Crash and Burn, the Republican Story

Because of the nature of their coalition, the Republican party's constant lying--compared to the Democrats' lying-- has long been astonishing to witness. The goal of today's Republican party is to use the government to drain money from the poor and middle class and ship it to the super-rich. That's easy. You start a war and then send billions of tax dollars to a plutocrat who owns the mashed potato industry. You feed the soldiers, who now include women,  African-Americans, gays, etc. That's excellent. But enriching mashed potato billionaires doesn't lend itself to winning political slogans in an election, so the Wall Streeters arrange their campaigns around issues that mean nothing at all to them but a lot to voters who are stupid or bigoted. The campaigns attack women, African-Americans, gays, etc.

Wall Street doesn't hate abortions or fear undocumented Mexicans. In fact, it finds both quite useful. But Wall Street promises Republican voters it will end abortions and fence out people of color, because the promises (lies) help get out the KKK vote. The problem today is that the stupid and bigoted voters have finally come to understand they have been lied to for a hundred years. The Republicans never really deliver.  

Abortion remains legal, and lynching remains illegal. The teabaggers, as mindless as inchworms, have taken a century to feel this out. Like worms who crawl out to die on cement after a rain storm, they have suddenly become disoriented. They back Trump, Fiorina and Carson. They bring down the Speaker. They want to stop the nation in its tracks, which would accidentally slow the surge of wealth to the donor class. No way, says Wall Street. The teabaggers hope to burn down the place and put up a new rotting white house. My guess, though, is that it will be the Wall Street wing that does the rebuilding. They have insurance. Maybe a steel house next time.

The Right to Die

I'm 80, so of course many of the people I love have died after long, painful, useless struggles that served only to torture them. In my father's last hours, he was in such discomfort that he signaled to his children to kill him. It was too late--we were taken by surprise--and we couldn't help. 

Today Gov. Brown signed a right-to-die bill, making physician-assisted death legal in California, and I take back every negative remark I ever made about the man, a devout Catholic. Now, when the time comes, each of us can choose, if we wish, to die with dignity. That's an enormous gift.

Death by Gun

 The following is from Market Watch

 

SilviaAscarelli

Senior news editor

You’re most likely to die because of a gun if you live in Alaska.
Deaths by firearms in Alaska totaled 19.6 per 100,000 people in 2013, the most recent data available, according to the Health Indicators Warehouse, using data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Center for Health Statistics.
That is almost double the national rate of 10.6 deaths per 100,000 people, according to its data. The national rate has generally risen over five years, although the 2013 rate was a touch below the 10.7 deaths per 100,000 recorded in 2012.
A separate measure of shootings, the crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker, lists the Umpqua shooting as the 295th mass shooting in the U.S. this year. It defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot—but not necessarily dead—in one event.
That is an average of more than one a day.
Following Alaska are in firearm mortality rates are Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Wyoming, all with 17 or more deaths by firearms per 100,000 people.

Fiorina's Face

I still remember how rejecting I was when Donald Trump criticized Carley Fiorina's face. That was about a month ago. Trump is without a doubt a racist, motormouthed blowhard and a pouting flabby sexist--but what if he was onto something? What a strange thought to have. 

To be honest, Fiorina's face has the look of a madwoman. She's brilliant, vicious and loony, radiating rage, defiantly living in an alternate reality in which her obvious lies are truths. She has the wet look of someone like Ted Cruz, someone about to pop. Cruz,  you may have noticed, is neckless, his head screwed directly onto his shoulders. Something went wrong there and twisted his lips. But Fiorina is even more off-kilter. This losing competition could end badly for her.

Funding Crackpots

My brother bent over to pick up a handout he found on the sidewalk in Santa Rosa, which is how I found out how bigots make money. The handout was the usual hate brochure about gay people.  It complained that gofundme, the website where ordinary people can fund one another with small contributions, had closed down a funding operation by a pair of "Christian" bakers after the site had raised over a hundred grand in a few hours to help these crackpot bakers out.  Gofundme tries not to fund nutters who discriminate.

Do you see the scam? You refuse to serve gay people, then go on the 'net asking for financial backing and a few days later "Christians" will have made you rich. (Note: there is nothing in the Bible about not baking cakes for gay couples.)

Black and White

It's taken me too long to recognize how smart Joy Reid is, perhaps because she speaks without flash. At the moment I suspect that she is the most insightful commentator on MSNBC. Reid has a book out. I haven't managed to get a copy yet, but I saw her interviewed for an hour, much of it on the differences between what she called "white liberals" and "black liberals."

My notion of her view oversimplifies it, but here goes. The white left works to improve the lives of all poor people, including African Americans, through support for measures like raising the minimum wage. The black left supports raising the minimum wage but is much more focused on challenging the New Jim Crow that kills African Americans or stunts their opportunities.  That's the divide. Think Bernie Sanders and Black Lives Matter.

Both sides are right. It's obvious that some in the white left think the black left is right, and some in the black left think the white left is right. There is a war of words going on in magazines and journals and on the  'net. We can hope that some people will be able to span the gap and pull the two groups together. 


(also on FB)

Women in Combat

Should women in the military serve in combat?  That's a major question before the Obama administration today. The answer, of course, is that they already do, but never mind facts. As a former sergeant, I want to make it clear that I endorsed women's liberation and stood ready to relinquish my place to a woman if it came to combat. My preferred duty was in San Francisco repairing messkits. 

The Politics of Respectability

You may have seen African American intellectual leaders on television who oppose something called "the politics of respectability."  I'm thinking of Michael Eric Dyson, Melissa Harris Perry and Ta Nehisi Coates, three professors. The first two have earned doctorates, and all three are as groomed and as handsome as President Obama, who happens to be the epitome of the politics of respectability. The denouncers of respectability are themselves respectable.

Now I reckon that there have long been movements in the black community for and against respectability. Think of MLK and the Black Panthers. The arguments for respectability were (1) if African Americans are solidly respectable, others will begin to grasp that they are human and (2) fewer respectable African Americans will be lynched or left to die.

The argument against respectability is that it doesn't work.

The politics of respectability works to a degree, right? Many black people now vote. They play major league baseball. A black woman became a senator from Illinois. A black man became secretary of state. But today unarmed African American men are being shot down by the police at a rate of about one a week. Millions of black lives are stunted by underfunded educational systems, closed economic doors and so on. That's why certain respectable African Americans argue against respectability and in favor of a different approach that will lead to solutions. That's what Black Lives Matter is about, rejecting respectable behavior.  But what exactly is the movement's strategy?

 The Black Panthers had a strategy that ranged from programs to feed children to armed defiance.  The strategy failed, but it was a strategy. Rudeness to old people, the hallmark of Black Lives Matter so far, is not a plan but an adolescent reaction.

How the larger African American community divides on this issue, I don't know. Coates, Perry and Dyson are powerful intellectual thinkers. In some sense they straddle the issues, opposed to respectability while safely living deeply respectable lives. I'm counting on them to explain a new strategy, which I hope to support.

aesthetics

In its editorial today, our local daily newspaper gave Donald Trump a low grade, which he earned for his KKK-like racism. For emphasis, the final sentence of the editorial reads, "His eye-rolling and name-calling is getting old."  I want to congratulate the editorial board members, who decided to reinforce  their point about Trump's vulgarity by expressing it in substandard language.  The style mimics the message, and that is a powerful stroke we seldom see employed these days. Or maybe the paper should hire a grammarian.