America: Land of Bounded Rationality

Political theorists and economists think of people in group chasing what they perceives benefiting them.  A politician promises things they want and they vote that way.  Make things more or less expensive and people will buy more or less – or none – of it.  Show certain values in an idea or a product that align with what you think a targeted group wants and they will buy your product.  Tell them you will enact laws and start programs to make their lives better and they will vote for your candidate.

But that’s not really how it works. 

Exhibit A is the support among poor country Whites for the Washington efforts to ‘Repeal and Replace’ the Affordable Care Act (aka ACA or Obamacare).  The executive and legislative branches of the American federal government are in a long slow motion assault on the health care of 20 million or more Americans. 

Man of those supporters would lose their own health care under the plan.  How is it possible for people to vote away health care that they need?  Health care for their families and friends and neighbors?  How can federal politicians think this is a good idea when they will literally be killing their own voters? 

It’s not just health care, either.  There are many supports - from food aid to tuition to not getting shafted by fraudulent for-profit colleges and universities, the list goes on – that are really helpful to White low-education voters who like to get yelled at in rallies.  They are all-in for this program.  You know, the one that will impoverish and kill them.

Why?

One reason is Bounded Rationality.  I know – it’s hard to use the word “rationality” about the MAGA crowd.  But the bounded sort fits.  Bounded rationality means that when people make decisions, they have limited information to do it with.  It also means that they have cognitive limitations, and don’t take the time (if they have any) to consider the issue.  Denizens of flyover country have all of these limitations on whatever rationality they can muster on a good day. 

But what kind of boundedness can lead people to vote directly against their own interests?  That’s not supposed to happen.  When one politician promises to improve their lot in life by measurable actions, why would they vote against that and for the politician who promises to immiserate and impoverish them?  How does that make any sense? 

Anger and racism figure in, for sure.  Far too many Americans will vote to gut a social support system that helps people who are visible minorities.  They’ll vote for politicians who will pull services they perceive as over-used by Black and Hispanic people – even when it’s their own group that the primary dependants. 

Italian Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) showed that people will work against their own interests when they misapprehend what their true interests are.  Through a bourgeois culture, the establishment keeps people in their assigned places in society – “Cultural Hegemony” as he referred to it.  This was an important distinction because, prior to Gramsci, it was always thought to be the coercion of economics or even violence that kept the downtrodden workers in line.  Gramsci showed that the imposition of a normalcy of oppression could make even the most exploitive situations seem, somehow, okay. 

We all live simultaneously in two realities which are often polar opposites of one another.  The first is our lived experience.  We know the world through our families and close friends, our distant relations and work associates.  When the economy goes to hell and the banks start unfairly foreclosing on people, the ripple effect goes through the community.  Everybody knows.  The victims are destitute and humiliated.  The many people in their personal orbit are angry. 

How many people were screwed out of their life savings by Joker-faced greed beast Steve Mnuchin – whose OneWest bank paid millions in fines for thousands illegal foreclosures?  Through the bank-run economic meltdown that started in 2008, millions of Americans were either directly impacted or indirectly felt the bottom drop out of their lives and the lives of those around them. 

The comic book Joker never did as much damage to Gotham City as Mnuchin and his bankster friends did to the ‘average Joe’ in America.  And they’re still in charge of the economy – literally.  Mnuchin is Treasury Secretary.  That’s like putting Jack the Ripper in charge of the Emergency Room. 

Which leads to the second reality:  information.  Information is the stuff that people read and hear from far away.  What happens in the State government?  Except for a relative handful of people, only the media and the politicians know what goes on or how it impacts different groups.  Citizens can’t have first-hand knowledge of how representative government works – it’s too big and complex.  They rely on reporters to explain – or at least tell.  And then the politicians spin their own stories.  Who do you believe?

Why are the Robinsons being kicked off their farm?  Because of…  Who? 

There was a day when journalists at least tried to be honest.  The Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite school saw it as their most fundamental duty:  tell the truth.  Yes, there were many problems of inherent bias toward race and class and other issues.  But the mission was to clarify and inform.

That’s no longer true.  Right wing media lies nonstop.  And when they’ve been increasingly called on their lies, they turn the accusation around on their accuser:  “fake news.”  It’s so well understood that it no longer required explanation.  Rachel Maddow is a progressive commentator.  Despite a clear ideological bias, when she speaks in terms of fact, she actually uses fact.  And so on for the progressive voices in the media.

On the other side, right wing “journalists” – both in the opinion section and the news section – make up their own stories out of whole cloth.  It’s just a well understood part of the media landscape:  they lie to their viewers and readers about everything. 

So the immediate reality for MAGA people is that they are being epically screwed by powers that they cannot even name.  And they are angry.  They see people of color doing well and are more angry because they think their own happiness has been taken away by lesser beings. 

Not having any first-hand knowledge of who is killing them, they turn to politicians and the media for answers.  What do they hear?  Politicians promising prosperity if programs for ‘those people’ are cut – never mind their own reliance on those programs.  Tax cuts for the rich are really tax cuts for the lower middle class and working poor.  There’s nobody – nobody they’ll believe – to call out the lies. 

The things in their lives they can see for themselves show a constant misery.  The death rate among men in their 50’s in these states is skyrocketing due to lifestyle choices like smoking and drinking – “deaths of despair.”  Where can they turn for help?  Nowhere. 

Their private media bubble stirs up their rage about women and people of color.  It gives them rage politicians like the Orange Jell-O.  They are pointed in directions that only lead them to further despair because the Republican Party cannot and will never make their lives better. 

The more they win the more they lose.

They rabidly support politicians who are promising to take away their health care.  They are given magic beans of tax cuts that have never grown a tree no matter where they’ve been planted.  They don’t know any better and they never will, because their Culture forces them to refuse reality.  Republicans threw away truth decades ago, along with any sense of honor or decency that went with it. 

The put the Orange Lie Machine in charge because it sounded as mad as they were.  And it made the same noises as Fox and Drudge and Breitbart.  That’s all they know. 

Sadly, that’s all they can know. 

The Memory Hole

Haven't blogged for a while, because frankly I can't think of what to add to the outrage.  Or even the simple rage.  The Orange Thing has a stunning ability to one-up himself.  Every time there is a seeming nadir a new bottom is discovered, endlessly. 


But I think the latest bout of presidential psychosis may be a tipping point.


Surely, the other acts of lunacy and hate have seemed like they should tip things a certain way.  Stealing affordable health care from millions was a shared cruelty with the rest of his putrid political movement.  That didn't take, but stealing a Supreme Court seat did. 


The likely-criminal use of his position to enlarge his fortune is something he's doing on his own.  The release of his taxes will come, at some pint, from a subpoena.  And thank the lord for Robert Meuller.  If the cover is ever ripped from this junta, he's probably the guy to do it.  Because Russia.


But the new nadir is a self-inflicted wound that has gone through the Orange and is spraying his entourage - liberally - with his signature colour.  It's even more needless and damaging than the other crap he gets up to every day. 


Nazi's.  KKK.  What?


This is where we must begin to contemplate a missing person.  Check your milk cartons for the last known photo of George W. Bush (do they still do that on milk cartons?).  This is the missing guy not just from the last Fellini film Republican Convention.  This is the guy missing from the Romney convention.  And the McCain convention.  Any Senators getting old W to pitch for their reelection since 2008?  No?  Representatives?  No?  Dog catchers?  Anyone?


Old W got disappeared down the Repub memory hole.  While he was in office he was their Decisioner.  Congress rubber-stamped everything he did - including telling a bunch or outright lies to get the nation into a multi-decade war of meaningless destruction.  Trillions of dollars followed Old W down the memory hole.  He turned vast Clinton surpluses into massive debt. 


Yeah, that W. 


The Repubs didn't wait until he'd cleared the building before active, almost forcefully forgetting him.  A man who, for eight years, could do no wrong was now mute and invisible.  Because as much as they could talk themselves out of what he's done, they couldn't put that money back into the treasury.  And they couldn't restore the hundreds of thousands of people killed and injured by their selfish recklessness.


Speaking of selfish recklessness, how long will the Repubs allow their id to lurch from one extremely reckless act to the next?  When will they pull the drunk from the china shop?


They waited two whole terms to disavow Old W.  How long will they wait for the Orange Nazi? 


Repubs want to work their racism and hate quietly. Like Jeff Sessions.  The AG isn't going to get his sheet out of the closet and wear it at Justice.  He's going to say how much Nazi's and Klansmen don't belong.  And then he's going to wink!  And do away with the Voting Rights Act.  He's going to support suppression of minority voting rights. 


Orange Thing doesn't know how to do that, so he roars and rages at rallies among the 30% rock of racist shitheads who will always love him.  Why?  Because he doesn't use code words and doesn't use dog whistles. 


He just says crazy shit. 


It's the same crazy shit that the rest of the Repubs believe, but they don't just come out and say it.  He does.  It makes him, on some level, much more honest than they are.  Neanderthals like Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-Hell) would like to reinstate Jim Crow and all his relatives (welcome back Uncle Lynching!).  But to do that in todays world will requires a load of whopper lies to sell the incremental disenfranchisement of non-whites. 


But the Orange Thing doesn't get it.  Bannon told him the thing that Washington was the same as R.E. Lee.  Why can't he tell everyone?  And so many nice people in the white march - he like them!  They like Orange!  Why can't he talk it?


The point is that at some time in the hopefully near future all the Repubs are going to forget and disavow, and claim to never have Followed.  They're going to hit 'reset' on the lie-casters and go at it again with a different, maybe calmer and more malleable candidate.  Does Old W have any sons who can read?


As the heat intensifies, how long can they wait?  VP Pence would sign any putrid crap they put in front of him, just like Orange.  They don't need Orange and his 34% approval rating (to go along with the Repub Congress's 12% approval rating). 


When do they cut him loose?  At what point does Orange become Old W? 

So Let Them

The efforts to kill the ACA in the US has been a slow motion airline disaster.  Every day has pushed and pulled the country inexorably toward the Far Right Party's undoing of quasi-universal kinda health care for millions.  They're going to succeed in this effective mass murder because there are no 'moderates' left in their Party.  Those are just extremists who don't cave to depravity until later.


And health care is not something you can just walk away from and say 'screw them' because the result will be the ruination of millions of lives.  People will live and die with untreated treatable illnesses.  They will be driven to poverty because unlike a car or a sofa, humans will pay every last penny (and then some) to get help for loved ones.  It's not now nor has every been a 'marketplace.' 


It's like expecting a junkie to negotiate with a pusher.  Can we bring these costs down?


But.  If they're going to do it - let them.  Here's why. 


First, they are cowards of the first order, meaning that their final bill will sunset the closure in the future.  The ACA will live on for a few years.  Their thinking is that this will protect them from an immediate backlash from humans.  Wrong. 


For the millions who depend on the ACA, it's death - even in the future - will be a wakeup.  Even some of the real zombies will realize that the care that's keeping Uncle Skeeter alive is going to disappear.  They finally have medical care and know what it's like to get fixed up and not lose the house doing it. 


So it could get reinstated before the sunset arrives.  But what if the Far Rightists have so disfigured democracy that this doesn't happen?


There are two types in the Far Right Party.  The first is the Monsters.  They love their Ayn Rand and want to take the social safety net out and burn it.  This is the Paul Ryan Wing.  They make up numbers out of the air to look like they've done the math, but it always adds up to tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts for everyone else.  They've been selling the death of ACA as a blessing of freedom, meaning the freedom to become poor, sick, and dead.


The lives of millions of Americans mean nothing to them.  They're in government for one thing:  their own interests.  And it serves them well to be insanely cruel toward the non-wealthy.  They make the middle class bear as much of the tax burden as they can get away with.  They pull as much away from the poor as they can.  Monsters. 


The other group is the Idiots.  Certainly the Leader of America is the head of the Idiot Wing.  The Idiots think that whatever pops into their heads is the right thing.  Leader goes around saying that the new health care will cost less and provide coverage for all.  And their Zombies believe them - because in the Zombiesphere, that's a cannon of truth.  Anything King Idiot says is truth.


These people believe in stuff like Creationism.  How can you show them facts that prove they're being sold out for a penny a pound when facts don't exist for them? 


But there is a chance the shock of an impending collapse to their newfound medical care will move them.


Both Far Right groups are owned, right down to Paul Ryan's running shoes, but the wealthy.  The American Rich seem to treat dollars like precious eggs.  They need to have them because they are valuable to just have - not even spend.  If you let poor people have a bunch of eggs, they might break them.  People with lots of eggs know how to protect them and not break them. 


So it's important to have all the eggs together in the safe hands of the wealthy.  Government shouldn't take eggs away and give them to the poor, even in the form of medicine.  Think about the eggs!  They have to come first!


But, sadly, what will likely have to happen is that the ACA will go away and people will start to suffer.  That's when the Liars and the Monsters won't be able to make up phony numbers or tell whoppers anymore.  People's lives will start reverting to the way it used to be, when so many could not get the medical help they need for a price they can afford.  If you had only ever eaten bread and water and suddenly everything changed and you had three square healthy meals a day, why would you ever choose to go back? 


You wouldn't, unless the old bread and water was being sold to you as BETTER FOOD FOR EVERYONE CHEAPER.  The Monsters and Liars should be prosecuted for every needless death and sued for every bankruptcy they cause in the time until people get their medicine back. 


I hope the impending loss of coverage, if it happens (not hoping for it), will move people enough to throw these bums out.  But if they can dissemble their way out of getting the political axe, then the real suffering they cause will start.  And you can't tell people they're not suffering when they really are.


So let them.

Thanks a Bunch

It's staggering that the Far Right Party in Washington is still trying to take health care away from millions of Americans.  Like their leader, they may be 'the dog that actually caught the car it was chasing.' 


Since its inception, they've been saying they want to kill it.  In the 30 seconds Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the House, they passed this weakest-possible version of universal care - which still leaves millions uninsured, but whatever, right?  That was against the scorched-earth opposition of the whole Far Right Party.


Now that that party has successfully Gerrymandered and lied its way back to majority status in both houses (as we know, they actually got fewer overall votes in both houses - and the presidency) they have what seems to be the opportunity to take the ACA out behind the sheds and put a bullet in it. 


Why hasn't that happened? 


First, it's so much easier to destroy than to build.  Because of the success of the ACA, millions of citizens have lifesaving care that they never had before.  So killing the ACA will literally impoverish, sicken, and kill millions of Americans.  For the Far Right Party that's not a bug, it's a feature.  Immiserating folks who aren't rich is half their party's mission. 


But to the folks out there in not-Washington, that's a big deal.  The Far Rightists thought it would be easy to end the ACA and thought it would be scrapped by February.  But they overplayed their hand when they agreed to 'repeal and replace.'  Because millions of people are saved by the ACA every day, they choice was to do the 'replace' thing to show a façade of caring about the unwealthy. 


If they'd gone ahead with 'repeal' without 'replace' as they'd intended, it would have been a shock.  Even though their nefarious plan would sunset ACA over several years, there still would have been a massive backlash .  Image you're on a countdown to losing health care over three years.  Especially if a loved one was dealing with a serous health issue.  'Dad can't go to treatment any more after 2020.'  There would be riots.


The only way to avoid that and still inflict cruel misery on America was to design a 'replace' that looked like it was a real plan but was actually a removal of coverage for millions - and then hope nobody notices.  That worked in the House - they put together a plan savagely cutting 22 million from care and making everyone else pay many times their current premium.


Oh, and it gives the rich a huge tax cut.  That's the other half of the party's mission. 


But the Senate hasn't managed it yet.  All the baked-in cruelty is just too obvious.  And it's easy to attack the ACA when you know you won't win.  It's hard when you may win and what you're doing is horrific.  They've been pulling the trigger click-click-click for years - now the gun is loaded.  Will they take the shot?


It's shocking to think that many of them want to.  Their ideology is so ghastly that lots of them would happily savage millions of lives and give rich people a raise.  Several would not.


Which is no great badge of honor for them.  Oh, so you don't want to cause millions of preventable deaths, huh?  Do you want a medal or a statue, Sunshine? 


Seriously, the media is calling these three or four Party loyalists "moderates" and "centrists."  Bullshit.  The Far Right Party has taken 100,000 steps to the right over the past decade.  A few have only taken 99,000.  They're still fascists who support the whole agenda of right wing ideology - but take one step back.


There are no Moderates or Centrists in the Far Right Party.  They all want to have the poor and middle class pay the entire tax bill and their rich sponsors pay nothing.  They're going to kill our grandkids because they've stopped the American fight against climate change.  And disenfranchising minority voters is what they do for fun on weekends. 


These are bad people.  And after brooding on the topic, they decided not to support what must surely be one of the worst legislative initiatives in American history.  It's like a mass murderer coming into your house and saying:  "It's okay - I decided not to kill you today."


Thanks a bunch.

J'Accuse

Back at the height of the Cold War, American and other NATO allies used to track Soviet activities partly by what the Soviets accused NATO of doing.  AT the bargaining table, the Soviet negotiator would accuse the US of destabilizing an African country (for example) by supporting one party over another.  Or they'd accuse them of parking surveillance subs off their coast and listening to their communications. 


And of course those were the things the USSR was doing.  It's a form of projection.  I'm angry so I accuse you of being angry.  I'm cheating at cards so I think you're cheating, too.


Which brings us to Don Jr.'s emails.  I won't go into the whole story - that's well-trodden ground.  But I do want to note one thing:  the smoking gun (or at least one of them) was in the email.  Why did the Leader Party make so much noise and fuss about the Clinton email server?  Because their worthless guilty souls were laid bare in their own email servers. 


Let's watch where the accusations go.  They are clearly accusing others of the crimes they've committed.    The Leader is more "Crooked" than his opponent could ever be.  The focus on email is a 'tell.'  There is more in there. 


What other accusations has he made to lead up to further criminality?

Integrity

What is the definition of 'Integrity?'  Here's a couple from the internet:


"The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness."


"Firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values : incorruptibility." 


You know where this is headed, right?  Has there ever been an American federal government with less of this stuff?  All three branches are run by majorities who have none of it. 


Honesty.  The entire Executive Branch lives in a world of fascist make-believe.  Congress operates on the notion that they can lie to the rubes all the time about everything because they've worked the system to a 97% reelection rate in the House.  What do they care what anybody thinks?  The Supreme Court has a Leader Follower majority because of a stolen seat.  President Obama's choice - Merrick Garland - should be the deciding vote on the court.  Nope. 


Supreme Court decisions should be considered stolen goods.


And "moral uprightness?"  Are you kidding?  The pack of them - the New Junta - are fighting among themselves to figure out the best way to transfer billions of dollars from people's health care to wealthy campaign donors.  How is that moral?  Leader is foul and narrow and stupid and malicious.  And those with Leader Oversight responsibilities in Congress won't say or do a thing because Leader will sign any reverse-Robin Hood crap they put in front of him.


Integrity.  Leader was sued multiple times in his (ongoing) business life.  He stiffed workers and cheated the suckers at his 'university.'  Everything he's done since losing the election and being granted the job anyway has betrayed his Leader Followers. 


American politicians have never been known to be angelic in their moral uprightness and honesty.  But I can't remember a time when the word Integrity was only a punch line.  Would the word ever even come up if it were not part of a dark joke? 


The entire government is pay-for-play now.  Putin played it just right.  US democracy has been revealed as having rotted out from the core.  He can now say confidently that American democracy is no more real that Russian or even Iranian democracy. 


Thanks to the Putin-Comey axis, the truth about American democracy is playing out real-time.

Are We Done Here?

It's the Fourth of July and I'm wondering what the hell to write that's not another indictment of what the American's Oligarchy/Kleptocracy is doing to them.  It's hard to say that the American people are doing it to themselves.  Most Americans are rightly appalled at what the governing party is doing.  They never voted for this. 


So I'm not going to do that today.  Instead, let's look at the vote in the House Appropriations Committee to force Congress to debate and decide on the many wars that the US military is fighting. 


It's interesting that there are "wars," not "war."  Back when Congress used to declare war - you know, like it says in the Constitution - there could be many fronts and distant battles, but only one war.  There's a whole expression about it:  "lost the battle, not the war." 


Not true today.  The US has deployed forces in 135 countries to fight, well, something.  We don't really know.  But we do know that there was an "Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that Congress meekly handed George W. Bush after the 9-11-2001 attacks.  The AUMF essentially said:  'go blow up anybody who looks funny over in the darker parts of the world.' 


Okay, it didn't use exactly those words, but that's been the effect.  The people we were authorizing force against 16 years ago are not in any way the same people we're killing today.  ISIS was the result of, not the target of, the violence we brought to (primarily) Iraq and Afghanistan.  It was the bloody mess that was made of the revenge tour after 9-11 that caused the incredible and so far endless cycle of killings that America is spearheading.


Sorry, right, I said good news.  Even extremist Republicans (there are no other kind) supported Rep. Barbara Lee's amendment to do away with the AUMF.  There.


Their about-face might have something or a lot to do with the madman they installed as president having the power to use the US military any way he wants under the AUMF.  It's not (just) the fact that the American Leader has the 'nuclear codes' that makes the situation so dire.  It's that he has an elaborate and active military that is operationalized globally and will do whatever he tells them to do.


It's not the 'nuclear football' he kicks around with him that is so troubling.  He likely has enough self-branded properties around the world that a nuclear war would necessarily obliterate several of them, and be bad for his self-interest in general.  I mean, out of the billion or so people who would get wiped out,  probably a thousand or more of the dead would have been rich enough to stay at his properties or eat his steaks. So no dice for the nuclear war.


But regular war?  Bring it on.  And it doesn't have to be a big Vietnam-style affair where Eric and Don Jr. would need to get deferments like their old Pop (how are those bad feet holding up on the golf course, Leader?).  It can be the execution of anyone on the planet anywhere for any or no reason.


Obama gave us that.  Drones have killed thousands with no judicial oversight.  Just a signed note from Berry Hussein O. 


So, stay positive, right.  The time may be nigh for an end to the blank cheque.  Tear that baby up.  So if Leader wants to drop some drone knowledge on a bad guy, Congress has to say first.  That won't be much of an improvement given the Gerrymandered mess in the House, but at least it won't be Leader making the call all by himself, or with the help of his friend Vlad. 


Good news, right.  ISIS is about finished.  The ideology and resentments that drove them won't be going away any time soon, but their ugly dreams of a bloody Caliphate are nearly over.  Surely, the unrestrained US military campaign against anyone bearing a Koran has to be done as well.


We live in a world where NASA has to issue a public denial of running child sex farms on Mars.  No need to go back and re-read that - you read that right.  So accusations that used to be far far beneath public denial are no longer so.  And presidents used to have to lie to Congress to get approvals for the use of the people's military.  Let's be done with that and pretend it's a Happy Birthday USA.

Move

Right now in the once-august United States Senate, the majority party is sitting - in-camera - and trying to remake the "health care" bill that their fellow travelers in the House sent them.  The Senators will, without a doubt, scratch together something truly worthless and harmful which they will pass without hearings, consultation, or scoring by the Congressional Budget Office.  Just like the House did.


When the Leader of America finally signs this atrocity, there is only one thing for Red State residents to do:  move. 


They're already telling you to go.  Barking scumbag Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) is leading the charge to de-populate his loathsome state.  “People can go to the state that they want to live in.”  Well-fed recipient of free Congressional health care Rep. Pittenger is happy to see you go.  He doesn't need your vote or anything - North Carolina isn't a democracy anymore anyway. 


So get up and get out.  If you live in a Red State and believe in universal health care (or democracy) you need to leave, now.  Your neighbors are working to take life-giving health care away from you and your friends and family. Don't wait to them to do it.


Go to California.  They're going to start a single-payer system there.  I'm sure there's time to establish residency.  New York is considering it.  Vermont has a version - of course Bernie's state does.  Better yet - pick up and go to Hawaii.  Why the hell not?  It's gotta be better than West Virginia.  And yes, Jeff, it really is a State. 


Sure you're pulling up roots, maybe generations worth.  But your neighbors all want you to become impoverished and incapacitated and then die an early death.  And you need to do all that so that very wealthy people can stop paying whatever pittance of taxes they're kicking in now. 


Fuck them. 


If we can get all the decent people to move out of the Red States, maybe we can seal them off.  Better yet - give them what they've wanted all along.  No not slavery - not ever.  I mean let them secede.  Go on - off you go! 


I'd also be willing to pay for anyone who wanted to leave the South and West.  We'll do a Kickstarter or something.  It will be like the new Freedom Train. 


The US has a leader who lost the election by three million votes.  And they installed him in the White House no questions asked.  The Republicans lost the Senate, too, but about 5 million votes but they control that chamber as well.  The House is Gerrymandered top to bottom because the cheaters won an election in 2010 and pickled the census. 


I don't recognize that country.  I moved out, and you should too. 


Last word to the late great Sam Kinison:

Doomed

“We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive. It's pretty dense kids who haven't figured that out by the time they're ten.... Most kids can't afford to go to Harvard and be misinformed.”   ― Kurt Vonnegut Jr.


That's exactly where we are today.  With the "Dense Kids" who, despite that density, did go to nice schools.  They could afford the price of admission.  But they are a group who are doomed to repeat a history they can't begin to understand.  It's a history they will repeat because they've never tried to understand.  These "Dense Kids" haven't "figured that out" and never will. 


There is a reason for the European Union.  There is a reason there is a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Those reasons are as valid today as the day the treaties were signed.  Both happened in the aftermath of what was the most horrific decade in human history, driven by the most horrific humans - who were mainly European.


1935-45 was the lowest point in the history of our species.  When it was over, there was a universal dedication to not have that same thing ever happen again.  Institutions were founded to try and avoid a world at war with itself, a world bent on slaughter. 


Especially with the advent of nuclear weapons.  The next World War would not end with a march on Berlin (let's face it - that's where World Wars end).  If Nazi Germany had nuclear weapons they would have used them, likely early in the war but at least at the end when the Soviet and Allied forces were closing in. 


Europe fought wars constantly over the centuries.  The internecine conflicts on their little continent spilled over to their wide-ranging colonies.  The British fought the French in North America.  The British and French fought in Africa and Asia, subjugating huge populations to savage autocraticc rule. 


These were, in historical terms, real assholes. 


German history is even more odd.  "Germany" didn't even exist as an idea until the middle of the 19th century.  It was a bunch of kingdoms bundled together by Otto von Bismarck in 1871.  It was led by the Kaiser (Emperor) until WWI, and then had a brief flirtation with democracy until they elected Hitler.  And then went dark. 


After 1945, European nations were strapped together so they would have something in common.  At first, that was opposition to the Soviet bloc.  Western Europeans were on a "we're all in this together" footing as long as the Soviet Union and it's satellite nations existed as enemies.


After that there came the European Common Market, then the European Union and the common currency, the Euro.  The point of all this was only partially to make money and eliminate trade barriers. 


The big reason for all the togetherness was that when these countries didn't have firmly aligned common interests, they had savage bloody wars every few years.  That's who they are and that hasn't changed in the last 70 years. 


But the Dense Kids have forgotten or never knew that lesson.  It's obvious that the Leader of America has no idea, and has clearly given a blank cheque on foreign policy to some other Dense Kids.  Those Dense Kids want to 'get tough' with other nations.  It's interesting to see how easily the authoritarian leaders of the world - Russia's Putin and China's Xi Jinping in particular - play the American.  He just wants to be liked so they constantly flatter him and he likes them so he does what they want.


European leaders are experience politicians who are accustomed to debate and challenge.  They are used to standing up for themselves and for their national interests.  The American has no use for them - they didn't flatter him and were clearly put off by his boorishness.  So he was the quintessential stumbling foul-mouthed bore when he visited.  So much so that Germany's Merkel is now considered the leader of the "Free World." 


America can't keep that honor because the American Leader - and his party - have no honor. 


But in the wake of Brexit, Europe is facing an existential crisis.  Europe will shake apart - as it has in every century since before the Roman Empire.  What will that mean for all of us?  A nuclear-armed Europe falling back into its warring pattern would be devastating. 


There is no moderating force to keep them together.  America under Leader will look for greedy business deals as the EU disintegrates.  Russia and China will keep manipulating European politics, supporting their many fascist and racist parties.  You don't have to use your imagination to picture a Europe led by these right wing demagogues.  Just grab a history book. 


America has withdrawn the helping hand.  It is now a competitor, not a partner.  And even if the American political winds some day blow in a different direction, there can never be a real bond of trust as has existed since 1945. 


All of that stuff that humans did to other humans in Europe, it's all coming back.  We're watching the un-doing of the bonds of peace that have kept Europe from repeating their violent historical patterns. 


When the centennial of WWII comes, will we be able to say it arrived without another European war having started since?

Education and The Inner American Leader

The more we see of the American Leader's behavior, the more we understand just how awful a person he really is.  I'd hate to have the spotlight burn so intensely and relentlessly on all my words and activities (though I'd hopefully hold up to the scrutiny).  But I didn't run for Leader, and I wasn't appointed to the job by a College after I'd lost.  I call that getting "unlected." 


Part of the big reveal is in the selection of the Leader's "Moron Cabinet."  Each selection serves to highlight a different personal failure of the Orangutan Executive. 


Since Betsy DeVos - possibly the least capable person ever to be a Secretary in any department, ever, is about to unveil her (and American Leader's) big Education plan, let's start there.  What does education mean to the billionaire heiress and her primitive boss?


Leader went to Wharton for an undergraduate education.  Wharton does a few things for the Leader.  First, it's a "name" school - graduates have a certain cachet on the market (at least they did before Leader).  So an education can give you name recognition.  What else?  Well, Leader can claim that he graduated first in his class.  Records from all the way back then aren't digitized so you can't Google it.  And the school, helpfully, won't confirm anything but the fact of graduation.  The Daily Pennsylvanian puts it on record as a lie.  He wasn't even on the 56-name Dean's List.   


Go journalism!


The school is and was expensive, so there is very limited elbow-rubbing with the Hoi Polloi - that's a feature.  No use going to a school with a bunch of losers who won't grow up to be bankers you can sucker on Real Estate deals. 


School was about raising your profile and making cash connections for the future, and likely sexual liaisons of some kind.  But that's it. 
Judging from all his words and actions in the time he's been under the closest scrutiny, this is a profoundly ignorant man.  Not (necessarily) stupid.  But intellectually uncurious to an astounding degree.  He reminds us daily - hourly - of his lack not only of knowledge but of insight.  A man with a two-minute attention span will never get to the heart of anything.


Which brings us back to the cold reality of Education Secretary Heiress DeVos.  Her plan for all of America is to make American education fit the Leader's paradigm.


So here it is.  Knowledge is worthless for its own sake, so there's no great need to provide it to the unwashed,  Libtards like to stomp around about how the Poors need learning but for what?  Why does my future janitor need to study algebra?  Why does my future limo driver need to read Shakespeare?  The future minimum-wage cashiers don't even need to add and subtract figures - the register does that for them. 


If education has no value in itself, its value can only be found in it's cash flow.  Expensive schools weed out the scum and turn a nice profit.  Why not take the profit from lazy gubmint teachers and give it to Deserving corporations? 


Education has no value outside of its monetary value.  So why is it still free to freeloaders?  Everybody can get education now - and you can't even segregate the schools since the 'good old days.'  So Deserving rich kids have to go to school with Undeserving greedy 'Taker' kids (sometimes).  Hell - they even feed the poor kids!   


Heiress Betsy has a solution for all that:  vouchers.  With a voucher system, the Deserving rich can top up their vouchers with lovely piles of their own cash and get their Over-Deserving Unicorn kids into the expensive private schools which they double deserve because of their wise choice of parents.


Meanwhile, the Poors can send their kids to schools that will take basic (free!) voucher money.  And they'll keep costs down by not paying teachers and having no libraries and holding school in a strip mal or (better) church.  And since the vouchers will only pay a nickel on today's education dollar, there's Small Gubmint! 


The next logical step is to slash university funding and raise the costs and debt collections of student loans.  That's clearly a win-win.  That way, if an Undeserving Poor manages to get a
degree, the Deserving banks can still milk them for decades. 


She's going to propose pay-for-play at all levels of education.  No knowledge anymore.  No social or economic mobility.  Just like the leader wants it.


My only question about this dementia is:  where does it come from?  What poor kids pissed in Heiress Betsy's corn flakes 50 years ago?  She's been spending millions of her inherited wealth to press for a voucher system to take educational opportunity away from poor and middle-class people  for years.  And she admits that she bought her current gig with those expenditures. 


Why?  Why is she so desperate to hurt less fortunate kids (in her case that's pretty much all of them)?  I guess you could ask that about all the appointees - and the Repubs in Congress.  Why are they so passionate about hurting people?


At this point I just hope I never really get it.  I'd hate to be cruel enough to even understand their cruelty.

Good Riddance: Roger Ailes (1940-2017)

Roger Ailes is dead.  [Spit].  Good. 


Ailes ruined America to the greatest possible extent that he could.  If he could ruin it more, he would have.  Gladly. 


The longtime fascist hatchet man for Nixon and Reagan and H.W. Bush was one of the people who saw the opening when Reagan had the Fairness Doctrine removed.  That doctrine had been in place since the dawn of television (1949).  It "required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was — in the Commission's view — honest, equitable, and balanced." 


Screw that, right?  If people hear both sides of the story, they will never choose the fascist side.  Having that doctrine in place forced even the scummiest of right wing blackhearts to try to seem rational.  Not any more.


Ailes built Fox News to tell right wing lies on a 24-/7/365 basis.  He polluted the American voting public with a perspective that was pure greed and hate.  He made the American spirit smaller, meaner, uglier, and more violent.  He made people believe that immigrants were sub-human.  He got disaffected whites to vote for garbage like the Current Leader - totally against their actual interest.


His professional liars pushed stories that made their viewers believe total unabashed falsehoods.  Viewers who were raised during the Fairness Doctrine era were defenseless against Ailes' army of charlatans.  Of course you believed what the News Anchor said.  Why wouldn't you?  Utter scumbag Brit Hume sounded like Walter Cronkite.  The only difference is that Cronkite never knowingly lied, and Hume never knowingly told the truth. 


Because American political discourse had always been a 'he-said-she-said' proposition, that's how news continued to be reported.  But one side started to be convenient fiction devoid of actual facts.  The Fox News version became complete constant fiction of the most perverse sort. 


The entire economics story of every Fox News liar has always been 'tax cuts for the wealthy will solve everything.'  It's an economic theory that has proven wrong everywhere it has been tried.  It doesn't work in fact and it doesn't work in theory.  But no matter what the problem - literally - tax cuts for the rich are the answer according to the far right mythology that Ailes pimped.  It applied are the same snake oil remedy for deficits as for surpluses.  When W. Bush showed up, he had Clinton budget surpluses to use - so he handed the money to the rich in tax cuts.  On his way to tanking the world economy, the budget deficits W. rang up had only one solution:  tax cuts for the rich. 


One of the most damnable things Ailes did was to order poor whites to reject Obamacare.  Akthough it's hard to choose a nadir for the author of the Willie Horton ad.  People who desperately needed the health care that the ACA provides were lied to over and over and over again for most of a decade - and even longer, to Bill Clinton's abortive efforts to provide a health care.  Even as the ACA worked - and continues to work - the falsehood machine told people it was failing and stealing their money and precious bodily fluids.  . 



Can you imagine driving people who need health care - people who will die early and painfully without it - to oppose their own salvation?  And doing it to preserve the profits of the greed-machine private health care firms?  What sort of monster would do such a thing?


Roger Ailes.  His legacy is an American voting public who can no longer act as responsible citizens.  Americans are now willing to embrace any crazy Nazi fascist racist crap that's shoved at them. 


I'm convinced that the American Leader is a nihilist.  I don't think he believes in anything at all.  And because his nihilism is equaled only by his narcissism he has put America in a constant cycle of crisis since the day he lost the presidential election.  But he's only there because of Ailes.


Congress can thank Ailes for their Gerrymandered majorities.  Those majorities are inept and unable to govern - because they're still using Ailes playbook:  lie.  Lie all the time and people will fall into line eventually.  But when elected politicians try to fulfill promises that were always counter to provable reality, the whole system fails.


That's what we're seeing today.  The system is crumbling because every federal leader has been put in place by telling demonstrable falsehoods and cheating on elections. 


They can't do tax cuts and deficit reduction at the same time.  No matter how many times they promise it, it's never going to be true.  If Speaker Ryan can pass his draconian joke of a budget, the deficit will explode because he gave it all away to the rich. 


Try this experiment:  take all the money you can get your hands on - cash in your retirement savings and take a second and third mortgage out on your house.   Okay?  Good.  Now give it away to rich people.  That's a Ryan budget.  And when you can't pay your bills or feed your kids, it's because you are irresponsible. 
He created an ocean of fear.  The message was always the same - be afraid.  Fear your African-American neighbors.  Fear the Muslim world.  Fear anyone not in our tribe.  Fear is a great motivator.  After 9-11, fear became the currency of American politics, stoked by Fox and the rest of the extreme right.
None of that ever brought him down.  It was the sexual harassment he promoted and committed in his organization that finally forced him out.  But not before he had warped the voting public into a group that would vote for a man caught on tape bragging about his sexual assaults and misogyny. 


People believe that stuff and vote for shitheads like Ryan and Leader because of Ailes. 


Fuck him. 

Why the Civil War?

Why did the American States have to fight the Civil War back in the Olden Days, and why didn't Andrew Jackson stop it?  These are the questions nobody wants to ask.  The American Leader is right - as always - to 'go there' and get to the heart of the controversy that nobody talks about.


Actually, Leader is just really bad at using his dog whistle.  Because only the dogs are supposed to be able to hear it.  And we all heard it, right?  The American Leader was telling the American Followers that the Civil War could have been WINK! avoided. 


And how could a savvy negotiator like the Leader of America have intervened to stop the Civil War?  The negotiation would have involved agreeing to WINK!  "States Rights."  WINK! 


That's "States Rights" in the sense that the States have the Right to own human beings.  And their White guys have the right to own people of a different shading scheme. 


Slavery.  It's called Slavery.  Say the word.  And the South depended on it completely.  And they were never going to give it up no matter what.  Unless forced to do so, by a, like, a war. 


The only "too bad" part of the Civil War was that the scumbag slave owners couldn't see that it had to stop.  These were terrible people who could not function without slaves to do their work.  So they held a massive war and doggedly defended their 'right' to be bottom-feeding sewer-hole slave-owning hell-destined people.  Now their direct descendants - in thought if not in genetics - are the Leader Followers. 


And to the Leader Followers the whole Civil War thing was just a bunch of Good Ole Boys marching around whipping Yankee ass - until they had to stop because they were a lost cause.  And then it was Evil Yankee Carpetbaggers ruining the Way of Life.  And on and on until poor Jim Crow got strung up on his own favorite hang'in tree by LBJ, and then all they had left was the statues and street names. 


And soon they won't even have those (not soon enough). 


So they all understand their Leader when he laments the Civil War.  Maybe that's the real meaning of MAGA.  Maybe it's the 1850's they want to go back to and not the 1950's. 


Again, a dog whistle is supposed to be a message from the Leader that only the Followers understand.  The Repubs have been doing that for decades, talking about 'entitlements' and meaning 'the welfare that Black people get from the rest of us.'  They talked 'entitlement reform' to tell their voters that they're going to slash money that people need to live on.  And just because that would mean cutting more from the White voters than anyone else - well that's just the price we pay for continuing a 400-year race war.  Well worth it amIright?


The question remains how much of the Leader's Twooting is good old American dumbness and how much was it a message to the Followers?  Because the dumbness goes very deep in this one.  Clearly, the Leader had no idea that questioning the necessity of the Civil War was well-trodden ground.  It was so well understood that when the dog whistle was blown it sounded like a trumpet. 


The question of idiocy includes publically talking about Andrew Jackson's reaction to the terrible war, Jackson having died 16 years prior to hostilities.  That means Leader didn't know before he started talking that he would stumble - and I do mean stumble - onto this topic.  He didn't know so he didn't ask the internet whether Jackson had any thoughts on the war - or that it took place more than a decade and a half after Old Hickory's demise. 


So Leader remembered that Followers like the Confederacy, so he should throw some lament in there.  But he didn't apprehend enough about things that happened in the past to align that lament with things that actually did happen.


That's part of being the Buffoon in Charge for so long.  He must have told his Jackson stories for years when fellow racists got together at parties.  And they were as dumb or - unlikely though it may be - dumber than him.  Nobody said anything because either they didn't know history or knew the lout they were listening to and kept quiet. 


And that's all part of Truthlessness too.  There is no such think as objective verifiable Truth, so whatever I say is equal to whatever you say because everything anybody says is equally True.  So pointy-headed science and history types need to just zip it. 


In a Truthless world, the only thing that matters is power.  Economic power is the best - you can tell people they're "Fired!"  You can buy and sell things and decide to rip people off.  If you have economic power you can legally steal by not paying for things you receive.  Hey!  Sue me!


Celebrity power is great because you can abuse and assault women and guys just laugh.  You're well-known so you're treated like royalty even if you don't even have a billion dollars.  You can walk into teenage girls dressing rooms because you're famous - or was that because you're rich?  Hard to keep it straight. 


But political power is a little different.  Unlike the other two types, political power requires a modicum of consent.  Enough other people have to agree with what you want to do political things.  When the American Leader won the College of Electors, he though that was it.  Not so much.  Because other politicians - not all of them celebrities or billionaires - won other elections.  And the Leader needs to have them want what he wants, and stull have the Followers at home want the same things. 


Nobody knew it was going to be this complicated. 


The Followers want lots of Civil War talk and they respond to DOG WHISTLES.  But Paul Ryan can't seem to get anything done in the House.  I mean, just because he's never gotten anything done in the House is no reason to think stuff wouldn't get done.  Truthlessly.  And the rich people just want him to give back all their money from the Poors, but then the Freedom people won't go into massive debt for the deserving wealthy.  And the Senate needs to stop needing 60 votes like they have ever since history.  Mitch cheated to get the stolen Supreme Court spot filled.  Why can't he just keep cheating?


Obviously, this is all the Democrats fault. 


Let's hope Barron gets assigned a book report on the Red Badge of Courage or something so we can get this sorted out.

100 Day Watch

That had to be the weirdest 100 days in American history.  A political party entirely based on self-serving falsehoods is in control of every aspect of the American federal government.  For the previous eight years there had been an executive who could keep the Truthless inanity in check.  Now - all bets are off. 


The only thing keeping hope alive for the millions of Americans who are appalled and angry by the worst of us being in charge (not to mention the billions of human beings around the globe who are equally apoplectic) is that they're so bad at it.


The American Leader has Tweeted resentfully about being measured on the '100 Day' standard.  I won't quote the Tweets - the fact that Twitter is his main venue of communication is embarrassing enough.  Marshall Mcuhan, the great media theoretician, famously taught us:  "the medium is the message."  And the American Leader's medium is something called a "Tweet." 


Message received.


The W. Bush Junta seemed like a governmental nadir at the time.  We're learning that they can go lower.  The history of that benighted regime - from the stolen 2000 election to the war of choice to the attempted murder of Social Security - seems to have been tossed into the Memory Hole.  Those were dark days.  The Bush Junta used the 9-11-2001 terror attack to bludgeon its enemies.  Anyone who didn't fall into line with their installation of the Surveillance State was the enemy.  Democrats in Congress fell obediently in line with whatever the hateful cowardly Cheney-Bush scum wanted to do, including a bloody needless war. 


But the thing about the Junta was that they were seasoned veterans of government - though not the armed forces (the Bush 'war hawks' had the wealth and connections to get Vietnam War deferments.  Poor kids died in the jungle in their places). 


The Cheney-Rumsfeld types played by the rules because they knew the rules.  They dominated Congress because they knew how Congress worked.  They got their tax cuts and war and private data collection and invasions of privacy and drone bombing and environmental destruction done through the real levers of power.


This new bunch can't do any of that.  They're true outsiders in the sense that they are such extreme ignoramuses and rapacious know-nothings that nobody would ever have thought to bring them anywhere close to the federal government.  Even the Leader himself - what federal job would he ever have been appointed to?  Nixon wouldn't have hired him to plant microphones at his crappy hotels.  He couldn't be trusted. 


The Bush Junta represented the Banality of Evil with its administrative mastery of domestic cruelty, meaningless use of military force, and radical ideological incompetence in the occupation of Iraq.  They could make their friends rich but couldn't get anyone else a job. 


They knew how to make a mess but could not figure out how to clean one up.


The new Leader's bunch doesn't even know that much.  As hard as they try to do things like withdraw lifesaving health care from millions of Americans, they just can't get it right.  And that's not just the multiple bumbling billionaires in the administration itself.  That's "Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver" Paul Ryan and the Kongressional Keystone Kops that he leads.


Ryan has accomplished nothing in Congress other than to catch enough media coverage to become a VP candidate and, unbelievably, Speaker of the House.  Previous Speakers have been people who could build coalitions well enough to move legislation to passage.  They made sure there was enough material in each bill to satisfy just as many Representatives as were needed to ensure passage. 


Ryan has none of that.  Everything he's done over the course of his career has been a pantomime.  He wasn't in charge of anything so he could write 'budgets' with no real numbers and bloodless damning cuts to needed social programs.  They were not meant to be passed, they were meant as red meat to the Neanderthals back home.  Their voters were cultivated with the Truthless policies he published. 


The Rubes and the Caucasian Poors  got the lessons they were meant to learn.  "Government always bad."  "Health care makes non-whites healthy too, so nobody should have it!"  On and on.


But now because all of the responsible people have been run out of the Party, he's the only one left who even looks sober enough to drive home.  He spent years pretending he was sensible.  Now everybody is looking at him to actually pass all the cartoons he's been drawing. 


But it's all wax fruit.  It was never meant to be consumed.  Today it's the main course. 


So an administration that cannot cease stomping on its own foot is relying on Congressional leadership that can't stop knocking over the supper table.  Their only real "success" was in confirming robot judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.  But they couldn't get enough votes to actually do that.  An extremely limp Senate Majority Leader had to change a  200-year-old Senate rule that was considered sacred in order to do it. 


That's not a "victory," guys. 


The American Leader will continue to scribble his name on Executive Orders he likely hasn't read, but unless he can move things in Congress, sign them, and be backed by the Supreme Court, it's meaningless.  Real presidents have laws passed.  Without that, why bother? 


The 100 Day standard has shown this circus for what it is.  No jugglers, no high-wire act, no Ringleader.


Just clowns.

Batshit

I've just read the transcript of the recent AP interview with the American Leader.  And it's just flaming batshit sideways nutjob crazy.  This is a person who should not be allowed out of his house without an escort carrying a tranc gun.  The Leader of all the Americans is dumber and crankier than Uncle Charley from My Three Sons. 


I'd say "go read it if you have any doubts" but, first, who doubts?  Second, don't read it because if you're not already Canadian you'll want to come here and we're all full up on Americans.  And third, don't read it because your brain will become very angry with you and that never ends well. 


The Leader of America has, thankfully, failed at everything except getting enormously unqualified people into jobs that they are purposefully incapable of performing adequately.  George Orwell couldn't have picked a more savage bunch of fascists, racists and idiots. 


He says, Truthlessly, that he's accomplished nearly everything he promised to do within his first 100 days.  "Well, I'm mostly there on most items."  Like what?  He goes on about the electoral college, again, Truthlessly. 


It's almost comical when he rambles about how he has 'chemistry' with foreign leaders.  They're nice to him!  The fat dope American Leader has foreigners treating him with lots of completely unearned respect.  It's as if these people actually know about diplomacy.  It's as if they have their own constituents back home who they've convinced to put them in charge - who could know they'd be charismatic?  Unreal. He thinks they're just being nice because he's so Leadery. 


Clearly they're being very, very careful.  They're handling him the way you'd handle a drunk heavyweight Ultimate Fighter if you'd spilled a drink on him at a metal bar. 


He's jazzed that he saved $725 million on some F-35 fighters by - probably illegally - threatening Lockheed with giving the contract - again illegally - to Boeing.  $725 million.  The Pentagon spends well over $1 billion a day.  $725 million isn't even a rounding error to them.  And Lockheed would never dream of getting their money back on cost overruns on other contracts.  A major defense contractor would never do such a thing.  Never. 


This is what he spends his time on when he's not watching Fox & Friends.


He's been calling China a 'currency manipulator' for years (Truthlessly).  They stopped doing that a long time ago.  Now he thinks he can't call them out on that while they're helping him with North Korea.  Why?  If they were manipulating currency (which they're not) wouldn't you want your American Leader to try to do something about that?  So what they're helping with the NK's?  Can't you do both at once?  Isn't that part of negotiating - dealing on multiple exchanges that are both friendly and adversarial?  Didn't someone claim that he is a master negotiator?  I know I heard that at some point. 


Here's what he said about his very Leadership-like Syrian missile strike:  "When it came time to, as an example, send out the 59 missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I'm saying to myself, "You know, this is more than just like, 79 (sic) missiles. This is death that's involved," because people could have been killed." 


Umm, yes people "could have been killed."  When you fire $18 million in munitions at people, you presumably want to kill at least some of them.  Otherwise why not just send a firmly-worded note?  He goes on to explain that since the missiles were sent by "boats" that were "hundreds of miles away" they could have hit a "hamlet" or something.  So the American Leader thinks the GPS guided missiles could have gotten lost on the way?  And does he not know that his government has been drone-bombing "hamlets" for over a decade with thousands of innocent lives being taken?  This is news to the American Leader in charge?


He observes that the American government is really big - without resorting the word "huge" or it's derivative "hugely" for which we must grudgingly give him credit because fairness!  He does call out the "bigness of it" so he loses that credit immediately. 


We need to stop for a moment and examine the word "unintelligible" as in 'what the Leader of America said was unintelligible.'  As in the Associated Press, working with the journalists who did the interview could not figure out what the American Leader was saying.  Think about that.  They couldn't even make a stab at it.  Seventeen times.  17 times. 


He also used the (non) word "impalatable."  Like 'not palatable' like something you don't want.  He must hear 'not palatable' constantly in his life and has a need to shorten it. 


He's definitely going to build the Mexico wall but may sign a budget without wall money, so there's that.  He explained that he said NATO was obsolete back when he thought they were obsolete but walked back that statement by saying that now he knows what NATO is and it 's all good because they're obsolete, or something. 


He endorses Marine Le Pen in France without endorsing her but endorses her.  And when the American Leader was called on it he was all like "hey I'm just some guy saying who should win just like any other schmuck."  And when asked about France again he talks more about the wall he's going to build for sure some day because 1% of drugs are worth billions of dollars or something.


Should the cherub-faced spirit of Jim Crow - Attorney General Jefferson Sessions - go after Wikileaks creature Julian Assange?  Well, "never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it."  Really?  "...But if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision, but if they want to do it, it's OK with me."  Good to know there's firm direction from the top.


On his address to Congress:  " A lot of the people have said that, some people said it was the single best speech ever made in that chamber."  Right.  I guess Lincoln never went there.


"I've done a lot. I've done more than any other president in the first 100 days and I think the first 100 days is an artificial barrier."  Let that sink in.


"I think my military team has been treated with great respect."  Is that supposed to mean something?  Really - please comment if there is any information intended to be conveyed by those words.  'My team is being treated with respect?'  Was there some intimation at any time that a senior military advisor to the Leader would not be treated with respect?  Or a White House official?  Was there a movie scene where somebody got mad in the Situation Room and yelled "fuck you, general?"


He Truthlessly quoted Rep. Elijah Cummings as having said "you will be the greatest president. He said you will be, in front of five, six people, he said you will be the greatest president in the history of this country."  Cummings challenged him to be a better man.  This is the answer he got back.


He quotes CNN and MSNBC and then immediately claims that he stopped watching them more than a year ago. 


But what really got ne was the difference he pointed out between the business world and government.  "Heart."  Business has none, and all this government stuff is about people so you need to think about humans. 


"You have to love people. And if you love people, such a big responsibility. (unintelligible) You can take any single thing, including even taxes."  And then he launches into a rambling tax reform word combination.  'You gotta love people and even when you're looking at taxes I'm looking at taxes we're going to do big taxes stuff and SQUIRREL!'


Absolutely surreal.  This is a 70 year old man who never realized that government stuff is human stuff.  When you stop health care for millions of people lots of them are going to die.  When you fire a bunch of missiles at people some people at the other end are going to not be alive at the end of the explody part. 


If you read this transcript and pretend it's an interview with a local grocer or something and not the Leader of America you'd wonder why somebody took all that time to question such a dumb cranky old gasbag.  Did Uncle Charley used to be famous or something? 


This is a man who fundamentally misapprehends his role in the world.  He desperately needs to be liked.  Did he talk to Germany's Merkel or Britain's May about the Iran deal?  " I mention it, but it's very personal when I talk to them, you know, it's confidential."  Personal how?  Personal why?  Why would you speak personally but not professionally with two major heads of state?


He just wants to be liked and have "chemistry" with people.  There's no strategy or policy objective other that being liked and getting paid.  And he constantly tries to self-validate over the Electoral College which he constantly and Truthlessly claims is tilted in favour of Democrats - of course the opposite is true.  He obsesses about TV ratings increases when he does interviews.  Of course the ratings go up.  Who doesn't want to watch the Crazy President Show?


If you edited out everything in the interview that's not - or shouldn't be - his job, it would be about a paragraph.  It's almost 100 days in and the American Leader is becoming more and more disjointed and delusional. 


Where do we go from here?  I so don't want to find out.

Truthlessness

Like everybody else, I've been trying to figure out how the US came to be led by it's worst citizens.  Part of the story is what I'm choosing to call "Truthlessness." 


It's not that the truth is not told.  It's not that the lies are thicker than the blackflies in Maine.  It's that there is no sense that there is a truth to understand.  There is no science.  There are no facts.  The Leader of America and all his appointees just think certain things based on the fact that they think them.  It's enough to think something is real - then it's real.


And that's okay for hateful greedy reality TV stars and assorted internet whackjobs.  But now that's the decision-making that's running America.  The American Leader says he was wiretapped by the previous administration, so it's true.  No amount of it not being true matters - if you says it's so, that's it.


The confirmation hearings for the new cabinet was dark humor.  They could literally have shown up in overalls and 'answered' questions in Russian - nothing they said mattered.  The Leader's stooges in the Senate had the votes - except in the case of the smarmy new Supreme Court Justice.  I that case they lost the vote so they changed the rules.   


Nothing that any of them said matters because there is no such thing as Truth.  So Betsy de Voss gets to be Education Secretary, in charge of the American public school system.  She's never taught in or attended a public school.  She thinks the Poors are given too much school and wants to withdraw school by making education at all levels a pay-for-play.  You want learning?  Pony up. 


The fact that education is the only thing that allows social or economic mobility is not relevant.  The fact that she demonstrably knows nothing about the topic of education but hates public learning is not relevant.  She thinks something and her inherited wealth makes it true. 


Rick Perry wanted to abolish the Energy Department when he twice ran for president.  Before his confirmation hearing he had to be told what the department does.  Don't matter.  There is no Truth.


Ben Carson was a sleepy-eyed former doctor.  Now he's the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development.  Why?  Because he grew up in a city?  It doesn't matter that he thinks the Egyptian pyramids were used to store grain - even though they're made of solid rock.  It doesn't matter that he has no more than a passing New York Post level of knowledge of Housing or Urban Affairs.  He's reliably on-side and lives the shared dream of Truthlessness. 


The rest are the same.  The American Leader and his government are there for their personal gain.  They want money and power.  But they can't earn money and power because they have no knowledge or skills.  But they are ideologues who can tell the Poors and Rubes enough non-information to get elected and appointed. 


To say they tell lies implies that there is a truth that they purposefully deny.  To them, there may or may not be a truth, but telling a self-serving story is always better.  For example, there may or may not be anthropogenic climate change going on, but if it is happening it doesn't help them.  So they deny it and call it a conspiracy theory.  Does it matter that it's true and they're dooming their grandchildren to living on a despoiled planet?  Please.  What matters is that they can stop doing things that are not in their economic or political interest.  They can help their friends to some short-term coal cash. 


But it becomes deadly very quickly when the American Leader starts to use his Truthlessness internationally.  To foreign leaders, truth matters.  When North Korea is threatened by an "armada," it could lead to a war which would cost hundreds or thousands of lives.  That's Truth.  It doesn't matter that being tough on Kim Jung Un plays well with the flyover states. 


And in case you were wondering, there is NO military option with North Korea.  The city of Seoul, South Korea (population 10 million) is within artillery distance from North Korea.  North Korea has a huge stockpile of chemical weapons that it can fire via artillery at the city.  If consulted, South Korea would never allow a strike against NK - it would mean the death of hundreds of thousands. 


Big the Truthless American Leader doesn't know or care.  The President of China had to explain the history of Korea to him.  And he admitted that he didn't know 10 minutes of the history of a country he's sending warships to intimidate - or worse.  A foreign leader had to explain it to him - where was the American State Department to explain this stuff?  Will he just not listen to them?  And what did the head of a communist super-power tell him?  What Chinese story does the American Leader now believe?  And does it fit with the Russian stories he believes?


What difference does history make, anyway?  It's just facts, and there are no facts. 


Imagine waking up in a world that you just make up as you go.  Somebody tells you some bad people did stuff, you just go with the first thing you think.  You don't try to know who they are or what they want or anything like that.  They're bad and that's that.  Hit them. 


Truthlessness.

Cowardice

Cowardice.  It is the primary and defining value of the Repub Party.  The motive in everything they do comes down to a quavering fear of something.  They like to think that they are 'tough guys' (even the few women they allow into the club).  But real tough people don't lash out mindlessly and violently.  Strength lies in self-control, and there's none of that coming from this abomination.


That's not something that is understood by the Current American Executive (CAE).  While he shares their fears and usually one-up's their cowardice, he didn't seem to see Paul Ryan's collapse on health care coming. 


Ryan - somehow Speaker of the House and shockingly a former VP candidate - is a long-established liar on policy and, well, everything,  He even lied about his marathon time.  Who does that? 


I'm certainly not the first (but let me be the latest) to point out that Ryan has never actually accomplished anything in his political career.  He's known for a series or cartoonishly harsh budget proposals that rip the social contract into confetti by cutting virtually all the money from human beings and lavishing it on recipients who need it the absolute least.  He wants the nation to go into massive debt for the military and to gift the most fortunate, but won't buy a starving kid a Happy Meal.


Charles Pierce got it exactly right years ago when he called Ryan a "zombie-eyed granny starver."


But what was really comical was his cave on health care.  The most 'conservative' (read: barbaric) group in Congress - the "Fascist Freedom Caucus" - wanted a health care bill with no health care in it.  The ACA replacement that guaranteed a health insurance death spiral wasn't deadly enough for them, so they wouldn't vote for it. 


That was all well and good - but then the CAE decided to force a vote.  Uh oh.  The CAE's a coward, but he has the guts of a gambler.  He's willing to push all the chips in and see what happens.  That's why he's been bankrupt so many times - but also why he's won a few.  This, I thought, might work.


The ultra-crazies might talk a good game about not supporting the ACA cancellation, but what would they do when forced to actually vote?  Their 'no' vote would be a 'yes' for the ACA.  Could they really go home for re-election having voted to keep the program that they'd run against and promised to destroy for seven years?


But Ryan came to the rescue.  The CAE might have the guts of a gambler, but Paul Ryan's got the cojones of a flea.  A particularly small flea.  A flea that other fleas make fun of for being extra small.  And for for being an abject flea coward. 


Ryan cancelled the vote.  No brinksmanship for Ryan.  He has to protect his phony-baloney job at any cost. 


Whew!  Glad we can count on the Speaker to be as craven as we always thought he was.  He's on to do taxes and impoverish as many people as he can.  The Republican Clown Car rolls on...

First Current American Executive (CAE) Post

Like a lot of people, I've been stunned to near silence by the emergence of this existential threat to the American experiment in democracy.  In less than three months, the new administration has made a real mess of what used to be a pretty decent country.  And it's not just the administration.  As I've said countless times - modern Republican politicians are all this bad.  The Paul Ryan Congress and Mitch McConnell Senate are filled with delusional whackjobs who are every bit as bad as the psycho in the White House.  Their schemes work because they cheat.  Congress as a whole is Gerrymandered so that Republicans lose by millions of votes and still have control of both houses.  And the executive Leader lost by 3 million votes and was appointed anyway - by an Electoral College that was put in place to preserve the institution of slavery.

So. 

Here are a couple of things that have been rattling around my skull for the past few weeks. 

1.  He's Gay

Not that there's anything wrong with that.  I say that not as any form of insult, but as a conjecture about his sexuality.  I'm reminded of South Park:

Kyle:  I'm sorry I called you a fat fuck.
Cartman:  I'm sorry I called you a Jew.
Kyle:  I am a Jew you fat fuck!

There are a number of reasons that I think the Current American Executive (CAE) is a closeted homosexual.  And I think it must be a terrible thing to live a lie and not be able to express who you are - I really feel for anyone in the closet.


First, he's been married to a series of models.  What better beard could there be?  Everyone agrees they're beautiful.  They're paid money for their looks.  And they've borne him children - he must be attracted to them, right?  But I think the massive ego of the fat man wants to have a legacy and push his execrable gene pool forward - I don't think he has any interest in them.  He's shown no actual affection for any woman other than his model daughter. 


Second - the "grab 'em by the pussy" remark.  No guy says that.  Heterosexual men don't ever talk like that.  How many men have said that since the remark was first heard?  We all say it:  guys just don't talk like that, ever.  But.  A homosexual man who does not understand the attraction of men for women may well say that.  Just as I don't know what gay men say to and about one another, the CAE is similarly befuddled about straight men.


Third - he's thin-skinned and defensive because I think he's conditioned himself to constant vigilance against discovery.  At 70 years old, he's of a generation that could not come out of the closet.  His belief system (such as it is) comes from a being raised in the 1950's.  That was not today's world of legal marriage and increased social justice.  That was a time when the man who won WWII for England - Alan Turing - was convicted of the crime of homosexuality and chemically castrated which led to his tragic suicide.  They should have been building statues of the man and naming universities after him.  Instead they killed him for being gay. 


The CAE cannot be who he is, and the repression has unhinged him.  Or, more accurately, added to the base derangement that guides him.


Which leads me to the last bit:  what does Putin have on him?  If Putin secretly made men available to him when he was in Moscow and has recordings of the acts that they engaged in, it would be ironclad blackmail material.  And if the golden shower story is true - it doesn't say he had sex with the women involved.  In that situation - why else wouldn't he?
The CAE would do anything to keep the gay videos secret.


2.  Russia


Speaking of Putin's Russia, it occurred to me that the Republican Party is really working hard for them.  Collectively, they're Russia's Employee of the Month pretty much every month.  Why?  Because they're doing what they always want to do.


What I mean is that for many years - since Reagan and maybe even Goldwater - Repubs have been running on a platform that says:  government is always the problem, never the solution.  Government needs to be tiny and not work at all.  When they've been in power, they've striven to make government bumbling and useless so nobody wants it and they can cut it.  Their aim is to run it into the ground so they can discredit and destroy it (for a number of reasons starting with giving money to rich people). 


So if you're, say, Russia and you want to, say, destroy America (or cripple its ability to act in the world) - what's the best way to go about it?  Easy!  Get the Repubs elected and they'll do it for you. 


If you hated Finland, for example, and the Finns had a Responsible Party and a Lets Tear This Shit Down Party (LTTSD Party)  wouldn't you just help the LTTSD's?  And since the LTTSD's were a bunch of dopey racist know-nothing rich guys, they wouldn't need your money.  You could help them Gerrymander with great ideas on cheating democracy.  You could also hack the Responsible Party for them and give the info to an increasingly unhinged truther (thanks Julian Assange!). 


And then just sit back and watch the JTTSD Party do exactly what they promised to do.  In the chaos, your country could pretty well do anything they wanted without any fear of a coordinated response to your perfidy.  Watching the CAE and the evil brainless henchmen he's assembled, plus the circus that passes for governance in Congress, it seems a bit like the end of a 1970's scare movie about nuclear war. The worst humans in America are in complete charge and they're tearing this shit down. 


They don't need Russia or anyone else to help them.  It's an assisted suicide of the American Dream.

P.S.  Just sayin. 

They Don't Sleep Together.
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