Distraction 101: Epstein? No Obama!

 

One thing about the digital age and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is it is easier to see what's coming: the algorithm is plainly visible. 

For example: I say, "Epstein/Trump" then the algorithm directs you to "Obama/Biden."

And, if prices go up following tariffs under Trump, then you get, "It's Biden's fault!"

Or, if Jeffrey Epstein's affair with Trump is the headline, then you get "It's Obama's fault!" or "What about Obama?He tried to steal the election!"

Or, if Ukraine suffers a Russian bombing after America abandons defending democracy, it's "Leftist, elitists antisemites want to abandon Israel and the Jews!"

At least the electronic flow seems to have shoved "It's Hillary's fault" and "What about Vince Foster" lower down in the chain of dribble. So that's something.

And when mention is made of the great steal in the big beautiful bill giving huge windfalls to the billionaires and driving up prices of eggs for the middle class, well that's all just, wait for it, "Ivy league elitist, leftist, antisemitic, communist Democrat" talk.

"Evidence" is by links to websites of unimpeachable integrity, like QANON, The Storm Front, Infowars, The Coming Apocalypse, The War Room, and sometimes, The Joe Rogan Experience. 

Mad Dog is waiting for new unimpeachable sites with better names like: Huge Biceps and Delts, Shaved Scrotal Truth, Musk Scent, Testosterone Surplus, Predator Predilections, Champion Bloodlines and all like that.

We now can see the algorithmic pathway from "If Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue" to "Then Obama made him do it!" or "It was really Obama!" or "It was the Clinton/Obama/Biden/Democrat cabal," or "He was in fear for his life--Just look at his Ear!"

Predictability is something markets and political institutions crave and need, and the predictability of these algorithmic pathways offers balance, stability.

It, of course, can get tedious, as any mention of climate change goes straight to "Chinese plot" and floods to "Biblical apocalypse--Obama's fault."

But, at least we can see what's coming. 

Curiouser and Curiouser: An Odacious Claim!

 

Dominatrix Donald posted a video--a Deep Fake AI product--showing him sitting in a gold chair and laughing as President Obama is wrestled away, arrested by some sunglass wearing men in dark suits, in the Oval Office.

Stephen Colbert showed this to his audience and there was a momentary stunned silence, not because anyone thought this video was anything other than bogus, phony an obvious fake, but because the Donald posted it. Because Donald seemed to think it was somehow effective, in some way, to some purpose.

What was he thinking?

And Colbert reacted, in what could have been a spontaneous expostulation, just as Mad Dog did: "What the Fuck is Wrong with this guy?"

Colbert got a little more analytical:

“Whenever Trump is backed into a corner, he needs to change the subject and throw red meat to the carnivorous base. And their favorite cut is filet of Obama.”

And we all move on.

Clearly, Trump has never gotten over being humiliated by Obama at the White House Correspondents' dinner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE&t=9s

Obama, of course, is everything Trump could never in a hundred years be: He is poised, articulate, suave, urbane and genuinely funny, not to mention, physically, he is lean and sinewy and played basketball to relax. A three star general spoke on the Seacoast about his meeting with Obama and he mentioned, rather unplanned, how physically impressive Obama is in person.  He radiates strength, agility and sinewy vitality, or did when he was in the White House.

Trump is, of course, corpulent, hunched, painfully unathletic. His sport is golf although he might do photo ops for tennis. He is that species of rich boy whose father bought him all the best equipment, a football uniform all decked out, but he simply was not a player, could not take a hit and was all show, no sinew.

Trump kept insisting his "investigation" of Obama's "fake birth certificate" had uncovered incriminating and disqualifying evidence Obama was not born in Hawaii but rather Kenya, but of course, this was all a bald faced lie. Obama waited for the perfect moment to reply--the WHC dinner--and when he did it was with devasting effect.  The withering disdain was wrapped in laughter and Trump simply hunched over and had to take it.

But now, Trump is trying to respond.

Like so many of his trolls, Trump thinks if you shout, "You're a doo-doo face!" or its equivalent, that will make your target just fall over dead or immobilized. "You're a left wing, arrogant, elitist" will function as a paralyzing sting from a jelly fish. 

Which leaves an educated person somewhat at a loss. 

You've been trained to listen to argument, consider the evidence presented, analyze its weaknesses and present evidence of your own, but what do you do with "You're a doo-doo face!"

Or with a fake video of the arrest of Obama, a dreamscape of a mind turned to, or revealed to be, mush.

Troll

 

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, I bailed.

But just before that I had seen a phenomenon now called, "The Troll"

Okay, does anybody have any conflict-resolution strategies that aren't spraying liquid from your anal glands?

The only trolls I had ever heard of were Scandinavian, and in Reykjavik, Iceland, and  they were more or less celebrated.  

But the rise of the internet troll was something different:

Professor Google informed me, "Internet trolls are individuals who intentionally disrupt online communities by posting inflammatory, provocation or offensive messages with the goal of eliciting emotional reactions and causing conflict."

Some time ago this small blog attracted its very own troll, which says something for a blog which has not attracted much in the way of readership, even less in the way of response. From the "stats" section of the blog it looks like most posts garner only a few thousand clicks, and those are mostly from South America and Asia for some reason. Maybe those clicks come from robots.

Mad Dog does not know, in fact if his troll, BOT Aon Troll, is even a real person.

In "Roger Rabbit" human beings interact with cartoons ("Toons") as if they are real people, who have feelings and rights. Is this the world Mad Dog has entered with his very own BOT Anon?

There is reason to suspect it/he is not a human being with a sentient self: In a recent post, the issue of what it means to be Jewish, what constitutes Jewish identity, Mad Dog noted that Professor Google says for many if not most Jews, Jewishness cannot be converted to, but is only inherited, and only through the maternal line. 

This came up because BOT Anon had offered up Trump's "Jewish daughter and grandchildren" as proof Trump could not be an antisemite. When Mad Dog suggested Trump's daughter--who married a Jewish man and converted into Judaism--does not really qualify (in the eyes of many Jews.) 

BOT Anon responded with a link to Marilyn Monroe's certificate of conversion to Judaism. 

She's a Toon, but is she Human?

This clearly suggested an algorithm: Key word/phrase, "conversion to Judaism" and ping: up comes Marilyn Monroe, even if Marilyn, gorgeous as she was, had nothing to do with Trump's putative "Jewish grandchildren" or even with Invanka's conversion, but not with true Judaism. 

This was a point which would, presumably elude a BOT using AI.

One could argue that if Trump were willing to allow his daughter to marry a Jew, that proves he could not be antisemitic, a dubious proposition, even if he is seen to be embracing his daughter's choice. But, significantly, BOT Anon Troll never came up with this obvious reply.

BOT Anon Troll did not respond to Mad Dog's dogged challenges about what it means to be Jewish until, after repeated and relentless probing: "I am not an expert" in religious questions pertaining to Judaism popped up. 

This might be fair enough, as many Jews, particularly and famously Israeli Jews, are pretty secular and do not know much about religious issues.  But if Mad Dog's unscientific survey of Jewish friends means anything, every Jew knows about maternal transmission of Judaism. 

Of course, BOT Anon never actually said he was Jewish, but his references to the anti-Defamation league and repeated admonitions  that Hamas is an existential threat to Jews, and his depiction of just about any comment as having rabid antisemitism embedded in it allows for a reasonable, if tentative conclusion if he is a sentient human Homo Sapiens, he is a Jewish Homo Sapiens.

One cannot read his ardent insistence that stopping the carnage in Palestine would mean the extinction of Jews any other way. 

The idea of trolling, of course, is not resolution of conflict.

 The idea of trolling is fostering conflict. 

Also domination. 

The BOT of this blog has a rubber stamp "leftist, privileged, elitist, Ivy League, delusional," string of adjectives which appears at the start of  virtually every response, and is meant to demean, delegitimize and intimidate.

"Oh," Mad Dog is meant to respond: "I don't want to be guilty of being any of THOSE things, so I'll just bend the knee and say, 'Yes, you are SO right and I'm so misguided,' so we really should be bombing women and children in Palestine until there aren't any left. That is the only way to ensure the survival of the Jews! I agree! And thank you so much, Master, for bringing this to my attention!'"

The quandary for Mad Dog has been: To respond or not to respond. 

Some have urged Mad Dog to simply ignore BOT Anon Troll, but this is a particularly sensitive issue for Mad Dog as he takes Bertrand Russell's observation as something nearly sacred: The ultimate damage you can do to your fellow human being is not to hate them but to ignore them.

Professor Google says of Russell:

"He believed that societies thrive when individuals are willing to listen to and engage with differing viewpoints, even those they find disagreeable. Ignoring or dismissing others, especially those with different opinions, can lead to harmful divisions and obstruct the path to a harmonious society. "

On the other hand, Mad Dog is left with the quandary: 

Has it come to this?

Is Mad Dog now committed to debating a robot?

What Was the Wonderful Secret?

 When Donald Trump was beating the drum about his own "investigation" of Barack Obama's birth certificate, he said, "Oh, you'd be surprised the things we are finding."

Of course, we were not surprised, because they were finding absolutely nothing.

Obama responded at the Washington Correspondents' Dinner by playing the scene from the Lion King showing the birth of the new young lion king being held aloft by a baboon, and saying this was even better than a birth certificate: This was his birth video.

Brought the house down. 

If Mad Dog recalls correctly, Donald Trump was there as people laughed at him.

But now, we have, under the "you'd be surprised by the things we're finding" rubric this letter published by the Wall Street Journal, which Trump purportedly wrote to Epstein which got put into a birthday book for Epstein:

It takes the form of an  imagined conversation between the two as imagined by Trump:

"There must be more to life than having everything. 

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won't tell you what it is. 

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is. 

Donald: We have certain things in common, 

Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey: Yes, we do. Come to think of it. 

Donald: Enigmas never age. Have you noticed that?

 Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you. 

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret. "

So, is it just Mad Dog's ice age sensibility, or does this sound homoerotic? You are my wonderful secret, etc., etc.

Trump's public persona, in which he revels is a playboy who loves women and, as he says, particularly young women. He does not deny that. He promotes that. He's a womanizer who grabs women by the pussy. MAGATs love it. He's authentic!

One does wonder, Mad Dog admits, about men who "protest too much" about their own attraction to women. 

It's that thing from "Avenue Q" about the puppet who everyone suspects is gay, because they never have seen him with a girl, but he sings about his girlfriend who nobody ever sees visit him, because she lives in Alberta, Canada. 

"Her name is Alberta
She live in Vancouver
She cooks like my mother
And sucks like a Hoover.

I e-mail her every single day
Just to make sure that everything's okay.
It's a pity she lives so far away, in Canada!

Last week she was here, but she had the flu.
Too bad
'Cause I wanted to introduce her to you
It's so sad
There wasn't a thing that she could do
But stay in bed with her legs up over her head!
Oh!

I wish you could meet my girlfriend,
But you can't because she is in Canada.
I love her, I miss her, I can't wait to kiss her,
So soon I'll be off to Alberta!
I mean Vancouver!
Shit! Her name is Alberta, she lives in Vancou-"

So why should his association with Epstein be so vexing?

Nobody has called Trump a pederast, even though everyone calls Epstein that. 

So, what is it about this letter that would make Trump sue the WSJ for a gazillion dollars?

Maybe Mad Dog's imagination is limited, but somehow he would not be surprised to see a headline on the National Enquirer tomorrow:

"TRUMP AND EPSTEIN SECRET LOVERS!!!!!!!"

"MELANIA SAYS: THEIR AFFAIR NEARLY WRECKED OUR MARRIAGE!!!!!"

But why would that be such a problem?

Being gay is no longer a problem in America, far as Mad Dog can see.

But among the uber masculine, testosterone driven crowd which comprises the MAGA world, maybe this would be a problem.

As Jonathan Capehart (who is gay) and David Brooks (who is not) remarked on the PBS News Hour (which Trump is defunding): Who cares about Epstein? We have vaccine denial, defunding weather services, ICE goon squads to talk about. But what is everyone talking about? Epstein!

Go figure.

The Message Sent

Locked out of power at the federal level, Democrats are struggling to show that they have taken to heart the message that voters sent in November and are well suited to regain power in future elections.

--The New York Times articles about autopsy conducted by the Democratic National Committee of the 2024 election

"Political Science" was a popular college major when Mad Dog was at university, but Mad Dog could not see then, nor since, where the "science" was in that.

Donald Trump ran on a very canny slogan: Kamala is for they/them; I'm for you.

Didn't that just say it all? Kamala is for those colored people from South of the Border. Kamala is for making your kids into transgenders, putting transgenders into your daughter's locker rooms and toilets, allowing some transgender male to run over your daughter at her field hockey game. Kamala is for giving away your money to them. It's us against them.

And Democrats walked right into that.

So that is Mad Dog's analysis. Is there any science to it?

None whatsoever. This is all drawn from field work, sampling opinions while knocking on doors in Hampton. Listening to blue collar workers in his offices and conversations around town.

But when Mad Dog suggested the Hampton Dems put people outside the polls on Election Day and conduct exit interviews to see how people voted and why, his fellow Dems scowled and snorted and said that was a ridiculous and misguided suggestion.

Granted, exit polling done right has to be randomized and done according to rules of surveying to be scientific.

Mad Dog was proposing to forget all that: rather than interviewing every 8th voter (to get a random sample) Mad Dog wanted to simply open up 10 desks with a sign: Tell Us Why You Voted the Way You Did!"

You would certainly not get a random sample that way; you'd get people who were not hurrying off to take children to school, people who were not trying to get to work. You'd get people with an axe to grind. But that might be revealing. And if you never try it, how do you know what you'll actually hear?

At any rate, if the Democrats really were interested in doing an "autopsy" that implies science, as an autopsy is very scientific, methodical and eyes wide open.

But, it sounds like the Democrats are not going to spend their time and money looking for uncomfortable truths.

 They'll just spend money.

Soothing Hot Toddy of White Trash

 When you're weary, feeling blue, 

When tears are in your eyes, 

History can pull you through.

That's the way it is for Mad Dog, reading things like "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg, for the umpteenth time.  When you look at Trump next to Andrew Johnson, or Andrew Jackson, or Woodrow Wilson, or Jefferson Davis, you realize as loathsome, as fatuous as he is, we've had Presidents every bit as bad and somehow, the nation survived because the United States is not a porcelain trophy on someone's mantle, but it is a swampy thing, which periodically floods, then desiccates, then flowers again, then returns to some other part of a long cycle.

Trump has given us RFK JR and Kristi Noem, but Teddy Roosevelt was in bed with Charles Davenport and Francis Galton, who thought the white race supreme over all others, who thought intelligence and poor character could be inherited, who believed in sterilizing or even killing imbeciles and morons for purposes of breeding a superior race of human beings as you breed race horses. 

And Oliver Wendel Holmes wrote the famous Buck decision approving the sterilization of a woman thought to be mentally retarded and ended his opinion with "Three generations of imbeciles are enough!" These "defectives" breed and either commit crimes or starve or become dependent on the state and so it is only a matter of self defense for the United States government to get rid of them. This opinion was cited by the defense of Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.  The defense counsel was quite correct, if maddeningly sly, to point out that much of the racial theory and justification for extermination camps of the Nazis was drawn from American (and British) writers and theorists. 

There was a reason Adolph Hitler had a photo of Henry Ford hung on his office wall--Ford the author of the polemic, "The International Jew."

It is actually a relatively recent phenomenon--dating back only 60 years really, that the idea really took hold, that people of all races are capable of equal intellectual attainment, that our laws really should embrace the idea that all men, all races are or should be considered equal in the eyes of the law and the government.

Even Lincoln spoke of "very intelligent Negroes" and his solution to the slave problem would have been to deport them all to Liberia, to reverse the history of having brought them here in slave ships. He knew the African American was the cause of the Civil War and he wanted to avoid that catastrophic, heroic and defining epic.

Wilson was an out and out white supremacist and even Teddy Roosevelt believed in Kipling's white man's burden and while he invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner--inflaming the South into a near second insurrection --he really made Booker T the exception. For the most part he believed allowing lower forms of human beings to immigrate into the United States was racial suicide.

For the most part, until the 20th century--1924 to be exact--the United States had open borders. (The Chinese Exclusion Act being the exception that proved the rule.) But in 1924 "eugenicists" like Davenport convinced the Congress that allowing people from Italy, Ireland, the Slavic countries, Africa, to freely immigrate would poison the blood and the purity of White, Christian America.

Trump likely did not know it, but he was echoing these racial purity/racial improvement types when he lamented that the only people who seem to want to immigrate to America are from "shithole  countries," and why couldn't we be getting some nice, blonde people from Norway? Or, as it turned out, from South Africa, which was the only country with some affluent white people who wanted to actually leave their country an come to America.

Of course, those blondes in Scandinavia, Germany and even Ireland were laughing at Trump: Why should we want to leave our free healthcare, free education, supportive governments and open societies for the United States, with its mass shootings, its "culture of death" and its President Donald Trump who calls climate change a Chinese hoax and who thinks vaccines cause autism and worse.

Right now, the mentally impaired have nothing to fear from Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Buck decision: They are, in fact, in charge. 

Stephen Colbert

 Not much knowledge of the Third Reich is needed to hear the echos of how that regime went after its critics, and the firing of Stephen Colbert as the big corporation bent over for Trump and supplicated. 

Corporations are, of course, not about conscience, as Milton Friedman gleefully told us, but about profit.

But, in  the case of certain public figures, they simply are bigger than the Lilliputians. Bob Dylan was bigger than the Nobel prize, and Steve Colbert is bigger than Paramount. He doesn't need Paramount and will land elsewhere and leave the corporate suits behind him. 

He has exposed the naked emperor mercilessly and effectively and he'll find a new place to reach his nearly 2 million loyal fans. 

But one thing is obvious: This was not a decision driven by profits, dollars from advertising, and decline in late night viewership as other forms of media eclipse the Old Johnny Carson model. This was a sheer cave in by corporate suits intent on keeping a merger on track. Like Columbia University, the suits caved to Trump.  CBS was no Harvard. No guts. 

Colbert may not be a Zelensky, but he is good enough for America's purposes.  When Lincoln first saw Philip Sheridan he remarked to Grant that Sheridan looked very small to be a general. "When the fighting starts, he will be big enough for the purpose," Grant remarked. Sheridan, of course, proved him more than right, and that remark became the understatement of the century.

The relentless scouring of America's resistance, whether it be comedians, police, local government office holders, scientists, teachers is not new in American history--if you look back carefully.

It will take a while to undo the corrosion Trump will cause, but eventually, the mighty pendulum of history will swing back the other way, and we'll laugh at the absurdity that is Trump, as we now laugh at Teddy Roosevelt for buying into the idea of "race suicide" and of all the eugenicists like Davenport who thought fecklessness could be genetically inherited, and Woodrow Wilson who thought women unfit for the vote.

They were all dinosaurs slated for extinction. Well, not extinction actually, because they proved to be zombies: reborn every several generations to re emerge like those cicadas from underground, from under rocks, to claim only White males of the proper heritage can be entrusted to run the world.

Trump likens himself to Andrew Jackson, who was hideous in his own way, but Trump is actually more like Andrew Johnson, who had some instincts in the direction of the common man, but who could not get past the idea there are superior white men who should run the world, and all the others should be ignored or shunted aside.

The 14th amendment, insuring birthright citizenship, voting rights for Black men and which denied the right to hold office or vote to former traitors (i.e. Confederates) was passed to thwart Andrew Johnson's attempts to undo the outcome of the Civil War, to deny Black people real freedom. 

Trump, of course, believes traitors and insurrectionists should be pardoned, especially if they they are invading the Capitol to protest his electoral loss.

Trump, of course, is a simple buffoon, and the real creepy crawly,  slithy toves are those like Steven Miller, who pullulate in the slimy swamps from which they all emanate. 

But, as Lincoln said, "This, too,shall pass."

ICE on the Seacoast

 The July 14, 2025 meeting of the Select Board was an exercise in the New Hampshire version of democracy in action. Which is to say members of the public were allowed to speak, to voice their opinions but this is not exactly a redress of grievances. The Board does not engage in "back and forth." Once elected, apparently you may, as with gods, pray to them but do not expect an answer. Live Free or Die.

Actual Patriot

Governor Ayotte had just signed a law requiring local town police departments to cooperate, aide and abet masked ICE agents as they abduct people from Hampton streets for the crime of not looking like they come from here.

We should all feel much safer for this cooperative police action, we were told by Representative to the State House Linda McGrath, who also let everyone in on a little secret apparently only she knows about: There are row houses just across the Piscataqua River in Maine, filled with Chinese Mafia, and they are just ever so eager to launch an attack on New Hampshire Seacoast towns. No cat or dog will be safe in Hampton, unless we allow our police to cooperate with ICE.

Regina Barnes excoriated those objecting to this melding of town police with ICE agents as people who are taking a simple matter of law enforcement and turning it into something it is not: POLITICS!

Imagine that! Making immigration political!

As if neither Ms. Barnes nor Ms. McGrath are not political down to their MAGA undergarments.

As if this whole law is not simply MAGA agency invading the statehouse and then washing downstream to drown the liberties of Hampton citizens.

As noted in previous posts, Chris Muns and others spoke at the meeting but one speaker particularly caught Mad Dog's attention for her power and brevity.

Brevity can sometimes be a power in itself. Before Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, the speaker who preceded him spoke for 2 hours. Lincoln spoke for less than 5 minutes and his predecessor told him afterwards: "I wish I had managed to say in 2 hours anything close to the importance of what you said in a few minutes."

Something of the sort obtains with the remarks of Cybele Grier:

"The ICE raids we see being carried out in American communities across this country are nothing short of state sponsored terror. ICE raids do not make neighborhoods or our communities safer. In fact, they make them more dangerous for all of us.

This is not who we are as Americans. I do not want us living in a police state like Putin's Russia or Erdogan's Turkey. This is not who we are. These are not our values. It is un-American!

Select Board, I urge you, say No to our Police Chief signing any cooperative agreement with ICE. Our police officers should be focused on making our community safer. I want them to stay focused on Hamton's issues and not do the federal government's job with our tax paying dollars."

******

Five cheers for Ms. Grier!

The fact is, we have seen things like this before in America. We corralled Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII while their sons died fighting for America in Italy. IWW "Wobblies" were rounded up in Western towns and deported out of state. Emma Goldman was deported for saying unkind things about Woodrow Wilson and J. Edgar Hoover. 

America has always been berserk. We have occasionally managed to do astonishing and unique things: We are the only country in the planet's history to fight a Civil War on behalf of an underclass, trying to liberate from above those who could not do it for themselves. We created Social Security and Medicare and we put up a statue in New York Harbor with a poem by Emma Lazurus which said, "Send me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." 

But we have also elected Donald Trump twice. And now he is here in Hampton. 

This is what Ms. Grier reminded us.

July 16

 July 16th has longstanding bleak resonance in Mad Dog's life, for personal reasons.

But in cosmic terms, July 16, 1945 is the day the world ended, in Kurt Vonnegut's words, the day Robert Oppenheimer's Trinity test in New Mexico exploded the first atomic bomb. 

That sword of Damocles is still hovering over our heads.

Vladimir Putin continues to snarl about using nuclear weapons whenever he feels particularly threatened in his rat cage. 

We still have people with their fingers on the button who are men who are determined to prove they are real men, not cowards.

As Adlai Stevenson once said, "Maybe what the world needs when it comes to nuclear extinction is a man who is willing to be a coward."

What the world needs is another Mickhail Gorbachev.

 

Hasn't been one since him.

Oddly, it took a President likely in early dementia, a man who race baited, who invented the "Welfare Queen" a man who said that there will always be poor and implied the poor deserve to be poor and if they worked harder they wouldn't be poor--that same President was able to say, having 1500 missiles armed with multiple warheads is enough.  And so we came down from 70,000 on each side to simply enough missiles to annihilate both countries but maybe leave a sliver of habitable planet.

Having read two of Gorbachev's memoirs, Mad Dog wound up thinking: Too bad we didn't have an American Gorbachev. Never have. Never will.

And Gorbachev was overthrown, dismissed and ostracized for his humanity. But while he lasted he was a world figure who may just have saved humanity from itself.

Surely, Harry Truman was nothing close. He never lost a wink of sleep about dropping atom bombs. To his credit he resisted dropping them in Korea or elsewhere.

During Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson went down the road of trying to prove his masculinity with bombs, but he resisted the advice from his Dr. Strangelove generals to drop atomic bombs on North Vietnam.

For all the existential threats we face today: climate change, pandemics, nuclear Armageddon is the game ender.  

That is the legacy of July 16.

Who Believes Jeffrey Epstein Committed Suicide?

 Not me.

Chris Muns at The Select Board: A Glimmer of Sanity and Stature

Yesterday, July 14, Bastille Day, at the meeting of the Select Board of Hampton, NH, people spoke in favor of allowing/forcing Hampton police to cooperate, aide, abet ICE officers in Hampton, and others spoke against it.

Chris Muns

As has been true at similar meetings, former chief of Hampton police, and former Selectman Rich Sawyer, and current Deputy Sheriff of Rockingham County (in which Hampton is located)  leapt up to set the stage for the discussion to follow by saying:

1. It is not within the power of the Select Board or any local government to refuse to cooperate with ICE. As a current Deputy Sheriff of Rockingham County his office has "entered into an agreement" with ICE which is meant to train police how to avoid getting sued, when they pull people who don't look like they come from here out of their cars, and hand them over to ICE. He said there is a lot of misinformation out there about the agreements between ICE and the sheriff and the Hampton Police. 

(This surprised Mad Dog because there is almost no information out there about what the Sheriff or the chief of Hampton police have agreed to. In fact, there has been a news black out about this. When asked exactly what has been agreed to or what is even being considered neither the Chief of Police nor the Sheriff has said word one.)

2. Nobody should worry about the police cooperating with ICE because police are the good guys.

Having been thus told that nothing we might have to say during the "Comments" part of the Select Board meeting would have the slightest effect on what is coming down the road from Governor Ayotte, the legislature in Concord and ICE itself, members of the seventy-five or so people who crowded in the basement at Town Hall got up to say what they came to say, no matter what Deputy Sheriff Sawyer said, or how dismissive he or anyone else might be.

Deputy Sheriff Sawyer's admonition did not seem to register with Hampton State Representative Linda McGrath, who promptly admonished the assembled citizens that illegal immigrants have flooded across the Southern border at the rate of 10 million a year,  100,000 of whom are dangerous felons, rapists and murderers. Where she got those numbers one can only imagine, but if you're interested, you might Google Qanon, or The Storm Front, or White, Aryan Nation. 

And not just that! Representative McGrath revealed, for the first time,  that just across our border, in Maine, are row houses filled with "Chinese Mafia," raring to rape and pillage in New Hampshire. 

She also complained that this is all just a question of concern to police, but some people are trying to introduce politics to it. 

It was all Mad Dog could do to stay in his seat and not rise up and shout: "There is nothing more political than this! Nothing more political than immigration! And you are political right down to your MAGA underpants!"

But Mad Dog was subdued by his friends who murmured: "Don't worry, Chris is going to speak."

Linda McGrath at Large

One could only pity the other Representatives from Hampton, who have to drive to Concord every week and listen to Ms. McGrath. Listening to her speak last night--she spoke twice--Mad Dog began wondering if it was such a good idea to reduce the number of psychiatric beds in the state, as the Republicans have done every time they get control, although now Mad Dog knows why they reduce those slots--presumably, on some level, they know who would be conveyed to those psychiatric facilities. These people know its better to be a state Rep than a resident of a psych ward, which is where they really, most sincerely do belong, Ding Dong.

And then, as promised, Chris Muns rose to speak. 

Chris is  one of the four Hampton representatives to the House of Representatives at Concord.  He noted (as you will see below) there is, in fact, something which can be done by the Select Board, and by extension, by all those Hampton citizens who cringe at the idea of masked goon squads waylaying roofers, or landscapers who are trying to drive to and from jobs in Hampton guilty of the crime of looking like they don't come from hereabouts.

Chris Muns is well known in Hampton from his work in Concord as a Representative, from his work with the Hampton schools and from many campaigns where he went door to door for thousands of doors.  He is ordinarily the essence of fairness, tact and civility.

Last night he got his Dutch up, one might say.

Here is the text  of what Representative Muns said:

.

"Members of the Board:

Establishing and enforcing our immigration laws is a federal responsibility. As we struggle to fix our broken immigration system, we need to support the difficult job law enforcement has enforcing the immigration laws currently on the books. And we need to make sure everything we ask them to do is consistent not only with those laws but the moral principles upon which this country was founded.

Two of those are that in America EVERYONE is considered innocent until proven guilty and EVERYONE is entitled to due process under the law. We must not stray from those principles, and we must not allow our LOCAL police officers to be put in a position where they may be forced to stray from them.

There are well-established practices and procedures in place that our police officers follow when they stop or detain someone to determine if there are any outstanding warrants against that individual from other jurisdictions, including their federal partners. There is no reason why they should not continue to follow those practices and procedures if they identify someone with an outstanding immigration related charge against them.

But our local police department should NOT enter into a so-called section 287(g) agreement with ICE. These agreements deputize local law enforcement as agents of ICE and make them available to participate in enforcement actions ICE chooses to take. Not only will the federal government NOT reimburse the town for any expenses incurred by our officers while engaged in those activities but given some of the questionable practices of ICE we have seen, it could expose those officers and the town to significant legal liability. SB62 which was signed into law by Governor Ayotte gives our Chief of Police the authority to enter into one of these agreements and removes you – our Select Board –from that process. I have the utmost respect for our Police Chief and the work he and everyone in our police department has done to build and maintain trust in our community. That is precisely why I do not want us to put him in the position of having to make this decision – on his own – without any input from “we the people” of Hampton, particularly as the pressure from ICE and Governor Ayotte’s administration increases.

SB62 is also an unfunded state mandate, increasing our share of law enforcement costs that the state already does not reimburse us for.

To provide our Chief of Police with a sense of where you – the elected leaders of our town – stand on this issue, I urge you pass a “sense of the board” resolution stating that it is not – at the present time – in the best interests of our town for our Police Department to enter into any additional agreements to provide additional assistance enforcing our immigration laws over and above what they are already doing."

And so, Mad Dog heaved a sigh of relief. 

Decency may not prevail, but it survives.