Trump curse strikes again

Earlier this week Senator Jon Ossoff made a pretty innocuous comment about Trump's favorite executive assistant Natalie Harp. His comment was meant to be a critique of Cheetolini's lack of interest in doing his actual job: being President. Instead of focusing on important policy issues and maybe finding an off ramp for the clusterfuck he created in the Middle East, Orange Julius would rather talk about drapes for his version of Versailles or the imaginary vandals attacking the reflecting pool on the National Mall. Ossoff correctly noted that Trump preferred to travel with Natalie rather than do any real work.

The MAGAverse flipped out. The response was bizarre. The Reich wing immediately went into overdrive ranting about how Ossoff had trashed the Diaper Nurse by suggesting she and the orange cockwomble were fornicating. It's kind of cute that the MAGAts hold Cheetolini in such high esteem they think that decrepit geezer is capable of fucking anything. Do they see the suggestion of impropriety as proof of Mango Mussolini's manhood? After all, if he and his human security blanket are getting it on it's more proof that he really is the hypermasculine almost a superhero his Truth Social posts keep suggesting he is. 

Let's get real. There isn't enough Viagra on the planet to stiffen the mushroom hiding in Cheetolini's diapers. And if there was it would probably kill him -- Viagra and a bad heart (and Orange Julius is like a textbook illustration for Congestive Heart Failure in an elderly man) do not mix. Granted, it could mean an old dude gets to die happy, but would The Donald risk it? He's definitely sliding into full-blown dementia but he's also got strong survival skills -- and Cheetolini is scared shitless of dying. 

So why do I say "Trump curse strikes again?" Because this is typical inept messaging from Team Trump. If they had all just ignored it anything Ossoff said wouldn't have been news outside Georgia. Instead the rapid response team freaked out and went more than a tad overboard on two things: accusing Ossoff of trashing Natalie and denying vehemently any unseemly genitalia fondling was happening. End result? Instead of a brief mention in the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution) a nothing burger turned into a multi-course meal for the national press. And maybe international. I haven't checked Helsingfors Sanomat recently but when a news item is on the front page of every major U.S. paper that news item usally ends up in papers elsewhere. The Trump rapid response team did a great job of promoting a news story no one really knew or cared about before they highlighted it.

So what is the deal with Natalie? It seems likely she's exactly what it looks like: a human security blanket who keeps Orange Julius mellow by indulging his narcissism. She carries a portable printer everywhere so she can produce hard copies of flattering memes, articles, whatever at a moment's notice to placate Cheetolini's ego. She's the one who feeds The Donald's vanity by handing results of bogus polls claiming he's super popular or that the economy is doing great. She guarantees he almost never hears the truth about anything. She's been described by various observers as basically unhinged, so totally obsessed with Trump that she's viewed by security experts as a potential threat (obsessive fans tend to lash out at whoever they've obsessed about when things don't go as expected), but Orange Julius is too dense to realize the woman is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. He loves the flattery so is oblivious to the crazy. Given Natalie's superficial resemblance to Ivanka, it's possible the senile old coot doesn't have a clue who she really is. 

Metal coat hangers poised to make a comeback

Like everyone else in the country, I have been thinking about abortion and a woman's right to control her own body. It's kind of weird how all those men who are so vehement about not getting vaccinated ("My body, my choice!!") refuse to apply that same concept of personal autonomy to anyone with a functioning uterus. They're also too rigid (and brain dead) to grasp the simple truth that abortion rates remain pretty steady regardless of restrictions on access. The only thing that changes is the death rate when the abortion moves from a clinic office to the proverbial back alley. 

I am tempted to do a real rant about the women who claim to be 'pro-life' because so many of them  are the worst hypocrites. Men have a sort of excuse when it comes to being anti-abortion: they're usually remarkably ignorant about how the human body functions to begin with, and quite a few of them really do want to control women. Maybe not always on a conscious level, but nonetheless they're totally on board with the idea of barefoot, pregnant, and not competing with men for anything. They're not really pro-life. They're pro-control.

Women, on the other hand, do know how women's bodies work, they all know someone who's experienced sexual assault or an unexpected or unwanted pregnancy, so why any woman would ever be anti-abortion baffles me. Too many women are pro life/anti-abortion until it's their own body or their daughters with the unwanted pregnancy. They'll go from standing outside clinics harassing patients to slipping in to get the procedure themselves to right back on the protest line calling other women murderers. I know a few myself. They've had abortions for various reasons but to hear them talk now abortion is the ultimate evil. Privately they'll admit it was one of the smartest things they ever did; publicly they're right there sticking crosses on the church lawn* and referring to anyone who has an abortion as a baby killer. I'm not sure what would be an appropriate label. Hypocrite actually feels a bit mild.

But I'm not in a solid ranting mood at the moment. Too early in the morning, not enough caffeine to sustain a long coherent rant. Instead, given the odd way my mind functions, I've been wondering where desperate women are going to find the coat hangers. Have you guys checked your closets lately? Plastic, thick, totally useless as a surgical instrument plastic. Coat hangers for abortion purposes have to be the lightweight metal ones, the kind dry cleaners might still use -- which is debatable, given how few

people still use dry cleaners for anything. You know, the kind of coat hanger many millennials and younger folk have never seen, the kind that you could untwist to create something to use in trying to unlock a car door back in the days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and you could unlock the doors on your Edsel by slipping the hooked end of the hanger down in the door to snag the lock release. The kind Joan Crawford could beat her daughter with when she violated the no wire coat hangers rule in the Crawford household. Of course, that's another thing younger folk have probably never seen: Mommy Dearest.

*Why only crosses? Why no Stars of  David or Hindu symbols? Are all terminated embryos automatically Christian?

Very shakey moral high ground

 Listening to '1-A' on NPR this morning and thinking, not surprisingly, that the United States has a really short memory when it comes to history. As a society we're really good at shoving unpleasant facts deep into the memory hole. The topic of the hour is Chinese mistreatment of the Uyghur minority within China. It is undoubtedly a horrible situation. The Chinese have established "re-education" centers, moved Uyghurs from their traditional homeland and forced them to take jobs elsewhere, they've tried to prevent Uyghurs from speaking their native language and separated children from their parents. Where, one asks, could they have possibly gotten inspiration for such mass indoctrination and attempted acculturation?

Genocide of native peoples? Indoctrination efforts? Boarding schools for the children? Persecution for practicing their traditional religion? Relocation to areas far from home to work in factories? Locked in internment camps as a possible threat to national security? The irony runs deep. 

One of the news items earlier in the morning was a brief report on the Secretary of Interior explaining the latest (as in, the immediate future; Biden still has to sign the bill) addition to the National Parks system, a site in Colorado that during World War II served as a concentration camp for Japanese-Americans. Amache National Historic Site is located in southeastern Colorado near the town of Granada. It is only one of multiple sites around the nation where Japanese-Americans were imprisoned during the war. We were at war with Germany, too, but I don't recall ever hearing about German-Americans being forced to leave their homes in Milwaukee, St. Louis, and elsewhere after being given barely enough time to pack a suitcase, but maybe no one in government wanted to risk losing breweries.  

A slight digression. The bill to designate the internment camp as a national historic site met with almost zero opposition. It was one of those rare examples of Congress coming close to passing a bill unanimously. One loud exception: Mike Lee, the asshole Republican Senator from Utah. He wants absolutely no land added to the National Parks (or maybe to the Department of Interior in general) so had said the only way he'd vote for it was if Interior agreed to put an equivalent amount of land, something like 1 square mile, up for sale to private ownership. Amache was already in public ownership; it was simply being transferred from state to federal management. Of course, Lee is still seething over President Biden restoring the boundaries for Bears Ears National Monument in Utah (also all public land, both before and after the boundaries got modified, because everything included in both versions of Bears Ears was owned by the Bureau of Land Management). Lee caved after the senior Senator from Colorado leaned on him.

In any case, I could see the U.S. lecturing China on human rights and suppressing indigenous and minority peoples if it was couched as "We did something similar and we realize now it was a huge honking mistake, a major blot on our legacy, and one we've learned to regret," but, nope. It's more like that whole demonizing the Japanese never happened. Almost 80 years after the fact the country is now willing to preserve a few crumbling buildings and put up a few books on sticks, but it's not going to get mentioned in policy discussions or lecturing other nations on proper behavior.

Ditto the re-education efforts, the removal of children from their homes, and all the other efforts to change the Uyghurs. If a person is thinking about it all pretty quickly calls to mind phrases like "Indian boarding schools." The book pictured above, The Ledgerbook of Thomas Blue Eagle, is both one of the most beautiful illustrated kids' books a person can read and one of the most heartbreaking. Thomas Blue Eagle is a teenager removed from his home on the reservation in South Dakota and sent to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. The book is the boy's journal. He's homesick, he misses his family, he gets punished whenever he forgets and speaks his native language, the school cuts his hair and changes his name, and in general they try to get him to forget he's Lakota. But he copes, he adjusts, and he looks forward to being able to go home for a visit soon. And then he dies from tuberculosis, as did massive numbers of other students in the boarding schools. It's definitely one of those keep the box of Kleenex close when you get toward the end books.   

More recently, there was the Urban Relocation Act in 1956. . . I know people who got persuaded to leave their rural homes and move to Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, or other cities in search of a better life. Native Americans were assigned social workers in the cities who would help newcomers find a place to stay and businesses that were hiring. Fred Dakota, former tribal chairman for the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, told a story about going down to Chicago in the late 1950s and getting hired by a company that made sporting goods like bows and arrows. He'd get pointed out to plant visitors as being "a real Indian" as if he possessed some special expertise when it came to manufacturing arrows. (He didn't last long in the city. He came home to Baraga County, became active in Native politics, and is remembered now as the father of Indian gaming. The Chinese government had better hope the Uyghurs don't have a Fred Dakota because the Uyghurs will eventually end up owning the country.)

In any case, the goal of urban relocation wasn't to end rural poverty or lack of opportunity; the implicit goal was to separate people from the reservations, get them to become embedded in a dominant white culture, and gradually depopulate Native communities, thus relieving the burden on the Bureau of Indian Affairs and treaty obligations. Granted, no one was forcibly removed from their home and told they now worked in a factory a thousand miles away, but is financially coerced cultural assimilation that much better morally than forced assimilation?

You know, when an ethically dubious government program happened recently enough that people who participated in it are around to talk about it, that's not exactly ancient history. You don't have to be real smart to recognize why the Chinese consider American hand wringing and lectures about human rights to be rather meaningless.

I guess Lockheed needs more drone sales

I've been watching the U.S. and the main stream media keep pushing harder and harder to create a reason to get sucked into a land war in Europe. Cynic (realist?) that I am, it seems obvious that since the high tech arms market in south Asia dried up when the Forever War in Afghanistan ended Lockheed, Raytheon, et al. need a new market for their high tech weaponry. We've been hearing about supplying the Ukrainians with Tomahawk missiles for awhile now. Each missile has a price tag of not quite $2 million, which makes them definitely a more lucrative item to peddle than bullets for the infantry to use. There is a reason why the U.S. isn't real interested in reviving the diplomatic efforts promoted by France, Germany, and other European countries.

Naturally there is, of course, an almost feverish rush to put all the blame on Vladimir Putin. Not only do politicians and the media love to have a villain they can point at, focusing on Putin and his imperialistic designs on a former Soviet republic means no one is asking the really important question: cui bono? Who benefits? Who has the most to gain if the U.S. gets entangled int he Ukrainian mess? 

Other than the arms manufacturers, though, I'm not sure anyone does. Putin doesn't really want to invade Ukraine. He's fine with just encouraging the pro-Russian insurgents in the Donbas region to continue trying to break away from Ukraine as a whole.If he can manage to sucker the American government into doing something stupid that'd be an added bonus.

There has been a low key civil war happening in the Donbas region of Ukraine for years, the area where the majority of the population are Russian speakers and where many people still get nostalgic for (believe it or not) the good old days of the Soviet Union. Or maybe an even earlier time period, the good old days when the Russian aristocracy spoke French. The imperial government may have been incompetent and corrupt, but it was consistently incompetent and corrupt, not to mention supposedly having God on its side. Given the choice between a predictable autocracy and an unpredictable democracy, a lot of people prefer the former.

And, speaking of that imperial government, a glance at the maps predating World War I provides a pretty clear reason why Russians, Putin included, might feel like they're justified in changing a few borders. Russia used to extend significantly farther west than it does now. Regions that are independent countries now were duchies in 1913. Some regions had a fair amount of autonomy, but they were all part of Russia.It's unlikely Putin actually believes he's going to be able to get any of that back, but you know he's got to be fantasizing about it.

I'm not sure what Biden and other American policy makers are fantasizing about. I do, however, find it interesting that the two governments talking the loudest about getting tough with Putin -- Great Britain and the United States -- are the two whose countries aren't part of the same continent as Ukraine. There's nothing quite like being the farthest removed physically from a potential mess to inspire hubris in a person or a government.

The circular firing squad is at it again

Part of me is thinking, holy wah, we really are carrying this whole everyone's a victim and we must listen to every woman and totally, totally validate whatever it is they're feeling thing much, much too far. Another part is going, oh, crap, there's a typo in that meme and do I have the ambition to try to redo it with a similar sentiment? (I think we all know the answer to that one.)

In any case, why, dear god, why when various supposed allies of the left like Trevor Noah -- who does a real good job of trashing Cheetolini on a regular basis -- talk about Biden and his penchant for invading personal space do they only focus on the women? There are a gazillion photos out there of Biden being an equal opportunity inside one's comfort zone offender. Let's face it -- Al Franken doesn't look real thrilled about Biden whispering sweet nothings in his ear. I know a lot of guys who would also feel totally creeped out or repulsed by someone being as much of a hugger/shoulder-patter/top of head kisser as some women say they were when Biden got touchy-feely with them. Why is the invasion of personal space only an issue for women? Isn't this an issue for all of us? Do dudes really want other dudes slithering up and giving them uninvited or oddly personal hugs?

In any case, it is definitely time for fellow liberals to stop piling on Biden as if he'd committed some truly heinous crime. Yes, he's been overly familiar with a gazillion people over the years, but so what? He hasn't been grabbing at boobs or playing grab ass; he's doing what even the women who say they felt uncomfortable classified as "nonsexual" and "not assault." They just didn't like having their space invaded. I know the feeling, but I also think it's really weird that no one bothered telling Uncle Joe they felt a bit creeped out at the time he did the stuff instead of many years later. What's the point other than to torpedo his possible plan to run for President? I mean, you don't punish a puppy for pissing on a rug a year after the event so what's Biden supposed to learn now? Were they hoping he'd get so distracted thinking back over the thousands of friendly hugs he's given and wondering which ones fall into the creepy category that he'd forget about presidential fantasies? Biden has a long and definitely mixed political history that combined with his age (ancient) makes him remarkably easy to derail as a candidate. Why bother to make him feel bad about the fact he's an unabashed extrovert who genuinely likes people?

I'm starting to think maybe it's time for us all to start emulating some other cultures that put a real premium on respecting personal space. Let's take a long hard look at Finland. Finns are known for their reticence, for their reluctance to become overly familiar too quickly. It's ingrained in the culture. The S.O. and I have been watching Finnish television programs and one thing we noticed is the way Finns build distance into even their work relationships. (Or maybe especially their work relations.) At the office when they ask about other colleagues it's never "Where's John" or "Where's Maria?" It's "Where's Nurmi?" "Where's Peltola?" It's surnames only. Built-in formality.

Why is common sense in such short supply?

I've been thinking about "the wall" lately. It's hard to avoid doing so when the federal government is shut down because the Toddler in the White House is throwing a hissy fit over not getting his way. I view this obsession with a medieval technology as yet another sign that the man is not the sharpest tool in the shed. Then again, considering that his most ardent supporters are equally obsessed with putting up a humongous wall to keep the close to nonexistent hordes of desperate women and children out, maybe he's just got an even lower opinion of his supporters than I do. If the only thing that will keep his deplorables happy is doing something stupid, then he'll do something stupid.

The whole emphasis on "securing the borders" by putting up a physical barrier to keep undesirables out has always baffled me. Walls have never worked. You can scale them with ladders, break through them, tunnel under, or walk around it blowing a trumpet (Joshua 6:1-21) but sooner or later the wall fails.

In fact, the wall, such as it currently exists along the southern border, is already failing. It's not keeping out undocumented immigrants. Most of them arrive by airplane clutching tourist visas in their hands and simply don't leave when the visa expires. It's not keeping out drugs. The absolute most devastating drug on the market in the U.S. today is fentanyl. It's coming in cargo containers from China, not being carried in backpacks through through the New Mexican desert. It's not keeping out foreign terrorists -- according to the FBI, the bad guys have figured out it's a lot less hassle to come down from Canada than it is to try to come up from Mexico. Among other things, quite a bit of the border between the U.S. and Canada can be crossed in a bass boat.

So if a physical barrier is a dumb idea, what would be a smart one? Well, if most of the people coming across the southern border claim to be refugees fleeing violence of various sorts, how about increasing the staffing levels for the federal workers who process those claims? People complain about the "catch and release" aspects, such as the fact there are long delays between the initial application for asylum and when the hearings are held. Right now asylum seekers arrive knowing there's going to be a long gap between when they get here and when the U.S. government decides their fate. They also know that if they manage to avoid being summarily targeted for expedited removal they'll be released on parole to await the hearing.

Here's a common sense notion: speed that process up. We don't need a wall to slow people down or more border patrol agents to arrest people. We need paper shufflers to speed up the pace of the bureaucracy. Hire more lawyers, more judges, and let the word get out that the time frame is shorter. It's a pretty sure thing that the number of asylum seekers will drop. It's one thing to make the trek to the U.S. knowing that after you turn yourself in you're going to have one or two or even three years to work here and send money back to the family in whatever poverty-stricken village you'e from and quite another to contemplate doing it when the turnaround time drops to a couple months. After all, Jeff Sessions claimed that close to 80 percent of the asylum seekers' claims are denied. That isn't exactly true but it's a handy talking point for this argument. If that many are denied in the end, then the common sense thing to do would be to speed the process up to get the ineligible applicants on to airplanes or buses faster.

Granted, it's not quite as manly, doesn't lend itself to a lot of posturing and macho bullshit about how tough someone is to say "I hired more lawyers" instead of "I ordered the troops to lay down concertina wire."

Actually, a truly common sense idea would be to stop freaking out over "illegals" and go for open borders. Sure, maintain border security in the form of customs enforcement at established border crossings but get a system set up where anyone coming in to the U.S. could work if they wanted to. Foreign nationals can be issued tax ID numbers now and pay income taxes while they're here; that part of the system is already in place. If everyone was working legally there'd be no incentive for employers to hire undocumented workers for less than legal wages and it would be harder to get workers willing to tolerate unsafe working conditions. If you can't hold the threat of La Migra over people's heads, they'll put up with a lot less crap. It would eliminate a lot of human trafficking -- who's going to bother paying a coyote thousands of dollars to sneak them across the desert or smuggle them in a cargo container when all you need is a bus ticket?

Yes, I know there are people who go ballistic at the idea of open borders. They're the same people who are convinced every Spanish speaker they encounter is here illegally and desperate to steal their jobs or sponge off welfare, usually simultaneously. My own thought has always been is that if you're so incompetent or unskilled that the only jobs you can find are ones that will hire people who do not read, write, or speak English and where the major work requirements are a strong back and a willingness to put in long hours for less than legal wages, you've got bigger problems than fear of competition from foreigners. 

And another one bites the dust

Make that two. I started off typing about Matt Lauer. Had to step away from the computer for a few hours, came back, and Garrison Keillor had joined the list. My lede required a rewrite. 

Matt Lauer. Holy wah. Matt Lauer. That one surprised me a bit. I don't pay much attention to the morning celebrity gossip showcases so did not know Lauer had a track record of being an ass and a philanderer. Garrison Keillor? Not so much of a shock. I've always thought there was something a tad creepy about Keillor. Still, based on close to 70 years of observing men in action, I've been saying all along that the number of men who have never been guilty of playing grab ass, saying something openly offensive, or being generally boorish toward any woman who isn't either their wife or their daughter is depressingly small. The combination of testosterone poisoning and peer pressure can turn almost any dude into a total jerk at least once in his life. And now that boorishness is coming home to roost -- every time a woman comes forward to say, hey, it happened to me, you know other women are wondering if maybe they should finally tell their stories.

Like every other adult in the country I've been observing miscellaneous men getting unmasked as  creepers of varying degrees, from the mildly disgusting -- the ass grabbers who want to hug just a little too long while letting their hands drift south -- to the blatantly pervy, like Roy Moore hanging out at the local mall while trolling for barely legal teenyboppers. I have, of course, Had Thoughts.

The most obvious thought is that heads are going to continue rolling for awhile. Payback Time has arrived; women who have kept their trauma and their disgust bottled up for decades are going to take advantage of a changed climate, as they should. Way too many men have been blatant pigs, abused their power as supervisors or celebrities, and it's about time some karma caught up with them.

I also had the usual thought that once again men in general were demonstrating how totally clueless most of them are about what a woman's life is really like. As Louis C. K. once said (when he wasn't busy whacking off in front of women who weren't real interested in seeing his dick or how proficient he was at self-love), when men meet women through dating sites, their biggest fear is that the woman will turn out to be fat while women fear that the man will be a psychopath who will kill them.

And, yes, it is more than a tad bizarre that a man who actually seemed to get some of the things that make women's lives a heck of lot more stressful than most men's was also so clueless that he thought it was okay to masturbate in front of women who until they got treated to the unwanted floor show had viewed him as being one of the good guys. (I keep hearing that he asked the women if it was okay if he got naked/choked the chicken. Just how does one phrase that? "Mind if I beat off while we chat about the craft of writing good jokes?" "Is it okay if I get totally naked while fondling my dick and pretending this is a normal conversation?") Nonetheless, what the man said is true. Men worry about a lot of stuff when it comes to women but the possibility of getting raped and killed by a lady they've just met usually doesn't make the stress list. The Elaine Wuornos of this world are few and far between.

I get reminded of this truth, incidentally, about the unmentioned but always present paranoia of women whenever I listen to Stephanie Miller on satellite radio. One of her major advertisers is Tiger Lady, the company that makes an easy to carry self defense device that mimics a cat's claws. You carry it in your hand when walking or jogging. It has retractable claws that emerge when you clench your fist. The claws are curved and hollow to ensure that sufficient skin will get collected to make a DNA match possible. Every ad lays it on thick about what a great device this is for women. When was the last time you heard an ad telling men they needed to invest in something they can use to defend themselves? Yes, it's true you'll see and hear ads telling men to buy guns or install security systems, but it's never for their own personal defense. It's to protect the man's family, his defenseless wife and kids. Or the weapon will be so he can be the good guy with a gun when some maniac menaces the public. It's never personalized, like the man is in danger of bad stuff happening to him.

And, speaking of clueless men, you've got to love the way so many guys are emerging as apologists for their fellow creepers by spouting lines like "If I pat a woman's ass, it's a compliment" or "Catcalls are a type of flattery." These are generally the same dudes who have homophobic fits over the vague idea of some other guy checking their equipment out in the men's room or maybe randomly grabbing their junk -- you know, being objectified and treated the way they treat women. Which means they know damn well what the problem is, but only in some mythical world where they're the victims and not the perpetrators.

Moving on to a final thought, it hit me that the whole Roy Moore saga would have played out a lot differently if the distinctly creepy Moore had been, let us say, a janitor instead of a lawyer. How fast do you think the police would have gotten involved if the creeper was a blue collar worker instead of a white collar one? Would it still have fallen into the category of "Oh, don't worry about it, that's just Roy. He likes younger women." Or would the blue collar guy found himself being hauled off to jail for being a public nuisance or worse?

We all know that class plays a role in how seriously crime (or perceived crime) gets treated. If some homeless guy ogles a teenager, he's going to get labeled as a pervert and a definite threat immediately. Society as a whole is going to make it real clear his attentions are not welcome. A dude in a suit and a well-respected position in the community, like a lawyer or a teacher, can be a serial molester but when girls or young women complain, they'll get the brush-off. "You're imagining things." "Oh, it's just Roy, he's a lawyer, he'd never do anything wrong." I wonder just how many teenagers Roy Moore had to hit on before it finally sank in with the mall management that what Moore was doing was definitely too creepy to allow to continue?

The whole Roy Moore episode, for what it's worth, brought back some disturbing local memories, like the elementary school teacher who got away with molesting dozens of students because no one wanted to believe a nice guy in a suit would hurt kids or the serial killer who didn't fall into the suspect pool immediately because he worked in the local Social Security office. Another nice guy in a suit. . . and perhaps the subject for a separate post on the many reasons women were reluctant in the past and remain reluctant today to report abuse that goes way beyond boorishness into outright criminality.

I guess the good news, such as it is, might be that the reluctance could be fading. Young women today should be a lot less likely to decide to ignore it when their boss plays grab ass or suggests that if they invest in some knee pads they've got a better shot at a promotion. Whether or not men's behaviors change will no doubt depend on just how many heads do roll before the current wave of outrage subsides.

It's still Amateur Hour at the White House

Ever wonder what life would be like if Cliff Clavin got elected President? I thought not. Most of us don't waste much time fantasizing about could happen if an annoying character from a 1980's situation comedy wound up in a position of power. Maybe we should have, because that's basically what the American populace allowed to happen when Donald Trump made it into the White House.

For those of you who aren't up on American television trivia, Cliff was the know-it-all postman who was a permanent fixture at one end of the bar. Cliff was a font of trivia -- you name it, he was sure he knew all about it. And even if he didn't have a clue, he refused to change his mind. Once he'd said it, whatever came out of his mouth had to be true. Sound familiar?

Back in January I told a friend that I thought a major problem with The Donald was that he had no idea how government actually worked. Coming at it from the outside, he had the same misguided view of the role of the executive that most of the public does: he thought that being President of the United States was like being the CEO of a corporation. The CEO issues a directive; minions immediately scurry around making it happen. You know, like Picard at the helm of the Enterprise.

The reality, of course, is that the Presidency comes close to being a figurehead, someone who has to work closely with Congress if he (or someday she) wants to get anything done. Can't really fault Trump for not understanding that when he entered office because most Americans are equally naïve -- we attribute all sorts of power (and blame) to the President when most of the time we should be recognizing that Congress is responsible for whatever we're complaining about.

But it turned out The Donald's ignorance didn't end with simply no working knowledge of how the government actually functions or who's responsible for what. Nope. Turned out he's amazingly, astoundingly blissfully clueless about just about everything. After witnessing him thinking the U.S. Virgin Islands are a foreign country, I'd be willing to be that if you asked him to list the fifty states, he'd draw a blank after rattling off the ones that have Trump hotels or golf courses.

And then there's been this most recent debacle. This was the week when we learned for sure that The Donald has the people skills of a rock. Tone deaf is an understatement. How hard can it be to offer condolences when someone dies? The stock phrase, the one that every adult should know, is "I am sorry for your loss." Period. No embellishments. That's all he had to do -- tell the widow he was sorry her husband was dead. You'd think that would be impossible to screw up. You'd be wrong. How can someone who starred in a scripted reality show manage to not parrot a few simple platitudes is a mystery, but The Donald did it. Whatever he meant to say, the way it came out registered as remarkably insensitive.

And then instead of having the simple courage to admit he'd tripped over his own tongue, he declared war on the widow and her friends.

Okay. I was wrong. The American populace didn't elect Cliff Clavin. They elected the annoying barfly, the aging frat boy who runs his mouth constantly about how wonderful he is and is oblivious to everyone else, the armchair warrior who hangs out at the VFW cloaking himself in stolen valor by waxing nostalgic about risking his life in rice paddies in Vietnam when he actually spent his years in the Army manning a typewriter in Louisiana. You know the type -- the dude who manages to bluster his way into the chairmanship of the local Eagles club and then drives the rest of the membership away. The mediocre but loud woman who insists on being put in charge of the Parent Teacher Organization and succeeds in persuading the other parents that maybe their kids would be better off in a different school. First they bluff, then they bluster, and finally they rant and blame everyone else on the planet for whatever went wrong.

Anyone want to make book on how much longer General Kelly is going to last as chief of staff? It must be exhausting trying to work with the world's oldest toddler.

Obvious unintended consequences: Grandma as a permanent houseguest

One of the things that I've heard coming up as part of the ambitions of the Trump administration is the desire to turn more stuff over to the states, like converting programs such as Medicaid into block grants. Medicaid is the federal program that funds health care for extremely poor people. You know, our fellow Americans who too many of us assume are shiftless, lazy, and unwilling to work. If you ask the typical right-wing conservative what they think of government-funded health insurance for persons living in poverty, the likely response is going to be "they should get jobs and pay for insurance like those of us who are willing to work do." Only one problem with that thinking.

You know where the bulk of Medicaid funding goes? It's not so to some kids or people of working age. It goes to keep old people in nursing homes. Observant readers may have noticed a proliferation of attorneys specializing in "elder law" in recent years. There was a time when only the wealthy worried a whole lot about estate planning or what was going to happen to their assets such as real estate once they hit their golden years. Since life expectancies crept up and more people started living long enough to develop the wide array of chronic morbidities that hit with age (i.e., diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, arthritis, dementia, . . . ) families of the elderly began realizing that it was quite possible that whatever Mom and Dad managed to accumulate during their working lives was going to vanish as the medical bills piled up. Instead of inheriting the old family home or a stack of T-notes, the potential heirs realized they'd have to accumulate their wealth the old-fashioned way: earn it themselves. Unless, of course, they could shelter assets through estate planning. Hence the proliferation of elder law specialists.

Elder law specialists do more than draft wills to help prevent heirs from squabbling over who gets Great Grandma Clara's Wedgewood china. They help people with assets (real estate, cash, whatever) figure out ways to shelter it so that if the day comes when they've got to go into a nursing home the cost of their care is going to fall on society as a whole, aka taxpayers, and not on the individual elderly and their immediate family. The initial legislation for Medicare and Medicaid was passed in 1965. It took a decade or two, but people eventually realized that if their elderly parent qualified as "poor" that Medicaid would pick up the tab for the nursing home. The trick was making the parent poor enough, which is where the elder law attorneys enter the picture.

It can be a rude awakening for most folks when they discover (a) Medicare does not pay for nursing homes; (b) when the government says you have to be poor to qualify for Medicaid, they mean it. Absolutely bare bones no assets whatsoever worth mentioning. If you own real estate, if you can't sell it before you die, it's going to have a government lien on it when you do go. If you have a whole life insurance policy, you're going to have to cash that sucker in, although you will be allowed to use a chunk of it to pre-pay for a funeral. And, as any good elder law specialist will tell you, the earlier you realize those facts of life, the better. The government can go back several years searching for reimbursement for the cost of your care. It used to be three years; it might be more now. That particular aspect of Medicaid law is, of course, intended to prevent people from trying to milk the system the day after they require nursing home care.

So what happens if the conservative Republicans succeed in their plans to turn Medicare into a voucher system and Medicaid into a grant block program? I can tell you. I've seen it. I remember it. Back when I was young, in those days of yore when dinosaurs roamed the earth, when someone's elderly relative became too fragile or feeble to live independently, they took up residence with a relative. If they had multiple adult children, families would engage in "pass Gramps around." The old person would spend a month here, a month there, until whoever was hosting the old geezer or geezette would decide they'd had enough and pass the aging parent on to the next unlucky sibling. In some cases, PawPaw or MawMaw would become permanent houseguests. Family members would find themselves having to bathe and diaper their now senile and incontinent parent or grandparent. Without having to think about very hard, I can recall at least half a dozen friends who had a grandparent living with their families. For most, it was not a happy situation.

You don't find many elderly chronically ill people living with their descendants these days. They're in nursing homes. How many would be there if not for Medicaid is debatable. Until the reality slaps you in the face, the typical person has no idea just how incredibly expensive caring for the elderly can be. Back in the '90s I served as my aunt Thelma's financial representative. She had to go to a nursing home after she had a stroke following by-pass surgery. She was a frugal woman and did have the cash stashed away to be private pay. At that time, the basic monthly cost was about $3500 a month. It would easily be double that today.

So what happens when the greedy heirs who have pushed their parents into estate planning and signing away their assets discover that the reason for doing it -- Medicaid -- no longer is an option? Are they going to be willing to start liquidating the stuff they'd anticipated inheriting? (I'm guessing probably not.) And what about the elderly who were genuinely poor to begin with, the old folks who maybe have a small life insurance policy and not much else? Families have gotten smaller -- it's no longer possible to play pass the grandpa -- and most don't have the ability to pay for outside help, like an aide to stay with the senile parent while the adult child goes to work. What happens when Medicaid goes away and the nursing home tells you to come pick up your senile parent or grandparent because they're about to close their doors  because without Medicaid payments they can't operate and the old person has to go somewhere? Every so often there'll be a story on the news about an aged relative being abandoned at a highway rest stop or other odd location because the family hadn't been able to get that person into a nursing home but could no longer cope on their own. How much more common will that scenario be if Medicaid vanishes?

We live in interesting times. Here's hoping that enough politicians can be persuaded to look at real world consequences instead of blindly behaving like lemmings and following The Donald and Paul Ryan off a cliff.

"They're coming to convert us"

A friend mentioned the other day that one of the reasons she's nervous about the Islamists in Syria and elsewhere is "they're coming to convert us." I had no good response at the time, and I also have no idea where she got that idea from. As far as I can tell, the fanatics associated with Da'esh (aka ISIS aka ISIL) are focusing their conversion efforts, if you can call them that, on the already converted, i.e., young people who are Muslims already but were raised in more secularized or moderate homes. They do a sales pitch on the Internet trying to persuade young people that Islam needs to be defended against the infidels; they're trying to turn run of the mill believers into fanatics. My friend and I are not the target demographic for Da'esh; they have no interest in converting little old ladies.

As for conversion in general, the S.O. and I have lived all over the country, including multiple major cities (Tucson, Atlanta, Washington, D.C.). We've had a lot of different "missionaries" try to convert us. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Pentecostals, Baptists, even a few Buddhists. The weirdest one was probably The Process Church of the Final Judgement -- they always reminded me of the Satanist branch of the Salvation Army. Maybe it was the uniforms. Anyway, the one religion that has never in my lifetime tried to persuade me that I should take a look at it is Islam. I've known quite a few Muslims -- co-workers, college friends, students, neighbors, a landlord -- and not once has any of them ever shoved a Koran in my face and told me I need to read the good news about God. Both of my kids had good friends who were Muslim; those girls were the only ones who never tried to persuade my kids to attend religious services with them. We had Baptists, Lutherans, and Pentecostals all trying to lure my kids away from whatever church we might attend to go to their church services instead, but the Muslims apparently figured your religion was your own business.

I know the Nation of Islam, which is a thoroughly American institution, does missionary work in prisons and in the African-American community. We've lived in cities where Nation of Islam members can be seen selling their newspaper on the street. But you don't see Nation of Islam members going door to door ringing doorbells and trying to persuade you to let them into your house to discuss the Koran with you, unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons who are so aggressive in their marketing missionary work that they've become cultural jokes. 

Yes, it's true that historically Islam did conversion by the sword. But so did Christianity. If you look back a few centuries, both religions did the "convert or die." I have, in fact, heard a few nominal Christians suggest that's what we should do now -- a few years ago, right-wing spokesperson Ann Coulter said basically that: tell Muslims to convert to Christianity and if they don't, kill them -- but that's not exactly mainstream thinking.  

In short, I'm not sure where the conversion fear comes from because it's surely not from being harassed by street corner imams passing out pamphlets and telling us to give up our sinful Western ways. It also can't be from observing Da'esh indulging in LARPing in the Syrian desert because thus far Da'esh seems more interested in terrorizing and chasing out non-Muslims than they do in converting anyone. Several million refugees fleeing the region doesn't exactly suggest that Da'esh is engaging in any meaningful proselyzation efforts. It's a mystery.

Sadistic sociopaths in blue

SPLC Report, the newsletter from the Southern Poverty Law Center, was in the mail the other day. One of the items in it was a report on a lawsuit filed against the City of Birmingham Police Department to stop the routine use of pepper spray on high school students. Like a lot of school districts these days, the Birmingham public schools use regular law enforcement officers for security. It turned out those highly trained professional men (and, one assumes, women) were routinely using pepper spray on adolescents who engaged in normal adolescent behavior, i.e., getting a little mouthy ("back talk"). Or worse.

One of the incidents mentioned in the courtroom involved a teenage girl who was having a bad day. The Birmingham PD made it a lot worse. The kid had been harassed by a boy who had made "inappropriate sexual remarks" and had managed to reduce her to tears. She was walking down the hall crying when a cop on duty in the school saw her crying. He told her to stop. She didn't. So he pepper sprayed her and slapped some handcuffs on her. Holy fuck. What type of sociopath pepper sprays a child who's crying?! The normal, human response when you see a young person is upset is to ask what's wrong, do the comforting little speech about how things are going to get better, maybe offer that person a tissue. . . you don't pepper spray the child. When did crying become threatening behavior? (The normal human response is to offer a tissue; the cop response should have been to ask what was wrong, and if she reported harassment or bullying the cop should have gone looking for the boy involved instead of assaulting the girl.)

In any case, it turned out that over a period of several years the police had used pepper spray on students 110 times.  None involved an incident so serious it led to criminal charges against the students. In short, the pepper spray was not used to break up fights or to stop students who were threatening faculty or other students. In the incidents where pepper spray was used, 300 students were directly exposed (i.e., targeted) and over 1,000 were indirectly exposed. In no case did the police attempt any decontamination afterwards; the students were left to cope with the after effects of pepper spray on their own.

I read elsewhere recently that the state of Colorado is going to require that all applicants for law enforcement jobs undergo psychological screening before they can be hired. Isn't there a screening process now? Or is it a case of if you manage to pass a 2-year criminal justice course at a local community college you're in? A zillion years ago it was as simple as just passing a basic literacy test and a physical exam; now there's more education required before a LEO can be commissioned, various certification hoops that must be jumped through. But just how are applicants screened? I know the process is fairly rigorous (at least the training part is) for people who want to do law enforcement for federal agencies like the National Park Service. Prospective LEOs get sent to the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. But before they get there, just like with any other applicant for a federal job, there's going to be a background check that will (theoretically) eliminate pathological liars. I'm not sure what the training itself involves, but every Park Service or Forest Service LEO I've ever met was a thorough professional as well as a decent human being -- but maybe just wanting to work for agencies like NPS or the Forest Service tends to self select for Not a Sociopath. Local law enforcement, on the other hand . . . sometimes you really have to wonder if some of those guys got their jobs simply because no one else applied.

Can I avoid listening?

I'm a little wary when it comes to turning on the radio this morning. The Republicans held a debate last night. We avoided listening to any of it, which was pretty easy to do when we have to stream television. The more hassle that's involved in connecting to something, the stronger our desire to watch it has to be. We have zero desire to ever see Ted Cruz or Donald Trump in anything longer than a 2-second sound bite (and 2 seconds is pushing our tolerance levels even when it's on "The Nightly Show") so everything we know about the debate will be secondhand.

One part of that secondhand will be, unfortunately, the local NPR station. I'm not quite sure just what's happened in terms of the quality of their news writers and readers, but, holy wah, the stupid has been running deep with the current line-up. "Morning Edition" has morphed into an audio version of the "Today" show. Lots of breathless fawning over celebrities, hyping of various musicians' latest albums, and just a general vacuousness where it used to be possible to catch an occasional hint of actual news. I'm leaning more and more towards tuning in the local classic rock station. Granted, I'll get to listen to the same Tom Petty song 3 or 4 times in less than two hours, but at least when they break in with news or comments, it's not as likely to have me yelling "How fracking stupid are you?!" at the radio. After all, it's pretty hard to have a banging-head-on-keyboard moment when the morning deejay is hyping the meat special at Pat's IGA or announcing the date and time for a local high school Christmas program.

I've never understood why there are right-wing tinfoil hat types out there who are convinced NPR is part of the liberal media. There are no mainstream liberal media, not on radio, not on television, and not much in print. There are small pockets of liberal media -- in Atlanta we were lucky enough to be able to listen to Radio Free Georgia, for example, and you can hear Thom Hartmann, Stephanie Miller, and a number of other progressives on Sirius XM -- but in general the news media are pretty far to the right, and that includes almost everything on NPR. And that shouldn't be a surprise. After all, they're as dependent on corporate funding as every other media outlet. They're not going to rock the boat and chase away the money from major corporations and the big foundations.

On the other hand, would it really be rocking the boat that much to occasionally point out that Ted Cruz is both flat out crazy and one lying son of a bitch instead of just breathlessly gushing about his poll numbers going up? 

I need to stop asking how stupid people are

Way too many folks are taking that question as a challenge. Apparently there's some sort of competition to demonstrate just who the most ignorant persons on the planet are, and at this point Texas is winning.

One of the more discouraging things to result from the most recent Election Day was voters in Houston shooting down an anti-discrimination ordinance because bigots and haters managed to convince them that treating transgender persons like actual human beings would result in hordes of male perverts invading women's restrooms. It was a variation on the same line of fear mongering used back in the 1970s to make people panic over the possibility of the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Just how fracking stupid are people?

I say this because it's pretty obvious that no one who succumbs to this particular line of bovine fecal matter is doing much thinking. First, has it ever occurred to anyone that no one does a genitalia check when you enter a rest room now? If someone looks even superficially female, that person is going to be able to use any ladies' room she wants. There isn't a security guard posted at the door looking up skirts or asking people to drop their pants and prove they don't have a penis. Ergo, if there are male perverts out there who want to dress like women and can do a sufficiently good job with hair and make-up that it isn't obvious they're men, no one is going to stop them. There is an exception to this, which I'll get to in a minute, but it doesn't apply to the average public restroom.

Public latrine 2000 years ago

And you know why no one is going to be doing double takes and strong arming would-be perverts at the door? Because ladies rooms are not one big open area where we women-folk indulge in some sort of group bladder and bowel relief. We don't sit cheek to cheek on an open bench similar to the public latrines of ancient Rome. A ladies room consists of multiple stalls, each with its own lock and plenty of privacy. Unlike men, who stand shoulder to shoulder in front of urinals with plenty of opportunity to glance at a neighbor's equipment (or, as a male friend mentioned, get splashed by some drunk with poor aim), women relieve themselves in solitary splendor. We step into the stall, lock the door behind us, proceed to hike up the skirt (or drop the jeans), pull down the unmentionables, and then take care of business. We are, in fact, so accustomed to stall doors locking that if the door doesn't want to lock, we will usually discover that we don't have to go that badly after all.

The big exception to the anonymity of public restrooms is, of course, elementary and high schools. That's the one place where people are doing genitalia checks, at least on paper, and it's also the one place were trans persons are experiencing the worst problems. School administrators have a really hard time dealing with teenagers who are listed on school records as being one gender but who have realized they are actually the other. Then again, school administrators have a hard time dealing with anything that falls outside the extremely narrow lines they've drawn for what is and is not acceptable in a lot of categories. They also have a bad habit of treating victims of harassment and bullying as though the victims were the perpetrators. Which means, naturally, that if a teen is already having a rough time coming to grips with his or her identity, with a few rare exceptions school administrators are going to do their best to make life for that kid even harder. That in turn leads to the reality that if a student is still listed on the paperwork in the school office as a girl, that student is going to be forced to use the girls' rest room even if the student is now viewed by everyone (parents, fellow students, the world at large) except the school administration as a boy, and vice versa  There will be bathroom police doing the equivalent of genitalia checks.

School bathrooms, incidentally, are also one of the two places I can think of where a person does lose the privacy of the typical bathroom stall. Quite a few schools remove the doors from stalls so teachers can easily check to make sure no one is smoking or doing drugs behind the stall doors. I remember being shocked as hell when I saw that in the Ironwood High School back in the 1980s; I imagine kids have even less privacy in the loo now.

One of the more bizarre aspects of this whole controversy has been the line taken by some of the bigots that people should be required to use the restroom that corresponds with whatever was put on their original birth certificate. The stupid, it burns. Just how do they plan to enforce that little gem? Are they going to start asking women who look like Caitlyn Jenner to whip out the paperwork to prove the word "female" was typed on their birth certificates? Or are they going to simply harass the ladies who don't match up quite as nicely as Caitlyn does with American standards of femininity? Ditto the mens' rooms -- how will these men who are so eager to make women prove they're women feel if they succeed and then they get asked to show their paperwork? Except, of course, that's never occurred to them: the whole focus has been on preventing perverts from entering a ladies' room.

Which leads me to another question: just why do so many people have such an astoundingly low opinion of men? Judging by the hysteria over some of the stuff men are imagined to be waiting with bated breath for the opportunity to do, apparently most men are low life perverted swine that can't be trusted around anyone, let alone women and small children. They're incapable of restraining themselves from indulging in all sorts of depraved acts.

Then again, "projection" is a fairly well known phenomenon in psychology. I can't help but wonder if the reason some of these people are foaming about hypothetical perverted situations is that they spend so much time fantasizing about accosting little kids in public restrooms that they assume everyone else is as sick as they are.  

Why are some jobs more important to save than others?

We were watching "Real Time" with Bill Maher last night, and one of the professional political operatives, one of those people I tend to think of as being akin to whores except practicing a less respectable profession, started regurgitating right wing talking points about how absolutely devastating it's going to be to make it harder for power plants to burn coal. You know the type of political operative I mean, the folks with absolutely no discernible principles of their own -- they simply parrot whatever the latest talking points their party is promoting. Sometimes after the fact they'll concede that the nonsense they cheerfully spouted a few years before was absolute garbage, but of course by then the damage has been. You know, like the various Bush administration officials and advisers who are now willing to admit that invading Iraq in 2003 was a super stupid thing to do. Why didn't any of them speak up at the time? Because they preferred collecting a paycheck for repeating propaganda and lies more than they preferred being honest and retaining a soul.

Anyway, the panel on "Real Time" included Gavin Newsom (Democrat), Mary Matalin (Republican, former member of Dick Cheney's staff), and Steve Schmidt (Republican, and chief strategist for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign). Not surprisingly, one of the topics discussed was climate change (California is burning), which naturally led to Schmidt and Matalin going into full-scale parrot mode about the economic costs of trying to do anything. That in turn led to talking about fossil fuels and trying to move away from burning coal in power plants. Except, of course, we can't move away from coal because of the "economic costs." Lots and lots of blathering on about how we can't move away from burning coal because it's going to cost miners in Wyoming their jobs or result in BNSF running fewer coal trains or something. The blathering about saving certain jobs always results in me wanting to reach through a tv screen and strangle someone -- or at least put a 2x4 alongside their head. What about the economic cost of sea levels rising to the point where New York subways become unusable? Or big chunks of Florida uninhabitable? And why is it more important to keep coal miners employed doing what has to be one of the nastiest, dirtiest jobs on the planet than it is to provide adequate funding for schools to keep teachers working? It's fine to slash funding for education or maintaining infrastructure, but god forbid some poor miner in West Virginia or Wyoming end up being laid off for lack of work. It's bizarre.

I have ranted on this topic before, like when discussions of the defense budget come up. It's more important to keep machinists employed building useless crap like the F-35 (the airplane pilots refer to as "the Lawn Dart" because it's so unstable in flight) than it is to make sure schools are adequately staffed, for example. This country's priorities are remarkably screwed up. 

As for the talking heads on the panel, Mary Matalin is, of course, not the sharpest tool on the planet. Or the most ethical, despite the way she kept trotting out the fact she's a convert to Catholicism. Her resume does include that stint working for Darth Cheney, and she is married to James Carville, a political operative who prefers to collect his checks from the Democrats. When you have two people sharing a bed but who claim to espouse opposite ends of the political spectrum, common sense says one (and no doubt both) is simply a paid shill who will say anything if she knows the check will clear. As long as the Republicans keep paying her, she'll keep parroting their talking points. I'm not sure how much longer she'll continue to be invited to do that parroting in front of a camera, though, as the woman is not aging well. She's 62 now but looks at least a decade older -- and the main stream media is not fond of women who actually look old. In any case, Matalin's been a paid shill for so many decades now that it's highly unlikely she retains the ability to think for herself.

Steve Schmidt, on the other hand, is a little more intriguing. He retains some shreds of individuality. He has been brutally honest on the subject of the Palin disaster, and he has brief flashes of honesty. Still, watching political operatives in action always reminds me of a line from a Dr. Hook song, "how much soul must a poor man sell just to rub two coins together?" I once worked for a distinctly conservative daily paper. A few times I found myself having to whip together a last minute editorial, a couple hundred words of meaningless right-wing platitudes that would pass muster with our corporate overlords, because the person whose job it normally was to plug that hole on the page was not available. It wasn't hard to do, but it definitely felt weird. I don't think I could have done it on a daily basis. And, in retrospect, I'm rather happy that editorials were anonymous -- it was the voice of the paper, not that of any particular person. I'm not sure I could ever do the type of publicly visible  political hackwork people like Schmidt and Matalin do. Would I have written those editorials if I had to slap my name on them? I don't know.

As for why we were watching "Real Time" on Sunday evening instead of when it was broadcast on Friday, we rarely see anything on its original broadcast date. We watch "Real Time" through the wonders of You Tube, which means we always see it at least a day late.

Finally, some good news

Back when I was still working at the Centers for Disease Control, I got to spend an evening doing a telephone survey of random persons in Alabama asking them if they (a) had diarrhea in the past six weeks and (b) if they had, what type of peanut products did they have in the house? It was all part of investigating the Killer Peanuts Salmonella Outbreak that hit a good-sized chunk of the country in 2009. Most people who suffered infection were lucky and experienced only a bad case of diarrhea, but at least 9 victims died. As the investigation progressed, it turned out that the company peddling the peanuts -- Peanut Corporation of America -- knew they had a problem with salmonella but kept selling their product anyway. Somewhat surprisingly, a criminal investigation followed.

Well, it's been six years -- the wheels of justice do move slowly -- but Stewart Parnell, the company's CEO, is staring at a possible life sentence. Two other executives with the company are looking at prison time, too, which would be nice. As a long piece at Natural News points out, the criminal case against Parnell and his co-defendants was the first of its kind. Usually when corporations engage in behavior that injures or kills people, no one in management is held personally responsible. Fines may be levied against the company, liability lawsuits may result in damages being paid to victims or their families, but the people at the top making the bad decisions emerge unscathed. They may lose their jobs, but they almost always have golden parachutes. Given the callous disregard for human life shown by Parnell and his minions, I'm hoping the judge doing the sentencing in September does follow the prosecutors' advice. It would, if nothing else, send a message to other executives that their bad decisions could result in more than just a generous severance package. A golden parachute wouldn't be much help in Leavenworth. 

No, we're not all thinking that

Talk about coincidences. Yesterday Gin and Tacos had a post up about people hearing someone spout something particularly vile or bigoted and responding by praising that person for being brave enough to "say what we're all thinking." The post said, in essence, no, we're not. When someone spouts some disgusting nonsense about all Mexicans being rapists or every Muslim being a terrorist, there may be a few ignorant yahoos who can't think beyond stereotypes, but please don't assume that just because something bizarre is going through your mind everyone else is on the same wavelength.

Then last night we were watching the local news -- With Luck You See TV* has been live-streaming its news programs for awhile now -- and they had done a story on The Donald on an earlier broadcast. The 7 pm news always includes viewer comments. Not surprisingly, there was the ever so predictable "I like Trump because he's got the courage to say what the rest of us are thinking." Oh really? On what planet would anyone with two brain cells to rub together agree with the suggestion that John McCain is a loser because he spent 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war? I don't particularly like McCain much anymore (he sold whatever soul he may have had during the last few election cycles), but the idea of mocking him for getting captured by the North Vietnamese? I'm not sure you can sink much lower than that. But some deluded viewer was actually foolish enough to publicly state, right down to providing her real name, that she agreed with Trump on a lot of the garbage he's been spouting. Thank you, naive viewer, for being nice enough to self-identify so it'll be easier for the rest of us to avoid you.

Why do people do this? Where do they get the idea that we all operate with some sort of hive mind where everyone is thinking the same way they are? Look around, people. Name a topic, any topic, from politics to professional sports to preferences in fast food restaurants and you're not going to have any trouble finding someone whose opinion is the opposite of yours, so where does this "we're all thinking" nonsense come from? Is it deliberate self-deception or just thoroughly ingrained ignorance? It's a mystery.

*WLUC-TV6, "your Upper Michigan news source"

If it doesn't work, why keep it?

I've been listening with some bemusement to the recent discussions about the Patriot Act and the ability of the National Security Agency to collect and store bulk data on phone calls. One thing that's been mentioned a  number of times is that no one who supports that data collection has been able to cite an example of where that program actually accomplished something. They can't point to a single case where a suspect was arrested or an incident averted because of their trolling through a gazillion phone records. One has to assume this program has been costing many millions of dollars to operate: computer equipment isn't cheap, software had to be developed, programmers and analysts hired, and so on. One would also assume that if you're going to be spending money by the tractor-trailer load, you'd have at least one example you could point to and say, "See. It was worth spending $100,000,000!" or whatever the amount might be. But nope, no examples, no lowlifes doing perp walks, no suicide vests confiscated, no jihadist training camps shut down, nada. Nothing to brag about, which is bizarre when you consider how many years the NSA has been doing this stuff.

So why keep it? Because, according to various politicians, it is absolutely vital to our national security interests. Unbelievable. At this point, the only thing it appears vital to is the bottom line for various defense contractors.

Then again, politicians are rather prone to cling to stuff that doesn't work. The landscape is littered with failed programs that no one seems able to kill. It's classic -- having shoveled mountains of money at something, no one wants to admit it was all a huge mistake. If money is being spent, something must be happening.

The clown car is filling up

Just heard on the radio that former Arkansas governor and Fox News personality Mike Huckabee has announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for President. He did so in his home town of Hope, Arkansas, which seems appropriate on multiple levels. It's always good to go back one's roots, even if the juxtaposition of "Hope" and "he doesn't have a prayer of winning" strikes some observers as a tad too ironic.

Yesterday the news was all about Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson. Dr. Carson went back to his roots, too, and made his announcement in Detroit. The clown car is filling up.

I can understand why Huckabee wants to take another shot at campaigning. He made a career of being a self-righteous hypocrite after his 2008 candidacy but enough time has elapsed that he's not the right-wing darling he used to be. Fresh faces have emerged. He needs to pump up his public profile again, do something that will help keep his appearance fees high and maybe even give his current book another press run or two. I can also understand why politicians like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have ambitions -- they managed to get elected to the Senate so they figure if they're electable in one part of the country, they're potentially electable everywhere. There's nothing quite like success at one level to encourage a person to believe he or she can rise higher. What I don't get is why Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson have decided to get into the race.

I'm going to cheerfully predict that Fiorina's candidacy will evaporate long before the primary season actually begins in 2016. She doesn't have much name recognition, and the recognition she does have is not particularly positive. She touts as experience as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard as a reason to believe she can lead the country. Unfortunately, she did such a great job of running Hewlett-Packard that she got fired. Hewlett-Packard paid her an outrageous amount of money to go away. That's not exactly a glowing endorsement of her management skills. Then when she ran for the Senate in California, her one and only venture into elective politics to date, she lost by a large margin. Why she thinks she's a viable candidate now is a mystery. The only explanation I can think of is she's pulling a Huckabee. She's trying to raise her profile enough to gain her more appearances on the "news" shows on Fox and elsewhere. That in turn would up the amount she could request in speaking  and consulting fees. Maybe she fantasizes about being as popular as Ben Carson. Dr. Carson reportedly collects fees as high as $250,000 to give speeches at various conventions and meetings.

Or maybe she's annoyed that she doesn't get as many phone calls from the producers at Fox News as she used to. In any case, at this point the only real mystery about her campaign is how long it's going to take for her to figure out that it's doomed, that Sheldon Adelson and the Koch brothers have no interest in giving her any money, and without money there is no campaign. Who knows? Maybe the Republican candidate pool over the next few months is going to look more like a revolving door than a clown car as one would-be candidate after another enters, figures out he or she has zero support, and ends up exiting the race long before any ballots are cast. It almost makes me wish I still watched C-SPAN.

Fiorina, incidentally, provided an almost instant example of her lack of connection with the real world. She failed to lock up all the most obvious domain names that would include her own name. For someone who claims to be technologically savvy and a business guru, that's a rather glaring rookie mistake. Not that it matters much -- I have a hunch she'll have sunk out of sight long before the real election season gets here.

It's too soon

I really despise the way our political system has degenerated into one long campaign. I swear the elections are barely over each year before the campaigning for the next one starts. In 2012 I don't think we went for even 24 hours before the chattering classes were speculating about who was going to run for President in 2016. We've spent the last couple years being treated to the news media anointing Hilary Clinton as the presumptive Democratic nominee -- doesn't matter who else might be remotely interested in running as a Democrat, it's pretty clear the mainstream media aren't going to bother writing about anyone other than Ms. Clinton.

On the other hand, there's that rolling circular firing squad that calls itself the Republican Party. They've got the opposite problem from the Democrats: instead of having their most middle of the road, establishment candidate sucking up all the oxygen, they've got a dozen different far right fringe tinfoil hat types all clamoring for attention. We've been treated to speculation about Governor Goodhair (aka Rick Perry), Herman Cain, Ben Carson, Sarah Palin (is the woman actually crazy enough to believe anyone would believe she's still electable to anything?) . . . there are a couple semi-sane Republican notables (Chris Christie, Jeb Bush) but whenever their names pop up, they're quickly followed by explanations of why they can't win the nomination. And now one of the looniest of the loons, Ted Cruz, has made it official. He's announced he's running for President. This means that fairly soon other fools will make it official, too. The next Presidential election is over 19 months away, but we're already stuck listening to campaign rhetoric. No wonder the country is a mess and Congress never gets anything done.

I have a vague memory of hearing years ago that one of the good things about the parliamentary system Great Britain has is that elections are a lot more unpredictable. Or at least they used to be -- they were held when Parliament dissolved, which until 2010 wasn't on a fixed schedule. There's now a law that says one term of Parliament can't last longer than 5 years, at which time Parliament dissolves and a general election is held. However, the law doesn't say a session has to run for that full 5 years -- if there's a crisis of confidence, Parliament can dissolve at any time. Once Parliament dissolves, the time frame between that dissolution and the general election is blessedly short. No doubt the Brits also have political figures who spend a lot of time hinting that next time around they're going to run for office, but the period of overt campaigning cannot last for literally years. It must be nice.

It has also occurred to me that a silver lining of living in a country ruled by a dictator has to be that electioneering is never an issue. Sure, there's propaganda touting the merits of The Great Leader, but after awhile that has to all fall into the category of background noise. If it's always there, you stop noticing it. No one's going to be calling you for fund-raising or to bash The Great Leader's political opponents, and your mailbox (both IRL and online) is never going to fill with political spam. It almost makes a person wish President Obama really was the autocratic tyrant the delusional right wing tinfoil hat types think he is. If he was, we'd never have to hear about Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, et al. again -- they'd all have been locked up in FEMA death camps ages ago. A girl can dream. . .

Desperately searching for a scandal

I have been watching with some bemusement the latest attempt by the Republicans to find a scandal that will stick to Hilary Clinton. Apparently she didn't have an official State Department email account. Instead of receiving emails at what would seem to be a logical email address for the Secretary of State she communicated through a private account. This does strike me as rather bizarre. I can't imagine a government agency that doesn't automatically assign an email address to a person when he or she starts a job -- in  my case I was NMannikko@nps.gov when I worked for the Park Service and some weird combination of letters and numbers, something odd that had nothing whatsoever to do with my actual name (e.g., gnh4@cdc.gov) when I was at the Centers for Disease Control -- but I suppose it's possible. Every cabinet department is a little different in how its email is set up. Both NPS and CDC had .gov tacked on to their email accounts but the USDA Forest Service is Person@fs.us. Who knows? Who really cares?

But, as usual, I'm ambling away from what was actually on my mind. Why do the GOP and Fox News even bother? Thanks to the relentless attacks on the Clintons while Bill was in the White House, Hilary comes close to being Teflon-coated. She went through 8 years of being attacked in a myriad of ways and was called a murderer when Vince Foster committed suicide. She still managed to get elected to the Senate from the state of New York. That, quite frankly, astonished me. She'd barely established a legal address there and she persuaded the people of New York to elect her to the United States Senate. She was a carpetbagger with dubious credentials, came complete with a husband who was a well-known womanizer and general sleaze, and the people of New York didn't care. And, yes, I will repeat, "dubious credentials." Her primary experience, other than being First Lady of Arkansas and then the United States, was as an attorney for a law firm no one had ever heard of before the Clintons entered the White House. Everyone talks about Bill's charisma. Well, Hilary must pack a pretty powerful campaigning punch, too.

And then, after one term in the Senate, she decided to run for President and came really, really close to capturing the Democratic nomination. My personal opinion is that the main reason she didn't was that Bill inserted himself into the campaign a little too much and served as a nice reminder of all the things the base of the Democratic party dislikes about the Clintons: they're corporate sellouts who never met a banker or a lobbyist they didn't love, not to mention the fact both of them will say or do almost anything to get elected. Granted, the latter is true of almost every politician on the planet, but there are limits to what a person is willing to stomach.

In any case, considering how many scandals the right-wing has dredged up or attempted to dredge up that appear to have minimal impact on Hilary's career trajectory, why are they bothering now? No one cares, especially when you start hearing about the sheer volume of the emails. She was Secretary of State for about 4 years. There were over 50,000 emails turned over to government archives. Fifty thousand! Think about it. If those are the ones that got saved for the government (Hilary has said it didn't include purely personal stuff, like planning for Chelsea's wedding), just how many emails was this woman dealing with daily? My calculations came up with an average minimum of 35. That's a lot of emails. Just when did this woman sleep? Or, to come at it from another angle, how many of those emails were ever actually viewed by Clinton and how many were routine memos sent out by staff? Who knows? And, once again, who cares? Unless someone can manage to come up with a specific email with something juicy in it -- Hilary trying to set up a 3-way with her, Bill, and Putin (and now I must reach for the Brain Bleach) -- no one will care. People hear "email" and their eyes glaze over. Trying to turn this into a scandal is another massive wasted effort on the part of any and all GOP strategists who are fantasizing that it'll derail Hilary's apparently inevitable candidacy. I can't decide if the Republican scandal machine persists because they desperately want her to be the candidate because they're delusional enough to believe one of their possible candidates (Jeb Bush? Ted Cruz?) could beat her, or if they're simply not familiar with the concept of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Which brings me to another question: where the hell are the Democrats with enough spine to try to derail the Hilary train? Why is the party just kicking back and allowing this elderly woman to be the de facto standard bearer? I don't give a rat's patoot about what anyone says about how the fact she's in her 60s doesn't matter. It matters. Ask anyone who's the same age (or close to it) as Hilary. She's 67 now. That's geezer territory. It's the age where you start checking the obituaries each morning to make sure you're not listed. It's the age where you wake up with mysterious aches and pains you apparently acquire while engaged in the strenuous activity of sleeping. No one who is 67 now should be making any serious moves towards running for President, but Hilary apparently is. Wasn't she paying attention to what it did to Bill? Or aWol? Or Barack? When you look at photos of recent presidents, you'd swear that Presidential years are like dog years: for every year you're in the White House, you age at least 5. But the media has managed to bestow such an aura of inevitability on Hilary that we don't even hear any names bandied about as possible vice presidential nominees. Unbelievable.