2016 Jan 31^st

Sorry about yesterday: never trust electrons, even they don’t know where they are half the time.

We have an election soon where the party in power despises the party in power’s leading candidates for that party’s Presidential nomination. Isn’t that just delightful? (Yes, I know all about Schadenfreude; it’s built into the genes of the Pennsylvania Dutch.) Consider the two leading Republican contenders, Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz: For the upcoming Iowa Caucus tomorrow Iowa Governor Terry Branstad has told Iowans that the nomination of Ted Cruz would be disastrous; it would destroy the party. Branstad is a very popular Iowa governor; he has been Governor of Iowa on and off for over twenty years and even though he is clearly a member of the establishment, Iowans will pay attention to him.  Could Branstad be said to have dis-endorsed Cruz? We also know that Cruz is unpopular with his Senate colleagues. Sometime ago he could not get a second for a routine Senate motion. His hope tomorrow is that he’ll get the evangelical vote. He’ll get some of it but that might not be enough.

Donald Trump is playing his hand superbly: He ducked the debate because he said that he had been “treated unfairly.” Then in an interview on his enormous airplane he said that everything was fine because Fox had “apologized” for this unfair treatment. He refused to say who at Fox had apologized. The usual savagery Republican candidates show toward the lead actor in their mini- tragedy was quickly transferred from Trump to poor Ted Cruz. It was interesting to watch these Republicans throwing nasties at each other instead of at the Democrats. Democrats will recover all of these criticisms and use them against the Republican winner in the general election. Ah, the perils of savagery, which sometimes return to bite the originator!

Neither Trump nor Cruz fare very well with the right wing columnists: The intellectual dean of this group, George Will, has used considerable ink to bash away at Donald Trump. Here is an example.

“If you look beyond Donald Trump’s comprehensive unpleasantness — is there a disagreeable human trait he does not have? — you might see this: He is a fundamentally sad figure. His compulsive boasting is evidence of insecurity. His unassuageable neediness suggests an aching hunger for others’ approval to ratify his self-admiration. His incessant announcements of his self-esteem indicate that he is not self-persuaded. Now, panting with a puppy’s insatiable eagerness to be petted, Trump has reveled in the approval of Vladimir Putin, murderer and war criminal.”

Bill O’Reilly, of Fox news fame, rejects Will’s bashing of Trump; and why is that you may ask? Bill O’Reilly’s co-authored “history” books, all titled the death of this or that historical figure, have not been kindly received by George Will, who is at pains to point out their shortcomings, which are many; so O’Reilly is now at pains to return the favor and dump on Will’s dumping on Trump….And so it goes ad nauseam.

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2016 Jan 30^th

A computer glitch erased tonight’s blog. I’ll be back tomorrow with some truly trenchant comments. Stay tuned.

2016 Jan 29^th

I saw Mona Charen’s column this morning and thought I would have something to tilt against, wrong-o. Mona is not happy with Donald Trump, neither is she happy with Senator Ted Cruz. She is sure that either of them, if nominated, will bring disaster on her party. Hey…when the woman is right, she’s right! Mona maintains that both Cruz and Trump are planning to get the “evangelical” vote. I’m not sure what Mona means by that. Usually evangelicals are those who believe in a very literal interpretation of the Bible. Many classified as evangelicals are not Biblical literalists at all and see many of the New Testament stories as metaphor. Even though there about 95 million evangelicals in the United States, not all of them will vote Republican anyway. Then there is the problem that for every evangelical these candidates cozy up to a non-evangelical may be lost by that same message.  Ms. Charen is very unhappy with the way things are going in her party. I wonder who’s to blame for that.

What I hope is a final note on the Oregon occupation, the FBI has released a video taken from an aircraft and showing the fatal shooting of La Voy Finicum. Mr. Finicum is shown getting out of his vehicle with his hands up, about thirty seconds later he begins reaching into his waistband and is promptly shot dead. He had said many times that he wouldn’t be taken alive and he did everything he could to guarantee that boast. Unfortunately the seditionists now have a martyr. No one will believe the FBI film; they will all claim it was doctored. First term Nevada Assemblywoman Shelly Shelton compares Finicum to Moses and to Christ. (A private subscription for a statue can’t be far off.)

The big event yesterday was the Republican debate sans Trump, who held his own celebration of himself just a few blocks away. Deciding to miss the debate was a smart move. He had nothing to gain by appearing and by having a competing event he guaranteed himself far more camera coverage than if he had shown up. It seems obvious that his posturing about Megyn Kelly’s “unfairness” was just a cover. I’m sure he had planned to skip the debate from the get-go. He managed to contact people with plenty of disposable income and raised 6 million dollars for veterans. We’ll be charitable and assume that the pledges given for the money will be honored.

Not all groups appealing for money to support veterans are using much more than half of the money collected to actually support veterans, The “Wounded Warrior Project,” very heavily advertised on TV, manages to spend just over 60 percent of its collection on veterans. The rest goes for expanses like conferences at the Broadmoor, a five star hotel in Colorado Springs. There are about 900 thousand veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and they need help. That help should be the responsibility of all of us through increased taxes and increased government support for veterans.

2016 Jan 28^th

The occupation of some federal land in Oregon by a couple of dozen out-of-state ranchers who wanted to send a message is nearly at an end. The message, one hopes, has been duly noted by other ranchers and amateur seditionists as well, and it is, “Don’t do that!” Much of this saga was an exercise in stupidity from the very beginning. These ranchers were there to protest federal land policy, particularly those of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) which sets the policy by which federal lands can be used for cattle grazing, logging and other purposes. These ranchers seemed to believe that they had a right to use the federal land adjacent to their ranches just as they pleas

ed. One of the group, named Clevon Bundy, some two years ago just refused to pay grazing fees that had been in arears for some time. The result was that now his sons and some like-minded friends decided to go up to Oregon and occupy an empty building in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge 30 miles from the town of Burns, Oregon, as a protest.

All of the occupiers had guns, and they also had some women and children with them. They moved into the temporarily abandoned government buildings at the Refuge and settled in for an extended stay. No one seemed to care; they were out in the middle of nowhere, but that changed. A number of them regularly went into the town of Burns for supplies. The presence of heavily armed strangers coming into a tiny town of three thousand was unnerving to the inhabitants and the citizens began to complain about it. The occupiers must have thought that these rural folks would be nothing but sympathetic. Some were, but most just wanted these armed strangers gone. Eventually the Oregon state government took notice and finally the federal government as well. The FBI was on its way. (Many people believed that if heavily armed black people had occupied a federal building in Chicago the government would not have been so forbearing.)  

Two large SUV s left the compound and when they were well away the federal agents stopped them. The occupants of one surrendered peacefully enough but the driver of the other vehicle took off at high speed right into a well manned road block where the fleeing vehicle got stuck in the snow. Here is where the tale gets to “he said, she said.” One of these ranchers named La Voy Finicum had proclaimed that he had joined this group prepared to die and that he would not be taken alive. He carried a .45 in a waistband and when he emerged from the car he reached into that waistband and was instantly shot dead by the FBI people trying to arrest him. The people in the car at the time have a different story, but then Finicum was the only casualty and given what he had said about not being taken alive, his death isn’t that surprising. There are still half a dozen or so occupiers left at the refuge. They are trying to bargain with the FBI hoping that if they do leave they will not be arrested. No immediate word about how this negotiation is going.

An interesting sidebar here: Finicum, the rancher, had been providing “foster care” for about 50 boys over the years. That was his primary source of income; it wasn’t from ranching it was from the state government for providing foster care for boys. The boys were also available to help with ranch chores. Isn’t that wild… Finicum a government hater feeding at his state government trough.

2016 Jan 27^th

The top political news of the day is surely Donald Trump (“Mr.” Trump to all of his employees) withdrawing from the next Republican debate. Trump will not show up for the debate scheduled for tomorrow night, the last debate before the Iowa caucus. Trump claims that Fox News, one of the debate sponsors, does not treat him “fairly.” The unfairness here is that a Trump nemesis, Megyn Kelly, will be one of the questioners. The last time Trump faced questions from Megyn Kelly she cited several of his most misogynous comments and asked him to respond. His response was to attack Kelly and imply that such vicious questioning meant that Kelly was having her period and insisted that she apologize to him. There was no chance of that.

Now his spokesman, Corey Lewandowski, has sent a message to Fox News claiming concern for Megyn Kelly’s welfare should she have to participate in the upcoming debate. Then Trump’s people slammed Fox for making public this veiled threat and insisted that Donald Trump simply wanted to be treated fairly and that since that wasn’t being done he would not appear on the debate stage, so there! Megyn Kelly’s role in this dust-up is impossible for Trump to obscure. Let’s be clear, Megyn Kelly is no pussycat. She is an attorney and knows how to bore in on a hostile witness. If she tangles with Trump his favorite phrase, “excuse me,” used to silence unpleasant questioners, might not be enough to protect him.

Trump has, by withdrawing from the debate, opened himself to some perfectly reasonable criticism from Senator Cruz. If Donald Trump cannot handle questions from Megyn Kelly without running away and crying “unfair” what will he do when the discussant is Vladimir Putin, one of the Castro brothers or Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader. I’m certain all of them will recognize that Trump just wants is to be treated “fairly” and they will respond accordingly. The problem is that Trump’s silliness on this issue matters not a bit to his followers. If you look at the comments by them at the end of the story there is almost universal praise for him and some severe scolding of Fox news and Megyn Kelly who are obviously at fault. His followers believe that Trump was quite justified to walk away from the debate given Fox News’ unfair treatment of him.

His physical absence on debate night will not silence questions about him or about his policies. His competitors will have a field day bashing “The Donald” who will have to wait to defend himself until the audience for the debate has dispersed or changed the channel. He may not lose any current fans but this does seem like a dumb move.

2016 Jan 26^th

Today I heard one of the TV anchors bring up Eric Hoffer’s “True Believers.” The occasion was Trump’s brag that he could shoot someone and not lose a vote. She agreed with him, and pointed out that true believers, according to Hoffer, cling to the bombast and braggadocio that promises them hope; they are not concerned with specifics. If a 6’3’’ aging billionaire promises to fix everything if you will only give him a chance why would any middle and lower income, struggling, poorly educated, middle-aged, angry white person ask “how?” Keep in mind that Trump’s audiences, by the thousands, are so disengaged with the real world that they will stand in line for hours and hours for the chance to see the man who promises to remedy their problems.

I now move from the ultimate fantasy to the ultimate realism: Let’s look at the betting odds given by a prominent British bookie, Paddy Power. As I mentioned here before, it is illegal for Americans to bet on our elections so the betting parlors for our Presidential elections are all offshore, in this case, in Britain. These odds are offered by people whose only interest is in making money; there are no ideologues here. The odds given by Paddy Power are purely in the interest of making money for Paddy Power.

Who is the favorite to win the Republican nomination? It is Donald Trump at even odds; Rubio is 9 to 4; Cruz is 6 to 1; Bush is 9 to 1. If you bet on Trump and he wins the nomination you double your money. If you bet on Rubio to win the nomination and you’re right, a four dollar bet will return nine dollars (plus your initial bet of course). A one dollar bet on Bush will return nine dollars if Bush wins.

On the Democratic side the very clear favorite is Hillary Clinton. If you bet on Clinton to win the nomination you must risk five dollars to win one additional dollar; Sanders is 7 to 2 and Biden is 16 to 1. The Brits believe that Secretary Clinton has the nomination well in hand.

Then comes the Big Kahuna, the election itself. The odds of a Clinton win are 10 to 11, very nearly even; if you bet on her and she wins you won’t quite double your money. Trump’s odds are 3 to 1; Rubio 6 to 1; Sanders 7 to 1: Cruz 18 to 1; and Bush 20 to 1.

How accurate are these odds? That’s unknown, but these are professional odds makers and it wouldn’t be smart to bet against them.

                       

2016 Jan 25^th

There is usually some piece of right wing idiocy in the national press, and when there is I am delighted to bring that to your attention. Every couple of months the idiocy is local and this community’s coziness should not exempt its leaders from similar examination.

This morning’s paper carries a story about Jeffrey Turner who wanted to discuss a city issue regarding building height with Brian Haas a supporter of high buildings and a city commissioner. Turner found Haas’ place of business, TC Venture Partners, located on the second floor of a building above the Omelette Shoppe, not exactly a high traffic area. Now Venture Partners’ web site is not fully operational but what information is on it touts it as “investments and consulting.” It would not be unreasonable to assume that Haas might have a financial interest in pushing the commission to approve a modification of the building code. Turner found Haas business address and had a very brief discussion with Nicholas Perez, another principal and founder of Venture Partners. Turner asked Perez for a business card, didn’t get it; Perez asked Turner to leave which he did.

This was vastly complicated by Turner taking many pictures, possibly with his cell phone, of the office corridors mail boxes and even of Perez who decided to take pictures of Turner taking pictures of him. Now Perez, armed with a picture of Turner decided to alert the business community on Cass Street that a picture taker was on the loose and so informed Ms. Karen Roofe Hilt who owns, My Secret Stash, a nearby store. Hilt felt it necessary to post Turner’s picture on Facebook and label him “The Cass Street Creeper.” She claimed the name appealed to her feeling for alliteration. Now Turner must deal with the comments that inevitably flow when someone posts his picture on Facebook with a label like that.

Now enter the city police called by Perez who apparently believed that picture taking compromised his welfare. Turner had walked by his building several more times taking still more pictures and was clearly up to no good. Finally we have Haas complaining to Coburn the city manager who then sends police to Turner’s home to warn him to stay away from Venture Capital’s office and Haas (who has yet to even meet Turner).

I wonder what the reaction would have been had Turner, instead of appearing with a camera, had walked up and down the street with a holstered pistol on his hip. Maybe we need a Constitutional Amendment reading, “A citizen’s right to keep and use a camera shall not be infringed.”…More seriously, what right do the police have, without a court order, to limit the free movement of any citizen on public property? No court ordered restraint is described here. Was there any court action to limit Turner’s movement? I don’t know.

Then we have the playful Facebook post by Hilt who characterized Turner as the “Cass Street Creeper.” She just liked the alliteration and of course Perez, telling her about Turner with his awful camera, scared her half to death. I would bet that Hilt would have a hard time defending herself against a charge of internet harassment if Turner wanted to get an aggressive attorney. I doubt that Hilt’s claim that “Turner is still welcome in her store” would matter much….And then we have Haas telling us that, “He’s willing to meet with anyone, just call him first.” OK, but perhaps you’ll have to leave any cameras at home.

2016 Jan 24^th

Yesterday’s Detritus began with a dismissive comment about New Yorker’s angst over a mere 14.7 inches of Central Park snow. I must apologize for that comment because 14.7 inches has now become 26.8 inches, just an eighth inch short of a Central Park record. There is another reason: A very close friend, born in the City (That’s New York City…what other city could there be?) was very distressed by my comment. While she has not lived in the City for over 50 years she still has a New York accent and renews it several times a week by talking to her sister. Fortunately my apology was accepted and life goes on.

Today we have Patrick J. Buchanan holding forth with his usual xenophobic ranting. He opens with a criticism of Joe Biden who claimed at Davos that the unraveling of the middle class here at home has provided a fertile ground for reactionary politicians peddling xenophobia, anti-immigration, nationalist, isolationist views. Of course that describes Buchanan just perfectly and he didn’t like it at all. He claims the “Political and economic elites of Davos have grown rich, fat and powerful by setting aside patriotism and sacrificing their countries on the altar of globalization and The New World Order.” Naturally he leaves out exactly how they “have grown rich, fat and powerful.”

Buchanan cites his “late friend” Sam Francis, a “paleoconservative and proud son of the South.” Here is a quote from this “proud son of the South” that Buchanan so admires: “We also oppose all efforts to mix the races of mankind, to promote non-white races over the European-American people through so-called "affirmative action" and similar measures, to destroy or denigrate the European-American heritage, including the heritage of the Southern people, and to force the integration of the races.” SCOTUS ruled that anti miscegenation legislation was illegal in 1967. That was nearly a half century ago and Buchanan still finds himself Sam Francis, favored “paleoconservative” dead over twenty years, to quote on the issue…talk about persistence!

Buchanan says that, “Americans never supported mass immigration. It was against their will that scores of millions, here legally and illegally…whose masses have never been fully assimilated into any western nation have poured into the USA.” This is nonsense. It should be obvious that if our immigration policies were unacceptable to the majority of Americans those policies would be changed. There is surely now an eruption of complaints about accepting a few thousand refugees even after a two-year vetting. The number of immigrants allowed to come into the country, excluding the very many exceptions, is 675 thousand. We have far more than that coming in because many exceptions are met for relatives of citizens who are already here, for very talented people who can contribute to certain industries and other special situations. If we had listened to Buchanan that German Jew Albert Einstein would not have provided us with the means to defeat the Japanese.

2016 Jan 23^rd

There is a snow storm on the East Coast. Central Park at this moment has 14.7 inches of snow. Snow in Central Park is now being measured to the nearest tenth of an inch. Driving in the City is against the law but from the television images a few law-breakers are still out there. More snow is forecast but here in a community that routinely deals with 100 inches of snow a season the reaction to New York’s predicament is more “what’s the biggie?” than “poor baby.”

There is some political news although I doubt that this storm has anything to do with it. Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has let it be known that he might enter the race for the Presidency. Hey, why not? Bloomberg was a popular mayor; he served three terms and he kept the garbage and the snow picked up; what’s not to like? There’s more: Bloomberg has about 37 billion dollars of net worth. If Bloomberg got into the race his net worth relative to Trump’s would make Trump look like…an apprentice!

Of course this is a very long shot; if Bloomberg doesn’t see a path to the nomination he will devote himself to other efforts. Bloomberg’s problem is that he is no Donald Trump. OK, Bloomberg was a great mayor and he could well be a fine President, but he is not the charismatic figure we have in Donald Trump, and that has nothing to do with the clear disparity in their relative wealth. It is hard to imagine Bloomberg attracting a tenth of the delirious crowds that wait in the cold for a chance to look at and hear Donald Trump in the flesh. Trump has claimed that he could “stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

Trump is right; he wouldn’t lose any voters, just as none of his fans are interested in hearing about how he would deport 11 million people, or how he would make Mexico pay for a 1900 mile border fence. His fans are “true believers” in exactly the sense of the true believers who were described by Eric Hoffer. They have bought into the magic of Donald Trump the multi-billionaire builder who will magically “make America great again.” The fact that Donald Trump’s building constructions were the result of other peoples’ efforts paid for and supervised by Trump is immaterial. Just as the fact that as far as we know Donald Trump has never built anything himself, not even a ninth grade wood shop foot stool. True believers simply don’t care.

2016 Jan 22^nd

Washington D.C. is expected to get a near record snowfall over the next few days. The removal of snow from householder’s sidewalks and from sidewalks in front of businesses is the responsibility of the owners of these establishments. They each have 24 hours to clear their sidewalks or face fines; the householder a 25 dollar fine, the business owner a 150 dollar fine. Washington D.C. has a Democratic mayor and Democratic government generally. These people believe that property owners, and particularly business owners have a responsibility for the safety of pedestrians. In Michigan our Republican Supreme court has decided that no such responsibility is expected. Here the customer’s personal safety takes a backseat to the businessman’s profits. The difference in attitude toward public safety is built into the policies of these two parties.

In an interview this morning Governor Snyder asserted that the decision to divert Flint River water into Flint’s city water system was “approved” by the city council and by the county commissioners. Governor Snyder apparently believes that responsibility (guilt) is a finite package and the more of it that can be scattered about the less he has left as his share. The problem with this view is that there is a considerable difference between the knowledge the part–time officials had about the consequences of turning untreated river water into Flint’s water system and the information Governor Snyder received from various sources. Scientists from as far away as Virginia Tech had, by September 1^st sent 300 kits to Flint residents to let them determine if there was lead in their water supply. (Why would they think there might be lead in Flint’s water supply when no State of Michigan agency was at all concerned?) The EPA had informed Snyder of the problem but he took no action and instead blamed the EPA for not being forceful enough and going over his head directly to the citizens. As a result the regional EPA director has resigned. We do have that great 500 million dollar state surplus for this past year. Once more for Republicans, money comes first, people come second.

There are some lighter moments: Trump recently showed a photo of people he claimed were American veterans but these American veterans were wearing Russian medals. Now that will be harder to explain than Trump’s last gaffe when he showed Moroccans scrambling to get across a border while implying that they were Mexican scrambling to get into this country. Then we have the deadlock right here in Leelanau County where a new commissioner must be selected. At the moment there are three Republicans and three Democrats on the commission so of course we’ll have to wait until election time to replace the candidate who resigned.

Who knows, we might wind up with three Republican parties. One clearly despises Cruz and another hates Trump, and the third wants the party to select one of the insiders like Kasich, Rubio or Bush. All this while the Democrats find they are faced with a surging elderly socialist.We live in interesting times.

2016 Jan 21^st

Dr. Sowell, in his column this morning, finishes by quoting Eric Hoffer! Can it be that a true believer has actually read Hoffer’s “The True Believer”? Let’s consider Sowell’s thesis for today: it is, in a more concise form than Sowell presents, that this election is the Republican’s to lose, and that they may well do just that.

Sowell begins by asserting that “…voter’s anger (is) at the Republican establishment which has grossly betrayed the promises that got a Republican Congress elected.” Then he claims that the Congress was elected to fight Obama’s policies, from securing the borders to overturning “Obamacare” to “runaway government spending” and then they caved “when crunch time came for Congress to vote.” Sowell needs to keep up. These Affordable Care Act (ACA) haters tried desperately to block ACA, sending fifty bills toward the President’s desk to defund, or otherwise cripple it. The fact is that not one of them got there where a veto awaited them anyway. (One Bill using an arcane procedural method did get through and was promptly vetoed.) This effort was an enormous waste of effort that the perpetrators must have known was going to fail but they pursued it anyway to provide their constituents with evidence that at least they were in there trying.

As far as “securing the borders” is concerned any greatly increased security is no longer needed. The people coming in about equal the people going back. The Mexican birth rate has dropped and their economy has improved enough so that except for smuggled drugs the whole notion of border security has become nothing but a talking point for people like the xenophobic Donald Trump.

Sowell’s complaint about “runaway government spending” probably doesn’t apply to increased money for border patrol or for the military. He appears to be taking a shot at Speaker Ryan who had the effrontery to cooperate with Democrats to pass a 2 trillion dollar budget. (Trump’s stump speech claims this means we must borrow 2 trillion dollars… and this man pretends to know something about balance sheets?)

Sowell says that the Democratic frontrunner “…is a former member of an unpopular administration…whose personal integrity is under criminal investigation by the FBI.” Sowell goes on with this, “After seven disastrous years of Barack Obama, at home and overseas,…the US may be approaching a point of no return especially in a new age of a nuclear Iran with long range missiles.” Oh, come now Dr. Sowell; this is an unpopular administration only with Republicans. President Obama’s approval rating among Democrats is at 80+ percent, high as it has been for any incumbent President. His approval rating among Republicans is lower that it has been for any out of party President, about 17 percent. In short, Republicans hate him more than any out of party President has ever been hated.

Having someone to hate is important for any movement; the Germans had the Jews, the Russians had their aristocracy and then they had the fascists and then they had the Democracies, Trump has almost everybody who isn’t a nice white Anglo. President Obama serves as the hate target for people like Dr. Sowell. It’s all in Eric Hoffa’s  “The True Believer.” Sowell has apparently read it but I wonder if he understands it.

2016 Jan 20^th

Governor Snyder’s “State of the State” message was primarily about Flint’s drinking water actually, Flint doesn’t really have drinking water and that’s the problem. The water they do have isn’t fit for drinking because it is contaminated with lead and ingesting lead is very bad for your health. Who put lead in Flint’s drinking water and why would they do that? The why is simple: Flint had been on Detroit’s water system but that contract expired and renewing it was too expensive so the State appointed city manager (or someone) decided to shift to the Flint River for the city’s water supply. Not a problem, although the river water would have to be treated because the chemicals in it would leach lead from the city’s elderly piping system. Treating the water would be expensive so the water went untreated and then Flint residents noticed some very peculiar looking and smelly “drinking” water. (This is essentially what happened although many would debate the particulars no one debates that the water was undrinkable.)

And then other people began to notice: the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) tested the water, found dangerous levels of lead contamination and notified Michigan’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ). Michigan’s DEQ is a toothless outfit whose major effort is to make sure that no environmental regulations impede various commercial interests. They are great buddies with the Upper Peninsula’s mining honchos. The DEQ insisted that there was no problem. They famously told the citizens of Flint, who by this time were getting very upset, to “relax.” Relaxing is hard to do if the water coming out of the tap is too brown for a shower, much less to drink.

The up-front guy for the EPA, Emmanuel Del Toral, who first blew the whistle on the contaminated drinking water, was characterized by the Michigan DEQ as a “rogue agent.” By this time it was critical for the Governor’s Office and everyone connected with this fiasco to get inside the fort and pull the walls in after them. The record shows that EPA had notified the governor’s office and the DEQ of the problem with Flint’s water but the Michigan authorities did absolutely nothing. Eventually they even criticized the EPA for not informing the citizens of Flint directly. Whether the EPA was legally allowed to do that had been debated. The blow back from the state to the EPA was loud enough that the EPA went so far as to discredit their own water authority, Del Toral, who found and reported the problem.

Eventually the facts were indisputable and Del Toral got the apology from the DEQ that he deserved. Governor Snyder finally recognized that the lead was not going to disappear and began to get his national guard involved to distribute safe drinking water. He also fired some of the DEQ people who were responsible for the mess. It’s interesting that Michigan for this past year has a budget surplus of over 500 million dollars. How much of that money was saved by not treating the drinking water in Flint; how much will it cost to care for the brain damage that the untreated water will cause?

2016 Jan 19^th

The morning’s paper has a column by George Will and it is unusual because George goes well out on a limb to tout Governor Christie. His column is titled, “Keep an eye on Chris Christie as the race heats up.” Chris Christie is clutching for a hand-hold on the clown car that contains the Republican candidates. He is in that group that could be referred to as “third tier” candidates. These, according to Real Clear Politics (RCP) latest poll, are; Christie with 3.5 percent, Fiorina with 2.8 percent, Kasich with 2.3 percent and Paul with 2.3 percent. Given these dim prospects, even with Christie’s endorsement by the Manchester Union Leader, why is George Will telling us to watch Governor Christie? Will points out that Christie is the Chairman of the Republican Governor’s Association and has raised and distributed millions of dollars to fellow Republican Governors. No doubt as a result of that he is very popular with Republican Governors. Unfortunately his abysmal record as New Jersey’s Governor is likely to be used against him in any general election. (There is photographic evidence that this man, Governor Christie, actually hugged President Obama when Obama came to inspect the damage from Hurricane Sandy.)

Today Donald Trump is pandering away to the corn raising farm folk in Iowa. He, for the first time, actually read a statement supporting the ethanol producing folks who want to “make us energy independent’ (Particularly now that oil is selling for less than 30 dollars a barrel.) It turns out that a gallon of ethanol is now more expensive than a gallon of gasoline.

During his speech in Iowa Trump learned that Governor Terry Brandstad had “negatively endorsed Senator Cruz.” He says that he wants to see Cruz defeated in Iowa. Poor Cruz, not only do his fellow Senators loathe him but he isn’t popular with many other politicians either. Cruz made a motion for a roll call vote in the Senate on a funding bill, normally this gets a second as a matter of courtesy, but not for Ted Cruz; his motion died for lack of a second. That is simply an unprecedented slap down. I don’t think Trump will have any problem defeating Cruz; compared with Trump at 6’3,’’ Cruz is a short person at just 5’8.” In politics short people usually lose. Not always of course, but couple short with a disagreeable disposition and you have long odds of winning.

We now have confirmation that Trump’s big endorsement is from Sarah Palin. This will probably help Trump in Iowa and in the sunny southland where social conservatives and evangelicals predominate. You have to admit that Sarah Palin is usually smiling (Some wag might say that is because she doesn’t understand the situation; sometimes, though, snarky is accurate.) Her cheerfulness might balance Trump’s contention that we are in an awful mess. She is now officially on stage standing next to The Donald himself who is looking a bit grim, perhaps because “Governor” Palin is being a bit prolix and depriving her hero pro tem (Not long ago she worked to elect Ted Cruz to the Senate.) of his microphone. OK, I’ve watched as much of this as I can tolerate.

2016 Jan 18^th

Today I happened upon Donald Trump bloviating from the badly misnamed “Liberty University.” Trump was supposedly giving a speech honoring Martin Luther King Jr (MLK) on MLK day.

Liberty University, you may remember, was founded by Jerry Falwell and now is governed by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr., Jerry Jr. was immediately appointed President of Liberty University on his father’s death. The senior Falwell would not be amused to find his school honoring MLK day for Falwell Sr. was all about segregation. So called Christian Schools in the south existed to thwart integration. They were private schools and so could admit whom they pleased and it didn’t please them to admit people of color. Finally the federal government seeing this as a segregation dodge changed the tax status of these schools and the dodge no longer worked.

The school determined, back in 2009, that its students could no longer have a Democratic (or indeed even a Democrat) Club on campus as such a club’s values conflicted with those of the college. Liberty University values conformity very highly. From Liberty University’s point of view this is surely the politically correct position although I can’t imagine Donald Trump criticizing it. If any other university had removed their Republican Club the academic freedom people would be outraged; when Liberty University takes a parallel action there is little comment because such outrageous action by them is not surprising.

Jerry Jr. made the news recently when with one hand in his pocket he dared terrorists to attack his university. He suggested that all eligible students, and I presume faculty as well, get concealed carry permits and thus armed, these Christians would not be soft targets. He did not discuss how this belligerent posture might conflict with Christian values. What could he say?

Trump today had a captive audience; Liberty University students are not at liberty to stay away from these convocations. You can compel a college student’s attendance; you cannot compel his/her attention. Students can clearly let everyone know that they have no interest in a speaker’s message they just open a newspaper when the speaker begins and then appear to read it. My guess is that such a performance would be dangerous for any student at Liberty. I listened to Trump only briefly, most of what he says he has said before. He has talked once more about building a wall but Trump himself has never built anything. He has hired builders and these builders are responsible for the constructions for which trump takes credit. His wall, properly constructed, would require enormous amounts of concrete and rebar and cost billions. That Mexico would pay for it is a pipe dream. Then Trump claims we are giving Iran one and a half billion dollars which we can ill afford given our level of debt. He’s wrong; we aren’t giving Iran anything, it’s their money which we have impounded. Secretary Kerry says we are releasing just 55 billion and that release will be over time contingent on Iran’s behavior. Then Trump claims that the recent budget agreement which funds the government will send us another 2 billion into debt. Well, it might if the government had no income, but the government certainly does have income as our tax bills demonstrate. Once again, Trump says whatever he thinks his audience wants to hear. What’s truth got to do with it? Does Trump even know what it is?

2016 Jan 17^th

There is a song popular when I was in high school in 1944. It’s called “Accentuate the Positive.” The lyric by Johnny Mercer advises folks to “Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, and don’t mess with Mr. In Between.” It was a great song and it might work as a theme for the Democratic National Convention; you will never hear it sung by the angry obstructionists at the Republican National Convention. The obstructionists are so busy pushing paranoia that I doubt they are interested in singing anything. Most all songs are upbeat, unless they’re songs about lost love, so it’s hard to imagine any singing at all at an RNC meeting.

We have some remarkable good news today; five of the people held by Iran have been released. It really seems that we may have turned to a new chapter with Iran, although there is still the issue of Iran’s lobbing missiles in the vicinity of our naval vessels. That is being addressed, but the larger issue is the combination of the release of our sailors who inadvertently violated Iran’s territorial waters and the release of these prisoners. All-in-all this has been a week with much to be thankful for… unless you are an obstructionist, in which case you complain about Iran’s holding of those prisoners in the first place. But then things do change and maybe there has been a shift in the political weather in Iran. Let’s hope so and let’s “Accentuate the Positive.”

A previous international diplomatic gambit has us opening better relations with Cuba. This is anathema to those Cubans who left Cuba just ahead of Fidel Castro’s followers who were intent on leveling the lopsided income distribution which was common under Fulgencio Baptista. Of course there are still problems in Cuba and those problems are mentioned as reasons against any change in our embargo. This “let’s embargo Cuba” policy had been in effect for some fifty years. The obstructionists, encouraged by Senator Rubio, claimed that these restrictive policies “were just now beginning to work” when President Obama decided to junk them. (What a bad President!)

Secretary Kerry, who had been working behind the scenes to get the release of the Iranian captives, and President Obama, can expect no credit for these diplomatic thaws. It strikes me that there is a parallel here with President Nixon’s and Secretary Kissinger’s trip to China. China then, and to a considerable extent China now, is hardly a country we would consider a role model encouraging freedom of expression and neither are Iran and Cuba. That didn’t matter when Nixon went there and acted to make nice and reduce tensions; why should the current administration’s efforts with Cuba and Iran be treated differently? Could it be the difference between a white Republican President and a black Democratic President?

2016 Jan 16^th

Mona Charen today touts a movie, “Thirteen Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.” Charen is once more in a high dudgeon about Hollywood’s anti-war and anti-American films that have had lukewarm receptions.” Perhaps she means Academy Award winning films like “All Quiet on the Western Front,” or “Platoon,” or “Patton,” or “The Bridge on the River Kwai.” Who knows what she means except that she tries to denigrate liberal Hollywood and all its works…in this instance her obvious bias makes her look silly.

About the film portrayal of the rescue attempt she says (from the film I presume), “The CIA officer in charge countermanded their (relief force) efforts to leave the annex and head to the consulate a mile away when it first came under attack.” Even if this movie is accurate, and it isn’t, how does a wait of “twenty-five minutes” before a relief column supposedly leaves for the consulate a mile away lead to a 13 hour battle without relief by the consulate’s defenders? Good theater; bad logistics or plainly absurd comments?

There is another side to this story, a side told by the CIA officer who supposedly “countermanded their effort to leave (and go to the rescue of those in the consulate)”: it follows:

“It is the most fateful moment in a movie that purports to present a searingly accurate account of the 2012 attacks that left four Americans dead in Benghazi, Libya: a scene in which the highest-ranking CIA operative at a secret agency compound orders his security team to “stand down” rather than rush off to rescue U.S. diplomats under siege less than a mile away. According to the officer in charge of the CIA’s Benghazi base that night, the scene in the movie is entirely untrue “there never was a stand-down order,” said the base chief known as Bob, speaking publicly for the first time. “At no time did I ever second-guess that the team would depart.” Nor, he said, did he say anything that could be “interpreted as equivalent” to an order to stand down.”

Where is the truth here? Who is telling it? What do we know absolutely? First of all we know that this is still a political football; that Charen will prattle on about whatever she believes will make anyone in the President’s administration appear guilty of heinous crimes, abandoning Americans when they are facing murderous enemies. She has lots of company: Congressman Daryl Issa has accused Secretary Clinton of instructing Secretary of Defense Panetta to stand down from sending aid to Benghazi. That is absurd on its face…one cabinet Secretary telling another what to do? It is quite simply a lie. There is also no evidence that Secretary Clinton knew of any request for additional security. We do know, and Charen fails to mention, that the State Department and the CIA were at odds over whose territory belonged to whom in Libya. The so called “consulate” was in fact a CIA post tasked with recovering shoulder fired missiles. Before Ambassador Stevens left the embassy in Tripoli to visit Benghazi he was warned that the trip would be very dangerous; he disregarded that warning and went anyway.

2016 Jan 15^th

Today marks the first anniversary of the “Henry’s Daily Detritus” blog. The very first entry in this noble effort was Jan 15^th 2015. (To distinguish the new entries from the old, the date will now carry the year.) The initial entry had to do with the Keystone XL Pipeline, a source of great controversy a year ago. George Will, whose column I addressed, claimed that while the jobs created by the pipeline would be temporary, all jobs were temporary. The blog pointed out that he had been writing his column for forty years and that gig hardly seemed temporary; the blog then came out in favor of the pipeline because it would be less dangerous than moving the sludge by truck or rail. None of that is relevant any longer.

The next entry was about the Blue Angels performance at the Cherry Festival. Since TC bears only a token cost for their appearances and since the performance increases the attendance and the local merchant’s gross, the performances will naturally continue. Their appearances are still a controversial topic but even if their noise makes babies cry, dogs howl and some veterans and elders leave town, they will continue to perform and make money for the local merchants. Isn’t that what this festival is all about?

All right enough nostalgia, the circus performed last night, let’s check that out!

Poor Cruz decided to complain about “New York Values” and Donald Trump, talking about a completely different set of New York Values did a dipsy-doodle and left poor Cruz in a very bad way. Cruz may be a fine formal college debater but Trump plays on another level, poor Cruz.

Then there was his belligerence, Governor Christie; he began by deriding the President’s discussion of the economy’s improvement as measured by the much lowered unemployment rate, now just above 5 percent. Oh no, not at all says Christie. The rate is much higher than that because once someone has tried and tried to get a job and failed, they stop looking and are no longer counted as unemployed. But then what about the drop in this index from its high in 2009 of over 9 percent to today’s rate of a little over 5 percent. Was the 2009 index not subject to those same problems? Unfortunately no one asked Christie about that. (Bernie Sanders has been claiming the same thing.)

Then Christie tells us about his plan to “save” Social Security. The government, he says, has effectively stolen the money people have put into this program so benefits will have to be cut. They will drop for people with incomes over 80 thousand a year and be cut still more for higher income people. The fact is that if your wages are over 237 thousand a year your FICA tax is just half the rate of someone earning half as much. If we applied the FICA tax rate to all income, not just earned income as is done now, we would not have to deny anyone full benefits and the system would be solvent indefinitely. Of course that plan would raise the tax paid by the wealthy and for Christie that’s an unthinkable solution.

Jan 14^th

Today we have Dr. Thomas Sowell, an economist, trying his hand at constitutional law. His political blinders are securely in place so an unbiased view of the issues has been seriously obscured. He begins by claiming that “the political left has been especially vehement in its denunciations of what they call ‘messing with the constitution.’” The left has been hostile to Texas governor Greg Abbott’s proposal to hold a constitutional convention. I commented on Governor Abbott's singular positions on several issues just yesterday. To review briefly: Abbott is the Governor who activated the Texas National Guard when army maneuvers involving his state, and a number of other states in the south west, must have hit squarely on a paranoid concern of the governor’s that the federal government was going to invade Texas. As far as I know Texas was the only state to embarrass itself in this by activating its national guard.

But then there are the issues that Governor Abbott wants us to consider: foremost among these is no government interference with any matters occurring entirely within a state; a supermajority of seven SCOTUS members to overturn any state law: require a balanced budget; and other changes which would increase the state’s power to do as they please. (Perhaps re-instituting slavery?) Governor Abbott has had a history of wanting no federal interference with anything Texas wants to do even if it requires Texas seceding from the union. They now want their share of gold back from Fort Knox. If they do go their own way they’ll have pay for the 1200 mile border fence with Mexico. You might think Abbott’s ideas are a one-off; they aren’t; some other politicians and citizens down there agree with him.

Sowell maintains that SCOTUS is left leaning; hardly! Justice John Roberts’ court, has managed to work its will on controversial cases involving civil rights, corporate accountability, and criminal justice. Over the past six months, the Supreme Court has eviscerated a key portion of the Voting Rights Act, made it more difficult for workers to sue for racial discrimination on the job, strengthened corporate protections against legal liability, and made ritual invocation a necessary part of claiming one’s Fifth Amendment rights; so much for using the court to advance a liberal agenda.

Sowell has for years vigorously opposed anything resembling affirmative action. The notion that the 14^th Amendment might be used to redress discrimination is a problem for him. He says that over the years the Constitution has been amended over two dozen times. That’s true, of course, but none of those amendments were the result of a constitutional convention. I quote California Representative Xavier Becerra on the constitutional convention issue:

"We’ve had 11,000 attempts to amend the Constitution since 1789. Twenty-seven amendments have been passed, 10 of them in one shot with the Bill of Rights. And so, we’re now hearing that Republicans may want two, three days before they plunge us into the economic abyss, propose the eleven-thousand and first constitutional amendment so that in less than three days we pass that when it’s taken over 230 years to pass 27 out of the 11,000 that were proposed,"

Dr. Sowell should stick to economics!

Jan 13^th

Last evening was President Obama’s last State of the Union message. I watched a short replay of his peroration and at its finish Vice President Biden rose to his feet smiling and applauding; Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, apparently afflicted with a touch of the lumbago, slowly and ponderously rose, looked around, seemingly bewildered, and seeing everyone else applauding chose to contribute his mite.

Later I heard South Carolina Governor Haley deliver the “Republican Response,” now a tradition for after the state of the union message. The governor is the daughter of two Sikh immigrants and was born in Georgia. She claimed that the loudest voice (Could that be Trump?) should not carry the day. Naturally she excoriated the President, except for his ability to make speeches. ACA was predictably awful and would have to be replaced with something predictably vague. When she had finished her rebuttal to the President she had the honor of discovering that Anne Coulter had said she should be deported. Of course she should, she has “swarthy skin” and we know what both Trump and Coulter think of swarthy skinned people even if they were born here.

Mona Charen attended the “Kemp Forum on Expanding Opportunity” last Saturday in South Carolina. She tells us that even at “8:15 AM it was tough to find a seat.” Her column about this event is titled “Fighting for the soul of the Republican Party.” (I will avoid commenting on the futility of fighting over something that doesn’t exist.) Of particular interest at this event is the absence of both Senator Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. The attendees were: Bush, Carson, Christie, Rubio, Kasich and Huckabee. (Fiorina missed her plane.) Trump and Cruz do not believe that the party will gain by being more centrist; the party can win only by motivating the “missing conservatives” who stayed home in previous elections because the party was too moderate.

Mona Charen claims that “Where the conservatives shine is in their emphasis on the importance of mediating structures in the lives of the poor. The family, the church, and private charities can give people more than a check: they can provide guidance and supervision.” Well that’s great if the poor person has a family functioning well enough and willing enough to provide guidance, very often they do not; what then? There are the churches of course and surely none of them would have any strings attached to their help; nor would any “private charities.” Charen’s “guidance and supervision” sounds like what is given to children in Sunday school. What the poor need are skilled social workers; there is a vast difference between those and Sunday school teachers.

Charen’s enthusiasm for the Kemp program is dampened somewhat by the program’s consensus that ‘too many people are being incarcerated for simple drug possession. She says “that has become the conventional wisdom but it’s wrong.” No evidence is provided of course. This is typical “Charenspeak;” the woman obviously has had little contact with those most in need of help, the alcoholic, the semi-literate and the marginally competent….still she rants on.

Jan 12^th

An interesting situation has emerged locally. This involves a pastor who was a temporary appointment to bridge the gap between the former pastor’s departure and the new pastor’s installation. These people have a difficult job, indeed they make a career of moving from church to church often needing to calm the difficulties that led to the departure of the former pastor. The temporary pastor usually serves one to two years and then moves on when the new pastor arrives. The case in point here involves a temporary pastor, now long gone, who is accused of sexually harassing several parishioners and a staff member.

His superior was informed and the interim received counselling and was prohibited from serving in any church in his denomination for five years. The women who were harassed received nothing, but at least they remained anonymous. Now there is an effort to redress this imbalance and the church is prepared to pay for the women’s counselling expenses.

The question immediately arises; why didn’t these women go to the police? The most obvious answer is that by keeping their complaint within the church they could remain anonymous; if they went to the police they, as adults, could not remain anonymous. By keeping their complaints within the church hierarchy not even other church members knew anything about this event until very recently. That is a powerful incentive for a respectable church woman to do just what these women did. The church hierarchy is quite likely to want to keep the entire issue very quiet so their secret will be safe.

There’s more of course: If a complaint had been made to the police then evidence would have had to be presented for any prosecution to take place. If the harassment had taken place during a private counselling session with this pastor how could a victim present any evidence given that there would be no witnesses? Going to the police would also open the entire church to community ridicule; you can hear it already, what kind of church has pastors like that? The women complaining would probably not be very popular with their church friends. So there is considerable incentive for not reporting this to the police. Also keep in mind that this interim pastor will not be there very long. This is another incentive for saying nothing at all to anybody.

If women are not to be victimized they must be willing to risk the potential stigma that may come with confronting their attackers. It might take some time but we can see, even in the case of Bill Cosby, victims will have their day.

Jan 11^th

Mona Charen is back. Her column is quite predictably an attack on President Obama’s attempt to control gun violence. Closing the gun show loophole (this she has in quotes), expanding background checks and restricting internet sales, all of which we hope will limit the carnage on our streets, Charen classifies as “moral grandstanding.” She claims that “not a word of it holds up.” This is followed by the disclaimer that she “doesn’t love guns” and “believes that the Second Amendment does not forbid all regulation of gun ownership, I am open to the idea of gun control,” she says.

She claims that, “We’ve always had plentiful guns in this country but we haven’t always had the frequency of random mass shootings in public places that have so disturbed us over the last couple of decades.” She claims that a “gun dealer must comply with federal laws that require gun sellers to  have licenses  and perform background checks without regard to whether the sale is arranged on the internet or in person.” That is nonsense. Many transactions at gun shows are done not by licensed dealers” but by collectors or hobbyists and they don’t have to conduct any checks at all. If you want to sell your pistol to your neighbor no background check is required.

Several issues should be addressed here: The typical hunting rifle or hand gun will not have a magazine capacity of more than eight or ten rounds. Now we have semi-automatic weapons that can easily be converted to fully automatic by any literate sixteen year old. Even on semi-automatic an AK-47 clip (magazine) holding 40 rounds can be bought on the internet for less than twenty-five dollars. You can easily pull a trigger 40 times and fire 40 rounds in less than one minute. The potential carnage by someone with a half dozen 40 round clips is obscene. Naturally the NRA opposes any restriction on magazine size; you never know when you might face a home invasion by multiple assailants. (Of course if everyone had semi-automatic weapons with high capacity clips who would want what was left of the home?)

Charen quotes Brian Doherty, a writer from “Reason” magazine, about the relationship between “the number of guns in circulation” and the gun murder rate. Doherty claims that as the number of guns in circulation has gone up the murder rate has gone down. Charen quotes Doherty but where does Doherty get his information? I think that the NRA would be quite surprised if there was, somewhere, a record of the “number of guns in circulation.” Another consideration is that “Reason, “ the magazine, is a Libertarian monthly. The Libertarian position on gun control is just what you might expect, there shouldn’t be any. That’s right, the Libertarian platform asserts that there should be no restriction on which persons may own guns, or on what kind of guns they may own, or on the size of gun magazines. I wonder if Mona Charen knows the Libertarian position is no gun control.

Jan 10^th

If you haven’t been following the news lately let me bring you up to date. We now have a lottery set to pay out over a billion dollars if anyone manages to win it when the critical numbers are announced on Wednesday. Of course you can still win something even if you don’t win the big kahuna because there are several lesser prizes to be had if you match slightly fewer of the correct numbers. I understand that the odds against winning the top prize are 292 million to one; even so, if you can win a billion dollars it’s probably a bet you should take.

On a different tack we have that top journalist Sean Penn interviewing the Mexican drug lord el Chapo who was captured shortly after the interview. Indeed the information floating about is that the Mexican marines had el Chapo dead to rights but they waited to arrest him until the famous American movie star interviewer could finish his interview lest he be inconvenienced by some misdirected gunfire. The perks of the rich and famous are wondrous to behold. (All the more reason to buy a lottery ticket!)

We have a one-time famous economist emerging from obscurity to make an interesting prediction about the coming Presidential election. Arthur Laffer tells us that the Republican nominee, whoever he/she may be, will carry at least 46 states, and maybe as many as 49. I’m not able to find how accurate Laffer’s predictions have been in past elections but this prediction sends him far out on a very thin and brittle limb. Mr. Laffer is best known for the Laffer curve. This curve purports to show the relationship between the rate of taxation and the amount of income the state realizes from this taxation. Basically, Laffer claims that if taxes are raised too high the revenue from taxes begins to decline. If people are “overtaxed” they will work less and tax revenues will fall. The sticking point is that nothing Laffer has asserted shows us just where this optimum taxation point occurs. Oh well; it’s an interesting theory.

Trump has weighed in on current football rules; he doesn’t like them because they’re too restrictive. He believes old time football when players could use their helmets as weapons made for a better game. Never mind the long term effects of concussions on players which have been well documented. Why should Trump care about that; he has never played a contact sport of any kind. Concussions can have effects on the brain for years after the injury. Macho Donald got multiple student deferments during the Vet Nam war and then after graduation developed those nasty heel spurs that gave him a medical deferment so he never got into the military. Now he wants to jump over everybody and become Commander-in-Chief. As he says in “The Art of the Deal,” “Think Big.” I guess the heel spurs are OK now, but then he’ll only have to march around the Oval Office.

Jan 9^th

George Abbott is the Governor of Texas, and Governor Abbott believes we need a constitutional convention because he isn’t happy with the constitution we have. Changing the constitution requires a great deal of work; first you have to get the states’ approval for a constitutional convention;  this means that have to get two-thirds of them to approve the idea. Once you have a convention, any proposed changes to the constitution must be approved by 38 states. The amendment process we’ve used up to now has worked quite well but I’m afraid that the Governor wants to go far beyond an amendment to the constitution, he wants wholesale changes. (At this point a number of states want to require a balanced budget amendment and we might get that. Of course getting it might mean we would have to start paying for wars as we fight them. Would that mean raising taxes? What, give up war or raise taxes…what a dilemma!)

Governor Abbott has a list of changes in the constitution he hopes to accomplish: Most interesting is that Abbott wants to prohibit Congress from regulating any activity occurring wholly within a state. So if a state wants to re-institute slavery, just so long as they don’t sell or buy their slaves from out of state that will be fine. Is this man hopelessly unacquainted with history? Actually, he probably is; this is the same state that has insisted on re-writing the high school history books to show that slavery was not all that large a cause for the Civil War; it was really states’ rights. And of course it was states’ rights, the rights of the states to perpetuate slavery that was the issue. This is obvious for anyone who bothers to read the Declaration of Causes for Texas’ succession from the union published 2/2/1861. The third paragraph clearly states that slavery of the Negro race should be entirely up to the states. The governor must have been reading his own state’s high school history books which now claim that slavery was really a “side issue.”

I should point out that Governor Abbott has been in the national news several times lately. Back awhile he called out the Texas National Guard. At issue was the potential threat that the federal government was about to invade Texas and Governor Abbott was not about to take chances about that. In fact the federal government was conducting some simulated war games but Governor Abbott I guess, is abnormally nervous about federal power and felt that he should be prepared. At about this time the governor floated the notion of Texas withdrawing from the union. I have never been to Texas so there might be advantages there that appeal to many outside the state, but I believe that if funds were required to accomplish Texas’ withdrawal from the union many outsiders would be happy to help and the financing would not be a problem. I hope Governor Abbott will let us know if financial help for the succession movement is needed.

Jan 8^th

“The Art of the Deal” by Donald Trump is interesting, at least is spots. The first chapter is a day book of one of Trump’s weeks with his various daily appointments all with famous names. You can skip this because it is essentially an ego trip. The “Deal” part starts with the second chapter and it’s informative. Trump lays out some fairly obvious principals about negotiation such as, “Think Big; Protect the Downside and the Upside Will Take Care of Itself; Use your Leverage: Enhance your Location and other similar bits of advice. The book was published in 1987 and is co-written with Tony Swartz so the book was written about thirty years ago.

He is certainly “thinking big;” aiming for the Presidency as your first elective office is certainly thing about as big as you can. He also has some interesting comments about the press: “They’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better…if you do things that are bold or outrageous the press is going to write about you.” He has surely taken advantage of that; his control of the press has enabled him to spend next to nothing on publicity. He can get on any talk show he likes, even at the last minute.

Then a few pages later he writes, “The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to peoples fantasies. …People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular… I call it truthful hyperbole.” Well of course; he still inflates everything from his wealth to the crowds he draws. It’s all part of a pattern he began thirty years ago. Not everyone agrees that it is “truthful” hyperbole.

There are some changes from 1987: Trump in this book is very complimentary about Ivana, his wife. He had married her in 1977 ten years before this book was published and had given her control over some of his properties. He was pleased with her accomplishments. But then by 1990 Trump’s involvement with the actress/model Marla Maples had been well enough documented that Ivana sued for divorce. In due course Marla became pregnant and a daughter was born to the couple, whereupon they got married. This happened in 1993; by 1999 Trump discovered he had reason to divorce Marla on the grounds of unfaithfulness, the very same grounds Ivana had used against him a few years earlier. How about that! Trump has now remarried, this time to another actress/model, Melania who is 24 years Trump’s junior.

Trump’s bankruptcies all came after “The Art of the Deal” was published. Before 1987 Trump was using his own money to make his deals, or at least he had borrowed it.  His first bankruptcy was in 1991 when the Taj Mahal was 3 billion in debt with Trump responsible for 900 million of that. Another bankruptcy followed in 2002, 2004, and finally in 2009. These were all Chapter 11 bankruptcies which involved reorganization, usually to get easier credit terms or reduce the influence of some manager, usually Trump. The companies didn’t go out of business.

It seems that Donald Trump’s style is easily predictable from his second favorite book (The Bible is his first of course.) Only in America.

Jan 7th

The big news today is that Senator Marco Rubio has been seen wearing high-heeled shiny black boots. That this has made the news, at least on some outlets, shows just how vacuous the news about candidates has become. But height is important for a candidate for the Presidency; except for Harry Truman who was 5’9’ and Dwight Eisenhower at 5’10” most of our recent President have been close to, or over, six feet tall. Maybe Senator Rubio wanted to lengthen himself a bit, although he is 5’10” and that is surely within reach (ugh!) of an appropriate height. His detractor, Senator Cruz who first called attention to these boots, probably should consider something similar for himself because Cruz barely makes 5’8”.

Then, still in the political realm, if just barely, is the comment by a Native American tribe of Paiutes who claim that the occupiers of the federal buildings on the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are trespassing on their sacred tribal lands; a lot of good that protest will do them. Some have pointed out the remarkable contrast between armed to the teeth white men taking over public buildings with no government response and a black kid, twelve years old, shot down in his tracks for brandishing a pellet pistol. I recognize the important differences; I also recognize the importance of the contrast.

Who do you suppose said this, “Let’s teach them a lesson if they ever show up here.” This was said while the speaker had his hand in his coat pocket where he claimed to have a gun. The “them” were Muslims and the speaker was a prominent Christian, Jerry Falwell, the President of Liberty University. That did not go unchallenged by another Christian, John Piper, Chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary, who took issue with Falwell’s curious interpretation of a Christian response. Deviation from the approved theological path has had repercussions for one Associate Professor at Wheaton College. Dr. Larycia Hawkins will lose her tenured position at Wheaton, a rigorously Christian college, for having the temerity to suggest that Muslims and Christians are all “people of the book,” children of Abraham, and worship the same God. Dr. Hawkins also has some eminent theologians who support her. I hope they will help her find a new job.

At this moment Donald Trump is about to take the stage at a rally in Burlington Vermont. Unfortunately the venue holds only 1400 people and the Trumps have issued 20,000 tickets. The Burlington police chief and the fire marshal are not happy but Trump will certainly crow about how many people had to be turned away. The latest news from the rally is that the Trump bouncers are asking people as they present their tickets if they are Trump supporters, if they say they are just interested in hearing him speak they don’t get in; only full throated Trumpeters will be admitted.

Jan 6^th

President Obama has called for more stringent control over persons legally entitled to own guns. At this point if you’re a dealer at a gun show you can sell weapons to whoever wants to buy them with no background check required; if you own a gun store however, then you are required to conduct a background check. The idea of equalizing these two sales methods have given those right wingers who are fed, or otherwise nurtured, by the NRA apoplexy.

Gun control of any kind in this country is an untouchable, at least for any elected official who expects to be re-elected. Congress has even prohibited the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) from investigating anything having to do with gun deaths. This prohibition is in spite of over 30 thousand gun deaths a year; pneumococcal pneumonia kills about 40 thousand citizens a year. Can you imagine congress stepping in to control the CDCs investigations of any other cause of death? In 2000 there were about 900 applications by trusts (museums and other educational institutions) for applications to purchase machine guns, sawed off shot guns and other weapons not ordinarily needed for hunting or personal protection. In 2014 these applications for machine gun and similar purchases jumped from 900 to 90 thousand.

The President shed a few tears when he was announcing this executive order and Fox news was quick to step right in and claim that the tears were a hoax aided by…onion juice on a handkerchief. Any evidence for this novel claim has not been forthcoming, nor is any likely to be.  This is in the same class as his birth and childhood in Kenya. (One of the more hilarious bits of his Presidency was when he claimed that he and Donald Trump had played soccer while growing up together in Kenya, but that Trump had not been very good  at it and had resented him ever since; which, of course, accounts for Trump’s current antagonism toward him.) Trump no longer wants to talk about the President’s birth certificate. When asked if he believes that the President was born in this country he won’t discuss the issue.

Then there are the fascinating discrepancies in the polling results about whether or not the President is a Muslim. One poll has 43 percent of Republicans believing that he is a Muslim but this increases to 66 percent of Trump supporters who believe that he’s a Muslim. Trump has encouraged the belief that the President is a Muslim with his followers and not much encouragement for that belief is needed. It is well known that the Trump supporters are a unique subset of voters. It seems to be a subset more inclined to paranoia than most.

Jan 5^th

“Everyone is waiting for the outcome of the standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge between the militia men and the well-armed federal authorities.” That is nonsense of course. There has been no confrontation and I’m sure that there will be no confrontation. The Bundy boys and their militia buddies would love to see several bus-loads of FBI agents, and perhaps a few light tanks, drive up to their stronghold. The national publicity would be enormous…but it won’t happen. These men, mostly armed and ready, will have to endure nothing but their own company in a largely deserted and desolate area until they get tired of playing hero and go home to their families.

The nearest town of any size is Burns and it has less than three thousand people…and it is 30 miles away. A closer settlement is Diamond, Oregon, but it has fewer than 600 people. I’m sure the town folk nearby have been coming with casseroles (Under a white flag of course) but after a few weeks that will stop and then what is there to do? Canned beans as a steady diet can be daunting. So the question is, how long will the occupation last…and will these macho men start shooting at each other given there are no federal agents to target? Shortly they will go home telling everyone who will listen that their resolve to defend the Constitution scared away those evil feds. (Now I have just learned that these same feds are “considering” turning off the power to these occupied buildings. (There will probably be a debate eventually about which side was the more inept!)

We are now treated to Donald Trump’s very first paid for and professionally constructed commercial… and true to form it’s photo shopped. The film is not of Mexicans crossing into the United States although it is shown as a narrator claims that Mexicans are pouring over our border, that’s not what’s being shown. The film is from May 3^rd 2014. It was taken at the Moroccan border with a Spanish colony and shows 800 Moroccans trying to cross into Spanish territory. The photo shopping consists of erasing the network origin and the time stamp from the film to make it appear to be of Mexicans crossing into the United States. Trump’s spokespeople claim that Trump’s fans don’t care about the-mislead. They are right of course; if they cared about any of Trump’s wild assertions, from deporting 11 million people to making Mexico pay for a multibillion dollar wall, they would have deserted Donald Trump long ago.

On January 18^th the British Parliament will debate banning Donald Trump from entering their country. There are two petitions: one with 500 thousand signatures to ban him and one with 40 thousand signatures to let him in. Petitions aside, the Brits will let him in; they would no more ban Trump than we would ban Muslims. Banning people on the basis of religious beliefs or on the basis of idiotic comments would not fit with either country’s core beliefs.

Jan 4^th

The big news today is another “occupy” only this time it isn’t occupy Wall Street. The occupation is of some Government buildings, closed for the season, in the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a good many miles from anywhere else in eastern Oregon. This occupation has an interesting history. It begins with a couple of ranchers, Dwight and Steven Hammond, in eastern Oregon, who set a fire to some federal forest land in order to build a fire break for their own property and to reduce the growth of noxious weeds which also threatened to spread. It seems they were caught, convicted and served out their relatively light sentences. (Their local reputation was one of being helpful to the community where they lived.) A federal judge decided that those previous sentences were too light under federal guidelines and re-sentenced these men to considerably more jail time. Both men agreed to serve this additional time. The unfairness of adding additional time after a sentence has been served is as obvious as it is absurd.

Enter the Bundy boys, Ryan and Ammon. These sons of Cliven Bundy decided that this was an invitation for anti-government militia action. (You may remember the Bundys threatening to shoot any federal agents that came on their property in Nevada expecting payment for the grazing fees they owed for letting their cows graze on public land.) Militia action is always called for when individuals are kept from exercising their right to appropriate public land for their own use. Woody Guthrie’s lyric was “This land is your land, this land is my land…” The militia boys seem to have left out “this land is your land” part of the lyric.

The Hammonds, whom these militia types claim to be defending, have said they want nothing to do with them. The local sheriff has said that the Bundys and their fellow militia men have simply taken advantage of the Hammond’s misfortune to generate some anti-government propaganda. Even the Bundy boy’s father Cliven Bundy has claimed that this wasn’t his idea and that he didn’t know how it would come out. A website, “Intellicall,” which seems devoted to supporting anti-government rhetoric, claimed that carloads of FBI agents armed to the teeth were converging on the area to do battle. No other news agency confirmed that. Intellicall seems more interested in creating heat than in creating light.

The leading Republican Presidential contenders haven’t had much to say about this either. Senator Paul claimed in Nevada that if elected he would turn over all federal land to the states. Won’t it be fun to visit Yellowstone after it has been administered by the political appointees from the Wyoming state capitol? Governor Kasich, on the other hand, said that the Bundy boys should find a home in a federal penitentiary. For a change Donald Trump had nothing to say…so far. Even Fox News has not enlightened us with their opinions. Tucker Carlson this morning was still tilting at those unhappy about the Virginia battle flag.

One of the Bundy boys has said recently, trying to tone down the rhetoric used by the group just the day before, said that they didn’t want to kill anyone. Sure they didn’t and that was why all of them brought guns along.

Jan 3^rd

Forty-seven people were executed by Saudi Arabia in the last day or so. This bloodshed was not public as most Saudi executions are; these consisted of beheadings and firing squads and included at least four Shi’ites, Saudi Arabia is almost entirely Sunni. The executed men had been condemned for some time and many had only been accused of criticizing the Saudi government, not of committing, or even advocating, violent overthrow of the Kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is devoted to the Wahhabi sect. These people believe that the Muslim religion must be purified. Wahhabi was born about 1700 and was affiliated with the Saudi family long before they came to control the entire country. The purification process called for by Wahhabi is not very different form that advocated by ISIL. Every decision about everything should have its roots in the Koran. This obviously means no “graven images;” they were even banned by the Ten Commandments after all. People praying to plaster images of Christ or to images of saints are anathema to Muslims generally and this behavior particularly infuriates the fundamentalist Muslims who believe that statuary of all kinds should be destroyed. Of course not all Sunni Muslims are Wahhabi; many are much more modern. Most of Egypt, Turkey, Jordan and the rest of the Muslim world is Sunni, Iran is the primary Shia country.

Iran is a very considerable power and they were very upset that the Saudis’ had executed a venerated Shia Cleric named Namir al Namir. The Saudis insisted that he was fomenting the overthrow of the government and the Iranians insisted that he was doing no such thing. The result is that the tension between Iran and the Saudis has ratchetted up considerably. The Saudi Embassy in Iran has been trashed, set on fire and looted. While the Iranian government has said that they will catch and punish the perpetrators of this outrage. I doubt that they are in any danger. The Head of Government the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has declared that, “God’s hand of retaliation will grip the necks of Saudi politicians.”

It’s obvious that the Saudi’s have control of the Muslim holy places, particularly Mecca. Non-Muslims are not allowed in Mecca and Muslims must make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least one during their lifetime. It is unlikely that Iran will take any military action against Saudi Arabia in spite of the huge population disparity.   About a third of the Saudi population of 27 million are not nationals while Iran has a population of close to 80 million. That is rather clearly a mismatch. With the Saudi’s sitting on all of the Muslim holy places any military action seems unlikely.

A fundamentalist branch of the Muslim religion is an efficient killing machine. Most of this killing machine has been turned against other Muslims. The Muslims fleeing to Europe and the few coming to America are trying desperately not to be consumed by this tragedy. Then we have a few Christians who claim that they can’t understand why Muslims are killing each other. Apparently they aren’t aware of the Catholic–Protestant blood baths we have had, most recently in Northern Ireland.  There is no need to detail them here; anyone with access to a computer can find that gruesome history. Nationalism and religion can each lead to disasters unless we’re careful.