Fathered by an Orangutan?

Just stumbled over a list of people Donald Joffrey Trump has threatened to sue.  Bill Maher made the list for claiming the Donald was fathered by an orangutan.

On the surface, Mr. Trump might appear to have a case, until you look at the actual orange peach and then back at the orangutan. 
I don't know. I might volunteer to represent Mr. Maher. This may be a strong family resemblance. 
On the other hand, the orangutan might have the more significant cause for complaint, if you are talking about sullied images. 

P.S.:
Ms. Maud has raised the horrific image of Donald Joffrey's conception--the Great White Wail, indeed.
This is in a long tradition of animal/human intercourse. As we all recall, Zeus assumed the form of a swan, which he knew no human female could resist, and he conceived some offspring with Leda.

Michael Moore Explains President Trump

Michael Moore hangs out with "real" Americans--White, high school (un)educated, work a day Americans.  He explains why they love Donald Trump.


These are the losers in our capitalistic society, the masses of workers who do not own shops, do not invent things, but who more or less passively passed through the doors of factories where they were taught to assemble cars, computers, shoes, clothes and were paid a living wage to do it.


They often had little schemes and scams on the side to supplement their wages, and they had health insurance and even some of them had pensions. Actually, they never had any of this stuff--their parents who worked at GM and Ford and US Steel had these things, and the current masses remember dimly this Ozzie and Harriet life, which seemed, through the nostalgic lenses, a Great America.


Now Mr. Trump promises to bring those golden days back again--factories back to Flint and Dearborn and Pittsburg and Cleveland and Gary and Oakland and with those factories, jobs, jobs, jobs.


Of course, those factory jobs ain't never coming back. The factories may come back, but the workers will be a thousand robots and three dozens workers supervising the robots.

But never mind.


The fact is, the country under President Trump will be Christian again--no Muslims will get across our borders because radical Islamic terrorists want to chop off American heads and we don't have to stand for that. 


And no more Obamacare--those 20 million newly insured will have health care savings accounts, which their first hospitalizations will drain dry.


And no more abortions, or gay marriages or transgenders using the locker rooms or Black guys getting away with shooting White police, and maybe, if Mr. Trump's fans are really lucky, we'll go back to the days when women stayed at home and took care of the kids, like June Cleaver or Edith Bunker.

We'll all be happy again, just the way we were in the 1950's, when nobody talked about sex, and Blacks could not eat at a lunch counter or stay in a White's only motel or vote, when abortions were done in motel rooms, when we started on the long road to endless war, beginning in Korea, and slogging through Vietnam and beyond, when most people lived in homes which to today's Americans would look like carpeted chicken coops and luxury was having a box TV, a clothes washer and dryer and maybe even central air conditioning, when cars got 12 miles to the gallon, but gas was only 29 cents a gallon, when most adults smoked and died of lung cancer or heart attacks by age 63, when there were only three TV channels and the interstate highway system hadn't been built yet, so most people shopped in their local towns and never got much beyond their home towns, except for those adventurous vacations to Florida or Maine, which took two weeks, and you packed a bag of sandwiches in the car because you couldn't afford to stop at Hot Shoppes. But mostly you camped out or went to the beach and that was Great American life.


All that Mr. Moore's people know is they feel like losers; they see the glitzy world soaring past them and they get no respect. I see the same thing in Haverhill, Methuen and Lawrence, Massachusetts and in Salem, Kingston and Stratum, New Hampshire.


There are people out there who just stew in their own juices, or as Anon has said, time and time again, "Can't fix stupid."

How Trump Can Win

Donald Trump is not morally, spiritually, positively, absolutely, undeniably and reliably, merely dead, not sincerely dead.

He can definitely, positively, undeniably, negatively win.

How?

His enthusiastic, orgiastic, nihilistic voters can swarm out of their caves and vote, while the best and the brightest find other things to do November 8.


Or, his friends in the Kremlin can target power outages in New York City, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chapel Hill, Durham--you get the idea.
It's easy to target Democratic voters because they are concentrated where the power grid is most stressed. Just a little cyber attack on some or all of these cities--and it doesn't have to last all day, just an hour or two, enough to make people give up and go home...Why just a week ago internet went out for the entire East Coast. Suppose the same thing happens on November 8?


The Donald is correct about one thing: I cannot close my eyes and imagine the process by which votes are counted.  It's not a bunch of people in a room opening up a cardboard box and hand counting ballots--except in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire.


For the most part, it's obscure, opaque, out of sight and we all simply accept the stuff we see flitting across our TV screens because the optics of national news are so colorful and bright and convincing.


I mean, how do we KNOW?


Well, there are polls going in and exit polls going out, but the correlation with exit polls in the last election were significantly wrong.


Exit polls? How can you get it wrong with an exit poll?


All I can think is Churchill's observation that democracy is the worst form of government--except for all the others.


The last time a bunch of pugnacious, gun toting louts refused to accept the results of an election, we had a war which lasted 4 years and took more American lives than all the others combined.


But, you know, it did clean out some nasty pus down South.  As Clemenza tells Michael Corleone, "Things gotta happen every five years. Ten. Cleans out the bad blood."


We shall see.

If Kelly Ayotte Wins

If Kelly Ayotte is returned to the United States Senate we can expect to see her work for the following:

1/ Converting Social Security into a voucher system
2/ Killing Obamacare and any system of nation wide health care coverage
3/ Making Medicare a voucher system
4/ Sending ground troops to the Middle East
5/ Insuring gun sales have no restrictions
6/ Reversing marriage equality
7/ Reversing Roe v Wade and making abortion illegal again

Birds of a Feather

That enough?

People accuse Hillary Clinton about all sorts of nefarious things which are never confirmed by public record, but in Kelly Ayotte's case there is an instance which is on the public record, and nobody seems interested enough to even read it.

Mark Connolly wrote about Ms. Ayotte's indifference to the most massive Ponzi scheme in New Hampshire's history in a book called "Cover Up."  And a sorry tale it is, with Kelly Ayotte right at the center.

Flock Together

The largest financial fiasco in New Hampshire history, which bilked hundreds of families out of their life savings was the Lakes Region Ponzi Scheme, which Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc perpertrated, but Ms. Ayotte, as attorney general, failed to prosecute because somehow Ms. Ayotte didn't see an injury.

Odd thing, that.

Ms. Ayotte is a bosom buddy of the "Toughest Sheriff in America"  Sheriff Arpaio, of Maricopa County, Arizona--you know, the guy who arrests people for looking like wetbacks and then parades them down the street in pink underpants, BEFORE they are even tried.  Senator Ayotte has appeared with the Sheriff and sung his praises, because he is tough on crime, she says. Would that she had had absorbed some of that toughness on crime in the Ponzi case--maybe the miscreants who stole millions from innocent New Hampshire families would be behind bars today, rather than living on their yachts and in their vacation homes.

Good Buddies

You have to see her appeal: All dimples and youthful looks, but looks can be deceiving. She has not been content to dance with the devil, she is what she was when she was elected: A Tea Party gal. She may look pretty but she is a spider wasp, intent on destroying government--all government--from within. 


The only thing she likes about government is its war making machinery--for that she is willing to spend us into the poor house. But heaven forbid we might want to build hospital or cure a disease. Oh, no! That would cost money. And you know what THAT would mean: Taxes!  Taxes are fine if they are spent to support the munitions manufacturers of Alabama and South Carolina. But tax money for health insurance in New Hampshire, for all those undeserving citizens, no way.

Oh, Kelly, we hardly know ye.

What If: Donald Hacks the Election Results?

DDoS attacks flood servers with so many fake requests for information that they cannot respond to real ones, often crashing under the barrage. It's unclear who orchestrated the attack.

“It’s a very smart attack. We start to mitigate, they react. It keeps on happening every time. We’re learning though,” said Kyle York, Dyn’s chief strategy officer said on a conference call with reporters Friday afternoon.

Troubling to security experts was that the attackers relied on Mirai, an easy-to-use program that allows even unskilled hackers to take over online devices and use them to launch DDoS attacks. The software uses malware from phishing emails to first infect a computer or home network, then spreads to everything on it, taking over DVRs, cable set-top boxes, routers and even Internet-connected cameras used by stores and businesses for surveillance.

These devices are in turn used to create a robot network, or botnet, to send the millions of messages that knocks the out victims' computer systems.

Okay, here's a good Halloween story: Donald Joffrey Trump, the Great White Wail, turns out to be not quite as stupid as we think. 

He has set up the "I will  accept the election results...If I win," very deliberately, to get Hillary and all the rest of us declaring emphatically how important it is to accept the voice of the people, the unimpeachable process of collecting results from polling places in 50 different states, a very decentralized system, which is impossible to rig because it is so decentralized.

But think of our system--votes are counted in high schools, town halls, sometimes by hand, sometimes by machine, but then they are funneled to bigger and bigger collection points, and all information flows into a central point in each state, so the Greatest Show on Earth, i.e. the Election Night festivities can proclaim a winner in time for everyone to enjoy it; just like a National Football League game, it all has to end like any other show, in time for the sponsors to run their final ads.

So, in this horror show, as those big rivers flow toward the networks, the Russians hack, not into the tributaries, not into the small polling places, but into the big conduits, so as each state's tallies start to coalesce, the hackers get those results and change them, just like last week's hacks where Netflix, Amazon, Spotify, Tumblr and a lot of other big networks were hacked by hacking some New Hampshire company nobody had ever heard of called Dyn, which somehow is involved in routing traffic among these big players.  

This attack was so vast I was unable to use the electronic medical record at my office and every computer in a medical care system which is spread out over Massachusetts and New Hampshire was paralyzed, unable to see patients, write prescriptions, operate any office. 

And Donald Trump was just in New Hampshire days before it happened. 

And what, we were all asking, did Donald Trump care about in New Hampshire, with its three electoral votes?

So, how's this scenario?  On election night, Donald wins not just  Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, the entire South and Far West, but he wins, astonishingly,  New York, Massachusetts, Maryland, and California. 

How could this be? How can we believe it?

Now we say, Hillary Clinton says, this cannot be.  

And Trump turns to the camera and says, "You rained abuse on me for daring to question the validity of the election: How can you object? The results are in."

Thank you, Vladimir.

The Prospect of Men With Guns at New Hampshire Polling Places

I am preparing for the appearance of men wearing guns standing outside Winnacunnet High School, the polling place in Hampton, New Hampshire on November 8.


New Hampshire is a state where it is legal to carry a gun openly.


What I expect to see is guys with guns standing around outside the polls, wearing Trump T shirts and Make America Great Again hats, in a silent effort to intimidate any citizen who plans to vote for Hillary from walking in and voting.


I am working on my poster, which will say:


I Don't Have a Gun
I Have a Vote


What I haven't decided is whether I'll try to wear it like a sandwich board into the voting booth, or whether I'll simply tack it to a wooden plank and stand outside right next to the thugs with the guns.


I am still looking for the hat that says "Dumb, Dumber, Donald"  or "Trump Chump."


Suggestions are welcomed.

Hillary Pillories Donald

Hillary Clinton finally showed she can throw a punch.  Tonight she was throwing flurries, combinations and she rocked the Donald time and time again.






He raised the 30 years of experience, so let me just talk briefly about that. You know, back in the 1970s, I worked for the children's defense fund and I was taking on discrimination against African-American kids in schools. He was getting sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination in his apartment buildings. In the 1980s, I was working to reform the schools in Arkansas. He was borrowing $14 million from his father to start his businesses. In the 1990s, I went to Beijing and I said women's rights are human rights. He insulted a former Miss Universe, Alicia Machado, and called her an eating machine.




Perhaps her finest combination was her answer to Donald's refrain about how she's had 30 years to do things right and she's failed and she said let's just look at the last 30 years, what I was doing and what you were doing--and then ticked off her work for children and families while he was borrowing money from his father, to her work as Secretary of State while he starred on Celebrity Apprentice.

She basically in three or four sentences illuminated the stark reality that while she was working in substantive jobs, he was playing and living the life of a lightweight.

She zinged him about building his buildings with Chinese steel, which undermined our economy by supporting the dumping of Chinese steel and she returned to his failure to pay income taxes.

If you were looking for something to cheer about, to see your candidate draw blood, to live the battle vicariously, she gave you plenty to cheer about.

She was as good as she was at the Benghazi hearings and better. She looked tough, ready to do the job.

Remarkably, she was able to slip punches about her own statements about her dream being a hemisphere with open borders, as she explained that statement was in the context of open borders not to migrants and trade but to sharing energy sources.

 Curiously, the one time Trump seemed to land a punch was about doing abortions on children a day before delivery and she never denied she was for that, but simply insisted on a woman's right to abortion, seemingly under any circumstances.

She might have said, "I'm willing to allow abortion, but not infanticide," but she likely simply didn't want to cut too fine a line and simply hammer away at his determination to reverse Roe v Wade.

Happily, both candidates finally admitted their appointments to the Supreme Court would be political appointees to carry out political agendas. That lie that Supreme Court nominees are about the Constitution and weighing cases according to the law, not according to politics is finally dispensed with. Hillary will expect her appointees to reverse Citizens United and to confirm Roe v Wade.  So be it. At least we know what we are getting.

Cannot imagine any minds were changed, but it sure will be with a new sense of enthusiasm I will go to the voting booth November 8.

When I arrive, I imagine I'll see men with Trump T shirts standing there with guns on their hips or slung over their shoulders (this is New Hampshire, where guns can be carried openly) and I intend to walk right up to them and say, "You have a gun. I got a vote. And I'm going to walk right in there and vote for Hillary."