The Dow hit 22,000 yesterday. So what? Sure it means that people with some savings or a significant amount of money are doing very well but what about the rest of the country? What about all those people who don’t have savings because they barely make enough to feed their kids?
Donald Trump jumped to the fore claiming that his administration is responsible for all the good news in the world, ignoring the facts as usual. He sent Kellyanne Conway, the serial liar out to confront George Stephanopoulos on This Week, spinning a web of falsehoods that would stupefy anyone not familiar with the lack of truth prevalent in all who speak for the Trump administration.
Conway starts out on the economy, boasting that Trump has eliminated 16 business regulations for every one that has been imposed. That’s great for big business but it is killing small businesses. Sure a lot of the regulation paper work is bothersome to small businesses but what’s killing them is the intrusion of big businesses in their realm. Small businesses need the regulations to keep big business from strangling them. This is not supposition. As any small businessman will tell you, their biggest problem is not too much regulation but the imposition of big business on their markets. Ask your average retailer if their biggest problem is the paperwork or that Amazon is grabbing their customers. Ask your local small drug store owner if his biggest problem is filling out medical protection forms, or that the same insurance company that pays for his customer’s drugs is now competing with him for their on-line business.
Regulation is not the enemy of the entrepreneur. It’s the enemy of big business and the lobbyists that pay off our congressmen to eliminate those regulations. Regulation is the enemy of fat cats, like Trump himself who doesn’t want anyone looking over his shoulder while he’s screwing his workers and cheating his contractors.
Conway and the Prez speak to an increase of jobs this quarter but jobs have been increasing at almost 20% more per quarter since Obama beat Bush’s recession in 2008. Trump and Conway speak to the DOW hitting a record high but the DOW like employment has been on a steady rise since 2008, both terms of the Obama Presidency. And even if it weren’t, the DOW is not a measurement of how ordinary people are doing. Only 20% of our citizens own individual stocks. The market is the playground of the rich. And oh, by the way, those jobs that are being added aren’t bringing the wage levels up.
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Trump is frustrated with Afghanistan. Really? Who isn’t? But it’s Trump’s job to figure out a working strategy for Afghanistan. He is the President and the commanding officer of the armed services. He is looking for a scapegoat but he is the scapegoat. He just doesn’t seem to understand that as the President, the buck stops at his door. He wants to blame everybody else when now that he’s President, the failure is his.
We have now been in Afghanistan since 2001, through the administrations of three Presidents, all of whom have failed to solve the problem. Trump talked big when he was running for this office. He made big noise about how he was going to get us out of Afghanistan, about how the war there and in Iraq was a big mistake. So instead of looking to fire a general who doesn’t make policy and who was only trying to carry out failed policy, maybe he should try to do his job, work and in conjunction with his generals and come up with something that will look like peace in that war torn country.
Right now, the US backed Afghani government controls about 60% of their own country, mostly in urban areas. The rest, including the roads that connect the urban areas, are under the control of the Taliban, al Qaeda and various other terrorist organizations. That’s not a successful formula. We have been in that sorry country for 16 years, almost two full administrations and now part of a third – and it’s still a mess. Trump made a lot of promises before he was in office. So far, he’s passed on all of them. It would be great if he could give us some traction on this one.
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Donald Trump went down to West Virginia on Thursday night and gave a speech that he could have given in August of 2016. It was probably more relevant then. But the key is where he went. He went to a devastated state, possibly the most pathetic in the nation, where desperate people driven by his campaign lies, still expect this despicable sleaze to somehow revive coal, which has no market, as an viable industry.
We all watched as a withered, grungy, all white constituency, wailed at every stupid, non-relevant lie he uttered, even as he spent far too much time babbling about Hillary Clinton’s emails. Yeah, that’s relevant to people who have lost their health to the conditions in the mines, then lost their jobs when mountain capping replaced those mines and now are being abandoned by the rich greedy coal owners who poisoned their water sources, turned their beautiful hills into lunar moonscapes and are running to foreign lands with the money they squeezed out of these people’s souls.
So the same fools who believed in the greedy con men who stole their lives still believe in the current con man that stole their votes and is back to feed his ego on their naiveté and ignorance.
Trump’s ego was all this rally was about. He spoke of nothing that was significant to today’s political or global situation. He spoke only of insignificant items that would get him the cheers of the true believers. Yes, that’s what these people are, true believers. They will buy any bullshit that Trump slings, simply because he is willing to ell them any lie that they will swallow. These are people who cannot face the tragedies that are their existence and he is a man who is willing to make their lives worse just to enlarge his already bloated ego.
Did Trump talk about Afghanistan, North Korea, the Middle East, taxes, infrastructure or even the failed healthcare bills? No he talked about Hillary’s emails, Russian hacking investigations that he knows will eventually end on his doorstep and fake news. Those are areas that will really help those people who reside on the moon but won’t mean a thing to his cheering audience. It’s too bad they were too ignorant to understand that.
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Watched an interesting comparison of Donald Trump and almost any other politician when Bill Maher praised former Vice-President Al Gore for making a connection with India at the Paris Climate talks. Gore demurred saying that many people had a hand in that process. Can anyone out there imagine Trump doing the same thing? As soon as Maher praised him, Trump would have gone into a long spiel about how he was the most action oriented president in the history of the nation and that he was now leading America to greatness again. Of course none of that would ever happen because Trump is wrong across the board on everything that is important for America. This is especially true in his energy appointments to the cabinet where he appointed Rick Perry, the dumbest ex-governor in the history of politics to be Energy Secretary. How dumb is Perry? He didn’t even know that nuclear power fell under his province when he took the job. Now that’s world class dumb.
Another Trump cabinet appointment, Scot Pruitt, as head of EPA, doesn’t even think the agency should exist. These intellectually challenged individuals are pushing Trump backed policies that have no basis in reality. Trump bellows the value of coal to starving brain damaged victims of environmental pollution in West Virginia while Perry and Pruitt speak to the economic values of oil and fracting gas. These morons are so stupid that they actually try to make a case for coal and oil on an economic basis, while real people with real intelligence know that renewables such as sun and wind are currently providing 17 times more new jobs than any industry in the country.
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Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition was on Bill Maher’s show the other night and he just about buried Maher. This is very disappointing because frankly his arguments were pretty thin and Maher just struck out in his attempts to bury him. The argument was about Reed trying to get the IRS to change the Johnson law that says religious organizations that receive tax breaks can’t proselytize for political position from the pulpit. This is based on the Constitution’s position of separation of church and state one of the bedrocks of this nations birth. Reed objects to this law. When Maher suggested that the churches simply pay taxes and then they could preach whatever they wanted Reed went off the deep end. His argument was that the churches support all kinds of charitable functions like feeding and housing the poor. That’s where Maher dropped the ball. He crumbled in front of that argument when the answer is so obvious. The first thing that Maher ignored was that he was sitting in front of a guy, wearing a four thousand dollar suit while talking about avoiding taxes so he could help the poor. But much more germane to the argument is; if the churches, want to proselytize they could easily set up each charitable action, like for instance a soup kitchen, as its own charity. So the money the church acquired by its religious function would be the gross income from which they could then deduct any monies that they spent on that soup kitchen just like anyone who deducts their charitable gifts from gross income. They would then pay taxes on the net income just like anyone else. That would allow them, if they were so hot to back a political position, to do so, but like the rest of us, at a cost.. Reid is a slick talking phony but Maher dropped the ball.
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58% of Republicans believe that colleges have a negative effect on the way things are going in this country. To me that is a stunning statistic. 58% of about half the country thinks colleges, the place where educated people find out about the world, are bad for the country. So what do they think is good for the country? And where did they get this idea?
Trump and his base, just like all dictators in world history, have a real hard on for the media, but there is a huge segment of the media that is so far to the right that it almost completely departs from any principles of the concept of democracy that has always been accepted by the general public. I am speaking, of course, about right wing radio as epitomized by Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Michael Medved, Michael Savage, Ben Shapiro, Larry Gaiters, Mark Levan, Steven Crowder and many more, especially Alex Jones. They have been joined by fascist print media like Brietbart and others to build a racist, bigoted narrative that is slipped into political philosophy that plays to the needs and prejudices of a largish segment of the population that has become Trump’s base.
But the bible of this broth of bigoted bullshit has been immediately recognized and debunked by the left, the center and, in fact, anyone with even minimum intelligence, making said debunkers the target of those they are rejecting. The positions of the far right are so obviously fallacious and the arguments against them so easy to make that the only retaliation comes in the form of an attack on elitism, education, big government and socialism. If a critic’s intellectual position is so strong you cannot identify a flaw in it, the only recourse is to attack them on the biggest difference between you or your audience and them. When you are standing in front of a couple of hundred out of work West Virginia miners who have at best a minimum education, you make the educated guy their enemy.
“Look at him! Fancy college education! Never had to work a day in his life the way you did every day of yours. Where does he get off telling you how to live? Just cause he’s read a couple of books don’t mean he knows more about what ails your life than you do.”
It’s the oldest con in the world. Hitler made it work in 1935 and Trump did it again in 2016. Dictators all over the world, since the beginning of time, have made it work for them. No one wants to think that some guy who never had to scrape for a living has any right to make decisions for them and they really resent it, so you make that guy, with his nice shirt and his college education the bad guy and no matter what he says, that audience isn’t going to listen. They are going to listen to the guy up there on the stage who s telling them that he gets them, that he feels for them and that he is going to win for them. They need jobs he will give them jobs, jobs they can do, jobs in coal. Who cares that there are no jobs in coal, he’s the President and a billionaire, it just isn’t possible that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it is.