The Future

I do have something to look forward to in the November election: Jelly Belly Trump's concession speech.

Polling

What the latest polls show is that in a contest between Clinton and Trump, Clinton would win big.  But the contest is not between Clinton and Trump. The real contest includes Gary Johnson of the Libertarians and Jill Stein of the Greens. At the moment Johnson and Stein have the support of 16% of the voters, and Trump and Clinton are tied. 

As we have seen in the Brexit debacle, strange things happen when voters decide to rise up and punish the party establishments that ignore them. In some ways the "leave" voters resemble 
Trump supporters, but our situation is different. Our population is more diverse than that of England--it was the English in Great Britain who voted to leave. We have stronger groups of minorities, but we had better be careful in the coming months to make intelligent choices. 

The Size of Killings

The slaughter at a gay nightclub in Florida was as bad as things get, but people on TV saying that it was the biggest massacre in our history, they don't know our history. At Wounded Knee, American troops killed more than 150 Lakota: men, women and children. Twenty of the shooters were awarded medals of honor by a grateful nation. I doubt if that was the biggest killing spree in American history, but it's an event some still remember.  

Death and the Senate

Marx famously wrote that capitalists will sell you the rope you need to hang them. Yesterday the US Senate refused to pass laws making it hard for terrorists to buy assault rifles. In Washington the business of selling guns has priority over certain future attacks by followers of ISIS. 

Polls show that the American people overwhelmingly do not want to sell guns to terrorists. The way our system works, what voters want often doesn’t matter. 

Sitting the Warriors

Some people I know have been asking why the NBA lets Lebron James throw Curry and Dramond down on the hardwood court. It's because the league does not want a short series. The TV money is too good. I don't mean that there is a plot, just that the refs understand that this should not be a short series. Lebron asked the league on TV to sit Dramond Green down for one game, and the league did it, not because they want Cleveland to win but because they want a sixth game.

During the regular season each team faces what some call "mandatory losses." That is, the league will schedule the Warriors (or any team) to play Saturday night in Oakland, Sunday night in Manhattan and Monday at noon in Boston. The visitors will be too tired to win in Boston. The Warriors, in their entire history, have never gone on a seven game road trip and won seven games.

All this gives the worst team some victories and keeps the best team from making the others look too bad.

Rape and Racism

A judge occupies the center of a controversy in California because he gave a white Stanford athlete an easy six months in jail for raping an unconscious young woman. The judge’s reason for mercy was that the man had been drunk at the time. I have to admit that when I was young, I got drunk more than once. That might have led to many rapes, if I had been a pervert. 

Rape is unforgivable, and an entirely legal movement is underway to recall the judge, making him an example for others.

Worse, we have a long history of using the threat of rape to justify racism. In the last century, the gut justification for Jim Crow was the claim that black men, if not kept down, would rape white women. Just when we thought we had put that rubbish behind us, along comes a traditionalist, Jelly Belly Trump, to tell America that undocumented workers, men, women and children, are brown rapists sent across the border by Mexican officials. 

Women have real things to fear (male Stanford athletes, judges, armed homicidal maniacs, filthy public bathrooms), but many Americans would rather focus on the danger to women found deep in the shades of human skin.

Character in Politics

When George Washington realized that political parties were forming, he commented that “distinctions of character no longer matter.” He said that if members of the Jeffersonian party set up a broomstick as their candidate and called it a Democrat, it would still command their voices (support).

Should Republicans Vote Libertarian?

Should Republicans vote Libertarian in this election?

Tom Belton passed along an article written by Jacob Weinberg about the Libertarian Party. “The Libertarian party’s nominating convention, held last weekend in Orlando, Florida, was typical of its gatherings. One of its more popular Presidential candidates, software magnate John McAfee, is wanted for questioning  by the police in Belize as ‘a person of interest’ in connection with his neighbor’s murder. Another candidate, who goes by the name of Vermine Supreme, wore a rubber boot on his head while explaining his platform of time travel, self-defense against zombies and free ponies for all.” And perhaps you saw on TV the often repeated clip of a naked libertarian of great weight dancing at the mike.

The party ended up nominating Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor, who is pleasantly rational, maybe a little kooky but nothing like “Jelly Belly” Trump. “Today’s Libertarians are not so much extreme left or extreme right as they are lost in the clouds of utopian anarchism. . . . During their nominating debate, delegates booed Mr.Johnson for endorsing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.”

The Koch Bros. are libertarians, and so is Peter Thiel, “the billionaire co-founder of Pay Pal and a Trump delegate to the Republican convention. Mr. Thiel contends that extending the franchise to women in the 1920s destroyed American capitalism.

That might still happen. It’s a work in progress. 

Did Bernie Run In Vain?

Did Bernie run in vain?

Heck no. The Democrats used to talk about saving social security by cutting it back. Now, thanks to Bernie, they talk about making social security more generous. And so on. 

The Craven

Ask yourself which TV news network has done the worst job of covering Donald Trump. It might be Fox, but I don’t watch Fox news. Among the networks I do watch, the most mealy-mouthed outfit by far is PBS. Even CNN has suggested to Trump’s orange face that he might be a racist, but PBS is content to note that Trump is “different.”  His candidacy is “unusual.” That’s as strong as condemnation gets on PBS with its unending row after row of corporate sponsors. 

The News Hour’s toleration of racism is worse than cowardly. I want to say that these PBS finks took up the wrong profession. There are better jobs for the desperately craven. They make good torturers, for example.  

Golden State

The Golden State Warriors are the masters of pretty basketball, as the Show Time Lakers once were. The OKC Thunder did their best to beat the Warriors in the semi-finals by playing ugly. That was their best hope, and it almost worked. They pounded the Warriors and just barely lost. 

In the finals the Warriors face Cleveland, and Cleveland is trying to play pretty against a prettier team. That is not apt to work. And they can’t win by playing ugly, either, because Cleveland isn’t tougher than Green and Bogut. (Back to the drawing board.) 

Ali

Mohammed Ali was a great athlete and a stand-up man of principle, much like Kareem Abdul Jabbar or Jim Brown. I think Ali started and embodied the claim that Black Is Beautiful. He believed in the separation of the races, and he took thousands of hits to the head. If you think he was kind, look up how he taunted, tortured and humiliated Floyd Patterson and others. Yet Ali was a genuine hero. He refused to be drafted and sent to kill Asians for no good reason. He never bowed and kissed the whip, and like all heroes, he had feet of clay.

Trump Beaters

We understand that free speech and assembly are protected in this country, but not everyone understands that what is being protected is unpopular speech and assembly. Popular events need no protection. Yesterday we saw on TV protesters punching the dopes at a Trump rally. That was an attack on free speech.

Donald Jelly Belly Trump is a racist. Anyone who backs him (Paul Ryan) is backing racism. Trump’s also a pathological liar, which makes him different from the usual political liar, different even from a sociopath like Ted Cruz. If you tell Jelly Belly that he is lying, he will lie even harder (and to your face).  He can’t help himself. He cannot see facts. Jelly Belly creates his own reality by moving two pink lips. In a President that behavior is beyond dangerous. But his right to talk and the right for the brainless to assembly and listen to racist rants are guaranteed by our Constitution.

As a practical matter, we must defeat Trump in his effort to become the leader of the nuclear-armed Western World. Punching his followers on camera will help to elect him.

Beneath Contempt

I don’t know what to say about the people who actually believe in Donald Jelly Belly Trump. If they do, they do, as is their right. 

But what about the Republicans who understand that Jelly Belly is a pathological liar? He’s someone who insists on lying to you when he knows that you have figured out that he is lying.  Pathological lying is a serious mental illness. Trump insisting that the President wasn’t born in this country is an example of pathology. He denies reality. Jelly Belly cannot stop lying. He insists on lying. 

That’s nutty. You don’t give a pathological crackpot the nuclear codes. He’s not living in the real world. He might nuke Syria and then lie about it. 

Paul Ryan knows that Jelly Belly is cracked, but today Ryan endorsed him for President and World Leader and trigger man for our huge nuclear arsenal. Ryan did this because his commitment to the flailing Republican Party and to his own career is greater than his commitment to America or, to be blunt, to sanity. Paul Ryan and friends rank somewhere below despicable. Their party now represents chaos. America needs a new party that has principles, even bad principles.