Time to refocus

My very wise friend, Jenny Willhouse Peterson, wrote this:

Time to refocus.

Things that are of critical importance to the health and wellbeing of millions of Americans today: conditions in and aid to Puerto Rico, healthcare vote. And Russia. Keep that one pinned to the top too.

Things that are thrown out there like chum to keep you divided and distracted: NFL shenanigans. It wasn't this much of a row before someone twisted the message to work everyone into a lather.

You're smarter than this. Focus. Love. Support. Unify.

I hope Trump will be remembered for this

When the history of this decade is written, I hope people will remember that while Puerto Rico was struggling in the aftermath of a Category 4 hurricane, President Donald Trump spent four days obsessing over professional football players who wouldn't stand during the playing of the National Anthem. Not until nine days after the storm hit, did he start taking any action to help Puerto Rico, and even then he spent way too much time patting himself and his buddies on the back and not really doing anything.

I know he's planning to visit Puerto Rico more than two weeks after the storm hit the U.S. territory, but:

1. I think he's being forced into it. His advisers are making him do it.
2. He really doesn't care about Puerto Rico. It's not on his radar.
3. The whole time he's there, he will be thinking, "Why am I doing this? This is a waste of time. And this place is a dump. Let's get out of here."

What this country needs

What this country needs are more radical moderates. Alt-independents. Conservative liberals. Liberal conservatives. People who think with their whole brains, and love with their whole hearts.

And you can quote me on that.

Short Thoughts on a Woman as President of the U.S.

Following up on something I said in my previous article:

To put it more bluntly: American voters aren't against electing a woman president. But they are against electing Hillary Clinton.

Let me elaborate. As I said in the article, "come on, people, it's 2017." Except for a few on the radical right (the remaining 8% of Americans who still support Donald Trump?), we don't live in the Stone Age anymore, and the idea of a woman as president is not only okay, but it's plausible - maybe even inevitable.


I would consider voting for someone like Condoleeza Rice or Madeline Albright, but not Hillary Clinton. To the best of my knowledge, Rice and Albright are not as blatantly greedy or power-hungry as Clinton. They are not rude, whiny, condescending or snobby, while Clinton is all of those things. They do not have the serious credibility or trust problems that Clinton has. They're not as full of themselves as Clinton is of herself. And they enjoy more respect (and credibility!) in both domestic and international circles of power than Clinton does.

Now, to those of you who will accuse me of holding a woman to a different standard than I would hold a man: first, notice that in the previous paragraph, I compared women to women. Second, perform a quick test by replacing "Clinton" in the previous paragraph with "Trump". See? Not a different standard at all.

No, HIllary Clinton, You've Got It All Wrong.

I'm going to put the concluding paragraph of this article at the beginning. If you don't read anything else, read this:

Nowhere in What Happened will you read these words, "I understand now. The America people didn't like me because I was a thoroughly unlikeable and immoral person who made it very clear that I was only in it for myself - well, for the power and the wealth." But that's the truth, and that's the bottom line.

Now, if you're still interested, you can read the article from top to bottom.

Hillary Clinton is making the talk-show rounds, plugging her new book, What Happened, which is a very whiny and self-absorbed analysis of why she lost the 2016 presidential election to Donald Trump.

No, I haven't read the book. But I've heard a lot of the interviews — too many. Clinton's main contention is that it's everybody else's fault that she lost. Here, in no particular order, are my observations on her comments. Please note that I'm not citing any polls or news articles to support my assertions. I don't feel like doing that today. If that hurts my credibility, tough. Clinton and her election opponent, Donald Trump, did (and do) the same thing.

1. I agree that the Russians were undoubtedly involved.

2. I agree that James Comey's bumbling undoubtedly played a part.

3. Point 2 notwithstanding, I don't think the emails themselves had anything to do with it. But Clinton's attitude, that she could do whatever she wanted and that she was above the law, had a lot to do with it.

4. Trump's charisma, and the voters who were deceived by his charisma, played a big part. Hillary Clinton has never had charisma. See also Kennedy vs. Nixon, Bill Clinton vs. anybody, and Reagan vs. anybody. Charisma wins votes.

5. I disagree that sexism (or misogyny, a stronger word) played a big part. Come on, this is the year 2017. Sexism may have played a part in the right-wing fringes of the Republican Party, but I don't think it played as big a part with the general electorate as Clinton says it did. I think that the majority of Americans are not opposed to a woman as president. After all, we've witnessed successful female heads of state in Great Britain, Germany, India and Israel, to name only a few, but those women were (and are) great leaders and, ahem, statesmen. Clinton's not even in the same league with them.

5a. To put it more bluntly: American voters aren't against electing a woman president. But they are against electing Hillary Clinton.

5b. Do you remember, "Who wants to see a woman president?" Clinton herself shouted this from the podium at a rally, at the beginning of the primary season. She got an overwhelmingly positive response. There's no difference between "Vote for me because I'm a woman!" and "They didn't vote for me because I'm a woman." She was not above using sexism to her own advantage.

6. And point 5a, of course, brings up the Electoral College. She can blame that antiquated institution for her loss, but hey, the Republican side knew how to play the game, and they played it very well. She could have done the same thing. She chose not to. That's her own fault, and nobody else's.

7. Simply put, the American people didn't like her. They thought she was devious, manipulative and underhanded. They thought she was greedy and dishonest, exemplified by the Clintons' looting of the White House when they left it in January 2001. They thought she was self-centered, mean, petty and cruel, especially to those in subordinate positions. They thought, accurately, that she wanted the office of President just so she could collect more power and wealth for herself.

8. Who can forget:
- "I could have stayed at home and baked cookies," her disenfranchisement of half of the electorate in the country;
- "I will do whatever it takes to get elected [president]," justifying her campaign for the U.S. Senate;
- "What difference does it make?" her handwaving dismissal of the Benghazi debacle/tragedy;
- "Get the @#$%* away from me!" to her Secret Service escorts;
- and many other condescending, insulting, dismissive, or imperious remarks? To mix metaphors, she opened her mouth and shot herself in the foot, over and over again.

9. She was married to Bill Clinton. The country still hasn't forgiven him, and they still think she was complicit in some of his debauchery. This may not be fair, but it's real.

10. Many of you will reread point 7 and say in Clinton's defense, "Hey, you can say all these same things about Trump," and you will be right. Everything I said in #7 about Clinton can be said about Trump (except, maybe, looting the White House). Donald Trump was just as bad a choice for president as Hillary Clinton. I've already talked about that, in this article and this article, for example. Neither of them should ever have won their party's nomination, let alone the general election.

Nowhere in What Happened will you read these words, "I understand now. The America people didn't like me because I was a thoroughly unlikeable and immoral person who made it very clear that I was only in it for myself - well, for the power and the wealth." But that's the truth, and that's the bottom line.

Donald Trump is Nothing But a Mean Old Man

Donald Trump is a mean old man. Nothing more.

In June 2015, I had declared Donald Trump an idiot.

In October 2016, during the height of the election season, I declared that he was a lot of other things, none of them very good. And I meant every word I said.

More recently, I had come to the conclusion that  he was an infant and a jackass.

Last Thursday, I declared that Donald Trump is an impostor.

Well, now Donald Trump himself has revealed that he is nothing but a mean old man.

Yesterday, on a Sunday in the middle of a three-day weekend, the White House announced that Trump had "decided" to end the immigration policy known as "Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals," or DACA. This policy, instituted by Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, in June 2012, gave hope to the children of illegal immigrants — children who didn't choose to come here, in the legal sense, but came with their families. DACA was a way to give them hope that they could build a future in this new country — the only country they had ever known, and the place that they considered home.

Donald Trump is not doing any good by canceling this policy. Nor does he care that he is making innocent people suffer.

Trump did not take this step to Make America Great Again, because this does not make America great. It makes America small, petty, and mean — just like its chief executive.

He did not take this step to secure our nation's borders. It has no impact at all on national security.

He took this step because he's trying to fulfill at least one of his campaign promises, and he hasn't had a lot of luck so far.

He took this step as part of his (unwritten) policy to undo everything that President Obama did, good or bad.

And he took this step to solidify his standing among his so-called base. (According to Time magazine, that's only 35% of Americans, and the number is falling. Can't Trump do math?) Donald Trump's base has shrunk to the point that it now includes only the baser elements of American society: the racists, the neo-Nazis, and the right-wing extremists. Oh, and closed-minded, two-faced hypocrites.

If you knew any of these so-called Dreamers personally, you would feel the same way I do.

Twelve years ago, I taught mathematics to some of these children, first in English, as state law required, and then a second time in Spanish, so they could understand and learn.

Six years ago, my sweet wife taught literacy, English, to some of these children. One of them, a young girl, had to skip school every Wednesday to help her parents work in the fields.

Some of these children have now graduated from college. The rest of them have found honest jobs. They have become contributing members of American society. They pay taxes, Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare. They are marrying and raising families of their own.

Where is the justice in sending them back to a country that they don't call home? Where's the fairness? There isn't any.

Let's hope that Congress has the courage and the will, to do something to ward off the damage this "decision" will cause, before it takes effect six months from now.

Please feel free to share this article - I won't consider it copyright infringement.

UPDATE: Tuesday, September 5

So, Trump had his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, give the official announcement this morning. Sessions wrapped it all up in pretty little legalese justification, inventing the word "effectuated" to help him get his point across. But according to MSNBC, a metric trainload of legal and constitutional scholars have rebuffed every point Sessions tried to make, including the most important assertion, that Barack Obama's executive order memorandum, setting up DACA, was illegal.

Then Trump tweeted something to the effect of "Get to work, Congress! You have six months." First of all, he's still laboring under the impression that he's the boss of Congress, and second, he's using an ultimatum again, one of his favorite negotiating tools. Ultimatums are stupid. What do you expect?

Finally, tonight, the Daily Beast reported this:

President Donald Trump said Tuesday night that if Congress cannot pass a legislative fix for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that his administration scrapped, he will “revisit” it. “Congress now has 6 months to legalize DACA (something the Obama Administration was unable to do). If they can't, I will revisit this issue!” Trump tweeted. He declined to offer specifics on what “revisiting” would entail. 

Vague threats like this are another one of Trump's negotiating tactics. To bring this article full circle, he sounds like nothing as much as a mean old man, like a grouchy neighbor.