Author: A.T.

One of your esteemed fellow readers — an Army vet and aviation defense attorney from Ft. Worth, Jim Burt — writes:

Harry Truman uttered what could be the entire Democratic Party platform in three sentences: “Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don’t need help. That’s all there is to it.”

Jim found that quote on a must-bookmark page with 44 others “to use when describing conservatives and Republicans to your friends,” ranging from Barry Goldwater (“Today’s so-called “conservatives” don’t even know what the word means. . . .“) to Mark Twain and George Carlin to William F. Buckley, Jr. (“A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!”)

And he adds thoughts of his own:

I have occasionally questioned why we let Republicans get away with calling themselves “conservatives” when they don’t seek to “conserve” anything except the bank accounts of the very richest people, and their program is one of the destruction of time-honored programs, practices, and principles.  Mitch McConnell’s systematic dismantling of Senate norms is a good example of this.

Conservatism in the classic Burkean sense has always been about the recognition of reality over ideology, an expression of disdain or even revulsion for starry-eyed paper programs for the betterment of government or society and a preference for practices and procedures which have been shown by time and experience to work, if not always perfectly, at least adequately.  In this sense, “dynamic scoring” of tax cuts on the always-disproven premise that they will actually increase tax revenue by spurring economic growth is the very antithesis of traditional conservatism, as is the dismantling of proven safety net programs like Social Security and Medicaid.

One Republican politician recently acknowledged that the bank bailout and fiscal stimulus that pulled the world back from the brink of disaster in 2008-2009 were necessary, and that it was perhaps a good thing the Republicans weren’t in power at the time because their principles would not have permitted them to do what was necessary.  Prioritizing ideology over facts would be scorned by true conservatives.  Unfortunately, too many of the people calling themselves conservatives in the US today are a mix of racists, reactionaries, and radicals with ideological agendas that are not fact-based.

Are all of today’s “conservatives” — or Trump supporters — racists or nativists?  No!  But if someone is a racist or a nativist in America today, they will claim to be a conservative and likely support Trump.  Are they all reactionaries who want to return America to a “robber baron” economy?  No!  But if that is their de facto goal, they will claim to be conservatives and they will vote Republican.  Are they all radicals who want to tear down not just the Affordable Care Act but Social Security and Medicare?  No!  But . . . you get the idea.

Are any of these plans or programs compatible with what Andrew Sullivan calls “the pragmatism, moderation, incrementalism, and [cautious] reform” which at least purportedly characterized classical conservatism?  No.  Do they rely on science or other investigative tools to identify the actual facts (about virtually anything) so that they can make cautious fact-based decisions, or do they take more of a “Who are you going to believe — me or your lying eyes?” approach?

Then I look at myself, and at the modern Democratic Party, shorn of its former racist base — which has all gone over to the Republicans.  Do we look to science for answers about climate, energy, medicine, etc.?  Yes.  Do we rely on other investigative tools, such as the Census and other population surveys, to gather verifiable facts about economic and social conditions?  Yes.  Do we try to identify actual problems and take a “whatever works” approach to fixing them, instead of identifying as a “problem” any incongruity between our theoretical aspirations and reality, in favor of our theories?  Yes.  So, I’m a conservative in the classical sense, and so is the Democratic Party.  That we’re actually trying to help people and make our world a better place is a lagniappe, in that sense.

I won’t insult you by hyperlinking lagniappe.  (Though if you didn’t have Tek Lin for eighth grade English, click here.)

But I will join you in saying, “Amen!”  (Even if we Dems too may from time to time be guilty of a little non-fact-based dogma.)

And hello?  Jim didn’t even mention conserving the environment, on which the habitability of our planet depends.

How about that small item?

But first — do you know jet.com?  Acquired last year by Walmart for $3 billion?

I love Amazon, but competition is important — and the glass-bottle Honest Tea varieties that are so hard to find in physical stores but that are just a click away with Amazon ($44.62 for a 12-bottle case of Moroccan Mint) are just a click away on Jet at $16.27 (for Cinnamon Sunrise or Ginger Oasis, my other two favorite varieties) — after the 15% new-customer discount on my first three orders but before the additional $4.31 they knocked off of already-free shipping for my willingness to wait a couple of days to receive it.  In all, $61.69, delivered, for 48 bottles, versus what would have been three times as much on Amazon.

Needless to say, that’s an extreme example — and I still love Amazon.  But “shop around?”

And now . . .

Okay, so this is about as self-indulgent as it gets . . . but I went over to the afore-mentioned Amazon recently to buy someone a copy of my investment guide — way easier to click for $10 than to actually have to put one in a jiffy bag, find stamps, and all that — and noticed a bunch of one-star reviews.

This is a little disheartening, so — being shallow and thin-skinned — I went to check them out.

My favorite, from G. Belmonte this past April 4th: “Book is great — however i received with the front cover torn….very disappointment.”  One star out of five.  (Don’t judge a book by its torn cover?) 

Then there was Matt, back in January: “Financial books shouldn’t get political. A great book whose advice is completely undone by a few sentences of rhetoric. Why? WHY?”  One star out of five.

Two people found that review “helpful.”

In fairness, not all ten of my one-star reviews call the book great.  In fact, only those two did.

Writing of an earlier edition in 2010, Chris called it “Worst book ever,” explaining: “This book was terrible. PLEASE do not waste your money on it. Anything of value in this book, you probably know already. PLEASE, in these tough economic times, find a better book to spend your money on.”

The current edition is not that much changed, so I’m afraid Chris would still hate it.

I actually challenged one guy (“What an idiotic set of advices“), who gave the book one star because it recommends that, when it comes to life insurance, most people should “buy term and invest the difference” — a point on which most consumer advocates and personal-finance experts agree.  Being a life insurance salesman (who earns a far higher commission on complex whole-life products), he calls this advice “stupid or simply irresponsible.”

We had a nice little back and forth (“It is the mark of a good salesman to believe passionately in his product, so hats off to Mr. Poletaev,” I began), and while he didn’t budge on the issue of life insurance, he agreed that maybe one star for the whole book, based on that one page, was “a little harsh.”  I like this guy.  But I’m still stuck with one star.

But first: “A lawyer, a spy, a mob boss, and a money launderer walk into a bar. The bartender says: you guys must be here to talk about adoption.” — Dr. A on Twitter

And whom do you believe — Eric Trump in 2013 (“We don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”) or Eric Trump denying he ever said that?

And why did Deutsche Bank loan him all that money?  Was there a Russian connection?

Why was the Vice Chair of a famous Russian money-laundering bank in Cyprus chosen to be our Secretary of Commerce?

And why was a guy Trump had not previously known — paid $10 million a year to help Putin — chosen to head Trump’s campaign?  Whose idea was that?

And why was the guy chosen to run — and gut — the State Department the only one of those being considered whom Putin awarded the Order of Friendship?

And why did Trump’s Attorney General lie about his contact with Russians?

And why did his National Security Advisor lie about his contact with Russians?

And why did his son Donald lie about his contact with Russians?

And why did son-in-law Jared attempt to set up a back-channel connection with the Russians that US intelligence would be unable to detect?

And why did Jared omit his Russia contacts from from his SF-86 disclosure form?  (And why does he still have security clearance?)

And why does Trump seem so happy whenever he’s with the Russians, inviting them and their photographer, but no American photographer, into the Oval Office; switching seats to seek out Putin for an hour’s chat at the G20 dinner?

And why does Trump still not accept the intelligence community’s assessment that Russia worked to influence our election?

When Trump fires Sessions to install someone to fire Mueller, he will explain that all this nothing-burger stuff is detracting from his (unparalleled) ability to get us all GREAT health care at a tiny fraction of the cost . . . make America safe again by getting Mexico to build a beautiful wall . . . and boost our economy by negotiating great trade deals.

Which brings us to . . .

John Mauldin’s report on the trade war that Trump is teeing up.  (By pulling out of the TPP, Trump’s already ceded American leadership in the Pacific to China.)

. . . Candidate Trump talked about renegotiating trade agreements to help American workers. I support that goal. The problem is that President Trump seems intent on starting a trade war that will hurt those same workers. We are on a very dangerous course. Worse, if a report I saw last week is accurate, that course is already locked in.

. . . This is what Axios reported June 30, based on the input of anonymous Trump-administration sources:

Read the whole letter, but the gist of the Axios report was that “One official estimated the sentiment in the room as 22 against [imposing 20% steel tariffs] and 3 in favor — but since one of the three is named Donald Trump, it was case closed.”

Apparently, our president has created a National Trade Council and put a discredited economics professor at its helm — someone who understands trade in the same way Trump’s EPA chief “understands” climate change or Trump himself “understands” health care — which is why we all now have GREAT health care at not just a fraction of the price (which would have been amazing) but at a “tiny” fraction of the price.  It was so easy!

Make no mistake: Putin is winning.

As I wrote earlier this month . . .

My fantasy — and it is only that — is that some crisis a month or three down the road triggers a lawsuit that can only be decided by the Supreme Court.  And that that Court, though captured by the right, somehow finds the fundamental patriotism and fairness to say something like this:

Seventeen years ago this Court faced a national crisis and — in a ruling it went out of its way to brand as non-precedential — made a tough and widely criticized call that, in effect, gave George W. Bush the Presidency and, as it happened, the opportunity to appoint two of us to this body.

Last year, the Senate made the unprecedented decision not to allow the President to fill a vacancy on this Court, on the grounds that the will of the people as expressed in 2008 and 2012 did not give him that authority — the Senate needed to see how the people leaned in 2016.  As we now know, the people — not the Electoral College, the people — leaned toward the Democratic candidate.

Today we face a new crisis.  In developments that have been building all year, it has become clear that the 2016 election results were interfered with by a massive Putin-directed thumb on the electoral scale — a thumb the existence of which the Trump team long denied knowledge of but of which we now know they were well aware.  In that context, we have been called upon to overturn the 2016 result as tainted, and to order a workable mechanism by which the country can move forward and regain its footing.

We hereby direct former presidents Obama and Bush, acting in concert, to recommend to this Court, in the shortest time possible, an interim president and vice president to serve out the remainder of this presidential term — or a shorter term if a majority of the House and Senate shall call for an earlier election.

Or something like that.  And Barack and George, very different people but both sane patriots, would perhaps recommend to the Court Joe Biden and Mitt Romney; the Court would approve; and most of the nation — not having attained anything like great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost — nor remotely to have tired of “winning so much they got tired of winning” — would breathe a huge sigh of relief.  As would the world.

Or they could just give it to Hillary, who did get more votes despite it all.  But Putin/Trump have been so effective at getting people to misperceive her (she is wonderful and would have made a great president), it could fail to give the same sense of closure.

Here’s the trailer for a documentary on the different “shades” of gender identity.  (I’m the old, square one.)

Commented one audience member on IMDB after seeing Between the Shades‘ debut at a film festival last month: “I am a straight man, and I went to see it with a straight woman. We both stood-up and cheered as the credits rolled at the end, loving each and every participant, fully embracing the individuality of us all, and the deft hand of the filmmakers. We were definitely entertained and elevated.”

How the world has changed.

At least a good chunk of it.

But these two minutes show how much harder it is for non-conforming people to live in places like Turkey and Russia and Uganda.  (They might have included Texas — for example and example — though Texans now enjoy certain federal protections that the Republican Party was unsuccessful in blocking.)

And here are seven minutes with a law student from New Jersey — atheist dad, Catholic Mom — and their attempts to deal with his sexuality.  Hard not to like this guy.

From Between the Shades:

“No matter how different people are, everybody wants to be loved.”

“If you meet someone and fall in love with them, why would you let anything stop you from love? And that’s really what it comes down to.”

Love is love.  No?

Have a great weekend!

Our Republican friends prevented us from creating millions of good new jobs revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure — lest a strong economy improve Obama’s chances at reelection, and because the plan included a surcharge on income above $1 million a year to pay for it.

Similarly, they’ve worked hard to impede, and now destroy, the Affordable Care Act, because it imposes an extra 3.8% tax on dividends and capital gains above a certain level — an extra $3.8 million in tax for every $100 million you earn.  The billionaires most influential in the Republican Party hate that tax, even though the combined rate (23.8%) is still lower than it was after Ronald Reagan’s eight years (28%).

(Democrats have wealthy supporters, too, but many of them are Patriotic Millionaires, either explicitly or in spirit.)

Rather than accept Medicaid expansion, that would have helped so many of their constituents, many Republican governors actually eschewed that federal aid.  And rather than work to improve the ACA — by allowing Uncle Sam to negotiate prescription drug prices, and adding yet a further 2%, say on investment income above $1 million (still below Reagan’s top rate) — they are hell-bent on its demise.

Republican Game-Playing Is Responsible for Three-Quarters of 2018 Obamacare Rate Increases.

It looks like health insurance rates will go up a lot next year, but not because medical inflation is high or because insurers aren’t making money under Obamacare. Mostly it’s because insurers are nervous about whether they’re going to lose the CSR subsidies that are part of Obamacare. President Trump has deliberately chosen to keep this dangling, so insurers have to raise their rate requests in case he decides to stop paying it. Insurers are also nervous about the individual mandate, which helps bring young, healthy customers into the insurance pool. Republicans have been talking about officially forbidding the IRS from enforcing it, and if that happens rates will have to go up too.

Charles Gaba has gone through the rate requests of 20 states, and he figures that these two things account for about 71 percent of the size of the rate hikes that have been requested so far. In other words, if insurers in your state are asking for a 20 percent increase, 6 percent of that is from normal causes and 14 percent is from deliberate Republican efforts to destabilize the individual market.

California’s exchanges are well run, and the state is fully committed to Obamacare. The state insurance commissioner has asked insurers to submit two rate requests for 2018, one with and one without uncertainty over CSR and the mandate, and these rate requests are set to be unveiled on Monday. It’s going to be an important bellwether.

WHEELTUG ENTHUSIASTS: Narration has been added to the Paris Airshow video.

Well, a very small step.

But Parvez Sharma’s book, A Sinner In Mecca: A Gay Muslim’s Hajj of Defiance, will be released next month, and if enough of us pre-order it, we will help initiate the virtuous cycle that makes books successful.  Success begets success.

You don’t even have to read it!  Give it to your local library if it doesn’t interest you.  (“Putting his own life at risk, the author takes us on a surprising and compelling journey through the front lines of his much-contested faith.” — Reza Aslan, author of the #1 New York Times best-seller Zealot.)

It’s the story of his film by the same name.  (“Brilliant . . . rare . . . takes aim at Wahhabi Islam” — Vice. “A rebuke of Saudi Arabia” — Yahoo News.  “A swirling, fascinating travelogue and a stirring celebration of devotion.” — New York Times Critics Pick.  “Revelatory.” — Washington Post.)

Islam can go two ways, as most of us can: peace and love and light . . . or, if sufficiently misled, desperate, or disrespected, something inhuman and horrifying.  Kind of like me: most of the time, a teddy bear . . . but make me crazy enough, as the local FedEx did recently, over nothing (which was part of what made me crazy!), and Dr. Jekyll becomes Mr. Hyde. May you never see my dark side.

Parvez is on the side of sweetness and light.  And gives heart, and spiritual support, to those who would modernize the faith and condemn barbaric Wahhabism.

So let’s see if we can get his book picked up here and around the world.  Click.

MILLENNIALS SAVING FOR RETIREMENT

My pal Bob Pozen wrote this piece for The Hill on the savings habits of millennials — those aged 20 and 36. They’re saving at a pretty good clip, which is great — but more for rainy days and nice vacations rather than for retirement. One structural reason is that half aren’t offered a retirement plan at work. Sure, they could open an IRA on their own (a Roth! read all about it!), but most don’t. Bob urges Congress to adopt the Automatic IRA, which would require employers with over 20 employees not offering a plan of their own to hook up their payroll systems to an IRA provider (Fidelity, Vanguard, whomever) and send regular IRA contributions from their employees paychecks — unless they opted out.

Smart.

Need a break from the negative?  Watch this TED Talk:

Inventor Manu Prakash turns everyday materials into powerful scientific devices, from paper microscopes to a clever new mosquito tracker. From the TED Fellows stage, he demos Paperfuge, a hand-powered centrifuge inspired by a spinning toy that costs 20 cents to make and can do the work of a $1,000 machine, no electricity required.

Or watch Mozart with a sense of humor.  (Thanks, Mel!)

Our petulant, vulgar, narcissistic president lies uncontrollably* and has dramatically diminished our standing in the world . . . but that’s okay, because we’re about to get “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.”

He and his team are deeply in bed with our principle adversary of the past 70 years . . . but that’s okay because Russia’s no longer communist. (Now it’s a journalist-murdering oligarchy run by a kleptocrat who hopes to — and is impressively succeeding at — destabilizing our democracy.) 

And because everybody’s getting the aforementioned health care. (“It’s going to be so easy.“)

He carries Tic Tacs wherever he goes, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, mocks the disabled, is on his third wife, and is everything Jesus deplored — but that’s okay, because — well, truthfully, I can’t imagine why it’s okay.  Yet it is, with 82% of self-identified Republicans. 

Oh.  And did I mention that he knows nothing about the complex issues that confront mankind? 

But plans to solve them by giving huge tax cuts to the uber-wealthy?

If you don’t think that will work, join MoveOn’s Resistance Summer.  Or the DNC’s Resistance Summer.  (Great minds think alike.)  Or find your own way to resist.  We need to fix this.

*Even FOX is beginning to call out the lies.  Watch.  Or the truncated clip.

I saved this for a Friday so you have the whole weekend to watch Bernie addressing a high school class 2003.  It’s an hour.

Steve:  “I wish I had seen it before the 2016 primaries.  I wish millions of us had seen it.  Hillary might still have been our candidate, but some of the candidates who lost winnable elections might have run better campaigns, and we would have won big instead of losing big. Progress, not disaster. . . . I’d love to see him make a high school video again in 2018.  I’d love to see progressives in every state do it, in majority white working class school districts as well as in big cities, and in community college classrooms and college classrooms too. . . . I think such videos are  powerful because they’re about our kids as they near voting age. We all love them, we all want what’s best for them, and we all know they are our future.  We all love our country, and, in the end,  most of us want to get along   If more such videos were made, many would go viral, mainstream media would cover them, and mainstream media narratives would change.  After all, on most issues, progressive positions have majority support, and the mainstream media — journalists, editors, and even publishers and owners — know this.  Many of us know it.   If more of us acted on what we know,  cynicism would decline.  Democrats would nominate more progressives, turnout would rise, small donations would more often beat big ones, and more and more Democrats and independents, at every level, would win.  Maybe we’d take back the Congress next year, and a lot of state governments too, and undo some of the harm Trump and the GOP has caused.  We’d win the presidency and the Congress in 2020.  After that, if we stayed together and didn’t overreach, we’d win again and again. Little by little our country would heal.  We’d enter a new era. And if enough of us still believe in American democracy  we can enter it soon.”

☞ I love the sentiment, and we should for sure try — though it’s not clear to me that thoughtful videos do have the power to go viral.  Bernie’s high school Q&A has scored barely 200,000 hits.  This one has scored nearly 3 billion.

Whichever candidate you favored in 2016 — even Trump — I think Bernie’s video may resonate with you.

I was neutral.  Though I privately believed Hillary would likely have made more progress, as president, toward the goals both she and Bernie shared — which was almost all of them — I’d have done all I could to vault Bernie into the Oval Office, had he won the primary.

Ellie: “If the Democrats, especially the DNC, had run a clean game, Bernie would have crushed Hillary.  I will never forgive them for that, and I blame them for all the horrors that have followed, as Bernie would have crushed Trump also.”

☞ The DNC had nothing to do with the READY FOR HILLARY movement that gave her a 2-year head start — we sure didn’t prevent Bernie from doing the same.  A two-year head start, with millions of dollars and millions of names is hard to overcome.  As is a sense of inevitability, which as the primaries began was widespread.

When the nascent field was Clinton, Webb, O’Malley, Sanders, and Chaffee, I think most democrats were mainly focused on holding the White House and — thrillingly, to some — electing the first woman president (who, by the way, was the most qualified nominee of ANY gender ever to run for the office, even including Bernie).

So the DNC chair at the outset of the process wanted to do everything appropriately — and sought input from all her predecessors — but was not focused on helping Chaffee or Webb or O’Malley or Sanders tear down our all-but-inevitable candidate or use up Democratic resources that could be used to hold the White House and perhaps take back Congress,  I think these things were in her mind.

Most of the specific charges against the DNC on the Bernie/Hillary score are either just wrong or exaggerated.  I’ve run thru a few of them in months past.  For more on that, please take a look.

I’m not saying that, with the benefit of hindsight, every single decision was ideal.  But in the context of the time at which it was made — early on, when Hillary seemed inevitable; or at the end, after she had in fact sewn it up but Bernie kept going in hopes the superdelegates would override the popular vote — I think there was just much less to fault than many of my fellow Bernie fans believe.  (It is possible to be both a Hillary and a Bernie fan — I am living proof.)

One particularly sad example of that was revealed in the WikiLeaks, when the DNC CFO — a wonderful guy who had devoted 20 years to the cause, as solid and well-meaning as they come — was caught in a private email having suggested the press ask Bernie about his religious beliefs.  Terrible out of context (and not fantastic in context), but the context matters: Hillary had won (unless superdelegates chose to override the popular vote, which was simply not going to happen); yet Bernie was continuing to campaign and suck in tens of millions of tremendously-well-intentioned Democratic dollars that could serve only to weaken Hillary’s chances against the Republican, and weaken the sense of unity we’d need to win (which Bernie later worked admirably to promote).

In that context, charged with trying to build the DNC war chest so we could win, the CFO and others were frustrated.  So in a private email (that was, properly ignored), he tossed out a bad, idea.

I’m not justifying it, but it had zero impact on Bernie’s campaign — and cost him his career (and the DNC, a key team member with institutional memory no one else had).

Had he made that suggestion in the thick of things, when Bernie clearly had a chance, it would have an attempt to put a thumb on the scale.  But that’s not when it happened.  It happened when Bernie — who had lost — was, unintentionally, I’m sure — hurting our chances of holding the White House.

So timing and context matter.

Finally, Ellie asserts Bernie would have beaten Trump.  I sure as heck would have tried to help him. And it’s easy just to state that — how could anyone not beat Trump?  Yet the one talent Trump does seem to have, other than bankrupting businesses at no cost to himself, is destroying opponents.  And in attempting to distort Bernie’s terrific qualities and qualifications, he would likely have had even more support from the business community, who would have perceived him as more of a threat than Hillary.

I truly don’t know whether Bernie would have won, but I am skeptical of those who feel they DO know.

Anyway, that’s my two cents.  Watch the video.  We’re all on the same team, wanting much the same things, as Steve says.  We need to come together whenever possible.  If we do, we may right the ship after all.

Happy Bastille Day.  Vive la France.

Halo Top — imagine: eating an entire pint of ice cream without guilt.

And we’re not joking. While Halo Top is low-calorie, high-protein, and low-sugar, we use only the best, all-natural ingredients to craft our ice cream so that it tastes just like regular ice cream. We know it sounds too good to be true, so don’t just take our word for it — dig in and see for yourself just how good healthy ice cream can be!

The peanut butter (320 calories in the entire pint) is insane.  The vanilla bean (240) shouts for a pint of blueberries as its complement.  Has there ever been a better summer than this?  (Ice cream-wise?)

Here’s their story.  And here’s what happened when a guy ate nothing but Halo Top for 10 days (spoiler alert: he lost 10 pounds).  I wouldn’t go that far.  But a pint a night?

Meanwhile, the summer, non-ice-cream-wise, continues to deteriorate, as our truly dangerous president dumps 70 years of earned world leadership down the drain — at a time when the world needs all the steady leadership it can get.

Monday I quoted the Australian journalist whose two-minute assessment has gone viral.  (More from that clip: “Trump has pressed fast forward on the decline of the United States as a global leader.”  At the G20 “He managed to isolate his nation, to confuse and alienate his allies, and to diminish America.  He will cede that power to China and Russia — two authoritarians states that will forge a very different set of rules for the 21st Century.  Some will cheer the decline of America. But I think we’ll miss it when it’s gone.  And that’s the biggest threat to the values of the West which he claims to hold so dear.”)

Really worth the two minutes — and forwarding to friends who voted for Trump expecting “great health care for everybody at a tiny fraction of the cost” — which he said would be easy.

Then again, he also said he would “absolutely” release his tax returns if he ran for president, that he saw thousands of Muslims cheering as the Twin Towers fell, that his investigators in Hawaii had found amazing stuff about Obama’s true birthplace, that he had won the presidency by a wider margin than anyone since Reagan — and that he carries Tic Tacs everywhere he goes.

This man cannot be our president.

Pence is apparently gearing up (read it here). Just what we need — a medieval theocrat.

My fantasy — and it is only that — is that some crisis a month or three down the road triggers a lawsuit that can only be decided by the Supreme Court.  And that that Court, though captured by the right, somehow finds the fundamental patriotism and fairness to say something like this”

“Seventeen years ago this Court faced a national crisis and — in a ruling it went out of its way to brand as non-precedential — made a tough and widely criticized call that, in effect, gave George W. Bush the Presidency and, as it happened, the opportunity to appoint two of us to this body.  Last year, the Senate made the unprecedented decision not to allow the President to fill a vacancy on this Court, on the grounds that the will of the people as expressed in 2008 and 2012 did not give him that authority — the Senate needed to see how the people leaned in 2016.  As we now know, the people — not the Electoral College, the people — leaned toward the Democratic candidate.  Today we face a new crisis.  In developments that have been building all year, it has become clear that the 2016 election results were interfered with by a massive Putin-directed thumb on the electoral scale — a thumb the existence of which the Trump team long denied knowledge of but that we now know they were well aware.  In that context, we have been called upon to overturn the 2016 result as tainted, and to order a workable mechanism by which the country can move forward and regain its footing.  We hereby direct former presidents Obama and Bush, acting in concert, to recommend to this Court, in the shortest time possible, an interim president and vice president to serve out the remainder of this presidential term — or a shorter term if a majority of the House and Senate shall call for an earlier election.”

Or something like that.  And Barack and George, very different people but both sane patriots, would perhaps recommend to the Court Joe Biden and Mitt Romney; the Court would approve; and most of the nation — not having attained anything like great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost — nor remotely to have tired of “winning so much you’ll get tired of winning” — would breathe a huge sigh of relief.  As would the world.

Or they could just give it to Hillary, who did get more votes despite it all; but Putin/Trump have been so effective at getting people to misperceive her (she is wonderful and would have made a great president), it could fail to give the same sense of closure.

I’m now going to have a full pint of Halo Top chocolate ice cream (280 calories).