2016 August 4^th

Donald Trump asks an advisor on nuclear weapons, “If we have these why can’t we use them?”

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump claimed the speechless mother of a dead Army captain killed in Iraq was silent on TV while her husband spoke was because her religion forbade her to speak.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump says Speaker Paul Ryan asked for his support but Ryan insists he has done no such thing.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump, when told that Putin kills journalists defends him by saying that we kill people too.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump says that Putin will never invade Ukraine, “You can take it to the bank.” But the Russians were already in the Ukraine.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump says that we should re-think our NATO treaty obligations.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump believes that we should encourage Japan and South Korea to develop nuclear weapons to defend themselves.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump, in front of thousands at one of his rallies, mimics and ridicules a handicapped reporter who suffers from athetoid palsy. Then, when faced with the video, claims he didn’t do it.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump invites Russia to break into the State Department email servers and produce the 30 thousand lost Clinton emails.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump complains about Hillary Clinton’s speaking fees of several hundred thousand dollars each.  His proposed income tax plan, if enacted, will save him 66 million a year.

Hillary Clinton lies about her emails.

Donald Trump got a fake Purple Heart medal from a fan who told him the medal was a copy but Trump announced to the crowd that it was real and that he had always wanted one. Trump got five deferments during the Viet Nam war.

Hillary Clinton has lied about her emails. Isn’t that awful!

2016 August 2^nd

Yesterday I suggested that Donald Trump might be verging on a psychiatric category, pathological liar. I pointed out some recent obvious Trump lies, for example claiming that the NFL had sent him a letter agreeing that the scheduling of the up-coming debates was bad. The NFL denied sending the letter. This was trivial in itself but it did fit into a pattern.

Eugene Robinson, the co-editor of the Washington Post and a columnist of considerable renown has a column today titled, “Is Donald Trump plain crazy?” His answer was “very likely.” He cited many more of Trump’s lies than I did and he came to a more forthright conclusion than I did. One interesting Trump claim was that he had raised 36 million dollars in just one month. Trump said such a huge amount raised in one month was unheard of; it was only unheard of to Donald Trump because Mitt Romney, in the equivalent period four years ago, raised 112 million dollars.

Concerns about Trump’s mental health come from many people who have seen changes in his behavior in the last few months. He seems more than ever unable to ignore the tiniest slight. He continues to pound away at Mr. Khan whose son was killed in Iraq, because Khan claimed that Trump had sacrificed nothing for his country. Trump countered by insisting that he had “worked very, very hard creating jobs.” The equivalency of creating jobs to having a son killed in battle is not obvious.

In an event in Colorado Springs, a right wing bastion, he and some of his people were stuck in an elevator and had to be extracted by the fire department. Later that evening Trump went after the fire chief because the chief wouldn’t permit more people to assemble in his venue than the law allowed.

He continues to pick at these scabs while we have an economic quarter with less than 2 percent growth; and the FBI report on Clinton’s servers is an open door to an attack on her. Trump would rather try to settle trivial grudges than make solid points against Clinton. This is either insanity or stupidity…or maybe some of each.

The thinking by some people who know Trump well is that he much prefers the adulation of his supporters to what awaits him if he becomes President. The result is that he doesn’t really want to be President. Of course he also hates to lose. How can he lose and not lose? The establishment can rig the election so that he will lose; he will be robbed of the Presidency. He will not really have lost it.

When this happens, some pundits claim, Trump will leave politics temporarily, get financial backing from his Russian friends and together with his good buddy Roger Aisles, open the Trump Network and create the Trump political party.

Is it farfetched? Of course it is; but it is no more farfetched than a thin-skinned billionaire winning the Republican Party’s nomination for President on his first try for public office.

2016 August 1^st

On CNN this morning I heard Wolff Blitzer interview retired Lt. General Michael T. Flynn. Flynn has been very critical of all things democratic and was here given a chance to flog his book “Field of Fight” in return for his views on various political subjects. His book will do very well with the Trump folks although his tweet at the RNC about Jews and the “USSR” should make us wonder why in the world this man was heading the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Wolff Blitzer from CNN was interviewing Flynn and asked him about Kr. Khan’s son who was killed in Iraq. Flynn did not hesitate to call Captain Khan a hero. Then Blitzer asked about Senator McCain: Was he a hero. Now it was “duck and dodge” time. Trump has said that McCain is not a hero and how can Flynn contradict Trump? He can’t and so he didn’t, but he did twist mightily in the wind avoiding an answer.

Both campaigns have their very own retired three star general tucked tightly in place to be brought forth whenever a military opinion is called for. Trump has Flynn and Clinton has Allen. According to General (four stars) Martin Dempsey, the retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this politicizing of General Officers is a very bad idea. The military is not supposed to be on either political side. If we aren’t careful we’ll have one group of American troops facing off against another and civilians will have nowhere to hide bur their basements.

Yesterday’s blog pointed out the problem Trump has with the truth. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 111) there is a category called “Pathological Liar.” Whether Trump makes it into that category or not is beyond my pay grade. It is well to understand that many mental disorders are quite unlike diseases caused by germs or cancers; you either have mumps or you don’t; you are either pregnant or you aren’t. On the other hand, if you aren’t schizophrenic you might have a schizoid personality. Donald Trump might not be a pathological liar but he might be very close.

Trump claimed that he got a letter from the NFL complaining about the dates for the debates selected by the debate committee. The NFL immediately claimed that they sent no such letter.

Then he claimed in a news conference last Wednesday that he had, “Nothing to do with Russia.” His son has said, “Russia makes up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

Trump said, speaking of Putin, “He’s not going into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down and you can put it down, you can take it anywhere you want He’s not going into Ukraine, OK? Just so you understand. He’s not going into Ukraine, all right.” At the time Russia already occupied the Crimea and a part of Ukraine. Trump was either hopelessly ignorant or lying.

There are many other examples. For Donald Trump the truth is whatever will bring a wave of applause from his adoring fans; there is no other criteria.

 

2016 July 30^th

This morning on Fox and Friends, Tucker Carlson, who passes for the program’s resident intellectual, was holding forth about the email hacking of various Democratic groups. Reverend Mike Huckabee was available to comment about this and Carlson invited him to do so. (Exactly why the former governor of Arkansas and failed presidential candidate should be expected to be knowledgeable about email hacking was not explained.)

Huckabee, whose daughter is employed as a Trump surrogate, was quick to give his views on the matter: Huckabee made it clear that he could not understand why only the Democratic emails were being hacked; he was quite specific, declaring that the Republican Party’s candidate’s communications were not involved and he didn’t understand why. It is possible that Huckabee’s knowledge base does not extend much beyond the Arkansas state borders.

The hacking was probably done by Russian national authorities and it was done specifically to discredit and degrade Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The emails were leaked on the eve of the Democratic convention at the perfect time to cause the maximum disruption by Sander’s supporters whose enthusiasms sometimes border on the irrational. Putin recognizes that Trump’s willingness to disregard our NATO treaty obligations make it well worthwhile to do what he can to help Trump win the election and that’s just what he’s doing. He makes no secret of his enthusiasm for Trump.

Trump encourages Putin; he says that if the Russians can capture and release those 30 thousand Clinton emails, they’d be well rewarded. Then after his handlers reigned him in he said he was just being “sarcastic.” No Donald, that isn’t being sarcastic; when you claim after being hammered by Clinton at her convention you will no longer be “Mr. Nice Guy” that, Mr. Trump, is sarcasm.

Fox and Friends brought a Trump surrogate forward to tell us about the differences between the campaign’s vice presidential picks, Indiana’s Governor Pence and former Virginia Governor Kaine. We learn that Governor Pence, who governed Indiana from 2013 to 2016, produced a considerable increase in the state’s employment over that period; Governor Kaine, who was governor of Virginia from 2006 to 2010, was quite ineffective because his state lost jobs steadily over his tenure. Because of this the Trump flack claimed that Pence had been the much more effective governor.

But wait, from 2006 to 2010 when Kaine was governor of Virginia, national unemployment rose from 4.7 to 9.8 percent. This was the result of the Bush recession when we were losing as many as 900 thousand jobs a month. No mention of this by the Trump flack and certainly no mention of this circumstance by “Fair and Balanced” Fox News.

 Pence, who had much better employment data, began his governorship in 2013 when unemployment was 8 percent and he watched it drop to its current 4.9 percent. Could the increase in Indiana jobs have been due the improvement in the national economy? That possibility would never be suggested by Fox News.

2016 July 29^th

Both conventions are over and we are reminded of “Macbeth” and the lines ending, “…It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” but what if it isn’t? Now that the odds makers have had time to make their adjustments, how have the election odds changed as a result of the conventions? The Brits, who can bet on American elections, have no political interest in the outcome, but they do have a monetary interest in getting the odds right. Paddy Power is one such outfit with a large online presence. The odds they give on the election have not changed noticeably because of the conventions. Hillary Clinton is still the odds on favorite to win. A two-dollar bet on her to win will earn you just one dollar if you’re right. (An odds on bet is one in which you can win less than you risk.) For Donald Trump the odds are 13/8 meaning that you can bet eight dollars and if you are right you’ll win 13 dollars. In sum, Paddy Power is still reasonably sure that Clinton will win.

Peggy Noonan, the very long time columnist for “The Wall Street Journal” tells us that Trump’s acceptance speech “was neither eloquent nor lofty, but it was powerful.” Then she goes on to say “Trump’s speech was important. He is a vivid figure and for year has elicited strong reactions. By now he’s exhausting. We have Trump fatigue.” So what was so powerful about Trump’s speech? Perhaps that will take another column.

She writes, “Does he want a ban on Muslims? No. ‘We must immediately suspend immigration from any nation that has been compromised by terrorism…’” Compromised by terrorism? Who decides? Do we ban immigration from France where there have been many terrorist attacks? Noonan does not mention this change from Trump’s initial ban, “…until we can find out what the hell is going on.” Does Trump believe that we now know “what the hell is going on” and so he changes his immigration criteria? Will he jump back to his first ban tomorrow, or maybe next week?

A high point of the convention was a talk by Khizr Khan, a Muslim whose son was killed while serving in Iraq. He pointed out that Trump’s ban on Muslim immigrants would have kept his family from coming to America. He said that Trump needed to read the Constitution, particularly the sections on liberty and freedom. He pointed out that Trump had risked nothing and lost nothing for his country.

Sam Clovis the co-chair of the Trump campaign was quick to deny that Trump had banned Muslims from the country. Clovis, a retired Air Force bird colonel, claimed that Trump had just wanted a pause on the immigration of Muslims. So Colonel Clovis, how long must a pause be before it becomes a ban? It seems obvious to most of us who speak English that this “pause” is a ban as long as it is used to stop Muslims from entering the country.

Of course Trump is not yet President and if Paddy Power’s odds are right, his presidency isn’t all that likely.

2016 July 28^th

The Democrats are having an excellent convention; the high profile speakers, from Vice President Biden, to President Obama, to Secretary Panetta, and on and on, have all given great presentations. But these fine speakers have been outshone by the Democrat’s not so secret weapon, Donald J. Trump.

Trump played to a raucous and adoring crowd in Scranton, Pennsylvania, at the same time the Democrats were holding forth in Philadelphia. The President presented a much more up-beat picture of the country than Donald Trump has given us. Trump claimed that the President was “out of touch” because, as Trump pointed out, 70 percent of those recently surveyed  thought we were going in the wrong direction.

The survey question, “country going in the right/wrong direction” goes back to the seventies. While 70 percent of the people now believe the country is going in the wrong direction, when President Obama was running for his first election in October of 2008 that number was 91 percent. There was a time when the country’s citizens thought the country was going in the right direction. On February 26, 1999 just after President Clinton was acquitted in his famous impeachment trial, only about 30 percent thought we were going in the wrong direction.

The whole issue of polling citizens to ask them if the country is going in the “right “ direction lumps together those who believe it is going in the wrong direction because social programs are hopelessly inadequate with those who believe it is going in the wrong direction because we are subsidizing welfare queens who are taking advantage of the system. The result is that there will always be a substantial group who believe the country is “going in the wrong direction.” The answer to that question really tells us very little about the mood of the electorate.

Then we have those WikiLeaks emails: There is some evidence that Russia had penetrated the DNC computer system and that their IT folks were responsible for these emails appearing at just the right time to throw a “spanner in the works” of the DNC’s convention. The emails detail the stupid bias the DNC had when they clearly favored Clinton during the primaries.

The bromance between Trump and Putin is an established fact. Putin wants the disintegration of NATO and Trump does not favor our continuing to support our treaty obligations there, It’s all about the money you see. NATO countries that don’t pay what Trump believes they should might not be defended. Putin loves that idea and will do what he can to see Trump elected, including a little email hacking. Trump has encouraged Putin’s efforts suggesting that Russia should jump right in there and get more of those emails. But then there was a lot of blowback and Trump let it be known that he was just being “sarcastic.” That fooled no one with the possible exception of Bill O’Reilly and other Fox News types. (Fox showed Leon Panetta being booed but didn’t get around to showing Panetta’s smashing assault on Trump’s Russian connection. So much for “fair and balanced.”)

2016 July 27^th

President Obama held a press conference with Mexico’s President Enrique Pena Nieto yesterday. The President provided some relevant facts about our relationship with Mexico and about our situation here at home. These facts nicely cut through the bluster we have lately heard from The Republican’s chief bluster boy. I quote the President below:

“Mexico is our third-largest trading partner. We sell more to Mexico than we do to China, India, and Russia combined. Every year, millions of tourists and businesspeople and friends and family cross our border legally. Every day, $1.5 billion in trade and investment crosses our border -- and that's trade that supports over a million jobs right here in the United States. On a whole host of issues, from our shared security to climate change, Mexico is a critical partner and is critically important to our own well-being. We’re not just strategic and economic partners, we’re also neighbors, and we're friends, and we're family -- including millions of Americans that are connected to Mexico by ties of culture and of language.

A reporter challenged the two Presidents to respond to the Republican presidential nominee who called, once again, for a wall. Isn't Trump's success an indictment of your Presidency, he asked Obama. And how do you partner with a person that you’ve previously compared to Hitler and Mussolini, he asked Peña Nieto. Here is the President’s reply:

“. . . this idea that America is somehow on the verge of collapse, this vision of violence and chaos everywhere, doesn’t really jibe with the experience of most people. I mean, I hope people, the next morning, walked outside and birds were chirping and the sun was out, and this afternoon people will be watching their kids play in sports teams and go to the swimming pool, and folks are going to work and getting ready for the weekend.  And, in particular, I think it is important just to be absolutely clear here that some of the fears that were expressed throughout the week just don’t jibe with the facts.  So let’s take two specific examples. When it comes to crime, the violent crime rate in America has been lower during my presidency than any time in the last three, four decades. And although it is true that we’ve seen an uptick in murders and violent crime in some cities this year, the fact of the matter is, is that the murder rate today, the violence rate today is far lower than it was when Ronald Reagan was President -- and lower than when I took office. We’ve just gone through a tragic period where we saw both a tragedy in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, and then the insanity and the viciousness of people targeting police officers. And we are all heartbroken by that, and we're all troubled by how we can rebuild trust, support law enforcement and make sure that communities feel that they are being fairly policed. But the fact is that the rate of intentional killings of police officers is also significantly lower than it was when Ronald Reagan was President. Those are facts. That's the data. When it comes to immigration, I think Americans expect that our immigration process is orderly and it is legal.  And we have put unprecedented resources at our border.  Well, it turns out that the rate of illegal migration into the United States today is lower by two-thirds than it was when Ronald Reagan was President.  We have far fewer undocumented workers crossing the border today than we did in the ‘80s, or the ‘90s, or when George Bush was President. That's a fact. So the one thing that I think is important is -- obviously there are going to be different visions about where we should go as a country -- how we can provide jobs, how we can make sure that our kids are able to get the education they need to succeed in the 21st century, how do we deal with our budget, how do we make sure our tax system is fair, how do we deal with very real issues around growing inequality or wages that have not gone up as fast as we want, and the real pressures that a lot of families feel. But we're not going to make good decisions based on fears that don't have a basis in fact. And that, I think, is something that I hope all Americans pay attention to.  America is much less violent than it was 20, 30 years ago And immigration is much less a problem than it was not just 20, 30 years ago, but when I came in as President.  That doesn’t mean we have solved those problems, but those are facts. I think that covers just about everything -- oh, you had some question about my approval ratings being high and right track-wrong track.  I think if you look at almost every year, under every President over the last -- I don't know -- 20, 30 years, you're going to be hard pressed to find a year in which the majority of Americans thought we were on the right track.  Maybe because all the good things that are happening in America don't get reported on a lot. So I don't think that's actually unusual.  But I appreciate you bringing up the fact that my poll numbers are doing okay.” So that’s the word from the POTUS himself; unsurprisingly he said it far better than I could have paraphrased it. Think about it!