Author: A.T.

I love this, though it is too tough on Hillary and Bernie.  (To read those parts, you’ll have to click.)

I am so proud of our President.

From conservative columnist David Brooks, writing in the New York Times, to which you should subscribe:

As this primary season has gone along, a strange sensation has come over me: I miss Barack Obama. Now, obviously I disagree with a lot of Obama’s policy decisions. I’ve been disappointed by aspects of his presidency. I hope the next presidency is a philosophic departure.

But over the course of this campaign it feels as if there’s been a decline in behavioral standards across the board. Many of the traits of character and leadership that Obama possesses, and that maybe we have taken too much for granted, have suddenly gone missing or are in short supply.

The first and most important of these is basic integrity. . . . He and his wife have not only displayed superior integrity themselves, they have mostly attracted and hired people with high personal standards. . . .

Second, a sense of basic humanity. Donald Trump has spent much of this campaign vowing to block Muslim immigration. You can only say that if you treat Muslim Americans as an abstraction. President Obama, meanwhile, went to a mosque, looked into people’s eyes and gave a wonderful speech reasserting their place as Americans.

He’s exuded this basic care and respect for the dignity of others time and time again. Let’s put it this way: Imagine if Barack and Michelle Obama joined the board of a charity you’re involved in. You’d be happy to have such people in your community. Could you say that comfortably about Ted Cruz? The quality of a president’s humanity flows out in the unexpected but important moments.

Third, a soundness in his decision-making process. Over the years I have spoken to many members of this administration who were disappointed that the president didn’t take their advice. But those disappointed staffers almost always felt that their views had been considered in depth.

Obama’s basic approach is to promote his values as much as he can within the limits of the situation. . . . President Obama may have been too cautious, especially in the Middle East, but at least he’s able to grasp the reality of the situation.

Fourth, grace under pressure. I happen to find it charming that Marco Rubio gets nervous on the big occasions — that he grabs for the bottle of water, breaks out in a sweat and went robotic in the last debate. It shows Rubio is a normal person. And I happen to think overconfidence is one of Obama’s great flaws. But a president has to maintain equipoise under enormous pressure. Obama has done that, especially amid the financial crisis. After Saturday night, this is now an open question about Rubio.

Fifth, a resilient sense of optimism. To hear . . . Trump, Cruz and Ben Carson campaign is to wallow in the pornography of pessimism, to conclude that this country is on the verge of complete collapse. That’s simply not true. We have problems, but they are less serious than those faced by just about any other nation on earth.

People are motivated to make wise choices more by hope and opportunity than by fear, cynicism, hatred and despair. Unlike many current candidates, Obama has not appealed to those passions.

No, Obama has not been temperamentally perfect. Too often he’s been disdainful, aloof, resentful and insular. But there is a tone of ugliness creeping across the world, as democracies retreat, as tribalism mounts, as suspiciousness and authoritarianism take center stage.

Obama radiates an ethos of integrity, humanity, good manners and elegance that I’m beginning to miss . . .

Oh, and he also steered us back from the brink of global depression, killed Bin Laden, and stuff like that.

 

Donald Trump will not be President of the United States.  Details to follow.

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From the CBS Evening News: a six-year-old orphan on a mission to make you smile.

Too schmaltzy?

Here’s something more practical, if you ever leave the country (as so many claim they would if he were):

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Using your phone when you travel is a nightmare — or has been, up til now.  Even if you remember to buy the extra international packages in advance of your trip, you very quickly find yourself exceeding the data pack age you bought, and constantly have to re-set your roaming options because they turn themselves back on whenever the phone restarts . . . and you get these crazy bills and want to kill yourself until you realize how much your loved ones would miss you and that, after all, we have hot water.  But still have to pay the bill.

Well, AT&T still does it that way, but Verizon now has TravelPass!

It is so great: for just $2 a day in Canada or Mexico and $10 a day in 65 other countries — and only on days you actually use it — you are charged for service exactly as if you were still home in the U.S.

It is so much simpler, so much cheaper, so much less a rip-off.  Thank you, Verizon.  (The only simpler thing would be if they added it to everyone’s plan automatically.  But there are limits to corporate kindness.  So you do have to sign up for it, one time. Until then, or if you have AT&T, the crazy expensive nightmare still applies.)

 

Have you been paying monthly for stuff you just never get around to canceling?  Or forgot you even were still paying for?

I wasted nearly $500 on e-fax alone this way.

Enter TrueBill, as described  here and here.   (Thanks, Brian!)

Find your provider below and TrueBill does the rest.  Free.

No, Norton Antivirus is not on the list — some things are just impossible.

But look!  There’s Time Warner!  Imagine the time you’ll save not having to “listen carefully as the options have changed” and then waiting on music hold for the next available representative.  (“We are [as always] experiencing unusually high call volume.”)

Even if you’re not ready to give TrueBill read-only access to your financial statements, these links could be helpful, as in many cases they tell you how to cancel “manually.”

 

 

TRUMP

‘Nuff said.  But two tidbits anyway.

A Book Review . . . Gary Belis panned The Art of the Deal way back in 1988:

. . . everything you always suspected about the makeup of Donald Trump: the pomposity, the shallowness and above all, the need for more money, more toys and more attention.

Which prompted the Donald to write Fortune suggesting Gary be fired for writing “the single worst review of a book in publishing history.”

A Cartoon . . . Tom Tomorrow’s “Earther.”

(See also, if you have time, from the current Vanity Fair: Buying an election is not as easy as it sounds.  It seems Trump horrifies the Koch brothers, too.)

RUBIO

Did you see his Iowa victory speech?  Marco thanked his lord and savior Jesus Christ for his third place finish and orated, with polished gravitas:

Each generation before us sacrificed . . . and for over two centuries, each generation has left the next better off than themselves.  Now the time has come for us to do the same.  Now the moment has arrived for this generation of Americans to rise up to the calling of our heritage.   Now the time has come for us to take our place and do what we must. And when I’m elected president of these great united states, we will do our part.  We will accept further tax cuts.

That last sentence I just threw in myself, because really, what sacrifice do Rubio and his fellow Republicans have in mind to make for future generations?  Not addressing climate change?  Not levying the taxes needed to revitalize our crumbling infrastructure?

Rubio’s call to sacrifice sounded Kennedyesque — “ask not,” and all that — but I knew Jack Kennedy, Senator.  Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine.  And although that’s not actually true — I didn’t and he wasn’t (I was 16 in 1963) — Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.

CRUZ

And neither is Ted Cruz.  Here he is channeling Jack Kennedy — literally trying to do his voice — and, with it, the Kennedy family’s reaction.  (They are appalled.)

And here he is Tuesday at a New Hampshire town hall.

I found myself wondering how many in his audience would see the up-is-down flaws in his argument.

At the 2012 Republican Convention, he said, he spoke of how our National Debt had reached $16 trillion — up from just $10 trillion when one of his daughters was born.

And afterwards I went back to my hotel room and began looking at Twitter (that was before Donald was tweeting about me everyday) and Paula Poundstone, the comedian, had apparently been watching that night.  I guess she didn’t have anything better to do.  She tweeted, “He said when his daughter was born the National Debt was $10 trillion. Now it’s $16 trillion. What the heck did she do?”

The town hall laughed, and Ted went on to say that “just last week the National Debt crossed $19 trillion.  In her short life — she’s seven — from ten to nineteen trillion.  It is wrong. It is immoral.  No generation in American history has ever done this to the next generation.  And if we don’t stop it, young people are gonna spend their entire lives simply working to pay off the debts of their deadbeat parents and grandparents.”

Powerful, no?

(Leave aside that the Debt was ramped up from 30% of GDP to 122% — quite sensibly — to confront the Depression and win World War II.  So, yes, it sort of does have precedent, and by the generation widely known and revered, actually, as “the greatest generation.”)

And then he evoked “a movement of people furious with government of both parties … who got in bed with lobbyists and special interests and grow and grow and grow government.”

“So what was the last time we broke the Washington cartel?” he asked the crowd.

No one was quite sure, so after a pause, he told them: 1980.  Ronald Reagan.  “And I’ll tell you, the Granite State played a critical role in making that happen.”  Giving Reagan their votes.

So if New Hampshire votes for Cruz, maybe, finally, he implied, we’ll get another Reagan who can keep from burdening future generations with immoral debt.

Except of course it is Reagan, specifically, who sent our National Debt into orbit.

Under $1 trillion when he took office — two centuries of accumulated borrowing — the Debt then represented just 30% of GDP.  In 12 years of Reagan/Bush, he quadrupled it, to $4 trillion . . . then Clinton handed Bush 43 a surplus . . . but Bush 43 got the Debt growing again and handed Obama economic collapse and a $1.5 trillion deficit.

So basically, Reagan — by massively cutting taxes for the wealthy, which Bush 43 compounded — set our Debt to growing faster than the economy, putting it on a trajectory to grow from 30% of GDP to 100% or so, where it is today.

Only the Democrats — first Clinton and now Obama — turned that around.

(Yes, we still have a deficit, so the Debt is still growing.  But so did it grow in virtually every year from 1946 to 1980 also.  But because the economy was growing faster, the debt in proportion to the economy as a whole shrunk back down from 122% to 30%.  Until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.   That’s when we started borrowing from future generations and began a decades long shift of wealth to the top tenth of one percent.)

It’s okay for the Debt to grow, so long as it’s generally growing slower than the economy as a whole.

Which under Reagan and Bush it did not.  But which under Clinton and now Obama, once they had time for their policies to take hold, it did and now again is.

If the National Debt grew half a trillion a year for the next 100 years — while the economy grew at 4% a year (half real growth, half inflation) — it would reach $69 trillion a century from now!  Ted Cruz could have a field day alarming people with that.

Yet $69 trillion would represent only 7% or so of what would by then be a $960 trillion GDP.

Like a $28,000 mortgage on a $400,000 house — not alarming or immoral at all, actually.

What’s immoral is to borrow from future generations to slash taxes on the super wealthy.*

What’s immoral is to borrow trillions from future generations to invade and occupy Iraq.**

What’s immoral is to not borrow to put people to work revitalizing our kids’ crumbling infrastructure.

But up is down these days in the Republican Party.

You’re sick to death of my quoting Mitch McConnell — “by any standard Barack Obama has been a disaster for our country.”  But here is a more recent example — Jennifer Horn, chair of the New Hampshire Republican Party, on TV Thursday night: “Americans are justifiably angry and frustrated after seven years living under, in my opinion, the most failed administration of my lifetime.”

Really?  More failed than, say, George W. Bush’s?

Can she really believe this with gas at $2 and unemployment at 4.9%?  Has she noticed how much more dead Bin Laden is under Obama than he was under Bush?  How many fewer trillions — and lives — it cost us to get rid of Iran’s weapons-grade uranium than to get rid of the weapons of mass destruction a single-source code-named “Curveball” told us Iraq had?  Has she noticed how well Detroit is doing?  How much more affordable heating oil is?  How much better millions of LGBT lives are — at zero cost to their straight brothers and sisters?  Does she not think the hard-negotiated TPP is a major accomplishment (even if she doesn’t appreciate the importance of the climate change accords)?

Really, Jennifer?  Really, Mitch?  Really, Ted?  Really, Marco?  Really, Donald?  Really Fox?  Really Rush?

Rubio and Cruz speak really well and the Donald does good stand-up — “hey, folks; how ya doin’ tonight?!” — but Politifact notes that most of Trump’s statements are untrue.  As are Rubio‘s and Cruz‘s.

Does that matter at all?

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Great weekend watching:  Thursday’s Clinton-Sanders debate.  And set your TiVo for the next one, February 11 on PBS and CNN.

*The 90% and 70% top rates of Eisenhower, Kennedy, LBJ, Nixon, Ford, and Carter were counter-productively high but Reagan / Bush 43 overshot in the other direction.
**Wars are traditionally paid for by raising taxes, not cutting them.

 

They’re spending millions to raise my street three feet so it doesn’t flood at high tide.  Restaurants at whose umbrella-ed sidewalk tables I used to sit last winter are now three feet below-ground.  The tables are still there, but now I sit at tire-level, as the cars go by above.

Perhaps instead of a beautiful 900-mile wall that will somehow cost us nothing — Mexico will pay for it — we need to build a serviceable 6,000-mile dike.  (I’m ignoring Alaska and the much scarier “second method” of measuring coastline, which for states like Texas and Louisiana is 10 or 20 times as long.)

This article from two summers ago is worth a read if you live anywhere near anywhere.  In part:

. . . Nor will south Florida have to wait that long for the devastation to come. Long before the seas have risen a further three or four feet, there will be irreversible breakdowns in society, he says. “Another foot of sea-level rise will be enough to bring salt water into our fresh water supplies and our sewage system. Those services will be lost when that happens,” says Stoddard.

“You won’t be able to flush away your sewage and taps will no longer provide homes with fresh water. Then you will find you will no longer be able to get flood insurance for your home. Land and property values will plummet and people will start to leave. Places like South Miami will no longer be able to raise enough taxes to run our neighbourhoods. Where will we find the money to fund police to protect us or fire services to tackle house fires? Will there even be enough water pressure for their fire hoses? It takes us into all sorts of post-apocalyptic scenarios. And that is only with a one-foot sea-level rise. It makes one thing clear though: mayhem is coming.”

. . . “[I]f you have sea level rises of much more than a foot in the near future, when you raise the canal gates to let the rain water out, you will find sea water rushing in instead,” Kirtman said. . . .

The problem stems from the top, Kirtman said, from the absolute insistence of influential climate change deniers that global warming is not happening. . . . “But global warming is occurring. That is absolutely unequivocal. Since the 1950s, the climate system has warmed. That is an absolute fact. And we are now 95% sure that that warming is due to human activities. If I was 95% sure that my house was on fire, would I get out? Obviously I would. It is straightforward.”

This point is backed by Harold Wanless. “Every day we continue to pump uncontrolled amounts of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, we strengthen the monster that is going to consume us. We are heating up the atmosphere and then we are heating up the oceans so that they expand and rise. There doesn’t look as if anything is going to stop that. People are starting to plan in Miami but really they just don’t see where it is all going.”

Thus one of the great cities of the world faces obliteration in the coming decades. “It is over for south Florida. It is as simple as that. Nor is it on its own,” Wanless admits.

“The next two or three feet of sea-level rise that we get will do away with just about every barrier island we have across the planet. Then, when rises get to four-to-six feet, all the world’s great river deltas will disappear and with them the great stretches of agricultural land that surrounds them. People still have their heads in the sand about this but it is coming. Miami is just the start. It is worth watching just for that reason alone. It is a major US city and it is going to let itself drown.”

The Republicans vying to lead the world scoff at such warnings.  Cruz: “global warming alarmists are the equivalent of flat-Earthers.”  Trump: “bull—-.”  Christie: adamantly unconcerned (at 38:51).  Rubio: “There’s never been a time when the climate’s not changing” — Florida’s junior senator opposes December’s Paris Climate Accord.

And Florida’s Republican governor?  He’s simply banned climate change.  That should do the trick.

How the Mullah Mafia Is Destroying Pakistan.

So powerful.

And of course, it’s much broader than Pakistan.

Any religion taken to extremes becomes a scourge.  My ideal world would stand on two legs: logic and the Golden Rule.

Logic includes science.

The Golden Rule includes everything from the Sermon on the Mount to the philosophy of John Rawls.

For color and comfort and community, inspiration, and richness of feeling, my ideal would would embrace the wonderful stories and traditions it already does, that I, too, cherish.  Just not taken literally.  (What: are we crazy?)

And do you know who should be the first to teach that distinction?  Priests and rabbis and mullahs and monks and ministers and madrassas.

 

I suggested UPIP at 77 cents in September and bought more at $1.  In case you’ve noticed it at $9.70, don’t be impressed. It split 1 for 12.  Which means we paid, adjusted for that, $9.24 and $12 for each share we now own.  But Aristides’s Chris Brown thinks UPIP may be an even better bet now, having won some of its patent cases.  It should be in the mid-$20s, he thinks, not least because it has NOL’s alone worth $12 a share (“net operating losses” from prior management — an accounting thing that can be monetized).  With money I can truly afford to lose, I bought more.

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Jeff: “I used to be poor, but now I’m not.  Should I choose a more expensive health insurance policy, because I can afford the premium; or a minimal policy, because I can handle the catastrophes?”

☞ I’d say go minimal if you feel you are generally healthy by nature/lifestyle/genes because (a) they’re not taking the risk as a favor to you (they expect to cover overhead and make a profit); (b) you’ll encounter less paperwork and frustration.  Consider supplementing the coverage you do buy with a health savings account.  And read How Not to Die . . . to need less health care in the first place.

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Friday was W.C. Fields’ birthday.  Specifically, according to The Writer’s Almanac . . .

. . . the birthday of the man who said, “Comedy is a serious business” – born William Dukenfield in Darby, Pennsylvania (1880). He also wrote screenplays, including for the films The Bank Dick (1940), Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941), and You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man (1939).

He ran away from home as a child, stole to survive, got in a lot of fistfights, and was arrested often. He was a fabulously skilled juggler, and at 14 he honed his juggling act and joined the carnival. He went from juggling to doing a witty comedic routine, and then to acting in films. He toured a lot, and the more famous he became, the more he drank. When he was filming movies, he kept a flask of mixed martinis near at hand, referring to it as his “pineapple juice.” He often quipped about his drinking, saying things like, “Once, during Prohibition, I was forced to live for days on nothing but food and water.” And, “Everyone must believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” And, “If I had to live life over, I’d live over a saloon.”

One day someone snuck into his trailer and replaced the martinis with real pineapple juice.  Back from filming, Fields took a sip and, surprised, spit it out — then charged around the set yelling, “Who put pineapple juice in my pineapple juice??!!”  (Thanks, Glenn.  Thanks, Nat.)

 

Have you seen the list of nihilistic password-recovery questions that’s going around?  Examples:  “What is the name of your least favorite child?” . . . and . . . “On what street did you lose your childlike sense of wonder?”

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Betty P.:  “Per your suggestion, I printed out the Hamilton lyrics and downloaded the music. Bob and I listened to it FOUR times before we saw the matinee on Wednesday. And we are still listening to it in our heads.  It made our ‘Hamilton’ experience magical!”

So much was made of the hit job on Planned Parenthood . . . and so much is being done to restrict access to reproductive health care . . . should the story of the Planned Parenthood case be simply a quick, “Never mind” and then dropped?  (A Republican-impaneled Texas grand jury not only failed to indict Planned Parenthood they indicted the accusers instead.)  Should it not stretch over more than a single news cycle?

In the interest of emphasizing the event . . . and perhaps piling on at least a little . . . here’s Trevor Noah’s take on it from Wednesday’s “The Daily Show.”  (Afterward, he had an interview with Jerry Seinfeld, now 61 and loving it.)

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A couple of other things that have not proven true despite much insistence from certain quarters: Clinton’s first budget, that got not a single Republican vote, did not destroy the economy . . . “by far the vast majority” of the benefits from George W. Bush’s tax cuts did not go to those “at the bottom of the economic ladder” . . .  invading Iraq was not the “last resort” to protect America . . . Barack Obama was not born in Kenya . . . Obamacare has not killed the economy (or deployed death panels or cost Ted Cruz his health insurance) . . . and . . .

. . . drum roll please . . .

. . . Senator Inhofe’s snowball does not disprove global warming.

Much as Republicans love to mock Al Gore — and employ the same “scientists” who whitewashed tobacco to whitewash carbon emissions — it turns out that 2015 was the warmest year in 136 years of record-keeping.

And by a record margin.

And that 15 of the 16 warmest years have occurred since 2000 (with the 16th being 1998).

“Moderate” Republicans like Chris Christie are emphatically unconcerned (here, at 38:51).

 

Three days left to sign up for 2016 coverage! 
Tell your uber driver and anyone else: HealthCare.gov

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So.  As described Monday, the Donald and his fellow Republicans insist things are awful.*

This has left a significant chunk of the Fox electorate yearning for a strongman.

That’s what people do when things are awful.  When rapists and murderers are flooding across the border, the economy is collapsing, and everybody needs a gun to protect against ISIS.**

And so today — while acknowledging he is fun to golf with (according to a mutual friend), terrific sex (according to Marla Maples), good at what he does (demonstrated long ago with Wolman Rink), and quite often funny (even I laughed out loud when, asked in that first debate what Secret Service code name he’d want, Donald chose “Humble”) — can we explore the strongman meme just a little?

Trump is no Mussolini or Putin.

But he does seem to feel a certain affinity with Putin.

And Mussolini, like Trump, was a showman (and narcissist, frequently stripping to the waste, like Putin).  He wanted to “make Italy great again” and wiped out half the population of Libya.  Or so I learned on the Evolution of Evil website.***

Trump loves and has tremendous respect for the Mexicans and the Chinese and the Muslims — and a great relationship with the blacks.  He rejects David Duke’s endorsement.

But he does retweet @WhiteGenocideTM.

And he did keep a 1941 book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

Which is fine.  I now have it by my bedside, too.  Cost me $159 (offered now at $124).  I wanted to see what it was.

And, when you think about it: what an interesting thing for a student of marketing and publicity and persuasion to read.  Hats off to the Donald for intellectual curiosity.

From the 1941 introduction to My New Order by an American correspondent:

[Hitler’s oratory] stirs hatred and feeds self-vindication, and whether on paper it bears inspection for consistency, logic or soundness is immaterial.

From the 1941 foreword by a French journalist:

To use constantly and untiringly the same arguments, and to pound into the heads of his listeners the same formulas, is part of Hitler’s oratorical technique.  . . .  [He] is past master at throwing up verbal smoke screens . . . He knows equally well the effectiveness of massive oratorical assaults that shake the nerves of his victims or opponents . . . he knows how to give pledges that will be broken later . . . he uses insults and lies in the same manner as his generals use Stuka planes and tanks to break through the respectable but often weak front of his adversaries. . . . His crudity frequently borders on downright vulgarity.

I presume the Donald read those same words and, like everyone else, finds Hitler to have been unspeakably evil.

Trump may be a bully and a narcissist . . . and perhaps an egomaniac . . . but he is surely not the Apotheosis of Evil.

Basically, I think, he’s just having fun.

I like Stephen Colbert’s theory — that the Donald doesn’t actually want to be president (that’s hard! look what it does to your hair after eight years!) . . . and now realizes that, OMG, it could happen . . . so seeks ever more outrageous ways to try to disqualify himself, toying even with the idea of “standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shooting someone.”  But no, he exults (or secretly laments, as Colbert would have it): even random street-shootings wouldn’t lessen his lead among Republicans.

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So enough of all that.  Trump is not evil.

Dreadful, perhaps; unfit to be president, for sure; but not evil.

Still, having dipped my toe into the strongman thing . . . and learning now that the Koch brothers’ fortune comes in part from the oil refineries their dad built for Stalin and Hitler**** . . . I was fascinated.

And found myself clicking from one three-minute Evolution of Evil video to the next.  Like the one on Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier.  Or, especially, the one on Hitler, which tells a jaw-dropping story I had never heard.  Did you know that Hitler, then a messenger in World War I, was temporarily blinded by mustard gas?  But that in his case, his sight failed to return in a few hours as it should have?  And that a psychiatrist ultimately cured him by persuading him he had been endowed with prodigious powers for the purpose of making Germany great again?

Could this story be true?  Absent time travel and a workable scheme to assassinate or otherwise redirect the temporarily blinded young soldier, it doesn’t much matter I guess.  But it didn’t take much Googling to come up with this corroboratory account of Dr. Edmund Forster, “The Man Who Invented Hitler: The Making of the Fuhrer.”

 

*Things are pretty awful for the working poor and the middle class, but that’s in significant part because those same Republicans have blocked cost-of-living adjustments to the minimum wage; blocked refinancing of federal student loan debt at today’s low rates; refused Medicaid expansion; blocked the Senate-passed comprehensive immigration reform; and blocked the American Jobs Act that would have created millions of good jobs revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure.

**Unfortunately, a gun won’t protect you if there’s a nuclear terrorist incident, or some other awful frightening thing — real threats that keep the government awake nights.  And the chances of some horrible thing like San Bernadino happening to you — where a gun might help — are like the chances of getting hit by lightning . . . yet we don’t carry lightning rods around.

***Sponsored, jarringly, I thought, when I was watching it, by a series of amusing GEICO ads.

****Which does not suggest he had — let alone that his sons have — undemocratic leanings.  But it does add a bit of color to the Koch story; and perhaps explains a little better how they have so much more money than you or I.