Category Archives: Commentary

Twitch Your Eyes So They Think You’re Crazy

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Imagine, if you will, that Donald Trump and family/hangers-on are in a bar planning further destruction of the poor and middle classes. Some immigrant waiters have accused the group of cheating on their taxes and undermining the Constitution. Trump’s gang doesn’t take kindly to being told the truth. The two groups are about to tangle.

The bar doors swing open and in walks Sheriff Mueller, dressed in black and sporting double holsters marked “subpoenas” and “indictments.” The Sheriff counts off his steps as he approaches the group and says softly, “it about time you boys got out of town.” They laugh. The National Marshall is on Trump’s payroll and Trump and team are sure they are above the law.

This is, of course, fiction, except for the part about Trump and team being sure they are above the law. And, further, I didn’t make this up by myself.

In case you haven’t seen it, GEICO this year produced a great ad called the “Cowboy Showdown.” You can see it at  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOG8AFPQcM4.  The basic idea is that in a typical Western bar scene, the sheriff confronts a scruffy trio of cowboys who have just been accused of card cheating. The sheriff tells the thugs that it’s time they got out of town, a demand met with hostile mirth by the cowboys. The sheriff then speaks his “left foot, right foot” steps as he moves in closer and then, in a close-up, says “Twitch your eyes so they think you’re crazy.” He does, as uncertainty spreads on the faces of the cowboys. And so on.

The ad’s humor resonates because almost everyone has seen variants of the scene in old western movies performed straight and serious.

The announcement of the indictment of Paul Manafort and Rick Gates reminded me of the ad, which in my view ranks right up there with the camel ad demanding that office employees acknowledge that it is “hump day” (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LtjzQaFZ3k).  The charges follow close behind Trump’s recent tweets chastising the Secretary of State for trying to negotiate a peaceful solution to the North Korean nuclear threat. In case you missed them, Trump tweeted: “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man…,” followed by “Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what has to be done!”

This follows other tweets in which Trump has threatened the total annihilation of North Korea, amidst name-calling reminiscent of school-yard behavior of grammar school boys.

The connection between the GEICO ad and Trump’s Tillerson take-down is that this is how Trump negotiates. The sheriff is outnumbered three-to-one and is trying to intimidate the cowboys into giving up their advantage by indicating he is nuts and may do something irrational and unexpected. This spooks them into a state of uncertainty and weakness. However, the sheriff, at the end of the ad, is still outnumbered and in a precarious situation.

This how Trump negotiates – make the other side think you’re irrational and capable of anything, in this case undermining the credibility of your official representative, and thus may at any moment unleash the full fury of American military power against a sitting-duck North Korea.

The “I may be crazy so you better be careful” strategy is not uncommon in business and other negotiations, as you know if you have experience with negotiating in high-stress situations. But the strategy rarely leads to good outcomes against experienced negotiators who are familiar with the approach and know now to deal with it. The outcome can only be positive if the other side responds rationally. If the other side is genuinely bonkers too, the outcome can quickly lead to mutually catastrophic results.

In the case of North Korea, it seems highly likely that Kim Jong-un has, at best, a severely distorted view of the United States and the political system that produced Donald Trump as president. Many people in the West see this confrontation as the worst-case scenario in which a demented, angry and generally ineffectual Trump acts out his fantasies and gets the world into a nuclear confrontation that could be avoided by adult behavior. If both Trump and Kim Jong-un are indeed crazy, as much evidence suggests, we are in a boatload of trouble as a civilization.

The case establishing that Trump may be insane is growing with every passing day. He has now threatened to abort the Iran nuclear deal, dumping it into the lap of Congress, because, most likely, he has no real idea what to do. He has threatened to cut off assistance to Puerto Rico which, according to multiple credible accounts, is in a humanitarian crisis unlike anything ever experienced in modern times. Trump seems unaware that Puerto Ricans are American citizens. Or maybe he just doesn’t give a damn. They are, after all, not like the people who elected him.

And now, frustrated that the Republican-dominated Congress cannot fulfill his promise to end the Affordable Care Act, Trump also is ending the billions in federal subsidies that make it possible for the health insurance marketplaces to offer meaningful insurance for the millions of people most in need of it.

Trump’s presidency is the work of an incompetent and likely irrational madman. If not crazy in the clinical sense, he is unhinged from reality a substantial part of the time. He does not understand government, has failed to staff multiple critical leadership positions throughout the government and spends a huge amount of time golfing. He still lies constantly and is unnaturally obsessed with Hillary Clinton and with undoing everything President Obama accomplished. He is in constant conflict many of his “advisors” in the White House. Most importantly, he is set upon undermining the free press which is protected by the very same Constitution he swore to uphold on January 20.

Trump’s “eye-twitching” is the real deal, not make-believe or only for effect. He is the only president in history who took the oath of office knowing that his real intent was to undermine the federal government. His uber-entitled cabinet members, when they’re not undermining environmental protections, are flying around on private jets. His coterie of family members and true believers are enriching themselves at the expense of everyone else.

As one commentator has accurately observed,

It’s become standard for reports coming from the inside of the White House to acknowledge, slyly at first but now overtly, that Trump is in constant need of managing. He believes false reports and refuses to read truthful ones. He lashes out at anyone who hasn’t lied for him adequately. There are now entire reports devoted to his rage, his anger, his madness and his inability to accept responsibility. [http://slate.me/2ggY2xy, bold in original]

This is the situation for which the 25th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1967, was designed. Whether or not he is a moron, as the Secretary of State recently labelled him, and even if not “crazy” in the clinical sense, he is certainly mentally unstable and incapable of responsibly executing the duties of the high office he occupies. Recall that he has access to the nuclear firing codes and is the Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces.

Unfortunately, the 25th Amendment, drafted by a senior senator from Indiana with the counsel of a constitutional law professor at Fordham, contains much vague language that makes invocation even more fraught than it would, in all events, be. It has also led to some sloppy analysis and commentary about what the amendment means. There are, for example, two alternative means for removing the president due to inability to perform. Sometimes, they are conflated by well-intentioned commenters on this most serious of constitutional questions.

One method is that the “Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments” (i.e., the Cabinet) may declare in writing that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” In that case, the “Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.”

The amendment then states that the President can make a written declaration that he no longer has an “inability,” at which point he resumes his office, unless the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet declare in writing that the President continues to be “unable” to do his job. In the case of such conflicting declarations, Congress must decide. That decision requires a two-thirds vote (known as a super-majority) of both the House and the Senate. If Congress concurs with the Vice President-Cabinet majority, the Vice President remains Acting President; if not, the President resumes his office.

It seems pretty clear that the crafters of the amendment did not want to make it easy to remove a president. That was probably wise, but now the unthinkable has happened. A president with the emotional makeup of a ten-year-old has been elected and the Republican Party is prepared to support him no matter what he does.

This brings us to the second method of removal under the 25th Amendment. To understand it, you simply substitute “a majority of … the principal officers of … such other body as Congress may by law provide” for the ‘a majority of the Cabinet.’ Everything else in the written declarations process remains the same, including the role of Congress to resolve conflicts between the President and either the Vice President-Cabinet majority or the “Vice President and other-body” majority.

This appears to be a dead letter because Congress has never created that “other body” with a group of “principal officers” who could vote on the President’s “inability” to do his job.

It may occur to you that there is a potential circularity in the alternative method. This appears so because the Congressional creation of the alternative body must be provided “by law” enacted by Congress. Since Congress cannot by itself enact a law, it could be argued that the alternative body can only be created with the cooperation of the sitting president who must sign the legislation. No one would expect a sitting president expecting a political attack by his own Cabinet would ever sign such legislation to make it easier to remove him. The answer, I believe, is the second method probably would have to be set up by a responsible and rational president who was not expecting a removal effort against him. Once the president has become irrational, he simply won’t cooperate with the Congress on any alternative removal mechanism and, thus, the alternative removal mechanism could not be used.

The apparent assumption of the drafters of the 25th that the President and the Congress would always act in advance of a crisis and do so responsibly seems naïve in the current context. In any case Congress has never passed a law to create the alternative body to address the “inability” of the President to perform his duties and, in the present political setting, it is unlikely to do so.

Where, then, do we end up? With Sheriff Mueller securing indictments. The Republicans and their news agents at Fox News are, naturally, parroting Trump’s continuous efforts to deflect attention elsewhere, usually to Hillary Clinton. Like some B-grade crime movie, Trump keeps screaming, via Twitter, “look, look, it’s not me/us, she’s getting away! Get her!”

At this point it’s a bit late for Trump and his gang to get out of town, so Sheriff Mueller will just have to finish the job he started. Trump and Fox will continue to try to undermine him. Maybe Trump will try to fire him. That would be a fatal mistake. If Trump is counting on the Sheriff to blink first, that also is a mistake. Manafort is in for a rough spell if he is found guilty, so maybe he will do the smart thing and start telling the truth. Then whose eyes will be twitching?

Show Me Your Papers … Or Spend the Rest of Your Life in Hell

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Hell in this case being, where else, a commercial airplane. The story, in case you missed it, is in the Washington Post: “Passengers sue government over immigration authorities’ demand they produce ID before leaving flight.” http://wapo.st/2gzQine The nine plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The government has now gone full-Nazi, a trend apparent since Donald Trump took office and began finding ways to strip Americans of their Constitutional rights. According to the story, way back in February two Customs and Border Protection agents blocked the jet way to an arriving aircraft and demanded identification documents from passengers trying to deplane. The crew had announced that showing government ID was required to deplane. Allegedly (presumption of innocence, or in this case truthfulness), passengers with the temerity to ask ‘why,’ were told it was “routine.” Ha! That’s a good one. Routine.

The routine is to be checked against various no-fly lists when you make a reservation and to be required to show ID at two stops en-route to the plane for its originating flight: once at the airline check-in counter and again at the TSA security checkpoint. If you skip the counter, because, say, you have no luggage and pre-printed your boarding pass, you still must show ID to pass security and board the plane. People who fly even somewhat regularly know this. The assertion that the pre-deplaning demand for ID was “routine” is pure … poppycock.

Not surprisingly, the Justice Department and CBP would not comment about the incident but said that the non-comment “should not be construed as agreement or stipulation with any of the allegations.” Of course not. Everybody knows that when the Trump-led government refuses to admit something is true despite being witnessed by dozens of people, it’s …. Let’s move on.

According to the Post, the suit seeks to bar the government from demanding ID before deplaning without a warrant or some other individualized reason to ask. The government apparently acknowledged later that it was looking for an ”immigrant” who was subject to a deportation order to leave the United States. The flight in question was from San Francisco to New York JFK Airport. As reported, an official with the Department of Homeland Security said after the incident,

“When we’re asked by our law enforcement partners to assist in searching for a person of interest, we are able to, and will, help” …. “This isn’t a new policy or related to any new executive order.”

Of course, the target of all this activity was not actually on the flight.

To be clear, the CBP agents in question were doing the job that management had given them. They cannot be expected to say “hey, this is stupid. We can get the answer another way and without drama.” So, let’s stay focused on the real issue.

The incident raises the question: why couldn’t the federal government, using information already in its systems arising from the original clearance and boarding of the plan, have determined whether the target was on the plane? If the government was unable to do this, a serious concern about the integrity of the security process that controls who may board an aircraft is raised. Perhaps this will be explored during the litigation that has ensued from this ham-handed “intervention.”

Another question also intrigues me, but we’ll never know the answer:  what would have happened if one or more the passengers had said,

OK, I’m not subjecting myself to this process, that I believe violates my rights, so I’ll just return to my seat. I will stay on this plane until I am allowed to leave without having to re-establish my identity. I have enough food and water to hole up here for several days! Where are we flying next?

Would the federal agents have repeated the scene from the recent United flight in which a passenger refused to deplane and give his seat to an airline employee and was then violently dragged off the plane? Or, would they applied common sense and checked the computer records to see if the target was on the plane? Speculation is invited.

Trump Orders Three Dragons Sent to Puerto Rico

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Faced with growing criticism about his ignoring the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, President Trump, according to sources in the White House, ordered three dragons sent to Puerto Rico to re-establish law and order and help with recovery efforts.

According to inside sources, speaking anonymously because they are not authorized to talk about the U.S. dragons, the President became enraged when informed that one of the dragons was out of commission and that the others were on break following some taxing fire-breathing in a battle that the Pentagon is denying ever happened. “Dammit to hell, this is what happens when you let the Dothraki into the military!” Trump was reported to have said. No one knew owning dragons could be so complicated. No one on the White House staff will even admit that the U.S. has dragons, probably fearful of tipping off North Korea.

Trump told one source that he was planning a personal visit to Puerto Rico to assess the damage, but that he couldn’t go until he completed his next golf round at Mar-a-Lago, scheduled for next Thursday. “Scott Pruitt, Steve Mnuchin and Tom Price are flying down to play with me and it’s very important, believe me,” Trump said. “Each of the Cabinet members will be taking a separate private jet, for, you know, security reasons.”

Asked about his relationship with Price, Trump grumped, “Hell, I didn’t fire Jeff Sessions for lying to Congress and then refusing to cover me on the Comey thing, so why would I would fire my buddy Price over a little thing like a private airplane trip or two. Hell, I fly private all the time and look at me, I’m the damn president.” [see  BREAKING NEWS ITEM AT THE END]

When told that the 3.4 million people in Puerto Rico were American citizens, Trump was incredulous. At last report the president was planning a weekend tweet-storm to distract attention from Puerto Rico. At press time the subject of the tweets was still undecided.

Unfortunately for Trump, and American taxpayers, a fourth member of the Trump Cabinet, Ryan Zinke, Secretary of the Interior, was also implicated in the luxury travel scandal, which he called “a little BS.” Zinke was interviewed while bailing hay for three of the horses kept in his $500,000 private stable which is accessible by elevator directly from his office at the Interior Department. “Look, I bail my own hay so the government won’t have to pay for it.”

The president said he had tried to speak with Scott Pruitt about his use of luxury travel for government business but Pruitt was inside his private in-suite $25,000 soundproof booth and could not be reached by his staff or anyone else. No one knows who he has been talking to in there.

It is expected that the subject of dragons for Puerto Rico will be discussed at a high-level meeting at the Pentagon this weekend. Trump will miss the meeting but probably will get a briefing some time when it’s convenient. Meanwhile, he has assured everyone that things in Puerto Rico are coming along just great.

BREAKING NEWS:  Tom Price has resigned. Another of the president’s “men” is out. The exodus continues. Can Pruitt and Zinke survive under these circumstances? What about Mnuchin? What about Mnuchin’s wedding? What about Jared’s emails? What does Zinke’s horse know? Why does Pruitt need a battalion of Secret Service protection? Is he afraid of Trump? When will enough be enough?

How We Know Republicans are Wrong re Pre-Existing Conditions Protection

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Oddly enough, in this time of special oddness, there is a debate going on, in Washington and on the internet, about whether comedian Jimmy Kimmel is right that the Graham-Cassidy health insurance legislation exposes people with pre-existing conditions to prohibitively high premiums and/or draconian reductions in coverage. Republicans are trying to argue that Kimmel is wrong to say that people with pre-existing conditions will be hurt by the Graham-Cassidy legislation. See http://cnn.it/2hmjP3l

Even more odd is the fact that the Republicans making this argument could, with some direct language in the legislation, remove any doubt about this question if they wanted to. But they don’t. Why? Because they want to leave it up to the states to decide, one by one, whether and how much to penalize people with pre-existing conditions. The end result would be a crazy quilt of differing state approaches that would add to public confusion about, and, I contend, the cost of health insurance almost everywhere.

Therefore, since the Republicans apparently will not take the obvious step to put this issue to rest, we, as rational thinkers and observers of the passing scene, must conclude that the Graham-Cassidy legislation does indeed pose grave (no pun intended; wait, actually, pun intended) risks to people with pre-existing conditions and all people economically connected to or dependent upon them. This is millions of people, probably tens of millions.

So, Republicans, until you develop the moral integrity to speak the truth about what you are trying to do to the American people, why don’t you just shut up about pre-existing conditions and, by your silence, admit that the reality of Graham-Cassidy is just what Jimmy Kimmel said it was. That’s step one.

Step two is for you to pack your bags and prepare to go home and explain to the people who elected you how Graham-Cassidy is going to make their lives better. And don’t even think about lying about it. Jimmy knows who you are and, with the rest of us, will be watching every move you make.

Step three, start looking for a new job, because you most likely will cease to be a U.S. Senator when the next election in your state is held. This is the well-deserved fate of politicians who act against the interests and values of their constituents. So it is written, so let it be done.

 

An Open Letter to Some Senators from Robert Frost

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Warning: Naiveté will be on display here.

This “letter” is directed primarily at U.S. Senators McCain, Collins and Murkowski although there are a few others who should be paying close attention to the implications for their states, and their constituents, of the Graham-Cassidy legislation that would replace the Affordable Care Act with a temporary set of block grants and the individual discretion to limit covered services, including pre-existing conditions and many basic regular services now covered by the ACA.

For you three Senators in particular, you have arrived yet again at one of those moments when history is going to judge you. It will not judge you for all the other things you may have accomplished, or even for your other failures. No, history is going to judge you for the action you are preparing to take – to vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on Graham-Cassidy.

Senator McCain, all of your well-known heroism and sacrifice will be dashed into dust if you vote to take away meaningful and affordable health insurance from the more than 32 million people now estimated to be impacted by Graham-Cassidy. You will be remembered instead for this one vote. Your choice – still hero or goat.

The same for the two female Senators from Maine and Alaska. You have come a long way, accomplished much for women in politics, served as an example of positive achievement for young women. I say that even though I disagree with much of your Republican politics. You too must face the judgment of history, and that of your constituents when they realize that you have, if you vote ‘yes,’ stripped them of the fair opportunity to secure health insurance for themselves and their children.

There is no escaping this crossroads for each of you. The President and the leadership of your party in Congress are so determined to remove the Affordable Care Act that they will sacrifice themselves and you as well on the ideological altar of state empowerment. Just look at the state-by-state consequences of Graham-Cassidy. Center for American Progress at http://ampr.gs/2fbzykY; Commonwealth Fund at http://bit.ly/2hhZpIE; The Atlantic at http://theatln.tc/2hjTsLw.

The Congressional Budget Office final score for Graham-Cassidy will likely not be ready by the time the vote, with no meaningful hearings or formal input process, occurs. Why the rush? It’s solely so that the Republicans can pass the bill with a bare majority of one under the “50 votes wins” rule that expires September 30. You thus can go along to get along, or you can do something else.

You are at the point of Robert Frost’s famous poem, the one that ends with

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

 

Can you truthfully say that, in your considered judgment and based on your experience with state and federal government and after a careful evaluation of the impacts, that Graham-Cassidy is good for the American people, a substantial majority of who favor retention of an improved Affordable Care Act approach? Will you be able to explain your vote to the parents of a disabled child who is denied health care because the family can no longer afford the costs? Is it clear to you, beyond reasonable doubt, that Graham-Cassidy is the best way to address the health insurance problem that plagues this country and which many other civilized nations seem to have solved without draconian denials of medical care to their citizens?

Time is short. Why don’t you just bring this insane charade to a close right now, by telling the Congressional leadership and the President that “the answer is ‘NO,’ I will not lend my name, my reputation and my honor to this disgraceful legislation that will harm tens of millions of Americans”? Take the road less traveled. The only honorable thing to do.

Once More into the Breach, Dear Friends

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Unchastened by multiple past failures of leadership and intellect, the Republicans in Congress have signaled their intention to bring one more piece of “repeal Obamacare” legislation to a vote before the month is out, so as to secure the benefit of a 50-votes-wins procedure. This time it’s the Graham-Cassidy version that would replace the Affordable Care Act with block grants to the states which would then be free, individually, to permit insurers to effectively price out of existence the coverage for pre-existing conditions that is now mandated by federal law. They will do this even without scoring of the impact by the Congressional Budget Office.

Thus, each state that chooses to support the Republican goal of undermining access to health insurance for Americans in order to secure some vague idea of “fiscal responsibility” and, more truthfully, to stamp out perceived federal support for such practices as abortion, can do whatever it wants with access to health insurance. This, notwithstanding that all polling shows a substantial majority of Americans favor key elements of Obamacare protections, including coverage for pre-existing conditions.

This effort is urged on the Republican Party by its putative leader, Donald Trump, who hates everything associated with Barack Obama and is determined to remove all vestiges of Obama’s presidency from the face of the earth. Trump thinks he can’t lose here because he promised his so-called political “base” that he would get rid of Obamacare. If he succeeds, and the base delusionally concludes it’s a victory for them, Trump is a hero. If Congress cannot deliver the bill to him for signature, Trump still sees himself as the winner because it is Congress’s failure, yet again, that has denied him fulfillment.

And nothing is more important to Trump than winning. So far, his presidency has failed in almost every significant initiative it has attempted, so Trump is desperate to accomplish something, anything, regardless of the consequences.

It is time, once again, for the people to rise up and reject this outrage by demanding in the clearest way possible that every member of the Republican Party in Congress vote against this monstrosity. Almost all of them will disrespect the will of the people, of course, because in the end they don’t give a damn about the people. But there are a few, literally only a few, Republicans who have previously shown the courage and humanity to stand apart from the rest of the drones.

Here we have Senators McCain (Arizona), Collins (Maine) and Murkowski (Alaska). It comes down to the same three people to demonstrate the moral fiber and independence of thought and action that history now demands of them. Senator Paul of Kentucky has already said he is opposed to the bill, but you can’t count on him to stay that course. He hates the Affordable Care Act almost as much as Trump does.

Everyone who cares about this should lay down a barrage of calls, emails, tweets and posts calling on those three to stand, once more, as the bulwark against the depravity of the Republican Party and its attempt to deny tens of millions of Americans any modicum of real access to health insurance.

Killing Wild Animals with Impunity

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I had intended to write about something else this week, but my plans were derailed by a story in this morning’s Washington Post entitled, in the hard copy at B-4, No charges to be filed in killing of protected birds and called, in the online version, Investigation into shootings of protected birds near Baltimore has stalled. http://wapo.st/2jnCXlJ  For purposes of this post, I am going to accept as true everything in the Post’s report. The opinions below are based on my inferences from the stated facts.

It is particularly disturbing to see a story involving the wanton slaughter of protected animals in the United States, just miles from the nation’s capitol, with, it appears, the perpetrators getting away clean. The story is doubly disturbing in that one of the men involved was a Maryland police officer.

The gist of the story is captured in these excerpts:

… a shotgun was fired several times from a boat [on the Patapsco River near Baltimore], killing several birds, including a federally protected gull and a double-crested cormorant.

The shots

were fired near the Spirit of Baltimore dinner cruise ship, which was taking passengers on a tour

thus putting additional lives in danger.

… an observer aboard a city helicopter saw someone on the boat throw a long gun into the water.

Divers recovered the weapon. Police said they found 210 rounds of shotgun ammunition, 50 rounds of 9mm ammunition, 100 rounds of 5.7mm ammunition and 12 rounds of .22-caliber ammunition on the boat. The speech of all three occupants of the boat was slurred, and empty beer cans were in the craft, police said.

If anything is clear, it is that these men intended to do some serious damage to something. What happened to the weapons that would have used the non-shotgun ammunition? And much of the ammunition cannot be justified as related to any form of “hunting.” Yet, according to the report,

authorities are unable to conclude which of the three occupants of the boat was responsible

The assistant state’s attorney in Baltimore County was quoted saying “At this point, the investigation is at a standstill.”

How is that possible? The shooting and attempt at concealment was observed. And, if that’s not enough, the story states that the men’s boat led police on a chase from Key Bridge in Maryland to a creek in Baltimore County where the men were apprehended. They thus attempted to evade capture for a crime in which each of them had to be either the direct perpetrator or an accessory before or after the fact. And, if that’s not enough, the story says that “the officer’s arrest powers have been restored.”

I am well acquainted with the concept of innocence until proven guilty and the principle that one cannot be compelled to testify against oneself. Assuming each of the men asserted their full rights not to be forced to answer who did the shooting and why they were carrying enough ammunition to start a small war, it is clear, isn’t it, that a police officer was present, did little or nothing to stop the offense and has now refused to answer questions about the incident and his role in it. And, nonetheless, his weapon is returned and he is authorized to make arrests????

Baltimore’s fraught history of police-community relations is well known in these parts and likely around the country. What message does this story send? A police officer apparently is free to participate in, or at least witness and not interfere with, the commission of a serious offense, then refuse to respond to police questions and just walk away with full restoration of law enforcement powers?

If there is more to this story that would overcome the inferences drawn, I am open to hearing it. Something doesn’t parse here and there should be an in-depth investigation by outside authorities as to what is going on. Just my opinion, of course, but this stinks to high heaven.

 

Laughing at Jeff Sessions

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AHAHAHAHAHAHA … there, I am laughing out loud, really LOUD, at Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the Attorney General of the United States. You know, the one with skin so thin you can see what passes for blood coursing through his arteries. You may recall that Capitol police arrested a woman during Sessions confirmation hearing in the U.S. Senate for laughing at Sessions’ remark about, get this, treating all Americans equally under the law. That’s a good one. No surprise that the lady laughed out loud. The charges were thrown out due to faulty jury instructions but Sessions is determined to try the woman a second time.

Dana Milbank wrote a wonderful column about this in today’s Washington Post, entitled “Our laughable attorney general.”  http://wapo.st/2f3PrKL. So, here I go again… AHAHAHAHAHA, laughing out loud at the Attorney General. Come and get me, Jeff; I dare you. I’m laughing at you, Jeff. It’s okay if I call you Jeff, isn’t it? Your feelings won’t be hurt? I wouldn’t want to hurt your feelings, Jeff. You might have me arrested for assault on your feelings.

I recall that many years ago, Senator William Scott of Virginia called a press conference to deny a published report that he was the dumbest person in Congress. See http://wapo.st/2wGJTyO.

That was pretty funny. But I think Sessions is even funnier. He apparently intends to bring the full legal weight of the United States Government to bear on this woman until she is either convicted of a laughing offense or confesses her guilt of something that will make Sessions feel like a real man. “Wipe that smile off your face, lady, or I’ll wipe it off for you.” Sounds like a line from a 1950s B movie. “Nobody laughs at the Attorney General and gets away with it. Nobody.”

I am so glad the AG and the Justice Department have time and resources for this activity.

Of course, in one way Sessions has done everyone a favor. He has revealed why there is no humor in the Congress. Can you imagine what would happen if the decorum of the Senate were blemished by laughter every time something monumentally stupid was spoken on the Senate floor? They’d never get anything done. On the other hand, under the leadership ofMitch McConnell, the Senator from Kentucky, they seem to have managed to get nothing done without a single overt guffaw being heard. Maybe the Republican majority has managed to swallow those giggles like they have choked down their integrity and dignity. Just as with humor, no gagging is permitted in the Senate.

Footnote: For more potential parallels between former Senator Scott and current AG Sessions, see the Wikipedia piece on Scott. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_L._Scott. And your day cannot be complete without seeing the Scott quotes in the Chicago Tribune at http://trib.in/2xaMJgX. You just can’t make this stuff up.

 

Trump Makes It All Clear – He is a Traitor to American Values

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I don’t know if I have anything important to say that has not already been said by the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of writers, commentators, pundits, Tweeters and others who are repelled by the overt alliance of the President of the United States with white supremacists and so-called alt-right neo-Nazis. Nevertheless, I must write about Charlottesville.

As background you may want to revisit my related post at https://shiningseausa.com/2017/05/09/visiting-holocaust-museum/

I am an old white man, the beneficiary of white privilege. A beneficiary of the reduced competition for jobs and other societal benefits by virtue of the systematic and relentless suppression of blacks and other minorities over the more-than-a-century since the end of the Civil War. I am the beneficiary of the sacrifices of millions of people, citizens, soldiers, doctors and many others who gave their time, their career opportunities, parts of their bodies and minds and, of course, their very lives to prevent the Nazis of 1930s-1940s Germany from dominating the world and destroying absolutely and finally what they believed were inferior cultures. If you reflect on this, you too should be aware of these “gifts” from past generations that have made your life of privilege possible.

These gifts were not intended to preserve America for white people alone, but to protect the country, and its culture, from destruction at the hands of a delusional lunatic who preyed on the fears of his countrymen to create a killing machine of unparalleled cruelty that still defines the phrase “crimes against humanity.” Despite that, it is also true that, at the time of World War II, the United States itself still practiced multiple forms of overt institutional and legally-reinforced racial discrimination. The country had not yet come to grips with its conflicted legacy of democratic values and abuse of non-whites. The post-War recovery, however, helped create conditions in which the discriminatory “rules” of Jim Crow were rejected and the American values expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution began to take hold.

The process was not peaceful. If you recall the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision abolishing school segregation, many whites resisted violently the idea that minorities, primarily Blacks at that time, would be given opportunities equal to those they and their ancestors had enjoyed all their lives. Violent resistance to the Civil Rights Movement was powerful but gradually, over years, the progressive forces favoring equal opportunity were successful in inserting the founding principles of the country into legislation and court decisions.

Slowly, the American creed, reflected in pledges of allegiance and other rituals that I recall from my earliest school days, became reality. Blacks and other minorities began to secure employment previously reserved to whites. They began to run for public office and to win elections. Eventually, the country elected a black man to be President of the United States.

Many liberals concluded that racism had largely been banished from American society. They were wrong. The election of Barack Obama seems to have been a turning point, inspiring a broad-based rejection of the progressive ideas he espoused. The leadership of the Republican Party made clear they would stop at nothing to prevent him from being successful in leading the country. They fought him at every turn. And the forces of conservative Republican hostility captured control of a majority of governorships and state legislatures.

And then they elected Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump is seemingly oblivious to history and incapable of making even rudimentary distinctions between dissimilar events. Charlottesville is just the latest example, but it establishes beyond doubt that Trump is, deep down, a racist.  Or, if, as many of his supporters have argued, he is just playing politics to please his base and “really doesn’t have a racist bone in his body,” then he is a racist. You cannot play the role in real life and escape the label. Behave like a racist and you are one. No matter what you may “believe” deep down.

In Charlottesville, there were two different but related phenomena involved. One was the desire of some people to oppose through protest the removal of Confederate memorials that they claim to believe are legitimate and valuable elements of American history worthy of open public preservation. I disagree vehemently with that view but I can understand how some people of good will might disagree and hold an intellectually opposite, but honest view about how history should be acknowledged. For present purposes, I will assume that there were some (a very few) such people intermingled with the white supremacist/KKK/neo-Nazi marchers carrying torches and chanting Nazi slogans and giving Nazi salutes in Charlottesville.

But what is completely untenable and unacceptable is that the presence of the few presumed people with a legitimate, if ill-conceived, position on removal of Confederate memorials can change the fundamental anti-American nature of the protest. Anyone with a legitimate position to assert on removal of Confederate memorials should have removed themselves immediately from the field of play when the torches came out and the chanting/saluting began.

No amount of rhetoric from Donald Trump can lift up legitimate protesters in this crowd by saying there were “good people on both sides.” The good people, if they were there, bear responsibility for aligning themselves with the neo-Nazis. To a large degree, you are who you associate with. By trying to equate the “good people” with the Nazis, Trump has revealed for all to see that his sympathies are with the alt-Right neo-Nazis.

The other phenomenon is the neo-Nazis themselves who were there on pretext of protesting the removal of the memorials but were equating those efforts with an attempt to eliminate them from society. It should be easy for the President of the United States to distinguish between the legitimate protesters against removal of memorials (a tiny fraction of the total even under my generous assumptions) and the neo-Nazis.

Belief is, I suggest, a matter of choice. We believe what we choose to believe. Trump has made his choice and voiced it publicly, following a brief period of trying to acknowledge, under intense pressure, who the real bad guys were, and, again under pressure, reading a prepared script to try to overcome his racist rant from the day before. Ultimately, he could not stand aligning himself with the good guys. He likes what the neo-Nazis stand for and he has made that as plain as possible.

I have seen multiple references in articles and statements that the “President made a big mistake” and “it’s unfortunate the President wasn’t clearer about what he really meant” and so on. There is a word for this but I won’t use it here. Suffice to say that this was no “mistake.” To suggest that it was is to see the issue as one of political strategy rather than what it really is: a question of morality and societal norms. Trump often says he “tells it like it is.” Most of the time, that phrase is followed by a demonstrable lie, but in this case, it is clear beyond doubt that Trump has spoken his true mind. He approves of the Nazis. He continues to tweet about what he perceives as a loss of history and culture.

Well, Mr. President, (I choke on that phrase in your case), the only culture being affected by removal of these Confederate memorials is the culture that said it was acceptable for people to own other humans as slaves, that it was OK to treat people as mere property to be disposed of as the owner saw fit. If, as is now clear, that is what bothers you about removing the memorials, then you have, at long last, self-identified as a prototypical racist, and you cannot escape with scripted denials days after the fact.

The neo-Nazi point of view is as delusional now as it was when Adolf Hitler espoused racial purity of the Aryan race as the rationale for killing millions of people. You must be among the most illiterate or willfully stupid people on earth to be unaware of the distinctions between the social/cultural history of the United States at its founding and the situation today. You, like the admirers of Confederates who took up arms against the country, you, like the founders who resisted every effort to address the slavery question in the original Constitution, you, sir, are a traitor to what this country stands for. How dare you attempt to equate George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with the Nazis marching in Charlottesville? You are a disgrace to this country and you should resign immediately.

Apologies to readers for the length of this post. On my birthday, I get to do what I need to do.

The End of Life as We Know It

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As an innately curious person, I read a lot: the Washington Post (all of it), excerpts from the New York Times and other news publications (courtesy of Apple iPhone) and, of course, many books. The books include much fiction, history and science. The history informs my understanding of the world in general, the fiction moves me in mysterious ways and the science … the science stuns and often frightens me.

I am currently plowing through Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs, subtitled The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe, by Lisa Randall, the Baird Professor of Science at Harvard, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and on and on. She studies “theoretical particle physics and cosmology.” Professor Randall has a PhD from Harvard University and has held professorships at MIT and Princeton University. She has received honorary degrees from Brown University, Duke University, Bard College, and the University of Antwerp.

So, you might say, what’s this obscenely smart woman got to do with me or the “end of life as we know it?” Here is what.

Chapter 11 of Dark Matter is entitled “Extinctions;” it explains the five major mass extinctions that have been documented through the Earth’s roughly 4.5 billion-year existence, following the emergence of the first life (as revealed by fossils aged 3.5 billion years old). Chapter 11 has a subsection called “A Sixth Extinction?” I will not go on and on about this; rather, I will just set out some of the facts supporting Prof. Randall’s “very disturbing speculation” about what is happening right now to our planet, the only home humans will likely ever have.

During the past 500 years, 80 species of mammals, out of less than 6,000, have gone extinct.

That rate of mammal extinction is 16 times normal – in the last century the rate has increased by 32 times.

In the past century, amphibians have become extinct at a rate almost 100 times higher than before – 41 percent more are threatened now.

Extinction of bird species in the last century are higher than average by 20 times.

Changes in environmental factors now are similar to those that occurred during the Permian-Triassic Extinction some 250 million years ago.

Prof. Randall believes, as do almost all knowledgeable and qualified scientists around the world, that “Human influence is almost certainly largely to blame for the recent diversity loss.” Dark Matter (PB ed. 186)

80 percent of North American large animals were driven to extinction when Europeans arrived here.

These dramatic effects occur from a combination of pollution, land clearing that destroys habitat, overfishing, ocean acidification, species invasion and homogenization of animal populations.

Prof. Randall concludes the chapter with these observations:

Even if new species do emerge or conditions ultimately improve, a dramatically altered world is unlikely to be good for us as a species…. Life has evolved with delicate balancing mechanisms. It is not clear how many of these can be altered without dramatically changing the ecosystem and life on the planet. You would think we would have considerably more selfish concern for our fate – especially when so many such losses can most likely be prevented. After all, unlike the creatures 66 million years ago whose fate was determined by an errant meteoroid, humans today should have the capacity to see what is coming. [Dark Matter, PB ed. 188]