Why I Believe Her

In order to seem less dickish for attacking a victim of attempted rape, Republicans are saying that, since Christine Blasey Ford couldn't give every petty detail about an attack on her more than three decades ago, she must be misremembering who tried to smother and undress her at that party.

I and every other kid who ever got picked on in school know this is BS. People often remember very specific details from traumatic events, and forget everything else. That doesn't make the recollections any less true. I've written about these events before, but they bear repeating.

When I was in fifth grade a bunch of kids would gang up on me when I walked home from band practice. I don't remember the exact dates, or who all the kids were, or even what they did to me (I don't think it wasn't too traumatic -- I could run faster than they could).

But I remember the name of my main antagonist -- Greg M. -- and what he looked at the time (a snottier Billy Mumy). I don't know why this kid had it in for me: he was just the neighborhood bully. The net result was that I never learned to read music properly because I gave up playing the cornet so I could go home at the same time as the other kids. Because bullies like Greg are cowards.

In junior high, there was another kid who chased me once and dented the trash can I had spot-welded in metal shop. Since I was taking metal shop it must have been in 9th grade (wood shop was 8th grade), and it was spring, so it must have been in 1972. His name was Darwin, and I remember what he looked like: a black kid with short hair. I might have done something to offend him -- my best friend at the time was a bit of a racist (he and his dad had a fascination with the Nazis). Maybe Darwin overheard us saying something obnoxious and I was easier to find than my friend.

Then, on another day in junior high, I was walking home along State Street when I saw a gang of boys attacking a girl, grabbing her breasts and laughing, reducing her to tears. I don't remember who the boys were (they were classmates but not friends), or how many of them there were, or even what grade I was in (probably eighth).

But I remember the girl's name (Lori P.), what she looked like (pale skin, big brown eyes, straight dark hair with a pageboy cut) and what she wore (a light blouse and dark, knee-length skirt -- back in the stone ages a lot of girls wore skirts and dresses to school). Lori was nice, quiet, ordinary looking, and completely undeserving of such an assault.

I only remember three girl's names from junior high, and maybe six boys. But it's been 45 years and I still remember exactly what Lori looked like then because what they did to her was so awful, and I was so ashamed that I did nothing to stop it.

So when Dr. Blasey Ford says she is 100% certain that Brett Kavanaugh was the one who attacked her, I know she's telling the truth.

And, having some experience with bullies, drunken frat boys and dickheads who molest girls, I am 100% certain that when Brett Kavanaugh says he didn't assault Christine Blasey, he just can't remember doing it to her because he was drunk out of his gourd and she was just one more bitch in a long line of "conquests" he racked up to brag about to his friends.

Did Kavanaugh Testify While Drunk?

Brett Kavanaugh's performance before the Senate committee was shockingly terrible. It was so bad that I wondered if he was drunk.

Republicans loved how "forceful" and convincing he was, but he came off as whiny, spoiled brat, unable to contain his childish emotions. He sounded like a teenage boy caught drunkenly masturbating with a copy of Playboy by one of his Jesuit teachers, complaining that his life would be totally ruined if his parents were told.

Just listen to Kavanaugh's hysterical, histrionic, whining tone of voice in this Daily Show clip and compare it to to the reasoned, measured tones of Dr. Blasey (who has been inundated by death threats by Trump-supporting whack jobs).



Kavanaugh is an embarrassment. His tirade revealed that he does not have the even temperament required for a Supreme Court justice. Worse, he has proved conclusively that he cannot be impartial in several types of cases, many of which could come before the court in the near future.

First, of course, is any case involving mistreatment of women. Given the intense antagonism he displayed toward his accusers, Kavanaugh has demonstrated he is incapable of rendering impartial judgment in any case involving sexual harassment. He would have to recuse himself.

Second, it's likely some sort of case involving Donald Trump and the Russians or Trump and women he's abused, will eventually wind up before the court. Since Kavanaugh will owe his position on the court to Trump (any other president would have withdrawn Kavanaugh's nomination after his disastrous performance before the Senate), Kavanaugh cannot be impartial in any case involving Trump and would have to recuse himself because he owes Trump everything.

Third, Kavanaugh's comments about the process have been nakedly partisan. He and Lindsey Graham openly expressed hostile and retributive attitudes towards Democratic questioners. Kavanaugh cannot be trusted to render impartial judgment with any case involving Democrats; in particular, cases involving Republican gerrymandering of district boundaries or voter suppression to the disadvantage of Democrats. He would have to recuse himself.

Fourth, Kavanaugh's antagonism toward women and Democrats clearly expose his prejudice against women, on abortion and birth control. His Catholic background doesn't help either. He would have to recuse himself on any cases involving reproductive rights.

Fifth, Kavanaugh was deeply involved with Ken Starr's investigation of Bill Clinton. Most of the documents he produced were filled with sexual references and nakedly partisan attacks on Clinton, which ultimately forced Clinton to testify in a case involving incidents that preceded his presidency. Yet after all that, Kavanaugh expressed doubts that Trump could be prosecuted for any crimes, or even compelled to submit to a subpoena in any case. This rank hypocrisy clearly requires him to recuse himself in any case involving such executive privilege.

Finally, Republicans have been yakking about "innocent until proven guilty" and "reasonable doubt" all week long.

This is not a trial. It's a job interview.

Kavanaugh has a long history of alcohol abuse, going back to his high school years. He was still bragging about it in 2015, when he gave a speech at Catholic University. "What happens at Georgetown Prep, stays at Georgetown Prep."

Kavanaugh clearly lied about his alcohol problem before the committee. He sounded like an angry drunk in his rants, making me wonder if he was testifying while drunk.

Anyone who drinks as much as Kavanaugh has admitted to should know exactly when he's had too much to drink. Yet he refused to say how much that was, giving some weasel words about "the standard amount according to the chart."

I don't drink, and even I know that two drinks will impair the judgment of a 180-pound man, and four will put him at the legal limit (0.08). How can a judge who drinks not know that?

Kavanaugh does not have a right to a seat on the court. If he is rejected, he will keep his current job. He will not go to jail. Though he will probably resign in disgrace.

If Kavanaugh were being interviewed to be the CEO of CBS -- a position just vacated by Les Moonves after several woman alleged inappropriate sexual behavior -- Kavanaugh would not get the job.

Shouldn't a Supreme Court justice be held to a higher standard than a TV network president?

Yes, Brett Kavanaugh's reputation has been destroyed. But it wasn't the Democrats' doing: it was Donald Trump. He picked a flawed man -- a mean drunk with a weird baseball fixation and debt problems -- and tried to put him on the Supreme Court.

This isn't the first time Trump has chosen the wrong man for the job. He does it constantly. Remember Ronny Jackson, the White House doctor Trump nominated to head the VA who had to withdraw? Remember Andy Puzder, Trump's nominee for Labor Secretary, who had to withdraw? Remember the Mooch?

It might seem that Trump destroys the integrity of everyone he touches, but the reality is that he only deals with corrupt and corruptible men. He only trusts crooks like himself.

The upshot of all this: if the Senate approves Kavanaugh for the Court, it has to be with the proviso that he submit to daily urine testing.

The Look On Every Woman's Face

Sticking By Kavanaugh

The old, white men are seeing their world threatened and they aren't happy about it. Clinging to power as bitterly as they are is fucking pathetic.

Watching the Ford-Kavanaugh hearings today, as most of America did, I saw a fairly clear ending to the rule of guys like Lindsey Graham. His tirade today was so incredibly out of step with the times that I am left to wonder what kind of world they think the rest of us want to live in.

Brett Kavanaugh came off like a douchey, frat boy desperately lying his ass off. He's a victim? Please, give me a break. He's got four women that are all telling the same story which means there is indeed a pattern.

I'm just thankful that #MeToo has finally gotten it right and is in the political realm. This is where the laws are made and the real change must be made. This fall, women are running in record numbers and they must win in order to change the patriarchy.

Hurricane Florence: A Perfect Storm of Republican Environmental Disasters

Hurricane Florence has been over for a week, but its aftereffects are still hammering the Carolinas, making it the perfect storm to showcase what a disaster Republican environmental policy is.

Anthropogenic global warming didn't exactly "cause" the hurricane, but higher air and water temperatures caused by the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants and automobiles added fuel to the hurricane's fire, making it much more destructive than it would have been without mankind's influence.

Storms that would have dropped 20 inches of rain in the past now drop 30, because the CO2-warmed atmosphere can hold that much more water. Hurricanes like Florence and Harvey, which hammered Texas last year, now drop upwards of 20 cubic miles of water.

During the storm the "old reliable" nuclear power plant that Republicans are always praising had to shut down. This power plant is similar in design to the ones in Fukushima that got hit by the tsunami and partially melted down, releasing radiation into the ground water and ocean.

On Friday floodwaters breached a dam near a natural-gas fired power plant, forcing it to shut down for lack of cooling water. The floodwaters washed toxic arsenic-laced coal ash out of the basins it was stored in since the power plant was converted from coal years ago, poisoning the river.

North Carolina is home to hundreds of gigantic hog and chicken operations. Many of these were inundated by Florence, resulting in the deaths of 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 hogs, according to preliminary estimates.

Worse still, the lagoons containing toxic pig and chicken manure were flooded and all that raw waste entered the rivers. Of course, there are cities downstream from these coal ash basins and hog manure lagoons that draw their drinking water from the rivers that are now poisoned by all this crap.

Yeah, hurricanes make solar panels and wind turbines shut down. But those energy sources don't need cooling water and don't have toxic waste products that warm the atmosphere (causing more extreme storms), kill millions of fish and poison drinking water supplies.

Florence was not the first hurricane to wreak this kind of destruction. It was basically a repeat of Hurricane Matthew, which hit the area in 2106. Back then millions of farm animals died, and feces and coal ash got into the drinking water, and the houses of people who live too close to the ocean were flooded.

But nothing changed. The people who live in the flood-prone areas of North Carolina rebuilt their houses and farms and businesses -- often with government money -- in exactly the same place, and now those houses have been flooded again.

Why don't they learn? Simple answer: Republicans. North Carolina Republicans actually passed a law in 2012 that demands local governments ignore the reality of climate change and the attendant sea level rise, which make the hurricanes so much more destructive.

This stupidity not only makes our federal taxes go up, it drives up our home owner's insurance. The same companies that pay to rebuild the houses of those idiots who want their barrier island dream houses also insure houses across the country, and we're paying for their idiocy.

It's sad that homes and businesses are destroyed by hurricanes. But the oceans are getting higher because the polar ice caps are melting, and the air and water are warmer, and warm water expands, making these 1,000-year storm surge events happen every couple of years.

The reality is that these homes and businesses can't stay where they are. No amount of Republican magical thinking is going to change the laws of physics.

When are the people who live and work there going to wake up and hold Republicans responsible for lying to them and continuing to push -- to this day -- the very policies that caused them to lose their homes and businesses?

Still Politically Ill

I peaked in to Kevin Baker's site for the first time in a while. I was sad to see that he has been ill. I wish him a speedy recovery and longevity.

He does seem well enough to continue to spout complete and utter nonsense, though. Check out this gem.

And where does that money go? Not into infrastructure, not into the classroom, certainly not into the pockets of teachers, no matter how good or bad they are, but into the pockets of an ever-expanding army of bureaucrats that "administrate" or monitor students for things like political correctness and diversity and tolerance. Like all government programs, failure means 'throw more money at it.

I showed this to my fellow teachers and, after all the laughing had stopped. we wondered where the diversity monitors were in our classrooms. Would that be next to the invisible SPED support? Or maybe next to the VHS machine?

Kevin, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about when it comes to education. Next time you want to open your mouth about it, consult the experts and stop trying to shove your dogma into a square hole. You might be surprised that the best solutions out there are the ones with which you agree.

Your straw man is made from the thinnest of hay.

Thank You, Gum Humpers

A sign of the times...

Yet, the tide has turned. I'm looking forward to taking away the guns of every asshole who caused this bullshit.

We're Not Socialist-YOU'RE TRAITORS

Why Kids Can't Read

A few years ago I started learning to use a complex 3D graphics application, but there wasn't a lot of written documentation.

There were, however, a lot of how-to videos on YouTube, but these are extremely tedious to watch. The authors usually spend 15 minutes telling you how to do something that should only take a minute or two, once you know the trick.

Nearly every person who makes an instructional video fills it with the same basic start-up information, their helpful hints, their pet peeves, their verbal tics and other time-wasting drivel completely unrelated to the task at hand.

And that's the problem with video: you can't effectively skim it or use text searches. So whenever I found a written tutorial I was relieved because I could skip right to the part that I needed to know. Instructional videos are such a huge waste of time.

Written tutorials are also easier to use. You can look at them side-by-side with what you're working on and proceed point-by-point without having to constantly stop and start the video, or back up the video, or try to understand the video author's accent.

But on more than one occasion I found comments about these excellent written tutorials saying, essentially, "I hate this! Make a video instead!"

Why? It baffled me that someone would actually prefer a video. I had always supposed that people made videos because they were easier to crank out. Rather than thinking through what you want to say, doing screen caps, typing it all in, editing it and proofreading it, with a video you just sit there and yak (and yak and yak) while you demonstrate what you're trying to teach.

But today, after seeing this story on an NPR website, I finally understand the real problem: American kids can't read any more. Now, this was a radio program, so it was audio. I dreaded having to listen to the whole thing. Audio has all the same problems as video: you can't skim or search it. But I just wanted to find out actual reason for why kids these days can't read.

Fortunately for me, the script of the radio program was included, so I could skip to the important part. And the reason kids can't read today is that reading teachers don't teach phonics. That is, they don't dwell on the fact that the letters of the English alphabet have a phonetic correspondence to the sounds you make when you speak.

In the last few decades most reading teachers have used a touchy-feely "whole language" approach, rather than what they considered the staid and rote phonetic method.

But writing systems, for most part, are phonetic. That is, they encode sounds as symbols, which you decode by pronouncing the sounds the symbols represent.

Not all writing systems work this way. Chinese and Japanese use pictograms or ideographs to represent words. Japanese actually has three writing systems: two are phonetic syllabaries (katakana and hiragana), and one is ideographic (kanji).

Proponents of whole language aren't completely off base. As readers of English become more adroit the phonetic component of writing becomes less important. They start to recognize entire words and the sounds never enter their minds. Reading in this sophisticated fashion allows people to read at hundreds of words per minute, and some people can read even faster than that.

At this point a written word becomes a concept, like a Chinese pictogram.

It is this realization, I believe, that convinced educators (incorrectly) back in the day that phonics were unnecessary, boring and detrimental. They thought they could let kids skip the tedious part of reading -- converting symbols to sounds -- and progress directly to the sophisticated method that the most adept readers use.

Contributing to the denigration of phonics is the fact that English doesn't have a truly phonetic writing system. It's a Germanic language that has been infiltrated by thousands of French, Latin and Greek words over a millennium.

Also, the pronunciations of native English words have changed drastically over the centuries, so that the spellings of many words have little to do with the current pronunciations: enough, through, friend, four, says, etc.

Foreign loan words from French, Latin and Greek have their own pronunciation rules, and even grammatical rules, such as for plurals: alumnus -- alumni, millennium -- millennia, crisis -- crises, and so on.

Other languages don't have this problem to the same degree as English. The vast majority of European languages (German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Czech, Polish, etc.), are much more phonetic than English. They use different -- though consistent -- sets of rules for pronunciation, which makes Americans think those languages aren't phonetic.

I have studied several other languages (German, Russian, French, Japanese) and the only way for me to grasp them was to learn the phonology of the languages and the intrinsic link to their writing systems (with Japanese, it's the kana, not the kanji).

I can read German, French and Russian with a fair degree of fluency, but I'm totally lost with Japanese. I didn't study it as long, and I didn't learn the kanji so I'm totally illiterate in the language. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of kanji, and there are no shortcuts for learning them. You have to memorize them all by rote. When I realized that, I gave up on Japanese: TLDR. (I've also forgotten most of the kana: there are more than 140.)

Memorizing kanji takes years and years. Worse, if you don't use them on a daily basis, you immediately start forgetting them. My wife's Japanese teacher had lived in the United States for decades and had forgotten the lesser-used kanji. A highly educated Japanese-born professor had devolved to a high-school level reading vocabulary.

The crazy thing is that he still knows the words those kanji represent: he just can't read them or write the kanji anymore. He can still spell the words out with kana -- he'll just look illiterate if anyone else sees what he's written.

This is why the "whole language" approach for teaching kids to read has failed. Yes, advanced readers can instantly link a sequence of characters to a word without sounding out the letters. But only after seeing it over and over, the same way a Japanese person learns kanji.

There are thousands upon thousands of common English words: too many for kids to memorize. It's far easier to learn the 26 letters of the English alphabet and several dozen pronunciation rules, and several more dozen exceptions to those rules.

And phonics works. According to the APM story, after teachers in Bethlehem, PA received training in the science of reading (basically, phonics), the reading proficiency of their students doubled within two years.

Once kids learn the basic rules they can decode most any text. They may not know the exact meaning of every word right off the bat, but nine times out of ten they'll be able to get the gist of mystery words from context.

And unlike the characterization some whole language proponents have hit phonics with, it isn't just a rote method: it is a problem-solving technique. It teaches kids how to break down a problem (a written word) into its component parts (the letters) and come up with an answer (the pronunciation).

This isn't the first time this "reading war" has flared up. In the 1950s a teacher named Rudolf Flesch found a 12-year-old boy who couldn't even sound out the word "kid." This prompted him to write the book Why Johnny Can't Read.

The book inspired Theodore Geisel to write The Cat in the Hat, proving that books using the principles of phonics don't have to be boring.

Bring Back Al Franken

It's time to get @AlFranken off the bench so he can come back to doing what he does better than any other Democrat: taking down right wing blowhards. #BringBackFranken pic.twitter.com/fphaB3sG9K

— Bill Maher (@billmaher) September 8, 2018

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?

Remember back when we had an articulate and sane president? It's only been a couple of years but still it was nice to see 44 completely fucking own 45 in the speech below. Even better, he called out the Republicans with this corker of a line.

Got a lot of good Republican friends here in Illinois, but over the past few decades, the politics of division, resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican Party.

Yep. Exactly. He went on...

This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics, systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people, and minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi. Or my birth certificate. Rejected science. Rejected facts on things like climate change. Embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills, to a refusal to even meet, much less consider, a qualified nominee for the Supreme Court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president. 

None of this is conservative. I don’t mean to pretend I’m channeling Abraham Lincoln now, but that’s not what he had in mind, I think, when he helped form the Republican Party. It’s not conservative. It sure isn’t normal. It’s radical.

Double yep. Here is the best line of the whole speech.

How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?

The simple fact that Trump and his minions can't say this shows how far fucking gone they are.

Here is the full transcript of the speech.

Here is the video.


The score?

Obama 1,000,000, Trump/Republicans  0

Politically Incorrect Round 2

Donald Trump made his pitch to voters by claiming that he was "politically incorrect." By that, he and most conservatives mean that they like to insult and demean people based on their gender, ethnicity or physical disability.

Like, say, Trump opening his presidential campaign by claiming Mexicans are rapists, constantly calling women fat pigs, his Megyn Kelly "blood coming out of her wherever" comment, or his mocking of reporter Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition.

That isn't being political incorrect. That's just childish, rude and uncivil behavior.

But now that Trump is in office, he's constantly clamoring for real political correctness.

Take Colin Kaepernick and hundreds of football players who kneel during the national anthem. They are politically incorrect. Trump wants them fired for not toeing the party line, the very definition of political correctness.

Take those demonstrators protesting Brett Kavanaugh's nomination that Trump is constantly calling "a disgrace" (I assume Trump means the protesters, not the nomination -- but who knows?). They are politically incorrect.

Take the four or five books about the political situation in the White House that Trump claims are "fake news," and whose authors he is threatening to sue for libel. Those books are politically incorrect.

A libel suit is a completely idle threat, because A) Trump is a public figure, and B) if he actually went to court the defense would get to call witnesses, including Trump himself, and they would all have to testify under oath. Which Trump is incapable of doing because a) he is a pathological liar, and b) his senility-addled memory is so corroded that his only answers would be "I don't remember."

Take that editorial written by a White House senior staffer for the New York Times, which says that Trump has to constantly be handled behind his back to prevent the country from bumbling into nuclear catastrophe from his incompetence.

That's politically incorrect in the most literal sense: the entire White House staff is forced to directly work against the petty whims of a president who is intentionally trying to drive the country into chaos.

"Politically correct" came into common usage in the early 1900s in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, who demanded political correctness from party members: comply or die.

Trump and his conservative enablers want to enforce that sort of real political correctness on America by trying to bully them into saying "Merry Christmas" instead of "Happy Holidays," by harassing, threatening, attacking and trying to silence the press, constantly attacking gay and transgendered people, and by sacrificing women on the altar of anti-abortion politics by literally forcing them to bear children against their will. It's like Nazi Germany's eugenics program in reverse.

"Politically incorrect" gained wide currency when Bill Maher hosted a show by that name on Comedy Central in 1993. Maher, one of Trump's biggest critics, has since moved his gig to HBO and renamed it Real Time with Bill Maher.

If only Trump had misappropriated Maher's politics, not just his catch phrase . . . .

Too Damn Old

If there's one thing we should have learned about the election of Donald Trump (and Ronald Reagan), it's that there should be a mandatory retirement age for presidents.

Reagan, famously, was suffering from Alzheimer's even before he left office at the age of 77. Trump, at only 72, is clearly suffering from some sort of cognitive deficit (probably Alzheimer's, which his father died of).

So it's ridiculous when we read articles like this one, saying that John Kerry "is not ruling out" a presidential run.

John Kerry would be 77 on inauguration day in 2021. That's too old. According to the Social Security Administration, the life expectancy of a 77-year-old man is 9.9 years. Seems okay, right? Until you realize that the last 10 years of your life are the most precarious, filled with heart attacks, strokes, atherosclerosis, cancer, blindness, deafness, dementia and broken bones that occur in rapid succession until one of them kills you.

To make things worse, John Kerry lost the last time he ran, and he was never a charismatic candidate to begin with. He got the nomination because it was basically "his turn." Other elderly potential candidates aren't much better off.

Bernie Sanders would be 79, with a life expectancy of 8.8 years. At that age, there's a 5.3% chance of him dying in his first year, a 5.9% chance in the second, a 6.5% chance in the third and a 7.2% chance in the fourth year.

That's too damn old. Sanders would spend every single day of his presidency dealing with serious health issues.

Elizabeth Warren would be 71. As a woman her life expectancy would be 15.7 years. She's probably still too old, but based on the numbers, it's a reasonable risk. But at that age a woman's bones are usually very brittle: a fall coming down the stairs of Air Force One could literally kill her.

And it's not just death and dementia that are the issue. Yes, the elderly have a great deal of experience. But they also have difficulty assimilating new information, have slow reaction times, do not handle stress well, and suffer from diminished hearing and vision.

The elderly cannot even get a good night's sleep, and drugs that induce sleep only make things worse, as was highlighted when George H. W. Bush was discovered using Halcion.

A sleep-deprived septuagenarian should not have their finger on the nuclear button.

Therefore, the Constitution should be amended to put a mandatory retirement age on the president and members of the Supreme Court. The age of 70 seems like a good number.

It's unlikely that such an amendment will never happen, though Trump may be the impetus we needed to get it passed. So voters and parties should simply reject elderly candidates out of hand.

Lest you complain about age discrimination, the Constitution is fine with age limits on office holders: members of the House must be at least 25, senators must be at least 30 and the president must be at least 35. The Founders deemed people younger than those ages not competent to be president.

Before the advent of modern medicine retirement age wasn't really an issue: if you weren't physically and mentally fit to be president, you just died. But medical treatment has extended the human life span beyond the age at which one is competent to be president.

If you can be too young to be president, you can certainly be too old.

One could argue that a candidate who passes a rigorous physical and mental examination should be able to serve longer. The problem with this is that there are no real standards for what is required of a president.

The Montreal Cognitive Assessement administered to Donald Trump proved he could copy a cube, name a camel, rhino and lion, and knew what time 11:10 is. Wow. He's a stable genius!

When I was younger I thought the idea of mandatory retirement was wrong. But now that I'm 61 and have more elderly friends, I know first-hand that no 75-year-old is fit to be president, and certainly no 80-year-old is. I have known many septuagenarians -- some of them stronger and fitter than myself -- and six months later they were dead from a stroke or a heart attack.

People at that age should be out golfing, or puttering in the garden or bouncing grandchildren on their knee. Not setting trade policy, or trying to run a war in Afghanistan. Or having Twitter beefs with NFL players.

The Puppeteer

Trump Supporter Kills Liberal

The last installment of Sacha Baron Cohen's amazing Showtime series, "Who Is America?" aired its final episode last Sunday and it was fucking brilliant. Check out what he got Trump supporters to do.

Yes, that's right, the are fingercuffing a Trump doll in the hopes of looking liberal enough to infiltrate left wing terrorist cells. Later in the segment, Cohen tells the guy on the right to press a button to kill one of the liberals they tagged and the asshole does it.

As I've said many, many times, Trump supporters want to kill liberals. That's how much hate and anger these people have inside of them.

Good thing Gitmo is still open. We're going to need it:)

What Trump Really Thinks About His Base

The core of Donald Trump's base is conservative Southerners. Without them breathing down the necks of incumbents, Trump would be completely powerless. 

But what does Trump actually think of Southerners? His shabby treatment of Jeff Sessions, the preeminent Southerner in his cabinet, tells you exactly what Trump thinks:

Seized by paroxysms of anger, Trump has intermittently pushed to fire his attorney general since March 2017, when Sessions announced his recusal from the Russia investigation. If Sessions’ recusal was his original sin, Trump has come to resent him for other reasons, griping to aides and lawmakers that the attorney general doesn’t have the Ivy League pedigree the president prefers, that he can’t stand his Southern accent and that Sessions isn’t a capable defender of the president on television — in part because he “talks like he has marbles in his mouth,” the president has told aides.

Yes, Donald Trump thinks Southerners are stupid. He doesn't like Sessions because he talks dumb, and he doesn't have an elite edumacation. Trump clearly thinks that Sessions is a chump because he adheres to the Southern culture of honor, a concept wholly foreign to the narcissistic Trump.

Trump ran his entire campaign blasting "the elites," by which he meant other Republicans, other rich people, the media and Democrats. His pitch to the voters was that the "elites" think they're so smart but we know they're not.

Yet Trump brags endlessly about how smart he is, how high his IQ is, how brilliant his uncle was, and how elite his schools were.

Trump went to the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School of Business. They're not bad schools, but they sure as hell aren't Harvard or Stanford or MIT or even Yale. And he only got into Wharton because the admissions guy was his brother's pal, and his daddy was rich.

It's obvious Trump thinks his supporters are idiots, so eager for phony praise that they'll swallow any lie. Bragging that people would vote for you even if you shot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue is not a compliment. Blind fealty to a murderer implies that his followers have the intellect and morals of a mafia stooge, and that Trump is a mafia don.

Trump clearly thinks he owns these people, that they are his chattel. He demands adulation from his political serfs, even as he publicly derides them.

In February of 2016 Trump smirked, "I love the poorly educated." Given his long history of dissing anyone who doesn't have an elite Ivy League education, what he was really saying was, "I love stupid people. They're so easy to con."

Trump's real opinion of his supporters is starting to leak out, and sooner or later he will blow a gasket and really let them have it. My guess is that when his poll numbers really start to tank, falling to, say, 70% unfavorable nationwide and only 50-50 among Republicans, this senile old crank will crack and unleash a Twitter tirade that will alienate even the hard-core white supremacists.

Rudy Giuliani Is a Romanian Foreign Agent

You would think that after several Trump lackeys have been nailed for being unregistered foreign agents that current members of the administration would be sensitive to the conflicts of interest and inherent corruption of lobbying for foreigners at the same time they're drawing a salary from the US government.

You would be wrong. Donald Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has been caught lobbying for corrupt Romanian politicians:

President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, wrote a letter criticizing an anti-corruption drive [supported by Trump's own] State Department.

The Romanian reaction to the letter — which Giuliani said was written for pay in his capacity as a consultant — was the most concrete indication yet that the Trump administration’s freewheeling approach to ethics and business conflicts is having an effect not only inside the United States, but on U.S. allies as well.

A State Department official told The Washington Post: “Rudy Giuliani does not speak for the U.S. government on foreign policy.” Giuliani, for his part, has insisted that he is a private citizen and was not speaking on behalf of the Trump administration. But that is not the way the letter was received in Romania, where critics of the anti-corruption drive seized on it as an endorsement from a senior official who has Trump’s ear.

Giuliani is using his position as Trump's lawyer to derail Romania's drive to eliminate corruption, and at the same time directly sabotaging the Trump administration's own policy on this issue.

This raises several questions. Why is Giuliani doing this? Who is paying him to promote corruption in Romania? Did Trump approve of this? Does Trump have any connection to the people who are paying Giuliani? (Interesting side note: Trump almost exclusively hire Romanians to work at Mar a Lago.) Is Giuliani also lobbying American officials to back off on their support for the anti-corruption drive in Romania? Is Giuliani registered as a foreign agent?

The optics of this are terrible. Romania was one of the most corrupt countries in the Soviet bloc back in the day. Its leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, tried to flee the country in 1989 amidst the collapse of the Eastern European communist regimes. He was captured, tried for genocide and executed. 

Now the US president's personal lawyer is fronting for the same kind of corrupt scumbags.

People used to the think of Giuliani as "America's Mayor" because he expressed the anguish everyone felt after 9/11. But he became a two-dimensional caricature when he started running for president, where he failed miserably. No matter what the question, Giuliani's response was always "9/11! 9/11!"

Giuliani then became a one-dimensional shyster selling ridiculous nonsense on television in defense of his corrupt master, spouting nonsense like, "Truth isn't truth!" and "Trump didn't collude and even if he did it isn't a crime!"

And now Giuliani descending even lower on the evolutionary scale, to some kind of slime mold, by cashing in on his connection to the president to help corrupt foreigners stay out of jail.

This is the guy used to brag about putting corrupt mafia dons in jail. Now he spends all his time trying to get them off.

Finally: a Modicum of Justice

It looks like decades of cops shooting unarmed black boys and men with impunity is slowly coming to an end:

A white former Texas police officer was found guilty of murder on Tuesday for fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager last year as the boy left a house party in a car full of teenagers.

Roy Oliver was fired from the Balch Springs Police Department days after the April 2017 shooting. Oliver killed 15-year-old Jordan Edwards after the then-officer fired into a moving car carrying five black teenagers leaving a local house party. Edwards was in the front passenger seat.

Oliver testified during the Dallas County trial that he opened fire after seeing the car move toward his partner. He says he thought his partner was in danger. But his partner told jurors he didn’t fear for his life and never felt the need to fire his weapon.

Prosecutors said Oliver fired after the vehicle passed Gross.

This case makes clear the real reason cops shot people: it's not that they're afraid for their lives, or the lives of others. They're angry because they're being disobeyed and they don't want to "let those cocksuckers get away."

Yeah, it's hard being a cop. But it is the height of hubris -- and stupidity -- to fire a rifle into a fleeing car when you have no idea whatsoever who is in the car or what they might have been doing before you came on the scene.

This is a serious problem with cops: they automatically assume that anyone leaving the scene is guilty of something. They don't seem to get that the best way to avoid being shot is to immediately leave any place where there are trigger-happy people with guns.

Trump's North Korea Deal Is an Utter Failure

Remember a couple of months ago, when Donald Trump returned victorious from Singapore, claiming that he saved the world from nuclear annihilation by getting North Korea to denuclearize? Well, that's not happening.

The other day he told his secretary of state to cancel his trip to North Korea. North Korea's Rodong Sinmun newspaper responded with this:

Such acts prove that the U.S. is hatching a criminal plot to unleash a war against the DPRK and commit a crime which deserves merciless divine punishment in case the U.S. fails in the scenario of the DPRK’s unjust and brigandish denuclearisation first.

We cannot but take a serious note of the double-dealing attitudes of the U.S. as it is busy staging secret drills involving man-killing special units while having a dialogue with a smile on its face.

And guess who Trump blames for the failure of these talks? You guessed it: China.

On Friday, President Donald Trump canceled Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's trip to North Korea, citing the lack of progress on denuclearization and blaming China. "Because of our much tougher Trading stance with China, I do not believe they are helping with the process of denuclearization," Trump tweeted. 

Trump is right. His trade war with China is undermining diplomatic efforts to denuclearize North Korea, as well as other US objectives. 

Trump promised Americans that a trade war would be "good and easy to win." While the trade war may be hurting China more than the US, tariffs are also taking a toll on American soybean farmers and businesses that rely on Chinese imports. Experts expect American consumers to be hit hard if the reciprocal tariffs keep escalating.

Think about it: North Korea has been China's loyal ally and proxy for almost seven decades. Trump has spent the last two years alternating between belligerent racist screeds against the Chinese, and insincere, phony fawning praise of their autocratic communist leaders.

Trump might as well have tweeted, "I kicked China in the nuts and now they won't help me take down North Korea! Waah!"

Why would China help Trump?

This is a genius in the art of the deal? This is why Trump has been divorced twice and his current wife doesn't even want him to touch her in public: he has no idea how to motivate human beings with anything other than threats and phony praise.

Trump doesn't get it. China is a dictatorship with an iron-fisted control over its population. Its leaders control all social media and ruthlessly censor and imprison dissenters. Its leaders have direct control over all Chinese industry and economy. They have life-time appointments and never have to stand for election.

Despite years of trying to undermine the free press, wanna-be dictator Trump cannot muzzle his critics. Americans disapprove of his leadership two to one, in large part because he conspired with a foreign power to steal an election in direct contravention of the Constitution. His congressional allies are facing a crushing defeat in the polls in several weeks, and Trump himself may well be impeached when the depths of his treason and perfidy are documented.

The Chinese leaders will still be there long after Trump and his cronies are long gone. He cannot intimidate them with mafioso-style tactics from the New York real estate market.

In the meantime, the Chinese can weather any trade war Trump tries to throw at them, especially considering how Trump has alienated all our other allies: Europe, Asia, South America, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. Even Putin is mad at Trump because he is powerless to stop sanctions against Russia, precisely because he conspired with them.

Trump has unilaterally given up any leverage he might have had over the Chinese with his blundering bravado.

Trump's meager popularity and hold on power hinge completely on keeping the small percentage of rabid racists and misogynists in the Republican Party entertained. The fact is, Trump is only hanging on by a thread, and not just because his criminality is coming to light. His incoherent policies are already hurting his base more than they are hurting China, who can just sell their goods to the rest of the world.

A serious economic downturn -- the inevitable outcome of his foolish trade war -- will kill his presidency. One slip of the tongue -- say, Trump admitting on tape that he thinks his voters are fucking morons who are so stupid they would support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue -- will alienate his base and cut the legs off his presidency.

Then Republicans in congress, most of whom Trump has insulted or embarrassed in one way or another, will turn on him "like a bitch," as he would phrase it.

Americans love to root for the little guy, which Trump somehow -- against all reason -- managed to cast himself as in the reality show that was the 2016 election.

The corollary is that Americans love to kick bullies when they're down. And Trump is the biggest bully this country has ever seen. When he falls, the people supporting him now will be the ones denouncing him the loudest.

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