Tag: Politics

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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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Why do our poor needs so little help and the rich are constantly needing help? If we don’t give the rich more, they just can’t produce the needed wave to lift all boats. The poor, on the other hand, must suffer or else they won’t come to their senses and invest their money in the Stock Market, vacation homes and crypto currencies. Right?

There are two ways to get government assistance. Government can give you assistance through programs and services or government can reduce your tax bill through tax breaks. People who have less money tend to get their assistance in government services while people who have more money receive their assistance through tax breaks. Both, however, are handouts.

But only one carries the weight of does this person deserve to be helped. The idea that if you receive government benefits you also need to prove you are deserving of these benefits. So, for example, a person who receives SNAP benefits are unable to buy alcohol and cigarettes with the money they receive while a person who receives a tax break can buy as much alcohol as they want. Nobody would dream of questioning their purchases.

Why? They are getting money from the government. Why isn’t it monitored with the same vigor that SNAP benefits are watched.

They even get a different spin on their handout — the rich are job creators who need that extra money to power the economy while the person who receives benefits is a welfare recipient — a non-productive member of society, a taker. This glaringly different view of these two handouts also has an effect on how government benefits and tax breaks are perceived so that if belts need to be tightened, it is the poorer people who are squeezed.

Tax breaks, on the other hand, are sacrosanct. Why?

Taxes are an obligation. Now, you may not like paying taxes nor the programs that taxes are used for but this doesn’t take away from the fact that taxes are an agreed upon method for us to pay the government bills. If you don’t like they way taxes are collected or the programs the government uses them for, you can take your position to the public during an election. It is an imperfect system, especially if your position always loses, but it is the one we have and, unless someone has a better idea, the fairest way for government to work.

I am not against tax breaks. I do, however, think that there should be a real verifiable return for the government for any break given. The tax breaks need to prove they are indeed more beneficial than the financial loss to the government tills. So my question is how are tax breaks measured as being successful — good for society or a good return in additional taxes. And, if they aren’t producing the desired effect, why not cut them instead of programs that help our most vulnerable citizens.

The tax breaks will, or so we are told, pay for themselves because the rich will invest in the economy which will eventually raise all boats. But, if this was the case, shouldn’t the government be rolling in dough. This isn’t the case. In fact, the biggest single expenditure in the Federal Government is tax breaks. Since the Reagan years, government has given tax breaks and cut taxes numerous times and yet we are further in debt. The income from tax breaks and tax cuts have failed to raise the promised revenue.

To get rid of these tax breaks, even some of them, would bring in enough additional money to offset some of these expenses. But, eliminating tax breaks is nearly impossible because you are hurting the job creator. They need help. But, then, so does the mother using SNAP. Who needs more help?

Herein is my question then, why do our richest citizens always seem to need so much help? Why can’t they stand on their own two feet, pull themselves up by their boot straps and just pay their taxes without any breaks? It is really sad that the rich have sunk into such dependency on government handouts. It isn’t really helping them they continue their proliferate ways — drinking alcohol, taking vacations — on the government dime. They just need to learn how to live within their means.

All I know is I am getting tired of their constant whining about how difficult it is for them as I have seen very little evidence that they are having a difficult time.

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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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The continuing debate regarding slavery and the Civil war is baffling to me. There is this faux confusion about why slavery is such a big deal. A good example of this odious opinion can be found in Jason L. Riley’s post in the City Journal. He makes two contentions regarding slavery in USA.

The first is that slavery was pervasive all over the world so why should the American version be seen as evil while every other country gets off the hook. Riley ignores the racist defense of slavery which justified the enslavement of Blacks but also persisted long after the Civil War ended. There was big difference between Roman slavery and American slavery. For most other countries who engaged in slavery, the slaves came from the defeated population after the end of wars. It was just bad luck that the losing side became slaves to the winning side.

Americans, on the other hand, and probably because it was a glaring contradiction with American values, justified slavery with the pernicious view that Blacks were racially inferior to Whites and thus their subordination was justified. It is the only way someone can understand why the subordination of Black people continued after the Civil War. White Discrimination, then, limited Black progress for, at least, 100 years following the Civil War and, sadly, even today, some Whites cling to this racist ideology.

Furthermore, particularly for conservatives who liked to sing the praises of American Exceptionalism, saying that everyone is doing it has all the moral weight of a teenager caught with a can of beer. So what if everyone was doing it? The question pertinent to American History is why did some of our forefathers have slaves. It doesn’t really matter that some African Blacks sold other African Blacks into slavery. Yes, it was wrong of them but their history isn’t what we are looking at. We are looking at American History. It was Americans who thought that these African Blacks were the equivalent of cattle and hogs and so there was nothing wrong with making them slaves.

Then there is Riley’s contention that slavery did very little to the advancement of American Capitalism which, OK, maybe but it hardly matters when Southerners, both slave owner and non-slave owner, believed that the continuation of slavery was vital to the economy of the South. They believed it so strongly that they were willing to defend slavery with their lives. They were willing to break the country in two to defend it. They thought their way of life was under attack. The percentage of GNP that slavery brought to pre-Civil War America seems a irrelevant to understanding the actual conflict.

The reason that Riley is confused about American Slavery being such a big deal is that he overlooks racism. The reason that Conservatives won’t look at racism is that it would involve some uncomfortable discoveries. The painful truth is that White people, either actively or passively, treated Black people badly for quite a long period in American History. It is painful to think that great Grandfather and Grandmother weren’t such good people. They had flaws. They really didn’t represent American ideals. On the other hand, it would certainly make such landmark events like the Civil War much more comprehensible to people like Riley if he introduced racism to the conversation. and, after all, isn’t understanding our history what learning is all about.

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The Right Wing Echo Chamber are using the Henry Nowak murder as evidence that DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) is not only bad, but it also is deadly. For those who don’t know about the Henry Nowak case here is a brief rundown of the events. Vickrum Digwa, a Sikh man living in Southhampton UK, stabbed Henry Nowak, an 18 year old university student. Digwa’s brother called police and told them that Nowak had attacked his brother for racially motivated reasons. When police arrived they handcuffed Nowak who repeatedly told them he was wounded. An ambulance was called but unfortunately to late to save Nowak.

The key discussion going on is that the police were so infected by DEI training that they allowed a White man to die because they believed the Sikh man over the White man thus causing the police to mistreat Nowak and, for this, DEI is responsible for Nowak’s death.

It is depressing that rabble rousers are using this unfortunate incident as a call to action. The facts don’t support their contention.

Digwa’s family made the first contact with the police. They claimed that Nowak had made racists comments before attacking Digwa. The police were looking for a violent man. When the Police arrived, Digwa and his family was able to tell their story first. Thinking they had a potentially violent person, they handcuffed Nowak. This is a common police practice. Police handcuff dead people, particularly if the person is suspected of a violent crime. This is for the protection of the police. A wounded person can still be violent.

Once the police learned more about Nowak’s wounds, his handcuffs were removed and his wounds attended to. Unfortunately, all this came to late for Nowak who died at the scene. The media accounts make this time lapse seem like a long time. It wasn’t. From the police handcuffing Nowak to the police administering first aid, took somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 minutes.

How DEI killed Nowak though somehow eludes me. The cops weren’t saying we have to believe the Digwa’s because they are Sikhs and ignore the wounded screams of Nowak because he was White. The police were acting on the information that the Digwa’s first provided and when they saw Nowak’s condition, they changed their tack.

It it makes no sense, as Konstantin Kisin does in the above linked article, to compare it to the George Floyd murder in Minneapolis. Floyd was arrested by cops who then used holds that were known to be dangerous when applied and have subsequently been banned. The cop’s actions were responsible for Floyd’s eventual death.

Lets be clear — the police were in no way involved in the murder of Nowak. Digwa stabbed Nowak. Digwa then lied to the police about Nowak’s and failed to inform the cops he had stabbed Nowak. As the police learned more, they released Nowak and worked to save his life. Digwa lies are the problem here and not DEI. The police had to traverse this chaotic situation and the Digwa family’s misinformation and rather quickly came to the right conclusion.

We live with imperfect systems. They will always be imperfect. Every time terrible things like this happen, they should be investigated and any information that can improve police procedures should be made. These are reasonable actions in the face of this or any tragedy. On the other hand, Farage is taking advantage of this tragedy to make dubious claims about the mistreatment of the Whites which is both dangerous and unwise. Sowing discord is apt to create even more discord and division which, I am afraid, is the actual reason Farage has latched onto this particular case.

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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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Michael Golden, in Real Clear Politics, wants the media to stop publicizing the names of serial shooters as a way of denying the shooter the infamy they desire. He believes it will discourage other shooters from seeking the same fate.

While I can support Golden’s proposal to quash any media attention these people are seeking, I doubt very much that anything significant will come from implementation of it. Mostly because, the shooter is already dead — either by suicide or by police action. What ever thrill the shooter was seeking was experienced in the shooter’s mind prior to the shooting. So I am unconvinced that such a media ban would have much effect at all on future shooters. It is worth a try but I would be surprised to see any change in the number of shootings

The problem with mass shootings, as Golden acknowledges, is the division in the country on what to do about them. One side wants to restrict access to guns; the other side thinks the problem is mental health. Since there is little areas of agreements, nothing much gets done despite the number of shootings. Golden, probably correctly, thinks that a media ban on naming the people who kill during a mass shooting would be something that both sides can agree on and get implemented.

But does it solve the problem? Not even close.

These people are well-armed and crazy. They are facing almost certain death. They know that they probably will be dead by the time the media begin discussing their actions. How does not mentioning their name going to stop them? The shooter is still crazy and still has a gun.

If people want to give it a try, fine, give it a try. But it changes nothing about crazy people still having access to guns. It is a way of looking like you are doing something while you are doing absolutely nothing to address the problem at hand. In other words, a waste of time.

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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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Sophia Tesfaye, in Salon, reports that conservatives are trying to recast the Rosa Parks story. In 1956, Parks famously refused to go to the back of the bus which set into motion the Birmingham Bus Boycott. Matt Walsh, conservative podcaster, made a documentary trying to show how this was not just a story about a tired seamstress breaking after a hard day of work when asked to move. No, it is worse, so much worse — Parks was a member of the NAACP and was looking for a way to challenge segregation. The bus incident provided her with an opportunity to do so.

Amazingly, Walsh isn’t giving us any new information. He just seems a little surprised that Parks was a member of the NAACP and how it might have affected her refusal to move. Well, yes, so what? This is stunningly meaningless presentation of the facts. The law was wrong and she was right to refuse. NAACP needed a case to highlight this indignity, Parks provided it.

The problem wasn’t that Parks was an activist, the problem was there was a back of the bus laws in the first place. There would be no need for activists opposing unjust laws if the laws did not exist in the first place. If Parks, based on her experience and the experience of other Blacks, saw a situation and was prepared to act in no way diminishes what she accomplished.

And, if Parks and the NAACP set a trap, then who is to blame for the cops falling into it? The cops had other choices here too. They exacerbated an already tense situation with Parks’ arrest. Who better to act when an opportunity presents itself — an ordinary seamstress after a long day of work or an ordinary seamstress after a long day of work who is also a member of the NAACP. What am I missing here? Is Walsh saying that Blacks should remain disorganized and leaderless?

It is painful to listen to this crap because they are trying to turn history upside down. Walsh is all about undermining Rosa Parks? Who backed the NAACP? Who paid for their resistance? Could there have been Communists involved and, if so, doesn’t that make the fight against segregation wrong? Well, the USA fought along side the Communists in World War II, does this some how diminish the Allies’ victory. Walsh misses the whole point — the segregation laws were unfair and needed to be resisted. Parks admirably used the opportunities and resources available to her. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.