Tag Archives: Trump

Week that was 3.0.

It’s been another one of those weeks. Not sure how many more I can stand. This election is enough of a nightmare without the regular drumbeat of disasters, but I guess it always works like this on some level. Maybe I’m getting more sensitive in my dotage. In any case, this is what I’ve been thinking about this week:

Lives not mattering. Police shootings of black men in Tulsa, Charlotte, and outside of San Diego demonstrate that this is not getting any better and perhaps is getting much worse. Whereas there has always been a degree of indifference about these incidents, as more and more take place without just resolution, people will tend to become inured to the issue, just as they have with mass shootings. And of course, in at least two of these incidents, details about the dead man’s background have been made known, including brushes with the law. They did this with Patrick Dorismond back in the later nineties and it’s become a favorite tactic: If you’re black, you have to be an angel to deserve to live through a police encounter. That’s a high bar.

Lopsided matchupNot-so-great debate. I was witness to the nerve-wracking exchange between former secretary Clinton and Donald Trump, and I have to say that something about seeing the two of them on the stage of a presidential general election debate was disturbing enough even before they said anything. Clinton bested Trump, but that shouldn’t be hard. The guy literally knows nothing about anything. Honestly, the Republican party seems determined to convince people that there’s nothing to the presidency, that any dunce off the street can do the job. Count me among those who do not agree. That rambling wreck Trump would be a total disaster, to borrow one of his favorite turns of phrase. If Monday’s debate proved anything, it’s that.

Name one leader. Did I mention that Gary Johnson is a dunce? That should be obvious after blowing another softball question on MSNBC. With a brain that flaccid, he should have run for the Republican nomination. I don’t know how this guy ever ran a state without being possessed of even a little bit of knowledge about the world. What makes him attractive to hipsters must be the perception that he would legalize marijuana … or perhaps that he provides a titanic opportunity for irony.

luv u,

jp

Purism deconstructed.

There seems to be considerable interest in third party candidates this year, even though neither of the major/minor candidates is anything to write home about. Jill Stein is a smart person with whom I agree across a broad range of policies, but her notion of how presidential elections work is severely stunted and bizarre. Moreover, the party she represents is almost a total waste of space – an environmental activist party that only appears once every four years to compete in the presidential race. When it comes to organizing, they’re not exactly Saul Alinsky.

Just do it, then move on.Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is clearly not the brightest ex-governor on the porch and hasn’t made much of a case for why young people should give their vote to a ticket that’s floated in part with Koch money, most likely. Perhaps his supporters are not aware that he would slash spending on just about any program that ever benefited them in any way. If American style libertarianism is about anything, it’s about that. Not that it’s likely to be much of a problem – he, like Stein, have no conceivable path to victory in this election. All they have is an extraordinary opportunity to hand Donald Trump and the hyper-reactionary Republican party an electoral victory this November that they don’t deserve and that will have repercussions for many years to come.

That is not an exaggeration. Elections have consequences, and I am saying this as someone who voted for Nader in 2000 (in New York state, of course). We are still living with the consequences of the election of Ronald Reagan, from the fallout from his Afghan “freedom fighters” (now called Al Qaeda and the Taliban), to his reactionary Supreme Court picks, to his war on labor. We also feel the effects of Dubya’s clueless reign, with troops deployed in all of the countries he invaded, a massively outsourced national security state, and our national budget buckling under the strain of his tax cuts for the richest Americans. If Trump wins, it will be because Democrats and progressives sat on their hands or actively voted for someone other than Clinton. That would be a disaster for poor and working people here and around the world.

No, Clinton isn’t a great candidate. But voting is a shitty way to protest. Voting should be strategic, and there is no coherent rationale for withdrawing support from the Democratic ticket that will lead to better policy.

Trojan horse.

The polls are tightening, and it’s no surprise. The Clinton campaign has spent the summer on the sidelines, courting centrist republicans and waiting for Trump to collapse under the sheer weight of his contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric. That strategy has been a dismal failure. Young people and the left are drifting away to third-party dead-end candidates or to simply sitting on their hands, mostly because the Clintons have done virtually nothing to attract them and plenty to piss them off, like naming fracking advocate Ken Salazar as transition chief and courting the approval of the likes of John Negroponte. When you see Trump ahead in Ohio, that’s down to the fact that fewer left-leaning members of the Obama coalition are self-identifying as likely voters. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Here they come.What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there’s also clearly identifying and characterizing the opposition, not in terms of the singular problem of Trump but rather the broader Republican party as it is currently comported. Trump is a bombastic idiot and a hypersensitive man-baby with tiny hands, but his xenophobic rants reflect the core of the party that nominated him. Clinton should make that clear.

And if she can stop praising neocons from the Bush administration, Hillary might want to point out that because Trump is a total idiot on foreign policy, that area of his presidency is likely to be populated by recycled Bush people. And because he hasn’t spent five minutes thinking about domestic policy either, she might want to mention that his economic team, justice department, interior department, you name it, will very likely be run by right wing ideologues of the kind represented by his vice president or his (meaner) campaign manager from Breitbart. Trump, she can say, will basically be a Trojan horse for the crew who (a) started the Iraq war, (b) let New Orleans drown, and (c) crashed the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s.

Oh, and that crew has a name: it’s called the Republican party.

luv u,

jp

The student prince.

I missed NBC’s “Commander in Chief Forum” thus week, but caught the aftermath, and it wasn’t pretty. For one thing, never have a discussion about war and peace on any deck of a warship. It’s like, I don’t know, riding an H-bomb Slim Pickens-style, like it’s a bucking bronco. Second, don’t hire Matt Lauer unless you plan on making it some kind of variety show with a quirky meteorologist and people standing outside the window holding signs. Then, of course, there’s the problem named Donald.

The Student PrinceTruth be told, I have seldom been so gob-smacked by the stupidity of a presidential candidate. Sure, Dubya was a tremendous dumb-ass. Sure, Dan Quayle couldn’t spell and thought Mexicans spoke Latin. Sure, Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson apparently thinks “Aleppo” is the name of a new recreational drug. Donald Trump is in a whole other category. Basic concepts about the nature of the world appear to be beyond his grasp. At the forum, he repeated his opinion that we should have “taken the oil” when we invaded Iraq. Asked to elaborate, he poked around the notion of leaving a few people there to stand guard over it, as if it was a small, contiguous, manageable object and not a massive natural resource that’s part of the geology of that unfortunate country.

Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Kay Johnston says that Trump knows nothing, and the first time I heard that I thought it was hyperbole. But it really is true: the guy simply has no knowledge outside of what he absolutely needs to know to hold himself upright. His comments at the forum were evasive, full of blather, devoid of meaningful content, and remarkably incoherent. And yet people still support him for the presidency. Some of those attending that event later commented that they were still “undecided”. I can understand the reluctance regarding Clinton. But this is no longer a policy argument. This is different. Trump would be a learn-on-the-job president with very few constraints.

The salient issue in this campaign is now how to keep a rich-ass crackpot away from the most powerful office on earth. That is a simple binary choice, whatever ideology you subscribe to.

luv u,

jp

Newsitis.

Time to face facts: I’ve got newsitis. Can’t take my mind off of the ongoing cycle of awful public policy stories. In homage to this obsession and temporary ADD, I will run through a few top of mind items and attempt to keep them brief.

Motor mouth cityNuclear summer. Here in New York State, our always forward-looking government recently decided to sink up to around $7 billion over the next dozen years to subsidize our aging nuclear power plants, particularly the Fitzpatrick plant up in Scriba, NY. Part of an effort to advance so-called “clean” energy, we will now be further subsidizing this moribund industry, underwriting the transfer of this 40-year-old plant to another massive electrical utility. Meanwhile, in my home county, they have canceled a major solar energy generation project. What’s wrong with this picture? (Actually, what’s right with it?)

His ass said it. Trump is making that pivot all right… pivoting right into where he was before. I think some of the pundits got a little excited when he delivered that sorry-sounding speech to the Detroit Economic Club last week – an overly long amalgam of wild, unfounded promises and tired old GOP favorites, like the three-tiered tax system and the 15% top rate for business. Pappy tax cut is back, folks! Then, of course, being a good cartoon neo-fascist, he piped up with this:

Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the Second Amendment. By the way, and if she gets to pick — if she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day, if — if — Hillary gets to put her judges in.

Being the bad comedian that he is – essentially, all set up and no punch line — it’s not hard to see how he would get around to this. He’s playing the crowd, of course, and many standup comedians riff on a certain topic, try to get a little edgy. Suggesting assassination is just where you would expect a comedian/politician to go.

Assholes vs. Fuckers. There was a fair amount of Clinton news this week as well. A lot of it was just email fodder about what amounts to the usual networking bullshit anyone who has worked in an office runs into almost constantly. Other stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation is more problematic, and I have little doubt that there would be plenty for the GOP to mine through four or eight years of Hillary. I tend to think concentrating on the Clinton’s finances is shaky ground for Trump, seeing as his own “billionaire” finances are pretty much opaque, but we’ll see.

As for me, I’m still voting for the assholes. Why? Because they’re better than the fuckers, that’s why.

luv u,

jp

Yea or nay?

Another week of national convention television, this time, the Democratic party. Different from last week, to be sure. Less venom, less doom and gloom – in some ways, more similar to what Republican conventions used to be. That’s not surprising: the Republicans have officially vacated the hyper-nationalist territory they have occupied pretty much my entire life, heading decidedly off to the reactionary end. So now, Democrats are a mixture of Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan Republicans, with some elements of center-left muddle in the middle politics and labor-left sensibilities. The most energized base is certainly on the left, but from what I’m seeing this fourth and final night of the DNC, they are shooting for these centrists and disaffected Republicans.

Yeah, I know.This is not a great strategy. They’re risking turning off some of their most ardent activists with the bluster, the hyper-patriotism, the parade of military officers, etc. Chants of USA, USA, USA! It’s pretty horrifying on a certain level to see them resort to overt jingoism. But Trump has given them that opportunity, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

That’s the bad news. The good news? A lot of Bernie Sanders’s core issues are represented in the major speeches, including the one Hillary herself delivered. Her speech was pretty slow to get started, but she got on track about halfway through, when she started talking policy specifics. A lot of the economic points were good. National security stuff is giving me heartburn. So … someone got Bernie on my Hillary. Someone got Hillary in my Bernie. It’s a mix, for better or worse.

I’m not going to tell people what they should do. Everyone needs to work this out for themselves. But it’s pretty clear to me, from watching these two conventions, that as binary choices go, this one is pretty much a no-brainer. It only takes five minutes to figure that out and actually vote (unless you’re a person of color, in which case the latter part might be more like five hours). One of those two people is going to be president. Among the many, many things we need to involve ourselves in politically, we need to take that handful of moments to make certain we never let somebody like Trump lord it over us.

So in my world, it’s yea. What say ye? Get back to me.

luv u,

jp

 

Lookout, Cleveland.

That was quite a convention, am I right? I’m just listening to what seems like the closing strains of Trump’s acceptance speech, a veritable greatest hits reel of the more boring parts of his stump speeches. A lot more waving the bloody shirt, a full-throated exhortation of the new nativism, and a bizarre admixture of vague populist economic rhetoric (that is probably scaring the hell out of some in his own party) and core GOP positions on fossil fuels, school choice, military spending, etc. Over an hour at the podium and still going. Holy shit.

Most reactionary agenda ever.I can’t believe how badly they miffed that introductory video, though. An amazingly bad production, narrated by an ossified Jon Voight (last seen praising Giuliani), it seemed like a farce fit for John Oliver’s show. I had to shake my head a few times – it was a jaw-droppingly lame attempt to make Trump’s life resemble a Horatio Alger story, evidently written by someone in his inner circle, perhaps a family member. He really has to widen that circle.

Okay, so … the convention can be boiled down to a handful of items. One is that Hillary put the nation in peril with her email server. (No, seriously. Priebus said this on the last night.) The second is that Hillary killed those guys in Benghazi, just like Vince Foster. Third, Hillary and Obama gave $200 billion of “our money” to Iran as part of the nuclear pact (incidentally, no one in the corporate media to my knowledge has called bullshit on this yet – the money is not from the United States; it is Iranian assets from oil exports that were frozen as part of the ongoing sanction regime).

But I think what the whole grisly spectacle boils down to is what Trump outlined in his closing argument: we are in a firestorm of crime and terrorism, and it’s all because of them foreigners and their enablers in our political class. To hear Trump say it, you would think that criminal illegal aliens are all around us, striking at will, raping our grandmothers, etc. This is a toxic, xenophobic trope that has already done tremendous damage, from Latino and Muslim kids being harassed at school to thug-like attacks on adults of the Wrong Color. No one in the corporate media is calling this out, as far as I can see. The other side of the deadly coin is total denial on climate change. Trump is the king of drill, baby, drill. If he wins this fall, it’s game over for the climate, friends.

With respect to this election, we have to do the hard thing: convince as many people as we can to vote for the ass so that we can defeat the fucker. This is a test, friends – an intelligence test, to some degree – and we dare not fail.

luv u,

jp

Another one.

No shortage of news this week, again. What the hell – is there something in the water? We just can’t get through the week without some kind of disaster, and this time it was at least three kinds.

First, another sickening attack in France. Horrendous loss of life, and from what seems obvious, almost completely avoidable. Forgive me, but is this what a state of emergency looks like in France? They know they are being targeted. When you have a mass attendance event like Bastille Day, and a huge crowd on an ocean-side boulevard, you need more than a few cops minding the traffic. Holland is extending the state of emergency, of course (you can see how well it works at keeping them safe) and will probably double down on their attacks in both Syria and Iraq. And the perpetrator? A Tunisian-born French citizen who thought it appropriate not only to kill people at random but to throw millions of French North Africans under the bus as well in the land of Le Pen. Nice freaking work.

Trump's pick. (He seems nice ... )Second, this dumb ass election. The corporate media is obsessing over vice presidential picks this week, for some strange reason (guys …. they are going to announce the names in just a few days – re the fuck lax). Clinton and Sanders did their event together, Bernie burning the house down as usual. It’s not a hard argument to make that, whatever else we do politically, we all need to make certain the wrong person out of the two possible presidential winners never reaches the White House. If the only thing you gain is exponentially better Supreme Court appointments, that in itself is enough reason to mark the ballot for Clinton, at least in swing states. A more reactionary court can do enormous amounts of damage – this we have seen.

Third, the aftermath of a rash of police killings and the shooting of the officers in Dallas. This “national conversation” rotates in the same circle over and over again. For chrissake, Philando Castile, the man shot in Minnesota, had been pulled over by the police 50 times. He had been fined over and over again for minor issues, sometimes for driving with a suspended license (suspended because he owed money on said fines), so that he was in hock to the tune of $5,000. This is Ferguson Missouri all over again. And the closer you look, pretty much every town in the country looks like Ferguson. Yes, there is implicit bias in policing in America, and yes, it is an institutional problem that goes beyond individual biases. But that bias is reflective of the broader culture that police departments serve. We cannot hold police accountable without holding ourselves accountable as well. That’s the bottom line.

Jesus … now there’s an attempted coup in Turkey. Not cool.

luv u,

jp

The choice.

Yeah, I know. California didn’t go the way we’d hoped. But then neither did New York. Or Ohio. Or Pennsylvania. Or Massachusetts. Freaking Massachusetts! Still, Bernie Sanders did an amazing thing. The last true progressive candidate, Dennis Kucinich, won maybe 20% in one state (I think Oregon) and that was cause for jumping up and down (or at least up). That was eight years ago, and back then we could never have imagined something like the Sanders campaign. This is a rising movement, as I’ve said before – it’s political, it’s generational, it’s policy-focused … it’s freaking amazing. And it came within a whisker of stealing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination away from the biggest name in party politics.

That's the story, Morey.Anyway, Hillary Clinton has won; that’s what the voters have said. I won’t quibble with the numbers – the horse race is over. However, the real project of 2016 continues – that of pushing a more energetic progressive agenda forward and finding effective ways of holding Hillary accountable to the activist wing of her party. My hope is that my fellow Sanders supporters will not resort to cynicism; a fear underlined by the ridiculous decision of the AP and NBC News / MSNBC to declare Clinton the “presumptive nominee” of the Democratic Party hours before the polls opened in California. That irresponsible act will, for many, throw doubt on the outcome of the California primary. We need to maintain the activist energy of the Sanders campaign and mobilize it behind a set of policies while working to defeat Trump in November. We can’t afford a radical Republican presidency. We just can’t.

I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: my disagreements with the Clintons are profound. I am opposed to her foreign policy positions, with very few exceptions. Her closeness to Wall Street augurs well for them and not so hot for the rest of us. And I am not convinced that she is the strongest candidate to defeat Trump this fall. But leave us face it – she will be the Democratic standard-bearer, barring disaster, and we need to take the five minutes (in favorable states) needed to cast our vote for Hillary where needed, then get back to the real work of politics – namely improving the prospects for our neighbors and our planet. That’s the work that made the Sanders campaign in inevitable. That’s the hope for a livable future.

That’s our choice. Choose wisely, friends.

luv u,

jp

Inside the May podcast.

Jesus, that was slow. You know what we need? One of those vacuum tube systems with a branch that runs straight up to the freaking internet. You just stuff the podcast into a plastic capsule, cram that sucker in the tube, and up it goes to the “cloud”. Then when it rains, everybody gets your podcast. Modern technology – what a freaking miracle.

Now that the long-awaited May episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN has finally been posted, this seems like a good time to offer a quick rundown of its questionable contents:

Ned Trek 28 – Disheveled in the Dark. This longish, musical episode of our Star Trek parody is based on the classic Star Trek episode entitled “Devil in the Dark”, a standard morality play (of course – it was the 1960s) about a mining planet being terrorized by a mysterious cave dwelling creature. Look it up … got it? Okay. The creature, called the “Horta”, is represented in our version as the “Hairta”, literally the animated hair of Donald Trump, rampaging its way through Republican candidates on a hyper-polluted, free market, toxic waste dump and fracking planet run by Mitch McConnell and Reince Priebus. There’s a lot of running, coughing, and (of course) a performance of the palamino mind meld.

There are also eight new Big Green songs, which include:

Say Can You Fear (timecode: 16:14). A Nixon song. Basically another plea from the Nixon android for consulting work and a path back to respectability. Dude’s got issues.

Romney and You Know It (timecode: 22:04). Captain Willard Romney muses on the now dim possibility of a brokered GOP convention. Arrangement offers a minor nod to the late great George Martin. (You can also hear the song on Soundcloud.)

Down in the Polls (timecode: 39:12). Mr. Welsh wields his folk guitar into action and renders an Irish-tinged ballad of the killer Hairta. References to some of your favorite GOP contenders in 2016.

post-itHerr Mr. Hair (timecode: 49:14). Perle’s song. Predictably, he’s trying to curry favor with the Hairta. Always another ego to be stroked (or combed in this case).

You Made That Bed (timecode: 1:05:25). Sulu, the moral center of the Ned Trek universe (aside from Ned himself), characterizes the episode as one of chickens seriously coming home to roost. Cowbell played by Marvin (my personal robot assistant).

Demigod (timecode: 1:15:16). Ned’s song. A moody Melvin slow rocker about the phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism. Listen closely for ironic callback to the Youngbloods’ “Everybody Get Together”.

Hey GOP (timecode: 1:21:49). Shuffle swing number about the predicament of the Republican party, faced with the rampaging Hairta.

Cry for the Children (timecode: 1:26:36). Another over-the-top Doc Coburn number, filled with religious imagery and agonized wailing.

Put the Phone Down. Matt and I talk about how freaking exhausted we are having just completed eight songs for a freaking podcast. We also discuss the Utica Peregrine Falcon project, as well as some archival audio and video from Big Green’s live performance period back in the early 1990s.