I think I must have missed something. Even Trump couldn’t have gone from taking kids from their parents at the border because it is the law and we can’t stop it – it’s the Democrat’s fault, anyway – to signing an executive order banning it without taking a breath.
Category Archives: Politics
A case against Bernie for president
We are the lens through which we understand the universe. Resa Aslan as quoted in a New Yorker Briefly Noted review of God read while standing at the kitchen counter drinking my cherry juice for gout.
Several times now, I’ve been berated for being ageist, mostly by old people who love Bernie, when I say he should not be our candidate in 2020 (if he were the only progressive running, I would vote for him, but I hope he will back somebody much younger). Recently Vern Smith said I didn’t know that common sense and decency had a shelf life, and I thought but that’s not the problem, the problem is…and that’s where I ran into my problem. How to explain that Bernie is too old to be president? I want to quickly add that, of course, Hillary is too old too, so is Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden, and, extra of course, so is Donald Trump. Not physically or, even mentally too old, but culturally too old. In a way, it is very simple, Bernie is out of it, just like I am, just like anybody is who complains about kids being on their cell phones too much, just like our grandparents were. I loved my grandparents and they were very influential in my life but they were from a different era, they came here before the last century and called a car “the machine”. In all four cases above, I do not think the problem is that they are not vigorous, they just are products of a different time. They do not see the same solutions that are visible to people who were born into and grew up in a world closer to the world as it is today. It is not a coincidence or an anomaly that the titans of Silicon Valley are all young. I think the Indians are right – I don’t know if it is the real First Americans or just the Indians in the movies but, either way, the point holds – the Chief should be young and the Elders should be trusted advisors.
The FBI has raided Trump’s attorney, or, officially, the office and home of Michael Cohen
I want to start with The FBI is out to get Trump (and back pedal from there). Trump slandered the FBI throughout his campaign and – and there is no better way to say this – fucked over the FBI ever since he has been President. The fact that he has actually done this ignores one of life’s cardinal axioms, You can’t fight City Hall and it makes me wonder Why would he do this? I can come up with a theory on the slandering during the election part; he may have thought that it gave him street cred as an outsider – especially compared to Hillary Clinton, who he kept saying, was left off easy by the FBI because she was an insider – it gave the message that his campaign was not just against the Democrats but against the unfair and unresponsive insider government itself, and it was a pre-excuse for why he lost, if he did lose, which, a lot of evidence seems to show, Trump expected. But, once Trump was elected President, Why did he go out of his way to alienate the FBI?. I don’t know but I’ve got a half-baked theory.
Going all the back to 1973, Trump has acted as if he were above the law and reacted to problems by suing and then, often, settling. In that first year, 1973, he was sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination and he sued back for 100 million dollars. They settled and he, essentially, agreed to follow the law. As an aside, he didn’t follow the law and he was sued again for breaking the settlement agreement. End aside. Since then, Trump has defended about 1,450 lawsuits and usually settled for less than he would have had to pay if he had honored the agreement (he has also sued about 1,900 times). I think that this has left him with the belief that laws are malleable and law enforcement pretty weak.
Trump has been referred to as a businessman and, while he has been in business, he is not an organizational chart kind of businessman with the kind of checks and balances that implies. He is more of a mafia-type businessman in which he is the absolute monarch at the center of an organization. It was easy for Trump to confused loyalty to him with virtue so that anybody who is not loyal to him is, de facto, not virtuous and shouldn’t be in the organization. He has never had a Board of Directors to moderate his impulses, and, one thing for sure, he is impulsive. That those impulses have largely worked out in the past has emboldened him. The FBI with its loyalty to its own rules and procedures is never going to be loyal enough to Trump for Trump; that aggravates him and he lashes out. Why not? He is now more powerful than ever.
People join the FBI for all kinds of different reasons, to help make society safer, to bring criminals to justice, for some, it is a safe government job and for some, it is a way and place to feel powerful, to feel dominant. I once heard an interview with an L.A. gang member, in talking about the anti-gang unit, he said: “They are the biggest, most powerful, gang; they always win.” Well, the biggest, most powerful except for the FBI.
The FBI embodies the same desires as its agents, it wants to make America safer, jail criminals, and it wants to be dominant, it wants to be the most effective law enforcement agency in the world. This is not an organization that takes criticism well, especially fake criticism. Trump has picked a fight with the biggest gang in the country and it is already not going well for him. To show how serious this is, the FBI has even broken through the client/attorney privilege. That must not have been easy, they had to prove to a judge that they were looking for something, not just fishing for anything, but looking for a specific something that they had a good reason to think they would find in Michael Cohen’s office. In the process, they must now have all his hard drives, and our hard drives know even more about us than Facebook.
Shocking, just shocking I tell ya
path·o·log·i·cal, paTHəˈläjək(ə)l: compulsive; obsessive. Google dictionary.
By now, most people realize that President Donald Trump is a liar. What I didn’t know until last week is that he brags about it, as in: “Trudeau came to see me, he’s a good man, he said we have no trade deficit with you, we have none…I said, well Justin, you do. I didn’t even know. Josh, I had no idea. I just said you’re wrong. You’re wrong. It was so stupid.”
This shocks me. He was meeting with a foreign leader to talk about a trade deficit and he didn’t even bother to look at the numbers beforehand. The point of the meeting was to talk about trade numbers and Trump didn’t even know if we have a trade deficit or a surplus with Canada. That is a level of not giving a shit that would be shocking in a high school drop out.
Then he lied to a guy who did know the numbers. When I was in the merchant building biz – the development biz a little like Trump, really – I saw lots of people lie but I don’t remember ever seeing somebody lie to a guy that knew the truth. A purchasing agent might tell a sub his bid was high when it wasn’t but the sub had no idea. A salesperson might lie about the schedule of a house but the buyer didn’t know the real schedule. Here, however, Trudeau knew the real numbers and Trump lied to him. Maybe Trudeau gave him the benefit of the doubt and just thought, He must have been given the wrong numbers, maybe Trudeau just thought This guy is an idiot but, either way, he knew Trump was wrong.
Lastly, in a public forum, sure to be reported, Trump bragged about being ignorant and lying. To me, this is the most shocking of all. Lying to a foreign leader about something that is checkable is stupid, bragging about it in public is shockingly idiotic.
Non Fake News
Karen Amy posted this chart on facebook and so did Gail Cousins so this is really only a repeat, probably at a larger size for easy reading. The chart was made by the very generous Vanessa Otero whose blog title is All Generalizations Are False. In her blog, Ms. Otero qualifies the chart thusly, However, I weight the ranking downward is if it has a significant number of stories (even if they are a minority) that fall in the orange or red areas. For example, if Daily Kos has 75% of its stories fall under yellow (e.g., “analysis,” and “opinion, fair”), but 25% fall under orange (selective, unfair, hyper-partisan), it is rated overall in the orange. I rank them like this is because, in my view, the orange and red-type content is damaging to the overall media landscape, and if a significant enough number of stories fall in that category, readers should rely on it less. This is a subjective judgment on my part, but I think it is defensible.
Vanessa Otero