Year: 2016

Hillary is one tough cookie.  Can you imagine all the traveling she’s done and speeches she’s given — with pneumonia? 

I spoke for four minutes at the same event she keynoted Friday night — having done nothing much the two or three days before — and was pretty well shot for the rest of the weekend.

By contrast, she participated in the Commander-in-Chief forum (and was solid as a rock, despite her pneumonia), held a press conference the next morning, flew to Charlotte and spoke brilliantly and substantively for half an hour — watch! — then flew to Missouri for another joyful half hour — watch! — sat for photos and posted two deeply personal, affecting stories on Humans for New York — read them! — and who knows what else she did (oh, yeah; she coughed — well, she had pneumonia) — and then showed up at our dinner the next night and greeted 100 guests (that alone would knock me out for the day, but she does it several times a day) — and gave a strong speech, during which she deplored racists and homophobes.

Doesn’t Trump?

She said “half” his voters seemed to fall into that basket — which was a political faux pas she quickly walked back.

But consider: more than half Trump’s supporters think our President is a foreign-born Muslim (this poll put it over 60%).  And more than a few tweet horrible racist or homophobic or Islamophobic things. In 2016, shouldn’t this be deplored?  David Duke doesn’t think so, of course. But is he on the right side of history?  And is it not deplorable that Trump has amplified the message of fringe white supremacists to millions of his followers?

There’s nothing wrong with being a Muslim or having been born in Kenya, of course, any more than there would be anything wrong with Trump’s having been born Heidi Drumpf in Essen before undergoing surgery and coming to America. It’s just that neither is true.  Trump and Obama were born in America and neither is Muslim or transgender.

But I digress.  My point is that, yes, Hillary can fall ill.

Who can’t?

(If she ever fell truly ill, we’d still have, in Tim Kaine, a President vastly preferable to Trump.)

But boy is she rugged.

I was at a “panel” 20 or so winters ago whose two participants were: Mr. Justice Harry Blackmun and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton.  Some of us were aware that Hillary had the flu.  Justice Blackmun spoke for about 15 minutes — I forget the topic — and then it was Hillary’s turn.  She came up to the standing mike — there was no podium, so you could see her from head to toe — put her hands calmly by her sides and, where I would have begun with excuses, “I hope you’ll forgive me, I’ve been hacking all day and am flying on Sudafed” — she began exactly where Justice Blackmun left off . . . seamlessly segued to her own remarks . . . and then, after 15 minutes — without notes or a script or a single grammatical error, lost thread, or infelicitous phrase — came back to Justice Blackmun’s final thought long after I, at least, had forgotten that’s where she started.

It was a tour de force.  With the flu.

And do you know what?  She recovered from the flu, just as she will recover from pneumonia.

She went on to become a fine Senator and Secretary of State, just as she will go on, I think, to be the most qualified President ever elected.

Trump’s lab results are “astonishingly excellent.”  Bizarrely, he would be the “healthiest.”

But he would also be the least qualified.

We all know Trump has a secret plan to wipe out ISIS shortly after he takes office.  He loves his country, but not enough to have shared the plan when first conceived, to wipe them out a year earlier.  Patriotism has its limits.

And we assumed he wouldn’t share the plan with Hillary if SHE wins because — well, again, patriotism has its limits.

But we’ve been assured it’s an incredible secret plan because, for one thing, Trump “knows more about ISIS than the generals, if you want to know the truth.”

Yet now, as you’ve doubtless seen, he has REVEALED his plan!

(I’m posting this early, before tonight’s 8pm Eastern time NBC commander-in-chief forum, in case he should change the plan in the meantime or make it secret again.)

Here it is:

Immediately upon assuming office, he will summon his generals and give them 30 days to come up with a pan to defeat ISIS!

Trump’s secret plan is to ask the generals what to do.

Even though he knows more about ISIS than they do, “if you want to know the truth.”

So let’s talk a moment about the truth.

Trump lied about having a secret plan to defeat ISIS (or maybe had one but secretly decided, upon reflection, it was a dumb plan), but it helped him win the primary, and he’s all about winning.  Lying and going bankrupt and suing people and buying politicians is the way he rolls!  It’s The Art of the Deal!  Never mind that he lied about writing that book and that Tony Schwartz, who wrote it for him, calls him a sociopath.

Politico checked one Trump’s hour-long speeches and found 71 lies.  He was rattling along at 71 lies per hour.

That may not sound so bad, because we’ve all hit 80 or 90 on an open stretch of highway; but this isn’t miles per hour, it’s lies per hour.

More than a lie a minute!

“Lying is second nature to him,” Schwartz told The New Yorker. “More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.”

And — while we’re doing metrics — what about the 3,500 lawsuits he’s been involved with?

Over 30 years, that comes out to one every three days.

And that doesn’t even count the legal actions he managed to prevent, like the ones in Florida and now, we learn, Texas, charging Trump University with fraud.

A lawsuit every three days!

Can you imagine all the depositions he’s endured over the years?  Fortunately, he has “one of the best memories in the world” — a claim, he stated in the course of one such deposition, he can’t remember having made.

More than one lie a minute.

A lawsuit every three days.

A candidate so unfit for the Presidency that the Dallas Morning News just endorsed a Democrat for the first time in more than 75 years:

There is only one serious candidate on the presidential ballot in November. We recommend Hillary Clinton.

We don’t come to this decision easily. This newspaper has not recommended a Democrat for the nation’s highest office since before World War II — if you’re counting, that’s more than 75 years and nearly 20 elections. The party’s over-reliance on government and regulation to remedy the country’s ills is at odds with our belief in private-sector ingenuity and innovation. Our values are more about individual liberty, free markets and a strong national defense.

We’ve been critical of Clinton’s handling of certain issues in the past. But unlike Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton has experience in actual governance, a record of service and a willingness to delve into real policy.

Resume vs. resume, judgment vs. judgment, this election is no contest.

In Clinton’s eight years in the U.S. Senate, she displayed reach and influence in foreign affairs. Though conservatives like to paint her as nakedly partisan, on Capitol Hill she gained respect from Republicans for working across the aisle: Two-thirds of her bills had GOP co-sponsors and included common ground with some of Congress’ most conservative lawmakers.

As President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state, she helped make tough calls on the Middle East and the complex struggle against radical Islamic terrorism. It’s no accident that hundreds of Republican foreign policy hands back Clinton. She also has the support of dozens of top advisers from previous Republican administrations, including Henry Paulson, John Negroponte, Richard Armitage and Brent Scowcroft. Also on this list is Jim Glassman, the founding executive director of the George W. Bush Institute in Dallas.

Clinton has remained dogged by questions about her honesty, her willingness to shade the truth. Her use of a private email server while secretary of state is a clear example of poor judgment. She should take additional steps to divorce allegations of influence peddling from the Clinton Foundation. And she must be more forthright with the public by holding news conferences, as opposed to relying on a shield of carefully scripted appearances and speeches.

Those are real shortcomings. But they pale in comparison to the litany of evils some opponents accuse her of. Treason? Murder? Her being cleared of crimes by investigation after investigation has no effect on these political hyenas; they refuse to see anything but conspiracies and cover-ups.

We reject the politics of personal destruction. Clinton has made mistakes and displayed bad judgment, but her errors are plainly in a different universe than her opponent’s.

Trump’s values are hostile to conservatism. He plays on fear — exploiting base instincts of xenophobia, racism and misogyny — to bring out the worst in all of us, rather than the best. His serial shifts on fundamental issues reveal an astounding absence of preparedness. And his improvisational insults and midnight tweets exhibit a dangerous lack of judgment and impulse control.

After nearly four decades in the public spotlight, 25 of them on the national stage, Clinton is a known quantity. For all her warts, she is the candidate more likely to keep our nation safe, to protect American ideals and to work across the aisle to uphold the vital domestic institutions that rely on a competent, experienced president.

Hillary Clinton has spent years in the trenches doing the hard work needed to prepare herself to lead our nation. In this race, at this time, she deserves your vote.

Amen, brother.

The last Clinton to hold office gave us eight years of peace and prosperity.  Then a poorly prepared businessman who wanted to cut taxes for the rich led us into a disastrous war and wrecked the national balance sheet.

Most of the — valid! — frustrations of the Trump people and the Bernie people are the result not of competent Democrats like Clinton/Gore, Obama/Biden, Clinton/Kaine, but of the near-treasonous obstruction of Republicans determined to see Obama fail, whatever the cost to the American people.  They wouldn’t pass the American Jobs Act, to put millions to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure; they wouldn’t hike the minimum wage; they wouldn’t enact the comprehensive immigration reform the Senate had passed 68-32; they wouldn’t pass universal background checks; they wouldn’t even hold hearings on Antonin Scalia’s replacement.

It’s true that in the 16 years since Bill Clinton left office, he and Hillary have made a small fortune “capitalizing on their celebrity” (though smaller, between the two of them, than Kim Kardashian has made all by herself).  But as sins go in America, why is their success such a big one? Or a sin at all?  Has anyone found a shred of evidence that they compromised America’s interests?  (Or failed to pay their taxes?)

And does it matter that while Trump was building and bankrupting casinos — gambling arguably wrecks more lives than it enriches — the Clintons were working to solve global health, poverty, environmental and human rights problems?

With that in mind, I offer Kevin Drum’s, “Sigh. Yet Another Non-Scandal at the Clinton Foundation.” In part:

. . . Go ahead and read the whole thing. There’s really nothing even remotely blurry or scandalous or shady or anything else. It’s just the standard way anyone operates who has multiple interests, multiple funding sources, and staffers who do work for multiple organizations. There’s no hint that any of the charges were incorrect, or that any of the purchases were misallocated. As near as I can tell, it was all entirely above board, and the GSA was actively involved in scrutinizing everything.

Basically, the reason for headlines like this is because Bill Clinton decided after his presidency to set up a large and active foundation that raised a ton of money for exceptionally worthy causes around the world. If he had decided to just lounge around instead, none of this would ever have come up. It’s a little hard to believe that he’s getting so much grief for this. . . .

Hillary is not perfect; only you and I are.  But she’s spent her entire life trying to help others . . . will be the best-prepared candidate ever to assume the presidency . . . and will be surrounded by really smart people, not thugs, able to continue the progress of the Clinton years, which George W. Bush set back; and of the Obama years, which the Republican Congress did all it could to impede.

Click here.

Vladimir Putin, whom Donald Trump admires, is a bit of a thug — no?

Trump’s mentor Roy Cohn, once thuggish Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, was himself a bit of a thug, as well.

Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s campaign manager, was called a thug by an editor of right-wing Breitbart.

(Per the National Review: “‘Corey Lewandowski is a thug, and Donald Trump is a thug for backing him,’ Shapiro said Thursday night during an appearance on Fox News’s The Kelly File.”)

Paul Manafort, Lewandowski’s replacement, has been called a “world-class thug” with a long history of supporting war lords, dictators, and oligarchs.

Steve Bannon, Manafort’s replacement, has been called a thug.

And now comes his deputy campaign manager, David Bossie.  Rachel Maddow aired this must-see segment on Bossie Friday night, noting elsewhere in the show that, yes, okay, campaigns may indeed hire gutter-dwellers — it’s not pretty but it happens — but what’s different is that normally they try to keep them hidden.  Trump puts Bossie proudly front and center.  “A friend of mine for many years,” Trump told the Washington Post. “Solid. Smart. Loves politics, knows how to win.”  Yet in the first Clinton campaign President George H. W. Bush condemned Bossie’s “filthy campaign tactics” and George W. wrote 85,000 of his dad’s contributors asking them not to support Bossie.

President George H.W. Bush was a gentleman; prior to winning the Presidency in 1988, he had been, among other things, a war hero, a Congressman, our ambassador to the UN, director of the CIA, and Vice President of the united States.  Donald Trump is a vulgar, bullying egomaniac, spectacularly unqualified to occupy the office.

And speaking of bullies?  He has named Chris Christie to head his transition team (see: “The Thug Politics of Chris Christie”).  The two are close.  Trump’s casinos failed to pay taxes owed to the state of New Jersey.  Once Christie was elected, the $30 million bill was settled for just $5 million — a $25 million gift from Chris to Donald.  It’s quite a story.

(And speaking of taxes — has Trump ever paid any personally?  Or given to charity even a tiny fraction of what he’d like us to imagine he has?)

Yet he’s currently given a 30% chance of winning, which could lead to a trade war which could lead to a global depression which could lead (as the last one did) to a world war, which we would win in 25 minutes — but could lead to the end of most life on the planet (see: nuclear winter).

So we need to spread the word this isn’t a TV show, this is reality, with potentially cataclysmic consequences.  Look at the damage done by the last unqualified man to take office (a nice guy you’d enjoy having a beer with).  And at least he had a sense of decorum; wasn’t mentally unbalanced; and didn’t surround himself with thugs.  (Well, Dick Cheney. But still.)

For all the problems and challenges — our military’s a disaster, crime’s never been worse, unemployment’s 40%, illegal alien rapists and terrorists make us all afraid to leave our homes in the morning (plus real problems and challenges, like climate change and cybersecurity, decaying infrastructure, income inequality . . . and the Zika virus that the Republican Congress adjourned without addressing) — for all that, the progress over the last century has been astonishing.

Consider, first, this poem (via Garrison Keillor) (thanks, Paul!) . . .  and then a letter to the quarterback who refused to stand for the National Anthem.

Portrait of Viola
by William Reichard

They lived without electricity.
Their water came from a hand pump
at the base of the windmill.
A Nebraska farm, 1935.
She said, you can’t miss what you
never had. Drugstore goldfish
in the water tank turned into
giant orange and white carp,
Koi prized in another country,
another class. Her father threw them
out into the prairie claiming
they’d poison the cattle.
Rattlesnakes, a way of life,
careful checking before eggs
were gathered from the darkness
of nesting boxes. Everywhere, heat.
Gone with the Wind
in 1939. She was fourteen.
During the war, she looked like
one of the Andrews Sisters.
First child at twenty, last at thirty-nine.
All survived save one, gone
at thirty. The death of her daughter
turned her hair white.
Eighty-four and she’s lived alone
for longer than she was married,
her husband a man with a wild imagination
but a weak mind. He was born
the year the Titanic sank.
That should have told me something.
Now, central air for the worst
of the heat. In her lifetime:
organ transplants, space flight,
television, artificial hearts.
On still nights she sleeps with
just a sheet, the window open wide,
summer’s heat hard and dry.

“Portrait of Viola” by William Reichard from Two Men Rowing Madly Toward Infinity. © Broadstone Books, 2016

The technological progress dazzles. But there’s been social progress as well. Integrated drinking fountains? A black President? A transgender CEO?

Bob M.: “I thought you might be interested in my brother Mike’s letter to Colin Kaepernick.”

Dear Mr. Kaepernick,

I happened to be watching the 49ers on the first day you became quarterback. I was amazed that you performed so well on your first appearance. When you weren’t throwing the ball and connecting with your receiver, you were running it and outdistancing the competition.

Therefore this recent brouhaha about you not standing for the national anthem was a great disappointment. You see I am a gay person and spent eight years in the Navy. I was always concerned that someday I would be outed. I even had a gay sailor in my division whom I tried to protect. Unfortunately he was as we say “a screaming queen.” It was a difficult job keeping him from being dishonorably discharged (and I include in that the general discharge that was in vogue when I was on active duty). Unfortunately he attempted suicide and then there was no protecting him. One day he was aboard the ship and the next day he was gone.

I also spent a year in country in Vietnam while in the Navy. I met three other gays while serving there. Again all of us were in fear of being outed. We all felt  kindred with Sgt. Leonard Matlovich, an Air Force Sergeant whose epitaph reads “When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one.” After Vietnam I worked for the Navy as a civilian and again had to keep my sexual orientation a secret. I was always hopeful whenever something came along that appeared to allow me more freedom, such as “Don’t ask don’t tell” but was always suspicious that someone was lying. That’s the way things were.

Now I am retired and I cannot believe the changes that have been made. After more than 200 years (Yes, you could be put in stocks in early America for being gay) we are now free to even marry. All the members of my generation wanted, was not to be kicked out of the service, military or civilian. We wanted to serve our country.

The point of all this is, is that in all that time I never once refused to stand for the national anthem. This was my country warts and all. But we do try and sometimes we even win! I do wish you had picked another way of expressing your understandable anger at the way things have been going recently. It is of course your right. But things do change. I am now 80 years old and can attest to that. Please don’t lose faith in our country; like I said, we do try.

We do.

When my mom was born, women didn’t have the right to vote.

Think about that this election season.

Have a great Labor Day weekend.

One of the many things nearly eight years of a Democratic Administration has given us — besides an end to the housing depression, 77 consecutive months of private sector job growth, a tripled stock market and a zeroing out of the weekly U.S. military body count — is the U.S. Digital Service, of which I ‘ve written before.

Here are two dozen highlights of what it’s accomplished in just two years.  Hillary Clinton, needless to say, would continue and encourage its good work.

Your tax dollars well spent.

Enjoy.

Jim Burt: “Pretty good summary from Rick Valelly, Professor of Political Science at Swarthmore:

. . . No previous presidential candidate in American political history has been a dangerous demagogue, clearly unfit and unprepared for the office.

No one before in American presidential electoral history has been so narcissistically disdainful of the basic ethical requirements of democratic electioneering.

. . . He has threatened his opponent’s life, said that if he is President he will try to prosecute her and jail her, asked a foreign power and dangerous adversary to intervene in the election on his behalf, encouraged violence at his rallies, urged a massive assault on the civil liberties of a group of Americans, offended an historic ally and neighbor, the Republic of Mexico, in the most unhinged way, threatened to rip up stable treaty alliances that protect our security, lied constantly about policy questions of fact, engaged in smears and conspiracy thinking, flirted with anti-Semites and white nationalists, suggested that he will encourage nuclear proliferation if he is President, and he has urged his base to treat his electoral defeat, if it happens, as a case of illegitimate and rigged defeat.

Yet this rhetorical barrage has been effectively normalized.  We have gotten all too used to this kind of menacing, deranged talk.  The basic reason for that is his own party.  It has refused to disown him.  There is no line that he cannot cross.  The Republican cohabitation with Trump is understandable. It’s not admirable, but it has a clear organizational logic. Given the enormous gains that Republicans made in 2010 and 2014, in Congress and among the states, they have a lot to protect. Most of the party’s office-holders have obviously decided that they must live with Trump and ride out the election to wherever it may lead.  That has given him a license to say things that should have cost him his campaign long ago. . . .

Jim concludes: “Trump is a human stain which should be a permanent ‘Mark of Cain’ on any candidate or officeholder who has temporized with him.”

And if she wins, Hillary Clinton will be the most prepared, qualified person ever to assume the office of the Presidency, with a lifetime of trying to make the world better for others.

Seventy days to go . . .

Look around!  Look around!  What a time to be alive right now!

Here are 11 reasons to be excited.

Thrilling.

Everything from flying cars to tremendous increases in efficiency and sustainability.  Making a pound of “beef” without 1,800 gallons of water.

Yes, it’s a little scary, too. (How soon will we be pleading with HAL to “open the pod bay doors“?)

With serious concerns over what it will do to jobs.

But as to that:

History has shown that while new technology does indeed eliminate jobs, it also creates new and better jobs to replace them. For example, with advent of the personal computer, the number of typographer jobs dropped, but the increase in graphic designer jobs more than made up for it.

It is much easier to imagine jobs that will go away than new jobs that will be created. Today millions of people work as app developers, ride-sharing drivers, drone operators, and social media marketers— jobs that didn’t exist and would have been difficult to even imagine ten years ago. . . .

And the future is coming in any event, so you may as well take a peak.

Then if you have time, read this by Richard B. Freeman — “Who Owns the Robots Rules the World” — which addresses that issue of employment . . . and, really, the central issue of our time: how to distribute the fruits of human ingenuity?

. . . Robotization, like past technological changes, can be a very good thing, relieving the workload of humans while helping overcome the many challenges the world faces. But it could also affect humans disastrously, dividing societies between the owners of the robots on one side, and the workers who compete with the robots on the other. We should worry less about the potential displacement of human labor by robots than about how to share fairly across society the prosperity that the robots produce. . . .

. . . In recent decades, the labor market has increasingly tilted against workers, producing levels of inequality that arouse global concern not just from traditional advocates of an egalitarian income distribution, but also from such staid organizations as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Increases in worker productivity were once passed on proportionately to workers through gains in wages. Today, gains accrue disproportionately to the wealthy—who are the principal owners of capital. . . .

Apologies that yesterday’s short column got mangled.  Here it is, corrected:

Trump’s Campaign CEO Guilty Of Voter Fraud

You gotta have to kinda love this:

Donald Trump’s new presidential campaign chief is registered to vote in a key swing state at an empty house where he does not live, in an apparent breach of election laws. . . . Bannon is executive chairman of the rightwing website Breitbart News, which has for years aggressively claimed that voter fraud is rife among minorities and in Democratic-leaning areas. . . . Willfully submitting false information on a Florida voter registration – or helping someone to do so – is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Already loathsome for his views and headlines, this is who Trump chooses to helm his campaign?  (Or, more likely, to helm the cable channel bonanza he plans to reap if he loses?)

You gotta have to kinda love this:

Donald Trump’s new presidential campaign chief is registered to vote in a key swing state at an empty house where he does not live, in an apparent breach of election laws. . . . Bannon is executive chairman of the rightwing website Breitbart News, which has for years aggressively claimed that voter fraud is rife among minorities and in Democratic-leaning areas. . . . Willfully submitting false information on a Florida voter registration – or helping someone to do so – is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Already loathsome for his views and headlines, this is who Trump chooses to helm his campaign?  (Or, more likely, to helm the cable channel bonanza he plans to reap if he loses?)

Not Republicans, not Democrats, not Reagan Republicans — not ONE of the living members of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

But what do they know?  Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed King of Bankruptcy, will win so much we’ll get tired of winning.  He will win so much that more than 95% of black Americans, he says (“I promise you”), will vote to reelect him. And Mexico will pay for it.

Read it in the Wall Street Journal, here.

And if you can, click here.

Have a great weekend.