Trump Claims to Support the Military. Do They Support Him?

Prevailing wisdom would have it that members of the military would favor Donald Trump, given his bombastic speeches and militaristic stance. But is it really true?

During the Vietnam War Trump got four college deferments and a fifth one for "heal spurs." Those heal spurs would prevent him from marching, Trump said. Because Trump thinks the the only thing soldiers do is march. 

But there are countless military jobs that don't require marching: flying airplanes, driving trucks, fixing engines, loading torpedoes, constructing facilities, handling logistics, cooking meals, policing bases. And many of these jobs were on American soil, especially if you volunteered instead of letting yourself get drafted: one of my former bosses became a programmer at Fort Huachuca for the duration of the Vietnam War.

Do our troops really appreciate a president who is a rich, spoiled draft dodger that thinks they're all marching morons?

Trump has constantly denigrated the military's primary mission for the last seventy years, keeping the peace in Europe and Asia. He keeps whining about how those countries aren't paying for their defense, but the fact is, our troops are there so that we have control and avoid more wars like WWII and the Korean War.

Keeping Russia, China and North Korea in check is a vital mission, and keeping Europe, Japan and South Korea in our column is solely for our benefit.

We spend more on our military than the next ten or twelve nations. The reason we have the world's biggest military is because our troops are everywhere, and we want it that way. If we abandon our missions across the world and pull our troops out of Germany, Japan, and South Korea, then the military budget would have to come down drastically. Because our troops would sit around on American bases with no mission.

In the last weeks of the midterm elections, Trump played the race card and started screaming about the caravan of women and children traveling through Mexico. He sent 5,600 troops to the border, where, because of the posse comitatus act, they stand around doing nothing, eating MREs instead of real food, wasting their time and hundreds of millions of our tax dollars on a nonexistent mission.

Do our troops really appreciate being props in an election year stunt?

Last year Trump insisted having a military parade on Veterans Day 2018 with tanks and missiles. When the Pentagon told him it would cost too much he huffed that he would go to France because they have better parades.

So Trump went to France for Armistice Day, to attend a ceremony for the troops who gave their lives in the Great War. But it was raining, preventing the helicopter from flying. Trump didn't want to spend two whole hours in the car. So he cancelled the event and stayed in the American embassy, watching TV and tweeting. Somehow, that didn't stop his chief of staff, John Kelly from attending, or keep Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron away from similar events.

Do American troops appreciate being dissed by a draft-dodging pussy? Did American troops in Vietnam cancel their helicopter sorties because of a little rain?

The United States has been fighting the war in Afghanistan for seventeen years. George Bush botched it from the get-go, allowing Osama bin Laden to escape into Pakistan. In the 1980s the Soviets were fighting the same Taliban thugs we're fighting today, only back then Ronald Reagan was funding bin Laden and the Taliban.

After a pathetic surge in Afghanistan, it's clear now that Trump is losing the war. To be fair, it's probably a war that can't be won. But after claiming that Bush made a huge mistake by invading Iraq, a war that Trump has falsely stated he opposed, Trump is just equivocating, afraid of being the one to lose Afghanistan instead of making the hard decisions. So our troops are trapped in a hellish desert purgatory that we're still spending trillions of dollars on.

As long as the Taliban can hide in nuclear-armed Pakistan and fund themselves with opium they export to US streets, where thousands of Americans die from heroin overdoses, there is no path to an American victory.

Do our troops appreciate being trapped in a pointless stalemate because they can't go after the enemy?

Trump's implicit racism, from his post-Charlottesville comments to his Mexican drug-dealing rapist tirade to his disrespect of a black soldier slain in Africa, probably does not endear him to to the troops. The military is more diverse than American society at large:

The Department of Defense publishes regular studies that compare the civilian labor force to the composition of the military. Their 2014 report states: “Although racial minorities make up 23.4% of the civilian benchmark (the civilian labor force age 18 to 44), 32.9% of DoD’s enlisted forces in FY14 are racial minorities.”

Hispanics, in particular, make up a significant fraction of the armed forces: 18% of the Marines, for example. Do they appreciate how Trump characterizes people fleeing horrendous situations in their parents' countries of origin as diseased terrorists?

Finally, it is clear that North Korea is playing Trump for a fool. A few months ago Trump claimed he had eliminated North Korea's nuclear threat, and that he "fell in love" with Kim. New satellite imagery has revealed that Kim Jong Un has duped Trump:

North Korea is moving ahead with its ballistic missile program at 16 hidden bases that have been identified in new commercial satellite images, a network long known to American intelligence agencies but left undiscussed as President Trump claims to have neutralized the North’s nuclear threat.

The satellite images suggest that the North has been engaged in a great deception: It has offered to dismantle a major launching site — a step it began, then halted — while continuing to make improvements at more than a dozen others that would bolster launches of conventional and nuclear warheads.

Trump is a blustering, blundering fool when it comes to military matters. He increasingly ignores his general's advice. He does not appreciate the military's missions or their sacrifices, and views them merely as pawns in his sadistic games.

Sort of like Jeff Sessions.

What America Actually Fucking Looks Like

Our new members of Congress...

Here We Go Again. Again.

Here it is: your weekly dose of mass murder. 

An armed man dressed in black opened fire late Wednesday night inside a crowded country and western dance hall in Thousand Oaks, Calif., killing at least 12 people, including a sheriff’s deputy who had responded to the scene. The gunman was also dead.

This story refutes every talking point gun nuts make about mass shootings.

Witnesses recalled a chaotic scene at the bar, which was filled with hundreds of people, many of them college students: A gunman opening fire, first at a security guard, as patrons dropped to the dance floor, hid under tables and broke windows to escape. 

The number of people wounded was unclear, but the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office said about 22 people had been taken to various hospitals.

The county sheriff, Geoff Dean, his voice cracking, identified one victim as Sgt. Ron Helus, who was shot when he entered the building.

And then there's this:

A witness interviewed by ABC7.com said that the violence started when the gunman walked up to the entrance to the bar, shot a security guard and a cashier, and deployed a smoke bomb.

Donald Trump and gun nuts keep telling us that more guys with guns will solve this problem. But the first ones to get shot were the bouncer and the cashier. Then the guy started throwing smoke bombs, making it almost impossible for anyone else who might have had a gun to shoot back. Because they would have no way to tell who was who in the cloud of smoke. Besides, carrying a gun while dancing is a terrible idea, as the FBI agent who accidentally shot someone on a dance floor could tell you.

But the assassin could fire blindly in any direction and hit more victims, shooting them like proverbial fish in a barrel.

Then a cop with a gun came in and was immediately killed.

Trump responded to the synagogue shooting by criticizing the victims for not having enough guards and guns, and saying that the shooter should be executed. This just shows how stupidly dense he is: there aren't enough security guards in the country to guard every synagogue, church, school, night club and dance hall. And the threat of execution is no deterrent to suicidal maniacs. In the end these killers shoot themselves, or commit suicide by cop.

And now we know who the shooter is:

Authorities identified the shooter as Ian David Long, 28, a Marine Corps veteran who was visited by the Ventura County sheriff’s crisis intervention team after a call of a “subject disturbing” at his home in Newbury Park in April. He was never placed on a mental health hold, and Sheriff Geoff Dean said Long may have been suffering from PTSD.

This country trained a man to be an efficient killer, sent him off to a war that messed with his head, and then turned him loose on society. Then he used the military tactics our country taught him to kill a dozen people and wound dozens more.

People will be eager to blame this man's mental state for the shooting. "See," they'll say, "he was crazy." Yes, he was. But the gun lobby put the weapons in his hands and pointed him at that dance hall.

Some may try to paint the Thousand Oaks victims as casualties of a war that has dragged on for 17 years with no resolution in sight. And they wouldn't be wrong if they painted the shooter as one of those victims. Despite a half-hearted surge last year, Trump has done nothing but lose ground in the war in Afghanistan.

But the real problem is, again, that we let any random person with a questionable psych profile have as many guns as they like through a perverse, willful and wanton misinterpretation of the Second Amendment of the Constitution so that gun manufacturers can keep raking in the dough and gun nuts can get their rocks off.

Online Voting Would Be a Tremendous Blunder

It's incredible how people just don't learn. Case in point: this glowing article about the wonders of online voting using blockchains. 

Like everything to do with computerized voting, this is a totally idiotic idea if you favor free and fair elections. If you're the Republican Party or Russia's GRU, blockchain voting is great because you can easily dictate the result.

The promise of blockchain is that it's decentralized and somehow magically invulnerable to fraud and theft. This is manifestly untrue.

Nine times out of ten when you read about Bitcoin -- the most prominent user of blockchains -- it's because someone got ripped off for millions of dollars. Fraud and theft are rampant with Bitcoin: blockchains do nothing to stop that.

The author thinks that people can use their phones and home computers to vote online. This is totally naive and completely idiotic: personal phones and and home computers are the most insecure devices on the internet. They are riddled with viruses and malware, because the average person doesn't take the most basic security precautions, and the operating systems are inherently insecure because they allow users to install new software, like the voting app.

Yeah, blockchains might be a technical solution to the "double spend problem" (though I am skeptical about this -- the blockchains have to be hosted somewhere, and how secure are those systems?) .

But the real problem is the application used to register your votes. Phones and home computers will never be secure enough to ensure that the candidate you selected in the app is the one that actually receives your vote on the back end. Malware on your phone could be used to select a different candidate from the one you picked, through an infinite number of possible hacks.

Even if the voting app were magically made bulletproof, the companies that control the app stores and the web browsers (Apple, Google and Mozilla) are the companies that will control your vote. How can we trust that the programmers didn't put some kind of backdoor into the app?

Then there's authentication. Many states require picture ID to vote. With app-based voting there is absolutely no way to ensure that you were the person who cast your vote. (And no, taking your picture or your fingerprint when you vote on your phone isn't any kind of proof because those things are already available elsewhere.)

Instead of showing up at your polling place, the government would have to send you some kind of authorization or password to vote. That goes through email or your phone's text app. These are not secure. These authorizations could be intercepted anywhere along the line, and anyone who has your phone or your login will be able to vote in your stead. A hacker who got hold of the database of voting authorizations could cast millions of votes.

Voter information is exposed on the internet all the time (for example, in Georgia, and this Republican contractor). Inevitably this same mistake would happen to the authorization file.

But the ultimate reason that you can never use computers for registering votes is that there is absolutely no way in hell to do a legitimate recount. Recounts are totally impossible with any form of voting that does not use a physical token, like a paper ballot.

I'm a computer programmer, I don't believe for one second that you can guarantee that every vote will be properly counted with blockchains. Blockchain systems are supposed to be wonderful because they arrive at a "consensus," essentially some kind of majority rule. That means that there will always be disagreements, and they will be arbitrated by some kind of consensus mechanism.

If a single entity controls more than 50% of the hosts, they can dictate the results. This is an acknowledged problem with Bitcoin (known as the 51% attack), and they just shrug it off. Well, they argue, no single entity could control 51% of the Bitcoin miners.

But this is false. With Bitcoin, it's completely possible for one country (China, for example), to devote sufficient resources (large numbers of fast processors that do bitcoin mining) to gain a 51% majority.

What computers will store the blockchains used for voting? Anyone with a server? Including servers in China and Russia? Or servers authorized by the federal, state and local governments? Clearly the latter.

Whoever controls those servers controls the vote, with no possibility of a recount, because there are no physical ballots, because everything is done in the computer.

Because the basis of our system is the secret ballot, there can be no link between you and your vote in the system. That means you cannot validate that your vote was properly recorded: you just have to trust that your vote goes through. This comes up often during recounts in close elections: ballots are discarded if they can be linked to individual voters -- that is, if they have signatures or other identifying marks.

I agree that the voting process is often manipulated for partisan gain, for all the reasons specified by the author of the article:

Messing with polling stations is one of the most common voter suppression tactics. Across the country, polling stations have been closed in minority neighborhoods, had their locations changed from election to election, and have been kept understaffed, or inaccessible, or ill-equipped, so that voters must stand in line for hours.

But the "blockchain solution" would allow Russia or China or Julian Assange to completely hose every election in the country. They wouldn't even have to do much hacking: if they hacked just one race, every other race in the country would be in doubt, throwing the country into total chaos.

Paper ballots are the only viable solution for free and fair elections. Yes, it's still possible to mess with them through official fraud, ballot box stuffing, criminal poll workers, theft, and so on. But these issues can be mitigated through proper election monitoring, hand-counted audits of random precincts in every jurisdiction and well-established chain-of-custody procedures.

With computers, everything happens in a black box that no one can see inside and no one can verify. This will always be the case, no matter what kind of mumbo-jumbo blockchain snake-oil salesmen spew at us.

There is no magic internet or computer-based solution to voting. Physical ballots that allow for manual recounts are the only verifiable voting mechanism. Instead of wasting time on pipe-dreams about blockchains and the internet, the federal government needs to step up enforcement of voting rights to ensure that local officials don't screw with the vote. Early voting should be the norm everywhere, and election day should be a holiday so everyone is guaranteed an opportunity to vote.

Remember, a successful hack of the an election doesn't actually have to install a particular candidate in office: it just has to cast doubt on the result, leaving the country leaderless and divided.

Election 2018 Predictions

Election 2018 predictions....

Dems take the House with the total number at 234 (GOP at 211). Honestly, I think it's going to be more but I wanted to go conservative on this one.

GOP holds the Senate but only because of Mike Pence. That's right, I'm predicting a 50-50 tie in the Senate. GOP will pick up North Dakota and the Dems will pick up Nevada and Arizona. Claire is going to hold on in Missouri.

Dems will add 8 to their column in the Governor races, picking up Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio and Wisconsin. The GOP will pick up Alaska.

How did I arrive at these conclusions? Pretty simple, really. Look at the states with heavy urban areas. More voters means more Democrats. Rural states and areas will hold for the GOP.

I also think that Trump beating the xenophobic drum of immigration is sub moronic considering he could be claiming credit of the economy.

For Millenials...

Kansas Militiamen Who Bombed Mosque Admit Trump Incited Them

While bobbleheads on Fox News insist Donald Trump did not incite a white nationalist to shoot up a synagogue or send mail bombs to targets of Trump's rage, lawyers for three Kansas militiamen who plotted to bomb a mosque claim that their clients should get more lenient sentences because . . . wait for it, wait for it . . . Donald Trump incited them.

Patrick Eugene Stein faces life in prison for conspiring with two other men to carry out the attack, which was supposed to take place on the day after the 2016 presidential election. On Monday, his attorneys filed a memo in U.S. District Court in the District of Kansas, requesting that Stein receive a sentence of no more than 15 years. They note that Stein was an “early and avid supporter” of Trump and argue that the climate in the months leading up to the 2016 election should be taken in account when evaluating the comments prosecutors used to build their case.

During the trial in the spring, prosecutors played back recordings in which Stein described Muslim immigrants as “cockroaches” that needed to be exterminated, and talked about killing Muslims with weapons dipped in pigs' blood. Two months before the conversation took place, The Washington Post’s Abigail Hauslohner noted, Trump had referenced a questionable tale about Gen. John J. Pershing killing Muslims with bullets dipped in pigs' blood.

"The court cannot ignore the circumstances of one of the most rhetorically mold-breaking, violent, awful, hateful and contentious presidential elections in modern history, driven in large measure by the rhetorical China shop bull who is now our president,” James Pratt and Michael Shultz, Stein’s defense attorneys, wrote in their sentencing memo, as HuffPost first reported.

No, Trump has not directly told his supporters to bomb mosques or shoot Jews. But he has told supporters to beat up protesters, praised politicians who assaulted journalists, and told cops to injure suspects. He has called Nazis marching in Charlottesville "very fine people" after one of their number ran down people with a car and killed a woman. He's always winking at politically motivated violence, so it should be no surprise when his supporters take the hint.

Conservatives used to heap ridicule on liberals by mischaracterizing their compassion for destitute blacks who who committed crimes as "blaming society," rather than taking individual responsibility for their actions.

Now we've got white conservatives blaming the political climate for their crimes, and that they should get a pass because Donald Trump is racist dickhead.

Yes, Donald Trump is morally culpable for the horrific political climate he created in this country. But his followers shouldn't get off the hook for committing the crimes he incited.

Next thing you know, Trump will be pardoning these "very fine people."

Just What Does Trump Think He Is?

Donald Trump thinks he can erase the 14th Amendment with a scrawl of his pen and eliminate birthright citizenship. He has now claimed, “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits.”

Of course, like most everything this gasbag belches, this is an outright lie. Dozens of countries colonized by Europe, mostly in the Western Hemisphere, have what is called jus soli, or "right of the soil." For example, Canada and Mexico have birthright citizenship, like the United States does.

Birthright citizenship has been a bugaboo for white nationalists for a long time, though they usually use the derogatory term "anchor babies." Trump harped on this during the campaign in 2015. So why is he trotting it out again just now?

That's an easy one: the synagogue shooting in Pennsylvania. Just a week before an important election Trump had to publicly repudiate the murder of eleven American Jews by a fellow white nationalist.

But to assure other white nationalists he was still one of them, Trump had to do something to prove he's still a racist douche bag. Hence, the attack on the perennial favorite of white nationalists: anchor babies.

This looks like a cynical and transparent ploy to juice conservative turnout, because such an executive order cannot stand up in court. The president cannot overturn the Constitution all by his lonesome.

But if Trump really does believe he can do this, and that the Supreme Court he has packed with sycophants will rubber stamp a clear abrogation of the Constitution, it's even worse.

It means that Trump thinks he is a tyrant who can issue diktats according to his every whim.

That is what the Republicans accused Barack Obama of when he issued executive orders (which, by the way, numbered fewer than those written by George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, etc.).

You can make a reasoned argument that the Constitution should be amended so that only children born of permanent legal residents are citizens, as Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, etc., have done. A real president who was truly concerned about this issue would have proposed such an amendment shortly after his inauguration, not days before an election.

What you can't do is claim the president can do whatever the hell he wants, all to mollify sympathizers of racist nutjobs who shoot up places of worship.

The Coddling of the American Mind

I've been following Dr. Haidt's research for years. His work on political sociology is groundbreaking. His new book delves into the dangers of over protecting young people from ideas they don't like. Here's a recent segment in which he explains his peer reviewed research and I have to say, I'm deeply concerned if we continue down the path of encouraging fragility.



Liberals, I'm calling on you to knock this shit off because we need to be tougher and the Trump party. They laugh at us when we do this shit.

To be clear, I'm not saying we need to let people be racists, homophobic or sexist. In fact, we need to confront that shit head on and call them out. Ensconcing oneself into a protective bubble of self referential confirmation allows evil to flourish.

It's Happening Again

It's official: the angry white men who sent more than a dozen bombs in the mail and who shot up a synagogue were directly incited by Donald Trump.

The mail bomber lived out of a van festooned with pro-Trump propaganda: a rolling shrine to racism. According to his lawyer, Cesar Sayoc was directly radicalized by Donald Trump:

Sayoc, a 56-year-old Florida man who friends and other associates say had never shown any interest in politics, suddenly began sharing images of himself on Facebook at Trump campaign events. He signed up for Twitter, where he trafficked in conspiracy theories and conservative memes. He registered as a Republican to vote in Florida ­— Lowy said he believes it was for the first time in Sayoc’s life ­— in 2016. He traded out his Native American decals for ones that supported Trump.

“Had no interest in politics, was always at the night clubs, the gyms, wherever he thought he could meet people, impress people. And along came the presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who welcomed all extremists, all outsiders, all outliers, and he felt that somebody was finally talking to him,” Lowy said.

The synagogue shooter, Robert Bowers, was also directly radicalized by Trump. Bowers blasted Trump for not being nationalistic enough -- Trump only hates Muslims, Latinos, Chinese, Japanese, Germans, French, Canadians, transgendered people, women who need abortions, women who need birth control, women who have been assaulted by dickheads, people who live in countries wracked by dictatorship and violence and look to the United States for salvation.

Bowers swallowed the whole "caravan will kill us" line that Trump is trying to sell and took it one step further. He attacked Tree of Life Synagogue specifically because they are part of a century-old organization that helps resettle refugees in the United States:

The most recent postings on the Gab account believed to belong to Bowers specifically targeted the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, known as HIAS, which is one of nine organizations that works with the federal government to resettle refugees in American communities.

“HIAS likes to bring invaders in that kill our people. I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in,” Bowers is suspected of writing hours before authorities said he opened fire at Tree of Life.

In one posting, which seems to have been published several weeks ago, the author appears to threaten participants in the HIAS’s National Refugee Shabbat project, for which more than 200 congregations across the country held celebration and worship services centered on refugees last week. The organization, founded in 1881 to assist Jews fleeing Russia and Eastern Europe, now works to resettle displaced people from around the world, including Muslim and Central and South American nations.

“Why hello there HIAS! You like to bring in hostile invaders to dwell among us? We appreciate the list of friends you have provided,” the poster wrote before linking to the Web page that lists all of the participating congregations.

If you whip a dog into a frenzy, encourage it to attack people on the street, and then let it off its leash and it tears the throat out of a five-year-old child, you are guilty of murder.

Every day, on Twitter, at his rallies, at the scrum in front of Marine One, Trump is whipping his dogs into a frenzy, encouraging them to beat up reporters, punch protesters at his rallies, telling cops it's okay to brutalize suspects.

Trump didn't directly order these attacks. But he is morally responsible for the mail bombs and the bloodshed at Tree of Life.

And then, to add insult to injury, Trump blamed the Jewish victims for not having guards.

How many times do we have to repeat this? Guns do not provide protection, they only allow retaliation. Guards are just the first people to be hit by the burst of gunfire from the AR-15 shooters like Bowers love to use. Four cops with guns were among the shooting victims at the synagogue.

One of the Bowers' victims was a 97-year-old Holocaust survivor. What were her last thoughts as gunfire rang though the synagogue?

Oh, no. It's happening again.

A Week Of Hate Courtesy Of Trump and His Supporters

Well, let's see. First we had Gregory Bush trying to kill black people in Kentucky. Then we had Cesar Sayoc send pipe bombs to 14 major Democratic leaders. And we ended with another shooting in which Robert Bowers walked into a synagogue in Pittsburgh and killed worshipers because he thought they were aiding the caravan coming from Honduras.

Thank you, Trump supporters and right wing bloggers/commenters for being responsible for all of this!

I've been saying this for quite some time on this site but these people are domestic terrorists. They are actively encouraging acts of violence against liberals. Their paranoid delusions have sent them to a place from which there is no coming back.

They are pure fucking evil and they want to kill. It's just that simple.

Consider Sayoc, who, according to reports...

...went on racist, anti-gay tirades at the Fort Lauderdale pizza shop where he worked as a night-shift deliveryman in 2017, telling his manager, a lesbian, that she and other gay people along with Democrats should all be put onto an island and then “nuked.” At a reunion event in 2015 with his college soccer team, he browbeat former team members with racist, sexist conspiracy theories.

Or Bush who tried to break into a black church only to give up and shoot up a grocery store with predominantly black patrons.

Bowers had an AR-15 (shocking...not) and several hand guns which helped him out a great deal, especially with shooting and killing the four policemen who were also armed. When you allow ordinary citizens the capability of a soldier, they create a war zone.

Of course, the right is already engaging in whatboutism, pointing out liberal violence that mythically equal. Worse, Trump blamed the media and Democrats for not being civil enough. Like the women who wears the sexy dress and gets raped, we brought it on ourselves.

When the Democrats take back the House in a week and a half, they should start issuing subpoenas to right wing hate groups and throwing these assholes in Gitmo. They aren't patriots.

They are traitors.

The Fat Slob in the Mirror

Donald Trump has constantly incited violence against political opponents and the media. The same day a bomb showed up in George Soros' mailbox, Trump praised a congressman who bodyslammed a reporter who was just asking a question.

Trump is now blaming the media for several bombs sent to prominent Democrats, George Soros, CNN and Robert De Niro.

A very big part of the Anger we see today in our society is caused by the purposely false and inaccurate reporting of the Mainstream Media that I refer to as Fake News. It has gotten so bad and hateful that it is beyond description. Mainstream Media must clean up its act, FAST!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 25, 2018

Yes, it's all the media's fault for spreading fake news: they keep repeating Trump's twitter feed and showing video of him making false claims and citing inaccurate statistics so he can make real estate arms deals with dictators who murder reporters.

The media just reflect what Trump says and does. If he doesn't like having his lies thrown back in his face, he should just shut up.

Why, just the other morning he was griping to Melania at breakfast (five sausage McMuffins and a Diet Coke): "Jesus Christ, that slob in the bathroom mirror was so fat and ugly! And what a terrible comb-over!"

Sexual Predator Claims "Executive Privilege"

A man on a Southwest Airlines flight groped the breasts of the woman sitting in front of him. He was arrested, cuffed and charged by the FBI with Abusive Sexual Contact.

But he didn't think he'd done anything wrong because, as the perp/perv says, the President  of the United States says it's okay to grab women by their private parts.

According to the complaint:

16. After being placed in hand cuffs, ALEXANDER asked what the sentence was for the charge he was being arrested for. Later, in the vehicle, ALEXANDER stated that the President of the United States says it's ok to grab women by their private parts.

Is this really the world that evangelicals wanted to create when they voted for Donald Trump? They used to say that character counts, that a country must be led by people with exemplary personal standards. That the president must serve as a paragon of virtue for the nation.

To be honest, this crap has been going on forever. Trump didn't start it. But with him as president, conservatives are starting to think that assaulting women is their god-given right. Since this is a democracy and everyone is equal, they reason, if a drunken Supreme Court nominee can get away with trying to rape a teenage girl, then every construction worker should be able to cop a feel on an airplane.

According to Trump supporters, arresting guys for groping women is PC bullshit!

How much lower will this country sink after two more years of this clown?

The Cyberoperation Begins!

Early voting in the 2018 midterm elections has been going on for weeks now, but the US Cyber Command has only now started a "cyberoperation" to stop Russian hackers trying to swing the election.

The United States Cyber Command is targeting individual Russian operatives to try to deter them from spreading disinformation to interfere in elections, telling them that American operatives have identified them and are tracking their work, according to officials briefed on the operation.

The campaign, which includes missions undertaken in recent days, is the first known overseas cyberoperation to protect American elections, including the November midterms.

What kinds of things is Cyber Command doing?

Defense officials would not say how many individuals they were targeting, and they would not describe the methods that Cyber Command has used to send the direct messages to the operatives behind the influence campaigns. It is not clear if the information was delivered in an email, a chat or some other electronic intervention.

Senior defense officials said they were not directly threatening the operatives. Still, former officials said anyone singled out would know, based on the United States government’s actions against other Russian operatives, that they could be indicted or targeted with sanctions. Even the unstated threat of sanctions could help deter some Russians from participating in covert disinformation campaigns, said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former intelligence official now with the Center for a New American Security.

Yes, Donald Trump's Cyber Command is stopping Russian hackers by sending them threatening emails. I wonder how these emails go?

Dearest Misha,

Please stop hacking Democrats' emails, especially beto@betofortexas.com.

Also, please stop posting inflammatory and threatening messages on #MeToo against women who have been abused by Supreme Court nominees. Don't pretend to be guys who were unjustly accused of rape. And don't post on #HimToo, suggesting that every man will be in danger of false rape accusations, and that women will run everything if the Democrats win. That might inflame conservative men and increase their turnout in November.

And please stop picking on George Soros on right-wing subreddits. Someone might get the idea of putting a bomb in his mailbox.

Yours Truly,
Jared

xxxooo

And if they don't stop, Trump's Cyber Command will tell their mommies.

Trump's Only True Skill

For Trump supporters and apologists everywhere....

“Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright.

The president’s ability to execute that cruelty through word and deed makes them euphoric. It makes them feel good, it makes them feel proud, it makes them feel happy, it makes them feel united. And as long as he makes them feel that way, they will let him get away with anything, no matter what it costs them."

--Adam Serwer, The Cruelty Is The Whole Point.

Who are we to believe-Trump or our lyin' ears?

President Trump's reluctance to call out the Saudi government for the assassination of Washington Post reporter Jamal Kashoggi illustrates two very key truths. First, Trump owes the Saudis a bunch of money from his business interests and doesn't want to make waves. Recently, he hilariously tweeted out this...

For the record, I have no financial interests in Saudi Arabia (or Russia, for that matter). Any suggestion that I have is just more FAKE NEWS (of which there is plenty)!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 16, 2018

Yet during the 2016 campaign we have him on tape saying something much different. The clip comes at the end of this video which also details his financial ties with Saudi Arabia.

 

Who are we to believe-Trump or our lyin' ears?

The second truth that is illustrated by his reluctance to call out the Saudis on the Kashoggi death is he really, really hates reporters (or anyone for that matter) that criticize him. If they get killed, great! That's one less asshole he has to deal with.

The president is not acting in the best interests of this country. He is acting in his own, personal interest.

Democrats Need Their Die Hard Issue

Now that some time has passed since Brett Kavanaugh has been confirmed, it's time for Democrats to reflect on how they lost...again. In order to get a good read on how this happened, let's go back to 2008.

Barack Obama won massively in his bid for president. Congress was all blue. Even the state houses looked solid for the Democrats across the country. People were talking about a permanent, democratic majority. Yet while this was all going on, the GOP quietly began to realize they could erode any gains by the left if they were just patient. After all, conservatives have far more reliable voters and knew that if they just bided their time and let the anger/hate/fear propaganda machine fully flow, democratic voters would assume victory forever and not turn out at the polls while conservative voters would vote every year no matter what.

More importantly, the picked one key issue that they knew would get voters out to the polls: JUDGES. 

Flash forward to today and we have a GOP that runs all three branches of government and 30 state houses. This has happened primarily because conservative voters want conservative judges running SCOTUS and all the federal courts below it. This die hard issue drives them to the polls. Donald Trump could be filmed sodomizing a 5 year old boy and then shooting him in the head but voters will forgive him because....

JUDGES.

The Democrats look good to take back the House three weeks and might have a shot at the Senate, although that is looking less likely. If they want to build a permanent majority, and they easily can because there are more liberal voters than conservative voters, they need to find that one key issue that people will rally behind no matter what. I think that issue is #MeToo.

The uptick in voter registration is largely a reaction to Donald Trump's misogyny. More women are running for office than ever before. Young voters are turning out and getting more people registered because of the mistreatment of women from the top of our power structures all the way down.

This issue could be the Democrats' die hard issue just as judges are with Republicans. People, especially women, have had enough. They want equal rights. Their anger will not go away after this election cycle. They will not rest until more women are in power at the federal and state level. It's time for Democratic leadership to seize this issue and make it their centerpiece.

If they want to win on November 6th and in every election in the future, this is all they should be talking about from now on.

First Man

A couple of weeks ago Republicans starting screaming about a movie none of them had ever seen: First Man, a film about Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. Since this is actual history, I can't actually spoil it, but I won't ruin the ending for you.

Republicans were angry because the movie, which came out yesterday, did not have a scene with Armstrong erecting the flag on the moon. The only reason that this fact impinged upon the Republican consciousness was something that Ryan Gosling, the actor who plays Armstrong, said back in August:

“Full disclosure, I'm a Canadian, so this might be some form of cognitive dissonance, but I think this achievement was widely regarded not as an American, but as a human achievement, and that's how we chose to view it,” Gosling said at a press conference in Venice on Wednesday. “I don't think Neil viewed himself as an American hero, quite the opposite” he added. “Neil was someone who was extremely humble, as were many of these astronauts...the way we made the film was to honor the way Neil viewed himself.”

Now, there is a flag raising in the movie: Armstrong's son raises the flag in front of their house when his dad is going into space. And flags appear on space suits and space craft and buildings all the time.

But is Gosling right about Armstrong not considering himself an American hero? It seems like it. Read articles that were published at the time of Armstrong's death in 2012:

Armstrong would doubtless have been uncomfortable with all the tributes. People who knew him said he was not a recluse, but he was a private man who quickly deflected credit to others. He described himself, more than once, as a "nerdy engineer." He often protested that while he and Aldrin made the first lunar landing, they merely piloted a mission made possible by thousands of others.

Consider what was written on the plaque left on the on the lunar excursion module's leg: Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.

Consider what Armstrong himself said when he planted his boot on the gray powdery surface of the moon: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

Incidentally, the movie kept the quote as recorded, rather than correcting it to "one small step for a man," which Armstrong had intended to say, and was certain he had said. Subsequent analysis appears to prove Armstrong's initial claim correct: the lost "a" was due to a communications dropout.

Clearly Armstrong, and the program itself, wanted to be seen as representatives of all of humanity, not flag-waving American braggarts.

Now, I watched the entire moon walk, live, in the middle of the night, as an 11-year-old child, and I can tell you that the flag planting was not a momentous occasion. It was boring. It was more fun watching them hop around.

You can see Armstrong and Aldrin set the flag up on the moon yourself in the video below, starting at about 46:00. They do it mostly silently and without ceremony or fanfare. It takes them five minutes of fiddling around, trying to unfold it and then making the pole stay in the lunar soil. Armstrong took a couple of pictures of Aldrin with the flag, without comment. Then Aldrin started talking about his gait in lunar gravity.

Armstrong was undoubtedly proud to be an American, glad to be from a country that had the foresight, grit and determination to go to the moon in the face of so many setbacks. But he wasn't a jingoistic blowhard. He was first and foremost an engineer who got the job done. That is the point of the movie.

After Republicans started their tirade Buzz Aldrin also blasted the movie, posting the picture that Armstrong took. Aldrin, a former Air Force pilot, said saluting the flag was his proudest moment.

Well, good for you, Buzz. I'm sure that's how you feel in retrospect. But you didn't say that at the time: you were all about the mission, not puffed-up patriotism. You did your job professionally, as befitting an astronaut.

The movie depicts Aldrin (played by Corey Stoll) as kind of a dick; unfairly, I think, but someone in the film had to tell it like it was. Is Aldrin's ire directed at First Man really because it omits flag-waving or because it doesn't flatter him?

First Man deals with a lot of grief. Armstrong's daughter dies of brain cancer early in the film. Fellow astronauts die in training accidents.

The film examines why these men keep going, and what it takes to keep their cool in life and death situations, when everything is literally spinning out of control and billions of dollars worth of hardware and thousands of man-years of effort are on the line.

First Man, as the title implies, is about the man, not the mission. There are several harrowing scenes where rocket planes, space capsules and LEMs are about to crash or run out of fuel. These all focus on Armstrong and what he sees, or can't see.

We never really see the X-15 he's in when he bounces off the earth's atmosphere. There are very few exterior shots of rocket launches, Armstrong's gyrating Gemini capsule, the Apollo 11 liftoff and the moon landing itself. Even when Armstrong is on the lunar surface, we mostly see it reflected in his gold-plated visor. The movie gives short shrift to all the bombastic aspects of the space program, not just the flag planting.

For a movie about space, First Man must have had a relatively small special effects budget. Because that's not what the film's about. It was about what motivates modest, ordinary men like Armstrong to do mind-bogglingly dangerous and extraordinary things. It's all about Armstrong's reactions and perspective.

We've had hundreds of rah-rah epics about flag-waving hot-dog pilots, from the Right Stuff to Independence Day. Can't we have just one movie about a quiet engineer who did something no one else did before?

First Man comes to an emotional conclusion that several critics and Armstrong acquaintances disagree with. If you're going to argue with the film, that's the argument you should pick with it.

Not the omission of some boring, perfunctory flag-raising.

The Man Who Killed Civilization

People were "surprised" when Hurricane Michael suddenly became a Category 4 storm only days after it came up on everyone's radar as a tropical storm.

They shouldn't have been.

Michael's storm track was along Florida's Gulf Coast, which has been inundated by "red tide" this year. A horrendous stench and millions of dead fish have washed up on Florida's western beaches, destroying the tourist industry there. Red tide is an algae bloom, caused by high nutrient content (fertilizer runoff) and high surface water temperatures.

Guess what else comes from high water temperatures? Very powerful hurricanes.

At the same time Hurricane Michael was spinning up the IPCC, the UN panel on climate change, issued a report saying that climate change was going to hit much harder and much sooner than they had originally projected.

That climate change causes higher sea levels and higher water temperatures, exactly those things that drive ever more powerful hurricanes.

Scientists are always careful to say that not every storm is "caused" by global warming. And, yes, that's true. But it's equally true that the force of every storm is amplified by higher air and water temperatures.

If we had started phasing out coal plants back in 1990s when it was clear that climate change was a serious issue, Florida's Red Tide would have lasted a few weeks instead of several months.

If we had imposed more stringent fuel economy standards back then, Michael would have stayed a tropical storm or Category 1 hurricane. Hurricanes Florence, Harvey and Sandy would have been less intense. Fewer people would have died and the destruction would have been far less costly.

But instead we have Donald Trump denying the every day reality of climate change, dismantling the EPA and actively pushing for more coal burning.

In 30 years people will look back on Trump and say, "That was the man who killed civilization." Not just for accelerating the pace of climate change. But for stoking hatred and division at every step: setting America against the world, whites against blacks, native Americans against immigrants, Christians against Muslims, old against young, and even men against women.

Evangelical Christians have long been talking about the end of the world and the antichrist. Well, they got their wish: they elected him president.

Trump's Climb of Shame

Yesterday gossip sites were abuzz with this video of Donald Trump climbing up to Air Force One with something stuck to his shoe:



Unfortunately, it wasn't toilet paper. It wasn't a napkin.

 It was the Constitution of the United States.

Power Begets Power

Trump Committed Hundreds of Millions of Dollars in Tax Fraud

The New York Times got hold of the tax records for Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father, and found a mountain of evidence that Fred and Donald committed tax fraud exceeding hundreds of millions of dollars.

Not only did they evade taxes, but they also screwed thousands of people living in apartments owned by Fred Trump's companies, illegally raising their rents by padding maintenance costs.

The [reporters] began to talk to people familiar with the president’s father and his empire. Those people told them that [All County Building Supply & Maintenance] was a middleman entity created by President Trump and his siblings essentially to move cash from Fred Trump’s companies to his children. After All County bought various items for Fred Trump’s buildings, like boilers and cleaning supplies, a secretary would bill the items to Fred Trump’s buildings with a 20 to 50 percent markup. The siblings would then pocket the difference.

In short, the siblings received millions in untaxed gifts from their father, skirting a 55 percent tax on gifts over a certain value that would have cut the total significantly.

“When we came to that realization, that was a big day for us,” Mr. Buettner said.

Over the next several months, the reporters would obtain tens of thousands of pages of documents, including more than 200 tax returns from Fred Trump, his companies and various Trump partnerships and trusts. (“We have a virtual mountain of spreadsheets,” Mr. Barstow said. “We should have spreadsheets for our spreadsheets.”) The trove included previously secret depositions, including one in which Robert Trump, the president’s brother, admitted that the family used the padded receipts from All County to justify higher rent increases for their tenants in rent-regulated apartments.

Now, I know that Trump supporters will greet this news with a gigantic yawn. Trumpies already know he's a crook. They know he's conspiring with the Russians. They know he sexually assaulted more than a dozen women.

It's the same with Kavanaugh. They know he assaulted the woman who've accused him. They know he was a mean drunk all throughout high school, college and beyond.

They just don't care.

By all rights Trump's supporters should be irate. Everything Trump said about being a self-made man was a lie: his daddy was constantly bailing him out of financial jams. And when Fred was getting senile Trump changed his father's will to make himself the sole executor of the estate, to steal whatever was left.

Trump is the worst kind of elitist: the kind that uses the inside track to enrich himself at the expense of others. The kind of guy that Trump supporters claim to hate the most.

In his defense Trump blamed it all on his accountants and lawyers. Essentially, he's saying that he's a stupid dupe and had no idea all these guys were stealing his father's money and shoveling it into his coffers. Yeah, right.

It's doubtful that the federal government will go after Trump (though they should). Trump has every agency in the federal government cowed. He's pushing the outright lie that the president can't be taken to court for crimes committed before he assumed the presidency, but since the Supreme Court allowed a sexual harassment claim to proceed against Bill Clinton, it's clear that presidents are not above the law.

In any case, the state of New York should be able to use this evidence charge Trump and his siblings with fraud and tax evasion.

And Trump won't be able to pardon his way out of that.

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:)