Category: Politics

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I am annoyed at the mean spirited memes going around about Lindsey Graham. This is my question. A man is dead. There are people who loved him. Give them a moment to mourn. What good does it do to dance on his grave?

He deserves every sarcastic comment made about him because he was a terrible man and the world needs to see that. There are people who disagree with this assessment. His legacy can be debated and should be. He was a public figure. I am fine with that but now is the time to put these disagreements on hold. A moment of silence doesn’t say you liked the man. It is an acknowledgement of the sadness of all of our impending deaths.

Trump talks ill of the dead why can’t I. This is an argument of a child who’s hand is caught in the cookie jar. So what? It deserves the perfect parental response to such a lame defense of personal behavior — if Donald Trump jumped off the Empire State Building, would you jump? Trump is hardly a role model for good behavior. Just because he is awful when people he dislikes dies, doesn’t make it right for anyone else to do the same.

It is one of the very worst things that Donald Trump has done to our politics. He has destroyed the little level of civility that existed in public discourse. Anything goes. Talk about a woman’s looks or her weight. Fair game. Talk about your opponent’s dick size. No problem. So why should any one’s death stop the fun back and forth of malicious commentary that permeates modern political life?

Because it is sad. Any time anyone dies, this is a moment to reflect on the fragility of life itself. It can be taken from us all in a moment. Life is sacred and it is terrible when someone loses this precious gift. It doesn’t matter if I like the guy or not. It is still sad no matter who it happens to.

But Hitler, what about Hitler? What about him? Lindsey Graham is not Hitler and there is nothing you can say to make me believe that he is. There is only one Hitler and just maybe Hitler is the one of the few people who have died when it was OK to dance on his grave. But Lindsey Graham Hitler? This is a disservice to true monsters everywhere. Hitler is rolling in his grave.

Which leads me back to my original question. What good comes to the world from dancing on Lindsey Graham’s grave? I can’t really see any. It only worsens the political divide that threatens to rip this country apart. And if we keep tearing and ripping, the country eventually will come apart. Is that what we want? I certainly don’t.

And doing the right thing is so incredibly easy in this case — all you have to do is keep your trap shut.

Try it.

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I have mixed feelings about the successes of Democratic Socialists in New York and Colorado.

Personally, my views are close to these candidates, although I do have some disagreements which, while concerning, are insufficient for me to vote Republican or skip voting altogether. But, and this is the important point, I am not the typical general election voter. which is why I am concerned about this more leftward move of the Democratic Party.

What matters, above all else, is winning the general election and not ideological purity.

To start with, the Democratic primaries are different from a general election. Liberals should do better in Democratic primary elections because the Democrats are the more liberal party. It shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Will they be able to win in November is a much different story.

New York City is both more Democratic and Liberal than the rest of the country. Colorado is less so but still comfortably Democratic. These Democratic Socialist winners will all probably coast to election in their districts. Is this the case elsewhere? I would like to see how Democratic Socialists fare outside of Blue States — say Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Michigan — three states that are vital to any Democratic victory.

This is yet to be seen and this is why I am concerned. I have heard the siren call of imminent Left Wing victories (see George McGovern, Jesse Jackson, Howard Dean and Bernie Sanders) too many times for these victories to signify a leftward movement in the country. Keep in mind, Hillary Clinton, hardly a Democratic Socialist, crashed and burned.

The overarching goal of this election is winning seats in the House and the Senate. Candidates need to be focused on putting a muzzle on Donald Trump and the economic issues affecting all Americans. If, in October, the Democrats are discussing which pronouns people should use then I am afraid this diversion will doom any success for the leftward trend in the country as a whole.

Let’s keep everyone can on board. Candidates don’t have to be perfect. They just need to be better than the Republican. Given the Trump take over the Republican party, this should be a piece of cake.

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Ken Paxton, notoriously bad Christian and Republican candidate for the US Senate, caught again breaking one of the Ten Commandments.

I know he was a keen advocate for having them posted in Texas schools so that children know their importance as a basis for American Law. They are also a good guide in regulating personal behavior. Perhaps he should post them in his bedroom. He clearly needs a reminder.

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Texas wants to teach the Bible in public schools. I am so tired of this. Republicans are trying to leverage this as an issue because Democrats would likely oppose this and the Republicans can shriek about the anti-Christian Democrats.

They hold this very strange belief that just reading Bible stories will make children Christians. Well, I am sorry to break it to them but I am living proof that it will not. One of the great disappointments of my parents’ lives is the extra money they paid to give their five children a Catholic education and they got exactly zero Catholics in the bargain. Zero Catholics with 12 years of Catholic education.

Catholic education also had the advantage, at least as far as the Church saw it, of putting their lessons in context to a much larger Catholic belief system. The story alone is a story. The story with an explanation of what this means to Bible believing Christians is something completely different and impossible to tell because no two Christians believe exactly the same thing.

The Texas School system will be unable to do much in the way of incorporating these stories into a belief system because once they try to do that they will have Christians arguing among themselves about Christian doctrine. And that is when the real trouble will begin as any one conversant with European History knows — Christians like nothing more than to spill blood over Christian Doctrine. This is the very trouble, by the way, that our founding fathers wanted to avoid.

So, go ahead, read your damn Bible stories. I am sure it will have little effect on the thousands of kids staring out the window wondering what the cafeteria is serving for lunch.

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I have many complaints about Donald Trump. He is an asshole. He is corrupt. He is stupid. He is incompetent. I could go on but you get the point. I don’t like the man. But nothing illustrates the true badness of Donald Trump like the Reflecting Pool Fiasco. And, also, sadly his genius.

Why on God’s Green Earth is the president of the United States so involved in such a trivial matter — particularly when the nation is at war. Isn’t this more of a First Lady or Parks Department issue? What a waste of the limited time of the most powerful man on the planet.

Other people can, and should, straighten out this mess but no Trump has to put his two cents in.

Furthermore, and much more irritating, why is the media so fixated on this bull shit. Again, I am sorry to have keep doing this, but it seems important to point this out — we are a nation at war. Yet what do we hear about in the news — how the Reflecting Pool, which was promised to be blue, is a murky algae green instead. Really.

And people are actually getting mad about it for some reason.

Donald Trump can create controversies with one hand tied behind his back and blind folded. He likes attention and he knows how to get it. He also, to the great advantage of the powers that be, knows how to distract the media from the issues that really matter. Just because Trump is talking about something doesn’t mean the press is obligated to report about it.

Think about the past few months — the Wrestling Match on the lawn, tearing down the East Wing of the White House, the Reflecting Pool — all, in the scheme of things, small potatoes — and distractions from more important issues. All Trump has to do to get the press dogs off of his ass is for him to pop off about something, make it juicy or controversial, and the press, who all seem to lack any sense of proportion, chases after this new controversy like dogs after frisbees.

Yes it is very interesting that the frisbee was caught but is it any surprise. This is what dogs do when frisbees are thrown. So what if they catch him making as ass of himself about the Reflecting Pool. It is meaningless. He seems to know this. I am afraid the press does not.

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You don’t press unpopular issues if there is little chance of winning. For example, Barack Obama did not support gay marriage when he first ran for president. Now, in my mind, a gay man, I realized that Obama could give a rats’ ass about gay marriage and was opposing it in order to win an election where a significant portion of the American public opposed gay marriage. It doesn’t make sense to lose an election for an issue, gay marriage, that would surely go down to defeat in most state legislatures. Gay marriage had to wait for another time because Obama could do other things that help me and, more importantly, every other non-gay citizen who, by the way, make up 90 percent of the population.

One of the great lessons of age is you realize that you don’t get everything you want. It is better to get some of what you want than to get nothing. You have to win elections in order to govern, this means compromise. This is how democracies work. Some changes have to wait. You have to deal with the reality you are in.

Which brings me to the New York legislature’s recent passage of a law that replaces mother and father with gestating parent and non-gestating parent in the law books. This change was necessary to make sure that the very few women who are transitioning into men (and vice versa) know that New York law is aware of their non-binary status and included in New York law.

I have numerous problems with this fishing expedition in an empty lake.

  1. 1.The binary division of man and woman has dominated Western Culture. It is still to be determined how this view might change but Trans activists are under the impression that they have won the battle. The vast majority of people, even in the liberal circles, still fall back on the terms like man, father,woman and mother. More to the point, nobody I know uses the terms gestating parent and non-gestating parent. None. So, why is this piece of legislation even necessary when no one uses the terms or even knows what these terms mean. But OK, I guess, gestating parent.
  2. Because no one uses gestating parent and non-gestating parent, it seems like a bad idea to incorporate such words into the law books when the more popular terms — mother and father are working without complaint. Why change them? Who requires this change? Oh, trans activists want this.
  3. Well, if Trans activists could deliver votes, I might be inclined to give them this change without complaint but they can’t. In fact, Republicans are using this issue as a cudgel to defeat Democrats. So, then, it might be bad idea to be pressing the issue. If they are demanding it, they don’t seem to have a grasp on reality. I would never have expected any Democratic body to push for gay marriage during the 1990’s. It would be political suicide. Are Trans activists so short sighted to see this an unhelpful in the struggle to defeat Trump and the Republicans.
  4. The Democrats control New York. How did this pointless and damaging piece of legislation get through these bodies when someone with power should have killed it long before it ever reached the governor’s desk? It is both shocking and depressing that Democratic power brokers were more interested in distributing symbolic prizes to loyal constituencies instead of winning elections. It is almost as if there is some Trump mole working at a high level in the New York Democratic Party.

I don’t want to lose this election but if it were to happen, I want the defeat to be about something big — something like Medical Care or the War in Iran and not whether to rename Mother’s Day to Gestating Parent’s Day.

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I am a party man when voting. If a Republican and a Democrat are running against each other, I will vote for the Democrat. Always. Not because I like the particular Democrat. This, unfortunately, doesn’t always happens. I do so because this gives the Democrats a chance at governing and this is more important to me than having a perfect candidate for every office.

This said, I found River Page’s defense, in the Free Press, of Graham Platner a little depressing. Platner’s skeletons keep slipping out of the closet and at a prodigious rate at that. It makes me think he might be a weak candidate. This is concerning because the seat he is running for is a very winnable Senate seat. His opponent, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, appears to be behind in the polls although this has been the case in all of her races — she runs behind or very close and then manages to handily win her elections. She is a tough candidate to beat.

Platner, her apparent opponent, is having a bad week or two. Page describes the problem. He has no filter which means he bluntly speaks his mind and that occasionally causes his foot to fall firmly into his mouth. When he was young, he got drunk and wound up with a Nazi tattoo. Years later, he got drunk and danced shirtless at a friend’s wedding thus displaying the Nazi tattoo in it’s full glory. He has made derogatory comments about Blacks, Jews, Gays and Women — all, by the way, the most dependable Democratic voters for the past 50 years.

Page, however, thinks all this worry is for nothing because Platner has working class appeal. He lived among them, even if only temporarily, speaks their language and they like his blunt talk. He is just the right kind of candidate to counter Donald Trump.

Because Page thinks Platner is such a great candidate he tries to address the concerns about his unfiltered tongue. Page writes about Platner’s use of the gay and fag, “he (Platner) also used the terms gay and fag as general insults. Similarly to the r-word, the consensus among the working- and lower-middle-class people I’ve spent most of my life around is that calling someone a fag may be mean, but it isn’t bigoted unless they are actually gay.” What? Calling someone gay isn’t an insult unless they are actually gay. Well, this certainly news to me. What kind of bull shit is Page, a gay man as a matter of fact, trying to spread?

When a straight guy calls another straight guy gay, he is just being mean but not homophobic. I fail to see the distinction. Why would a straight man calling another straight man gay be an insult if there weren’t negative connotations to those terms for a straight man. If you are trying to be mean to someone, you use terms that will insult the man. He used those terms to get a rise out of his male friends. Now it might be only friendly banter between the guys but telling me this isn’t also homophobic is unbelievable. These men think there is something seriously wrong with being called gay which pretty much defines homophobic. It, then, does mean something after all and it isn’t as innocent as Page makes out.

It is also insulting to Working Class people. Indeed Page’s whole working class appeal is a slam against working class people. That is just the way they talk. They love hard drinking, free-talking tough guys who don’t filter their words. It is part of their appeal. So what if a few of them use the N word or anti-Semetic terms or fag, these are real people in the real world. Grow up.

It doesn’t help Plant’s case when he makes a disturbing comparison with Trump, “A decade of Trump should have taught the political and media establishment that voters, especially those in the working class, couldn’t care less about personal scandal so long as their genuine-seeming proposal for real political change is on the table.” So what the Democrats need is a foul mouth bigoted egotistical lout who makes rash decisions (lets not forget the Nazi tattoo) and is offensive on so many levels but, at least, he wants Universal Healthcare and he has just the type of muscle to make it happen.

What worries me is that it is only June and the Republicans have yet to dig for all the dirt on Platner. Given Platner’s character, I fear there are more juicy stories to come. If this is where Platner is starting, what fresh shit will be thrown at him in October.

Plant will say that the working class don’t care about that. Maybe. But then other parts of the Democratic coalition might – say like Women, Blacks, Jews and Gays. Platner is still at the starting blocks and the race has a long way to go, many other politicians who aren’t named Trump were done in by lesser hurdles. The question I have is why would we want to start with such a damaged candidate, when we could choose otherwise?

Not key Democratic demographics.

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Florida continues to rewrite the history of the Civil War. The governor and his cronies want a much more palatable history so that white children don’t have to learn that their ancestors behaved like assholes. As Chauncey DeVega, in the above linked Salon article, noted: “The discomfort of Black and brown children — who watch their communities’ histories, experiences and reality being systematically erased and distorted — was apparently of little concern.”

But never mind, the fragile minds of white children are the concern here. They need to know that their country is great. Period. Any information that might suggest otherwise has to be massaged so that these delicate darlings don’t get the wrong idea about the country.

So the Civil War becomes a little kerfuffle about State’s Rights. The North wanted to force its ways on the South and the South wasn’t having it. Making State’s Rights the issue, as opposed to slavery, drains the Civil War of any meaning.

Florida education wants white children to think that slavery wasn’t so bad. The plantation owners gave the slaves a good profession, and kept them well fed, and housed. The plantation owners and the slaves, in fact, got along fabulously. Besides, slavery was a dying institution and wouldn’t have lasted much longer any way. Got it.

Leaving white children with the mistaken idea that the founding fathers were perfect and the nation was perfect from the beginning with no need to change. But the nation did change — a bloody civil war was fought, the slaves were freed, and the South began a hundred year resistance campaign against blacks which included lynching and legal discrimination.

How does one explain American History without touching on the Civil War and race? More importantly, how does this silence about what happened help anyone – Black, Brown, Red, Yellow or White? The fact is race is an ongoing concern for the American people. The American people’s approach to race has changed over time and this change is important both to note, to discuss and to understand.

How does a student understand Reconstruction without first learning about the Civil War? How does a student understand the Civil Rights Movement without understanding legal discrimination? Yes, these are unpleasant topics because a lot of people behaved badly and their behavior is difficult to understand. But it did happen. It is a part of history.

Children, contrary to popular belief, live in the real world not an imaginary world of lollipops and gum drops. They see confusing and terrible things every day. This is part of their transition to becoming adults. Not all truths are pleasant. Children need to know that. The country started with some grand ideas but some pretty awful ones too. It is important to learn from the awful ones in order to change our present to an even better future.

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Another assassination attempt was made on Donald Trump. The Secret Service shot the man down. Early reports about the shooter are depressing. He thought he was God so I am not sure whether he had a coherent world view which prompted him to take this action but I doubt it. People who think they are God are uniquely incapable of coherence so this leaves us with crazy.

Early in the week two teenagers stormed a San Diego mosque — killing three people and then themselves. They hated about everybody, given the way it turned out, even themselves.

I don’t know what to do about the crazy people in this country. As a nation, we have pretty much decided to lump them in with the regular citizens which means they are left to their own devices. They can own guns, sleep on the streets, do whatever the Hell they want until they cross a line and then, in the worst case scenario, they are gunned down.

This is how we want to live and, lets be clear, no decision is a decision. We would rather have the occasional blood letting to addressing why unstable people with guns keep creating such havoc. Limiting gun availability is off the table. Let’s face it the 2nd Amendment makes this impossible. Furthermore there are too many guns out there now and there would be way too much resistance to confiscating guns to make it worthwhile. It is, for now, off the table.

But what about the other part of the equation dealing with all the crazy people. Well, this would require political will and money. Why this is controversial is beyond me? Mental health requires some level of preventative measure. Identify the people who are sick and get them the help they need before they break.

Think physical health. For example, we can control high blood pressure through medication. The first step, though, is identifying people suffering from it before we can help them. The same practice apples for mental health. We need to know who needs help.

But freedom, people shouldn’t be forced into a psychological check. We could require a yearly psychological check as a part of having health insurance. This would, at least, help us address the vast majority of the population.

Who is going to pay for all these checks? The government or the insurance companies? Forget I said anything.

So you see nothing is going to happen. We just have to accept that mad men with guns will be walking the street until they break and then after they are done killing, we will kill them or they will kill themselves. A little messy but the problem is solved without raising taxes.

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It always irritates me when I read articles like Barton Swaim in the Wall Street Journal (paywall though you can get a free article if you get a log in). Swaim thinks that the adherence to the Protestant Work Ethic is in decline and he pins this decline on Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty and every other helpful thing ever done for poor people since then because the poor have no reason to work hard when they can get so much free shit from the government. The USA has just made it too easy for poor people to goof off instead of work.

Those retched poor people are just too God damn powerful and greedy as opposed to those put upon rich people who everybody keeps picking on. Swaim’s thinking is that we need to make the poor more miserable than they already are. They will never understand the value of hard work because they are given too much. His search for a villain in this story stops directly where his prejudices end — the poor.

Where to begin? First, we have to take him at his word that people would rather not work. It is mostly word of mouth drivel about adult men living with their parents, COVID subsidies and Somali refugees. Some of these may be problems but Swaim doesn’t really give much insight on how these unrelated problems have undermined the Protestant Work Ethic or how they are related to Johnson’s War on Poverty. He is flinging them out like a mad ape throwing shit at patrons at a zoo. He is hoping one of them will hit the target. They don’t. Adult men living off their parents, I am afraid to say, are living off their parents and not the government. COVID subsidies are long gone and no longer an issue. Which leaves the Somali refugee scandal which may or may not be a problem (it is still under investigation) but hardly a reason to eliminate a whole system. You wouldn’t call for the end of Corporate Capitalism based on the bad behavior of Bernie Madoff or Enron now would you? Why apply a different standard to government assistance.

Swaim also mythologizes life in pre-War on Poverty America. It was not sweetness and light. It was grinding poverty for most Americans — with estimated poverty rates between 40 to 60 % of the American people. And I am not talking the Great Depression either because even before the Great Depression an awful lot of Americans lived in poverty. It was only after Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal that this rate came down to about 20% in 1960. After Johnson’s War on Poverty, the poverty rate now hovers around 11%. So government services lifted many poor Americans out of poverty.

Next lets look at those patriotic Capitalists who, in order to avoid paying higher American wages, brought to you, thank you very much by unions, fled the country in order to pay lower wages to workers outside the country. These “good” Americans pulled the rug out from under high wage workers in order to make more money with absolutely no concern for how this affected their now out-of-work employees. Nobody, by the way, stopped them. They were free to undermine union workers wages and unions themselves with nary a complaint from anyone.

This left getting a good education which has turned out to be bit of a trap for some. Many took out loans for educations that turned out to have very little benefit in the job market. People came out of college owing a bundle of money with little chance of recouping on their investment. So much for a home and a family.

Now AI is whittling away at the functions in the better jobs so that workers even in medicine, law and engineering are being threatened. What type of jobs does Swaim have to offer these young people with the advent of AI? Even a $15 minimum wage is insufficient to pay the rent in most states. The lowest possible wage can’t provide a meaningful income for survival. Some companies like Walmart and McDonald’s encourage their workers to use government benefits to supplement the low wages they pay their employees.. People actually are working full time jobs while receiving government assistance. Then these same assholes are trying to take away these benefits from full time workers because it discourages them from hard work.

Fuck them. Talking about how government benefits discourages people from fully engaging in the Protestant Work Ethic is just bull shit. People can see their reality. Hard work without a pay off is a meaningless exercise. I am surprised that so many low wage workers are still punching a time clock.

If only the poor worked harder, the world would be a better place. Maybe for the rich but there is little evidence that it would help the poor. The corollary to this rule is that rich people need even more money or else they will stop working so hard. Do you see the problem here? Rich people need more money are they won’t work while poor people need less money are they won’t work. Genius.