Response to Fresh Eyes

(See: Just Above Sunset: Fresh Eyes)

It's a no-brainer that being president is not brain surgery. And this is exactly why Dr. Ben Carson, the brain surgeon, is not qualified to be president, any more than Barack Obama, the president, is qualified to be a brain surgeon.

That all may be obvious to you and me, but it probably isn't to the populists who support Carson. Among all the things that populists believe is, you don't need to be particularly smart to know how to do big things, and it certainly doesn't take an experienced politician to run a nation of 320 million Americans, with the largest economy and military budget in the world. Anyone with good old common horse sense can probably pick that up after a week or so on the job.

And right there is one of the many reasons I'm not a big fan of populism. I think it's better to be smart than be popular. Case in point: Both Donald Trump and Ben Carson are very popular right now. I rest my case.

Yes, I realize leading in the polls is not really what is meant by "populism", but in fact, since "populism" has so often crossed party lines down through history, it's hard to know exactly what is meant by the word. I do think David Masciotra gets history slightly wrong in Salon:

The debate and dichotomy between populism and elitism has its origins in the foundation of the United States. Alexander Hamilton believed that an educated-elite should legislate and lead with the consent of the governed, while Thomas Jefferson envisioned a “nation of farmers” in which the power of ordinary people surges through the halls of capitol buildings everywhere.

Yes, Jefferson thought farmers like him and his fellow Virginians to be morally superior to the money-shuffling New Yorkers like Hamilton, but education is not where the two men differed; both of them were big believers in education, which means neither one of them was a populist. It should be remembered, after all, that near the end of his life, Thomas Jefferson founded a university, for godsake!

When you think of American populism, you think of William Jennings Bryan, who probably learned it at his father's knee. Bryan's father was Silas Bryan, a politician of Scots-Irish and English ancestry, and a fervent "Jacksonian" (as opposed to "Jeffersonian") Democrat:

Jackson's equal political policy became known as "Jacksonian Democracy", subsequent to ending what he termed a "monopoly" of government by elites. Jeffersonians opposed inherited elites but favored educated men while the Jacksonians gave little weight to education. The Whigs were the inheritors of Jeffersonian Democracy in terms of promoting schools and colleges.

With Jacksonian populism came some good, but also some not-so-good:

Even before the Jacksonian era began, suffrage had been extended to (nearly) all white male adult citizens, a result the Jacksonians celebrated. ... [but] Jackson's expansion of democracy was largely limited to Americans of European descent, and voting rights were extended to adult white males only. There was little or no progress for African-Americans and Native Americans (in some cases regress).

Forgetting political parties per se, traditional populism seems more at home among conservatives rather than liberals. Populist movements in this country tend to be crowds of peasants with pitchforks, from the rural farm areas, who don't like cities and don't care about your goddam education that makes you doubt God created us all in his image, and who don't like you elites just out to destroy capitalism with all your global warming talk.

For example, the bible-thumping anti-education crusader against teaching evolution,William Jennings Bryan, was a famous populist. Another was George Wallace. No, Bernie Sanders isn't really a populist; before you can be an American populist, you have to be a conservative. Populists are those people who don't know much about anything but know what they don't like.

There are no liberal populists in America, or at least that's the way it seems. And that's why I got no truck with populists.

Response to Attempting Preemptive Impeachment

(See: Just Above Sunset: Attempting Preemptive Impeachment)

The odd thing is that we all saw this coming. So the question is, why didn't they? I think one answer is that they think when they plot among themselves, the rest of us can't hear them.

So, for example, we sometimes hear them openly debate among themselves closing down the government and then blaming Obama. So then they settle on going ahead with that plan, and the next thing we hear them all saying is, "President Obama shutting down the government does nobody any good!", followed by photos everywhere of small groups of hapless and confused veterans at some war monument, surrounded by Republican operatives carrying signs demanding that Obama open up the government he heartlessly closed down.

Meanwhile, polls show the public overwhelmingly blames Republicans, who are totally confused by that.

Maybe Kevin McCarthy should have asked Fox News to not tell anyone when he made that comment that Hillary's poll numbers dropped after the House announced they'd hold another hearing. Unfortunately, Fox accidentally leaked it to the world, and eventually, the Democrats got wind of it. If this were a TV sitcom, this would be the point where one of us non-conservatives would pipe in and ask, "You do know we're standing right here, and that we can hear everything you're saying, don't you?"

So having been to several of these dog-and-pony shows already, Hillary apparently knew what not to do this time -- that being, to lose her temper, giving the Republicans a soundbite such as "What difference does it make?" to use against her. She kept her cool yesterday.

And we have to remember the context of that quote, from that Senate committee hearing back in January 2013, during questioning from Sen. Ron Johnson, R-WI, an administration critic, who asked her about exactly when everyone knew the assault wasn't a protest against some film:

Clinton: ... I would recommend highly you read both what the ARB [State Department Accountability Review Board] said about it and the classified ARB because, even today, there are questions being raised. Now, we have no doubt they were terrorists, they were militants, they attacked us, they killed our people. But what was going on and why they were doing what they were doing is still unknown -- 

Johnson: No, again, we were misled that there were supposedly protests and that something sprang out of that -- an assault sprang out of that -- and that was easily ascertained that that was not the fact, and the American people could have known that within days and they didn’t know that. 

Clinton: With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans. Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided that they’d they go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator. Now, honestly, I will do my best to answer your questions about this, but the fact is that people were trying in real time to get to the best information. The IC [Intelligence Community] has a process, I understand, going with the other committees to explain how these talking points came out.

So, yes, the big issue back then, as it was yesterday, was talking points. And where, you may be asking yourself, do "talking points" fit into the deaths in Benghazi?

In fact, "talking points" always have nothing to do with anything except politics.

From the Republican perspective, even while the fires were still burning in the Benghazi outpost, the administration was playing politics with them -- wondering what effect the attacks would have on the upcoming 2012 reelection, with the Republicans assuming the Democrats would be thinking that labeling this a "terrorist" attack would allegedly go against the Democrats' alleged campaign narrative, that all al Qaeda terrorism had been wiped out by the Obama administration.

Okay, stop right there.

First of all, I don't remember any such narrative at that time. Second of all, as Democratic strategist Paul Begala pointed out on CNN yesterday, you'd think a better Democratic strategy back then would be that we need to keep in power the president that finally caught up with bin Ladin, since the terrorist threats were still out there. And they were, as Obama frequently noted.

So yesterday, by concentrating on the imaginary politics that the Democrats were playing in 2011, the Republicans were playing politics for 2016. Not only that, everybody in the world now realizes that. Had they realized that would happen beforehand, you'd think they'd save their embarrassment by canceling the hearings.

As for where were all those Sidney Blumenthal questions headed? For a while, it seemed to be to prove that Hillary spends too much time texting old friends than her ambassadors, since there were hardly any emails between her and them in her recently released emails. She, of course, countered that by pointing out that she communicated with embassies by other, more secure means, than emails. Case closed.

And why did none of the Benghazi requests for increased security reach her? Because those requests from the embassy would not have gone to her, they would have gone directly to the State Department security department. Case closed.

And finally, did this hearing hurt Hillary Clinton? No. In fact, it probably helped her campaign, by showing she's a professional who knows how to do things, and that her critics, whenever they get the chance to set a trap for her, seem to fall into the trap themselves.

So what was learned? Maybe this:

How can one escape the conclusion that, if there is a God, he put conservative Republicans on Earth solely for the amusement of the rest of us?

Response to No Time For Nice

(See: Just Above Sunset: No Time For Nice)

I keep hearing reporters say that Joe Biden really wanted to be president? I think most of us have realized for over a month now that he didn't, really. Can anyone imagine, after all that hesitation, seeing him spring to life with all the enthusiasm needed to win it? All this drawn-out indecision reminds us of 1992 and the original "Hamlet on the Hudson", Mario Cuomo, or even the half-hearted campaign of Bob Kerry that same year. Nobody ever wins the job who doesn't sincerely want the job.

But there was that hint that lingers after Biden's announcement (during which it was easy for me, after a while, to imagine a cartoon thought-bubble above the president's head saying, "Somebody, get the hook!") that we may all have dodged a bullet:

I believe that we have to end the divisive partisan politics that is ripping this country apart. And I think we can. It's mean spirited, it's petty, and it's gone on for much too long. I don't believe, like some do, that it's naive to talk to Republicans. I don't think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They are our opposition. They're not our enemies. And for the sake of the country, we have to work together. 

As the president has said many times, compromise is not a dirty word. ... 

Four more years of this kind of pitched battle may be more than this country can take. We have to change it. We have to change it.

Technically, he's right, but his implication seems to be that both sides are to blame. Maybe he's trying a little too hard to be even-handed, sort of like saying, "Well, okay, you Jews may have a point about the Nazis. But still, one wonders if, had you just been a little bit more willing to compromise with them, things might have worked out differently!"

And yes, I know, Nazi analogies are supposed to be off-limits in political discussion, probably because nobody else in history can ever compare to their level of evil. But I'm not saying Republicans are really like the Nazis, I'm just saying it's hard to waste an opportunity to point out the inherent absurdity of these phony "both sides share the guilt" arguments. Both sides don't. The only reason Obama couldn't deliver on his promise to bring both sides together in Washington is because the Republicans decided from day one to make sure it didn't happen, and to pretend otherwise is just dangerously disingenuous. It wasn't until Obama himself stopped pretending it that he was able to get anything done.

Ezra Klein's observation, that the Republicans were happy to deal with Biden rather than Obama, is a good one, but not just because it made Obama seem "too extreme and partisan to work with" -- which is totally outrageous on its own! How can someone be "too extreme and partisan", and at the same time, as they claim, be too naive and weak to negotiate with our enemies? But it was really because the Republicans, especially the now-called "Freedom Caucus", made the Obama name poison, and that any Republican who did deal with him at all was violating a code, and was liable to be "primaried". It got to the point where even Obama himself, if he really wanted to get something done, knew to send in Joe to do it.

Having said all that, I have always liked Joe Biden, and I still do, and am happy to learn that I'm not the only one thinking he would make a pretty good vice presidential candidate in 2016. After all, he's one of the only people alive with actual experience in the job.

The question is, I think, whether she would take him. I still think he's a good choice, although I don't think Joe would have the working relationship with Hillary that he had with Obama, and I'm not sure she could trust his loose-cannon mouth to not blurt out something she disagrees with.

Meanwhile, who else is out there?

There's always those other candidates, especially Bernie, although her people might be afraid that the other party would label the ticket "Benghazi and the Socialist", or some such thing. Bernie might not worry about that word, but especially if the race is a close one, the Clinton campaign would probably think they don't need that albatross hanging around their necks.

Response to Refusing to Project Foolishness

(See: Just Above Sunset: Refusing to Project Foolishness)

Here's part of Obama's problem:

I bet if you polled one hundred Americans, asking them two questions -- the first being, "What's President Obama's policy in Syria?", and the second being, "Who's the United States Secretary of Labor?" -- more people could answer the second question than the first.

Knowing the answer to the first question doesn't really help all that much:

“We are prepared to work both diplomatically and where we can to support moderate opposition that can help convince the Russians and Iranians to put pressure on Assad for a transition,” Obama told “60 Minutes” in the interview, which was scheduled to air Sunday night. “But … what we are not going to do is to try to reinsert ourselves in a military campaign inside of Syria.”

By the term "reinsert ourselves", he apparently means something like "boots on the ground", but not "planes in the air", as you can see if you read further at that WaPo link:

The U.S. military has dropped thousands of bombs on Iraq and Syria since returning to the country last summer to battle the Islamic State. The air attacks have been successful in some parts of the country, but haven’t been able to dislodge the Islamic State militants from their key strongholds in Iraq and Syria.

And just last week, he did a little finessing of that half-a-billion-dollar training program that ended up graduating four or five guys:

The Obama administration announced last week that it was ending a blighted $500 million effort to train Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State in favor of a new plan that will provide direct aid to existing rebel units that the Pentagon thinks has a better chance of succeeding against the militants. Obama, who resisted pressure from some of his top national security advisers — including then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton — to arm the moderate rebels in the early months of Syria’s civil war, told “60 Minutes” that he had grave doubts about the training program before it even began. 

But he pressed forward with it last year out of an instinct to “try different things” to improve the chaotic and deteriorating situation inside the country. Obama said the program failed because it was difficult, if not impossible, to focus the moderate Syrian rebels on fighting the Islamic State when they viewed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his military as an even greater threat.

So what confuses me is, based on all our planes bombing and our trainers training, and now us providing "direct aid to existing rebel units", what exactly does it mean to say "we are not going to do is to try to reinsert ourselves in a military campaign inside of Syria"? Likewise, what do all these critics mean when they accuse Obama of doing nothing? No wonder so many of us are confused by all this.

What do I want our policy to be?

Despite all the missteps and confusion (or maybe because of it), I'd just trust Obama on this. I see the choices he faces in Syria as sort of being, "Do we want to single out one of the random rebel groups to support, then insist they fight who we want to fight, instead of who they want to fight, also taking the chance that they will lose?" or "Do we just stay the hell out of it and watch who ends up the winner?" Sort of like asking, "Would you prefer running out into the deadly surf to save the drowning man, or would you prefer to stay on shore and watch to see if he is able to save himself?"

Yes, I'm sorry Obama ever took that public stand that Assad has to go, I guess placing his bet on the expectation that Assad will eventually be ousted, so we end up on the winning side. We shall have to wait to find out if Putin bet on the wrong horse, especially since he's attacking everyone else, even the group that will probably win the fight.

By the way, Obama's Secretary of Labor is Thomas E. Perez, who's "maternal grandfather," according to his government webpage, "was the ambassador to the United States from the Dominican Republic in the 1930s until he spoke out against his home country's brutal dictator and was declared non grata. His Dominican-born parents eventually settled in Buffalo, N.Y., where Perez was born and raised." Hmm. I find that interesting.

Response to At the Waffle House

(See: Just Above Sunset: At the Waffle House)

I knew there was something wrong with Carson's Hitler-taking-guns-away story but it's been so long since I'd heard anybody use it that I forgot the true story until Kevin Drum reminded us, which is worth repeating, lest we forget it again:

In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles disarmed Germany. ... This was long before Hitler came to power. 

In 1928 this legislation was relaxed. “Germans could possess firearms, but they were required to have permits” ... Again, this was before Hitler came to power. 

In 1938, Hitler relaxed the law further. Rifles and shotguns were completely deregulated, permits were extended to three years, and the age at which guns could be purchased was lowered to 18. 

Now, Hitler did effectively ban Jews from owning guns in 1938. However, this is highly unlikely to have affected the fate of the Jews even slightly. The Nazis were considerably better armed and organized, and if Jews had taken to shooting them it would have accomplished nothing except giving Joseph Goebbels some terrific propaganda opportunities. The 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is a good example of this: Jews fought back, and the result was a few dead Germans and 13,000 dead Jews.

One way to remember this in the future is just to remember that Hitler was a conservative, and conservatives generally favor loosening gun controls, not tightening them.

But it's discouraging that the truth has to be constantly recovered from long forgotten memory, since in time, these false histories always seem to bubble back up from the slime, including this one:

“What I’m talking about is the reason we have a Second Amendment in there,” Carson explained. “In case of an invasion by foreign power, the people will be able to aid the military. And also, if we have a time when we have the wrong people in office and they want to dominate the people, the people will be able to defend themselves.”

I realize I'm repeating things I've mentioned before, but as John Wayne never actually said, "A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do."

The real "reason we have a Second Amendment in there", despite what some will tell you, isn't so much so the people could "aid the military", it was so the people could be the military, since -- as difficult as it is for us to grasp today -- the founders purposefully founded a nation that had virtually no military! Oddly enough, early Americans thought the idea of maintaining a "standing army" was not only not necessary, but was even slightly evil, something their recently defeated enemy, the British, would do:

In June of 1787, James Madison addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the dangers of a permanent army. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty,” he argued. “The means of defense against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home." ... 

While polls today generally indicate that Americans think of the military in glowing terms (rightly associating terms like “sacrifice,” “honor,” “valor,” and “bravery” with military service), Americans of the 18th century took a much dimmer view of the institution of a professional army. A near-universal assumption of the founding generation was the danger posed by a standing military force. 

Far from being composed of honorable citizens dutifully serving the interests of the nation, armies were held to be “nurseries of vice,” “dangerous,” and “the grand engine of despotism.” Samuel Adams wrote in 1776, such a professional army was, “always dangerous to the Liberties of the People.” Soldiers were likely to consider themselves separate from the populace, to become more attached to their officers than their government, and to be conditioned to obey commands unthinkingly. The power of a standing army, Adams counseled, “should be watched with a jealous Eye.”

In case our country was invaded, we would depend on local militias to hold the line until an army could be raised -- after all, they reasoned, militias served us well during the Revolution. But this would only be possible if we guarantee the people's right to own guns -- and therefore, the Second Amendment. But then, along came the War of 1812, which disabused us of thinking it wise to fight a major war without a regular military:

The United States was not prepared to prosecute a war, for [President James] Madison had assumed that the state militias would easily seize Canada and that negotiations would follow. In 1812, the regular army consisted of fewer than 12,000 men. Congress authorized the expansion of the army to 35,000 men, but the service was voluntary and unpopular; it offered poor pay, and there were few trained and experienced officers, at least initially. The militia objected to serving outside their home states, were not open to discipline, and performed poorly against British forces when outside their home states. ...   

The war was ... a major turning point in the development of the US military. The poor performance of several US armies during the war, particularly during the 1812–13 invasions of Canada and the 1814 defense of Washington, convinced the US government of the need to move away from its Revolutionary-era reliance on militia and focus on creating a more professional regular force.

By then, of course, it was too late to go messing around with the Constitution, so the Second Amendment became a vestige of a bygone era. In fact, throughout most of our history, most American families did not even own guns.

But as strange as it may sound to many of us, Carson's "if we have a time when we have the wrong people in office and they want to dominate the people, the people will be able to defend themselves" has some truth to it. Why, we ask, should the people fear a government of their own making, a government that they own and run?

When founders wrote about the right to bear arms, it was often hand-in-hand with that fear of standing armies, such as the writing of James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution":

In Federalist No. 46, he confidently contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he contemptuously described as "afraid to trust the people with arms." He assured his fellow citizens that they need never fear their government because of "the advantage of being armed ..."

This idea of people having a right to defend themselves from their own government traces back to the English Bill of Rights of 1689, exactly 100 years before our own government got up and running, after King James II, a Catholic, tried to disarm all the Protestants:

One of the issues the Bill resolved was the authority of the King to disarm its subjects, after James II had attempted to disarm many Protestants, and had argued with Parliament over his desire to maintain a standing (or permanent) army. The bill states that it is acting to restore "ancient rights" trampled upon by James II, though some have argued that the English Bill of Rights created a new right to have arms, which developed out of a duty to have arms. 

In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Supreme Court did not accept this view, remarking that the English right at the time of the passing of the English Bill of Rights was "clearly an individual right, having nothing whatsoever to do with service in the militia" and that it was a right not to be disarmed by the Crown and was not the granting of a new right to have arms.

Okay, well, more to the point, the English Bill of Rights guaranteed the right of Protestants not to be disarmed (which I guess means you Catholic gunmen out there are SOL), unless maybe you're willing to admit that our Bill of Rights has nothing whatsoever to do with the English Bill of Rights, with all its Catholic vs Protestant folderol, especially since our Bill or Rights specifically cites a "well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state..." as a reason for the right to be guaranteed by the government.

But a lot of us are thinking about the huge numbers of shooting deaths in this country, compared to all those European countries that are "afraid to trust the people with arms" that Madison talked about, and wish we could go back in time to chat with Madison and the other founders about their overwrought fear of standing armies, and the mess they left for future generations of Americans.

Response to The Amazing Disappearing Republican Party

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Amazing Disappearing Republican Party)

Speaking of Hollywood-type movie references, how about "Village of the Damned", the 1960 British-made science-fiction film, starring George Sanders?

The setting is the fictional British village of Midwich, in which a number of strange occurrences lead to a bunch of babies all being born on the same day.

Their children have an unusual appearance, including: "arresting" eyes, odd scalp hair construction and colour (platinum blond), and unusually narrow fingernails. As they grow and develop at a rapid rate, it becomes clear they also have a powerful telepathic bond with one another. They can communicate with each other over great distances, and as one learns something, so do the others. ... 

At age three, the children are precocious, physically and mentally the equivalent of children four times their age. Their behaviour has become even more unusual and striking. They dress impeccably, always walk as a group, speak in an adult manner, and behave maturely, but they show no conscience or love, and demonstrate a coldness to others, causing the villagers to fear and be repulsed by them.

You've probably seen the flick while surfing the dial. A bunch of little blond-headed kids with no sense of humor, walking around in a group, and god-forbid they all start staring at you, with those glowing eyes of theirs.

The children begin to exhibit the power to read minds and to force people to do things against their will. There have been a number of villagers' deaths since the children were born, many of which are considered unusual, and some citizens believe the children are responsible. This is confirmed when the children are seen killing a man by making him crash his car into a wall, and again when they force his suspicious brother to shoot himself.

In other words, all the weird children started staring at John Boehner, which made him off himself by crashing his car into a wall, and then they shifted their gaze to Kevin McCarthy, and right away, made him go shoot himself.

Why? Nobody really knows for sure. All anyone can guess is these two guys, for some reason or other, just pissed them off.

Response to Death Wish

(See: Just Above Sunset: Death Wish)

A confession: I dissent.

I think everyone's making way too much of a deal about what Ben Carson thought he would have done if faced with a shooter, and how Trump defended him. And this, of course, is not because I'm a big fan of either of them. In fact, just the suggestion of the remote possibility of one of these guys actually becoming president gives me hives.

The contention is that Carson was insulting the shooting victims for not fighting back? Except that, for something to be an insult, it has to be intended to be one, and it's pretty obvious it wasn't. When I first heard him say what he would do, I remember wondering the same thing; could that work? Could I even have the time to convince everybody to rush the gunman, or would I be dead after saying five words? What is one supposed to do in that situation?

It did not occur to me that victims and their families would take this as criticism, or that he was calling them cowards. I tend to think that this is a case of people who are angry at all Republicans (as well they should be) for their defending the right of gunmen, in essence, to go into schools and shoot people to death, refusing to give Ben Carson any slack.

In fact, what Carson said on his FaceBook page is, to me, much more damning:

I grew up in the slums of Detroit. I saw plenty of gun violence as a child. Both of my cousins were killed on the streets. As a Doctor, I spent many a night pulling bullets out of bodies. There is no doubt that this senseless violence is breathtaking – but I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away. Serious people seek serious solutions. The Left would prefer to use these tragedies to advance a political agenda. To me, that is also devastatingly sad. The Left would have you believe that a man that asked Christians to stand up (and then executed them one by one) would obey “new gun laws”. That kind of logic explains many of the problems we find ourselves in today.

What exactly does this even mean? He wishes these bullet-riddled victims had more gunpower to keep from getting shot? He's glad that whoever shot these people had a constitutional right to own the guns they used to shoot them? And the question is not whether the bad guys would "obey" those new gun laws, since we wouldn't be demanding they do, we would be forcing whoever sold the guns to obey those laws. So I have to, once again, agree with Carson on something he said on his website, above:

That kind of logic explains many of the problems we find ourselves in today.

But don't get me started on Carson, who I sense is sort of a mild-mannered crockpot, and maybe even nuttier than Trump. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Defending Carson. I just wanted to say that the demand that we all be so sensitive to everyone's sensitivities puts too much of a crimp on our ability to talk these things out, and it shouldn't.

And no insult intended, but I still wonder what I would have done if I came face to face with someone exercising their Second Amendment right, who was threatening to kill me.

Response to The Fatalists

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Fatalists)

As accomplished a theoretical physicist as Albert Einstein was, what with his attempts to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field, leading to the development of his special theory of relativity and later his general theory of relativity, he was never quite able to unify all the laws of physics with gravity, to develop one big "unified field theory", which pretty much would have been an all-encompasing "theory of everything".

Unfortunately, Einstein died in 1955 and didn't live long enough to witness Jeb Bush's explanation of why we have all these mass killings in America, which could, if you've noticed the way these people think, even be seen as a wider attempt at a "Republican Unified Theory of Everything":

“Things happen all the time. Things."

Yep. Things. The implication, of course, being that if those things be bad things, you should just leave them be, since they're just natural occurrences in the Almighty's own cosmos, and any attempt to fix them will somehow just upset God's master plan.

So yes, as Bush says -- and seems to get an "amen" from the amen corner of Republican candidates that includes Trump, Rubio, Kasich and Christie -- while "things happen all the time", many more of them seem to happen in our country, and one would hope our next president would not only notice that and see it as a problem, but would look for ways to fix it.

And yet, many of us non-Republicans immediately spot the flaw in the theory, that being that, while these "things" do "happen all the time", they do seem to happen more in the United States than they do elsewhere. In fact, President Obama tried to make that point back in June in his comments after nine people were gunned down in a Charleston Church:

At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries. It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."

All obviously true, right?

Well, not according to some nit-pickers who asked PolitiFact to rule on it. After showing a chart that lists the incidence of mass shootings between 2000 and 2014 in eleven advanced countries, including our own -- with the United States in first place, with 133 shootings happening during that time, and the second place going to Germany with six, and last place being a tie between four countries (England, France, Switzerland and Norway) with one each -- Politifact announces its ruling:

On balance, we rate the claim Mostly False.

And so, in my mind's ear, I can hear your mind asking, "Whaaat?!?!" Yeah, that's what mine did, too. How the hell did they come up with that?

It seems that they decided, firstly, to break the statement into its constituent sentences, the first being "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries" -- which, okay, if taken literally, is obviously not true. After all, it even happened in Britain that one time. Still, Obama didn't leave it at that, he completed the thought by adding, "It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency."

Yet secondly, rather than determining how often ("frequency") it happens in America in comparison to other countries, PolitiFact wandered off on its own to, instead, analyze how many fatalities and injuries there were per 100,000 people of each country's population, in which we ranked behind Switzerland, Norway and Finland.

I see that shortly after PolitiFact put out its ruling, a guy named Jason Linkins mercilessly, but justifiably, ridiculed it on Huffington Post, in which his rejiggering of the same data showed that America's incidence of the events -- that is, not deaths or injuries -- per million of population was in first place, at .417, followed by Finland, at .380, with Norway in third place, with .194 (all from that one incident, where the guy blew up a building, then went on a shooting spree of that island, killing a total of 77 people).

China came in last place on Linkins' list, at .003 events per million, but if that country, with their much higher population, had experienced the same number of events as we did -- 133, instead of 4 -- but they'd be way up in first place, way above us, at 9.810!

In fact, Linkins goes even further, using that same chart, by ranking the U.S. incidence of mass shootings against all the other countries on that list (Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Germany, England, Mexico, France, and China) combined, and gets this:

United States incidents: 133       population: 318,892,103
incidents per million population: .417

The Others incidents: 23             population: 1,752,555,493
incidents per million population: .013

Keep in mind that the United States has only about one-sixth the population of the rest of those countries combined, and yet experiences about 32 times the number of mass shootings of all of them put together! This gives a whole new meaning to the term, "American Exceptionalism".

But if you think this should convince even the other side that we really do have a mass-shooting problem in this country, forget it. First of all, Republicans don't care what happens in other countries, and they especially don't like to dive too deeply into science and statistics that contradict their opinions.

So none of this matters, since none of these facts refer to real problems -- like Benghazi, long-form birth certificates, and the murder of Vince Foster.

Whoops! Wait! That last one hasn't come around again yet, has it? Well, give it a little more time. The campaign season is still young.

Response to Complications Arise

(See: Just Above Sunset: Complications Arise)

Two nits to pick today, one with a Republican elected official, and the other with someone who has incredibly phenomenal ambitions to be one:

 - - - - - - - - - -
First, there's that famous "Red Line", reported by Kristina Wong in The Hill:

[Foreign Relations chairman] Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) ... criticized the Obama administration for missing opportunities in Syria, citing the decision to pull back from its red line after the regime used chemical weapons.

The Republicans have been saying that for so long, a lot of people are starting to assume it's true, but here's what really happened when Obama used the phrase, "red line", in response to those who questioned under what conditions he would intervene in Syria:

Barack Obama used the phrase on August 20, 2012, during the Syrian civil war in relation to chemical weapons, saying that "We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground, that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation." 

In the US, the phrase then became a source of contention when political opponent John McCain said the red line was "apparently written in disappearing ink," due to the perception the red line had been crossed with no action. On the one year anniversary of Obama's red line speech the Ghouta chemical attacks occurred. Obama then clarified, "I didn't set a red line. The world set a red line when governments representing 98 percent of the world's population said the use of chemical weapons are abhorrent and passed a treaty forbidding their use even when countries are engaged in war," in reference to the Chemical Weapons Convention.

That Ghouta attack occurred in the morning of August 21, 2013.

Several opposition-controlled areas in the suburbs around Damascus, Syria, were struck by rockets containing the chemical agent sarin. Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people to 1,729. The attack was the deadliest use of chemical weapons since the Iran–Iraq War.

The president probably should have made clearer to everyone that, on the breach of that red line, we would not immediately be dropping troops into Syria with guns a-blazing. His actual response was more realistic:

United States President Barack Obama said the US military should strike targets in Syria to retaliate for the government's purported use of chemical weapons, a proposal publicly supported by French President François Hollande, but condemned by Russia and Iran. ... 

In early September, the United States Congress began debating a proposed authorisation to use military force, although votes on the resolution were indefinitely postponed amid opposition from many legislators and tentative agreement between Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin on an alternative proposal, under which Syria would declare and surrender its chemical weapons to be destroyed under international supervision. 

In contrast to the positions of their governments, polls in early September indicated that most people in the US, UK, Germany and France opposed military intervention in Syria. One poll indicated that 50% of Americans could support military intervention with cruise missiles only, "meant to destroy military units and infrastructure that have been used to carry out chemical attacks."

Also, Republican members of Congress and candidates for president, especially those advocating that Obama listen to his military, please note the following:

In a survey of American military personnel, around 75% said they opposed air strikes on Syria, with 80% saying an attack would not be "in the U.S. national interest".

And to those who suggest Putin may be just trying to please his population back home?

Meanwhile, a Russian poll suggested that most Russians supported neither side in the conflict, with less than 10% saying they supported Assad.

But the bottom line was this:

Within a month of the attacks, Syria agreed to join the Chemical Weapons Convention and allow all its stockpiles to be destroyed. The destruction began under OPCW supervision on 6 October 2013. On 23 June 2014, the last shipment of Syria's declared chemical weapons was shipped out of the country for destruction. By 18 August 2014, all toxic chemicals were destroyed aboard the US naval vessel MV Cape Ray.

So to summarize, Obama once alluded to use of chemical weapons in Syria as a red line that, if crossed, would change the calculus of our getting involved in the Syrian civil war. One year after saying that, the line was crossed. He first considered a military response, but found very little appetite for it, neither among his fellow citizens, nor in Congress, nor in our military, nor among the populations of our allies. Instead, he opted to make a deal with the Russians and the Syrians for us to pick up all Syria's chemical weapons, then destroy them all at sea -- which was done.

Therefore, we here at The Inside Poop rule that the claims of Senators Corker and McCain and all those other conservatives, that the Obama administration decided "to pull back from its red line after the regime used chemical weapons", is nothing more than one of those flaming paper bags of poop that some nasty neighborhood brat places on your front porch, then rings your doorbell and runs away, hoping you'll come to the door and stamp out the fire -- which, of course, you do.

(We contemplated using the much-more concise "Pants On Fire", but that was taken.)

 - - - - - - - - - -
Trump now thinks Assad may be okay, after all?

“I’ve been looking at the different players, and I’ve been watching Assad,” Trump told O’Reilly. “I’m looking at Assad and saying maybe he’s better than some of the people we’re supposed to be backing because we don’t even know who we’re backing. We have no idea.”

Yeah, I've had those suspicions, too.

Since the first time I heard that Obama pronounced the American position as "Assad must go", I'd wished he hadn't said it. I never liked the idea of us singling out some country's leader, then telling the world that we think he ought to go.

For one thing, we did that in 1953, with Mohammad Mosaddegh, the democratically-elected popular prime minister of Iran, and it has been biting us back ever since. Also worth considering is a situation in which we say some guy has to go, but then he just keeps hanging in there, like some smarmy guest who won't go home after your house party -- something Assad has been doing. That makes us -- and in particular, Obama -- look a bit foolish. And thirdly, what's the point of saying some leader has to go, but then not lifting a finger to help him pack, so to speak? In other words, if we're really against Assad's leadership, we should show it by joining with some opposition group; otherwise, we should probably just put a sock in it.

I think I'd have preferred that, instead of deciding who's side to join in that war, since we couldn't ever verify that the good guys were really all that good, meaning we'd end up arming our future enemies, we should have stayed totally neutral -- and furthermore, quietly hinting to the Russians to do the same. The risk we'd face, of course, would be pissing off whatever legitimate rebels by not helping them in their time of need, and then watch them ally themselves with ISIS or somebody else we don't like. But while I'd be willing to take that risk, Obama was not -- and, to paraphrase some other president, Obama is the decider, not I, and certainly not all his Republican critics.

Not only did Assad start this thing by attacking peaceful demonstrators, pretending they were all evil extremists, then savagely killing thousands of civilians, apparently with chemical weapons and barrel bombs, but on top of that, he could not, and cannot, be trusted. In short -- in the words of many who have paid closer attention to the man than Donald Trump ever did -- Bashar al-Assad is a "pathological liar", a recent example being this interview he granted to the BBC's Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen:

Bowen: What about barrel bombs, you don't deny that your forces use them? 

Assad: I know about the army, they use bullets, missiles, and bombs. I haven't heard of the army using barrels, or maybe, cooking pots. 

Bowen: Large barrels full of explosives and projectiles which are dropped from helicopters and explode with devastating effect. There's been a lot of testimony about these things. 

Assad: They're called bombs. We have bombs, missiles and bullets. 

Bowen: So you wouldn't deny that included under the category of 'bombs' are these 'barrel bombs', which are indiscriminate weapons. 

Assad: No, there's no indiscriminate weapons. When you shoot, you aim and when you aim, you aim at terrorists in order to protect civilians. If you're talking about casualty, that's war, you can't have war without casualty.

Plenty of people have testified to seeing barrel bombs being dropped from helicopters in Syria. Nobody else but the government uses helicopters In Syria. Assad just denies things that everybody else knows is true, like the possession of those chemical weapons that he later turned over for destruction.

If Trump had only been following him over the years, he'd be aware of Assad's reputation as a blatant liar from way back, this being an assessment of his broken promises from the GlobalPost back in 2012:

Assad's vows have come almost weekly since the uprising began. And they are broken often times within days, or even hours. 

A little over a year ago, Assad promised to abolish the much-maligned emergency law that gives his security forces license to violently crackdown on threats to the state. A month later he again promised to lift the controversial law. Four days later the Syrian cabinet said it backed the law's removal. 

On April 21, 2011, there was little celebration when Assad finally made good on the promise. Little changed. His security forces continued to operate under the same impunity the law sanctioned. 

On June 20, 2011, Assad made a rare public speech, promising to amend the constitution and call his soldiers back to the barracks. Three days later the country's foreign minister promised "serious reforms." Syria would eventually hold a referendum on a new constitution, but it would do so amid violent crackdowns throughout the country. 

Turkish officials said it doubted the vote was legitimate. US officials called it "laughable." 

"It makes a mockery of the Syrian revolution," White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters at the time. "Promises of reforms have been usually followed by increase in brutality and have never been delivered upon by this regime since the beginning of peaceful demonstrations in Syria."

I think I heard that Donald Trump has said everything he knows about the world comes from watching television and reading. Same with me. My advice to you is, just to be safe, don't vote for either of us.

Response to No Sufficient Second

(See: Just Above Sunset: No Sufficient Second)

Whatever arcane rules and procedures of the Senate that Ted Cruz is wielding to get his way sure are mysterious, but no less so than what exactly the hell it is that he's trying to achieve in the first place.

I love the fact that, for some reason, he needs to get ten others to join him in some meaningless roll-call vote, and that he's no longer able do it. In fact, it reminds me of the stories my Jewish mother-in-law would tell of someone always coming to the house to try to persuade her husband, who was not all that religious, to join a "minyan" of ten adult Jewish men, the minimum required for prayer back at the temple. How big a deal could that prayer be, she would ask, if they had to work so hard to scrape together a quorum every time to do it?

And I'm sure that many former members of Cruz's cohort are starting to feel the same way. Enough with all this tilting at windmills.

What I also find mysterious are Ted Cruz's intentions. They say he's trying to position himself as an "outsider", but as intelligent as he is supposed to be (I can't get over the fact that he was a Rhodes Scholar), he doesn't seem to understand that the appeal of the outsider, to those looking for that sort of thing, is that maybe someone from anywhere outside Washington, someone so far un-seduced by all that confusing arcana of government, might just be who we need to send there to get done what we want done.

That doesn't describe Ted Cruz, since in the almost three years he's been there so far, he's become extremely proficient at taking advantage of the confusing rules, but all he's been able to get accomplished is to piss off all his colleagues. Why would those people want to elect as president someone who's become an expert at getting nothing done? And does Cruz ever even ask himself that?

In conclusion, a few observations on the theory of (a) blaming Obama for shutting down the government, and (b) the so-called "fungibility" of the money we give to Planned Parenthood:

(a) Every time the Republicans shut down the government, they deny that it was them, insisting instead it was the president's doing.

Back in my college world history class, I remember studying the Allied Bombardment of Hamburg during World War II, and the lesson that it taught the Allies -- that if the plan had been to persuade the local population to blame their government for bringing all this misery down on them, then maybe the bombers should have just stayed home instead.

The bombing, which took place over eight days in late July of 1943, "killing 42,600 civilians and wounding 37,000 in Hamburg and practically destroying the entire city", creating an unexpected 150 mph tornadic firestorm that soared to 1,000 feet in the air, "was at the time the heaviest assault in the history of aerial warfare and was later called the Hiroshima of Germany by British officials."

The hope, I read in one of my textbooks, was that Hamburg citizens, many of whom were known to be already disenchanted with the Nazi leadership, would turn on them if given a big-enough nudge. But instead, the citizens rallied around their leaders in the weeks following the raids, volunteering their own time to rebuild the damaged and destroyed the factories and war-making resources, and reunited against their real enemy -- that is, not being Hitler, but the Americans and British; the ones who had bombed them.

Since then, our military leaders have become suspicious of "collective punishment" techniques, designed to divert the blame. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that stuff apparently usually backfires.

The moral of this story being, Americans are not stupid, at least most of them aren't. They sit there and listen to Republicans debating among themselves about whether they should close down the government and blame it on Obama, and so when it happens, they know who to pin it on.

(b) Another case of Republicans pulling wool over our eyes, thinking we won't notice, is this business about the funding of Planned Parenthood.

Yes, there are all sorts of polls that show that most Americans, even the Republicans amongst us, don't favor trying to deny money, mostly Medicaid reimbursements, to an organization that specializes in providing healthcare to women -- especially out in the boonies, where this healthcare is hard to find -- just because it also provides abortions, none of which are funded by government money.

Conservative Republicans, including Michigan Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, are very aware of this. Still, they brush that fact aside, as he did during a House hearing on Planned Parenthood a few weeks ago:

"Money is fungible," Sensenbrenner said at the hearing. "You and I know that."

Is it? Not really, according to Amanda Marcotte in Slate:

The most important thing to remember is that Planned Parenthood clinics operate like any other medical clinic. A patient comes in, gets some services, and is billed according to what services she got. Some patients are eligible for federal money to offset the costs of some services. ... 

For patients who are on Medicaid, the process is the same as with any insurance program. The patient's bill is sent to her insurer, in this case Medicaid. They pay for any services that are covered and she is on the hook for the rest. Since Medicaid does not cover abortion, any Medicaid patients who get an abortion have to pay the price in full, in cash.

It's also important to note here that these Republicans are not trying to defund Medicaid or Title X at these PP clinics, just the funding for all the non-abortion services, such as x-rays and contraception.

Title X funding is a little trickier, because it is given as grants and not reimbursements, but works in roughly the same way. If a patient falls within the Title X income parameters, the clinic is able to pay for part of that bill with Title X funding. In this way, low-income patients can get, for instance, a pack of birth control pills that would normally cost $50 for $10. They can't obtain abortions in the same way, as Title X funding cannot go to abortion. 

Republicans who tout the "money is fungible" line want you to imagine that Planned Parenthood draws on one big pot of government money for all its services. But since medical services are billed and funded individually, that's not actually how this works. For instance, if subsidies that discount contraception disappear, the price of contraception goes up, but the price of abortion will stay the same.

Okay, let me try this another way:

Suppose I give my college-attending son enough money to buy a car, and also enough to buy auto insurance each year, but tell him he has to pay for gas out of his own pocket. But then it occurs to me! How can I be sure he's not filling his gas tank using the money I gave him to buy the car and pay for insurance? After all, isn't money "fungible"?

The answer, of course, is that it doesn't really matter, does it? I mean, I only agreed to pay for the car and the insurance, so I only gave him just enough money for those two things, which is all that matters. If he, for some reason, somehow used the insurance money to pay for gas, then he has to scrounge somewhere else for the cash to buy insurance, and might even get in trouble for driving without insurance. But what's that to me?

The conservative arguments about how this all works are not only wrong, they make no sense, assuming that even matters these days. Making sense is not longer meaningful; everything is symbolic with these people. Sensenbrenner and his posse are, like Ted Cruz, just finding ways of stirring the pot, even though polls show most Americans don't want them to do this. But the thing about polls is, most of the good ones are "scientific", and we all know what many Republicans think of science.

Landing on Planned Parenthood as this year's rallying point was probably an arbitrary choice anyway, since there seems to be a shortage of actually important issues they can agree on. And besides, as long as gerrymandering is there to make it possible for just enough from the crockpot wing of the Republican Party to win their seats, who even cares if the Republican brand is damaged? Voters don't vote for the party, which they dislike anyway; they vote for their local politician.

Given the constant infighting in that party, it could probably hold both houses, the Supreme Court, and the presidency, and they'd still fail to get anything done.

Which, in their case, is just the way I like it.

Response to Jugglers and Comics

(See: Just Above Sunset: Jugglers and Comics)

With money seeming to be at the center of everything we do in this country, you'd think we'd all have a better idea of how it works.

(And yes, I'm including me in that. Although I probably could do my taxes by myself, I've always had somebody else do them for me, since the process only makes me angry, and I'd only screw it up.) 

Strangely, though, polls have shown that Americans think Republicans are more trusted than Democrats at handling the economy, but statistics seem to contradict that opinion. In their 2012 book, "Bulls Bears and the Ballot Box: How the Performance of OUR Presidents Has Impacted YOUR Wallet", authors Bob Deitrick and Lew Goldfarb looked at the numbers behind presidents Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush, and ranked them the following way, from most healthy economy to least:

1st  ***** JFK/LBJ (D) 

2nd  ***** Clinton (D) 

3rd  ***** FDR (D) 

4th  ***** Ike (R) 

5th  ***** Reagan (R) 

6th  ***** Truman (D) 

7th  ***** Carter (D) 

8th  ***** HW Bush (R) 

9th  ***** Nixon/Ford (R) 

10th ***** W Bush (R) 

11th ***** Hoover (R)

As Adam Hartung, reviewing the book for Forbes, learned from reading this book back then:

• Personal disposable income has grown nearly 6 times more under Democratic presidents 

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has grown 7 times more under Democratic presidents 

• Corporate profits have grown over 16% more per year under Democratic presidents (they actually declined under Republicans by an average of 4.53%/year) 

• Average annual compound return on the stock market has been 18 times greater under Democratic presidents (If you invested $100k for 40 years of Republican administrations you had $126k at the end, if you invested $100k for 40 years of Democrat administrations you had $3.9M at the end) 

• Republican presidents added 2.5 times more to the national debt than Democratic presidents 

• The two times the economy steered into the ditch (Great Depression and Great Recession) were during Republican, laissez faire administrations

Okay, now, if you go back even further, back to 2004, before a serious run for the White House was much more than a twinkle in his eye, guess who apparently knew all this already?

"In many cases, I probably identify more as Democrat," Trump told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in a 2004 interview. "It just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats than the Republicans. Now, it shouldn't be that way. But if you go back, I mean it just seems that the economy does better under the Democrats. ...But certainly we had some very good economies under Democrats, as well as Republicans. But we've had some pretty bad disaster under the Republicans."

(Trump also said this, in a separate interview with Wolf: "Hillary's always surrounded herself with very good people. I think Hillary would do a good job". Yes, someone is bound to bring that up again this year, although given the track record, nobody will notice.)

Fast forward to Monday of this week, with Trump releasing some specifics of his tax plan, which ends up sounding just like an example of your average Republic thinking! It's nice he's finally giving us facts, because facts were what exactly we needed to nail this guy's shoes to the floor.

He's been promising to his middle-class followers, at least those who would listen, that they're going to love his tax plan because it will lower taxes for the middle class, and it will more or less stick it to the really rich guys.

When we get to see his plan, we find that the net result of his plan is to cut taxes for the rich, although a larger chunk of people at the bottom even get to pay no taxes at all.

(I'm against that last part. I think everybody who makes over $1,000 a year should pay taxes, even if it's just $10 or so, just so everybody, even the poor, can call themselves "American Taxpayers", and that those higher on the ladder can't give them grief for not paying taxes.)

So back when he was not running for president, and was free to look at things objectively, he observed that Republican ways of handling the economy were, maybe counter-intuitively, worse for the country than the Democratic ways, but now? Now, he's running for president, as a Republican, fishing for Republican votes in Republican primaries. So screw objectivity and what works! Now, you walk like a Republican!

When Trump hears his plan cuts tax revenues too much, so we probably won't be able to have our government do what it needs to do, his answer sounds like the same old Republican line, but with a Trumpian twist -- the revenues will be fantastic because the economy will be incredible, due to some phenomenal things he will do to bring our jobs back home from overseas!

I suspect that Trump, like all those Republicans before him, is not all that concerned about lost tax revenues -- since the government is probably too big and spends too much anyway -- which is why they all think the country can afford to let all the little, poor people pay fewer or even no taxes, too, along with the rich. He says his plan is "revenue neutral", and to those who claim it isn't, there's always that mushy part that takes a leap of faith to believe in, the part where things magically come together, just because people the world over respect The Donald.

You know what this is? This is Californians going for Arnold Schwarzenegger all over again! Okay, yeah, the guy has no experience, but the point is that he's famous and has an outrageous persona, but the important thing is, he doesn't talk like a politician! Whatever happened to The Arnold, anyway? Let's bring him back!

Oh, wait! Never mind. I forgot!

Didn't someone figure out that Arnold Schwarzenegger was really born in Kenya?

Response to The Republican Revolution

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Republican Revolution)

These are odd times we live in -- never being sure who to root for or against in a contest between ISIS and Assad, much less Trump and Fiorina, and it's even come to the point of me defending John Boehner from attacks from those in the Whackadoodle Wing of the Republican Party who might presume to take credit for the downfall of their own speaker.

In fact, we liberals have wondered for years why he didn't just up and quit that job, since it was obvious he was never going to be able to convert the swarms in his minority base into somewhat productive citizens, and it was obvious that, largely because of his own party's gerrymandering policies, his tormentors were not going to go away. In fact, we applauded him for hanging around so long. Not that it mattered, of course; while we admired his efforts, we also knew it makes little difference if he is replaced by someone just like himself or someone more in favor with the radicals, whatever craziness it is that those people are clamoring for has the same chance of passage that it had if Boehner had stayed in place.

Don't they realize that? Probably not. As we all know by now, reality is not part of the Tea Party lexicon. These people are not programed to learn from the experience of losing time after time, and they are programed to ridicule people who do:

“This is why outsiders are all leading in the polls,” said Gov. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), a former congressman who served alongside Boehner. “This is probably a key part of why Boehner’s resigning. They don’t want to hear any excuses anymore – they’re done with that. If you say you tried, they ask, ‘Why didn’t you get it done?'”

I sometimes wish I were a reporter and could ask Ted Cruz this question:

Brown: Senator Cruz, if you had been Speaker of the House instead of John Boehner all those years, what would you have done differently?

To which I can only imagine his answer. He might say something like this:

Cruz: Well, for one thing, I wouldn't have caved in and worked with the Republican Surrender Caucus. I would not have given the president everything he asked for.  

Brown: Fair enough. So what would you have done differently? 

Cruz: I would have honored the promises made by the leadership, of reducing the funding, or at least restricting the funding for bad law, such as that job-killing Obamacare. 

Brown: Well, didn't Speaker Boehner try to do that? 

Cruz: No, he didn't! He needed to stop working closely with this president, who is the world's leading financier of radical Islamic terrorism, a man who is a profoundly dangerous unmitigated socialist who happens also to be the world's most powerful communist! But also, I would do anything, and I will continue to do anything I can, to stop the train wreck that is Obamacare. The test that matters is, are we doing anything for all the people that are getting hurt from Obamacare? And 

Brown: Okay, I hear you. So what would you have done differently from Boehner? Anything he didn't do that would achieve your aims? 

Cruz: Well, I can tell you one thing. If I were stepping down, I wouldn't make a secret and insidious deal with Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi to avert another government shutdown when the current annual budget expires. 

Brown: Okay, once again, you're telling us what you WOULDN'T do. Now, can you tell us what you WOULD do? 

Cruz: Well, LOTS of things! For example, I would have defunded Planned Parenthood. Also, I never would, under any circumstance, have allowed the debt limit to be raised, and I never would... 

Okay, enough. Yeah, I just made that stuff up, but I honestly have never heard him say specifically what he and his gang would do that Boehner didn't do, but that would get the agenda passed.

And Planned Parenthood? I mean, can't these people focus on bigger fish?

I mean, with actual problems facing this country, like how to finesse peace in Syria, a war in which there seem to be no natural friends of ours, only enemies, and one that has killed an estimated 200,000 people and sent thousands of refugees out of the country. Wouldn't you think any Republicans worried about their public image could shit-can the idea of defunding federal funds going to some organization performing abortions, given the fact that this organization doesn't use any federal funds for abortions anyway, especially since there really are universally recognized serious problems facing us?

No, they can't, because they're not serious people. Yes, Trump is not obsessed with Planned Parenthood, but his focus has also been on the little things that don't mean anything -- anchor babies, for example. To fix this problem (which is not a problem, since undocumented immigrants really don't get much advantage from having babies here), he's deep into finding ways to do away with "birthright citizenship", which will take some work, maybe involving changing the Constitution, work that's wasted on something that doesn't do what he thinks it does anyway.

(Trump's latest Syrian solution? Easy! Just let Assad and ISIS fight it out, and then we fight the winner -- which is not that much unlike what we're doing already.)

In the New York Times, there's this from David Herszenhorn and Jonathan Martin:

The hardline group has not put forward a viable candidate for speaker and, with only 50 or so members, does not have enough to elevate one of its own.

That's because these hardliners -- who collectively have essentially no real world experience in getting anything done themselves, but only have the experience of pretending they've achieved something of value by pecking at Boehner's ankles like a herd of angry ducks until he resigns -- couldn't organize a two-car funeral. Which, in this case, seems to be their own.

But of course, it would seem any attempts by anybody -- whether the Tea people or the so-called establishment Republicans, whoever that may be -- to break away and start a new party would just insure a Democratic Victory, and even a President Bernie Sanders! So maybe this could be a good thing, especially if the Tea Party becomes a new party.

After all, those revolutionaries over there should by now be used to shooting themselves in their collective foot.

Response to The Third Story

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Third Story)

Josh Marshall, remarking on the fact that you wouldn't see a reaction comparable to that of the Republicans if something like this had happened on our side of the aisle, settles on the juxtaposition of two words that beautifully illustrates that there really is more than what has been called "a dime's worth of difference" between the two parties:

Yes, there’s been base clamoring against Nancy Pelosi and even more at certain times with Harry Reid. But it simply doesn’t compare to the angry joy we’re seeing now toward a quarter-century member of the House.

It's that phrase, "angry joy"!

Exactly! I remain convinced that, someday, scientists will discover what it is that makes conservatives derive so much joy from their own anger.

But what now? For example, in the short term, how is it that John Boehner's resignation has, as has been claimed, "lessened the chance of a government shutdown"?

In fact, that deal was largely agreed to on Thursday, the day before Boehner dropped his bomb, when he announced plans to offer up a clean budget bill, including nothing about Planned Parenthood, that would keep the government open through December 11th, but also a Budget Reconciliation Bill that would defund both Planned Parenthood and Obamacare.

According to the Washington Post:

Reconciliation bills — which are a joint effort between the House and Senate — are considered under special rules that require only a simple majority for approval, and cannot be filibustered in the Senate. The reconciliation bill is expected to easily pass Congress, allowing Republicans to force President Obama to veto the legislation. 

Even if that happens, the move would ensure the debate over abortion policy remains a priority in Congress and in the media.

But there's also talk that Boehner could try to get some stuff done before he leaves that he probably wouldn't otherwise have even attempted:

Some Republicans are speculating that Boehner’s lame-duck status could free his hand to act on other measures that have bipartisan support but are despised by hard-line conservatives. 

Those measures could include an reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, an extension of the federal debt ceiling, or a long-term highway bill. All of them have been opposed by the same conservatives who have pushed for Boehner’s ouster. 

“He gets a chance to really go out on a high note and now I think you’ll see a few things in October,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio). “I expect to see a very busy month in October.” 

Mulvaney said Boehner’s resignation “probably” makes it more likely Ex-Im or a debt ceiling extension moves forward. But he warned that it might not be so simple. 

“They have to pass rules in order to accomplish that,” he said. “There’s a good rule of thumb: If you’re counting on Democrats to pass a piece of legislation, you better count on them to pass a rule.”

Which means we may get a chance to see what has really been on his mind all these years -- in other words, to finally discover if he's really the tragic closet good guy that so many Democrats suspected he was, or the actual jerk suspected by others.

When my wife came and informed me that Boehner had resigned, I started to laugh out loud, to which she admonished, "I'm not so sure this is a good thing!" Yeah, I know what you mean, I told her, but I always figure that, either way, whether Boehner goes or whether he stays, it will always be a mixed-blessing:

* If he goes and they replace him with someone even more in tune with the nutcase minority, it means the Republicans will have marginalized themselves even more than they are now, and will be even less inclined to cooperate with us -- which could be good because it also means we don't have to meet them halfway on their crackpot ideas -- but also means maybe mainstream America will finally give up on them and turn to the Democrats. 

But the bad news is, until then, gridlock will still ensure nothing gets done, and worst case, the country might actually fall apart, as Spanish political scientist Juan Linz once suggested. After all, although our system has survived over two hundred years, we are living in deceptively dangerous times. 

* And if the opposite happens, that someone somewhat sane replaces him, and the so-called moderates regain control of the Republican Party? Then we're back to normal, which is good for America, because we become a functioning nation again, which might help convince people that America can work after all. 

But the bad news is, we'd then have to seriously negotiate compromise with a party that has, at least in recent history, seemingly defined the word "moderate" as "a conservative who, although he did drink the Kool-Aid, did so only reluctantly".

For example, ultra-conservative John Boehner has been seen as almost a moderate, and yet, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie says in Slate:

After Barack Obama took office, Boehner immediately moved to opposition, accusing him of “snuffing out” the America he knew and comparing politics in 2010 to America’s fight against Great Britain. “There’s a political rebellion brewing,” he said, “and I don’t think we’ve seen anything like it since 1776.”

Tragic character? Closet good guy? Not sure I'm buying that yet, at least until after I see what he does in October.

And okay, I always find myself quibbling with conservatives who seem to think that it was them what won the American Revolution, but here it is again.

Truth is, as everyone knows, the fight back then was between Whigs and Tories, but what they don't all realize is that, if anything, the Whigs were the liberals and the Tories were the conservatives. The Whigs won that war, and many of the Tories then took off for England and Canada.

To put that another way, the liberals, in the name of political change, won the American Revolution, while the "angrily-joyous" conservatives, fighting to keep everything as miserable as it always had been, lost that war.

But the battles have been continuing ever since.

Response to What it Takes

(See: Just Above Sunset: What it Takes)

Not to take away from that extremely helpful critique of Carly Fiorina -- the success so far of whom being, I think, as equally unwarranted and unsustainable as that of Donald Trump -- but I really did think all this "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend" talk was going somewhere else.

The thing is, I'm just not into bling, and I don't understand its attraction. I especially don't think much of diamonds, since whatever sparkle they give off can be achieved at much less cost, with costume jewelry. But that, of course, would defeat the purpose, wouldn't it? The point of a diamond is not so much that it's beautiful but that it's somewhat expensive, isn't it? I mean, diamonds are attractive, I guess, if you like that sort of thing, but they're certainly not as pretty as they are expensive.

And they're only expensive because they're rare, and only rare because of artificial scarcity, with mostly one company making sure not too much of the stuff comes to market at one time.

In other words, the market for diamonds is a bubble, and if, suddenly, two or three times as many "high quality" diamonds showed up for sale, people would stop finding them so attractive, and then even more people would stop finding them attractive, and everyone would realize that, ultimately, a diamond is mostly useless. Oh, sure, we can make drill bits out of them, but who wants some drill bit decorating your finger?

So for a moment, I suspected the point was going to be about what Donald Trump has in common with a diamond.

The truth is, diamonds are only popular because they're popular; once people stop wanting them, people would stop wanting them, and they'd eventually come to see a diamond as nothing more than a fancy lump of coal.

Likewise, Trump's poll numbers are only up because his poll numbers are up, but once the other candidates show they have something more to say about the country's problems than his "We'll be looking into that", Trump's numbers will start to slip, and then they will continue to drop, mostly because they'd be dropping -- at which point, his supporters will wake up and notice that he's just another fancy, although also mostly useless, lump of coal.

Fiorina's story is a bit more complicated. Once her real history becomes more widely known, there may still be those who will say, "So what! I like her spunk!", but I think those people will eventually be in the minority, and she will find herself, like Trump, out of the running. Right now, the markets for both Trump and Fiorina are bubbles, and at some point before the season really gets going, I think both the Donald and Carly bubbles will pop.

But enough of the good news. The bad news is, try to imagine who from this bench will replace them!

Response to Riding Humiliation to Victory

(See: Just Above Sunset: Riding Humiliation to Victory)

Yes, this is one good theory of that exchange in New Hampshire:

Those two guys at the Thursday night rally may have gotten the details wrong, but they certainly got the idea right. Trump didn’t correct them because he didn’t notice the details. Everyone was in the zone.

I agree that Trump probably "didn't notice the details", and possibly (although unlikely) that he didn't hear the first part of the man's question, the part about Obama. But if he didn't hear him, most people in his position would ask the man to repeat. In Trump's case, however, there was no reason to either notice the details or to ask him to repeat. It really didn't matter, because either way, he would be giving the same boilerplate answer that he's been, in one form or another, giving everywhere he goes through this campaign:

Trump responded, “We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things. A lot of people are saying bad things are happening, [and] we’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”

But aside from Trump leaving the impression that (a) he agrees Muslims are a problem in this country, and that (b) Obama is one, and (c) is not really an American, and maybe even that (d) he thinks "Muslim" training camps, training them to kill us, may even exist in this country, his not really addressing all of this shows a serious lack of good judgement that should not be tolerated by American voters in their search for who to elect president. If he can't immediately think of how to nip that problem in the bud, he absolutely shouldn't be elected, period.

But even if he isn't quick on his feet, he should still be able to put out the fire afterward. Instead, we get this:

Trump released a statement to The Washington Post defending his comments. 

"The media wants to make this issue about Obama," he told the Post. "The bigger issue is that Obama is waging a war against Christians in this country. Their religious liberty is at stake." 

His campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, talked to the Post late Thursday night to further defend Trump's answer. 

"Mr. Trump was asked about training camps," Lewandowski said. "Mr. Trump answered the question and said, 'If there are any, we will fix it.' He said, 'I will look into it.' The question was specifically about training camps." 

When asked if Trump believes that Obama is a Muslim, Lewandowski told the Post that he doesn't speak for Trump and that it's "up to the media" if they want to "make this about Obama."

So given that, as is the conservatives' wont, Trump is predictably incapable of apologizing for his screw-ups, much less even noticing when he does something wrong, even much less admitting it when it's pointed out to him, he has failed yet another test of competent leadership, that of how he will handle whatever inevitable crisis arises while in office. Apparently he might not even see the problem, and if he does, he'll just turn to a stock answer about "looking into it, along with a lot of other things", and let it slide.

Occasionally we hear the suggestion that, if Hillary is elected president, it just might be the third term of Barack Obama, but I think our real worry should be that, if Donald wins, that might just be the first term of Sarah Palin.

Response to The Night of the Shark

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Night of the Shark)

I feel the same way about the shark. We had a neighbor over to eat dinner and watch the debate last night, and she left about halfway through, complaining of a headache.

My wife went to bed early, too, so she didn't see the interview Donald Trump had with CNN's Chris Cuomo immediately after the debate . Cuomo asked Trump how he thought the debate went, and a fairly subdued Donald surprised me by saying, in just a few words, he thought everyone did quite well.

Cuomo seemed to be trying to get him to "go all Trump" on us, with the boasting and the unbelievable and truly incredible superlatives, but Trump wasn't having it. He answered with a gentle smile and was uncharacteristically kind about his rivals, and it was then that I remembered that, during the debate, often when he would be expected to take a shot, he instead said something nice, or at least something he thought was nice -- that he thought Carly Fiorina was beautiful, or that he had heard that Columba Bush was very pleasant or something -- as if he had decided to cut back on the usual nastiness, as if he realized his act was starting to work against him.

Oh, yes, he took the occasional shot, such as those aimed at Rand Paul, but I write them off as his wandering off script, his not being able to help himself, but mostly I noticed him making nice-nice with Jeb -- that low-five thing -- and something similar with Dr. Carson, and Hugh Hewitt, a man he had just last week or so called a "third-rate radio announcer", was now his new best friend, after Hewitt reportedly apologized to him.

So at breakfast, I said to my wife, "I guess the story today is that Donald Trump tried to play nice last night?", and her answer was, no, the story was that Donald Trump brought nothing to the debate, and fell flat -- to which I replied, "Oh. Well, maybe the story is, he tried to play nice, which caused him to fall flat?"

Maybe he is now at that inevitable fork in the road, where he realizes that, if he continues acting like the playground bully, picking on the smart kids, that he can't win. Then again, maybe if he takes that other road to normal, he will leave behind all those people who were attracted to him because he wasn't.

I think the reason I can't join in the popular celebration of Carly Fiorina's so-called "win" last night is because I just don't like her very much, and so I'm letting that bias color my judgement.

Yes, she's now impressing people with her articulate put-downs of Donald Trump, and even a little sound-bite where it sounded as if she actually knew something about foreign policy, but she still has essentially nothing going for her except a false history of what a great leader she was at HP, whereas very few of anyone else views her career as anything more than the destruction of what had been one of the best companies in the world to work for, the stock of which skyrocketed upward when they announced her resignation.

Hers is a self-delusion only matched by the dreamworld of his own creation surrounding the Donald himself. In fact, one of the highlights of the debate, for me, was hearing the two of them going at it about who was most right when criticizing the other -- he on her infamous flameouts in the business world, and she on his four bankruptcies -- with both of them being equally right! The truth is, both these business honchos (one being a honchette?) seemingly really go the distance in trying to cover their tracks.

Trump kept denying that he's ever gone bankrupt even once, much less four times, of course, but this is that typical Trumpy slight-of-hand that, had his supporters ever cared the slightest about the veracity of anything he says, would have killed his candidacy at birth. It's just that he has apparently never declared personal bankruptcy:

Four of Trump's businesses have declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. According to a 2011 report by Forbes, these were due to over-leveraged hotel and casino businesses in Atlantic City: Trump’s Taj Mahal (1991), Trump Plaza Hotel (1992), Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts (2004), and Trump Entertainment Resorts (2009). Trump said "I've used the laws of this country to pare debt. ... We'll have the company. We'll throw it into a chapter. We'll negotiate with the banks. We'll make a fantastic deal. You know, it's like on 'The Apprentice'. It's not personal. It's just business." He indicated that other "great entrepreneurs" do the same.

And apparently those "great entrepreneurs" also got involved in some fascinating lawsuits:

Over the course of his career, Trump has initiated and been the target of "hundreds" of civil lawsuits, which Trump lawyer Alan Garten said in 2015 was "a natural part of doing business in this country". ... 

In March 1990, after an analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott said that Trump's Taj Mahal project would initially "break records" but would fail before the end of that year, Trump threatened to sue the firm unless the analyst recanted or was fired. The analyst refused to retract the statements, and was fired by his firm. 

Taj Mahal declared bankruptcy for the first time in November 1990. A defamation lawsuit by the analyst against Trump for $2 million was settled out of court. The analyst's statements regarding the Taj Mahal's prospects were later called "stunningly accurate".

At least one of the suits had nothing to do with a failing business, but is of interest nonetheless:

In 1973, the Justice Department unsuccessfully sued Trump Management Corporation for alleged racial discrimination, at which time Trump was the company's president. The federal government filed the lawsuit against his New York City real estate company for allegedly discriminating against potential black renters, which Trump never admitted. The case was settled out of court in 1975.

Which means we can't be sure what the settlement was, although it might have been just a misunderstanding that was cleared up once the feds realized Trump gets along very well with "the blacks".

But as for any contest between Fiorina and Trump over who is the more self-delusional, Trump has just been at it longer.

For one thing, exactly how tall is he, anyway?

If you watched the debate last night, you could see Jeb Bush, one podium over, towering above Trump, even though Fox News Insider says they're both 6' 3". And yeah, while that's what Trump once told the New York Times, various people, some who have seen him in person, estimate him to be, variously, 6' 2", 6' 1", 6 feet even, and even down to 5' 11". But Jeb is definitely several inches taller, so I wonder if this is another case of Trump exaggerating his size.

Speaking of which, there's always been some question of his personal wealth, of which he has said, "my net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with markets and with attitudes and with feelings — even my own feelings". True, that! I think maybe everything that Donald Trump says about Donald Trump fluctuates with his feelings.

To put his real wealth in perspective, at this writing, Forbes says Warren Buffet, at $65.2-billion, is the 4th richest human on earth, and it also says Donald Trump, at $4.1-billion, ties for the 405th richest, a position he shares with 12 other people.

Then again, according to Wikipedia:

In 2015, Forbes pegged it as $4 billion, while the Bloomberg Billionaires Index (which scrutinized Trump's FEC filings) estimated a net worth of $2.9 billion. On June 16, 2015, just prior to announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, Trump released to the media a one-page prepared financial disclosure statement "from a big accounting firm—one of the most respected", stating a net worth of $8,737,540,000. "I'm really rich", Trump said. 

Forbes called the nearly $9 billion figure a "100%" exaggeration. In July 2015, the Federal election regulators released new details of Trump's wealth and financial holdings when he became a Republican presidential candidate, reporting that his assets are worth above $1.4 billion...

So, if it's really only $1.4-billion, that would mean he's the 1,324th richest person in the world, a ranking he shares with 59 other billionaires. But please stay tuned, since his wealth apparently "fluctuates" with his mood.

In other words, if we all wait long enough, we just might find that, actually, he's only about as wealthy as you and me put together!