The Child is the Father of the Flim Flam Man

Norman Vincent Peale died in 1993, but for 50 years before that he wrote best selling books and ran a church in New York City and a  psychiatric/religious "clinic" next door.

Norman Vincent Peale

He wrote a book, "The Power of Positive Thinking" which I have never read, but I've read Wikipedia and other internet excerpts and it seems to be an argument that a positive mind set can overcome all adversity, and you are going to be afflicted in life, you're going to have reversals but you can slide right by all those, and use that to make yourself a success--the old that which does not kill me will make me stronger stuff. 



“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”  

“Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something special in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only the best, be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

Stand up t

Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.

 your obstacles
and d

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities -- always see them, for they're always there.

o something about them. You will find that they haven't half the strength you think they have

Peale did not like the Catholic in Kennedy and supported his opponent, Nixon and the Democrats pointed to Peale's book and said this country was built by realists who took action based on facts, and Peale's book was larded with examples of how well his positive mindset works which were invariably anecdotes about unnamed people who prevailed through thinking happy and constructive thoughts and made lemonade out of lemons.

President Tripe was an acolyte of Rev. Peale and you can hear it in his refusal to cite facts, statistics and numbers but in his pattern of simply saying what he wants to be true and that's enough. So Mexican rapists are pouring across the border because he heard about a woman who got raped by one in San Francisco, and vaccinations cause autism and mental retardation because he had a friend who had a child...and as for positive thinking, well we are going to have so much winning when President Tripe gets into office and drains the swamp you'll be tired and bored of winning.


Bless his soul. President Honey Boo Boo.


In his time Rev Peale was called "the flim flam man" because he asserted so many things which were supported by nothing more than tales he had clearly simply made up.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life.

When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

You can change your world by changing your words... Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Reading about Joel Osteen and his prosperity gospel of read my book and you will be rich, there are distinct echoes of Peale.

I wonder if President Tripe will invite Rev Osteen to the White House for dinner with him and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.


Wouldn't you like to be there for that?

Carol Shea Porter In Exeter: Oh, Democrats!

You have to love Carol Shea Porter, who represents  New Hampshire's First District in the United States House of Representatives. She has authored a Medicare for All bill which has found no other sponsors in the House. She has been for increasing the minimal wage for years, fighting against that canard from Republicans that increasing the minimal wage will decrease jobs, as if every owner of a McDonalds franchise will close down his store rather than share his profits more equitably, as if exploitation of labor is a good thing.

You also have to love a lady who was thrown out of a George W. Bush rally for wearing a bright red T shirt which said, "Turn your back on Bush."


And you have to respect her fighting spirit for beating Jeb Bradley twice and Frank Guinta twice, having also been beaten twice by Frank Guinta.


On the other hand, she is exactly what is wrong with the Democrats: Heart in the right place, right on all the issues, but milquetoast. Her voice is too quiet.


She spoke at Exeter last night and I lost count of the times she mentioned how nasty Washington had become, how upset she had been by the shootings of Republican Congressmen at a baseball field, how she hoped for more pleasant conversations with Republicans and more comity in the halls of Congress.


Her most ardent meme was opposition must come from people like us, in the audience, "grass roots" ordinary folks. This the same thing Ray Buckley tells us every chance he gets. Which is to say, "You are not going to get any leadership from us--you do it."  Or, put another way, the ship has hit an iceberg and the captain and crew are powerless, so you passengers organize yourselves in boats and get off while you still can.





The last question of the night was the one I wanted answered:  Who do the Democrats have who can beat President Honey Boo Boo in 2020? 


Oh, we have lots of people, good candidates. And we all sat forward on the edges of our seats and waited to hear. Ms. Shea Porter struggled, well, Kirstin Gillibrand, maybe.  And someone, a name I'd never heard and quickly forgot. Another couple of names like that. Sherrod Brown. And Al Franken.
Al Franken? Really? That's the best we can do?
I mean, I like Al, but he was never that funny on Saturday Night Live and he won his Senate seat by like, two votes.

So, we are left with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as the face of the Democratic Party, while the Republicans have Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John Cornyn, Rush Limbaugh, John Thune and a host of other big voiced, smooth talking fair haired boys who hammer away at the wimpy sounding Dems, who, until recently were led by Harry Reid whose voice could barely ever rise above a whisper and who was beaten up by a snapping exercise band and had to retire, passing his mantel on to Chuck Schumer who thought hard and consulted widely and came up with the slogan "A Better Deal" for America. Which is like, "Well, we may not be much, but we are probably better."

There was a lot of talk from Congresswoman Shea Porter last night about the things President Honey Boo Boo had done, but there was precious little about what we will do, why the Dems ought to be leading the government, how we will address immigration, the war in Afghanistan, healthcare, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the withering life in the non urban parts of America.
We need warriors. We've got nice ladies who are wonderful, good hearted people, but they are not leaders.

The President's Favorite Joe

Joe Arpaio does not disguise what he thinks.  He thinks dark skinned Hispanic immigrants are criminals and threaten White America. 

And he says he's the toughest sheriff in America, and he bought himself a tank and painted flames on it just to show that off.

He rounds up people, claps them in handcuffs for the crime of looking suspiciously Hispanic, which in a border state like Arizona, means his police are kept busy. 

He is a hero to the White supremacists because their greatest fear is non white immigration. People like Kris Kobach of Kansas have figured this out, and he panders to those quaking voters by agreeing with callers to radio shows who imagine the coming "ethnic cleansing" once Hispanics arrive in sufficient numbers to wipe out the Whites the way the Whites wiped out the  Indians. 

I had a secretary once who was a very smart woman, who learned our computer system quickly and did the job of three people, so she was an asset.  But she was  a big fan of Joe Arpaio. She had grown up in a desperate hollow in West Virginia and never got past the third grade and lost all her teeth by age 50. Her husband could never keep a decent job, but would scrounge a job here and there delivering flowers. When he found out about the retirement money I had put into an account for her, he drained that account to buy himself a new pick up truck.  

That didn't bother her though. What bothered her was the Spanish speaking teenagers who worked at the McDonalds who would laugh and chat in Spanish with customers and then switch back to English to take her order.  

"I don't even feel like I'm in America any more," she said. "Can't understand what half the people in that McDonalds are saying." 

A Chinese family moved in the rental house next door to her rental house and they gutted fish in their back yard and then cooked the fish on a wok. That disgusted her.  

"But didn't men gut deer in West Virginia?" I asked her.
"Yeah, sure, but they didn't squat down in their back yards like they wanted to poop and jabber in Chinese."

What really bothered her, I think, is that she had finally got a well paying job, felt secure economically, bought a new car every 3 years, but she found herself living with people who were just starting out in this country, and that made her feel she had not made any real progress in life. "Moving on up," had not happened for her.

She was still living among people who were on the first step of the ladder in America.

The courts told President Snowflake he couldn't just bar a class of people at the airports. The court held Joe Arpaio in contempt for continuing to imprison people for being Hispanic. Well, Snowflake could do something about that court--he just over rode the court's action with a pardon. 

Checks and balances.



From Wikipedia:

On July 2, 2011, when the temperature in Phoenix hit 118 °F (48 °C), Arpaio measured the temperature inside Tent City tents at 145 °F (63 °C). Some inmates complained that fans near their beds were not working, and that their shoes were melting from the heat.^[47] During the summer of 2003, when outside temperatures exceeded 110 °F (43 °C), Arpaio said to complaining inmates, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths!"^[48]

In 1997, Amnesty International said Arpaio's tent city jail was not an "adequate or humane alternative to housing inmates in suitable ... jail facilities."^[49] Tent City was criticized by groups contending that there were violations of human and constitutional rights.^[50]

Arpaio stated he reserved the punishment of living in Tent City "for those who have been convicted."^[51][52] In April 2017, it was announced by newly elected Sheriff Paul Penzone that the jail would be shut down.^[53]

Volunteer chain gangs

In 1995, Arpaio reinstituted chain gangs. In 1996, he expanded the chain gang concept by instituting female volunteer chain gangs.^[54] Female inmates worked seven hours a day (7 a.m. to 2 p.m.), six days a week. He also instituted the world's first all-juvenile volunteer chain gang; volunteers earned high school credit toward a diploma.^[55]

Pink underwear

One of Arpaio's public relations actions was the requirement that inmates wear pink underwear in order to prevent its theft by the released inmates. He claimed this saved the county $70,000 in the first year the rule was in effect.^[56] Arpaio subsequently started to sell customized pink boxers (with the Maricopa County Sheriff's logo and "Go Joe") as a fund-raiser for Sheriff's Posse Association. Despite allegations of misuse of funds received from these sales, Arpaio declined to provide an accounting for the money.^[57]

Arpaio's success in gaining press coverage with the pink underwear resulted in his extending the use of the color. He introduced pink handcuffs, using the event to promote his book, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff.^[58] Arpaio has said "I can get elected on pink underwear... I've done it five times."^[59][60]

Selective Service registration

In 2004, Arpaio ordered all undocumented immigrants currently in jail to register for the Selective Service System.^[61]

What Liberals Can Learn From Derek Black

Derek Black, the son of Don Black a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, founder of "Stormfront" a website which serves as a platform for White people who are in a tither about White genocide, racial purity, immigration, "preserving" America for the White race, wrote a thoughtful and altogether wonderful article in the NYT Sunday August 20 Sunday Review.

Derek Black 

He noted that the history of the idea of preserving America for White people of European descent, excluding White Jewish Europeans is not new but was embodied in United States immigration law until just 50 years ago.

He also noted the Jefferson memorial in Washington, DC has the words "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [Negro] people are to be free," but does not include the second half of that sentence, "Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government . Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."

Zealotry of the Convert

He notes that Lincoln hoped to deport all coloreds back to Africa, to Liberia. He would free them, but deport them. Only when that did not work, for practical reasons, did he agree to simply set them free in place.

Having been raised in the White nationalist subculture he notes the most important and fundamental issue for these racists, what keeps them up at night is the oncoming demography, that immigration will mean by the yer 2040 Whites will be in the minority.  What Hitler called the mongrelization of a nation is well under way in the United States.  Clinton remarked on this, and celebrated it.  For Derek Black, David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan nation, this is their greatest nightmare.

This is why Donald Dubious's "Build the Wall" resonated so thoroughly with the crowds of White nationalists who cheered him. 

Frightened White Men

Derek Black had his own radio show for White people at age 10, and his father had one, in addition to the website.  One thing about the conservatives, they do mass communications as the first step.

They talk a lot, marshal arguments, test them out. 
Liberals, not so much.

We had a Democratic Party meeting at which the Free State Project was presented by a young woman who was trying to make a career by tracking this group of ultra libertarians, who do not believe in government beyond protecting individual rights, which means no public roads, no public schools, no public health funded by government, no vaccinations, basically, no government beyond an army. Everything but national defense can be done by private enterprise. Or at least, that's what some of the Free Staters believe. They are so into not being part of a group, they refuse to even call themselves "members" of the Free State Project because they so cherish the idea of their own individuality.

Six Free Staters were in the audience but they were hardly allowed to speak or defend themselves. The presentation was all about whipping up anxiety about how the Free Staters were trying to take over New Hampshire. This was what Democrats were doing--declaiming from the pulpit, not allowing a free exchange of ideas.

I think what Democrats, and liberals of all stripes, need to do is to engage in open and spirited debate with the Free State Project, and with other kooks like  Kris Kobach, who believes White genocide is imminent. These folks have arguments which are easy enough to demolish, but when we do not give them a hearing, they have an easy claim to the status of a suppressed minority.

The other thing we need is a liberal Rush Limbaugh. The first effort, Air America, failed because, as Rush Limbaugh observed, they did not know how to entertain.

Liberals need to find their showmen and show women.

When he stepped out on that stage in Chicago on election night in 2008, and Barack Obama said

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our Democracy; Tonight is your answer.”

there was no better show on earth. He had that exultant crowd in tears, and he was better that night than President Snowflake has ever been.  
We need somebody who can take the stage, as Obama once did and observe, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states." 

How clever that sentence, at once disparaging the idea of those sanctimonious Bible Thumpers in the red states that only they are pious, and at the same time reaching out to those in the red states who think the Democrats up north are godless. 

In a country of 320 million, one would hope there is one more Obama out there, if only the Democrats would allow him or her to flower.  But, looking at the pathetic Chuck Schumer and, God Bless her, but Heaven Help her, Nancy Pelosi, the only thing one can conclude about the Democrats is they value seniority over real leadership and over winning. 

What Democrats need is a war consigliore; we need a pugnacious Churchill who wants to fight, who does not care about offending people or being politically correct. 
We do not need people who are preoccupied with stupid things like a sports broadcaster who says a black tennis star engages in guerrilla warfare and thus has uttered a racial slur by suggesting a black woman might be a "gorilla." 

We've been through all that stupidity back in the 60's when youths cut off the alligator patch from their LaCoste polo shirts as an anti elitist statement.

First, we have to stop looking like fools. Second, we have to stop worrying about what Donald Dubious is going to say or do and then, thirdly, we have to start thinking about what we can do to Donald Dubious.

Liberal Crack Up? Or New Burst of Renewal?

Mark Lilla, of Columbia University, writing in the Wall Street Journal, suggests something many others have noted: Liberals have lost their mojo, lost their groove, their riff, which is to say, have never found an answer to Ronald Reagan's one, two punches of "Government is not the solution; it is the problem," and "The ten scariest words in the English language: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help you.'" 

Of course, once he got in office, he realized he couldn't simply stop all government functions--there were a few programs like Medicare and Social Security which even the folks in Montana and Alabama would have missed. And there were the farm subsidies all those rugged individualist folks in those broad red states depended on and there were all those fat defense contracts which flowed through the government teats to South Carolina, Alabama, Missouri and virtually every red state where they hate the gov'ment but they do so love the money.  
Under Reagan the national debt tripled. So did the deficits.

Never you mind about all that, Rush Limbaugh and Fox would love to resurrect Reagan, in their fantasies at least. 
The reality of no government in a continental nation of 300 million people who need roads and airports and bridges and an electric power grid, not to mention health care and retirement programs is a different thing altogether.

The Republicans have got a consistent riff, which keeps selling: We don't need no gov'ment. We need to be left alone.

Which reminds me of that wonderful scene in the Daniel Day Lewis film, "The Last of the Mohicans," where a proper British lass, having stumbled upon a frontier family, massacred by a Huron war party, asks the Deerslayer how that family could have chosen to live  the ultimate off the grid existence, out there alone, with no protection and the Deerslayer, looking up at the blanket of stars in the night sky says, "They chose to live out here where they were beholden to no king, where they never had to ask anyone's leave to do anything," and waving at the stars, he says, "That is their memorial."

It certainly wows the young lass, but it sent a cold chill through me. Without others, you are on your own, and when a war party arrives, they are not on their own and you are bludgeoned, along with your children.

So, the conservatives get that, and most of them are for an army to protect the population, except those who really embrace the idea of living off the grid with their own arsenal of weapons, but of course, there is always a bigger arsenal.

But, as Lilla asks and as U.S. Grant insisted--you have to offer more than a criticism of the Republican off the grid metaphor.  You have to have an idea of your own.
You have to think of what you are going to do to General Lee.

For this, you need a eutopian dream. 
I'm working on mine.
It will have to include an economy which gives everyone a job, but not a job which totally consumes them, which allows them enough time off to recover, to enjoy life, to vacation, to have children and to participate in the raising of those children. It has to provide enough income to buy the basics: home, transportation, food.
It will have to have health care.
It will have to provide for retirement.

Of course, I'd like to see some provisions for sexuality. No good eutopia is appealing without that. Brave New World would never have gained notice were it not for the idea that women would be provided with contraception--condoms in the days Aldous Huxley was writing (1931), pre pill, pre IUD. I'd provide every 12 year old girl with an IUD, HPV vaccination and every 16 year old boy with a thirty to forty something woman to bring him through the wonderful world of sex in an expert manner. 

Oh, we could work on this.
1984 and Brave New World were about the imagined future where the community or the authoritarian state controlled individual destinies.  Where psychology and biology were used to alter life for the individual, where the very thought process of the mind was beyond the control of the individual.

My liberal eutopia would allow for individual variation, celebrate it even, but provide the basics so people could pursue work which benefited not just them, but those who depend on them and the greater society.
Stay tuned. 

Tear Down the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial?

Snowflake, backtracking from his dutiful bad mouthing of the KKK now says he thinks it's just outrageous we are tearing down monuments to Robert E. Lee and even Stonewall Jackson. What's next? he asks--Jefferson?

Funny you should ask.

In fact, if you ever have visited Mount Vernon and gazed at George Washington's sarcophagus, you might have looked over your shoulder and noticed a dirt path leading away from the marble tomb, down into a clearing, mostly overgrown, with graves, no headstones, of Washington's slaves. It is then the full impact of Washington as a slave owner erupts. 

Of course, we erect monuments for our own purposes to celebrate people we think are inspiring or heroic, and Washington did get us through Valley Forge and down to Yorktown and he did refuse to be named king and he did insist on the idea that the office of Presidency should be one which is passed on after elections and should not be a hereditary title, so much as we might find him unappealing for keeping slaves, he did do some important things for the country.

You will say, well Mussolini made the Italian trains on time and Hitler built the autobahn, but we don't want monuments to them.

But both Jefferson and Washington worked hard to keep the United States intact as a nation and they risked their lives so that we could have a country.

Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis did their best to destroy this country. And they did this so a slave state could replace the United States of America. 

As Grant observed, these valiant soldiers fought for one of the worst causes ever. No, we don't need monuments to these traitorous losers, dignified and pious as they may have been.

Our Drug Infested Den

I've stopped listening to stories which begin with "Donald Trump." Well, mostly. It just sort of goes to some back room file in my brain when I hear those syllables and I zone out for a while, until something new comes across the air waves.

Pia Guerra

But reading this week's New Yorker, I learned Donald Trump said he won New Hampshire because of his bold and effective approach to the "opioid crisis" in New Hampshire, which is a "drug infested den."

I would not deny we have a problem with deaths from opioid here, although I really don't know for sure. According to the New Yorker's Amy Davidson Sorkin, we had 22 deaths out of every 100,000 attributed to opioid use. How many of those were people with terminal cancer who chose to end their lives with opioids and how those numbers got generated, I do not know. I do know that death certificate data is garbage in, garbage out. But I'm willing to believe we have an opioid crisis.

Welcome to Hampton, Drug Infested

I'm not at all convinced there is anything government or the medical profession can do about opioid use or addiction or deaths. Watch "The Wire" before you object to that. Until you've watched "The Wire" I don't even want to hear from you about this topic.

But opioid use  is not really what this posting is about. 

It's about New Hampshire. 

As Ms. Davidson Sorkin pointed out, Trump did not win New Hampshire. Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire. By about 1,000 votes, but she won.

Pia, again

Which brings me to my actual real subject: Somehow, New Hampshire voters, at least 50.1% of them kept the state blue, and rejected Donnie Dubious.

How this happened continues to be a subject of earnest debate. 

Mostly, probably, it's demographics.  A lot of people who did not grow up here moved to New Hampshire over the past decade.  More of them were liberal Democrats than there were conservative Republicans. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not people from Massachusetts who polluted the conservative state of William Loeb's Manchester Union Leader with liberal ideas. Most of the Massachusetts refugees were anti tax conservatives seeking nirvana in a state without a sales or income tax. They live in Nashua, Salem and the Western border towns. 

But others moved in from farther afield, as I did, and settled in the Seacoast or around the university towns like Durham. 

North Carolina has similar enclaves of liberalism around the towns of the Research Triangle, Durham, Raleigh, Chapel Hill.  And, it ought to be noted, North Carolina voted for Obama the first time and recently, in Chapel Hill, a rowdy band of anti racists pulled down a brass statue of a Confederate soldier, without a single human casualty, as police stood by and shrugged. 

More Pia

But back to New Hampshire. 
I don't know how Clinton won the state. 
My intrepid neighbor, a rabid Democrat, born and raised in New Hampshire, from Manchester to Londonderry and now Hampton, worked the phone banks, knocked on doors, talked to people she had never met, stood on lines outside the polls with Hillary signs, and she says, after all that, she is not sure her efforts and those of people who worked hard like her actually made the difference, but she thinks it might have made the difference and she could not live with herself if she did not try.

Hampton, picket fence in the DID

I'm proud to know her.  
Pride is not one of my favorite emotions. Pride leads to all sorts of irrational behavior and it is often misplaced and it is something you feel about what someone else has done, more often than about what you yourself have done. But, still...Somehow I feel better every morning getting up and going on my bicycle ride and thinking, this state voted against Alabama Donald. 

Save Sheriff Joe!

President Snowflake says he will pardon Joe Arpaio for whatever it was he's been found guilty of--violating Civil Rights of dark skinned Arizonans as he rounded up anyone who didn't look American enough to him, to prove he was indeed the toughest sheriff in America.

Sheriff Joe got himself a tank to bring home the point, and paraded it like Kim Il Jung, down the street to show what a tough guy he was.

He also took men who had been arrested in Maricopa County, not convicted mind you, but he decided they deserved some humiliation for looking un-American and being possible illegal aliens, so he made them wear pink underpants and marched them down the street to the jeering Arizona throngs, thereby evoking the London of Dickens or the Paris of the Revolution, where prisoners were subjected to the vituperations of the mob before they were hanged or beheaded.

In doing all this, he earned the undying affection of Donnie Dubious, who likes a tough guy, and who will now pardon Joe for violating the Bill of Rights dictums about cruel and unusual punishment, a presumption of innocence, due process and equal justice under the law.

White Trumpland: All the President's Men

Every day each of us makes a cancer cell or two or three or three hundred, and our immune system, as part of its "immune surveillance" function sees  that, labels it for destruction and then zaps these aberrant cells.

We are such heroes; fearsome, too

White racism is sort of like, that, always cropping up, trying to burrow into a tissue, an organ somewhere and then, hoping to metastasize.

You can speak your mind, if you don't mind getting shot

If you give people immunosuppressant drugs, the malignant cells can see there aren't as many immune killer cells around to suppress them and they start multiplying, digging in, getting bold and happy.

Heroes from a prior decade

If you give the white racist a little less oversight, same thing.

Gather a hundred of these little nasty White supremacists in a room and you have a collective IQ which does not add up to more than 90.  They are there, stoking each other, telling each other how brave and heroic they are and organizing to go to a Trump rally.

Expressing their opinions

That's what we had in Charlottesville, I have no doubt.

That's what we have in that great Alabama of the mindless which exists in every state, out there from Rhode Island to Texas, from Wisconsin to Colorado, from Florida to Maine.

Our forebears circa 1950: The South Shall Rise Again 

It's always out there, but here in the happy shire, we don't have to think about it. Every once in a while a guy drives his pick up truck down Exter Road (Rte 27) with his Confederate stars and bars flag flying across the pickup bed from his American flag, as if there is no contradiction there.

Freedom of Speech Alt right sytle; fire in a crowded theater 

It's everywhere.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.

Just here to express our opinion