Sheer Incompetence. Again.

When Donald Trump announced that he had nominated the White House physician to be the next secretary of veterans affairs I thought it was ridiculous: Dr. Ronny Jackson, a rear admiral in the Navy, had never run a large organization. Jackson is a trauma doctor who had served in Iraq and ran the small White House medical office. The VA is a sprawling bureaucracy with dozens of facilities across the country and 370,000 employees.

Moreover, I really had to question Jackson's judgment after his fawning report on Trump's health. He said that the seriously obese 71-year-old Trump was merely overweight (he had to use a golf cart on a trip to Italy when other leaders walked), was in "excellent" health, had excellent genetics and could live 200 years if only he had a healthy diet.

Since no human has ever lived more than 122 years, no competent doctor would say this: obviously he was joking, but the health of the president (especially one as physically and mentally unfit as Trump) is not a joke. Jackson is either a huckster, a Trump sycophant or wants something from Trump.

Now Jackson's nomination is serious trouble:

President Trump acknowledged Tuesday that Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, his nominee to lead the Veterans Affairs Department, is in serious trouble amid allegations that he oversaw a hostile work environment as the White House doctor, allowed the overprescribing of drugs and possibly drank on the job.

Trump apparently did nothing to vet Jackson, and it's clear why. Republicans want a puppet in the VA who will rubberstamp their plan to privatize veterans health care, because it has a huge budget and medical service companies that contribute to Republican election campaigns want in on the action.

And then Trump said this:

“I told Admiral Jackson just a little while ago, what do you need this for? This is a vicious group of people. … What do you need it for?” Trump said Tuesday, during a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron. “I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it. What does he need it for? I don’t think personally he should do it. It would be totally his decision.”

Huh? Trump asked Jackson to run the VA, knowing full well what the nomination process involves. Trump is complaining that senators are doing the job that his administration failed to do before tweeting out Jackson's nomination. This is sheer incompetence.

The vetting process at the Trump White House appears to be this: if Trump likes what you say on TV, then he thinks you're qualified for a job in his administration. Jackson clinched his nomination with his hyperbolic press conference on the president's physical.

Other recent hires (including some aborted hires) from TV land include talking heads John Bolton (Fox News), Joseph di Genova (Fox News), Larry Kudlow (CNBC), Heather Nauert (Fox News), Mercedes Schlapp (Fox News) and Tony Sayegh (Fox News).

And, of course, how can we forget Anthony Scaramucci's blazing 10 days as White House communications director? His qualifications: Trump liked how the Mooch buttered him up on TV.

Nobody in the Trump administration knows what they're doing. Like Scott Pruitt (EPA), or Ben Carson (HUD), Mick Mulvaney (Consumer Protection Agency), Ryan Zinke (Interior), Rick Perry (Energy), Betsy DeVos (Education), and countless others. All these appointees actively oppose the missions of the agencies they run or are completely oblivious about them.

This is why so many Trump appointees are constantly getting in trouble for ethics violations and profligate spending.

Worst. President. Ever.

A Good Guy Without A Gun

Remember this?



A couple of years later we had this...

2 members of U.S. military stop Islamist attacker on train in Belgium

And yesterday we had this...

‘It was life or death,’ says man who snatched gunman’s AR-15

Huh. Looks like gun humpers don't have any idea WTF they are talking about. Shocking...not...

How about we stop listening to them? Oh wait, we already are...:)

Yeah, I Don't Trust Them

The Socialists Are Coming!

A recent piece in the New York times details how socialists have finally come out of the closet and are feeling welcome by more people than conservatives would like to admit.

Supporters, many of them millennials, say they are drawn by D.S.A.’s promise to combat income inequality, which they believe is tainting every facet of American life, from the criminal justice system to medical care to politics. They argue that capitalism has let them down, saddling them with student debt, high rent and uncertain job prospects. And they have been frustrated by the Democratic Party, which they say has lost touch with working people.

I can't wait for the mouth foaming and premonitions of a boiling pit of sewage when these folks start to win. It will happen.

And there will be a whole generation of leaders telling conservatives how to better live their lives...:)

Quote of the Day

"It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion" ----Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chapter II, Part II, Article I, p. 911.

Conservatives Are Not As Racist As You Think

A recent Facebook discussion over the Starbuck's "waiting for a friend while black" debacle got me to thinking about conservatives and racism. There is zero doubt that most conservatives are racially insensitive. But are they out and out racist?

Racism is defined as "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior." Certainly, there are plenty of conservatives that think that people of color are inferior to them and they likely feel threatened. Trump supporters definitely lean in this direction. Yet, I submit that some of them are not full out racist. They have another problem.

They just don't like people telling them what to do.

This is especially true of libertarians. If someone told them they should be more racist, they would foam at the mouth about doing the opposite. Whatever problem they had with authority in their formative years engages quickly and out comes the adolescent asshole. It's all about defying that authority and chiding people that respect those in power.

Of course, the other reason why they don't like authority is due to the fact that THEY want to be the authority. How dare someone tell them what to do when they should be telling all of the rest of us what to do!

How Did These God Damned Spammers Get My Cell Number?

In our region, the Twin Cities, there are four area codes (612, 651, 763, and 952). I live in 952 but my cell phone's number is in 651, which is the other side of town. Most of the people I know are in the 612, 952 and 763 area codes.

Most every afternoon I get a call on my cell phone from a number in the same exchange. The few times I've answered these calls they have been spam calls for direct marketers or businesses I've never dealt with (auto glass dealers).

The number displayed when I get these calls isn't the caller's real number: it's fake. Direct marketers spoof the caller ID, using a number in the same area code and exchange to make you think that someone living in your neighborhood is calling you. But since I don't know anyone in that exchange of the 651 area code, I know immediately that the call is spam and I don't want to talk to them.

I've given my cell phone number only to friends, family and only recently the doctor's office. I used to give out my landline to companies that required it, but we recently dropped the landline. Now I use a Google Voice number for companies that I never want to talk to. So no companies should have my cell number.

But how did these spammers get hold of my phone number? The same way Cambridge Analytica got hold of 80 million people's data without their permission:

From Facebook, or some other app that one of my friends installed on their phone.

When you install the Facebook app one of the things you give it access to is your contact list. That means Facebook knows your phone number and, worse, the phone numbers of everyone in your contact list.

Does Facebook sell the phone numbers it harvests from our contact lists? I don't know. There's nothing stopping them from doing so. Google also has my number, since I have an Android phone, and Apple has the phone number of everyone with an iPhone.

It's possible that Google sold my number to spammers, or Apple sold the contact list of one of my friends. Or maybe it was a company that has an app that purports to do one thing, but exists solely harvest contact lists to sell to spammers.

And that's the problem. It's one thing for Facebook to sell the personal data of Facebook users. But Facebook and companies like it have access to mountains of data about the people that Facebook users know, and there's nothing to stop them from selling those people's data as well.

If your reaction is, "Pish, tosh. What's new about this? Phone companies used to publish big fat books with everyone's phone number in them."

The difference is twofold: first, these contact lists allow companies to create networks of people, to figure out who knows who. Phone books didn't list the phone numbers of all your friends as well.

Second, Facebook has access to all the information in your contact list, including physical addresses, email addresses and any other notes you may keep on your acquaintances. Like their birthdays, or the code for your friend's home security system so you can feed their cat. Some people might even store their bank account number or other sensitive information in their contact list.

Clearly we need legislation that limits what companies like Facebook, Google and Apple can do with this sensitive information, and controls on apps to prevent them from accessing information on your friends without their permission.

Lake Elmo: a Case Study

Conservative ideology and stubbornness isn't limited to the Deep South. It can also be found in states like Minnesota.

Lake Elmo is a suburb of the Twin Cities, in what was formerly the boondocks. It's now becoming intensely developed as the population of the region continues to grow.

In the last few year residents of Lake Elmo, like my brother- and sister-in-law, have been bitching because the Metropolitan Council ordered the town to install a sanitary sewer system that will cost a lot of money.

Residents complain that they can't afford $14,000 per house for the sewers. They don't mention that these assessments are not lump payments: they are assessments paid over many years. They don't mention that the state gave the city a million bucks to defray the cost. And they don't mention that they'll no longer have to pay to pump out their septic systems multiple times a year.

Lake Elmo started out as a small town long ago, unlike most Twin Cities suburbs that were developed from farmland over the course of just a few years. New suburbs were planned out all at once with roads, water, sewage and so on.

But since Lake Elmo grew up over a century, homes and businesses drilled wells and used underground septic systems, in which sewage is collected under buildings, and allowed to seep into the groundwater.

This works fine in thinly populated rural areas. But once you hit a certain population density, it's no longer feasible. There's more waste than the aquifer can safely absorb and decontaminate: pretty soon urine and feces start leaching into your water supply.

And right on cue, to illustrate the problem of well water contamination, Lake Elmo is facing another problem: PFCs in their water supply. Recently the town was forced to shut down a well and a water tower.

PFCs cause cancer and a wide variety of other diseases; infants and fetuses are most vulnerable. For years 3M discharged chemical waste into nearby landfills, ultimately contaminating local wells.

Both these problems are the result of lax environmental regulation of businesses producing dangerous chemicals and a failure to plan for future population growth.

The conservative idea that everything should stay just the way it was 250 years ago simply does not work when the population exceeds a certain number.

For the economy to grow, the population has to grow. Growing cities and states that keep dumping excrement into aquifers, toxic industrial chemicals into landfills and car exhaust into the air will eventually kill their own people.

That's why Donald Trump's dismantling of the EPA is one of the biggest disasters of his presidency.

Alabama Inundanted by Excrement and Greed

The consequences of greed and lax environmental regulation are coming home to roost in Alabama:

A stinking trainload of human waste from New York City is stranded in a tiny Alabama town, spreading a stench like a giant backed-up toilet — and the "poop train" is just the latest example of the South being used as a dumping ground for other states' waste.

In Parrish, Alabama, population 982, the sludge-hauling train cars have sat idle near the little league ball fields for more than two months, Mayor Heather Hall said. The smell is unbearable, especially around dusk after the atmosphere has become heated, she said.

One woman complained, "Would New York City like for us to send all our poop up there forever?" she said. "They don't want to dump it in their rivers, but I think each state should take care of their own waste."

Hey, lady. If you don't like this, stop voting for Republicans who let businesses get away with literally any shit.

Other towns sued to prevent the waste from landing on their doorsteps: her mayor needs to get on the ball. The legislature of Alabama and other southern states need to take action to stop their countryside becoming a toxic dump. Just say no to the greedy companies that are importing this crap into your state.

New York used to dump this crap into the Atlantic Ocean, but the federal government banned the practice (for good cause) in the 1980s. The question then becomes, what should be done with all this human waste?

Many localities just burn it outdoors, producing air pollution and a horrific stench. In recent years many waste treatment plants have turned their waste incinerators into power plants, like the Twin Cities' Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant.

But there are even better ways of dealing with waste: converting it to natural gas (methane) in giant digesters. There have been numerous pilot projects for this concept, and it is technically feasible. The problem is that as long as cities can find places to dump their crap more cheaply than turning it into natural gas, they will continue to do so.

So, Alabama, please help yourselves and your environment by banning the importation of toxic waste like human excrement and coal ash. Make other states dispose of their waste safely, or stop producing it altogether by shutting down coal plants.

This points out, yet again, the fatal flaw in the conservative dogma of laissez-faire capitalism: it doesn't scale.

Conservatives always think in terms of one guy, or one small town, or one small state. With so few people and so much land their lax attitude toward guns, zoning regulations and environmental protection will have relatively few downsides.

But when nine million people live in one city, you can't just dump your excrement in the river or in the back 40. And you don't have to be as big as New York City to feel these effects.

See my next post for another example.

Nikki Haley Has More Balls than Donald Trump

Last Friday Donald Trump looked like he finally stopped knuckling under to Vladimir Putin when the US, UK and France hit Syrian chemical weapons depots with cruise missiles.

When Nikki Haley announced Sunday that the United States would slap additional sanctions on Russia for supporting Assad's brutal dictatorship, it looked like Donald Trump was finally done being Putin's bitch.

Apparently, it was all for show: it turns out that the attacks did essentially nothing. And on Monday the Trump administration had changed its mind, and additional sanctions on Russia were off the table.

The Trump administration tried to blame Haley:

[A] Trump official accused UN Ambassador Nikki Haley of “momentary confusion” for announcing sanctions against the Kremlin this weekend that the administration later walked back.

But Haley isn’t going to take the fall. “With all due respect, I don’t get confused,” she said in a statement, according to CNN.

Her firm response came after National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow blamed Haley for the snafu. Haley said Sunday the US would punish Russia with sanctions for its role in supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons program. But the White House reversed itself Monday, reportedly because Trump wasn’t okay with the sanctions.

“She got ahead of the curve. She’s done a great job, she’s a very effective ambassador,” Kudlow said of Haley. “There might have been some momentary confusion about that.” He added that additional sanctions were “under consideration” but not implemented.

Haley, however, made it clear it that she wasn’t about to scapegoated. Kudlow later said he apologized to Haley for the demeaning comments, telling the New York Times that he was “totally wrong” to call her confused. “As it turns out, she was basically following what she thought was policy,” Kudlow said. “The policy was changed, and she wasn’t told about it, so she was in a box.”

The source of the confusion was, as always, Donald Trump.

What changed between Sunday and Monday mornings that had Trump shaking in his boots at the thought of angering Putin?

The Comey interview, in which Trump was reminded that Putin still has the pee-pee tape.

Christmas in April!

The Twin Cities Metro area got a foot and a half of snow over the weekend much to the consternation of the denizens residing here. But the giant white piles of snow aren't the only things that are reminding me of Christmas these days. The news headlines of late have made me positively giddy. Here's the one that dropped today...

Michael Cohen's mystery third client is Sean Hannity

Ah, Sean me boy...you hitched your wagon to a star that is rapidly imploding. Your life, as you know it, is over. Speaking of lives being over...

Donald Trump's presidency is collapsing

Michael Cohen and the End Stage of the Trump Presidency

Prediction: By the end of 2018, Donald J. Trump will no longer be president. 


Bolder prediction: By the end of 2019, Donald J. Trump will be in jail. 

Folks, it's all over but the crying. Consider all of the shit that Cohen has on Trump. It's now in the hands of the FBI. Soon we will all see just how much of fucking mafia thug he is and he will be gone. And then the real work will begin...

As I have said many times, Trump isn't the problem. It's his followers. Some will fall off as this information comes out but most will stick with him. They will believe exactly ZERO of the evidence present against Trump because to do so would mean admitting error. Worse, it would mean that liberals win...again! They will never be able to go against someone who trolls liberals so much because that's all they really care about.

So, what do we do about these people? Well, I'm sure some will pop off and do something dumb so we can arrest them. The other loudmouths (likely on INTERNET ONLY) will retreat to their parent's basement and have all sorts of things on which to grouse.

Meanwhile, a massive blue wave is coming soon to a theater near you this November. It's filled with women running for office for the first time who just can't wait to tell old, white men how to live their lives.

I can't wait!!

Mission Accomplished??!!!

After hitting some chemical weapons facilities in Syria, Trump was oblivious enough to tweet "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED".

Does he not remember what ridicule was heaped on George Bush for uttering those fateful words just before Iraq turned into a trillion-dollar hellhole?

What mission was accomplished? Destroying Syria's chemical weapons?

Hardly. The US, UK and France hit a few depots. Syria's weapon of choice has been chlorine gas. Chlorine gas is required to kill bacteria in drinking water supplies and pools. That means pretty much every town that has a water supply has tanks of chlorine gas just sitting around. Assad can just put grenades on them and drop them from helicopters.

If we really did destroy Syria's entire supply of chlorine the country would erupt in an epidemic of cholera, typhoid and dysentery.

What mission was accomplished? Distracting the press from the raid on Michael Cohen's office, hotel room, home, and safe deposit box?

Hardly. Since Trump announced that he couldn't attend the Summit of the Americas the news has been filled with reports about Cohen. Like the revelation that the deputy finance chair of the RNC paid a Playboy playmate $1.6 million to have an abortion.

Trump himself has continued to tweet about it, with his inane "attorney-client privilege is dead" whining. That privilege goes away when your attorney is committing crimes with you.

What mission was accomplished? Burying the Comey book and interview?

Hardly. Except for a brief time on Friday night, quotes from the book and the ABC interview have been running nonstop everywhere (except Fox News).

And, of course, Trump himself has been tweeting nonstop about Comey, hurling childish Twitter insults at the former FBI director like some 12-year-old mean girl.

The only mission Trump has accomplished has been to make himself look petulant and foolish as he and most everyone in his administration is doddering toward some form of censure, impeachment or criminal prosecution.

The real reason that Trump had to declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED was that he wanted to go to Mar a Lago. Since the Syria thing screwed up his weekend plans, Trump is instead going to Mar a Lago on Monday and returning to Washington on Thursday.

Because the only mission Trump is capable of accomplishing is a round of golf.

Trump Manages to Make Himself Look Even Dumber

After flailing into a trade war with China that could bankrupt American pork and soybean producers, Donald Trump suddenly wants back into the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Barack Obama negotiated but Trump pulled out of:

President Trump, in a surprising reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.

Rejoining the 11-country pact could be a sharp reversal of fortune for many American industries that stood to benefit from the trade agreement’s favorable terms and Republican lawmakers who supported the pact. The deal, which was negotiated by the Obama administration, was largely viewed as a tool to prod China into making the type of economic reforms that the United States and others have long wanted.

The whole purpose of the TPP was to form an alliance with other Pac-Rim trading partners against Chinese hegemony. But Trump was uninterested in making deal with our allies; instead he just insulted and attacked Australia, South Korea, Mexico, Canada and other signatories.

Throughout the campaign Trump either didn't understand what the TPP was or lied about it, implying that the deal included China (it doesn't) or disadvantaged the United States to the benefit of China.


Now that Trump is about to start a trade war with China, he's suddenly desperate for allies.

What this episode shows is how utterly clueless Trump is. He trashes things he doesn't understand (TPP, NATO, the rule of law), and then expects everyone to give him a hundred mulligans for all the catastrophically stupid mistakes he's made.

At this point Republicans in Congress should impeach Trump for sheer incompetence alone.

Teacher Leaves Gun in Public Bathroom Stall

Here's a perfect example of why it's sheer lunacy to arm teachers in schools:

Not the most normal sight: a gun left in the bathroom stall.

But that's exactly what went down on Sunday in a men's room at the Deerfield Beach Pier.

The circumstances of how the Glock 9mm got there are unusual.

According to the Broward Sheriff's Office, the weapon was left by Sean Simpson. If his name sounds familiar, he's the teacher at Marjory Stoneman Douglas who said he'd be willing to arm himself while on duty.


According to the sheriff's office report, Simpson told deputies he'd left his gun by accident. By the time the chemistry teacher realized his mistake, the Glock was already in the hands of a drunk homeless man who had picked it up and fired. The bullet hit a wall.

Simpson was able to grab the gun away from the vagrant, Joseph Spataro, who was charged with firing a weapon while intoxicated and trespassing.

Who could have predicted such a thing would happen? Me. And every other rational person.

The teacher didn't leave the gun in the school bathroom, so at least the school didn't get shot up. But the incident illustrates yet again the fallacy of the "more guns make us safer" trope.

The more guns there are, the more dropped guns, forgotten guns, lost guns, accidentally fired guns, and guns falling into the wrong hands there will be.

This kind of crap happens hundreds of times every day, across the country, but it doesn't make the news because the people who do it aren't school teachers. The more common guns are, the more gun handling errors there will be.

As guns become more common and prosaic the less dangerous they will seem, which will ultimately make the people who carry them less careful, increasing the frequency with which such errors are committed.

Is Trump About to Start a War of Distraction?

Today the White House announced that Donald Trump had canceled his trip to South America, where he was supposed to attend the Summit of the Americas. The reason? To "oversee the American response to Syria and to monitor developments around the world."

But in reality he cancelled the trip because of the raid on the offices, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, the lawyer who paid porn star Stormy Daniels hush money days before the 2016 election.

Just a couple days ago Trump promised to pull American troops out of Syria completely. Then Syria gassed some more civilians. That made Trump's advisors nervous, because it looked like Trump was caving in to Putin and Assad.

Trump made a big show of hitting a Syrian base with missiles a year ago after Assad gassed civilians last April. But Trump had warned the Russians the attack was coming, so there was almost no damage: Israeli media reported that the base was operational the next day.

Syria has used gas on civilians nine times since the 2016 election, and Trump has taken no serious actions against the Syrian dictator.

But now, suddenly, Trump is about to take bold action. Why? Why now? Nothing in the Syrian Civil War is any different this time than it was the dozens of other times Assad used chemical weapons against his own people.

It appears all too likely that any attack Syria will just be an attempt to Wag the Dog and divert attention from the Cohen raid. Because if we're at war, it would be unpatriotic to investigate the president.

I can just hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders saying that the investigations into wrongdoing by Trump and his cronies are aiding and abetting America's enemies abroad.

Those investigations include Russian election hacking, the conspiracy between the Russians and the Trump campaign, large Russian contributions to the NRA and the Trump Foundation, numerous financial connections between Trump businesses and Russian oligarchs, financial connections between Trump cabinet members (like Wilbur Ross) and the Russians, secret backdoor negotiations between Trump proxies (like Eric Prince) and the Russians before Trump assumed office, several Trump flunkies who have already pleaded guilty to a wide variety of criminal activities surrounding the election and the early days of the Trump administration, as well as countless scandals about profligate spending and influence peddling by his cabinet members (Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson, Steven Mnuchin, etc., etc. ad nauseam). Not to mention Trump's history of sexual harassment and paying hush money to silence Playboy playmates and porn stars.

Nothing about the Syria problem today is any different than it was for the first 400 days of the Trump administration, yet Trump managed to spend more than a quarter of his days in office at one of his golf clubs. Now he suddenly can't go to South America?

We all know what Trump thinks about South America and all those "shithole/shithouse" countries, as he likes to call them. In all likelihood he was just looking for an excuse to avoid going down there and pretending to like those people.

What do you bet that by Friday everything will be calm enough that Trump will be able to spend the weekend at one of his golf resorts?

The NRA is a Terrorist Organization

Someone is Wisconsin is making me very happy today. Check this out.

A quick glance at Mad Dog Pac shows a grassroots organization to fund billboards countering gun humper dogma. I fucking love it! It also looks like they are going after voters as well.

The tide has finally turned...

Trump Tower Death Trap

A man died after his apartment caught fire in Trump Tower: 

The fire on the 50th floor New York City's Trump Tower that left 67-year-old Todd Brassner dead and six firefighters injured was the second fire in the building in 2018. President Trump's centerpiece Manhattan skyscraper opened in 1984, but does not have sprinklers on its residential floors, a measure required in new buildings since 1999. President Trump, then a private citizen and property developer, lobbied to try and prevent the mandate at the time.

It was the second fire in Trump Tower this year:

Saturday's fire is the second fire in Mr. Trump's Fifth Avenue building this year: Two civilians suffered minor injuries and a firefighter was hurt by debris in a fire on Jan. 8 on the top of the building. That blaze was sparked by an electrical issue, Mr. Trump's son, Eric, said at the time. Eric Trump said the fire had been in a cooling tower.

Donald Trump fought tooth and nail against a law that would have mandated sprinklers in residential buildings. In 1999 he said:

People feel safer with sprinklers. But the problem with the bill is that it doesn't address the buildings that need sprinklers the most. If you look at the fire deaths in New York, almost all of them are in one- or two-family houses.

What a moron Trump is. If a wealthy art dealer accidentally starts a fire in a 72-story high rise and the building burns down because there are no sprinklers and no effective way to evacuate the tenants, hundreds of people could die and losses would be in the billions. If some poor bus-driving schmuck falls asleep on his couch while smoking in his low-rent bungalow in Queens, he and his family are likely to be the only victims.

This is a typical argument for Trump and conservatives. They constantly rail against common-sense regulations using bogus strawmen. The more potential victims and the greater the potential losses, the more protection is required. This kind of short-sighted penny pinching ultimately cost lives and money.

And even though only one person died, units in the upper floors suffered heavy smoke damage, and some residents -- especially the elderly -- will likely suffer effects of smoke inhalation.

As of last November there were 21 vacant units in Trump Tower, and only five had sold since Trump took office. I expect that number to go up after this disaster and all the bad PR about sprinklers. And with all those Russian oligarchs being sanctioned, Trump is going to be hard-pressed to find tenants.

More ominously, this incident emphasizes how Trump's business interests and properties expose him to all manner of threats, from blackmail to terrorism.

This Just In...

Pruitt Next to Be Axed?

In the dumpster fire of the Trump administration the question is never whether someone is going to be fired. It's when.

This week's candidate is Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator. Pruitt has a long list of reasons for being fired.

It started out with his extravagant spending on travel, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on private planes for useless junkets, then traveling first class instead of coach (because he didn't want to have to deal with people who despise his destruction of the EPA and the environment). Pruitt built a $43,000 soundproof booth in his office so EPA employees couldn't overhear him plotting with oil company executives. Oh, and Pruitt also had his security detail also fly first class.

Last week it was discovered that Pruitt was paying only $50 a night to stay in a tony DC condo, which happened to belong to the wife of a lobbyist. Then the EPA approved a pipeline that the lobbyist was pushing.

Today's news is that Pruitt went around the White House to give raises to two young female cronies from Oklahoma, increasing their salaries to $164,200 and $114,590. These were political appointees, so the White House has to okay any raises. The White House rejected the raises, so Pruitt used the Safe Water Drinking Act to give his girlfriends 53% and 33% raises.

The cheap rent/pipeline approval certainly looks like a quid pro quo, an overt example of corruption. One might argue that it was just a coincidence. But Pruitt's long history of extravagant spending and disregard for the EPA's mission suggest a pattern of corruption.



From the top down, the Trump administration is clearly the most corrupt in at least a century, and probably all of history.

Memo to Gun Humpers: Start Shitting Yourself

I had several students and their parents trek out to DC for the #NeverAgain event on March 24. Here are a couple of photos that they took.

Remember when gun humpers used to make fun of crowd size at gun safety events? Something tells me that those days are over.

If all of these people vote, we are going to see significant change to our nation's gun laws.

John Paul Stevens is Right

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently penned an Op Ed calling for the repeal of the 2nd Amendment. I wholeheartedly support his assertions and call for the students of this nation that risen up against gun violence across the country to aim for this goal. It might not be as difficult as we think.

Of course, we would need a 2/3 vote of both chambers of Congress and 38 states to ratify such a repeal. If a vote were held today, how close would we be? California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island all have 2 Democratic Senators who would vote for repeal. That's 10 states and 20 Senators. Washington and Oregon have shifted leftward so that would give us four more senators and 2 more states. Our total is now 12 states and 22 Senators.

Looking at the states that fall into the middle (Colorado, Nevada, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania),  I see about six senators and maybe 4 states that would vote for repeal. I'm being conservative and clearly this could all change in the 2018 midterms but I think it's safe to say that 28 senators and 16 states would vote to repeal the 2nd amendment.

Obviously, this far short of what we would need but it's a pretty solid foundation on which to build. We could start by focusing voting efforts on these states in the middle and then branching out to those states that lean more right. It's also far closer to the goal than gun rights activists would probably like to admit.

For decades they had the numbers on their side in terms of reliable voters. Parkland has changed all of that and we now have a retired SCOTUS justice calling for the repeal of the 2nd amendment. Each mass shooting that happens from here on out will put more and more pressure on the NRA and other gun rights activists to cave. They probably won't.

And that means that the end is nigh for them:)

The Knives Are Coming Out

The other day Ann Coulter had a discussion with New York Times columnist Frank Bruni, in which she expressed a great deal of contempt for Donald Trump. I have long said that when Trump supporters figure out that he's been playing them for suckers, they will -- as the Trump phrasing goes -- turn on him like a bitch.

Now Ann Coulter is saying the same thing:

Bruni: The $1.3 trillion spending bill that he signed last week sent you over the edge.

Coulter: Yes. This is a different category you’re seeing now: Former Trumpers. That should be terrifying to the president. Maybe he’ll actually keep his promises. Unlike Marco Rubio. Unlike the rest of them. Unlike Mitch McConnell. We have been betrayed over and over and over with presidents promising to do something about immigration. If he played us for suckers, oh, you will not see rage like you have seen.

"If?" Lady, Trump has played everyone he's ever done business with for suckers (remember the $25 million settlement he paid for Trump "University"?). Trump voters thought that since he was a vulgar, bragging racist and pandered to their basest instincts, he was somehow more "authentic" than politicians who pretended to be nice to brown people.

But Trump has always been a dishonest, incompetent, multiply bankrupt lying real estate huckster and sexual predator. Just because his racism was the only thing that was authentic about him did not mean he would be able to carry through on his useless wall. He has proved to be as incompetent a manager and negotiator in the Oval Office as he was in the casino business.

Donald Trump is a lying braggart, seeking only to bloat his own ego. Nothing he says can be trusted. And anyone should have known this, after seeing him constant lie and brag, and the obnoxiously cloying way he talked and prissily preened during the campaign. He might have been entertaining to some people on television, but he's worthless as a president.

The immigrants Ann Coulter wants to keep out pick our fruit and vegetables, clean our houses and hotel rooms, butcher our livestock, cook our food, take care of our children and our grandparents, mow our lawns, roof our houses and help hospital patients go to the bathroom. In short, they do all the poorly paid, dirty and dangerous jobs Americans refuse to do.

But as long as businesses don't pay Americans a living wage to work for them, there will be a demand for immigrant labor. And Trump himself is a prime example of the problem: he hires hundreds of foreign workers for his golf courses, hotels and resorts like Mar a Lago: in fact, Trump refuses to hire Americans for those jobs.

Trump voters knew (or should have known) this before the election and yet they still voted for him!

To remove the need for immigrant labor, we would need to unionize all service jobs, institute a $20 minimum wage and universal health care, as well as beef up regulations in dangerous work places so that Americans could take those tedious, dangerous and dirty jobs. Which means increasing the budgets for EPA and OSHA, not cutting them.

But hard-core Trump voters don't care about real solutions to our problems. They just want to bitch about immigrants. They want a giant wall on the southern border as a symbol of their racism, even though it would do almost nothing to limit illegal immigration and drug trafficking, because of things called "boats" and "airplanes."

I have an idea: let's just move all those Confederate statues across the South to the Mexican border and declare MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Guns: What The Experience of Each State Shows

Take a look at this article (I had to scan it in because it's not available online).

There are several things I love about this article. First, it's a nice summary of all the states that have decent gun safety laws and the ones that are severely lacking.

Second, it illustrates quite clearly that the states that have lax gun laws have higher rates of gun violence per 100,000 people. Take a look Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. They have very high rates of gun violence and very lax gun laws. Compare those three states with the favorite punching bag of the gun humpers, Illinois. Very tough gun laws and lower rates of gun violence per 100,000 people. Look at New York, for pete's sake. It's the lightest color of red on the map!

Third, it gives gun safety advocates a path forward for each of their states. With the current make up of the federal government being run by cowards, the state governments are where the battle should be fought. Look at how much success we have seen so far.

Fourth, this article is free of emotion about guns. It's just the facts. The good thing about facts is that they are true whether you believe them or not.

Laura Ingraham vs. New Reality

Laura Ingraham made fun of one of the survivors of the Parkland shooting. Now she is getting exactly what she deserves: lost advertisers and a forced vacation.

Let this be a message to all of you right wing trolls out there. The tide has shifted. Gun rights activists and 2nd amendment apologists no longer have the upper hand. You don't get to fuck with us anymore.

And we are most definitely coming for your guns...

I Spoke Too Soon

I wrote a post the other day about how the father of the Maryland school shooter should be made an example of for letting his son get hold of his Glock pistol. The father's malfeasance resulted in the deaths of his son and the boy's girlfriend. It had been almost a week since the incident, and I thought I had waited long enough for all the facts to come out.

But I hadn't.

At first it seemed that the NRA's dream scenario had come true: a good guy with a gun had stopped a bad guy with a gun.

But it hadn't.

Because the Maryland school shooter committed suicide.

Austin Wyatt Rollins, the 17-year-old who opened fire on classmates at Great Mills High School in Southern Maryland last week, injuring one and killing another, died from shooting himself in the head, officials investigating the case said Monday.

According to details released by the St. Mary's County sheriff's office, Rollins parked his car at 7:50 a.m. and walked through the school's main entrance two minutes later.

At 7:57 a.m., he approached classmate Jaelynn Willey, 16, and shot her once in the head with his father's Glock 9-mm pistol. That bullet also struck 14-year-old Desmond Barnes in the leg.

After firing the handgun, Rollins kept walking through the school, where he was confronted by school resource officer Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill just after 8 a.m. Their weapons went off simultaneously 31 seconds later, with Rollins shooting himself in the head and Gaskill shooting Rollins in the hand, officials said. 

Rollins was despondent and suicidal, following the typical pattern of domestic abusers: kill the girlfriend and commit suicide. He apparently had no interest in shooting up the school, but if he had, he could have shot dozens of other students in the three minutes between the shootings of his girlfriend and himself.

In summary: the NRA "good guy with a gun" theory is total bullshit.

This is why the only solution to preventing gun violence is to keep guns out of the hands of likely shooters. As long as the NRA gets its way, shooters are guaranteed have easy access to guns, and will have the ability to kill dozens of people before anyone can react.

Because, as we've seen countless time before, guns are not protection. In fact, for every instance that a gun in the home is used for self defense, there are 22 (twenty-two!) instances of suicide, assault perpetrated by the gun owner or family member, or an accidental shooting.

These one-off murders and suicides are the real problem with guns in America, not the flashier mass shootings that gets everyone so worked up.

The lesson parents should learn: people with kids just should not have guns.

Make an Example Out of the Maryland Shooter's Dad

Last week a boy shot a girl in the head at a high school in Maryland. She died two days later, when her parents took her off life support. Another boy was shot in the thigh (he survived). A school resource officer exchanged gunfire with the shooter and killed him.

The incident, occurring less than a month after 17 people were killed in a mass shooting in Florida, illustrates perfectly why the NRA's mantra of more and more guns can't work.

The situation in Maryland was set up exactly as the NRA said it should be: a good guy with a gun was right there, johnny on the spot. This was the best possible outcome with the NRA policy, yet two kids are dead, and another was shot.

With the NRA's "solution" of doing absolutely nothing to prevent people from obtaining firearms and reactively killing people who start shooting up schools, there will be bloodshed 100% of the time. There will be at least one death basically 100% of the time (the shooter), with the shooter being able to unload a full magazine at a minimum (six to 100 rounds) on his targets every time, likely killing anywhere from 1 to 20 other people depending on shooter accuracy, magazine capacity, and security response times.

The NRA policy is like turning on the stoplights at an intersection only after there has been a car crash.

Gun advocates insist that measures to prevent gun violence won't stop every shooting. Yep, that's true. But the NRA policy of doing nothing stops zero shootings: by allowing shooters to get guns in the first place, they are guaranteed to be able unload a full one magazine of ammo every time.

Just because a law won't stop every shooting doesn't make the law useless. Stoplights at intersections don't stop every car crash, but they allow traffic to flow smoothly and prevent millions of crashes every day.

Each of the following laws will stop some percentage of deaths -- including murders and suicides:

• Take guns away from domestic abusers. 
• Raise the age requirement to purchase firearms.
• Impose longer waiting periods for firearms purchases.
• Strip firearms licenses from gun dealers whose weapons are consistently used in crimes.
• Strict firearms storage requirements and trigger locks, especially in homes with children.
• Strict background checks on all sales, including gun shows and private sales.
• Ban bump stocks, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines.  
• Severe penalties for individuals who supply or allow firearms to illegally fall into the hands of shooters.

None of these laws impose any hardship on legitimate hunters, sharpshooters or gun collectors.

If each law stopped, say, 2 to 10% of would-be shooters from getting hold of weapons, we're talking about reducing the firearms death rate from murder and suicide by as much as 50%. Which means saving 10,000 to 20,000 lives a year.

These types of laws really do work: states that have adopted them have lowered their murder rates, and states that repealed them have increased their murder rates (as was illustrated in Connecticut and Missouri).

Gun laws won't stop all murders because criminals break laws. Duh. But such laws will reduce the number of would-be shooters who get guns, especially people who act impulsively out of mental illness or emotional duress. And stricter laws definitely make it harder for criminals to get guns.

It's tempting to call the shooting in Maryland a tragedy. The kid doesn't seem to have been a mass shooter, but was in some sort of argument with his girlfriend. He appears to have focused solely on shooting her.

But this wasn't a tragedy. This wasn't a terrible accident: it was a completely preventable disaster that was the logical outcome of the NRA's despicable lie that "guns protect you." The shooter's father swallowed that lie and now his kid is dead.

If this kid's dad had kept his gun locked away, two people would still be alive, and the officer who killed him wouldn't have a death on his conscience.

This has to be the dad's worst nightmare: his kid is dead and dozens of other lives are shattered because he foolishly thought a gun would "protect" him.

Maryland law forbids possession of firearms by teenagers, and it's not clear whether the shooter's father will face any charges for letting his kid get hold of the murder weapon. Some people might argue that he's suffered enough.

But if his family had been Muslim you can be damn sure that all those law-and-order Republicans would be demanding the father's head on a platter. An example must be made! they would scream.

The father shouldn't have his life destroyed, or have trumped-up accessory to murder charges thrown at him. But he should be quite publicly charged with illegally providing a weapon to a minor, improper storage of firearms, and whatever other laws he broke.

Making a very public example out of him could save countless lives if other parents secure their firearms properly, or even better, get rid of them altogether.

Because kids and guns don't mix.

Ambush Proposals, Romance, Love and Marriage

The other week my wife and I were watching the second season of Jessica Jones. At one point a man ambushes a woman with a marriage proposal in front of all her friends and family. She of course has to say yes, but her reaction speaks volumes: she's only doing so under duress.

Wow, I thought to myself, that was really cruel and selfish. Do men really do that?

It seems so. Today I saw an article in the Atlantic entitled "Marriage Proposals Are Stupid:"

The marriage proposal is one of the most ritualized moments in modern American life. Growing up, many girls are instilled with a specific idea of how it should go: He’ll take us somewhere romantic—we’ll have no idea what’s happening—he’ll get down on one knee—we’ll start crying—he’ll pop the question—we’ll immediately say yes. It should be magical.

But for a lot of heterosexual couples, the proposal—as movies portray it, as many millennial women have internalized it—doesn’t reflect the kind of modern, egalitarian relationships many women want today. Whom to marry is among the most important decisions most people will ever make in their lives, and yet it’s not a choice made in the course of a conversation—the normal way two grown humans make big life decisions. Instead, it has to be a show, with a prefixed grand finale: “yes.”

But the marriage fantasy doesn't end there. Recently, the gimmick is extravagant "destination weddings." Two recent ones I'm personally familiar with were on Caribbean or Mexican beaches, where all the attendees had to pay for an expensive weekend trip, one to an island that turned out to be in the path of a hurricane.

Last year the average cost of a wedding was over $35,000. That's almost nine months of the average American's salary.

The Atlantic writer concludes that the whole idea of a fantasy marriage proposal is totally stupid, and that marriage should be a joint decision, carefully discussed and considered. I couldn't agree more.

My wife and I have been married 38 years. We went to college together (she studied electrical engineering, I studied computer science and Russian), and in our junior year we decided to get married. Neither of us can recall any proposal. Over time we just decided that we wanted to get married. I can remember the day we talked to the priest to arrange the wedding, but that's about it.

I was living in an apartment with a friend at the time and I didn't have any extra money. My wife and I went to the jewelry store together to pick out the rings she wanted and we (mostly she) spent a couple hundred bucks on a modest engagement ring and wedding bands.

After graduation, her parents footed the bill for a modest church wedding and reception with family and friends (as the eldest son and daughter, we were the first children in our families to marry). Our honeymoon consisted of a weekend trip to small hotel on Lake Superior, paid for out of the savings from our library and programming jobs. We moved into a modest apartment, got jobs in our respective fields, and within a year bought a small starter home in a Twin Cities suburb.

When people talk about marriage, they always throw around the dreaded statistic: 50% of all marriages end in divorce. If this is true, does it really make sense to spend all that money on an engagement ring, a fancy wedding and a honeymoon? Does spending all that money improve the chances of a lasting marriage? Or does it have the opposite effect?

Before we go too far, let's acknowledge that the dreaded statistic is a lie: 50% of all marriages may end in divorce, but because those include second, third and fourth marriages, it doesn't really tell the whole story.

Despite what popular culture likes to say, the divorce rate is actually going down:

About 70 percent of marriages that began in the 1990s reached their 15th anniversary (excluding those in which a spouse died), up from about 65 percent of those that began in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who married in the 2000s are so far divorcing at even lower rates. If current trends continue, nearly two-thirds of marriages will never involve a divorce, according to data from Justin Wolfers, a University of Michigan economist.

This is borne out in my wife's and my immediate families. Among the 13 marriages (12 kids, two sets of parents and one stepmother) five ended in divorce and two ended in death and the rest are still intact. Three of the divorces involved the same sister. Out of the 17 people in our families only three are divorced (17%), even though we have a "divorce rate" of 38%.

There are many reasons why divorce is declining: people are waiting longer before getting married, birth control is better (resulting in fewer shotgun weddings), prior cohabitation, more people are marrying out love rather than economic necessity (women are more independent), the birth rate has declined (kids cause a lot of stress in marriage), and men taking on more domestic duties. In addition, the marriage rate is down among groups that tend to get divorced -- in particular, people without college degrees.

The real problem with these fantastical marriage proposals and destination weddings is that they confuse romance and love. Romance is a combination of physical attraction and play-acting: it is a fleeting and ephemeral thing that cannot last because people cannot keep up the charade their entire lives.

Life is driving to work, vacuuming the floor, doing the dishes, making breakfast, lunch and dinner, raising kids, not getting enough sleep, paying the rent, and finally, when you find the time, and aren't sick with a cold or having a period, making love.

When the romance ends -- and it always ends -- there has to be enough love to keep people together through the humdrum details of daily life. And the most important part of that love has to be the desire for your spouse to be happy in everyday life.

Extravagant proposals and weddings set the wrong expectation for the realities of life: if you think dropping a major chunk of change on a fancy wedding ring proves your man loves you, do not get married!

An extravagant proposal, a pricey ring, an expensive wedding and honeymoon set the stage for economic disaster by putting the newlyweds in debt immediately. And when the reality of work, and kids and having too little free time destroys the romantic fantasy, if you are wedded to the romance -- and not your spouse -- the disappointment will crush you and the marriage.

Life after marriage is the same as life before marriage, only you're not alone any more.

If that isn't enough romance for you, you should watch reruns of The Bachelor instead of getting married. And as we just saw, The Bachelor brand of romance really sucks.

A Noun, A Verb and A Liberal

I'm on spring break this week so I've been hitting the gym more than I usually do and working out. Yesterday morning, I ran in to Pastor Ed and decided to take his temperature on Donald Trump. Recall the last time I spoke with this hard core evangelical conservative he was not a fan.

His first remarks were not about Trump but about Obama and how he gutted the military. Then he launched in to a tirade about Hillary, how she is a crook, and how Comey changed the law to help her out. I asked him again about Trump. More comments about liberals, the debt and Obama's gutting of the military.

I then pulled out my phone and showed him this.

But Obama, notwithstanding his own opposition to nuclear weapons, has committed to modernizing the U.S. arsenal. He supports the Air Force's new bomber, a new ballistic missile submarine for the Navy, revitalizing a fleet of nuclear bombs, a potential new nuclear cruise missile and other commitments. Some estimates put the cost for the program Obama supports at around $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

Ed didn't care about the nuance. Obama. Bad. Gutted. Military. Why?

Facts, he said storming off.

I didn't really want to argue with him because I find myself less and less interested in doing Vladimir Putin's work for him. But the whole exchange did reinforce the core value that conservatives have today. They only stand for one thing.

Trolling liberals.

Any sort of criticism or questioning of Trump results in denials, redirects and sentences which contain the following.

A noun, a verb and a liberal.

I suppose that's what happens when Donald Trump is the leader of your party.

Kim Jong Un, Trump and American Decline

The shock over Donald Trump's announcement he would meet North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un without any preconditions has started to fade after Trump started waffling about the whole thing.

But it will ultimately come to nothing. Kim will never give up his nukes. Even if Kim signs an agreement to do so, we know that he will not abide by it. Look at what happened to the other dictators with WMDs:

After the Bush II administration lied about Saddam Hussein having WMDs and started a preemptive war, Saddam was found hiding in a hole and was executed after being put on trial for crimes against humanity.

After giving up his WMD programs, Muammar Gaddafi was captured and reportedly shot in the stomach or head, stabbed in the anus and dropped off the back of a truck.

Trump made a show of attacking Syria for using chemical weapons, but the Syrians have since repeatedly used chemical weapons against civilians. Trump has done nothing since the first retaliatory attack (which didn't hurt Syria because Trump told the Russians it was coming hours beforehand). Why? Syria has the backing of Russia, and Trump never acts against Russia. He has only praise for Putin.

Iran signed a treaty with Europe and the United States to scale back its nuclear ambitions, allowing for inspections and other restrictions on the Iranian nuclear program. But by threatening to scuttle the treaty, Trump has completely undermined the credibility of the United States.

If Trump does indeed break the Iran treaty (and his appointment of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state increases this likelihood), then he will prove that the United States is not a reliable negotiating partner.

If treaties with the United States are agreements with the current president, and not the law of land, no one will enter into good faith negotiations with the United States.

Furthermore, Trump himself has personally reneged on countless contracts, declaring multiple bankruptcies and stiffing hundreds of contractors out of money he owes them.

So anyone -- Kim Jong Un in particular -- negotiating with Trump is clearly not expecting Trump to abide by any agreement he makes: they're just playing for time. They're just buttering him up, playing to his sense of self-importance, while they either develop their nuclear weapons or cement their relationship with the Russians.

Bush's disastrous Iraq war taught dictators that to survive they have two options: get nuclear weapons or Russian backing. Syria and Iran have the Russians. North Korea has nukes and the Russians. Turkey is going with the Russians. Egypt is going with the Russians. Saudi Arabia is going for nukes.

Eastern European countries like Hungary and Poland are selling out to the Russians. Geeze, even Italy is selling out to the Russians.

Meanwhile, Trump is doing everything he can to alienate our European, Asian, North American, South American, Caribbean, Australian and African allies. After Rex Tillerson completely dismantled the State Department and destroyed our diplomatic corps, Trump fired him by tweet and put the CIA in charge of our diplomats and a torturer in charge of the CIA.

The United States used to be a force for peace and democracy across the world. But Trump appears to have entered into a deal with Putin: Russia can have all of Europe and Asia and the United States can have ... the United States.

Trump's America First is America Alone.

The United States used to project power and hope across the globe. Now, under Trump, we have become a nation in moral and psychological decline. We have lost any sort of moral authority: Like Trump, Americans are quickly becoming whiners who just bitch about how unfair life is, blaming everyone else for their problems and lashing out violently.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the latest epidemic of of miserable white men who shoot dozens of kids in schools, mow down hundreds of people at Las Vegas concerts and blow up innocent people in Austin with no discernible motive.

Trump's Problem in a Single Tweet

Eleven days ago Donald Trump wrote the following tweet:

The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and.....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2018

Earlier this week Trump did in fact add another lawyer to his legal team, and yesterday John Dowd, with whom Trump said he was VERY happy, quit and/or was fired.

The Times was right and Trump's tweet was a total lie: everything he claimed was false was actually true and came to pass within 10 days.

Dowd quit because Trump won't listen to his lawyers' legal advice. Which has been, essentially: shut up and stop making yourself look guilty by lying constantly and doing massively stupid things that are clearly intended to obstruct the Russia investigation.

Trump keeps saying and tweeting lies like the one above on a daily basis, which are then proved to be lies within a week a two. Yet Republicans keep defending him. Why?

Trump supporters think the mainstream media are after Trump because their reporting on him is so negative. But the problem is Trump: he keeps lying and doing negative things. The media just report what he says and does. You can't blame Trump's lies and mistakes on the people who report them.

Avoiding bad coverage is easy: don't lie, don't bang porn stars, don't grab women's pussies, don't brag about grabbing pussies, don't congratulate foreign dictators on their rigged election victories, don't obstruct justice, don't conspire with foreigners to win elections, don't insult your own attorney general, and above all don't unjustly fire the people who will ultimately provide the testimony in the impeachment trial that will bring you down.

Why is the Republican Party letting Donald Trump drag them into the pits of hell?

Why Facebook is Evil

Some people are accusing Facebook of a "massive" data breach, in which a foreign company took a bunch of data about tens of millions of Americans and used it to influence them to vote for Donald Trump.

Others are saying that Facebook did nothing wrong, that they didn't do anything that wasn't listed in the terms of service. From the Atlantic, here's a brief summary of what happened:

In June 2014, [an England-based Russian] researcher named Aleksandr Kogan developed a personality-quiz app for Facebook. It was heavily influenced by a similar personality-quiz app made by the Psychometrics Centre, a Cambridge University laboratory where Kogan worked. About 270,000 people installed Kogan’s app on their Facebook account. But as with any Facebook developer at the time, Kogan could access data about those users or their friends. And when Kogan’s app asked for that data, it saved that information into a private database instead of immediately deleting it. Kogan provided that private database, containing information about 50 million Facebook users, to the voter-profiling company Cambridge Analytica. Cambridge Analytica used it to make 30 million “psychographic” profiles about voters.

The key thing here is that while only 270,000 people explicitly gave their consent for their personal data, this Russian professor got hold of 50 million people's data because Facebook let "friends" look at personal data.

That data included all kinds of personal information that can be used not only to influence you, but to commit identity theft. This data not only included Facebook posts, personal photos, and Facebook likes, but also birthdates, addresses, phone numbers, educational histories, lists of family and friends, names of pets, what people ate, where people went, what what people did and when they did it, and tons of other sensitive information on whatever people happened to blab about themselves on Facebook.

The reason this enables identity theft is that much of this information is used by various web sites to validate your identity: birthdate, addresses, mother's maiden name, names of your schools, names of your pets, etc.

Facebook thinks it's doing nothing wrong. They claim that apps need to have access to information on your friends so companies can write apps to perform critically important services that we simply could not survive without, like wishing you happy birthday.

If Facebook friends were actually real, close friends and family, this wouldn't be as big a problem -- but it would still pose a serious breach of personal data. Do you really trust your elderly grandmother to understand that taking a pop quiz on Facebook -- and getting paid a dollar! -- can give information on her family and friends to hackers and Russian spies?

What makes it worse is that many people somehow think that the number of Facebook friends is an indicator of social importance. So they accept friend requests from people they barely know. A lot them were phony accounts created by Russians trying to influence American politics.

But the real root of Facebook's evil is that the public image of what it does has nothing to do with its true purpose.

People mistakenly think that they are Facebook's customers and that Facebook's communications service is the product. This is utterly false.

Businesses, advertisers, opinion researchers and political operatives like Cambridge Analytica are Facebook's real customers. The real product is you and your data.

Facebook sells your secrets to anyone who will pay for them, be it advertisers, identity thieves, political operatives, foreign governments, or private investigators working for people looking for dirt on cheating spouses.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to destroy your Facebook account, delete all the data and never log in to Facebook again, hoping that your data hasn't already fallen into the wrong hands and that Facebook will actually honor their commitment to delete it.

The second-best thing you can do is unfriend everyone except your family and your closest real friends. Of course, since those people already know all that stuff about you, there's really no reason for Facebook to have that information in the first place.

The third-best thing you can is enter false information in your profile: never use your real birthday, or address or other personal data for social media accounts. The whole idea that companies need your birthday to make sure children don't see "adult" material is preposterous, since kids can just lie anyway.

Deleting your Facebook account will have immediate benefits. You will get back an hour of your time every day.  You will feel less depressed. You will be less angry.

Ditto for Twitter. If Donald Trump deleted his Twitter account, the world's net happiness quotient would increase by 7 billion!

Economist Cost of Living Survey Slanted for the Wealthy

Minnesotans were astonished when the Economist magazine said Minneapolis was the third most expensive American city to live in, after New York and Los Angeles.

"How is this possible?" they wondered.

Housing is one of the biggest expenses in any budget. The median home price in Minneapolis is $244,000, whereas most every city in California's Bay Area has home values in the million dollar range (San Jose: $1,036,000, Sunnyvale: $1,819,000, San Francisco: $1,285,000), and places like San Diego are in the half million dollar range (San Diego: $608,200, Escondido: $479,200, Chula Vista: $514,000).

Average apartment rent in Minneapolis in $1,390 a month, while in San Jose it's $2,616.

Another large expense is fuel costs. According to Gas Buddy, the price of gas is about $2.45-2.50 around Minneapolis. It's between $3.05 and $3.89 in the Bay Area.

The web site Expatistan has a comparison function that shows the difference in the cost of living between any two cities. Using that, we see that San Jose is 21% more expensive than Minneapolis, while Houston is 11% cheaper than Minneapolis (in large part to lower transportation costs -- i.e., cheaper gas, and a large immigrant work force that is paid less than native Americans).

One of the most common things that make Minneapolis more expensive than other cities is entertainment, including alcohol and cigarettes. That is, completely unnecessary expenditures.

So what exactly does the Economist survey measure that other economic surveys ignore that makes a magazine targeted at the wealthy rank Minneapolis as more expensive than dozens of cities in California that are clearly more expensive for the average person to live in?

The survey is compiled using the prices of 160 products and services in each city, including, “food, drink, clothing, household supplies and personal care items, home rents, transport, utility bills, private schools, domestic help and recreational costs.”

The primary flaw in the Economist survey is that it omits house prices, because it's targeted at corporations who ship executives around the world. Those people don't buy houses.

Domestic help is expensive in Minneapolis, because it's mostly performed by Americans, rather than undocumented workers, as it is in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida, etc. I know people who provide maid service in Minnesota and they make significantly more than minimum wage. Because a decent wage is the only way to get average Americans to clean other people's toilets.

Private schools are of concern mostly for the wealthy or the rabid religious right. Public schools in Minnesota are generally good. Teachers are mostly paid a decent wage.

So, yeah, if you're a millionaire executive who needs an army of underpaid chauffeurs, maids, and cooks, send your kids to private schools where non-unionized teachers get paid peanuts, and buy lots of booze and tobacco, you don't want to live in Minneapolis. You want to live in a place where you can lord over those less fortunate than yourself. A place where you don't give a damn about what happens to the people who live there in five, ten or 20 years.

The cost of living has to be balanced with the quality of life. For example, US News' 2018 state rankings list Minnesota second in the nation for citizen outcomes. Minnesota consistently comes out on the high end of surveys that measure income and the health of average citizens.

Which is a far superior measure for society than how much millionaires can flaunt their wealth.

Surprise! A Russian's Behind the Facebook Data Breach!

There's a firestorm in Washington and London now with multiple senators and MPs calling for the CEOs of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica to testify before various committees about the gigantic data breach at Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica worked with Trump campaign operative Steve Bannon to target users on Facebook. There have also been accusations that the data was used by Russian hackers to target users with fake news and to otherwise manipulate American voters.

The Trump campaign denies there was any collusion. But if you dig a tiny bit, you learn that Cambridge Analytica didn't actually write the code that stole the data, it was a company called GSR (great acronym, right?). The guy who runs GSR is Aleksandr Kogan. When I saw that name a red flag immediately went up.

Who is Aleksandr Kogan?

Dr Kogan – who later changed his name to Dr Spectre, but has subsequently changed it back to Dr Kogan – is still a faculty member at Cambridge University, a senior research associate. But what his fellow academics didn’t know until Kogan revealed it in emails to the Observer (although Cambridge University says that Kogan told the head of the psychology department), is that he is also an associate professor at St Petersburg University. Further research revealed that he’s received grants from the Russian government to research “Stress, health and psychological wellbeing in social networks”. The opportunity came about on a trip to the city to visit friends and family, he said.

There are other dramatic documents in Wylie’s stash, including a pitch made by Cambridge Analytica to Lukoil, Russia’s second biggest oil producer. In an email dated 17 July 2014, about the US presidential primaries, Nix wrote to Wylie: “We have been asked to write a memo to Lukoil (the Russian oil and gas company) to explain to them how our services are going to apply to the petroleum business. Nix said that “they understand behavioural microtargeting in the context of elections” but that they were “failing to make the connection between voters and their consumers”. The work, he said, would be “shared with the CEO of the business”, a former Soviet oil minister and associate of Putin, Vagit Alekperov. 

British researchers working for a Russian professor in England were discussing American elections in a sales pitch to a Russian oil company run by a pal of Vladimir Putin. And then those same people worked with the Trump campaign to target American voters.

If it looks like collision, if it quacks like collusion, it is collusion.

But let's fire Andrew McCabe so we can yell about the Clinton Foundation and Hillary's emails instead.

The NRA Hearts Russia

The FEC is now looking in to whether or not the NRA colluded with Russia to tip the election towards Donald Trump's favor. Here's the best part...

Under FEC procedures, the preliminary investigation is likely to require the NRA to turn over closely guarded internal documents and campaign finance records. Depending on what FEC investigators and lawyers find, the agency could launch a full-blown investigation, impose fines or even make criminal referrals to the Justice Department and Special Counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the probe said.

Closely guarded internal documents...campaign finance records...this is starting to smell an awful lot like what was the beginning of the end of the tobacco industry.

A Teacher in a Gun Store

Quote of the Day

"Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young."

---Tim Kreider, from "Go Ahead,Milennials, Destroy Us." 

How Russian Trolls Operate

The above is a very informative video that all of us should use as a benchmark in online discussions. I don't engage in comments with anyone that I don't know personally anymore.

This video also makes me wonder if the former commenters here were actual US citizens are troll farm douchebags. It certainly would make a lot of sense. Even if they weren't, they are still doing the bidding of totalitarians which I find fucking hilarious.

Their hatred of liberals trumps everything else, including being loyal to their country.

"Real" Democrats

Since Pennsylvania's special election for a seat vacated by Tim Murphy -- who resigned after it came to light he demanded his mistress have an abortion -- Republicans have been trying to paint the humiliating loss as a win.

Their claim is that the winner, Conor Lamb, isn't a "real" Democrat because he is pro-life, pro-gun and doesn't like Nancy Pelosi.

Let's take these claims one at a time.

Lamb, a Roman Catholic, considers himself "pro-life" because he personally opposes abortion, but he thinks that women should be able to choose for themselves. I'm basically in that same camp: even though we never wanted kids, if my wife had become pregnant I wouldn't have wanted her to have an abortion. Unless she wanted to, or the fetus tested positive for serious birth defects, or if the pregnancy would harm her health.

Most Republicans who consider themselves "pro-life" are actually just anti-abortion, which is really code for denying women control over their own bodies. As Tim Murphy showed, Republicans are all for abortion when it's convenient for them.

But to say that Republicans are pro-life is a joke. Republicans are all for the death penalty. They think people should be able to buy guns and shoot people on the street. They heartily endorse George Zimmerman's murder of Trayvon Martin. How very pro-life of them.

When Trump was in Pennsylvania ostensibly campaigning for the Rick Saccone, the Republican candidate, he proposed the death penalty for drug dealers. I can't find anything describing Lamb's stance on the death penalty, but the Catholic Church is very much opposed to it, and that's where Lamb takes his cues on moral issues. Trump is now taking his cues from a murderous dictator in the Philippines who has had thousands of people killed without trial. How very fascist of him.

On guns, Lamb says that we don't need new laws, we just need to have better background checks. He also said he's open to other measures, but wants to start on issues that have broad agreement. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of the NRA's guns everywhere-all-the-time stance. It sounds like he will vote for reasonable limits on firearms if they are brought before the House, which is exactly what the vast majority of Americans want.

And Nancy Pelosi? You don't have to support Nancy Pelosi, the senior Democrat in the House, to be a real Democrat. She's too old, too easily ridiculed, and not the best spokeswoman for the Democratic Party. I think we would be served better by someone younger, who connects with more Americans and isn't the punch line to every Republican joke.

Saying that Nancy Pelosi's time has passed isn't disloyalty, it's acknowledging reality.

And if you want to talk disloyalty, just look at the behavior of Republicans over the past several years with respect to their House leaders.

How many Republicans wanted the head of fellow Republican House Speaker John on a pike? Boehner was forced out of office by angry conservative Tea Party Republicans for not being a big enough dickhead.

How many Republicans right now, today, want the head of Paul Ryan -- the current speaker of the House -- on a pike? Many of them have never forgiven Ryan for refusing to defend Trump's disgusting behavior during the 2016 election. As recently as last October they were writing political obituaries for Ryan.

Real Democrats represent the people of the districts that elect them. Real Republicans consistently represent the Republican party line, which is dictated by the moneyed interests of corporate America.

Conor Lamb represents a right-of-center district in Pennsylvania, so that's how he rolls. Pelosi represents a liberal district in California, so that's how she rolls. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator, represents the centrist views of most Minnesotans. So that's how she rolls.

Democrats from different parts of the country will have different interests because their constituents do, so it's natural that they won't all agree on everything. But they'll work together to find a solution that won't give everyone exactly what they want, but everyone can live with.

That's how democracy is supposed to work.

Republicans, on the other hand, all back Donald Trump and his mo-money tax cuts for oil barons and Wall Street bankers. They back the dismantling of the EPA, allowing the fossil fuel industry to pump more poisons into our air and water. They want to sell off the national parks to mining interests. They want to eliminate Dodd-Frank so Wall Street can repeat the Great Depression of 2008. They want to take away health care for all Americans and destroy the public school system.

Some of them, like my Republican representative, Eric Paulsen, aren't bombastic in their support for Trump's outrageous policies, but they quietly vote for Trump's agenda every time.

The Democratic Party represents all of America, while the Republican Party represents a tiny sliver of the elites. Republicans seem to be so hung up on the idea of duty to party that they'll blindly follow Donald Trump into an authoritarian nightmare, because for them "loyalty" is more important than doing the right thing.

But, as we've seen, Donald Trump is loyal to no one. He constantly insults and stabs his allies in the back. He is immoral, selfish and narcissistic. He lies constantly, and then brags about lying.

From this we can see that Republican loyalty isn't real loyalty, it's fear. Republicans are just knuckling under to bullies -- Trump, campaign contributors, oil barons, Wall Street bankers -- because they're too cowardly to do the right thing for the people they're supposed to represent.