Space Aliens Confess All To President Trump!

What I want to know is what President Obama's wire tap on Trump Tower has to do with McCarthyism.

I get the Watergate comparison--you know, the President goes outside the FBI, CIA and NSA to hire some G. Gordon Liddy types to wire tap Trump Tower, but McCarthyism?  
McCarthy was all about witch hunts for Communist spies in the Federal government who sold out the United States, when in fact there were no communists in the United States government and certainly none who could have sold out the USA if they had wanted to.

Did Arnold Schwarzenegger have anything to do with the wiretap?

Wait, is this all about connecting dots?  Like maybe Arnold was working for Obama, and sneaked into Trump Tower and planted the bugs, and then Jeff Sessions got told about it and had to recuse himself from the investigation, but Comey wasn't told about it and didn't know about it because he was just closing in on tracking down Obama's REAL birth certificate which shows, very clearly, he is a Muslim born on Mars, and that's why nobody every knew him in school. 

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has got herself in trouble with one of the space aliens who was hanging about the State Department around the time of Benghazi, which was why she was so cagey about who she spent the night with after she went home from the office that night. It wasn't General Petraeus. It was that space alien.

Obama is just so bad, or sick, or both. Very sick. Incredibly sick, actually.
It is just so incredible. President Trump has all the best words, like "incredible."  Ever think about that?  He says something and then he says "it's just incredible." So he's telling you, actually, he does not think whatever he said is credible. 
So what are we getting so upset about?

I am going to set my alarm for 5 AM every morning so I can get my coffee, turn on my computer and read President Trump's morning tweet.  He is going to put Fox News and the National Enquirer out of business. Who needs them when you've got the Presidential tweet?  First there was FDR and the fireside chats. Not we've got those incredible tweets. So Presidential. Really. I can hardly wait.

Trumptopia

Really liked the tie. President Trump has the best ties. He generally wears that dark blue suit and he favors white shirts but it's the ties where he really lets his personality shine through  and the dark blue tie  with the narrow white diagonal stripes looked very sharp last night. Downright Presidential.

And he started so well--telling his neo Nazi, white supremacist, off the grid fans that it was not good to topple the gravestones in Jewish cemeteries. I may have sounded like Adolph during the campaign, but ixnay on the Jew baiting. This is American fascism, not European.

The Europeans are such losers--we don't need that anti Semitic stuff to stoke fear here. We got those rapist Mexicans for that.

Trump is a consummate showman. I really liked all the stuff he promised:  More weapons systems for cheap, great hardware for the military, big wall to keep out all the illegal alien gang members, who will never figure out a way over, around or under that Great Wall of Trumptopia.

And a trillion dollars of infrastructure, the biggest thing since the interstate highway system, only financed by private corporations. So how's that going to work? They lend the money to build the road and how do they make money on the road? All I can think is: tolls. Just when I got used to driving down Route 95 without tolls, they go back to tolls, but I got that Easypass, so what the heck?  Private roads and private schools for inner city kids, because, you know, government can't do anything right.

And Obamacare, didn't work in Kentucky he says.  Rates went up and all the insurance companies fled the state. The former governor of Kentucky who implemented the program begged to differ. He said all they had to do to make people love Obamacare in Kentucky was to rename it Kynect.  But, hey, why quibble?

And oh, all those awful immigrant murderers.  Mr. Trump pointed to the father whose son was slain by an immigrant gang nogoodnik who had been deported twice before he murdered the man's son.  Does that not say something about the impotence of deportation? But, oh, wait. We'll have a wall.

And Ryan's widow up there sitting next to Ivanka. Did you notice Ivanka had that off the shoulder red dress? She looked stunning, but what was with that black bra strap?
As Mr. Trump pointed out, they kept the camera on Ryan's widow for so long, it was a new indoor record for people as stage props for a joint session speech. She was under a lot of pressure as an animate prop--first she raised her chin bravely; then she cried; then she clasped her hands together and looked Heavenward in prayer. I think she was talking to dead Ryan, and President Trump certainly said Ryan was looking down happily from Heaven at his happy widow. It was just like one of those TV shows, like the Jim Baaker show, or Pat Robertson or Billy Graham. Just ecstatic joy in the hall. Donald is such a showman. The best ever President. So fantastic. Incredible, in every sense of the word. Really.

He's got Ford and all those American companies bringing jobs back to the USA, tax cuts for corporations and the rich, healthcare way better than Obamacare for all, jobs, jobs, jobs especially for the coal miners who will dig clean coal--love that clean coal.

Hey, I'd like to wake up 20 years younger, 20 pounds lighter and with a full head of hair. Do you think he can do that for me?

Pelosi and Schumer: Cringeworthy

Chuck Schumer scored a perfect 1600 on his college board SAT exam. This is surprising because among the Democratic Senators your see on TV he shows every evidence of being a truly inarticulate, clueless, tone deaf mediocrity. He spoke yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington and stumbled through the speech he tried to read. It was full of clichés, uninspiring metaphors which sounded as if he had pulled them out of the recycle bin after the Democratic National Convention.

Nancy Pelosi, now 76 and looking every bit of it, was almost as bad, losing her place on the page of the remarks she read.


Both were better during the question and answer sessions, revealing their intimate knowledge of the history of various pieces of legislation.


At one point Schumer answered a question by saying, "It is a well known fact Israel has nuclear weapons, although exactly how many or what kind they've not said."


The fact is, it may be a widely held assumption, or suspicion, or it may be a secret in name only, but we have acted and planned  in the American government as if this is received truth, and all the countries in the region have too.  But a fact it is not.


This may seem like a small point, but it is just one easy example of how sloppy Schumer is in speech, how inelegant and how uninspiring. He could have done so much more with that issue.
"Israel has never acknowledged that nuclear weapons are part of its arsenal, but I have it on good authority that Iran, Syria and all its neighbors assume Israel does have such weapons and that is good enough for me. The fear of nuclear weapons, as we all know, is probably as important of the actual possession."


Or all that like.


The fact is the Donald has an unerring instinct for the jugular. He described Marco Rubio as small and Jeb Bush has low energy and now Schumer as a light weight. Coming from a guy who has no street cred for brains, describing a guy who went to Harvard, this may seem odd, but that's what Schumer looks like on TV, a lightweight.

Nancy Pelosi is 76 and Schumer is not a young 66. They are both too feeble to oppose Trump, who, if he is nothing else, has the frenzy of a balloon propelled by escaping air.  He has the energy of a Berlusconi or a Mussolini and the brains to match.


Schumer got all weepy over the thought of immigrant families being torn asunder. He should not have got weepy, he should have got angry.


"Mr. Trump makes war on the helpless and the harmless while he allows the predatory billionaires of Wall Street to escape taxation, just as he himself has. Is this what you wanted in the small towns of Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio? Well, if so, you've got it now. Congratulations. You've beaten up on the little people and you've had President Heel Spur do it for you."


And all like that.

Immigrants: Puppies vs Skunks

President Trump wants to build a wall to keep all those Hispanic immigrants from flooding across the border.  He talks about that illegal Mexican immigrant who raped a white woman in San Francisco, his version of President Reagan's Welfare Queen, who drove a Cadillac to pick up her welfare checks.

In Germany, Denmark, France and England there have been two specific sorts of  problems with Muslim immigrants.
1. Some young men, visually identifiable as Middle Eastern,  groped blonde German women in public squares and elsewhere, during Christmas festivities. These were more or less isolated instances. But to say they were isolated instances does not mean they were not an expression of Islamic culture. Anyone who has been posted to Saudi Arabia knows unaccompanied women are often groped at the markets there. Western European women were raped in Tahrir Square during the Egyptian demonstrations.  It is a culture norm among some Muslim subcultures that unaccompanied women are sluts and deserve anything they get. This is a problem, but a remediable problem.


 2. Some Muslim immigrants, particularly in France, have arrived from former French colonies and festered in suburban housing projects, and have refused to assimilate. Imans in London and in Paris and other Northern European cities have enunciated the belief that their religion is the only true religion and everyone else is an infidel. The value democratic institutions in Europe and America place on tolerance is simply not endorsed by some Muslims and in some Islamic centers.  So you have this curious graft vs host reaction of new immigrants arriving, building a mosque and then railing against the country which has received them. It's not exactly analogous to the man who buys a house near an airport and then complains about the noisy airplanes, but it's something like that.


Of course, some of the complaints against Muslims are pretty beyond comprehension: Muslim women  offended French sensibilitiesby refusing to strip down to bikinis on French beaches. Muslim women and girls who want to wear a head scarf to school or to work have been told no--if you want to be French, then act French.  Are Christians in France told not to wear crosses on necklaces and are Jews told not to wear yarmulkes?


President Trump has conflated the problems Europe has had with the flood of a million Muslim immigrants with the problem non problem of Spanish speaking immigrants in the United States. If you don't control your borders, you get chaos and rape and pillage he says. Muslims, Hispanics, all the same thing.


For the most part, they may be illegal, but the Spanish speaking immigrants I know are hard working, family oriented and the last people I would think would ever engage in a terrorist attack.


The Muslims streaming out of the Middle East and North Africa are more like a herd of buffalo, trampling a wide swath, causing problems by their numbers and physical needs, but not predators.

The Hispanic immigrant who I heard interviewed on NPR yesterday, was brought by her parents to America when she was two, gave birth to a daughter in Los Angeles, went to work every day, until she was stopped for rolling through a stop sign and then deported to Mexico, a foreign country to her, the country of her birth. She spoke little Spanish and would have wound up a street person, but for the intervention of distant Mexican relatives. 

Most illegal Hispanics seem more like the chocolate lab puppy who wanders into your garage.

Living among us are the occasional Muslims who are the skunk under the porch, like the Tsarnaev brothers, who did the Boston bombing.  But they have proven to be the rare exceptions, and they would not have been impeded by President Trump's executive order.

 Of course, for the most part Muslims here, unlike in Europe,  assimilate in all the important ways, and they are more like the seals who wash up on Hampton beach or the otters in the salt marshes--they are part of the great variety of fauna which enriches us all.

Emperor of Empty Spaces

We had a taxicab driver in New York this weekend who is one of those people you just want to adopt and bring home. Or maybe, you want to introduce him to your dog, because you know they would love each other. He is the sort of person who apologizes when he interrupts you, "But you see, I must know if you want to be on the east or the west side of the street."

Rich People to the Top. Poor People at the bottom. 

He is from Pakistan, but he now lives in Queens.  I wanted to ask him how competition from Uber has affected his livelihood, but never got to that because something else was far more of a problem for him now. 
Now he gets stopped and interrogated by ICE agents because they know a lot of taxicab drivers are immigrants. They have made his life miserable, and he is, he was quick to point out, a citizen. 

And I thought, how would any of us be made any safer by throwing this guy out of the country?

The next day, I was doing my usual Manhattan wandering, walking north from my hotel and allowing the traffic signals to pick my streets for me, never stopping and waiting for a light, just turning down a street I had not investigated because the light at the corner was red and I found myself on the east side of 5th Avenue between 56th and 57th, and noticed a lot of police, and police with M-16's and helmets, and I looked in the building and realized it was the entrance to the Trump Tower, all black stone with gold trim.

And I thought: Here is this billionaire who lives in a penthouse suite trying to round up and throw out of the country guys like my taxicab driver. 
They are both from Queens, but from different strata.

Back in my hotel room, on the 64th floor,  I could see the Hudson River and the GW bridge, Central Park and to the east, the East River. And I looked at all the tall buildings between my hotel, 5 blocks north of the park and the new ones going up which will cast a shadow on the park. Their shadows will block out the sun for plants in the park, darken walkways and bicycle paths, not quite to the ice rink, for which Donald Trump once famously took over construction because the city had become bogged down by regulations and union work rules.  Once the big shot built an ice rink for the people, now the big shots were building buildings for themselves which would cast a shadow over the people's park. 

The Failing New York Times ran an article about Steve Bannon today. He is the brains behind the bluster in the White House now and his big concept is that the United States is a nation with an economy, not just an economy among nations. Catchy phrasing, don't you think?

Mr. Bannon once planned to write a 26 part TV series on America and its people and its history. The Bannon version of the world as it was, or how it should have been; his very own creation myth. The world according to Mr. Bannon. Now he is in the White House faced with reality, and he's writing executive orders to ban Muslims from entering the country, as if he actually could prevent bad hombres intent on murder and mayhem from entering the country with an executive order.

But, really, what is a nation?  Is it lines on a map? Is it fruity plains and purple mountains' majesty? Is it the coastal towns of Maine, the glacial lakes of New Hampshire, the peaks of the Rockies, the windswept plains of Kansas, the desert of Arizona, the sunny shores of California?  Is it the cows in the fields of of Vermont, the pigs penned into feeding lots in Iowa? Is it cornfields? 

I would submit a nation can occupy all of the above, but a nation is no more a collection of things (land, borders, possessions)  than a man is his possessions, his house, his car, his wardrobe. Without his worldly tangible things, the man is still who he is. You can lash him to the mast and send him out to sea and when he washes up, naked on the beach, he is still the man he is. 

And so it is with a nation like the United States. Yes, the nation claims land, geography, products, missile silos, but, at core, it is the people. 

The cornfields of Kansas did not elect, nor should elect the President of the United States. People should do that. 

We gave this pig a vote

When Jefferson and Madison and the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina went about constructing their new nation, they were terrified the rules would be written by the masses in the big cities of the North. So, they allocated representatives to Congress by state, incorporating into political power, the notion of land. Just as a plantation owner got his own power from the size of his estate, and the property he owned, (which included 2/3 of all their slaves to count for allocation of representation) each state would get power from the land and property  it claimed.  States with smaller populations liked this idea, and they were mollified by the arrangement of each state getting an equal number of Senators even if the smaller states had few people.  

The last time these guys get to be this high

Today, Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas have fewer people living in each than live in any one of the biggest cities of Pennsylvania, but each of those states has two Senators, where Pennsylvania has only two.

When President Trump won the last election, he won on the back of this anachronism as embodied in the electoral college. The people did not elect Trump, the states did. More accurately, the peculiar distribution of the disaffected in key states elected him.

Some have spoken about the great state of suburbia, because the people living in Shaker Heights, Ohio and Grosse Point, Michigan have more in common with people in Scarsdale, New York and Chevy Chase, Maryland than they do with people living in Lima,  Ohio. 

The nation by geography

What we have now is a divide not among big states/little states but affluent areas vs economically depressed areas. If you are living in Wisconsin and your factory closed, you are in the same sinking boat as the guy in Ohio, Pennsylvania or Michigan. 
So the people who live in all those places which are largely empty of people, empty spaces which include the heads of some of the electorate, have elected the billionaire to save them. 

The vote by population

It doesn't matter to you that Mr. Trump proposes solutions to problems which do not exist, solutions which have no viable chance of solving those irrelevant problems. It doesn't matter to you that Mexicans and other Hispanics fleeing their failed states are coming across the border into the United States are not actually harming you.  It doesn't matter to you that the Pakistani taxicab driver in New York City is harmless and in fact, is raising his kids to have a burning desire to do well in this country and it doesn't matter to you that when the big shot wants to drive him away, it won't help you one whit. It doesn't matter to you that turning back Muslims at JFK and Logan and Dulles airports will not prevent the next (and would not have prevented the last) 9/11 terrorist attack.

All that matters to you is you have an outsized power to disrupt the ways things are now.  It's the only bullet you have in your gun's chamber. So you are going to pull that trigger, even if you wind up shooting yourself in the foot. 

Feel better now?

You Can't Make this Stuff Up

Every April, as income tax season arrived, Johnny Carson used to do a very funny bit on his show: He would simply read the income tax directions on his show, slowly, with increasing frustration and confusion. "Subtract line 45A from line 30 B."  It was a hoot. You could hear the audience roaring in the background.

Now we have the same opportunity afforded by our 45th President. 

Here he is explaining why his order to ban Muslims from entering the country is actually quite legal:

"They didn't write the statute they were making the decision about because every word of the statute is a total kill for the other side. So I though I would read it. And here's what it says. This is what it says: 'Whenever the President finds that the entryh of any aliens or any class of aliens into the United States--okay. So essentially, whenever somebody comes into the United States. Right? 'If it would be detrimental to the interest of the United States'--okay. Now you know the countries we're talking about and these were countries picked by Obama. They weren't even picked. They were picked by Obama."

So he gets a little lost here. He does not actually identify the statue he's talking about, but most people think it's the Immigration Act of 1952, passed during the McCarthy Red Scare era. 
And then he gets distracted by the countries.  I think he means the 7 countries in his own executive order, but then he gets off onto who actually put together this list, which he claims wasn't even him. It was Obama who was at fault, really. Mr. Trump just found these countries on a paper some woman in the parking lot gave him.

"'He may,' so the President may,'by proclamation and for such period as he shall deem necessary'...

And here he gets really distracted about whether the law talks about a male or a female president and he goes off on a long digression about how well he did with women voters and how women love him, which he knows because Melania--that's his wife--told him.

"So and it goes,'for such as he shall deem necessary to suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens as immigrants or nonimmigrants or impose on aliens any restriction he may deem to be appropriate.' So basically it says the President has the right to keep people out if he feels it's not in the best interest of our country. Right? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. And I listened to these judges talk and talk and talk. So unfair."

Someone in the White House really ought to take the President aside and explain about laws and the Supreme Court and how when you argue a case before the Court, everyone can find some law which seems to support his side, but then the other side finds other law, which says something entirely different and the Court, the judges, then talk and talk and talk about which side has the best argument.

Then they usually say stuff like, "The one law you cited was a really bad law and violates this or that part of the constitution, so we are not going to listen much to that law, because we like another law better, which we think reflects the principles we like to find in the Constitution." 

This is what's called "Constitutional Law." 

Which is why you want to appoint this reincarnation of Roger Taney to be the next Supreme Court justice--a guy like Neil Gorsuch-- because he will always like the laws you like and vote the way you would vote.
(Roger Taney was the judge who ruled on the Dred Scott case, where a slave, Dred Scott sued for his freedom but the judge said he couldn't sue, he didn't have "standing" to sue because as a slave he was not a human being and only human beings can sue in the Supreme Court.)


Actually, Taney had a point, because in the Constitution mentions slaves right in Section 2 of article One, as "2/3 of all other persons."  So, if you are an "other person" you are not actually a human being person,  maybe at most 2/3 of a person, or that's the way Justice Taney saw it. You know Justice Scalia would have agreed with Justice Taney, because Justice Scalia was an "originalist" and there's nothing more original than 2/3 of a person, and Neil Gorsuch, President Trump's nominee says he's just like Justice Scalia--an originalist.

2/3 of a person, Dred Scott

Recently, there's been a case about whether a dog could have standing in the Supreme Court, but now I'm getting distracted, like Donald.

Any way, someone ought to explain to the President about laws and how judges get to rule on whether what you do as President is legal. It's not like you are king. Or even it's not like you are a CEO. 

The President says these judges of the Ninth Circuit are not as smart as even bad high school students. 

That's kind of refreshing, don't you think? 
And why do they have to wear those robes? If they were so smart and if what they really cared about was the correctness of their arguments they wouldn't have to put on airs and robes. They could just wear T shirts and blue jeans like regular people and maybe a baseball cap that says "Make America Great Again."

The Donald, in HIs Own Words

Here's your daily inspirational message from President Donald Trump.

I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news. The dishonest-media which has published one false story after another with no sources, even though they pretend they have them, they make them up in many cases, they just don't want to report the truth and they've been calling us wrong now for two years. they don't get it. But they're starting to get it. I can tell you that. They've become a big part of the problem. They are part of the corrupt system...when the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it. I will do whatever I can that they don't get away with it. They have their own agenda and their agenda is not your agenda. Thomas Jefferson said, "nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper." "Truth itself," he said, "becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle." That was June 14, my birthday, 1807. But despite all the misrepresentations, and false stories, they could not defeat us..and we will continue to expose them for what they are, and most importantly, we will continue to win, win, win.
--President Donald John Trump

Now, that's what I call "authentic." All the best words, really, just incredible. So fantastic.
I particularly appreciate his invoking Jefferson, who once said, "If it were left to me to decide if we should have government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. "  He also said the nation needed a little revolution now and then, and of course, that's what Donald Trump has given us.  Jefferson was no friend of organized religion, and he practiced a rather liberated sexual life, given the times, inter racial sex, children out of wedlock, so he was a man relevant to the 21st century, even though he was a product of the 18th century enlightenment.  So, it's good to see Donald is looking to Jefferson.

So President Trump does not like "the media."  Actually, it is apparent he does not like the media he cannot control. He likes Fox, but he hates CNN. He loves Twitter, which is, after all, media. I don't know how he feels about Facebook.

Trump's spiritual parents

But what he really hates is the idea of the media. He cites no specific stories he thinks are lies, are malicious; he simply says, "don't believe a word they say." If it's critical of me, don't believe it. Believe Fox. Fox loves me.


What the Donald is really reminding us is that he is not the first President to have a contentious relationship with the press. John Adams signed the Sedition act and he used it to throw newspaper editors in jail. Now that is what I call a contentious relationship. Very unfriendly. You hear people saying Trump intends to become a dictator and they cite his attacks on the media and his attacks on judges as the first sign of a man bent on dictatorship. This is what gives liberals a bad name, such calumny. Trump does not want to be a dictator. He wants his job back on the Celebrity Apprentice.  He is not really enjoying being President yet.  He cannot simply issue orders as he can with Trump enterprises.


I am most of all astonished to learn President Trump was born June 14, 1807, which makes him, by my shabby arithmetic, 210 years old, which may explain his trouble remembering specifics. He knows the media prints nothing but lies, but he cannot recall exactly what lies he's referring to. He cannot remember what he had for breakfast this morning, or whether he actually ate breakfast.

And another thing about Jefferson, he would not like the Lord's Prayer read before a governmental or political meeting. He was very disturbed by the influence of organized religion over government. But that's just Jefferson.
Did you know President Clinton was actually named, William Jefferson Clinton? Probably explains why he was such a failure as a President. Spent his whole Presidency chasing skirts. That's the thing about those 18th century founding fathers--they took that title seriously, spreading their seed around like dogs in heat.  They had sex on the brain. Got in the way of their business deals. You can't make a deal if you are running away from sex scandals all the time. You got to be careful with women, if you are in the public eye.