A Fight for Control

On Facebook, I came across an early manifestation of the coming struggle for the Democratic Presidential nomination. We're in for two difficult years. The conflict will be between the New Deal & democratic socialist wing of the party and the overpowering centrist big money wing. The difference in ideology is genuine, but behind it are the thousands of staff careers and millions of dollars that go to the winners in the Democratic primaries. Think of the party as a giant corporation where you can make a good living and sometimes get Clinton rich if you support the winning faction. That's not all of the conflict, of course, but that is a major aspect of it.

I hope the Democrats nominate someone people like. Voters liked FDR, JFK and Obama. If voters actually like the candidate, it gives him or her an edge. But for the power brokers in the party, winning control of the party money is what counts most, not winning the election in November. So Democrats sometimes end up with a candidate most voters dislike. So do the Republicans. It's a strange outcome of our system.

Louis C. K.

The much-admired comic Louis C. K. apparently lost followers last year because of transgressive  sexual misbehavior. I don't know the details. I didn't watch him. Anyway Louis seems to be getting ready for a comeback, and below is a sample of his new comedy material, which is addressed to the Parkland Farms kids.

“You’re not interesting because you went to a high school where kids got shot. Why does that mean I have to listen to you? How does that make you interesting? You didn’t get shot, you pushed some fat kid in the way and now I need to listen to you talking?”

Who Is Captain Marvel?

Who Captain Marvel is depends on when you were young. My encounter with the good captain came in the 1940s when Billy Batson was more popular than Clark Kent. Captain Marvel was a handsome beefy dude who could fly etc. until the creators of Superman sued him for a copyright infraction and took away his power of flight. In my memory, though, Superman could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but that's not flying. It's jumping. He didn't flap his arms or flutter his feet.

In the the 1960s Superman bought Captain Marvel and restarted him in lesser comic roles, the ultimate revenge. Recently he turned Captain Marvel iinto a transsexual named Monica Rambeau, who appears as Captain Marvel in books published by Marvel Comics. 

If you're old that may surprise you. 

Captain Marvel led the Avengers for a while, so don't get the idea that she is the Other--she's one of us, only better.

Jennifer Rubin

I see a lot of Jennifer Rubin on MSNBC, where she is one of the anti-Trump conservatives I put up with temporarily  I kind of like her, but I figure Rubin will soon return to attacking the New Deal etc. 

This morning I read one of her columns, and in it she claims that our three greatest human losses in the last year were George H. W. Bush, Barbara Bush and John McCain. Forget about Stephen Hawkings and Aretha Franklin.

In short, the nation should be mourning a colorless, Wall Street, CIA President no one remembers, his frighteningly unpleasant wife and John McCain, a war lover who had an independent streak and moments of honor and decency. The Bushes will be remembered, if at all, for their boys, an awesomely repellent governor of Florida and an uninvolved, dried-out-addict President who killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis by mistake. The couple who raised these creeps should have been mortified.

My point is that Jennifer Rubin's thinking must be an inch deep.

Spanky's Foe

President Spanky is currently holed up in the White House negotiating the building of a fence with his nemesis, himself (aka Agent Orange). He's going back and forth, playing the red checkers and the black ones, taking turns. Meanwhile the government is partly shut down. 

Congress is at home, drinking eggnog and singing the songs of the season, while Spanky frantically tweets offers back and forth. He's promised to give up concrete and change the name "wall" to "steel oblongs," but Agent Orange won't budge. 

Keep in mind that President Spanky is the greatest financial negotiator alive. He made a small fortune by inheriting a large one and losing most of it. Negotiating with himself is a can't-lose proposition on Twitter. Soon he will declare himself the winner and go home, where he dines on the best chocolate cake you can imagine.  

Four Walls for Spanky

Curtis Lambert of Santa Rosa has proposed setting up a go-fund-me to build walls around President Spanky's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. For unknown reasons, this star has been singled out to be frequently crushed by hammers and rinsed with loogies. There are four prototype walls developed by our government, awaiting only funding from Mexico to become useful. Lambert suggests that we place a different protective wall on each side of Spanky's star, but what if most people still object to building walls? We could unite behind steel slats instead. 

Trump's Immigration Plan

President Spanky, of course, has no immigration plan and could hardly care less. He likes undocumented workers . He hires them at his mansions because they work for starvation wages and are helpless when he cheats them. 

The immigration issue means nothing to Spanky but a lot to the bone-stupid Trumpers, who do have a plan. They want immigration to end.

To end immigration we will have to cancel flights, trains and boats from foreign countries and build walls along the Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific coasts to keep foreigners out. Then we'll need  a wall along the Canadian border to keep people in. 

The Dirty People

Yesterday I heard someone say that the city was dirty because immigrants like the Chinese are a dirty people. He watches Fox News. This morning I read that Tucker Carlson of Fox is losing advertisers because he suggests on air that our immigrants make the cities "poorer and dirtier." I'd like to suggest that Fox News does the work of the Devil, but I am not into Manichaeism.

People like Carlson attach "dirty" to groups in racist or religious categories. My wife is a dirty Jew, my student is a dirty Mexican, the Chinese are a dirty people and so on. This has little to do with reality except in cases where poor people lack access to showers. In the old West, underpaid cow herders bathed once a year in a creek. They did this in the late spring, whether they needed it or not.

Old Yellow Hair

There's a sense in which President Spanky is not a liar. To lie is to consciously mislead. Much of the time Spanky does not appear to grasp what he's doing. 

Instead, as new, damning facts come to life, Spanky instantly incorporates them into the delusional state in which he has lived his protected, billionaire's life. New damning facts, twisted on arrival, become added proof he's been innocent all along. Spanky does this effortlessly, automatically. He seems intent on convincing himself and maybe his dead father that he isn't a mental degenerate.

Today Spanky was saying that General Flynn is tough. But if Flynn rats him out, it's because the Feds scared him into making up false stories against the gorgeous victim, the ancient man with white hair dyed a urine yellow, the delusional dotard who is currently President of the United States of America.