President One

What on earth are we supposed to do with President Individual One, the co-conspirator?

Apparently most of the legal community agrees that President Indy One is above the law, as if the Founders, that bunch of hard-cider-drinking chuckleheads, had created a Constitutional king. That may be nonsense, but what do you One expect from today's legal dudes?

The House can impeach a co-conspirator, but chances are good that a morally bankrupt Senate will not convict One. Instead they will stall for two years, while the Republicans coming up for re-election decide to retire or to edge away indignantly from the pussy-grabbing Christian One (to save their jobs).

We’re in for a long, dangerous two years. Trump and his cretins will fight dirty, dirtier than Nixon, worse than anything we’ve seen before.

The SF Giants and Niners

Yesterday we learned that one of the principle owners of the San Francisco Giants, Charles Johnson (85), gave the maximum contribution to the campaign of America's newest racist senator, Hyde-Smith of Mississippi. The brutal Hyde family is back among us.

It's possible that Johnson didn't know Hyde-Smith is an overt racist, but he did know she is a Republican. 

The Niners, on the other hand, fired a useful linebacker, Reuben Foster, because he may have slapped his woman-friend around and definitely found himself arrested again. Foster was immediately hired by another NFL team, the Washington Racist Slur. The Slur believe they can provide the supportive environment needed by long-term domestic abusers. Some now claim that racist slurs and abuse of women are at times joined together, along with homophobia, in football leadership. 

Trump's Nobel Prize

Today Pres. Spanky got to obsessing in public about the probability he will be cheated out of the Nobel Prize. It wasn't clear which Nobel prize he meant. Perhaps the prize in literature for his tweets or in physics for his contributions to global warming. Of maybe he should get a special prize for his expert portrayal of most of the personality disorders known to psychology.

The Guns of Thanksgiving

Our modern version of Thanksgiving is the result of a campaign by a prominent editor in the 1860s named Sarah Josepha Hale, who also wrote "Mary Had A Little Lamb." She was known as "a woman of masculine energy." Then she was forgotten.

The Pilgrims brought thanksgivings events with them from England, where fasting and harvest festivals were intended by the pious to replace dubious pagan holidays like Christmas and Easter.  

From day one the Puritans and then others held occasional secular and religious thanksgiving fasts and feasts to celebrate whatever seemed important to them, often military victories. President Washington suggested that states put together thanksgiving holidays.  Thanksgiving remained a locally scheduled series of holidays, not regularized into one federal holiday until Lincoln did it in 1863. That was not our most thankful year. A great number of young Americans were killing one another. 

From colonial days onward some parts of the South resisted this Yankee holiday.  

Canada and many other countries influenced by Europe have their own versions of Thanksgiving, but it isn't such a big deal. 

In 1941 Congress made the holiday permanent in the United States. 

As far as I know, the fasting, feasting and giving of thanks to Jesus have had little to do with America's original settlers. If your school made you don a onesy and war bonnet and participate in a Thanksgiving pageant, forget about it. You should have been waving a musket and wearing a powdered wig. 

Bread and Circuses

Ancient Rome reached a point where poor people greatly outnumbered the rich, so the nervous authorities began to distribute grain and stage chariot races and entertaining gladiator fights and so on. The poet Juvenal famously called these precautions "bread and circuses." Food prices were regulated and kept low. And it worked. The poor did not get hungry and attack the rich.

America has a related problem today. People are employed, but wages are low.  Getting new glasses or getting your teeth pulled can be unaffordable. The rich outlive the poor, on average, by 14 years. Meanwhile knuckleheads like President Spanky (who inherited hundreds of millions) flourish. The Republican response has been an attempt to punish people for being poor. Republicans want to cut entitlements. That is guaranteed to irritate a majority of people. 

The party that works hard to provide health care, to raise the minimum wage and to keep bread cheap will have an edge.

The Sameness of MSNBC

Many years ago I was elected to serve on a faculty committee that weighed in on personnel disputes. I was sent to examine and report on a case where a tenure candidate, Jane Doe, had gotten a vote of only 65% from her colleagues. I scheduled interviews with Jane Doe and her colleagues. In the end the main accusation against Doe was that she dressed herself exactly like a senior professor, who bitterly resented being copied.

I wrote the complaint up, perhaps expressing reservations about the nature of the charge against Jane Doe, who seemed like a regular professor to me, and she got tenure. 

What brought this back to mind was watching MSNBC this morning. This station has at least three nearly indistinguishable but intelligent blonde hosts with the same hair, same coloring, same age, same big lips, etc., and this morning two of them were on at the same time, interviewing one another while wearing the same clothing.  Wow. 

A Moron in Paradise

Last week we saw President Moron visiting Paradise, California, where a raging forest fire had totally destroyed a town of 26,000 people. This may have been the first time Moron had ventured outside and into a forest; and he was visibly upset. For one thing, the forest floor was filthy, littered with dirt and pine needles. He wanted cleaners sent into the foothills of the Sierras. “This is a management problem,” he insisted. 

He might have been able to call the American Army in to police the forest floor, but he had already sent the army to our southern border to fend off hundreds of families and youngsters seeking asylum.

What matters is that Moron may have opened a needed discussion, which is how do we live with the monstrous fires resulting from global warming? I've seen one fire up close. It's no joke. Fortunately, the answer is straightforward and inevitable. 

We have to build fireproof structures and make them safe by surrounding them with fireproof grounds. The fires will happen. We let the fires flow around us. We watch fires race by. And we stop using oil, coal and natural gas.

Rich!!!

Suppose you own five hundred acres of empty ground in downtown Chicago, but you have to live on social security. Are you a rich woman?

Suppose you are a nation with gigantic holdings in corporations, oil fields and Wall Street, but your bridges are falling down, your people's teeth are falling out and your school textbooks are fifty years out of date. Are you the richest country in the world?

Death for Republicans

The Associated Press summarized what has happened to politics in California, once Nixon and Reagan country and today America’s biggest tax base: demographic change. And California is the future.

In California racism will no longer get a candidate elected. People of color outnumber white people. Independents outnumber Republicans. The Democrats hold a 41 to 9 edge in House seats. One House district with a 7 point Republican registration advantage ousted an incumbent Republican because so many Republican voters found Trump toxic. They elected a protege of Elizabeth Warren.

Hillary Clinton carried Orange County, a legendary Republican stronghold.

So far the Republican Party has learned nothing from its defeats. It's doubling down on a losing hand.

The nation and state need two or more viable parties to give voters at least a shadow of choice. The Republicans in California are on life support. For the moment, the voters  mostly are choosing between the two wings of the Democratic Party, who seem fairly well matched.

If the nation's deluded Republican leaders and voters can re-orient themselves to face reality, their party might avoid joining the Passenger Pigeon.

(also on Facebook)

Mars?

Jim Jefferies recently explained what might be wrong with the idea of Americans settling people on Mars. Mars, Jefferies points out, is a piece of crap.  We could go there and fix it up, but it would be a lot cheaper to fix up our own planet.

One Shade of Gray.

We've been told that a spokesman for America's First Lady apparently fired a Presidential security advisor named Mira Ricardel, writing she "no longer deserves the honor of serving in this White House." 

The White House mentioned  above is currently sheltering a President who enjoys a good spanking or one shade of gray.

This is the first time an immigrant wife of a President has fired one of his advisers. I guess someone had to do it. The President couldn't act. He fell into a gigantic pout after his team lost the midterm election and Mueller outstared him. 

I mean no disrespect, but the firing does raise a philosophical  question: What is honor to a gold digger? Does she have any?

I say she does. The difference (allegedly) between an honorable gold digger and a dishonorable one is that an honest gold digger, once she is bought, stays bought. Trump may wander about in an addled way from one porn star to the next, but he can count on Melania. 

A Short History of the Republican Party

As I  recall it, the Republican party grew out of the Whig party (whatever that was) as a party opposed to slavery. This led to the Civil War, won by anti-slavery forces. After the war, reconstructing the nation began well but ended with Rutherford B. Hayes, who traded away the civil rights of men of color in exchange for the Presidency.  Jim Crow began and lasted for nearly 100 years.

During the Great Depression the Democratic party won the loyalty of a majority of voters by trying to help them.  The Democrats included both America's main progressive elements and the most racist voters. About 60 years ago, the Republicans realized that one way to return to power would be to hint that they were now the genuine home of racists. That would split off some of the Democrats' voters.
  So the Republicans began to hint that they might support a little more racism. This was the dog whistle tactic used by Nixon and Reagan. Soon Southern racists began to shift their loyalties. With more racists voting in Republican primaries, candidates began to compete, seeking racist votes more openly. The most obviously racist candidates began to win primaries. 

To stand out among so many racists, some Republican leaders  began to add that women were forgetting their place, which was pregnant, barefoot and in kitchens. Abortions should not be tolerated by men. Now armed with two issues, white supremacy and male supremacy, the Republicans began to attract fringe elements like the KKK.  Soon the KKK and Nazis were voting in Republican primaries. Instead of nominating Wilkie, Dewey or Eisenhower, the Republicans were nominating Nixon (paranoid), Reagan (senile) and Trump (nuts). Each election the Republicans slid deeper into a concentration of America's worst muck, until, today, the old-style Republicans are leaving the degenerating party in disgust. (This summary omits the Wall Street factors and attempts to repeal social security, Medicare, Obamacare, etc.)



  

The Captain of the Titanic

This is the captain of the Titanic. We just crushed a major iceberg. We won bigger than I said--I said we would win huge. The North Atlantic loves me. It always has. It loves me. People tell me there's never been a bigger victory in the history of  ships. That's right. People know I have a big brain, really big, and the best words. Lots of the best words. These icebergs are small, little things, but cold. Fine. I can be colder than they are. Everyone is telling me I am the coldest. Icebergs are losers.  They're ugly and low I.Q, somewhere in the mid-30s. You ever see an iceberg? They don't know what they're doing.

In the Land of the Fraud

Probably you've seen or heard that the White House distributed a fake video clip yesterday. This fiction showed (supposedly) a respected reporter pushing around a young female intern at a press conference. 

We live in a tech age of faked data used to manipulate ignorant voters. 

Politics has always been rife with lying. Lies were told for and against President Washington. More recent political leaders have often presented absurd travesties of the truth. Johnson lied about Vietnam. Richard Nixon was paranoid. Reagan was senile in office.  Bill Clinton perjured himself chasing young women. George W. Bush started a war with the wrong country, killing hundreds of thousands (by mistake?).

This increasingly steep downhill slide has produced today a rich President who is mentally blighted, emotionally warped, vulgar in the worst ways, cruel and utterly incompetent. He's a lout a dog couldn't love. Trump is unbearably ugly inside and out, but nearly half the nation worships him.  That's what our system has come to. We need to change something.

The Outcome

I'm trying to come to terms with Tuesday's outcomes. On the positive side, I still live in the Republic of California, which has deep flaws (including politicians groveling to real estate corporations)-- but the state rejects the mad Trumplets who ate and excreted the Republican party. In the larger nation, I am grateful to the many ignored but decisive organizations like Indivisible that organized and brought out women candidates and encouraged the votes of the women and young people. Independent volunteers won the House of Representatives. They did for the Democratic party what the party remained too backward, too Bill Clinton-enfeebled to do for itself.

The last Republican congressmen from L.A. county is packing his bags. The Republicans lost Statin Island and the last Republican congressman from New York City.

On the negative side, 45% of the voters still approve of the zombie, our vulgar, misogynist, openly racist and brain-dead President Spank-My-Buttocks. White-Wingers prevailed in the South 150 years after the end of the Civil War. We lost, at least for now, three promising leaders to the nasty lunacy of racism. That's hard to accept. When I was young I once stood within a few feet of  MLK, and now that I'm old, this? 

The Democrats

We are at a peculiar corner in history where one of our two major political parties has collapsed into white-winged, radical-right nihilism. There is one relatively rational major party left on the field, the Democratic party. As an independent democratic socialist, my view is that it is up to the Democrats now to represent a spectrum of voters ranging from Bernie Sanders to Ronald Reagan, from FDR to Eisenhower. Responsible people have no place else to go.

Voters have the options of supporting third parties or not voting at all, but they won't restore sanity to our governance system. 

The Democrats have been claiming for decades to be a big tent party. At this point we need an absurdly big tent party, and we may have one. I see surviving Reaganites on television asking people to vote for Democrats. They are trying to save what little exists of a representative system already stacked against women, the working poor and people of color. Republicans and Democrats had better hang together on Tuesday or we will, as Thomas Paine wrote, all hang separately.

Who Is White?

The definition of  the white race depends on which culture you dwell in. Below I reproduce the official position of American white nationalists (Trump). It's from a website called STORMFRONT.  According to nationalist guidelines, my wife, children, grandchild and son-in-law are not white.

What follows below is a quote from a leader in the movement. By his definition, which is reminiscent of the old "one drop" rule, white-wingers are a minority group.

_____________________________________ 

So in response to the question, "Who's White?" we answer: "Non-Jewish people of wholly European descent. No exceptions."

What comprises "European?" Those areas north of the Mediterranean and west of the Urals corresponding roughly to what was formerly known as European Christendom.

Note the word "wholly" -- "of wholly European descent." Sometimes a person might volunteer that he is some small part non-White, like 1/64th or 1/128th, and then ask if we still consider him White. The answer is that if a person identifies with his non-White part so much that he is concerned about it and feels compelled to tell us about it, then we consider him to be non-White.

If someone were to say that they (sic) were 12.5% Amerindian then, as far as we're concerned, that's what they are, 1/8th non-White. This is something about which we can't compromise. You're either White or you aren't.

"Prepare to Squat," a True Story

In our first war against Mexico (1846), which trained the military leaders of the Civil War (Grant, Lee),  one outfit was led by a general named Doniphan. Maybe he was a colonel.  

Anyway, Doniphan soon faced an enemy army at the Battle of Brazito (Little Arm). Both sides loaded their muskets and lined up to exchange volleys. At this point Doniphan, like many a good Irishman before him, was struck by an idea. He turned to his troops and uttered the first command he had ever given in combat. "Prepare to squat!"

Doniphan squatted his men as the Mexican army fired its volley, which passed overhead, wounding only a few traditionalists who had rejected the new order. He then stood his men up, and they fired a volley into the ranks of the confused and possibly indignant Mexicans, killing many and winning the day.  

This is today's small piece of history. 

Fort Bragg

Civil War General Braxton Bragg was responsible for the deaths of thousands of American soldiers, starting with Shiloh, one of many battles he lost for the Confederacy. Anyone familiar with the Civil War knows that Bragg was mightily disliked by many soldiers and generals of the Confederacy, including James Longstreet. Bragg was sustained by the high regard of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, but nearly everyone else considered Bragg a toxic loser. 

Recently I read the republished diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, DOWN THE SANTA FE TRAIL AND INTO MEXICO, in which this 18-year-old woman, newly married, records her journey into Chihuahua in the middle of the Mexican War. Her portrait of life on the road in 1846 is compelling; this is what she says about Bragg, then a major. "The Maj. is called a great disciplinarian, drilling his men twice a day much to their dissatisfaction, they a few nights since placed a shell (under his cot) with a slow match, intending to kill him, but fortunately tho' it exploded about 11 O'clock shattering the roof of his tent, his trunk, part of his cott and even piercing the bed-clothing, he was unhurt."

This was one of two attempts the men made to kill Bragg during a short and unwarranted war. 

I mention this because there's a town in California named Fort Bragg. It's located a few miles west of Fort Benedict Arnold.