Response to Mutual Damage Control

(See: Just Above Sunset: Mutual Damage Control)

Lately, people keep saying stuff like, "Our two parties have nominated two deeply flawed candidates this time…”, but I think that’s too much of the same old infamous “both sides do it” bullshit. It leaves the impression that there are two equally-guilty contenders here, of which Donald Trump is one and Hillary Clinton is the other.

Yes, Hillary has some faults, and so does Barrack Obama, arguably the best (or maybe second-best) president in my lifetime, but neither one of those two is “deeply flawed”. To put this back into perspective, Hillary is actually just fine and whatever flaws she has do not belong inside any equation with those of Donald Trump, period, and belong probably more in the “horserace” category (either “she doesn’t smile enough” or “she smiles too much”) rather than of the stuff that is important, such as “All things considered, would this person make a tolerably good American president?”

The fact is that Hillary would make a good president, whereas Trump, being an evil scumbag, would not.

But more importantly right now, here’s something else we’ve been hearing lately:

“I think it’s inarguable that Vladimir Putin has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country,” running mate Mike Pence told CNN on Thursday.

Okay, but using that standard, you could also say, "Vlad, the Impaler has been a stronger leader in his country than Barack Obama has been in this country”. In fact, by that standard, the 15th-century Rumanian Vlad was even more powerful than the present day Russian one.

In both these cases, the argument ignores that the reason these guys are/were powerful is that they are/were tyrants, with essentially nobody to report to but themselves. Obama is at a disadvantage there, since he has to work within our American Constitution and, unlike Putin, can do hardly anything without the concurrence of Republicans. Putin can do virtually anything he wants to do, without the inconvenience of having much of any opposition to deal with at all.

But conservatives just don’t give as much weight to real reality as they to do the so-called optics:

“Bare-chested Putin gallops his horses, poses with his tigers, and shoots his guns,” wrote National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson in a 2014 column. “Barack Obama, in his increasingly metrosexual golf get-ups and his prissy poses on the nation’s tony golf courses, wants to stay cool while playing a leisure sport.”

And yet, with all this imagery of galloping horses vs tony golf courses, you might be tempted to believe that the strongman's domain is going gangbusters, while the leader of the Land of the Free is presiding over a wasteland. Don't be, since it's actually the other way around. The United States, much to the chagrin of both Trump and Putin, is doing remarkably well, under the circumstances, while Russia is its usual mess.

But also, think about the implications of this:

“He was a bad guy, really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good,” said Trump of the late Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein during a July campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina. “They didn’t read them the rights,” he continued. “They didn’t talk, they were a terrorist, it was over.”

Which all sounds fine if you’re just spouting off, without giving it much thought, but the obvious reason they didn’t "read them the rights” is because they didn’t have any! 

After all, Saddam killed lots of people, and I’m willing to bet that whether or not they were “terrorists” was never a real consideration. In fact, I’d bet hardly any of the people he murdered were terrorists! He killed people because he decided he didn’t like them, and also because he could! After all, he didn’t live in the United States of America, where you’re not allowed to do that sort of thing, and the failure to acknowledge this just highlights a lack of appreciation for what the American founders were able to accomplish in creating their republic.

Will this Putin admiration thing finally be the deal-breaker for Trump? That’s hard to tell, given that the standards for breaking the deal have lowered of late. After all, who of us doesn’t indulge in nostalgia for the days when a simple promise to do three things, then to remember only two of them, was enough to instantly bounce you out of the race? Maybe that’s the way it should be.

Think of it this way: If you are interviewing a job candidate who, during the course of his initial interview, professes his belief that adults should be allowed to have sex with toddlers, you don’t even consider inviting him back for a second interview in hopes that he might say something to redeem himself. But times have apparently changed, at least in Republican party politics.

Trump is not, as portrayed by his army of seemingly all-blond surrogates, the “defender” of “Western civilization” against the invading barbarian, he is the invading barbarian! He represents the enemy that this country has traditionally sought to defend itself from!

First of all, Donald Trump is literally evil (figuratively speaking, of course.) If I were at all religious, I would argue that Donald Trump was sent here by Lucifer to finally destroy the United States of America, at least in the sense of the U.S. as a guiding example of a nation ruled by good people.

Second of all, we should not elect an evil person president!

And thirdly, the only thing we can do to keep this evil person from becoming president is not to stay home on election day, or randomly vote for whoever the Libertarians are putting up this year, the only thing America can do is to elect Hillary Clinton.

“But I just don’t trust her,” (whatever the hell that means), you say? Well, after deftly sidestepping the obvious question, “Trust her to do what?”, you need to seriously ask yourself the crucial question, “But do you distrust her more than you do Donald Trump?"

And if your answer is yes, then you have to ask yourself this:

"What, are you nuts? Have you actually lost your mind?”

Once all of this is behind us, assuming Hillary wins, I do hope America takes a lesson from all this, and maybe looks for a way to fix our system of choosing candidates, to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

For one thing, as I’ve mentioned before, the Republicans should consider making a rule that nobody who “self-finances” their campaign should be allowed to get the party’s nomination. Trump was only able to take control of the party because he had so much money of his own that he didn’t need to pass any of their qualifying tests. He should have had to impress them, but instead, he ignored them.

(The GOP might also consider a rule that limits the size of donations, making it more likely that the winner would have widespread popular support, instead of just billionaires who can afford to buy support for their own agenda — but maybe that’s too much democracy for the party to swallow in one gulp.)

And maybe we do need to take a citizenship test to earn the right to vote, for which you will need to study very hard — to learn, first of all, what it was the founders were trying to do when they created the nation, and secondly, learn about all the trials-and-errors the country had to go through to collectively learn the lessons that it had to learn to get to be what we are today, the longest-lasting democracy in the world.

Response to Under the Volcano

(See: Just Above Sunset: Under the Volcano)

Since posing as one of his own people in order to say something stupid on his own behalf has historically proven to be his wont, I wonder if this “unnamed campaign adviser” could possibly have been the Big Trumpeter himself:

An unnamed campaign adviser was oddly specific ... telling CNN that the goal of Trump’s visit to Mexico was explicitly to get a photo that makes him look presidential.

So Mexico was just some frigging photo-op?!?

And not only a photo-op, the Trump surrogates, without a hint of irony, are today even saying the trip was “successful” because it showed Donald Trump, standing next to some foreign leader “on the international stage”, looking presidential!

This may explain the discrepancy in stories about whether the two discussed the wall. Yes, Peña Nieto probably did tell Trump at the very beginning of the private discussion, just to get it straight, that Mexico wasn’t going to be paying for the wall, to which Trump just stared into space — and so when someone asked him later about whether they talked about “the wall”, and he answered, truthfully, no, there was no discussion of the wall.

In fact, he didn’t fly all the way to Mexico City to get into some discussion, he came there for action! Specifically, he came to get his picture taken!

Which also explains why Trump said all those nice things about the Mexican people, and that he thinks of Mexican president Peña Nieto as his “friend”. The president, for his part, seemed dumbfounded, but of course, this was only supposed to be a photo-op for him, too, since his popularity numbers are also in the toilet, and he wanted to let everyone know that he had told the Donald off!

(One has to wonder: Was the talk taped? Maybe we’ll find out some day.)

In essence, Trump didn’t need anything from Peña but to be in the same picture frame with him in an official-looking “foreign policy setting", and so it didn’t matter what was said, as long as none of it would upset the applecart, and just so the whole visit could end up being as boring as all those foreign visits that Hillary Clinton used to make -- since, I’m sure in the minds of Trump and his gang, nothing ever happened at those boring international junkets either, outside of everybody posing for pictures with one another, all looking very serious and important. And afterward, everybody goes back to whatever they were doing, such as insulting each other from afar.

And that, my friends, is how foreign policy is done! Nothing to it! Especially if you have the photos to prove you were there.

The question is, did his junket change any voters' minds, like so many Republicans, grasping at straws, were hoping?

I doubt it. Let’s face it, anybody who was impressed with his south-of-the-border dog-and-donkey show was already voting for him, and if all those hoping for a sign that he was actually “softening” his approach to immigration wasn’t already hopelessly confused by all the backtracks of his reversals of his flip-flops in the week leading up to Mexico, then his hard-nosed Arizona speech should have knocked their heads off — unless, of course, that happened when, the next day, they heard Trump characterize his speech as a “softening” of sorts.

But you have to figure the conservative Hillary-Derangement-Machine must be chugging along very well if these people are still looking for Trump to show signs of reform.

Sure, it’s all very easy for me, who sees her "high crimes" (assuming she’s even guilty of any of them) as being on the order of going forty in a 35 MPH zone, but to me, Trump’s deal-breakers are not even that huge — cheating workers out of their pay and Trump U students out of the life-savings, telling a friend that you gotta “treat [women] like shit”, deriding an American war hero POW as just some loser who got captured, and addressing all his political opponents with demeaning nicknames like “Little Marco” — but they all demonstrate that he’s too much of a dirtbag to run any country, especially ours.

So continuing to look for Trump to show he’s in the least way up for this job is just idiotic. He’s already shown us the best of what he thinks he can do, even before he demonstrated that he hasn’t a clue what an American diplomat, even a “pretend" one, actually does in a meeting with a foreign leader.

And, by the way, about his big speech on immigration policy?

Immigration, as Trump himself says over and over, is an issue that nobody was talking about before he started talking about it, and probably because it doesn’t present the country with any real serious problems. It has been shown repeatedly that so-called “illegal” immigrants don’t bring lots of crime to this country, no matter how many individual cases the Trump campaign rounds up. Nor do migrant workers replace American workers. In fact, I saw an interview last night with a farmer who can’t find enough workers, American or not, to show up to pick his crops, even after hiring every undocumented worker in sight for $12 per hour.

In other words, Trump has us all focussed in on a non-issue!

The real problems that do need solving revolve around the economy itself, including poverty and jobs, and the fact that whatever wealth is being produced is being hogged by the people at the top of the food chain. This includes some of the same things that, for complicated reasons, Trump followers think have to do with competition from immigrants and foreign workers, but really have more to do with automation, not to mention the way we apparently don’t tax rich people as much as we should. Americans in the working class are not making enough to afford to buy their own products, much less move into a safer neighborhood.

And some of our problems come from our not listening enough to the people who know about these problems, and how to fix them. Instead, we listen to people like Donald Trump, who thinks you can ignore expertise in all its forms — including, by the way, how to run a campaign. He seems to be out to prove that someone can win the White House without, say, buying ads on TV, since he can always say something stupid on a daily basis as a way of tricking the media into covering you, or without coordinating with your party so you can have a gang of campaign volunteers on the ground in a state to do all those local things that campaigns have learned over the decades that have to be done.

So this election really is a test to see who’s got it right — is it the smart people who, say, have spent much of their careers, traveling from place to place, building expertise, trying to get some good things done; or is it the bombastic "strongman" who, just for fun, can get almost any crowd to chant just about whatever he wants, but also knows how to play the “diplomat” by flying in his own plane to some foreign country, just to have his picture taken with some foreign president, as if Leadership is just some child's game of Make-Believe?

He thinks it’s all just smoke and mirrors. He’s gotten along for years by tricking himself into thinking he’s smarter than he is, that all these so-called “professionals” are faking it, and figures he can do that, too.

But while I’d like to state, unequivocally, that he’s about to learn his lesson, I can’t. I just now looked at Nate Silver’s site, which shows Hillary’s odds of winning (right now at 74.1%, down from 89.2% on August 14th) gradually sliding earthward on a daily basis, slowly but surely taking my faith in self-government with them.

Response to Colin Kaepernick

(See: Just Above Sunset: Colin Kaepernick)

Today, I came to the realization that, although I have spent not one Lincoln penny in the battleground states of Pennsylvania and Ohio, I enjoy virtually the same statistical popularity among African-Americans who live there as does Donald J. Trump. To put it another way, there is a immeasurable groundswell of no enthusiasm for both of us. We’re running neck-and-neck, and that’s with me running not at all!

And while God only knows why I’m doing so poorly among black voters, there's no wonder that Trump is. When he addresses them in the stereotypical terms learned from his youth, it has to remind you of his cringeworthy meeting with Jewish Republicans back in December, as noted by the Times of Israel’s report on the story, "Trump courts Republican Jews with offensive stereotypes”:

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump on Thursday invoked a series of stereotypes about Jews that are often deemed offensive and even anti-Semitic — in an address to Jewish Republicans. 

“I’m a negotiator like you folks were negotiators,” the controversial candidate declared to his audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition, as he explained that he would broker a stronger nuclear deal with Iran than the one concluded earlier this year. At another point in his speech, he said: “Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals? Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.” 

His speech came at the tail end of a morning of addresses in which the other Republican candidates boasted of their pro-Israel credentials and their close ties to the US Jewish community. 

Although Trump did reiterate his tight ties with his “friend” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the audience wasn’t tolerant of the mogul’s attempts to duck a question on Jerusalem. Asked about his position on the unification of the Israeli capital, Trump refused to commit – as most Republican candidates have – to declaring the city to be the eternal capital of the Jewish state, and was greeted with boos. 

However, the audience did not offer any negative response when Trump told them, “You’re not gonna support me even though you know I’m the best thing that could ever happen to Israel. And I’ll be that.” 

He continued, evoking a stereotype about Jews, money and control, “And I know why you’re not going to support me. You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money. Isn’t it crazy?”

(It’s because he’s very, very, very rich! Get it?)

According to AP, he added: “You want to control your own politician.”

You might assume Trump would know that, no matter what skepticism black voters have about Democrats courting their vote, they'd also be wary of just another Republican acknowledging that they all live in crime-infested slums, with their kids going to lousy schools — all which is true because of failed "Democrat" policies, of course — all which can easily solved simply by closing our borders to drug dealers and job-stealing Mexican rapists, followed by lowering taxes that, in itself, would then create millions and millions of good jobs so fast our heads would spin.

But then he blows it when he turns around and, as if no African-Americans can hear him, tells all those white voters in Pennsylvania that if he happens to lose the state, it will be because of “rigging” in “certain areas” of the state (hint: I think he meant “urban” areas!), because of certain court decisions…

“You don’t have to have voter ID to now go in and vote and it’s a little bit scary.” ... 

Trump says without voter ID, “people are going to walk in, they are going to vote 10 times maybe. Who knows?”

There were rumors that, on the very day he said that, dog owners all over Pennsylvania coincidentally noticed their pups holding their ears in pain. (Okay, I just made that part up.)

But if Trump really wants to appeal to black voters, he might also want to be careful about this Colin Kaepernick story, the news conference with whom, found at that link, you really should listen to in its entirety. While I may disagree with Kaepernick's assessment of both Hillary Clinton and the Lord Jesus, I agree with his main point — police brutality has to be addressed in this country, and it is not being addressed at all, by either campaign. It’s hard not to admire both Kaepernick’s courage, and his intelligent answers to all the questions.

I imagine Trump may not realize it, but there seem to be a lot of people, and not only black people, who are taking this guy’s side — and a lot of those seem to be veterans and service members currently stationed in war zones who are sympathetic with the idea of not just fighting for a flag, but also for The Republic for Which It Stands, not to mention the actual freedoms that the country cherishes, such as freedom to express political dissent.

And then today, there’s this surprise visit to Mexico — where, ironically, Trump has higher numbers among the Mexican people than he has among Blacks here — but which only gives truth to what he’s been saying all along: Sure enough, there are indeed some very scary people crossing the Mexican border these days!

As I write this, he’s landing, but wouldn’t it be fun if they found drugs on Trumpforce-One and had to impound it, and then made him sneak back across the border into the U.S.? Now what a great photo-op that would be!

Response to Our August Fires

(See: Just Above Sunset: Our August Fires)

True story:

Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a friend of my wife’s was on a tour of Moscow and its environs with a group that got lost in one of its small cities, so they approached a traffic cop to ask directions. As they began, he interrupted and said, “One second! Come with me,” and led the group across the street. When everyone had reached the opposite side, he arrested them all for jaywalking and put them in jail for a week. It took lots of American dollars to get them out.

And what does this have to do with Donald Trump, you ask? (And you’d be right to ask that, since, these days, everything has something to do with Donald Trump.) It’s just that the way Trump treats the press reminds me of that story. 

Because he’s such a cheap bastard, he doesn’t spend his precious dollars on advertising, figuring he can get all the publicity he needs by manipulating the media to cover him for free, simply by saying something outlandishly stupid on a daily basis. So the news media, as if they have a choice, faithfully report verbatim — and often, live — on everything he says, and he then accuses them of being "crooked” and “liars”!

And technically, he’s right! If the news media passes on to the public any lie, even one that originates from Donald Trump’s mouth, then Donald Trump would be right to call them liars.

Is it a coincidence that Trump likes the way they do things in Russia, not to mention that they also seem to like him? The two could give each other lessons on how to get away with pushing people around.

But it’s actually worse than that. Here’s Fareed Zakaria, talking on CNN over the weekend with Pavel Felgenhauer, columnist for the Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, about Trump’s popularity in Russia: 

Zakaria: Explain to us Russia’s love affair with Trump. 

Felgenhauer: Well, I would say, primarily, Trump is popular here in Russia because Barrack Obama is deeply unpopular. 

So, I mean, anyone who is attacking Obama would be seen nicely by the Russian population. Obama is seen as a person who organized the sanctions after Russia took over Crimea, and these sanctions, together with the [something] price of war, cost a very badly for the Russian population. We have a shrinking economy, falling household incomes, and everyone believes, I mean not just the Kremlin but also the masses of the people, that this is all Obama’s fault. 

And Hillary Clinton is seen as a kind of surrogate, a continuation of Obama. And Trump is saying the right words, about that he is ready to maybe recognize Russian annexation of Crimea, maybe will give Russia the rest of Ukraine as a kind of dependency, as part of Russian recognized sphere of influence. So he is believed to be maybe the good guy!

Wait! What?

You heard that right! The people of Russia apparently miss the good old days of the Cold War, in which Russia and America were like two New York crime families, divvying up territory among themselves: 

Zakaria: Pavel, you talked about how Obama is unpopular because he’s been tough on Russia. But in general, is America also unpopular? My sense is that Russians have really lost any fascination that they had after the Cold War with the United States, and regard it with pretty jaundiced eyes.  

Felgenhauer: Yeah, there is no love there. America is seen as the major geopolitical enemy, the big Satan that’s trying to kind of hold Russia under, not allow Russia to rise again to its normal status of super power, and so on. 

Though, at the same time, America is also, to some extent, envied. And basically the Russian [something], the Russian elite, they would want to be with the United States on par, kind of working a world concert, over the heads of other nations, finding quid-pro-quos, agreeing, as they did during the Cold War, the two superpowers, working together, keeping a new world order. 

So America is seen as an enemy, but at the same time, as a very important partner.

Yikes? Welcome to the post-Obama world! 

And yet one more good thing about Trump becoming president, at which time we become more like Russia, is that the American media would, once and for all, suddenly stop being such notorious liars.

Response to After Trump

(See: Just Above Sunset: After Trump)

I’m starting to think that Donald Trump is actively trying to lose this thing after all. If so, the question is, why?

Has he, as a friend of ours suggested a few months ago, thrown in with the Clintons, and been trying to engineer Hillary's victory from the very beginning?

After all, as conservative Republicans have said all along, he has a history of holding liberal positions — deficit spending on infrastructure programs, for example — and saying nice things about Hillary Clinton, and pointing out (correctly, by the way) that the economy always seems to do better under Democratic administrations. In short, he can make his place in American history, by engineering the final demise of that so-out-of-control Republican party.

Or maybe we need to go back and take a closer look at that story being pushed in late March by Stephanie Cegielski, who had been Communications Director of Trump's short-lived "Make America Great Again" Super PAC: 

Even Trump's most trusted advisors didn't expect him to fare this well. 

Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it. 

The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.

But then things went tragically awry.

What was once Trump's desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks. 

I'll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now. … He doesn't want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some.

Tired of him always talking about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, she supported the campaign’s decision last October to shut down the Super PAC, "in order to position him as the quintessential non-politician".

So maybe Trump is just trying to cover his ass for after his inevitable loss?

But what’s odd is, while everyone seems so certain he’s going to lose on November 8th, at least Nate Silver doesn’t see that it will be a landslide, which is defined as a double-digit margin in the popular vote — Silver sees that separation, at least right now, to be only 7-8%.

Nor, if those 538.com numbers hold, will he be held down to the "one state, plus Washington DC" of both George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. In fact, right now, it looks like Trump might end up winning 21 states.

And that may be enough for the Trumpistas to survive as a viable political movement after the election is over. In fact, not just a movement, but a movement bearing arms, and knowing how to use them.

And speaking, as we were yesterday, of people believing the Second Amendment was designed by the founders as a defense against government tyranny, by the way, brings up the question of what they think their actual revolution would look like. Do they imagine themselves mowing down a company of heavily-armed IRS tax accountants, approaching their homes with intentions to take away their guns?

More likely — and I hope those in the Trump National Front realize this — it would be American soldiers! You know, as in, “Support-Our-Troops" American soldiers? Not to mention, with tanks and planes and cruise missiles and whatnot, people who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and … (wait for it) … domestic! Did you ever imagine you’d end your life as a “domestic" enemy of your country?

Although I also wonder what would happen to this movement if Trump were to announce on the day after the election that his presidential bid, as many had suspected, was all a fake campaign, maybe designed specifically to knock out any serious contender to Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning.

I’m wondering, for example, what the reaction will be of all those on the Trump Surrogate Brigade — not just all those blond women but also Rudy Giuliani — who were, on a daily basis, left to spin in the wind on CNN as they struggled to come up with some ingenious explanation for something Trump had said the day before, even after it was obvious that nobody, not even his fellow Republicans, was buying it anymore.

But will Trump pay them anyway? I can’t wait to see if Rudy Giuliani will settle for thirty-cents-on-the-dollar.

In any event, we have a little under three months to let this saga play out to its illogical conclusion, but I’m sure that will give the candidate himself enough time to find something else to keep us entertained, the most obvious of these that comes to mind being his dropping out of the race before election day, maybe on the pretense that he refuses to participate in a rigged election.

And especially one in which he is getting so obviously “schlonged” -- and by a girl.

Response to That Deadly Aside

(See: Just Above Sunset: That Deadly Aside)

Hey, who you going to believe, your lying’ eyes and ears, or Rudy Giuliani?

I’m pretty sure there will be college courses taught in the future, analyzing in detail exactly how the Trump campaign of 2016 tried to get away with lying right to America’s face. This morning, the spin from the Trump surrogates was that nobody in the room heard Donald Trump’s Second Amendment comment in the way you did.

What I want to know is, are all these surrogates paid to say what they say, or do they say it just for the fun of seeing if they can get away with it?

First, here’s the original Trump quote:

"If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do folks," Trump said Tuesday at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. "Although the Second Amendment folks, maybe there is. I don't know."

So once she’s elected, she gets to pick her judges, and then there’s nothing that any of us can do about it — unless, of course, you believe in what Sharron Angle once famously called “Second Amendment Remedies”, in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson urging us to have a revolution every twenty years — in which case, "maybe there is. I don't know.”

If you enjoy watching a spinner mid-spin, here’s what George Stephanopoulos got from Rudy Giuliani this morning on GMA:

Giuliani: Well, first of all, I was there. … What he said is that they should vote against her. He never used any... 

Stephanopoulos: He was talking about AFTER the election. 

Giuliani: He was talking about the election in GENERAL, he wasn’t talking just about after the election. You know how speeches go, he was talking about how they have the power to keep her out of office. That’s what he was talking about. That is what... 

Stephanopoulos: Generally. But specifically, he was saying, he was talking about, you can’t do anything after the election, except these Second Amendment people. 

Giuliani: We know Donald Trump is not particularly indirect. (Laughs) If Donald Trump is going to say something like that, he’d say something like that. I was there. I’d like the people at home to realize that the first time that any of us had any idea that was the way it was interpreted is when the Clinton spin machine interpreted it that way, spun it out to a press that is willing to hit him every day, bang-bang-bang-bang-bang, and then ask us the question. 

Stephanopoulos: But in real time, you have people like the former CIA Director Michael Hayden, raising the exact same question. 

Giuliani: It wasn’t in real time, it was after the Clinton spin machine spun it out. They spun it out within — about eight minutes. Bam! Like that! That is not what he intended. What he intended was very very simple. What he intended was that they should vote against her. With a crowd like that, if that's what they thought he meant, they'd have gone wild.

When Stephanopoulos started asking Giuliani about the reaction of the man visible over Trump’s left shoulder, whose expression seemed to indicate he shared the Clinton spin machine's interpretation, Giuliani used the opportunity to quickly change the subject:

Stephanopoulos: Well, we did see that guy sitting behind him. 

Giuliani: Oh, which brings me to the guy behind Hillary Clinton who’s the father of a person who killed 49 people, who wounded 53 people, ends up being invited to sit in a prime position behind Hillary Clinton, and you gotta ask yourself, number one, who invited him — we still don’t know — and number two, what drew him to Hillary Clinton?

Stephanopoulos: They’re saying they didn’t invite him, and she’s disavowed any of his support. 

Giuliani: But why is he such an avid supporter? What is drawing him to Hillary Clinton, holding a big sign up about what a great president she’s going to be...

Okay, let’s stop there.

Who did invite Seddique Mateen to that Clinton event? The answer seems to be, nobody did. The Clinton people say they didn’t even know he was there until they found out afterward, and Mateen himself said he showed up because it was a public rally, mentioning nothing about any invitation.

But just to make sure — English is Donald Trump’s first language, isn’t it?

Because the only way Trump’s after-the-fact explanation would work would be to assume he’s too stupid to understand English syntax. Either Trump was too stupid to know what he said, or his interpreters, such as Rudy Giuliani, are themselves all too stupid to know what he said. Or maybe they weren’t listening, which is understandable. I know I have a hard time listening to the guy.

But why, in the real world of live television, do we even need interpreters anyway? We all saw and heard him ourselves and we don’t need anyone, afterwards, all with these puzzling smiles on their faces, to tell us what he really meant.

In fact, as Clinton supporter Bakari Sellers pointed out this morning on CNN, something to the effect of, Isn’t it curious to see a candidate who’s built this huge following based on his courage to “say what he means”, being trailed by an army of apologists who’s job it is to do nothing but claim that what he just said isn’t really what he meant to say?

Sort of like the guys with the shovels who follow the elephants down Main Street whenever the zoo comes to town.

I think I’m starting to fade. Can’t keep looking up Nate Silver like this, day after day. I’m starting to wish it were November 9th.

Response to The Dismal Gambit

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Dismal Gambit)

You might be forgiven for thinking Donald Trump himself, having graduated with a degree in economics from Wharton, could be called an “economist", but according to Wikipedia, "A generally accepted interpretation in academia is that an economist is one who has attained a Ph.D. in economics, teaches economic science, and has published literature in a field of economics.” Trump has no such doctorate degree, nor even a masters; tellingly, his Wharton economics degree is a BS.

But another member of Trump's new “Economic Advisory Council”, often referred to as an economist but also without a doctorate (although he, at least, has a masters in economics, from George Mason University), is Stephen Moore, chief economist at the Heritage Foundation.

Moore’s interesting history in economics includes ten years as a fellow at the Libertarian think-tank, Cato Institute, and a stint as senior economist under Dick Armey on the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee, where Moore, according to Forbes, helped create the “FairTax” proposal, which, had it ever gotten out of committee, promised to effectively replace all federal taxes with a consumption tax — with supporters contending that it would decrease tax burdens, and critics agreeing, but claiming it would just shift those burdens from the rich to the middle class.

Moore is also a buddy of Arthur Laffer, who’s drawing on a napkin of what was later laughingly named the “Laffer Curve” became the prime illustration of how tax cuts should pay for themselves, a concept that has been since roundly debunked.

In 1999, Moore co-founded the “Club for Growth”, a political action committee of which, he said, "We want to be seen as the tax cut enforcer in the [Republican] party”, but was ousted from the presidency by the board in 2004 after saying snotty things in the press about president George W Bush, among other people.

And then, there’s this:

In a 2014 Kansas City Star opinion piece entitled "What's the matter with Paul Krugman?”, Moore responded to Krugman’s opinion piece entitled "Charlatans, Cranks and Kansas." In his piece, Moore claimed that job creation had been superior in low-taxation states during the five years following the recession ending June 2009. After substantial factual errors were uncovered in Moore's opinion piece, the Kansas City Star indicated that it would no longer print Moore's work without "thorough fact-checking."

Basically, Moore claimed in the article that "No-income-tax Texas gained 1 million jobs over the last five years. Oops", when it actually gained less than half-a-million, and that "Florida gained hundreds of thousands of jobs while New York lost jobs. Oops", when, in truth, as the newspaper put it, "Over that time ... Florida lost 461,500 and New York gained 75,900."

Oops!

But wait! There’s more!

Jonathan Chait, in his New York magazine column, in response to Moore's February 15, 2015 Washington Times column on Obamacare, stated "Perhaps the most revealing aspect of Moore’s column is the fact that, five years after its passage, the chief economist of the most influential conservative think tank in the United States lacks even a passing familiarity with its fiscal objectives".

So yeah, you could hardly expect any presidential candidate as controversial and exciting as Donald Trump to have nothing but boring old competent fuddy-duddies any less ditzy than himself in his top circle of economic advisors. Where would be the fun in that?

Response to Opening Night Jitters

(See: Just Above Sunset: Opening Night Jitters)

I don’t even know what the theme was for the opening of the Democratic Convention yesterday, but maybe it should have been “Heal The Bern!”, because that is essentially what happened as evening faded into night.

Full disclosure:

In case you don’t remember me saying this, I voted for Bernie in my state’s primary early last March, not because I wanted him to win but just to let Hillary know that she should be listening to those of us in the party who are left of her on issues Bernie is concerned with, such as the whole business of the “top one-tenth-of-one-percent owning as much as the bottom ninety-percent” — what is often referred to as “income inequality” but what I describe as an economy owned by all of us that has somehow been knocked out of balance.

But while I like many of Bernie’s positions, I think Hillary would make a much more well-rounded chief executive, with experience that will serve her well in almost everything the presidency would call upon her to do. As for Bernie’s talents, I think of him as sort of the Bo Diddley of presidential contenders: If you’ve heard one of his tunes, you’ve pretty much heard them all.

Last night probably wasn’t the smooth transition toward unity that Berny apparently thought it would be, but I think I speak for the “I’m-With-Her” group when I say to him, “We told you so!”

For one thing, he waited too long. For another, the deeper he got himself into taking his crusade seriously, the more he painted himself into a corner, giving his followers the impression that she really is a craven professional politician, enriching herself with speeches while in the pocket of big business and Wall Street, and not trustworthy when it comes to making rotten trade deals that are bad for American workers.

But that's all changed, and it’s okay now?

Even as an outsider, Bernie may be now fostering the suspicion among his disillusioned supporters that he’s been around Washington politics too long, and has become a typical inauthentic pol who sees nothing wrong with immediately abandoning his deeply-held principles as soon as a better deal comes along. I wonder if he understands the danger to the generalissimo who musters a revolutionary force and then defects to the enemy during the heat of battle. I sense he doesn’t. 

I had hoped Sanders’ speech would speak a bit more directly to his troops, much as George Washington did when he put down a budding rebellion in the Continental Army in Newburgh in 1783. Bernie might have said out loud that if anyone stays home on election day, instead of voting for Hillary Clinton, then they’ll be helping Donald Trump become president. Okay, he didn’t say that, but his speech seemed to do the trick anyway.

The tone was different with the Democrats. For one thing, our celebs — Debbie Lovato, Sarah Silverman, Paul Simon, even Al Franken — were bigger deals than those that appeared in Cleveland — Scott Baio and Alberto Sabato Jr. — even if Simon did struggle to hit the notes in “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. As in 2012, the speakers for the Democrats were better, the mood more positive, upbeat, and dare I say it, mellow!

Should there be any mention at all about Benghazi and the emails? I’m interested to see how they handle those.

On the one hand, since it’s going to come up sooner or later, maybe someone should present Hillary’s case in each. The truth about the emails is that, after all was said and done in the FBI probe, it came down to only three emails that were somehow marked “classified”, and that two of those were marked “by mistake”. Someday we’ll all learn what the third one was about, but I’ll bet it was not a big deal leak.

In Benghazi, nothing Hillary did or didn’t do had any bearing on the death of those four men, and that nearly all of the Republican rage seems to only center around “political talking points” — how the story was presented on TV and to family members in the days immediately after the incident, which Republicans seem to think helped them lose the election in 2012.

But on the other hand, I can see the argument for the opposite way to deal with the Republican-sponsored “scandals” — don’t bring them up at all. Maybe if people hear nothing about these things in Philadelphia, it might convey how actually insignificant they are compared to real concerns, to be seen as mole-hills that only Republicans care about, and of which, after all those expensive investigations, nothing more need be said.

And speaking of Benghazi, on a CNN panel, after Democrat Paul Begala praised Michelle Obama’s speech, Republican panelist Jeffrey Lord tried to counter with a Benghazi reference, and Begala, who had had enough of this stuff, hit the roof:

PAUL BEGALA: She has focused on things we all agree on, that we all care about, especially those military families. And so when she stands up and says, "I trust her, this person who is polarizing, and partisan and a politician, she says "I trust her with my children," this just is really powerful. 

JEFFREY LORD: But, you know, Pat Smith trusted her son to Mrs. Clinton's care, Secretary Clinton's care in Benghazi, and she didn't take care of him. 

BEGALA: I don't -- that's a cheap shot. 

LORD: No. 

BEGALA: How many embassies and consulates were attacked when Bush was president? 

LORD: I don't know the answer. Do you? 

BEGALA: Twenty! Sixty-six people were killed. How many congressional investigations? Zero. How many front page stories? Zero. This is exactly the kind of thing makes me crazy. This was a terrible tragedy -- 

LORD: But Paul -- 

BEGALA: It's been investigated. She was cleared even by the partisan super PAC of the Republican House of Representatives, and even they cleared her.

Sure, we can argue facts until we’re blue in the face, but after decades of conditioning, not to mention listening to hundreds of news clips of Hillary talking on television, too many Americans are predisposed to not trust Hillary Clinton. She is absolutely the most qualified candidate in the race, but with her public speaking “charisma” — or, in her case, the lack thereof — which is, unfortunately, what so many voters base their preferences on — let’s just say, it’s an uphill trek.

Still, I pretty much enjoyed last night. Yes, unlike the seemingly frenetic Republican get-together, it was largely boring, as I do hope our lives will be if Hillary finally wins.

Unless, of course, after the election, we see a remnant of the losing "Bernie-or-Busters" join forces with the losing “Trumpsters" to form some new combo revolutionary movement. What would such a group look like?

Imagine, if you will, the Occupy movement, but with AR-15s.

Response to The One Man

(See: Just Above Sunset: The One Man)

I guess the final night of the GOP convention should settle the question of whether we are all in a Battle of Civilizations. We are. It’s the Trump camp's vision of America on the one side, and civilization on the other.

And so who represents “civilization” in this analogy?

Here’s a hint:

Barrack Obama went to Dallas and spoke to both sides of the cops and blacks controversy, expressing understanding and sympathy for both the “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” crowds, and seemed to hope the two sides could work together to solve the problems.

In contrast, if even a single soul at Trump's Convention in Cleveland this last week gave one moment’s thought to the idea that the controversy had to do with anything else but some bad guys killing American cops, I never noticed them.

Donald Trump reopens the old issue of the “Great Man Theory of History”. Much of America seems to have tired of boring old civilization, with all its political correctness and boring old self-rule. They're on the cruise for some excitement, and feel the need for a strongman leader, someone who “makes his own rules". And if not Trump, then the movement will find someone else to do it.

Ezra Klein nails it:

...a demagogue, but he’s also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante. He lies so constantly and so fluently that it’s hard to know if he even realizes he’s lying. He delights in schoolyard taunts… 

He has had plenty of time to prove me, and everyone else, wrong. But he hasn’t. He has not become more responsible or more sober, more decent or more generous, more considered or more informed, more careful or more kind.

In short, he’s a jerk, which is exactly what those people who admire him admire about him.

So of course Trump hasn’t pivoted to being a measured statesman. He’s famously a schmuck. Take away all that schmuckyness and he’d be John Kasich, who’s presidential bid went nowhere. Trump's kids can get up and give convincingly sweet speeches about how he’s really not as bad as he looks, but that’s only a counterbalance to our picture of the kind of man you would expect to get to where he’s gotten in the world.

Even if he were capable of changing into what many want him to be, his enormous following would fade away and go looking for someone else. After all, he’s not really creating this movement, he’s just discovered it and then found a way to get out in front of it.

And if he were capable of changing, he’d become a wannabe Jeb Bush, and why would anybody want a wannabe Jeb Bush when we already have a Jeb Bush, who is probably better at being it anyway? And then, who would represent all those followers Trump has now?

And what this “outsider” movement wants is to, just for fun, turn the world upside down, just to see what happens — which, by the way, was what the last Republican administration was looking to do, back when it invaded Iraq for essentially no reason -- and which is, by the way, what helped the world get to where it is today.

It’s hard not to notice when you hear that Trump might consider not defending NATO countries against an attack from Russia, that he thinks a president can ignore history and has no obligation to understand what he’s doing, that a president can just do what feels right at the time. In doing this, he may not realize this but he’d be pulling a GW Bush.

Bush, too, realized that his appeal was to voters who held the current “elite world order" in distain, including anything Bill Clinton had accomplished before him, so as soon as he got into power, he virtually did his best to undo the whole Bill Clinton administration. This included not only scrapping the Kyoto Global Warming Protocol, but also the “Agreed Framework" treaty with North Korea that kept them from building Plutonium nukes in exchange for aid — a treaty that, once it collapsed when Bush came into power, they abandoned and got back to work on making bombs. And they never looked back.

Maybe more critically, during the Clinton/Bush transition committee meetings, they reportedly pretty much ignored warnings of the danger of non-state threats, specifically from al Qaeda.

The point is, what Bush knew for sure going into office is that he had a mandate to undo all that confusing stuff Bill Clinton had done during his time as president. There are indications that, years later, Bush finally came around to understanding how stupid that had been, but it was too late to change the world back to the way it was, and we’re still living with the consequences.

I also like Andrew Sullivan's take on Trump’s big speech:

Why will the speech work? Because it manages to frame the narrative – using false or misleading data – by making this a change election. He somehow spins every disconcerting piece of news at home and abroad into a compelling social imaginary of chaos, decline and frustration. He blames Obama for everything bad and gives no credit for anything good. If you know nothing but feel insecure, the picture he paints will be electrifyingly persuasive.

And then he proclaims that he alone can fix it. Sort of reminds one of a protection racket. You may have no idea things had been bad at all until some master salesman comes to town to convince you that he can fix it.

Yeah, Trump's sort of like Professor Harold Hill, but without the trombones, much less the redeeming social conscience. In fact, while Trump hasn’t the charm of the Music Man, he does have a much more exciting personality than Hillary, which is why she could lose to him.

It’s such a tragedy for our country that the only actually competent candidate in this race may end up lacking the necessary showbiz skills to defeat a clown with schtick. I’m sure if the founders are looking down at all this, they must be glad they’re dead.

So despite what Trump and his legion of surrogates would have us believe, the country is not in chaos.

But if you want to see what a world in chaos does look like, go ahead and make Donald Trump the leader of it.

Response to The Cruz Missile

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Cruz Missile)

As much as I agree with Josh Marshal’s wonderful description of Ted Cruz as an "odious weasel”, I have to give Cruz props for what he did last night.

The very little thing that should have tipped off everybody about Trump from the very beginning that showed he is not only not at all qualified to be president, but also that he would be America's first asshole president, is something that would have immediately disqualified any other candidate from the get-go — that is, the way he showed pretty much no respect to any of his opponents; first to McCain for being a P.O.W., then “Little Marco”, “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, and so on.

True, last night, Ted was only reprising his feckless "Green-Eggs-and-Ham" filibuster, which apparently accomplished nothing but get everyone pissed off at him (which we can expect him to never let us forget throughout the next four years), and yes, he was only defending his family, what you’d expect any real man to do, but doing so brought us back to that moment before candidate Trump hurled his first insult or coined his first nasty nickname. In effect, Ted took us all backward in an imaginary time machine and nipped Donald in the bud.

But won’t that hurt the duly-nominated Republican candidate’s chances for victory? Cruz's answer just might be, who cares? A better question, he might ask, is, what would a Trump defeat in 2016 do to a possible Cruz victory in 2020?

In any event, Cruz brought back the fun and drama that used to be important features of political conventions!

On the other hand, a pox on the whole damn bunch of them.

Having said that, I need to also say this: Bernie Sanders better not be thinking of trying that same trick next week!

Still, this week’s GOP show is a hard act for Democrats to beat. Hopefully it will be a repeat of 2012, in which the alternate reality conjured up by the GOP's surreal anti-Obamafest (remember Clint Eastwood’s weird chat with that chair?) was dissapated the following week by Bill “Explainer-in-Chief” Clinton. Let’s cross our fingers.

But back to last night. Here’s Josh Marshall’s take on Cruz's sucker-punch:

The first thing to say about this is that there is simply no way Trump’s and Priebus’s convention managers okayed that speech. No way. The fact that they allowed him on stage to give that speech will go down as one of the greatest organizational pratfalls in convention history. Whether Cruz got them to agree not to review the speech or whether he substituted another speech, I don’t know. But something very wrong went down there.

Except that cable news reporters noted receiving an advanced text of the speech and noticed the absence of an endorsement, and that, since the speech had to be loaded into the TelePrompTer ahead of time, it’s reasonable to assume the Trump convention people would have noticed the same thing -- giving Trump himself a chance to either call it off, or better yet, to upstage Cruz at the end of the speech, which is what he did.

Which is to say, I would guess the whole thing was as much a part of the Trump Traveling Circus as was wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin smashing folding chairs over the head of the "evil Mr. (Vince) McMahon". What may have escaped respected political journalists this past year is that Donald Trump has effectively demoted them all to entertainment reporters.

The big problem, of course, is that, while Mike Pence’s speech was unexpectedly well received last night, the only people who know that are the people who watched it live. Anyone else, especially those who relied on this morning's news programs for their GOP convention summary, likely only heard about the big Cruz non-endorsement kerfuffle.

The mood on the floor? To hear the descriptions of those at the convention, it may not come over on TV but it sounds more like the rehearsal dinner of an arranged marriage, with the two families eyeing each other suspiciously.  Longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy (and Jeb Bush SuperPAC show-runner) has been spending the week in Cleveland, and said this:

“Talking to operatives here, the mood is something between grim resignation and the Donner party”.

What stands out about this so-called “Trump Convention” is how much everybody is trying to gingerly not talk about Trump. Those failed-candidates who did show up, even those that have endorsed him, seem to prefer expending their pent-up nervous energy saying ever-more outrageous and borderline-slanderous things about Hillary than even nice things about the nominee. In fact, while there’s really nothing truthful they feel comfortable saying about either candidate, they seem to find it easier repeating the more well-worn lies about Hillary (after all, who there will contradict them?) than having to fake the sincerity necessary in convincingly praising Donald.

In fact, if it weren’t for Donald’s own buttinsky, hey-look-at-me stunts — such as his official Wednesday arrival in Cleveland on his Trumpjet (Wait!! What? Hadn’t he already been there for two days???) and then flying on his Trumptycopter what may have been about 800 yards, then getting off to officially kiss his family hello — we might be forgiven for forgetting this is supposed to be all about him. 

Hey, Donald, you still believe all press is good press? Think again! 

Yes, you may have everybody talking about your action-packed, albeit-dysfunctional convention the next day at the water cooler in the same way that they now discuss “The Bachelorette”, but whether or not that will help you on election day depends on how all this plays with the people who wouldn’t be caught dead watching phony-reality TV shows, since I’m pretty sure the people who would are already voting for you.

Response to The Now What

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Now What)

I like Will Saletan’s “race war team” trope, if you can call it that:

Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war team. 

It’s a lot like the global struggle over jihadism, in which Muslims who hate Christians collaborate, in effect, with Christians who hate Muslims. In the case of jihadism, the real struggle isn’t between two religions. It’s between people who want religious war and people who don’t. 

The same is true of race: Either you’re on the race war team, or you’re against it.

I’ve always argued the same about the dispute between Israel and its neighbors. I keep thinking there are at least some Israelis who wouldn’t mind if Palestinian Arabs had their own sovereign state that lived in peace with Israel, and there must be some Arabs who, if given their own state, would live beside Israel, in peace. It’s just that the combined Peace crowd is outnumbered, or at least overpowered, by the combined War crowd in the region, and so progress toward settling the disagreements goes nowhere.

I think of this every time I hear of Rudy Giuliani say something along these lines:

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani stood by his recent comments Monday that the Black Lives Matter movement is "inherently racist." 

"It's inherently racist because, number one, it divides us. ... All lives matter: White lives, black lives, all lives," he told Fox News on Monday.

There may be something to that. I still wish “Black Lives Matter” would change its name to “Black Lives Matter, Too”, just so folks couldn’t get away with making that argument. But Giuliani continues, making a claim I myself can't verify:

"Number two: Black Lives Matter never protests when every 14 hours somebody is killed in Chicago, probably 70-80% of the time (by) a black person. Where are they then? Where are they when a young black child is killed?"

I remember that the first time I heard Giuliani bring up this business about “black-on-black crime” in the “Black Lives Matter” context, I think last year, I thought he was just trying to change the subject. But now I realize that, if I were in a conversation in which both sides were looking for common ground, stuff we could agree on, I would grant him that argument, yet would likely follow it with...

“...but while your point — that anyone professing to care about black people’s lives should not just be talking about black people killed by white cops, but should also about black people killed by other black people — is a good one, I would still like to hear what you think about the contention that black people do seem, for some reason, to be profiled by cops — and not just by white cops, but also by black cops. 

First, do you agree this is true — and statistics seem to suggest it is — and second, if so, what do you think we should do about it?”

If this discussion were really open, and both sides were of good will, both acknowledging that there is a problem and what the problem is, they might also admit that not every case of a cop killing a black person is necessarily racism but might sometimes, for example, be a case of sloppy police work, or good intentions gone bad.

I personally think that was the case in the alleged chokehold death of Eric Garner in Staten Island in 2014 — that Garner’s large size intimidated the cops into using maybe more force than was necessary.

But what may have called the cops’ attention to the scene in the first place was not that he was illegally selling cigarettes but that there had just been a fight nearby that Garner broke up, something he was known to often do as the neighborhood peacemaker.

Although maybe there can be more thought put into how to subdue a large man who resists arrest ("Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today,” he reportedly told the arresting officers), there definitely needs to be some nationwide attention given to finding ways to not confront citizens over the small stuff, such as the suspicion of selling loose cigarettes, or for having a broken brake light. This was apparently the case of the shooting of Philando Castile, near St. Paul. If so, the police could have traced the license plate and mailed the ticket, saving not only a lot of trouble but a man’s life.

And both victims last week had licenses to carry guns? Still, in the Castile incident, Thomas Kelly, the accused cop’s lawyer, told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

“This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with the presence of a gun,” Kelly added. “Deadly force would not have been used if not for the presence of a gun.”

Maybe the originalist approach to the constitution is that when the founders wrote the Second Amendment, they surely didn’t envision non-white people being allowed to carry guns! And yet, the NRA was slow to respond to the shooting in Minnesota, posting this on its Facebook page only after its response to the shootings of the police in Dallas:

As the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization, the NRA proudly supports the right of law-abiding Americans to carry firearms for defense of themselves and others regardless of race, religion or sexual orientation. 

The reports from Minnesota are troubling and must be thoroughly investigated. In the meantime, it is important for the NRA not to comment while the investigation is ongoing. 

Rest assured, the NRA will have more to say once all the facts are known.

Another idea that could be tried out, to prevent all these misunderstandings surrounding drivers reaching for their wallets, might be for the cops, still in their cars, to instruct drivers over a loudspeaker to retrieve their identification, to hold it up to show it, and to bring it out of the car. Or if that doesn’t work, try something like it, but make sure the new rules apply to all drivers, not just the African-American ones.

And yeah, maybe someday we could try what they do in the U.K., where the cops don’t generally carry firearms. But you and I both know that won’t happen until we grow up a little more, and become a mature and responsible country, like other countries in the world.

Response to No Reasonable Prosecutor

(See: Just Above Sunset: No Reasonable Prosecutor)

Damn, I’d really hoped that the eventual announcement of the findings of the FBI, more or less exonerating Hillary Clinton on her handling of her emails, would pretty much shut down the Republican noise machine. Silly me. But I soon realized, even before James Comey had finished his presentation, that this beast of a story just grew more legs.

First of all, as far as I can tell, even the legal part ain’t really over, at least not until Attorney General Loretta Lynch announces whether she will indeed follow the FBI’s recommendations, which there frankly seems to be plenty of incentive for her to not do, simply to demonstrate that there was no bribery involved or foolishness having to do with that meeting with Bill Clinton at the airport.

And secondly, FBI Director Comey seemed to make sure he left enough hanging to keep this thing going for awhile. For one thing, the Republicans will certainly want to ask him questions about how he could have come to his obviously preposterous conclusions, given the case he laid out (and as I write this, it is now known he’ll be talking to the House Oversight Committee on Thursday)

But also, while it may be understandable that he might call the press together to announce that he won’t be recommending any indictments, I’m not sure why he would find it necessary to throw into the mix his personal opinions, having nothing to do with the law — saying "there is evidence that they [Hillary and her staff] were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information” (although, in fact, probably no more careless than Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were before her) — which seemed to serve no purpose other than to give the Trump campaign juicy soundbites for their attack ads.

Why would he do that? Maybe because Comey, as a Bush Appointee, is a presumed Republican himself, and no friend of Hillary? Although maybe not. Who knows.

In fact, did he even have to make his recommendations public at all? Maybe it might have been better if he hadn’t, except that I suspect that Lynch, even if she didn’t know ahead of time what he was going to say, may have suggested he do it, in hopes it might defuse some of the political chatter if it happened out in the open.

Still, one thing I’ve not really been able to figure out is what led Hillary to handle her emails the way she did, and I think I may have figured that out by following Ian Millhiser’s link in his ThinkProgress piece, to Newsweek Kurt Eichenwald’s February 8th article, “The Shocking Truth: Colin Powell’s Emails Don’t Matter”, in which he points out that, for anyone to insure they never ever transmit or receive classified information by email, they'd have to walk around in a portable "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” ...

… or what is known in intelligence circles as a SCIF. 

Most senior officials who deal with classified information have a SCIF in their offices and their homes.These are not just extra offices with a special lock. Each SCIF is constructed following complex rules imposed by the intelligence and defense communities. 

Restrictions imposed on the builders are designed to ensure that no unauthorized personnel can get into the room, and the SCIF cannot be accessed by hacking or electronic eavesdropping. A group called the technical surveillance countermeasures team (TSCM) investigates the area or activity to check that all communications are protected from outside surveillance and cannot be intercepted. 

Most permanent SCIFs have physical and technical security, called TEMPEST. The facility is guarded and in operation 24 hours a day, seven days a week; any official on the SCIF staff must have the highest security clearance. There is supposed to be sufficient personnel continuously present to observe the primary, secondary and emergency exit doors of the SCIF. Each SCIF must apply fundamental red-black separation to prevent the inadvertent transmission of classified data over telephone lines, power lines or signal lines.

Basically, it’s a room. Sometimes it’s a tent. But you can’t be sitting at your desk in your office and communicate sensitive information, and still make absolutely sure you keep it safe.

And by the way, as you may have heard, much of what information is, at some point, made classified, isn’t secret, or at least shouldn’t be kept secret. Much of what eventually becomes “classified” is made so by the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) staff, just acting in an abundance of caution in keeping some innocuous Associated Press article from being released to the public.

People outraged by the (false) belief that [Secretaries of State Colin] Powell and [Condoleezza] Rice’s aides broke the law are creating a fantasy world where every official email, no matter its content, must go through a SCIF just in case the FOIA staff eventually determines, sometime in the future and applying different standards, that the information in the email should not be released to the public under a FOIA request out of classification concerns. 

Given the cumbersome procedures of using a SCIF, that would mean the secretary of state would have to spend a lot of time sitting inside a locked box and sending emails not yet designated as containing secret information, solely to avoid the partisan gnashing of teeth that could potentially occur if someday the FOIA staff were to retroactively decide they should not be released to the public out of classification concerns.

And in Powell and Rice’s case, there’s also this:

Plus, both Powell and Rice had the authority, granted by President George W. Bush through executive order, to classify and declassify any document created by the State Department. So if either of them had received an email from another agency containing information that had not gone through a SCIF, he or she could have independently declared that it did not need to be secret and sent it along to anyone they chose.

In other words, had Obama only granted this same power to Hillary, she could have just unilaterally declassified all that stuff on the spot, and avoided all the partisan tooth-gnashing that’s been happening ever since.

So, given how difficult it was to do the job without publicly disclosing that the AP had published a news article mentioning that we have a drone program, there seems to be good justification for doing what Powell, Rice and Clinton all did, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t have been tempted to do the same -- and maybe even at the risk of voters taking umbrage at my doing it, and deciding then to elect Donald Trump president instead of me.

Yikes! This is the world turned upside down!

Response to The Major Minor

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Major Minor)

This recent Star-of-David thing is just more evidence that maybe half the trouble Donald Trump gets himself into could be summed up this way: “Once again, the twit hits the fan!” Every promise he makes to pivot to “looking presidential” is belied moments later when he launches himself onto social media.

I tend to agree with James Fallows on this, when he says…

So you can take your pick: negligence, or malice. Either a presumptive major-party nominee is spending his time, as he “pivots” toward the general election that happens just four months from now, sending out personally insulting tweets without having anyone check their provenance and implications, or someone in the campaign is doing this on purpose, dog-whistle style. I think the former is more likely, but either one is bad.

And I have to admit, I never quite understood this particular argument about Trump’s birtherism, this time from Paul Waldman:

"President Obama might be the beneficiary of a decades-long conspiracy to conceal the fact that he was actually born in Kenya. If you’re wondering whether that’s just stupid and crazy, or if it’s inherently racist, let me clear it up for you: Yes, it’s racist.”

So if it turns out Obama was actually born in Kenya, does this mean (gasp!) that our president … is actually a black man? My God! All this time, we’ve been fooled into electing someone who’s ...

Hey, wait just one gosh-darn minute! Obama is black! Nobody’s denying that! Even if he was born in Hawaii, he is black! So now, which is supposed to be the racist part?

I’m not saying Trump's not a racist, but birtherism doesn’t seem to be proof of that. And if he is, his racism would still just be part of something even bigger — that this candidate for American president is “just stupid and crazy” -- and being at least one of those things would disqualify him from buying a gun, so I would think being both should disqualify him from being president.

So as for that sticky question that cable newspeople keep asking pundits, “Is Trump a racist?” — the question for which the answer often seems to be, “Well, I’m not really in a position to know what’s in his heart” — that puzzle might be solved with a paraphrase from Forrest Gump: “Racist is as racist does.”

In short, if Donald Trump ever does something "racist”, then I guess we would have our answer, wouldn't we?