Think Like a Dictator

There's an upwelling of anger against Donald Trump among his allies for his defense of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. When asked about the death of Otto Warmbier, an American student who died from a brain injury after being released from a North Korean prison, where he had been sentenced to 15 years hard labor for stealing a propaganda poster, Trump said:

I don’t believe that he would have allowed that to happen; it just wasn’t to his advantage to allow that to happen. Those prisons are rough — they’re rough places — and bad things happened. But I really don’t believe that he — I don’t believe that he knew about it.

He tells me that he didn’t know about it, and I will take him at his word.

Is Trump totally oblivious? Kim unquestionably allowed it to happen: Otto died, Kim is the absolute dictator of North Korea, he could have let Otto go at any time before the injury. Ergo, Kim allowed it to happen.

No, Kim didn't personally bash Otto over the head with a lead pipe. He lords over an evil dictatorship that kidnaps foreigners and throws them in prison for decades for bogus offenses. He then uses these victims as pawns to extort favors from foreign governments. For example, to get a meeting with Trump.

How can Trump not understand that Kim is evil incarnate and that he is directly responsible for Otto's death? Because Trump thinks like a dictator.

And by the way, Trump is doing exactly the same thing to women and children that Kim did to Otto Warmbier.

When victims of gang violence and poverty come to the United States from Central and South America seeking asylum, Trump's policy dictates the ICE throw them into privately-run for-profit prisons, separating parents from children. Some of these kids are put in cages. Some of them have been sexually assaulted in ICE detention. Some of them have died. Many of them will never see their parents again because they were so young when they were taken that they don't even know their last names, and their parents have been sent back to their home countries (or died).

If Trump admits that Kim is guilty of Otto's death, he would be admitting that he is responsible for all the travesties that happen to children in ICE detention centers.

It's the same with the Saudi prince, Mohammad bin Salman, and the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi: MbS wanted Khoshoggi dead, and now he's dead. MbS didn't slice up his body, but he ordered the hit and is responsible. But because MbS is best buds with Jared Kushner, and he's a dictator like Trump wants to be, Trump "believes" his denial.

Trump is jealous of dictators like Kim, MbS and Putin (who's had dozens of journalists and political opponents murdered) and wants to pull the same crap that they pull. Trump constantly trashes our democratic allies, but consistently lavishes praise on the most heinous tramplers of human rights.

It just baffles the mind to think that so many Republicans are defending a creature so thoroughly and indisputably corrupt. In a few months or years they will find themselves in exactly the same position that Michael Cohen finds himself in: they will rue the day that they defended Trump, that they lied for him, that they threatened people for him, that they sold their souls to this ineffably corrupt demon who will throw them under the bus the instant he no longer needs them.

Like Michael Cohen, or Michael Flynn, or John Kelly, or Reince Priebus, or Steve Bannon, or Rex Tillerson, or Jeff Sessions, or Rod Rosenstein, or Jim Mattis, or... Well, you get the picture.

How Conservative Propaganda Works

The Epic Takedown That Has The Internet Exploding

Exactly How Stupid Is Donald Trump? 42 Billion!

Donald Trump is, to put it mildly, stupid. But have you ever wondered exactly how stupid he is? What if there was a way to put an actual number to his level of stupidity?

Well, there is a way. And since money is the only thing that matters to Donald Trump and Republicans, that number should be a dollar figure. We will roughly calculate this based on Trump's proposal for controlling forest fires.

One of the major causes of forest fires in recent years is climate change. Donald Trump is relentless in denying this basic fact. He thinks that we can stop forest fires by raking, which he said the president of Finland told him was how they prevented fires (note: Finland is near the Arctic Circle and has 187,000 lakes). The Finnish president denied ever saying this.

Trump doubled down on stupidity in an interview on Fox News last November, this time claiming that a governor of "a certain state, I won't say which," told Trump they tested raking forests and that it stops forest fires. The reason Trump won't say which states is because he's lying and doesn't want to be embarrassed, as he was when the Finnish president called him on his lie.

So, down to brass tacks.

According to a 2014 USDA report, there were 819 million acres of forest and woodlands in the United States in 2012. California alone has 33 million acres of forest.

So, how long does it it take you to rake your yard? A couple of hours? We'll just say two hours. The average American yard is 0.22 acres. That means it takes 4.5 hours to rake an acre. The average lawn maintenance worker made $11.53 an hour in 2012, and that price has only gone up since then. But we'll low-ball it and use that number.

It would take 148,500,000 hours to rake all 33 million acres of California's forests, at a cost of $1.7 billion. That's 74,250 man years.

If we apply the Trump forest fire solution to the entire country, it would  take 3.7 billion hours (1.8 million man years) and cost $42 billion. Every year. Forever.

So, where do we put all those leaves and pine needles that those workers rake up? And how do we get those leaves and needles out of those forests, many of which have no roads? And what happens to the animals and insects that live in those forests when all these guys with leaf blowers and rakes come tearing though? And what happens to the trees when they no longer have the nutrients that decaying dead leaves put back in the soil?

So that's how stupid Donald Trump is: 42 billion.

Given the dire straits a lot of employers are in these days trying to find people who will do menial jobs like lawn maintenance, where are we going to find 1.8 million people working full time raking forests?

For a start, I hear that 10 immigrant groundskeepers who worked illegally at Trump's Westchester golf club are newly available.

How can anyone take this clown seriously? He's a stupid, senile old man who thinks you can solve forest fires by raking. Now, I doubt he really believes this is an actual solution to forest fires. What he's doing is insulting the intelligence of everyone who's listening, in particular his supporters.

He has been feeding his voters a completely stupid and unrealistic line of bullshit on everything from forest fires to immigration, while at the same hiring hundreds of foreigners -- many illegally -- to work at his golf courses, hotels and clubs to do jobs that he categorically refuses to give to Americans.

Trump voters get really mad at liberals who think they're stupid. But Trump constantly treats them like morons, feeding them an idiotic diet of total bullshit of every day, while taking their support for granted.

Too Many People Running For President

Now that Bernie Sanders has thrown his hat into the ring along with the 89 other people running for the Democratic nomination, I must say something. There are too many people running for president. Again. The GOP got stuck with Trump because so many people ran in 2016. Who are the Democrats going to get stuck with?

I've also got an issue with so many Senators running for president. We need them in the Senate, not the executive branch. I don't see any of that magic, populist fairy dust with any of the Senators who are running. Many Americans are going to see them as establishment and not as outsiders which is what wins elections.

Perhaps the biggest mistake that all of them are making is assuming they are going to be running against Trump. He will not even be in office by the time of the 2020 election.The Mueller investigation is going to put us into a place where he have never been in this country-prosecuting a foreign asset that colluded with the Russian government to win an election. They should be thinking about who is going to fill that void and start planning on running against them. It's not going to be Mike Pence or William Weld.

I want to see a populist nominee run for president who has previously won elections, isn't a long time senator, and understands that she or he will not be running against Trump.

O, Lord, Save Us from Geezers

Predictably, Bernie Sanders has announced that he will be running for president in 2020.

Sanders will be 79 years old on election day. That's too damn old to be president. There's a 10% chance Sanders will be dead by election day 2020.

The same is true for Joe Biden, who will be 79 on inauguration day in 2021. Elizabeth Warren will be 71 in 2020, which is also too old to be president: she would be almost as old Trump when he assumed office.

If the election of Donald Trump has taught us anything, it is that people his age should not be president. If you listen to Trump 20 years ago, you will notice a huge difference in the level of coherence in his speech. He was always a dick, but he has not aged well. He is frequently confused when he speaks, often contradicting what he just said in the previous sentence, darting off on pointless tangents and constantly making asides that undermine the very message he is trying to deliver. He spends more than half his day in "executive time," watching TV and napping. In short, he is a foolish, fat and weak old man who is not competent to be president.

We do not need a repeat of Trump's senility in the Oval Office.

Lest you think that I too am going senile by repeating myself on this issue, I am fully aware that this is the second time I've ranted about this recently. But this election is too important to cede to geezers who are highly likely to be dead before their term is up.

I am 61 years old, and it has become abundantly clear that people my age and older have lost more than a few steps, both physically and mentally.

After age 65 or 70 people who are still actively pursuing a goal are simply running out of time, whether they can admit it to themselves or not. They get hung up on winning and proving that they were right before they die, and not concentrating on what's best for the country.

Sanders and Warren are right where they belong, in the Senate. There are a hundred senators working in a deliberative body, there's no single point of failure and they're relatively easy to replace when they die. They don't have to make snap decisions the way a president does. It's a much less stressful and demanding job.

Yes, experience is important. But after a certain age, people just don't learn any more. They simply become more hardened in their attitudes, more certain that they're always right, and less flexible and agile mentally and physically. That's just how old people are.

Sanders is exactly the same guy he was 20 or 30 years ago, only older and slower. So are Biden and Warren. If they didn't have what it takes to be president at age 50, they certainly don't have it at age 79.

The last thing we need is for Sanders to win the election in Nov. 2020, and then die of a stroke a week later.

The Democrats are supposed to be the party of youth and new ideas. Why are so many of them rushing to nominate great-grandpas?

Coulter Finally Calling It Like It Is

Usually it's liberals who call Trump voters stupid. But Ann Coulter, formerly one of Trump's most steadfast supporters (she wrote a book called In Trump We Trust) is finally calling it like it is:

"No, the goal of a national emergency is for Trump to scam the stupidest people in his base for 2 more years," she tweeted early Friday morning. "The goal is to get Trump's stupidest voters to say "HE'S FIGHTING!" No he's not. If he signs this bill, it's over."

In his incoherent, rambling speech announcing the emergency declaration Trump admitted that he didn't need to do it, and that it would be litigated all the way to the Supreme Court, which will take months or years. So much for the "emergency."

Trump and the Republicans controlled every part of the federal government from 2017 to 2018 -- the
presidency, the Senate, the House and even the Supreme Court -- and he did diddly-squat on building the wall. Then, suddenly, right before the election he says we're being invaded. And then after the election he lost for the Republicans, he shuts down the government for month, costing taxpayers literally billions of dollars, all just to sign a bill that gave him less for the wall than the Democrats and Republicans offered before the shutdown!

Like everything Trump does, this is just one big con. He doesn't care about the wall. He knows the wall is useless. He never liked the wall. But his stupid racist supporters liked to chant "Build the wall!" at his rallies, so he went with it.

The whole point of the emergency declaration is not to actually build a wall. It's just a stupid political stunt to generate division in this country, to sow chaos, and to get ratings, as if this were a reality TV show. Trump is pretending to fight for the wall, knowing full well that it will cost the government hundreds of millions in legal fees, and will likely fail in the end.

Building the wall will require confiscation of thousands of acres of private land through eminent domain, something that conservatives usually call government overreach. And it is this question of eminent domain that will likely cause the Supreme Court to rule against Trump (Clarence Thomas really hates eminent domain).

Worse, this stupid political stunt will also cost the citizens along the border millions of dollars in legal fees to fight this stupid political stunt, which is really outrageous. Conservatives carped when the federal government tried to charge Cliven Bundy fees for grazing his cattle on government land. Now Trump wants to take private land to build a monument to racism. Come on!

Trump's press conference was nothing but lies. Drugs don't come through unwalled border areas: they come in hidden compartments of semitrailers hauling lettuce and machine parts (a la Breaking Bad), or regular cars going through border check points, or in tunnels built under the existing walls (as we learned from El Chapo's trial), or in boats, or in private airplanes, or in drug mules flying on commercial airliners.

Check out this bundle of incoherent nonsense spewed out of Trump's cake hole:

Asked Friday whether conservative media personalities influenced his policy on building a border wall, the president denied commentators like Coulter and Fox News' Sean Hannity pushed him to declare a national emergency to get a physical barrier on the southern border.  

"They don't decide policy. In fact, if I went opposite — they have somebody, Ann Coulter, I don't know her. I hardly know her. I haven't spoken to her in way over a year. The press loved saying 'Ann Coulter.' Probably if I did speak to her, she'd be really nice. I just don't have the time to speak to her," Trump said.

But he does have plenty of "executive time" to watch Hannity and Coulter on Fox News constantly whining about the border wall.

Just listen to him: "I don't know her. I hardly know her. I haven't spoken to her in way over a year." Hey, Donald: you knew her well enough to invite her to the Oval Office, where you had an obscenity-laced screaming match about the border, NAFTA, etc. So, by any reasonable definition, you know her.

This is how he talks all the time: he makes one statement, contradicts himself, then contradicts himself again. Why does anyone trust this guy at all? He's clearly lying or he's so confused he doesn't know what he knows. He has no brain, it's all just Swiss cheese and air. Nobody's home.

Yet his supporters like him? I am completely baffled. They can't like this guy. The only thing there is to like is the hatred and bile that he spews.

Even more baffling: how was Ann Coulter fooled by Trump? She's wrong about most everything, but she's not an idiot. Trump has always been a stupid, lying scumbag. Always.

People like Coulter let their racism and hatred cloud their judgment, and the country is paying the price.

Oldest Audio Recording of a President

So cool!

For Those Of You Who Don't Understand Socialism...

White Men: Stop "whitesplaining" the definition of racism

From a recent article by John Blake.

There are different strains of whitesplaining, but what unites them all is the belief that white people are more qualified to decide what's racist and what's not, says Jonathan Walton, author of "Twelve Lies That Hold America Captive." 

White men in particular have felt free to define standards of beauty, goodness and even freedom for all people, Walton says, "so why not define racism as well." 

"The power to define is reserved for white people, which is the crux of whitesplaining," he says.

Yep.

Sorry, white people, in particular, white men. You don't get to define what racism is.

Marked Safe!

The First Step Act and Blackface

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BWAHAHAHAHA!

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

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

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

Infuriating!

— Dennis Jordan (@DennisMJordan) February 5, 2019

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

Color and Diversity

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

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

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

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

Straight Outta Bugs Bunny

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conservatives Are Trying to Make Democrats Commit Political Suicide

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the Rationale for Raising Taxes on Billionaires?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Billionaire Drug Pushers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no global warming

Trump's Groundhog Day Stock Market Tweets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That’s a lot,” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Climate change.

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

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

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

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

Assimilation Is Always the Goal

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

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

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

That's what kids do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Finally Shows Some Spine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yesterday Was A Good Day

Why Can't Giuliani Make Up His Mind?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that's not how democracy works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Are You Doing For Others?

Christmas 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New Hitler Youth

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


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

Ah, the white male threatened...

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


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

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

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

Neither will the gentlemen they will encounter in prison:)

No Fancy Words

Trump Is Still Working for the Russians

Last week we learned that the FBI was so concerned about the huge number of Donald Trump's Russia connections that they actually opened an investigation into whether he was working for them, something he declined to immediately deny in a Fox News interview.

Trump reacted Saturday during a telephone interview broadcast on Fox News Channel after host Jeanine Pirro asked whether he is currently or has ever worked for Russia.

“I think it’s the most insulting thing I’ve ever been asked,” he said. “I think it’s the most insulting article I’ve ever had written, and if you read the article you’ll see that they found absolutely nothing.” Trump, however never directly denied the claim, a fact which quickly became a Twitter meme.

Eventually Trump did deny it, in the same way that he denies grabbing women by the pussy. But no one is buying his denials, not even Republican senators, judging by recent actions on the Senate floor with regard to sanctions on a Russian oligarch.

Last year Trump levied tariffs on aluminum and steel imports, proclaiming they were necessary for reviving American industry.

The world's second-biggest aluminum producer is Rusal, owned by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who is tight with Vladimir Putin. Rusal dumps a lot of cheap aluminum on the United States.

The company is under sanctions because of Russian meddling in the last presidential election, to help get Trump elected. Deripaska also paid Paul Manafort millions of dollars. Manafort worked "for free" as Trump's campaign manager, until secret payments from pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians were revealed.

But, despite all these highly suspicious Russia connections, Trump's treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, decided to remove sanctions on three of Deripaska's companies, including Rusal. So you gotta ask: why is Donald Trump still carrying water for Putin's pals if he's not working them?

At least some Republicans understand how absolutely terrible this looks. In a Senate vote, 11 Republicans joined Democrats in a vote to maintain sanctions on Rusal.

Munchkin Mnuchin says sanctions on Rusal have to be lifted to avoid damaging the aluminum market. Huh?

Thousands of American soybean farmers are declaring bankruptcy because of Trump's trade war with China, yet the tariffs are still in place. Thousands of federal employees are being forced to work without pay. National parks have become disaster areas. TSA workers and FAA controllers being stretched to the limit, increasing the risk of aviation terrorism and air traffic control disasters. Yet Trump's government shutdown is in its fourth week.

Why is Trump going out of his way to reassure the Russians that he has their backs, when he spits on American farmers, American companies like GM and Harley Davidson, and federal employees?

Hitching Your Wagon To The Star Of A Loser

You're Locked In Here With Me

To quote Alan Moore: “None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with YOU. You're locked up in here with ME.” 🤣 https://t.co/8TCmKNJlkD

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 11, 2019

As if I wasn't already in love with her...

I can only imagine how 'splodey the heads of right wing bloggers and commenters are right now. You assholes are so fucked.

And D-O-N-E...DONE!

Build A Wall!!

Trump Shutdown Increasing Terrorism Risk

Donald Trump claims that the whole reason we need to build a wall at the Mexican border is to keep out terrorists.

The fact is, essentially zero terrorist suspects come over the southern border. More actually come in via the Canadian border, but the vast majority come in through airports.

For example, this Justice Department report says that in fiscal year 2017, of the 2,554 encounters DHS had with individuals on the terror watch list who were traveling to the United States, "335 were attempting to enter by land, 2,170 were attempting to enter by air, and 49 were attempting to enter by sea." It is unclear which land port DHS was mentioning.

Since the real entry point is airports, clearly we need to beef up security at airports. Ironically, Trump's shutdown is blowing a hole in airport security.

During the shutdown TSA agents are being forced to work without pay. As a result many are calling in sick. And many are deciding to call it quits altogether.

Clearly, Trump does not give a damn about the security of this country. He is demanding a wall for two reasons: first, Ann Coulter has him pussy-whipped, and second, he wants to claim he fulfilled a campaign promise, hoping that he can gain re-election in 2020 and avoid going to jail before he dies of Alzheimers.

Of course, the biggest terrorist threat is from people who are already here, such as the racist right-wing men who have been shooting up schools, synagogues and churches over the past few years.

The Perils of PDF

Paul Manafort has always been a weasel. After decades of making millions of dollars shilling for evil foreigners like Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, Angolan rebel Jonas Savimbi and pro-Russian Ukrainian dictator Viktor Yanukovich, Manafort agreed to run Trump's presidential campaign for free.

Nothing suspicious about that. No sirree. 

Manafort lasted only a few months: he was ousted when his name was discovered in a Ukrainian ledger indicating he received $12.7 million in secret payments from a pro-Russian Ukrainian political party. By that time, however, Manafort had already accomplished his main goal: removing the pro-Ukrainian independence plank from Republican Party platform at the Republican convention.

Despite receiving tens of millions of dollars from foreign dictators over the years Manafort was heavily in debt (perhaps because he spent his money on nonsense like a $15,000 ostrich-skin jacket).

Manafort's legal problems really cranked up when prosecutors got hold of emails he sent to his buddy Rick Gates, asking him for help in creating fraudulent profit and loss statements so he could avoid taxes. Manafort couldn't figure out how to covert a PDF file to Word format.

And that wasn't the last time PDF caused Manafort problems. Yesterday Manafort's lawyers submitted a PDF file that tried but failed to redact an embarrassing revelation: While running Trump's campaign Manafort gave internal campaign polling data to Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian operative with connections to the Kremlin.

Manafort and Kilimnik also discussed a Ukrainian "peace plan," which would mean dropping sanctions on Russia for the invasion Crimea and the ongoing occupation of eastern Ukraine.

These details, plus the Trump Tower meeting with Jared Kushner, Don Jr., and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya (who was indicted yesterday in an unrelated case that firmly establishes her ties to the Kremlin), and literally dozens of other contacts between Trump campaign operatives and Russian officials, spies and other organizations like the NRA, make it abundantly clear that the Trump campaign and associated PACs conspired with the Russian government to steal the presidential election.

It also doesn't help that Trump constantly repeats pro-Russian propaganda, such as his comments on Montenegro ("Very aggressive people") and Afghanistan ("The Soviets invaded to fight terrorists"), as if Trump was Putin's ventriloquist's dummy.

Trump apologists, such as Rudy Giuliani, have essentially admitted to all the facts above, and have been reduced to claiming that "collusion is not a crime." The thing is, collusion is just another word for conspiracy.

And conspiracy is a crime: Trump conspired to commit campaign fraud in the form of hush money payments to porn stars and Playboy playmates.

It is a crime for foreigners to spend money to influence American elections: it's an illegal in-kind campaign donation. The Trump campaign clearly conspired with Russians who funded vast social media campaigns to sway Americans to vote for Donald Trump or Jill Stein, and to defame Hillary Clinton and dissuade black Americans from voting at all.

In essence, Giuliani and Trump's apologists are going for the "pussy-grabbing" defense: everyone knew Trump was a sexual predator in November 2016, and he won the election anyway, so he should be able to get away with it.

Since "everyone knew" Trump was in bed with the Russians before the election because "everyone knew" that Manafort was a Russian plant and "everyone knew" about Trump's numerous connections to Russian oligarchs and mobsters, the American people obviously didn't care he conspired with a foreign power to steal the election.

Trump's defense, in the end, will be that his conspiracy with the Russians is "old news," and it should just go away.

Quote of the Day

The controversy of the moment involves AOC’s advocacy of a tax rate of 70-80 percent on very high incomes, which is obviously crazy, right? I mean, who thinks that makes sense? Only ignorant people like … um, Peter Diamond, Nobel laureate in economics and arguably the world’s leading expert on public finance (although Republicans blocked him from an appointment to the Federal Reserve Board with claims that he was unqualified. Really.) And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

---The Economics of Soaking The Rich, Paul Krugman

Conservatives Think The Nation Is John Lithgow in Footloose.

Apparently, conservatives think that we are in the film "Footloose" and dancing is evil. So evil, in fact, that spreading a video around of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in college, was employed in the hopes of making her look bad. Here is he original tweet from a Q Anon psycho...

Here is America's favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is...
...High School video of "Sandy" Ocasio-Cortez @AoDespair pic.twitter.com/j3hTnwErib

— AnonymousQ1776 (@AnonymousQ17763) January 4, 2019

Ooo...scawee...my god, the humanity! A person having fun!! Must be a commie because only commies have fun!! The response to this (ahem) expose was hilarious. It shows just how fucking out of touch the right is these days. Here's the best one...

Now she's totally done for. Newly unearthed video reveals that when @AOC was in college, she was ... adorable. https://t.co/EkqXTrQSAo

— Karen Tumulty (@ktumulty) January 3, 2019

"They will thrash and spit and bellow..."

Jon Pavlovitz has an amazing blog that I enjoy every day. His recent piece, The Extinction of the White American Male Dinosaur, is his best post yet. I found myself thinking of all the angry and hateful old white men that used to post here and over on Kevin Baker's gun blog, especially these two parts.

In the coming days, the Tweets will become more erratic, the legislative assaults grow more transparently desperate, the hate crimes more brazen, the sermons grow more alarmist and incendiary. These Jurassic, soon-to-be-amber-trapped relics, will act is if the very sky above them is falling, because in very real ways, it is. They will thrash and spit and bellow, in an effort to buy themselves a few more days and a bit more power and another Federal judge or two, but they cannot stave off their inevitable disappearance, as progress and civilization and time swallow them up. 

The misogynistic, supremacist nostalgia of their dying glory days is dissolving, in the glorious refining fire of what is coming on the horizon: color and diversity and new and young and wide open. The wall-builders and the close-fisted and the table-monopolizers will not survive this evolution.

Indeed, they won't.

This is what the future looks like, assholes. You aren't in it.

The Discomfort of Thought

Happy New Year!!

Welcome to 2019 AKA the year we take our country back from the internet trolls. It's also going to be the year that Donald Trump will leave office-either by choice or force.

We here at Zombie Politics would like to extend our thanks to all of our readers, especially the new ones who have joined from Quora and Twitter. We used to average around 100 regular readers a day and now we are up to three times that and more sometimes. A large part of the increase has been due to Nikto's solid commentary. Thanks, buddy!

We appreciate your readership!