Sunday, January 28, 2018

Mueller has the Trump Card


Trump’s Russia scandal is a reality TV show that seems to be unspooling in slow motion.  The nature of a story like this can’t really unfold any other way when the audience just learns piece by piece about the individual details of all the egregious events that are a part of this saga.  What makes completion of the story even more sluggish is the fact that Special Counsel Mueller is perhaps the only one who has the most details and the most ‘truth’ about the evolution of this story and he is not telling…..yet.  Until he issues his report or divulges his findings, none of us—the general public, the Congress, the rest of the world---will be able to reach a consensus about the veracity of the claims made against Trump and his administration.

Everyone is caught up in positing about what happened and
predicting what will happen without any confirmation possible.  In the meantime, all the different groups of people with their own agendas and theories scream their opinions to the other groups believing that if they can scream the loudest, their theories will be proven correct.  Predictable.

Meanwhile, our democratic institutions are under attack by a President and administration bent on deconstructing government and degrading long held institutional bulwarks: the rule of law, a free press, equality for all.  That is the real danger slowly eating away at the foundation of our republic, much the same way hot coffee slowly dissolves a cookie.  If you don’t extract it from the liquid in time, it just falls apart.  

The biggest contributor to the looming battle over the survival of our institutions is the majority party in Congress that has abdicated its responsibility to be a check and balance on the Executive Branch.  As the evidence seemingly connects the dots and the administration appears to at the center of the approaching storm, they become more and more hysterical about the FBI and the Press, defending their President when they should be defending the Constitution, and worrying more about the vulnerability of our country to the Russians.

I read a really insightful opinion piece in the New York Times this morning that describes the conditions that contribute to the destruction of democracies.  If there are any arch-conservatives reading this blog, I urge you to ignore your loathing of the New York Times and read this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/27/opinion/sunday/democracy-polarization.html 

I hope it will give you food for thought about what is disappearing from our discourse, and why we should carefully consider how to bring back the concepts of tolerance and forbearance.  I wonder if that is even possible in today’s political parties.  Recent bi-partisan efforts in the Senate hopefully will show us a way forward.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Take a Deep Breath......

The impasse is broken.  There are those Democrats who excoriate their colleagues for being wimps and having no backbone to hold their ground.  I think that is rather short-sighted.  It may appear that Democrats surrendered when the temperature got a little too hot, but if you take the long view, it actually seems like the smart thing to do.

First of all, the Democrat’s pressure resulted in 6 year financing of health insurance for over 9 million underpriviledged children which Republicans had repeatedly backed away from, even to the point of standing there with their arms folded saying essentially, “I don’t care about the health of those children.”  That is a really good thing!

Secondly, they got a ‘commitment’ from McConnell to bring to the Senate floor for a vote a bill that deals with immigration, which is something he has refused to do up until now.  I have already told you how I feel about McConnell in a previous blog, so I hold no trust in his follow-through.  He is a slimebag and we can expect him to try to weasel his way out of honoring his word.  However that will be a lot harder to do now.  Why?

Because, thirdly, he is now faced with a substantial new power base that has arisen in the Senate in the form of moderate Democrats and Republicans who pushed for and got an agreement through the Senate to end the shutdown.  These 25 or so legislators actually acted in the best interest of the country, which is something we haven’t seen for awhile!  It remains to be seen whether this group will be able to alter the course of the majority to actually get an immigration bill through the Senate, but we won’t have to wait that long to find out.  Either way, McConnell has lost some of his cache because now there are a substantial number of Republicans who have actually put country before party.

Fourth, the Dreamers will just have to wait a few more weeks.  Their deadline is still over a month away, and as much as they have to grind their teeth over this, all is not lost.  Can you imagine what might happen if Trump actually starts to try to deport these people?  My guess is that the resistance might take some actions that as yet we have not seen, but you can be sure would be ugly!  The House will be a separate fight if, in fact, the Senate passes something, but much can happen between now and then.

Fifth, Trump has shown his Republican ‘colleagues’ that he is an abject failure as a negotiator.  The last two weeks have shown him, and much of the country, just how weak he is and how malleable he is by his Rasputin like staff and arch conservative Republicans.  This Miller character is all bad.  I knew he was bad news from the moment he made his television debut on a Sunday morning talk show and decreed to all of us that ‘This President will not be disobeyed!’ (I knew kids like him in Junior High School….arrogant and self-righteous---and no one cared to be around them—ever!)  And Kelly!  The two of them are ‘managing’ Trump’s access to outside influence.  I think many Republicans are now seeing why it is important to take power and responsibility to be a check and balance against the chaos, lies and madness emanating from the White House.

Sixth, as mad and angry as the Democratic progressives are, tempering of their anger is a good thing when seen in the context of actually making strong headway in the November midterms.  Moderate Democrats elected in 2016, and those senators up for re-election in 2018 in really ‘red’ states need to be protected.  We need them in the Senate.  There would be a good chance they would be sacrificed if the shutdown had dragged on and been blamed on the Democrats.  No need to take that chance now.  The most, and I mean the MOST important result we need is to make the majority party the minority party after November.  Everything must be in service of that objective.


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So on balance, even though at first blush it seems like the Democrats ‘caved’ according to ‘His Trumpness’, I think Schumer and the Democratic caucus made the right call.  You have to pick your battles in the effort to ultimately win the war.

Monday, January 22, 2018

A Question!

A Question…..          

Can anyone -----ANYONE!-----please tell me why, when 80-90% of the country want dreamers saved; children insured; the military financed; community health centers financed, every measure that Democrats have been introducing in the Senate to deal with each of these problems for the last year, and specifically over the past three days, are nixed by Mitch McConnell.  He refuses to bring any of these measures to a vote.  Why?


Why would anyone do that?  Surely not in the best interests of the country!

Sunday, January 21, 2018

Mourn Competency!

So, the landscape becomes clearer and clearer as we watch the debacle that is our government sliding into bi-cameral fibrillation.  This truly is a reality TV horror show and the action scenes reveal more and more about each of the player’s motives and capabilities.

Donald Trump is really a terrible negotiator after all!  No surprise,  actually, but the demonstrative evidence of his incapacity to understand issues, much less lead parties to the negotiating table for compromise and forward motion is stunning.  Schumer said it best—“negotiating with Jello”—what an image!  His concept of negotiation is make an agreement, then renege…demoralize your adversary by lying to them and wearing them down.  Do it repeatedly and confuse them.  This is not leadership, it is chaos.

On the Congressional side, the Republicans have demonstrated that they are unable to govern.  With all the government shutdowns we have endured over the last 40 years, this is the only time it has occurred when one party had control of all branches of government.  Their prime message is that all of this is the fault of Democrats.  Forget that we are five months into the new fiscal year without a budget, suffering through fits and starts of ‘continuing resolutions’.  Important issues like immigration, defense,  tropical storm relief funding, infrastructure, filling important government posts, children’s health insurance program, DACA issues were ignored.  Instead, Republicans spent the last year dragging us through the meat grinder of unsuccessfully trying to repeal Obamacare and throw 25 million people off health insurance.  After that failure they spent the rest of the year pushing through a ‘tax reform’ bill that was a giant gift to the ‘swamp dwellers’ (wealthy contributors and lobbyists). 

Trump provided the spark for our current government shutdown firestorm by unnecessarily revoking Obama’s executive order protecting the DACA children and throwing 800,000 people’s lives into turmoil.  Then when the ‘President’ washed his hands of that issue by turning the issue over to the Congress to resolve in 6 months, we have seen no less than 4 attempts at bi-partisan solutions by a handful of men of good character.  Each time, the Trump supplicants have twisted their puppet President around to crush the initiative with the heels of their racist boots of intolerance.  Is it any wonder the Democrats have finally taken a stand in support of the DACA youth?  Who else is looking out for them?

And now it is all about the Democrats unwillingness to compromise.  Give me a break!  Trump just released an ad that will poison the well of negotiation by trying to hang future murders by immigrants on the Democrats.  What kind of negotiation tactic is that??

I can feel the momentum rising.  The news reports about all the marches this weekend nationwide have described a change in the energy of the demonstrators.  One year ago when millions of women marched in protest of Trump’s inauguration the attitude and feeling was one of fear and anxiety.  The energy this year is different—it is now anger, resoluteness and resistance.  The election this year is going to be a tidal wave.  Frankly, that is the only way to remedy this situation.  The next three election cycles offer us the chance to change the equation.  New people need to be elected to Congress.  We need to refresh our legislator selection with people with integrity, humanity, competency, compassion, and most of all, motivation to revere the Constitution and do the business of the country!

Isn’t it ironic that the whining, squabbling lawmakers are getting paid during the shutdown while government employees, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck will go without pay?  Just symptomatic of how our system has been corrupted.


P.S.  (As the investigation into Trump’s business history is revealed piece by piece, as Mueller follows the money, we are discovering that he actually has had a long and tortuous history with finding financing and losing money.  It is curious most of his business partners have been organized crime characters who thrived on money laundering and theft.  Most of his financing has come from Russians over the years….from Russians who were criminally moving vast amounts of stolen assets out of Russia and other countries and finding a willing transfer/laundering agent in Trump and his construction and real estate deals.  No wonder he has a soft spot for Russia.  These sleazy characters appear in almost all the deals that Trump has done over the decades.  People like Felix Sater, Oleg Deripaska, many other oligarchical friends of Putin.  These are cronies that run the big banks and other shady conglomerates in Russia.  I can’t wait to see a complete list of all the ‘deals’ he was involved in over the years with Russians.  It is clearly possible for Putin and his associates to have all kinds of influence and power over Trump.  They have been financing all his activities and ‘grooming’ him for exactly what has happened.)

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Monday, January 15, 2018

Make The Deal!



I had a chance to actually meet and talk with a 'Dreamer' a couple of weeks ago.  He was a young man, oldest of three children from Mexico whose parents are migrant farmers.  They arrived in the US as undocumented, spent years following the crops with their young children who spent the same amount of time as their parents in the fields picking tomatoes or lettuce or whatever was being harvested.  His parents are still doing that, and he is now 20 years old.  They struggled for him and his siblings, eeking out a living so their children could have a better life.

Today, their son is in his second year of college with a scholarship studying biomedical engineering, proud of his heritage and proud of the only country and home he has ever known.  His DACA registration is about to expire and he is scared.  Uncertain about his future, suddenly put at risk by an ignoramus in the White House who arbitrarily and flippantly decided to undo Obama’s executive order just because he could, without any thought to the chaos and anxiety he would cause for almost 800,000 young people, to say nothing of their families.  Please explain what ‘good’ this does for our country.

So legislators have been trying to scramble to figure out a deal that would save these young people from further heartache and uncertainty.  Trump set an arbitrary deadline for this, and as the Congress tried to come up with a bipartisan solution, Trump opened his foul mouth and has now probably queered the deal.  Democrats are incensed, Republicans are being intransigent on the wall and meanwhile the Dreamers—800,000 young people who through no fault of their own are pawns in this political melodrama—suffer in silence waiting for a bunch of elitist legislators to ‘unpuff’ themselves and accomplish a solution.

Democrats are threatening to vote NO on a budget resolution that would shut down the government unless the Republicans relent and accept a clean DACA bill or some compromise they can accept…..all of this provoked by our racist President for no other reason than he wants to reverse everything “Obama”!  Good Lord, what a shitshow!


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I say to Democrats, relax and give the goonies their stupid wall money and take the heat off the Dreamers.  Then you can take the ‘high road’ and save the future of these productive and innocent young people for our country.  Republican rule will pass away over the next several years and you will be able to undo much of the horror that has been visited upon us over the last year.  If you balk, and the government shuts down, then you risk being tarred with the blame and it does nothing to fix the real problem, which is the short-circuiting of almost a million young lives.