Author: A.T.

Empowering The Sensible Center; No One But Trump

TEN MINUTES . . .

I’ve written about this before:

Ultimately, the solution to our country’s toxic polarization is a combination of open primaries, ranked choice voting, and easy voting-by-mail.  Candidates will no longer be able to win their party’s nomination by appealing to the most ardent on the right or left.  Instead, they’ll have to appeal, also, to the broad, often-more-sensible center. Over time, compromise and comity could once again become the norm.

Andrew Yang’s just-released 10-minute TED talk does a really good job of making the case.

It worked in Alaska — with more states on the way.

Watch!

MEANWHILE . . .

Many believe that the New York “business records” charges now playing out in in court would not have been brought against anyone but Trump.

And that’s probably true.

But there’s a reason.

It’s that mischaracterizing a hush-money payment as a legal expense to spare embarrassment — or even to cheat on taxes — is not something of great consequence . . . whereas doing it to become President of the Unted States and change the course of history is — and something no one but Trump has ever done.

Yes, it would have been better if Al Capone had been tried for murder instead of tax evasion.

So, too, if Trump could be timely tried for lying to the FBI about documents he claimed not to have had and then worked to conceal.

Better still, if he could be timely tried for attempting to overturn an American election.

He seems clearly guilty of both.

But given that he appointed judges (one in Florida, three to the Supreme Court) seemingly intent on dragging those cases out long enough for him to shut them down once reelected, we have to take what we can get — if we get anything at all.  (It’s not easy to get all 12 jurors to agree; and not enough if only 11 do.)

 

The Case For Hope

I hand the microphone to Nick Kristof (one of my heroes):

More than three-quarters of Americans say the United States is headed in the wrong direction. . . . Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that’s not how I feel at all.

. . . I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime.

Worth reading in full.

Have a great weekend.

Oh, wait!

What Trump Promised Oil CEOs As He Asked Them To Steer $1 Billion To His Campaign

The headline says it all.

If only we had the video tape.  What an ad that would make.

RNGE

A sharp-eyed reader asked why I had sold my entire holding of 333,333 shares, as per this filing Wednesday.

I have not.  These were shares bought direct from the company which the company is now in the process of registering with the S.E.C. so that they can be freely sold someday.  I have no intention of selling them any time soon.  Also, the form should have reflected the substantially larger number of shares I had previously bought on the open market.  I’m not selling those, either.

As noted in the past, this is a speculation, to be undertaken only with money you can truly afford to lose!

 

Good News:

BATTERIES
Storage Prices Coming Way Down — making wind and solar all the more economical.

BEES
Honeybees Invaded My House and No One Would Help — good news, because it turns out honeybees are not on the brink of extinction.

BIDEN
Georgia ex-Lt. Governor, lifelong Republican: “I’m voting for a decent person I disagree with on policies over a criminal defendant who has no moral compass” (30 seconds).

BONUS
Biden v. Trump on Health Care (30 seconds).

 

Opening Our Eyes To Hindsight

The rule of law — and democracy — are mortal.

We’ve already begun losing the rule of law.

Democracy is already faltering.

Rachel Maddow grabs us to make sure we’re paying attention.

“Democracy is losing the propaganda war,” writes Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

Autocrats in China, Russia, and elsewhere are now making common cause with MAGA Republicans to discredit liberalism and freedom around the world.

And boy are they succeeding.  Not reading her piece — or watching Maddow — won’t make these huge threats any less real.

All we need do for democracy to triumph is win big in November.

Help?  Volunteer?

Unlike the Germans and Italians who freely elected wannabe dictators (who then soon were) nearly a century ago, we have the benefit of hindsight.  We can see what happened.

[If Monday’s short post — Part II of “Should Joe Debate?” — arrived garbled, as it seems to have for some of you, please try again.  It’s been fixed.]

 

They’re Mad As Hell

Everyone agrees our Southern border is in crisis.

Only Trump stands in the way of fixing it.

Rosa DeLauro is mad as hell (60 seconds).

Everyone knows Trump is guilty of trying to overturn a free and fair election . . . and of stealing government documents he lied to the FBI about not having.

Thanks to Merrick Garland, those cases may never come to trial.

Bill Maher is mad as hell (7 cathartic minutes).

And then there’s Gaza.

So much reason to be mad — and cry.

If only Hamas had accepted Gaza’s 2005 victory — Israel’s unconditional retreat — and built a prosperous society instead of an underground war machine (60 seconds).

Hamas hiding among and below innocent women and children, intentionally causing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians to die, is beyond horrible — but not genocide.*

Because yesterday was Holocaust Remembrance Day, it’s worth remembering that the Brits basically carved out a Jewish state after two-thirds of Europe’s Jews were purposely exterminated.  That’s genocide.

 

*About 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, 2 million in Israel (as citizens, 10 of them in the Knesset), and 2 million-plus in the West bank.  Because Hamas has used Gazans as human shields, one-third of one percent of the Palestinian civilians in the region have died.  Again: beyond horrible.  But not genocide.

 

Should Joe Debate? II

In response to my thoughts last week:

Ed Costello: “Why not refuse to debate unless Trump admits he lost the 2020 election?”

→ So simple.  And brilliant.

If he “agrees” — and then, once the debate starts, says something Trumpian like, “I only said that so I could get Joe on stage and get the truth out to the people” — the moderators should be prepared with endless questions on just this one topic (“why did your own head of election security, Chris Krebs, call it ‘the most secure election in history?’ after all, you told us repeatedly that you appoint only ‘the best people’ — did you appoint an incompetent to this important job?” . . . “why did all 62 judges, many of them your own appointees, in all 62 cases you brought alleging election fraud, throw you out of court?” . . . “you have called former vice president Dick Cheney a ‘great guy,’ yet in light of the way you have conducted yourself since you lost the election, he says that ‘in our nation’s 247-year history, there has never been an individual who is greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump’ — can you explain why?” . . . and on and on) until his head explodes.

Kathleen M:  “Debates would need to be done without an audience with questions being asked by League of Woman Voters or a suitable other group of regular citizens in order for me to even consider Joe Biden standing on the same stage with the current defendant.”

→ That, too.  And as proposed in the piece I linked to last week, the moderator would have to have a mute button to prevent either candidate from interrupting the other.

 

Should Joe Debate?

He’s announced that he will.

I think there are two good options:

OPTION #1

He announces he’s changed his mind after reading this article — and refers all further inquiries to that article.

OPTION #2

He debates, with this opening statement:

Donald is a better debater than I am but a much worse candidate to be President and let me tell you why:

[turns to Trump]

Donald, you’ve proven yourself to be a serial liar and a loser who cannot lose gracefully or even admit defeat.

> You write love letters to dictators who murder journalists and political opponents.

> You’re a tool of Vladimir Putin in his quest to conquer Ukraine and reconstitute the former Soviet Union.  The only part of the 2016 Republican Party platform you touched — the only part! — was not about real estate or taxes or the problems of working men and women – it was about weakening our support for Ukraine. 

> You failed to improve on Obamacare even though you claimed to have a secret plan to deliver — and I quote — “terrific health care at a tiny fraction of the cost.”  The only piece of that plan you revealed was Step One: REPEALING it.  Your Republican colleagues voted over and over — 52 times! — for repeal but never succeeded, thank God.

> You failed to make any progress on infrastructure, even though you called week after week “Infrastructure Week.”

> You don’t do your homework.  Being a GOOD president requires a lot of actual work, not just watching TV, throwing paper towels to hurricane victims, and playing golf.

I could go on and on, but the biggest reason you would make a terrible president is that what you really want to be is a dictator, not a president.

That’s in part because you admire dictators — you even started your 2016 campaign with a quote from Mussolini, for crying out loud — and in part so you can shut down the multiple criminal cases pending against you, for which you are currently out on bail.

So go ahead and win this debate by being loud or bullying or making up what you call “alterative facts.”

But no matter how many $60 Bibles you sell quoting “two Corinthians” to raise cash to pay your lawyers, may God keep you from realizing your unAmerican vision of vengeance and retribution.

I’m good with either option.

The second would actually give him a chance to be heard — even on Fox — by people who don’t usually hear “our side” of things.

It would give him a chance to quote Trump’s staunch Republican critics, starting with Nikki Haley, who aptly dubbed him the “chaos” President . . . Tucker Carlson (in private texts he never expected to become public) . . . and dozens of Trump’s own high-level appointees . . . and, for sure, Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz, using their words from before Trump bullied them into submission, the way “strongmen” (think Putin and Mussolini) do.

There would have to be some ground rules — read that article — but they would apply to each candidate equally.

Let me know your thoughts.

 

DJT — Then, Now, and How

1990 — Barbara Walters interviews a young Donald Trump (2 minutes).

Now — Time interviews an old, multiply-indicted Trump.  If he wins, how far would he go?

You need read only up to the point that you’re sufficiently alarmed to ask how things could possibly have gotten so far.  And what we can do to save ourselves, as the Italians should have saved themselves from Mussolini and the you-know-who should have saved themselves from You-Know-Whom . . . whose book of speeches, while married to Ivana, Trump kept by his bedside.

How — Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy reveals how we got here, what we’re up against, and why we need to do everything we can to help and volunteer.