Since Hering could be held responsible for crimes against humanity if he incinerated millions of innocent civilians in a nuclear strike on the orders of a madman, it was perfectly reasonable for him to ask for assurances that the president's orders were properly vetted.

In the present case, it is clear that Donald Trump is unfit to be president. Republicans know it, though only a few brave ones who are no longer running for office, like Bob Corker, dare say it. They are counting on Trump's generals -- Mattis, Kelly and McMaster -- to prevent him from doing something catastrophically stupid.

But there's no law that gives those men the authority to override the president. If Trump ordered a nuclear strike and they refused to carry it out they would be technically guilty of treason.

That's why it's more important than ever to be sure that there's a legal and constitutional process in place to prevent nuclear insanity.

First, Congress should pass legislation to require that everyone in the chain of command is of sound mind and body, including the president, vice president and the generals in the nuclear chain of command.

Second, it should be impossible for the president to launch a nuclear strike in a fit of pique because some third-rate dictator insulted him. It should require a unanimous decision by the president, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the speaker of the House of Representatives.

The idea that we must be able to launch a full retaliatory strike within minutes and can't involve a small committee is nonsense. Even though Trump still doesn't realize it, we have a nuclear triad that includes ICBMs, strategic bombers (like the ones in Dr. Strangelove), and submarine-launched nuclear missiles. No country can launch a preemptive nuclear strike against the US without fear of retaliation -- especially not North Korea.

This isn't some idle and unfounded fear. There have been two incidents where the world was minutes away from nuclear war: the first was during the Cuban Missile crisis in 1962.

The second was in 1983, three weeks after the Soviets shot down KAL flight 007. The Russian nuclear early-warning system detected several missile launches in the United States. The officer on duty, Stanislav Petrov, decided the warning was a false alarm, and it was: it was just sunlight reflecting off clouds. He most likely stopped a nuclear war single-handedly.

But, like Hering, Petrov was not rewarded. Doing so would have meant the bigwigs in charge of the faulty system had screwed up.

We need men like Hering and Petrov in charge of our nuclear weapons. Not the toddler in the White House Day Care Center.

Quote of the Day

Senator Bob Corker‏Verified account @SenBobCorker

It's a shame the White House has become an adult day care center. Someone obviously missed their shift this morning.

Thoughts on Vegas, and Why Men Keep Doing This

I recently came across this extraordinary piece by Charlie Hoehn, an author, marketing strategist, speaker, and play enthusiast. Hoehn posits that the core reason why mass shootings happen is the mental health of men. In short, it really, really sucks.

Men are chronically lonely, they don't have enough play time, they aren't allowed to express their fears and sadness because of societal stigma, and they are ashamed of having these feelings in the first place. He wonders...

But do you have confidants? Do you have male friends who you can actually be vulnerable with? Do you have friends whom you can confide in, be 100% yourself around, that you can hug without saying “No homo,” without feeling tense or uncomfortable while you’re doing it?

I've been thinking a lot lately about a theory that my ol' buddy and commenter here at Zombie Politics Last in Line/Cornbread has regarding men. If they don't have any friends, there's something fucked up about you and it needs to be fixed. He goes as far to say that men who are isolated like this shouldn't be trusted.

I agree and it goes along with what Hoehn is saying above. If we leave older white men isolated, they can behave in very unhealthy ways. This would included becoming immersed in gun rights culture, especially online.

I think Hoehn's piece needs to be read by every single US citizen and we should use it as a foundation to end mass shootings forever. Following his prescription has the added perk of never having to deal with the gun lobby and their cult followers. In fact, it might peel more of them away because we're talking about things that are largely non gun related. They may come to realize that there emotional and sometimes sexual feelings towards their weapons are masking a deeper issue.

Heal that issue and they have a much healthier view of their guns, even possibly getting to the point where they wonder why they have them.

The Racism of Guns

Bill Maher brought up an interesting point last night during the panel portion of his show. If the Vegas shooter had been a Muslim, there would be talk now of the Muslim ban. If the shooter had been Hispanic, then there would be talk of a wall. But because the shooter was white, it was sort of like...gee, I wonder what happened there?

When shootings happen, we can really see the blatant racism in our country.

The NRA Hotel

Helping Out

Welcome to the War Zone Part 1

I'm going to post a photo from the Las Vegas shooting every day for a while. I know for a fact that there are several gun humpers who read this blog every day so this is what they are going to get to see. 

Thanks, assholes. You are domestic terrorists. This is YOUR fault.

Guns Don't Kill People

Quote of the Day

...even with those who have the strange American fixation on the right to own military-style firearms. They don’t have a reason for this fixation—no reason can be found. There’s no argument for it—such weapons are useless in sport, except for the sport of using them; they play no role in hunting, or not hunting anything except helpless people; and they protect no one from a tyrannical government, since the tyrannical government, if it would ever come to that, is hardly in need of small-arms fire to assert its will. Absent an argument for it, they merely have a fixation about it, but it remains practically religious in its intensity. 

Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker

Vote, Fuckers!

In the wake of last night's shooting in Las Vegas (the worst in US history), US citizens need to finally get the message that the only thing that stops a gun rights activist with a gun is VOTING.

There is a reason why Nevada has lax gun laws. The gun humpers are very reliable voters and the people who want common sense gun laws do not. If US citizens want this crap to stop, they have to turn out and vote. Period.

Let's bury the Gun Cult in a sea of votes that will finally put the NRA out of business for good.

Time to Repeal the NRA Lies

Every time there's a mass shootings the gun nuts tell us that now is not the time to discuss gun control. Almost in the same breath, they endlessly repeat their mantra: "The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun."

This has always been a ludicrous lie, but the shooting in Las Vegas shows how utterly stupid it is:

A gunman in a high-rise hotel overlooking the Las Vegas Strip opened fire on a country music festival late Sunday, killing at least 58 people and injuring hundreds of others in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

The gunman, identified by police as Stephen Paddock, was later found dead by officers on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, Sheriff Joseph Lombardo said during a news briefing Monday.

The shooter, a crazy old white man (who may have been motivated by gambling losses), sat 32 stories above a concert with 10 rifles, including some kind of submachine gun, and shot into the crowd. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Even if every person in that crowd was armed with a handgun and had returned fire, it's basically impossible for anyone to have hit him. In the dark, with all the echoes in the Vegas environment, it's difficult to even tell where the shots are coming from, much less see the assailant 300 feet above.

To demonstrate their complete insanity, the NRA and the Republican Party want to make silencers available to anyone by having the big bad federal government prevent states and cities from banning or even taxing sound suppressors. They are ramming a "Mass Murderer Protection Act" through Congress, though they have euphemistically called it the "Hearing Protection Act."

Are gun owners really too poor to afford to buy earplugs (50 cents a pair) or hearing protectors (10 to 20 bucks)? Don't they want to muss their hair with those big ear muffs? Or are they such bad shots that they need silencers to prevent deer from fleeing when they miss? What is the real point of this bill, other than to anger liberals and promote mass murder?

Think about it: Republicans and the NRA want to make it possible for madmen with submachine guns to sit on top of buildings and shoot hundreds of people with complete impunity. With loud music playing, the victims would not even hear the silenced report of a rifle a hundred yards away: people would just start dropping dead in a hail of lead.

Republicans delayed action on their Mass Murderer Protection Act in June after Republican congressmen and staffers were shot by another crazy old white man. If they have any sense of decency they'll drop it completely.

But it's only a matter of time before Trump starts bragging about how his mass shooting was the biggest, most spectacular, flashiest mass shooting in history, and how Obama's mass shootings were piddly, squalid, low-rated failures.

A Broken Record

Donald Trump is a broken record, pulling the same stupid Twitter stunt that he played on Jeff Sessions:

President Trump seemed to undercut his own secretary of state on Sunday as he belittled the prospect of a diplomatic resolution to the nuclear-edged crisis with North Korea even as the administration was seeking to open lines of communication.

In a fresh set of Twitter messages from his New Jersey golf club, where he was spending the weekend, Mr. Trump diminished Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson’s outreach to Pyongyang and its autocratic leader, Kim Jong-un, leaving the impression that he was focused on possible military action. On a visit to China, Mr. Tillerson acknowledged on Saturday that he was trying to open talks.

Here we have the supposed president of the United States sitting at his golf club hurling nasty tweets at his own secretary of state, who is trying to prevent an outbreak of nuclear war with a megalomaniac who thinks he's a god, while three and a half million Americans in Puerto Rico have no electricity, no water and no houses, and are at grave risk of typhoid.

By the way, this could be a political disaster for Republicans if Puerto Rico doesn't get help: since they're American citizens, they are free to move to the mainland, potentially putting heavily Hispanic Florida and Texas into the Democratic column. A few hundred thousand Puerto Rican transplants could turn several states that Trump won into wins for Democrats.

Not only is Trump physically, mentally and emotionally unfit to be president, he is too stupid to understand how much his the people who work for him hate him at this point. He thinks that because they praise him in cabinet meetings and laugh at his jokes they actually like him.

No one respects Trump. No one thinks he's smart. They think he's a big-mouthed dumbass who just watches Fox News and plays golf. His voters know that. That's why they like him. He's just like them. He validates their pathetic existence, sticking it to the "elites" and the blacks and Hispanics. They don't care that his tax cuts will all go to the billionaires and cost the middle class money, because Trump told off the North Koreans and the Puerto Ricans, by gum!

But the day is coming when his cabinet, and his staff, and the Republicans in the Senate and the House will all stab him in the back. It's not a question of if, but when we will see Shakespeare's Julius Caesar reenacted in the American Senate.

Because everyone knows this clown has got to go. Every day his divides the country further, intentionally fomenting race and class wars at every juncture. Except for a Supreme Court appointment (which was stolen from Obama by Senate Republicans), Trump has accomplished absolutely nothing.

And that is his plan. Trump is playing the Republican Party and his voters. They're all expecting him to deliver on his promises, waiting for those tax cuts, waiting for the Obamacare repeal, waiting for the wall. But all those things will never come.

Republicans are patiently putting up with all the crap Trump keeps puking out every day in the desperate hope that they'll get the things that they swallowed their pride and dignity for to justify their vote for an immoral, senile scumbag.

But Trump will never deliver on his promises. He can't. Not just because he's a terribly incompetent negotiator and manager, but because if he delivers on his promises the Republicans won't need him anymore and they'll twenty-five him.

Russia's ad buys on Facebook make it clear that they were fostering a divided America by pumping up Trump and Texas secession on one side (even sending Russian women to the United States to marry alt-right Americans), and Black Lives Matter and Jill Stein on the other. Trump is still following the Russian play book.

At this point it is irrelevant whether Trump actually communicated with the Russians to set this plan in motion. He is actively colluding with them, destroying the very fabric of this nation.

The worst thing about Trump is that he has turned the entire country into a broken record. His supporters keep reiterating their racist rants and the preposterous claim that Trump is so noble because he sacrificed "his beautiful life" to be president, while his opponents are turning blue in the face as they protest Trump's daily impeachable offenses.

This cannot continue for another 40 months. If Trump doesn't shut up or leave office, this country will either implode or stumble into a nuclear war.

Quote of the Day

A recent answer I gave on Quora elicited this comment.

This is… one of the best explanations I've seen regarding Trump supporters and fits the bill perfectly. Every Trump supporter I've met thus far is petty and miserable, and thinks nothing of making everyone around them miserable, including their own families.

Why they are petty and miserable is the key to understanding how to either win them over or beat them. We aren't anywhere near having all the answers yet but I think we are getting some idea. Economics matters, fear of change, insecurity, a sense of control loss...all of these drove them to be the trolls they are today.

Emotional Intelligence

Last night, one of the dads from my son’s baseball team said to me, “Hey, your wife is really hot.” I replied, “I know” and went on with my evening.

A little bit later another dad came up to me and asked me if I was OK. I was puzzled.

“Why?”
“Well, Jim (not his real name) said your wife was hot.”
“So? I know she’s hot.”
“That’s YOUR wife. He shouldn’t talk that way about another man’s wife.”

I laughed and told him it really didn’t bother me. He was then offended that I wasn’t more offended and walked away shaking his head.

Marriages are partnerships. People aren’t possessions. And, husbands, if you are so fucking insecure that you can’t take a compliment about the wives you love and adore, then you have some serious issues to deal with in terms of emotional intelligence.

Just Like Nixon

Like many millions of Americans, I have been enjoying Ken Burns' amazing 10 part documentary, The Vietnam War. Part 7 contains an historical fact that most folks likely do not know about.

Richard Nixon and his team told the South Vietnamese government that if he was elected president, they'd get a better deal with the North Vietnamese. This all took place in the weeks leading up to the election. Humprhey was actually up in the polls and likely would have won had it not been for the South Vietnamese refusing to show up to the peace talks in Paris in the fall of 1968. Nixon ended up winning by 0.7 of a percentage point with a few states falling his way in the last few days.

The Donald seems to be doing his best to emulate Nixon. He too has conspired with a foreign government to influence and election. Back in 1968, LBJ called what Nixon did "treason." It's time for us to recognize that our current president is guilty of the same thing.

We all know where this is going to end up. The facts speak for themselves.

Snowflake?