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?

Response to Building Jerusalem

(See: Just Above Sunset: Building Jerusalem)

A tad off today's topic of discussion, but there is this misconception still worth straightening out.

First, read this, from a New York Times article by Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, then meet me on the other side:

And while Britain decided to leave the European Union through a popular vote, the White House race will be determined by the Electoral College, which is tilted toward the Democrats. 

Some large states with significant nonwhite populations have been out of reach for Republican candidates for much of the last three decades; California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and Pennsylvania have voted for every Democratic nominee since 1992. Mr. Obama also won Florida twice and Mrs. Clinton has a lead there now in part because Mr. Trump is unpopular with Hispanics. 

Together those six states offer 166 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

What?!? Did they just say that the Electoral College is "tilted toward the Democrats"?

Okay, no, I don't think that's what they meant to say. I think they were just reiterating, as most people seem to believe about the 2016 elections, the Electoral College seems to be tilted toward the Democrats this time around. (And not that it guarantees anything, but that's probably true.)

Still, you'd be forgiven for assuming our electoral system might give some advantage to one party or the other, given its deliberate imbalance due to being based on combining (a) the total number of House members, which varies by population from state to state, with (b) the total number of Senators, of which each state gets no more than two -- with the result being that low-population states end up having slightly greater representation, proportionally speaking, in the Electoral College.

But if you look closely at elections back through our history, as 538's Harry Enten did in 2014, we find that "The Electoral College advantage has swung back and forth":

I found this out by gathering presidential election data since 1900. For each year, I looked at the margin between the major parties in each state, compared it with the national margin, and calculated how many electoral votes were more Democratic or Republican than the nation as a whole. 

During the first half of the 20th century, Republicans benefited greatly from the Electoral College. They could have lost the national popular vote and won the electoral college in 12 of the 13 elections from 1900 to 1948. On average, they could have lost by 2.2 percentage points nationally and emerged victorious. ... 

Since 1952, the Electoral College picture has changed. Beginning in that year, Republicans began making inroads into the South. Democratic votes became more dispersed, and the Republican advantage in the Electoral College waned. 

Today, the South is solidly red, but Democrats still win over 35 percent of the vote there. That’s a far cry from pre-1952, when Republican candidates sometimes didn’t break 10 percent of the vote.

So if electors aren't putting the thumb on the scale for one party over another, then who is getting the benefit of the imbalance?

The answer, I think, is that since those voters who reside in the states with the least population seem, by design, to carry more weight than those in more populous states, then the system tends to slightly favor the kind of people who prefer living in smaller groups, in the somewhat isolated back of beyond, away from the energy that comes mostly from existing in the middle of the noisy mix of cultures and foods that are the crossroads of the world.

To me, at least, that sounds like the imbalance would tend, all else being equal, to favor conservatives and Republicans, but since all else is seldom equal, the matter is mostly moot.

By the way, the most common benefit of having an Electoral College system I ever hear mentioned is that it supposedly "protects the smaller states", which I take to mean those states with smaller populations -- which is total nonsense. The Electoral College neither helps nor hurts states, large or small; it merely gives states, rather than citizens, the power to pick chief executives.

It's worth noting, as I read somewhere, that the two guys who called together our original "Constitution project" -- James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution", and George Washington, the "Father of the Country" -- were both a tiny bit disappointed with the result, at least when it came to questions of the balance of power between the states and the people. Washington especially, who knew what it was like to wage a war while reporting to thirteen sovereign bosses, was hoping for a strong central government that took most its marching orders from the people themselves, not their states.

But both knew from the beginning that in order to sell the new constitutional republic as a "more perfect union" than the old confederation of states, they had to hedge on the question of how much sovereignty would be vested in the people and how much in the states, and were reportedly irked that the balance of power ended up tipping too much in favor of the former rather than the latter.

In fact, even beyond the stupid convoluted mechanism that had to be invented to make this Electoral system happen, selecting our president should have nothing to do with the states, which already exercise their "federal" power through the Senate and House of Representatives, but should instead be in the jurisdiction of the nation's citizens, through the principle of "one voter, one vote", and without the system's fat thumb on the scale to allow the occasional nonsensical circumstance of a candidate getting the fewest votes, yet still getting the job.

If we ever find a way of making this happen, then we will no longer just arguably be a democracy, in theory, but we will finally be one in fact.

Response to The Rationale Evaporates

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Rationale Evaporates)

On an afternoon centuries ago, sitting in my 10th floor apartment on Manhattan's West 76th Street, I hear a knock on my door from my downstairs neighbor, offering me a steal of a deal. Literally.

I can't remember his name, but I do remember he was a very nice guy, someone always with a recommendation of books I should read (he put me onto "Rosemary's Baby" and "Time and Again", both of which I really liked.) On this day, he said he met someone selling very expensive color TVs for under $100 apiece, and he was knocking on doors, persuading his fellow neighbors in the building to join him on the deal.

I asked him why they were so cheap, and he said, with a wink, "Let's just say they 'fell off some truck.'" (If you've not heard this phrase, it's New Yorkese for "stolen property".)

I said I would not be in on the deal; he asked why; I said you're just encouraging thieves to steal TVs, and what if it had been your TV they stole; he said, "But it wasn't!" I said nothing good would come of dealing with thieves. He smiled and said I'd be sorry as he moved on to the next door. Many others in the building, being more "pragmatic" than I, were less shy about taking advantage of a good deal, and handed over their cash.

Of course, on the designated day, nobody showed up to deliver the TVs. My friend had to pay off the other residents, dimes on the dollar, from his own pocket, with all the money he had. The next month, penniless, he moved out.

I think back on this every time I hear Donald Trump say, yeah, he had his suits and ties made overseas, and bought lots of politicians, and paid no taxes some years, and admitted he didn't pay small vendors for the work they did, because he was a businessman, doing what businessmen have to do to make lots of money, but promised if we elected him president, he'd put all his wheeling-dealing skills to work for us, the American people!

Here's another tip-off:

Have you ever seen those late-night commercials with slick-looking guys with way too much enthusiasm, trying to get you to give them money to tell you their "secret" to making millions in real estate? You think it's a coincidence that they're always posing with a beautiful girl on each arm, standing next to a private jet?

These people are all grifters ("A practitioner of confidence tricks; one who befriends another to take advantage of them, or gain something from them.") Maybe not the kind of grifters we came to love in "The Sting", but you can tell from their constant senseless chatter that boils down to nothing but "Trust me! I'm a winner, and so can you be! Just trust me!", that these people have been doing this for awhile, are professionals, and they're up to no good.

And if you want a hint at what Trump might be up to, scope out these details from the Washington Post:

There is also growing scrutiny of his heavy use of Trump-owned companies as vendors. Of the $63 million his campaign spent through May, more than $6 million – close to 10 percent – went to pay Trump properties or reimburse Trump and his family for expenses, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. That includes $4.6 million paid to his private jet company, TAG Air, and $423,000 that went just last month to his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

Okay, first, let's just say I am the sarge in charge of how some presidential campaign spends the campaign funds that comes from outside donors. Is it okay for me to have it rent its jet aircraft from a company I happen to own, or is that considered an illegal kickback?

Don't get me wrong! I'm not a lawyer, and I don't really know if that's breaking the law, but if it's not, you might think there would at least be people asking lots of ethical questions.

But wait! There's more!

Secondly, just for fun, what if I am not only spending those outside donations to lease planes from a company I happen to own, but am also spending the money that I myself loaned to the campaign! What's the big deal, you ask? The big deal is that, legally, the campaign has to repay any loans it receives.

So it seems that Trump is not only redirecting some of those outside donations back into his own pocket, but also maybe to be immediately turning around some of that money he himself loaned the campaign, back into his own pocket, and then can just sit and wait for the campaign to repay him the money that he loaned it.

Am I imagining all this?

The thing about grifters is they prey on victims who think they're so smart that they're gaming the system. Maybe I got this three-card monty-looking scheme of Trump's wrong, and just maybe he has a simple explanation for it, which is something I would like to hear.

But if this play really is the scam it looks to be, somebody might actually be going to jail, and I doubt their name will be Hillary.

Response to Those Missing Strawberries

(See: Just Above Sunset: Those Missing Strawberries)

Please don't stop me if you've heard me say this before, but the reason the Republicans have a "Trump problem" is that he's so rich, he doesn't think he has to listen to them.

When you're really rich, you don't have to pay attention to losers, with the word "loser" being used here in the sense of "anybody but me, especially some bunch of mucky-mucks I've publicly humiliated on numerous occasions."

Josh Marshall sees the problem manifest itself here:

There’s a Politico story out today about how the RNC gave him the names of twenty big GOP donors to call. He got bored or frustrated and stopped after calling three. And this comes after deciding that he actually doesn’t need to raise a billion dollars.

I'm guessing that Trump has never held down a regular job, working for anyone other than his father or himself, someone who could order him to do something he doesn't want to do. I'm also guessing he never had to do the dirty work of actually raising money. He always found some way of getting money other than asking anyone for it, which is somewhat demeaning, especially for someone who has too much pride to put himself at anyone else's mercy.

Remember that fund-raising thing for the veterans? That was relatively easy, with him pledging a million of his own money -- saving him from begging it off of someone else -- and getting another pledge of another million from some other friend of his. That's two million, with no pressure to cough it up any time soon, since the point was to provide a high-minded diversion to some debate he decided to skip.

And it's not like he pulled a Jerry Lewis, staying up twenty-four hours, concluding with a tearful collapse on stage. Donald Trump would never lower himself to doing the sorts of things one has to do to raise pledges for more than that paltry six-million dollars.

In a word, Donald Trump seems to be a bit of a lazy bum.

Another problem with having a rich guy for your candidate is that he has so much money, he feels he can get along without the people who know how to do things he doesn't know how to do. Here's Josh Marshall again:

Trump now needs to operate with and collaborate with people who will face real electorates in November. They know a modern presidential campaign requires $1 billion dollars of funding. They still know it does after Trump insists it only requires $50 million. No one outside the Trump fact bubble believes that. 

(Does that $50 million cover the down-ticket? God, I hope not! I'd love to see us win back the Senate, and maybe even the House.)

Another related problem is that, because of his life experiences, he doesn't feel the need to make anything a group effort, that he can just do everything himself.

Our country is at least arguably a democracy, which means ultimate power is vested in the people. You can't approach our governance with some "leader" saying, "Listen, everyone: Get behind me. But if you don't, leave me alone. I can do this by myself!" To be effective, you will have to use the "It takes a village approach" (remember that?) that assumes that, no matter what happens, we're in this together.

And by "people", I don't mean the total number of eyeballs, divided by two, that see more than fifteen minutes of a so-called "Reality" TV show. Certain people need to be reminded that there is a big difference between so-called "Reality TV" and actual "Reality", and that being that only one of them is real.

Remember reporter Ron Suskind, quoting a Bush White House source who later turned out to be Karl Rove, who accused reporters like Suskind of living, blissfully, "in what we call the reality-based community"?

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

(By the way, where the hell is Karl Rove today? Has anybody heard from him?)

While later events proved Rove wrong, Trump never got the memo. He may not realize it but he's still operating on outdated assumptions.

That's why I think that when all those state delegates are in there, changing the rules, they should consider adding one that says that, from now on, no candidate can run for president on the Republican ticket if he self-funds his own campaign.

In other words, they should hang a sign: "No billionaires need apply!"

Not that I really want to be giving advice to the GOP, but no worries, they never listen to me anyway.

Response to Letting It Rip

(See: Just Above Sunset: Letting It Rip)

Various thoughts:

Firstly, there needs to be some followup on something Obama brought up in his speech yesterday, the part about using that phrase to describe who we're fighting:

That's the key, they tell us. We can't beat ISIL unless we call them radical Islamists. 

What exactly would using this label would accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this? 

The answer, is none of the above.

And while that's completely true, he may be addressing the wrong part of the equation.

In addition to asking what good using that phrase does us, somebody needs to ask Trump and his fellow Republicans what specific harm they think is done when Obama and his people don't use it. Although on the face of it, it seems they think that leaving out "Islam" ignores an important piece of the puzzle, and that putting that piece in there where it belongs helps us all focus on who the bad guys really are -- or something.

But sometimes, he (and they) allude to refusing to call a "Radical Islamic Terrorist" a "Radical Islamic Terrorist" is due to "Political Correctness" -- to which anyone actually thinking about this stuff has to ask the rhetorical question, "Huh!?!" -- or, to be more specific, "What does any of this have to do with 'Political Correctness', unless you think that we are afraid to insult the terrorist by calling him a Muslim?"

News flash: Nobody is afraid of offending the terrorists by saying they're Islamic. In fact, if anything, it's the opposite. We're afraid of not insulting them! They want us to refer to them as Islamic, and that's why we don't!

Every time someone in the west tags them with the word "Islam" anywhere in the description, they can point to it as confirmation that the west -- and, in our case, the United States -- is indeed declaring war on their religion! And who are they trying to sell that story to? Most of the Islamic world!

And if you actually want our fight to be against Islam? Then you are fighting on their side, whether you know it or not.

And that means you, Donald Trump! (I wonder if he's reading this.)

Secondly, there's what Josh Marshall brings up:

By September and October, if Trump is looking at the prospect of a shattering defeat, one that brings down much of the Republican party around him, I think it’s quite possible he manufacturers some excuse to drop out of the race to avoid that level of public humiliation. My best guess would be some argument that system is ‘rigged’ against him or the GOP hasn’t supported him enough. I’m not saying that electoral scenario is likely but I think it’s definitely possible. But if it happens, I think a Trump bailout could definitely be in the cards. Not likely. Definitely possible.

I was thinking roughly the same thing, that he's just enough of a loose screw who creates his only portable reality zone as he strides the world, and also that he might do anything to escape being called a "loser", that he'd drop out before election day.

Maybe the only thing that makes it less likely is if enough people predict ahead of time that he would do this. In addition to being a loser, he hates being predictable.

Thirdly, GOP Chairman Reince Priebus, according to the LA Times, uses the president's speech to unearth an old chestnut:

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blamed Obama’s “hasty and politically driven withdrawal from Iraq” for creating a vacuum that allowed the rise of Islamic State in the first place.

No, no, (as been pointed out often whenever Republicans try to claim this), that's just a rewrite of history to make it conform to Republican party daydreams, so to speak. The so-called "Islamic State" traces its history back to 1999: 

The group has had various names since it was founded in 1999 by Jordanian radical Abu Musab al-Zarqawi under the name Jamāʻat al-Tawḥīd wa-al-Jihād (lit. "The Organisation of Monotheism and Jihad"). When in October 2004 al-Zarqawi swore loyalty to Osama bin Laden, he renamed the group Tanẓīm Qāʻidat al-Jihād fī Bilād al-Rāfidayn (lit. "The Organisation of Jihad's Base in Mesopotamia"), commonly known as al-Qaeda in Iraq or AQI. Although the group never called itself al-Qaeda in Iraq, this remained its informal name for many years. [Emphasis mine]

Note the year 2004, which was one short year after George W. Bush's 2003 invasion of the country. If you're looking for some president to blame the rise of ISIS on, you'd think you'd land on Bush before you got to Obama, but I guess that isn't exactly what these Republicans are trying to do.

And finally, something else that Priebus touched on yesterday:

He also suggested that Obama and Clinton had talked about gun regulation in the aftermath of the shooting in order to avoid discussing terrorism.

So in regards to all the usual fuss about whether to call the Orlando shooting "terrorism" or not, have we decided yet? And if so, did it help?

If the answer is "yes" and "yes", I beg to differ.

True, this guy went to the Islamic Center to pray several times a day and spent some time on Islamist sites online, but how far can we take this "inspired by jihadists" stuff when we hear he claimed to be a follower of Sunni Al-Nusra Front and Shi'a Hesbollah and Sunni ISIS, all at the same time?

I never like to question anyone's faith, but this sure sounds a lot like a shooter in search of a reason to do it, and certainly shouldn't be used as an example of "radical Islamic yattta-yatta" on which to base national immigration policy.

Still, whether or not this New-York-born wannabe-jihadist was "inspired" by Islamism, we do know he used an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle -- originally designed for military use -- to mow down almost 100 people, killing about half of them. The guy could have chosen some other weapon, but the fact is that the one he chose was designed for use by soldier, which made it much more fitted to the task of killing human beings, especially if bunched together.

So while there's not very strong evidence that this shooting was directly connected to so-called "Islamic terrorism", at least in a way we can do anything about, there's no doubt that the shooter chose a weapon that, had it been banned, would have been more difficult to get away with doing what he wanted to do.

In other words, it seems that Reince Priebus has been talking about terrorism in the aftermath of the shooting in order to avoid discussing gun regulation.

Response to Odd Man Out

(See: Just Above Sunset: Odd Man Out)

I'm pretty sure we're only now starting to see the reason that Donald Trump calls Hillary Clinton "Crooked Hillary", which from the start always seemed like a bit of a stretch. Psychologists call it "psychological projecting":

Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude.

For another example, a person who is crooked may constantly accuse someone else of being crooked!

The trick, of course, is to "get there first" -- that is, you need to call Hillary a crook (when she clearly isn't) before she gets a chance to call you one (which you clearly are), because once she does, you can just accuse her of being "unoriginal".

And the psychologists take this into even deeper and potentially more dangerous territory:

Bullying: A bully may project his/her own feelings of vulnerability onto the target(s) of the bullying activity. Despite the fact that a bully's typically denigrating activities are aimed at the bully's targets, the true source of such negativity is ultimately almost always found in the bully's own sense of personal insecurity and/or vulnerability. 

Such aggressive projections of displaced negative emotions can occur anywhere from the micro-level of interpersonal relationships, all the way up through to the macro-level of international politics, or even international armed conflict.

In other words, God forbid some hypothetical psychological-projecting bully becomes the supreme leader of some big world power!

Much of the thinking behind "projection" was originally conceptualised by Sigmund Freud, but there were later dissents in the psychology community which, frankly, I tend to agree with more:

Some studies were critical of Freud's theory. Research supports the existence of a false-consensus effect whereby humans have a broad tendency to believe that others are similar to themselves, and thus "project" their personal traits onto others. This applies to good traits as well as bad traits and is not a defense mechanism for denying the existence of the trait within the self.

But all the psychobabble aside, we've all seen people who use projection as a rhetorical trick. You've seen it every time you heard some conservative Republican claim that it's really the liberals who are the true racists!

So whatever, if anything, comes out of the FBI investigation of Hillary's email business, it probably won't show her to be crooked, especially if by crooked you mean:

crook*ed |ˈkrʊkəd| adjective ( crookeder |ˈkrʊkədər|, crookedest |ˈkrʊkədəst| ) ... 

• informal dishonest; illegal

Hillary admits to doing what everyone knows she did, which was put her email on a server in her home, so she can't be found to be dishonest, and I doubt the probe will find that she did anything illegal.

But can the same be said for Trump? It's becoming more and more obvious that he got to where he is not only by being dishonest, but also by stealing other people's money.

And in the Thesaurus, in the list of synonyms to "crook", you'll find the word "racketeer":

rack*e*teer |ˌrækəˈtɪ(ə)r| noun 

a person who engages in dishonest and fraudulent business dealings.

Bingo!

Think not only Trump University, but you'll also need to read Steve Reilly's investigation into the history of Trump's business dealings in USA Today:

On just one project, Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, records released by the New Jersey Casino Control Commission in 1990 show that at least 253 subcontractors weren’t paid in full or on time, including workers who installed walls, chandeliers and plumbing. 

The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. 

In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.

One of those that was run out of business was Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr.:

During the Atlantic City casino boom in the 1980s, Philadelphia cabinet-builder Edward Friel Jr. landed a $400,000 contract to build the bases for slot machines, registration desks, bars and other cabinets at Harrah's at Trump Plaza. 

The family cabinetry business, founded in the 1940s by Edward’s father, finished its work in 1984 and submitted its final bill to the general contractor for the Trump Organization, the resort’s builder.

The final bill they submitted 30 years ago, as recalled by son Paul Friel, the company accountant, was for $83,600.

So then what?

Paul Friel said he got a call asking that his father, Edward, come to the Trump family’s offices at the casino for a meeting. There Edward, and some other contractors, were called in one by one to meet with Donald Trump and his brother, Robert Trump. 

“He sat in a room with nine guys,” Paul Friel said. “We found out some of them were carpet guys. Some of them were glass guys. Plumbers. You name it.” 

In the meeting, Donald Trump told his father that the company’s work was inferior, Friel said, even though the general contractor on the casino had approved it. The bottom line, Trump told Edward Friel, was the company wouldn't get the final payment. Then, Friel said Trump added something that struck the family as bizarre. Trump told his dad that he could work on other Trump projects in the future. 

“Wait a minute,” Paul Friel said, recalling his family's reaction to his dad’s account of the meeting. “Why would the Trump family want a company who they say their work is inferior to work for them in the future?”

I'm thinking that if I were the Friels, I would do what "repo men" do when their company fails to get paid for the car somebody bought. I'd sneak into the casino and rip out all the cabinets and take them home, and leave a letter to Trump, reminding him that he made a deal to pay for my work product, and that he doesn't own my work product until I'm paid all of my money.

But, the Friels’ story is similar to experiences of hundreds of other contractors over the casino-boom decade in Atlantic City. Legal records, New Jersey Casino Control Commission records and contemporaneous local newspaper stories recounted time and again tales about the Trumps paying late or renegotiating deals for dimes on the dollar.

Donald's daughter, Ivanka Trump, who will be running the company if Trump is elected, denies it all:

“We have hundreds of millions of dollars of construction projects underway. And we have, for the most part, exceptional contractors on them who get paid, and get paid quickly,” she said, adding that she doubted any contractor complaining in court or in the press would admit they delivered substandard work. “But it would be irresponsible if my father paid contractors who did lousy work. And he doesn’t do that.”

(Really? Well, I guess the nut doesn't fall far from the tree! Obviously learned all she knows about business at Trump University! I wonder if they'll let father and daughter share a cell at Riker's.)

But Jesse Singal notes this in New York Magazine:

While Trump would often claim shoddy work as his reason for not ponying up, Reilly presents pretty overwhelming evidence that in many, if not most, of the cases, this was not a credible claim.

That 253 subcontractors, all on just one project, are swindled by Trump doesn't make it sound like he was refusing to pay someone for substandard work performance, it instead suggests a business model based on fraud, which one would think would be illegal behavior.

To put this another way, if you agree to pay a certain amount of money for a certain amount of work, and when the bill comes, you refuse to pay it (or you pay only part of it, or you don't pay on time), you're guilty of theft! You're stealing money from someone you've made a deal with.

Is Donald Trump a crook, or not? Try as I could, I could not find out why he's not being criminally charged for any of this. It seems to me he's probably not guilty of mere civil fraud, his company's whole MO seems to be that of a criminal enterprise -- which is what he wants to turn the United States into!

It's absolutely true what they say, that Trump's campaign is in a totally different category of candidacy than past Republican candidates. He's certainly not anything like Abraham Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt, nor Ronald Reagan, nor John McCain or Mitt Romney. If I had to name anyone he's like, I'd have to say Al Capone.

It's as if the GOP got conned into putting some smarmy "Little Caesar" on the top of their presidential ticket this year.

And as a final thought, Donald Trump keeps saying how he's surprised that nobody gives him credit for "self-funding" his campaign. But in fact, had Trump been forced to raise funds like everyone else, he probably wouldn't have had any more luck than Mitt Romney did when he considered a run, then dropped out when donors rejected him.

Maybe the GOP should write a new rule at its convention this year, one that could save them a lot of hassle next time around:

No candidate who self-funds his own campaign will be allowed to become the nominee on the Republican Party presidential ticket.

Response to The Alpha Male Neutered

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Alpha Male Neutered)

It's true! Donald Trump doesn't seem to know how to use a prompter when he speaks. It actually makes him more boring, and for what it's worth, doesn't help him at all look very presidential.

Which is good news, I think! If speaking on a prompter actually were to suit him, he might be tempted to use it more often, which means he'd have to start tailoring his content to his presentation, and more people might actually start taking him seriously and, God forbid, liking him! I prefer his old way, where he just can't help but pull stuff out of his ass, which makes people either love him or hate him -- and hopefully more of the latter than the former, especially lately with this judge thing.

The latest thing is that he's apparently decided to just shut up about the judge, claiming that what he has been saying about all that has been "misconstrued" -- which it has! By him! To me, this is just a tiny confession on his part that he had no idea what he was talking about, although it seems almost everyone else did.

What Trump said in his own defense:

It is unfortunate that my comments have been misconstrued as a categorical attack against people of Mexican heritage. I am friends with and employ thousands of people of Mexican and Hispanic descent.

Okay, but the question is, if one of your Mexican friends or employees were a judge in a legal case of which you were a party, should they be disqualified, since they can't help but know that you are, as you say, "building a wall" at the border? If your answer is yes, then you have not been misconstrued by the public, you've merely been construed.

But racism aside, what I think people should all be getting on Donald Trump for doing in this case is dragging one of his many private squabbles into the public arena, essentially trying to leverage his run for public office for private gain. I don't know if he realizes it, but were Trump president already, he could probably get impeached for that.

But the odd thing is, according to Jeffrey Toobin, the judge's rulings have been mostly pro-Trump!:

CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin weighed in on the Trump University case this afternoon, and he said Donald Trump is strongly exaggerating how much the judge is supposedly biased against him. 

In addition to that whole “I’m building a wall, he’s Mexican!” thing, Trump has gone after Judge Gonzalo Curiel because of his “terrible rulings” (i.e. rulings that did not go Trump’s way). 

But as Toobin explained, the judge has ruled that plaintiffs in the case “are not entitled to complete refunds if they win” and so they have to argue individually “what percentage of the fee that they pair… was a ripoff.” And that, he added, “basically kills the whole idea of a class-action.” 

“This is a judge,” Toobin said, “who has by and large favored Donald Trump. The only thing he’s refused to do is throw the case out altogether.” 

He concluded that this is clearly not a judge on a “rampage” against Trump.

If so, then, why is Trump doing this? I heard somewhere that Trump treats each transaction he gets himself into like a game, that playing with the details is more important to him than the outcome, so it's possible that he's just sort of toying with his food.

You might think the "new" Trump campaign might be able to rein in his playful tendencies, but according to the Washington Post, maybe not:

In a conference call Monday, the real estate mogul told surrogates to step up their attacks on Curiel as biased and on reporters as racists, overriding a directive from his own staff distributed over the weekend, according to reports.

Which brings up a question:

How many of these fun lawsuits does he have going on right now? At any given moment, he seems to be either in a lawsuit or he's being audited by the IRS or bankrupting one of his companies. He seems to consider being in constant legal trouble a mark of success.

Can we really afford this guy running the country the way he runs his life?

Response to The Wall Just Got Higher

(See: Just Above Sunset: The Wall Just Got Higher)

Today, some observations on (a) unpredictability and (b) racism.

So almost the entire roster of Republican officialdom has now climbed aboard the campaign bus, even after suspecting the driver is drunk, and now they're complaining about his erratic driving? Maybe they shoulda just stood at home.

One of his prominent characteristics the Republicans take issue with is something Trump brags about -- his unpredictability:

"I like to be unpredictable," he said in an October debate, explaining why he carries a concealed weapon. In September, Trump said he likes to stay unpredictable when dealing with foreign foes. "You want to have a certain amount of, you want to have a little bit of guesswork for the enemy," Trump said.

Can't pin him down! He flies all over the place! Maybe the reason Donald Trump seems to defy gravity is that he has so little of it.

And if you think Trump means he can be counted on to be unpredictable, don't bet the farm on that, since he's also been heard several times to say something like this:

“If somebody hits me, I have to hit them back. I have to. I’m not going to sit there and say, ‘I’m wonderful, I’m a president.’ I want to win."

A trait that, I'm sure, will not escape the notice of our nation's friends and foes alike, and who will all, I'm quite sure, take the occasional opportunity to play him like a fiddle.

Washington Monthly’s David Atkins confirms that:

His reaction to being criticized is to immediately engage in childish and petty personal attacks against his critics. ... 

So it is that when a judge with a Hispanic surname ruled against Trump in the ongoing scandal of his fraudulent Ponzi scheme “university,” Trump’s reaction wasn’t to suggest that all the facts had yet to come out, or that the judge had misinterpreted the data, or even that the judge had a politically motivated agenda as a secret liberal. These are the sorts of defenses that people who aren’t egomaniacal narcissists might make. 

But not Trump.

In fact, what Trump does respond with borders on the mysterious, and is such a non-sequitur, it would certainly have immediately snuffed out the campaign of even the most milquetoasty non-egomanical, non-narcissist candidate. To Jake Tapper's dogged questioning (over twenty times!) of whether his citing a federal judge's ethnicity as justification for recusal from a case was "racism", Trump repeatedly presented this answer:

"He's a Mexican. We're building a wall between here and Mexico." ... 

At the end of a lengthy exchange, Tapper asked: "If you are saying he cannot do his job because of his race, is that not the definition of racism?" 

"No, I don't think so at all," Trump said. ... "If he was giving me a fair ruling, I wouldn't say that," Trump told Tapper, pointing again to Curiel's background. ... 

"I'm building a wall."

So the question is now this:

Is it racist to argue that some American judge should recuse himself from a case on the grounds that his ancestors were Mexican? To which our next president's unequivocal answer is, "I'm building a wall."

Does that make sense? No? Good. Let's move on.

But the question still is, yes, but is that really racism?

Well, maybe not technically -- but yes, it certainly is. Here's my online dictionary's definition of racism:

rac*ism |ˈreɪˌsɪzəm| noun 

the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races. 

• prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on such a belief

So by that reading, what Trump is doing -- albeit possibly unknowingly -- is indeed racism.

Trump is figuring that, because he plans to someday build a wall at the Mexican border, then any judge who has any Mexican blood whatsoever flowing in his veins is a member of a whole race of people who can be assumed to be biased against Donald Trump (despite that fact that he does very well with the Mexicans), unless, of course, the judge gives Trump a "fair ruling", in which case, never mind.

But in summary, overlooking all the nonsense parts: Yes, Trump is being racist.

Except, of course, that biologists don't technically recognize "races" of humans anyway, do they? Same Dictionary:

Although ideas of race are centuries old, it was not until the 19th century that attempts to systematize racial divisions were made. Ideas of supposed racial superiority and social Darwinism reached their culmination in Nazi ideology of the 1930s and gave pseudoscientific justification to policies and attitudes of discrimination, exploitation, slavery, and extermination.

Theories of race asserting a link between racial type and intelligence are now discredited. Scientifically it is accepted as obvious that there are subdivisions of the human species, but it is also clear that genetic variation between individuals of the same race can be as great as that between members of different races.

Instead of human races, scientists nowadays tend to differentiate between people of different "continental origins". Here's Stanford University biologist Dr. Marcus Feldman, who's done lots of research in the area of what we might call "race":

Many biologists have replaced the term “race” with “continental ancestry.” This is because such a large fraction of the world has ancestry in more than one continent. The result is hyphenated nomenclature, which attempts to specify which continents are represented in one’s ancestry. 

For example, our president is as European in his ancestry as he is African. It is arbitrary which of these an observer chooses to emphasize. Obama’s opponents overtly and by implication denigrate him because of his African ancestry. But he is equally European.

Which is to say that Barrack Obama is not technically an "African-American", he's really an "African-European-American" (or maybe, just as accurately, a "European-African-American".)

Still, "Mexican" is not, in itself, a race, it's a nationality, right? So doesn't this mean Trump's not a racist after all?

Not so fast. Take another look at my dictionary:

race 2 |reɪs| noun 

each of the major divisions of humankind, having distinct physical characteristics: people of all races, colors, and creeds.

• a group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.; an ethnic group :we Scots were a bloodthirsty race then. 

• the fact or condition of belonging to such a division or group; the qualities or 

• a group or set of people or things with a common feature or features : some male firefighters still regarded women as a race apart. 

• Biology a population within a species that is distinct in some way, esp. a subspecies :people have killed so many tigers that two races are probably extinct. 

• (in nontechnical use) each of the major divisions of living creatures: a member of the human race | the race of birds.

So while scientists may not believe in this stuff, lexicographers still do, and therefore, they get the last word.