White Cop Shoots Black Man: Misunderstanding

whenever I hear about a white cop, or any cop shooting a Black man, or shooting anyone, I think of that beautiful seen from "The Wire," and I grow frustrated with all the blather and ignorant solutions proffered by politicians who want to do "sensitivity training" for cops or who want to hold demonstrations or who want to add more Black cops to the force, but of course, none of them are talking about putting policemen in neighborhoods where they can walk the streets and get to know the citizens.


Even in my small town, the police ride around sealed off in these glass and metal isolation booths they call police cars.


If any of the policy makers, office holders, radio talk show hosts who offer opinions and solutions to cops shooting people would simply watch this sequence from "The Wire" they might have some idea what they are talking about.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW6FLFLDSYY


And don't even get me started on drug interdiction and drugs on the table and sending a message to the gangs and the drug kingpins.

Did Shaheen and Hassan Sell Out New Hampshire Main Street for Wall Street?

At the Hampton Happening, Terence O'Rourke, Democratic candidate for the United States Congress seat in the New Hampshire First, built a case carefully that the vote to repeal the Dodd Frank Act was far from an obscure and technical correction to a banking bill.  It actually was the expression of a rapacious sect which may well destroy our economy.  

Once having established that fact, the corollary was that knowing this about that bill did not require clairvoyance or great insight or special genius; any Democratic senator should have been able to see that clearly.

O'Rourke

Once he had established A/ The bill was a disaster  B/ Knowing that was easy,  then the next judgment about why Democratic senators would have voted for this horror show became hard to avoid. 
If there was every reason to vote against it, and if the banking lobby had contributed half a million dollars to each senator over the previous 5 years, what other explanation could there be, other than that our two Democratic senators were bought?

There were two dozen citizens in the room, many of whom had not just voted for both the senators but who had worked to elect  both senators, had knocked on doors, thrown house parties, manned telephone banks for them.  And they asked each other: What other reason, other than the money, could these Senators, who we thought we knew, have had?

Say it ain't so, Maggie.
Say it ain't so, Jeanne.

How did O'Rourke manage to convince this jury of citizens?

Sell out?

He started with the Great Depression, a catastrophe which has been explained in many ways, from Milton Friedman to Krugman, but prominent among the explanations was that Wall Street banks gripped by greed and rapaciousness, engaged in an orgy of misbehavior and when they failed, the brought the economy down with them. 
In response to that, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act to separate banks which held the savings of common folk from the wild and reckless speculator banks. 

Proud to be Bought and Sold

But sometime during the Clinton years, Democrats caved to Republicans, who were always whining about unleashing the stallions of innovation and energy in the markets, and Glass-Steagall was repealed.  
And sure as night follows day, the scoundrels exploded out from under their gated communities and you had community banks, savings and loans swept up in a frenzy of lending along with Wall Street banks.

All sorts of reckless schemes erupted, spread like a contagion throughout the financial world and as was documented by books and movies like "The Big Short" you soon had things we never heard of, still don't understand, like credit default swaps and other vehicles of mayhem setting up the nation for a trip over the economic cliff.

So came forth Dodd Frank, to prevent that from happening again.

O'Rourke walked the assembled citizens through all this in step by step detail, explaining what credit default swaps were and a whole host of other things, during which Mad Dog's mind wandered, but he got the point: This was madness, and it happened because the government and the ratings groups like Moody's were asleep at the wheel. And because those regulators were looking forward to the time they could leave those jobs, join Lehman Brothers and cash in themselves.

O'Rourke did it, step by step, with everything but that woman in the bubble bath.

Now we all could see the folly, the disregard for lives and fortunes of the unsuspecting, the sheer recklessness against which we have only our public officials to protect us. 

But then an email from Senator Shaheen got read: She claimed she was as appalled as anyone by those Wall Streeters, but she was trying to protect Main Street, namely "Community Banks" which had got swept up into this effort at clamping down on the bad guys. 

That's when O'Rourke pounced:  Those Community Banks are not innocent good guys, he said and he named the New Hampshire "Community Banks." Every one of those Community Banks has just one wish and goal, to become a too big to fail powerful Wall Street Bank or to be bought up by Goldman Sacks. Just as every small start up really wants to hit the pay day of being bought up by somebody with deep pockets--Nantucket Nectars wants to sell out to Ocean Spray--the Community banks controlling only $5 billion want to combined, get bought or otherwise elevated into a too big to fail bank of $30 or even $250 billion.

Paul Wellstone

And when you see those Open Secrets tables, showing the contributions from the banks to the senators, you try to imagine how they were not bought.

You say, "Well, they got even more money from Emily's List than they got from the banking lobby and we don't complain about that because Emily's List is out there to promote women's rights."  Sometimes money is given because of what a senator has already done, because of what she stands for.

But sometimes, the money is given to change what the senator might do some day.
If you say, "Here's $250,000 if you vote against Dodd Frank," that's a bribe.
But if you say, "Here's $250,000. We are your friends," that's not a bribe, it's just I'm your Godfather and one day, I may call upon you for a service, and then you will remember who is your Godfather.

When someone objected: "I'd rather have a Democrat in that seat than Kelly Ayotte or Scott Brown," O'Rourke replied that's a false choice. You could have another Democrat, a Paul Wellstone. 
We don't have to settle for the bought and sold.
That is the sort of thinking which lost Democrats the last election and which made them vulnerable to the Trump tsunami:  We have to be sophisticated, nuanced, practical, real politic, willing to compromise.  
And that begat Trump.

Hearts and Minds

During the discussion with Terence O'Rourke a citizen rose to challenge him on his assertion the United States military had no business in the Middle East fighting undeclared wars.
"But what about all the good we did in Afghanistan? The Taliban was horrible. Women had no rights. Girls could not even go to school!"

Terence O'Rourke

Before Mr. O'Rourke had a chance to respond, another citizen challenged the first, citing the widespread and never denied reports that Afghan military officers and police, who were often on the same military bases as American soldiers and marines, rounded up village boys and raped them, often chaining them to beds in the barracks and American soldiers and Marines had to endure the screams coming from the Afghan barracks all night long.

When American soldiers protested to their superiors, they were told to show some cultural sensitivity and not to interfere with what was a cultural practice.

Dan Quinn

When Dan Quinn, an American green beret finally could stand it no longer and beat up one of the Afghan officer rapists Quinn was disciplined and his career virtually ended.

So how much good were we really doing over there, in that setting, in that culture?

"We always were taught we were the guys in the white hats," O'Rourke said of his time commanding troops as they did sweeps through Iraqi villages. "Well, to those Iraqis we were not wearing white hats. We were invaders"
From the NY Times:

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

The policy of instructing soldiers to ignore child sexual abuse by their Afghan allies is coming under new scrutiny, particularly as it emerges that service members like Captain Quinn have faced discipline, even career ruin, for disobeying it.

Such is the power of the American propaganda machine that many otherwise informed American citizens still believe we were the agents of a benign order swooping in and laying a little civilization on those Afghan villagers.

As we learned in Vietnam, we do not change hearts and minds. What hubris. The Jolly Green giants bringing enlightenment to the local savages.

And don't even get me started on "The Spirit Seizes You and You Fall Down."

The Simple

Watching "Berlin Babylon"  about the year 1929 in Berlin, you get this eerie feeling of deja vu.

In Berlin at that time there were few Nazis. There were far more Communists and there were "monarchists" who wanted to reinstate the Kaiser, who felt democracy was a fool's dream and could not reign in the passions of competing groups. But Nazis were most definitely a fringe group, apparently mostly a regional phenomenon, trying to gain hold in more rural parts of the country, in the southern parts, Bavaria.

Mad Dog can say all this because he is untutored. Never took a college course in history. Last course in world history was in high school taught by a true dolt, a twenty something who was never more than one page ahead of his students, except when he had read some pamphlet he handed out as if Saint Peter himself had written and published it for the young. 

Mad Dog is not sure Madeline Albright is much of a historian, but she's written a book about fascism.  
A historian goes to primary sources, and as Nancy Isenberg notes in her wonderful preface to her equally wonderful book about Aaron Burr, "History is not a bedtime story." 

Mad Dog discovered the essential wisdom of this listening to the Lyndon Johnson tapes, which he first heard on NPR and are available through the Johnson library on line.  
In them you hear Johnson at his best, talking to some young Ivy Leaguer, an official in the Dept of Agriculture, who reports to Johnson the farm state Congressmen are being unreasonable in negotiations about some farm bill, arguing over three cents per pound in some provision about beef, and Johnson interrupts him and says, "Whoa! When you're talking about a 1,000 pound heifer and you've got 10,000 head on your ranch, that's $3 million, that's real money to a rancher." So, when he is on familiar ground, he's very sharp. 
And you hear him talking with his old chums, Southern Senators, about the civil rights bill, men who he clearly likes and respects like Richard Russell of Georgia, you can hear how patiently but stubbornly, he pushes the cause of equal rights.  
He's not doing this for political gain--you are sure of that much, listening. In fact, he knows he's going to lose a lot of votes over this. But he really believes Negroes must be liberated. And the fact is, the author of Profiles in Courage showed a lot less of that quality than Johnson did about Civil Rights. 

But when you hear him on Vietnam, that's when you realize how obscure history can be.  Mad Dog remembers that history. That's history he lived through. And he remembers Johnson on TV sounding like a perfect horse's ass, talking about defending freedom.
But on the tapes you hear him talking with Richard Russell, who tells him, "You know, Mr. President, you really do not want to be in Vietnam."
"Yes," Johnson agrees that's true. "It's the damndest mess I ever heard of and I wish to Hell we'd never got in. We just can't stay there forever."
"Thing is," Russell tells him. "Them Cong, they know that, too."
"Yup," Johnson muses. "I think you're right about that."

History is one long argument. Like all memory, it changes as new information surfaces and as our needs to use history for present day purposes change. 

But, even given the limitations of history, there is something eerie about listening to Adolph Hitler, even today, from this American moment: 
"I will tell you what has carried me to the position I have reached. Our political problems appeared complicated. The German people could make nothing of them...I on the other hand...reduced them to the simplest terms. The masses realized this and followed me."

This is why that Alabama which exists in between the urban centers in every state voted Trump: Simple answers. 

As Jake Lamotta says in "Raging Bull" when someone asks him why he is so angry, and why he needs to fight. "At least in the ring," Lamotta says, "I know who to hit."

For some folk, that's the problem. Problems are complex. Just point them in the direction of who they should hit, to solve them. Immigrants. The media. The Koreans. Anyone, just show them who to hit.


Obama was a joy to listen to, but he embraced complexity and while that was his great strength, it was also his great weakness. He would, like the Constitutional scholar he is, look at every problem from one side, then the other. 

And he was a compromiser. And he followed the rules. When the Secret Service and his West Wing staff took his computer and his cell phone from him, he acquiesced. Trump's West Wing staff tried to do the same thing, get Trump off Twitter and he told them to go to Hell--he was President and he'd damn well do what he wanted to do. And he was right and his base, which will re elect him, loves it. It is revolutionary, a new "fire side chat" putting him directly in touch with the people.

He was right, of course. And unless the Democrats can do better than Bernie Sanders, that doggedness will carry Trump to a second term.

Resenting the Immigrant

Lincoln Soldati asked "Where does the resentment and fear of the immigrant come from?"  He went on, "Have any of you, raise your hands, lost a job to an immigrant lately?"

He laughed at the Louie Gohmert line about all those dark skinned immigrants massing on the borders poised to flood across and take our jobs and to rape white women.

"Of course, if they raped women of color, he'd have no problem with that," Soldati observed.

But all this made me think.

I talk to people living in Lawrence, Mass every week, a town which is densely populated with immigrants from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Middle East, South Asia. One Black man told me he was leaving Methuen because the Hispanics have ruined his neighborhood, playing loud music, speaking Spanish.

I can think of no better depiction of resentment against immigrants than the 1989 Spike Lee movie, "Do the Right Thing," in which three Black men sit across from a Korean owned grocery and contemplate why the Koreans seem to have been successful so quickly, while they, Black men who have lived in the United States so much longer, have not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUbvT6YKPzk


That's where the resentment comes from. Not from anything the immigrants have done but from the disappointment which wells up from a sense of failure.
One of the men speaks with a Caribbean accent and he laments that Korean grocer has been off the boat no longer than three years and already has a thriving business, while he, who has been in the States for a decade has failed to acquire any wealth.

Watch that clip and you can see it all there. So many of the Trump crowd have that same sense of rage, and it must come from a sense of  humiliation--that  they have not done better, and the unspoken suspicion they cannot admit to themselves derives from their own sense that they have not done better because of their own failure to advance themselves.

It is a question they must see in the eyes of their wives: Mr. Kim across the street, he buys his wife a new car. We can barely meet the rent. What's wrong with you? And that man has to ask himself, "What's wrong with me?"
MAGA.

You Know You're In Trouble When the Russians Are Following Your Blog

Actually, Mad Dog is  not sure what to think when he checks his "audience" display and sees a lot of Russians tuned in this week.

To say nothing of the Italians, but they are the folks who elected the Italian Trump, Berlusconi, so it's hard to know what to think about them.

The Russians, on the other hand, we know are just riding the internet seas flying the skull and crossbones.

Mad Dog is comforted in that his blog audience is so small, it could fit into a single Moscow subway car.

Despite his negligible Russian ancestry, or possibly because of it, Mad Dog is pretty sure Russia is not much interested in him or his blog--they just cast a net from that pirate ship and see what they pick up.

What Mad dog particularly likes about this display is it makes it appear that he has a robust audience in Alaska, which is of course untrue. The guys out there on those king crab boats are not entertaining themselves by reading Mad Dog--they are part of America so they get the same dark green treatment because people in New Hampshire and Washington, DC tune in and it's a gerrymandered map.

Presumably, the same applies to Russia--nobody in Siberia is actually reading some hobbit from a New Hampshire shire, although it might do everyone some good if they did. Mad Dog would love to read about life and thought in Siberia, if he could find a good blog from somebody in Siberia.

No, it's probably Moscow which turns that map dark green for Mad Dog, some schlub in some dreary Moscow office who has been assigned some insignificant portion of the American internet, is tuning in and logging on to Mad Dog, while he drinks vodka to drown his boredom and sorrow. 

North Hampton, NH

He would rather be in Berlin, clubbing with attractive young ladies and drinking whatever they drink in Berlin. So, my sympathies, Mr. Schlub. You have a really uninspiring entry level internet troll job, and you'll know you're taking the next step up the ladder when they give you a better assignment with some bloggers who have thousands, rather than hundreds of followers and which have pop up ads.

Exeter, NH

If you are like most Europeans, you get 12 weeks vacation, and I'd suggest you use part of that for a holiday on the seacoast of New Hampshire, maybe even the lakes region. Eat lobster rolls (New Hampshire chicken) and expose yourself to sunshine (good for your vitamin D levels, likely pretty low after a winter in Moscow), do some surfing, meet some interesting women, talk to some Live Free or Die men, go to a minor league baseball game in Manchester. 

Plaice Cove, Hampton

Just don't get ill when you're here, because, our healthcare system is nothing you want to get involved with. They will track you down no matter where you go, Siberia even, for that $1200 Emergency Room bill. 

Eye catching: But really boring. Airheads. 

And don't miss Fox News every morning. A week of that and you'll be just dying to get back to Russia.

The Best Congress Money Can By

When Terence O'Rourke attacks his fellow Democrats Shaheen and Hassan for voting to dismember Dodd-Frank, he imputes a certain nastiness to their motivations: Oh, they are owned by "banking interests." They are banking's whores. They sold out Main Street to Wall Street.

We can and will get into this, but, ultimately, he raises a larger question: As soon as money changes hands in the political world, is there not a built in conflict of interest between serving those who voted for you and those who pay you?

$Money: The Gorilla in the Room$

This is not limited of course to politics: How can you know and dissect out motivations?

A woman meets a man in a bar. She laughs at his jokes and moves closer to him, makes eye contact which she holds steadily. She's attracted. He says, "Your place or mine?"

Right then and there we see some insight into the nature of the relationship unfolding.

If she says, "Mine," well then that may mean she wants some measure of control. It also may imply some trust on her part. If she says, "Yours," on some level that may mean she wants to know more about him, and part of that may be his wealth, his taste, his interests.

They go to his place and it's a hovel. She leaves shortly. Or, it's a palace and she sits down on his bed. What is her motivation? Is she thinking steps ahead? If I get involved with this guy, he might be a long term prospect. 

I would not be the first to consider the thought that the difference between a prostitute and a wife is their long term plans. 

It's that old joke about the woman at the bar who accepts the proposition when asked if she'll sleep with the man who offers her $50 million. 
But when he says, "Well, then will you sleep with me for $50?"
She erupts in anger: "What kind of girl do you think I am?" 
"We have already established that," says the man, "Now, we are just haggling about the price."

Now many women will say, of course the money matters in choosing a mate, partner, ally, but the consideration would never even have gotten that far unless the values of the guy were simpatico. These ladies will say: If I'm talking to a guy at a bar and he turns out to be a Trump fan, the discussion ends there. But if he voted for Bernie Sanders and he sends Planned Parenthood a check and if he marched with the women wearing the pink pussy hat, then I might just check out his apartment. If he's poor as a church mouse, I may walk; if he's living in a Penthouse, maybe I'll spend the night.

Where are you when we need you?

Did the money matter?  

This extended analogy may be quite flawed but the point is, if you accept money from somebody who you already like for other reasons, is that a moral flaw?

That Cost Money

So the top donors to Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen accepted was Emily's list a political group which sends money to women politicians who support abortion rights.  They will say, they gave me money to keep up the good fight, which I had started before they gave me the money.  
O'Rourke will say, now they've got you.  What happens when it's about late term abortion, so late term you might think it's infanticide?  Or what happens when Emily's list decides to push a bill for reparations to all Black Americans for slavery?

Does accepting money that mean Shaheen and Hassan have been bought and sold? If they got $50 million from Emily's list is that worse than they got $50?
Are we just now haggling about the price?

The fact is, you can go on to the "Open Secrets" website and it's still tough to tease out who is sending any senator money. There is also all that Dark Money we cannot trace, especially since the Supreme Court ruled money is speech. 

Money is amplified speech.

What O'Rourke has been saying is that once we know our senators have taken bank money, how can we know whether their votes for "community banks" were based on a judgment about what's good for the average citizen in New Hampshire or based on paying off the investment the banks made in the senators?

We cannot.

Our senators could reply: Look, if I took no money from anyone other than anonymous on line supporters I would have no chance to even vote. I'd never have made it to the Senate, which costs millions to run a campaign.

As matters stand, O'Rourke looks like he's tilting at windmills. "I will not take PAC money. The only consideration should be what's right."

He says that in a long line of thinkers who saw clearly the impact of money on moral decision making.  Alexander Yersin, the doctor who identified the bacillus which causes the Black plague, the first doctor to come up with an effective anti serum against plague, the first man in the history of mankind to defeat that scourge which had wiped out large portions of humanity across Europe, refused to practice medicine.  He said simply: "I could never practice medicine because I could never say to a man, 'Your money or your life.'" (Of course, that was before government sponsored National Health Care in France.) 

Conqueror of the Black Death

Like Ralph Nader, he did substantial good outside the established system. 
When he arrived in Hong Kong, a British crown colony, the British authorities would not allow him access to plague victims. They already had their selected doctors in place. So Yersin worked outside of the establishment and succeeded in conquering plague while the British effort sunk beneath the waves. 

Is he correct or too pure?

I once saw a man on a soap box speaking in Hyde Park, London.  He said, "I refuse to speak to a crowd of less than 500 people! My insights, my thoughts are simply too valuable and profound to squander on an audience of smaller size!"

Of course, the joke was, he might have been correct about the importance of what he had to say, but he was never going to get a chance to say it.

Good Luck with That 

I can write a blog which is read by only a few hundred people every week and which gets no responses. I can shout into the void and tell myself if there is a sound in the forest and only I can hear it, it's still a sound.

But I'm not running for Congress. You do that and you better take steps to get heard.

Drawing Conclusions, Inferring Motivations from Campaign Contributions

A Democratic candidate for the New Hampshire 1st U.S. Congress seat is getting a lot of attention for saying that New Hampshire's two Democratic senators sold out to the bank lobby when they voted for a change (gutting/repealing/repairing--depending on your point of view) of the Dodd Frank Act which was supposed to protect Main Street from Wall Street after the near catastrophe of the financial meltdown of 2008.

Terence O'Rourke says their votes to "gut" Dodd Frank were a betrayal of core Democratic Party principles and the reason for their votes was simple: They are in the pay of the banking industry lobby.

Barney Frank, in his youtube video begs to disagree:
He is the author of the law which the Senate voted to change and he says 95% of the law was left intact by the changes, so it was hardly an evisceration of the law.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NUlVA8dT5A

He explains that the American banking industry has 3 components: Big banks with over $250 billion dollars (often trillions) in assets, which if they fail could start a chain reaction in the economy.   Middle size banks which hold between $10 and $250 billion and "community banks," small banks which played no role in the financial crisis.

The changes would exempt all but the banks with over $250 billion from federal government stress tests to be sure they are not going to fail.

Community banks, the little guys have complained that a law intended to discipline the big boys has instead been thwarting the health and vitality of the little guys and they want that fixed.

That's what Senators Shaheen and Hassan voted for. 

Responding to inquiry from Mad Dog, Senator Shaheen said, "As with most broad reform legislation, time reveals improvements that need to be made. Main street lenders did not cause the financial cris, but many small banks and credit unions located int New Hampshire were unnecessarily burdened by the Dodd-Frank Act. I have heard directly from many community banks and credit unions in New Hampshire."

So she argues, she was responding to her constituents and as often happens with complex fixes, the fix has to be adjusted later.

O'Rourke says this is poppycock, that both senators have received money from the banking industry and that's why they voted to change the law.They were bought off.

Looking on line the two biggest contributors to both senators seem to not be banks but something called, "Emily's List" an pro abortion organization. O'Rourke does not argue the senators are pro choice because of this.

The next big contributors to both is something called "J Street" a pro Israel lobby.

Then there are "law firms" and "real estate" which might be banks.

But let's suppose Mad Dog's internet research is wrong and both have received money from the banks. Does that mean we must conclude that money bought their votes on this particular bill?

It is hard to prove the money did NOT buy their votes, but they are getting money from all sorts of sources and what might be banking interests looks small enough that if they never got another cent from them, it wouldn't make a big dent.

What O'Rourke may be saying is that with our current system, we've got legalized bribery.  We give you money. We are banks. Legislation comes up which we tell you is good for us. We expect you to vote our way. We expect a return on investment.

O'Rourke says he won't take money this way and he faults the senators for participating in the game as it is currently played because it looks like their votes were bought, or might have been bought or at least influenced by campaign contributions.

When Hillary Clinton tried to explain those $250K "speaker's fees" from Wall Street firms, she basically said, "Everyone does it and it didn't ever affect the way I voted."

Donald Trump was able to label her "Crooked Hillary" because she could never make that appearance of being bought look like good clean fun. 

Apparently our two senators are in the same position now. O'Rourke is making essentially the same claim Trump made about Clinton: The optics are bad.

But the difference is the magnitude. They got some money, but compared to the money they had coming from other sources, chump change.

Mad Dog really does not believe either Senator is corrupt, or bought. He does believe they responded to the "community bankers" pressure, but isn't that their job?

One man's legalized bribery is another man's redress of grievances.

Barney Frank has said Democrats should not throw the baby out with the bath water. He says senators who voted to amend his law were violating no core principles; they were just trying to survive.

O'Rourke says this has to change. 

Mad Dog suspects both senators have clear consciences about their votes. 
How are you going to run if you don't solicit and receive campaign contributions? But if you do, then how are you going to convince your constituents your vote on legislation was not influenced by the money?

Lambs to the Slaughter

There are the issues:  How do we approach the opioid crisis (which is not just one problem but several); guns (ditto--many problems wrapped in a single cloth); healthcare (again); income inequality; endless war; abortion (oh, God); immigration; globalization; climate change.

And then there is the personality: When Democrats face a strongman (or, really, a phony strongman) Trump and all his Lilliputian disciples and henchmen, how do you respond? With whom do you respond?

Much as we may be inspired by him, Gandhi would have been on a fast train to Auschwitz and never been heard of again, had he faced Hitler instead of the English crown and parliament.

England needed a tough guy to rally around, a Chruchill who could growl, belittle and inspire. 

He was a man for his time, but remember, the British electorate threw him out of office promptly after the war ended.

I'm not saying we can never look for another Obama, but really, how would even Obama be able to respond to Trumpism? In fact, is Trump not the inevitable reaction to the cool, informed, careful Obama?

We have 8 candidates for Congress for the New Hampshire first. 

Among them are some real prospects: Mad Dog counts three who he thinks could stand up against the thug Republicans, maybe four.

But when he talks, briefly, with his comrades in arms, he is confounded, confused and mystified by who they gravitate towards.

It is really apparent that Trump fans tend to fall into two or three easily defined categories:  the dull, the rich and the pathologically resentful. 

Democrats come toward selecting representatives from all sorts of angles: Is he kind to gays and transgenders? Does he embrace immigrants? Is he appalled by guns? Does he appreciate the importance of women's rights? And on and on. 

Every Democrat has his or her own burning issue and required personality profile for the candidate.

The only thing which unifies Democrats now is Not Trump.