The Dutch Paradox

The Dutch are thought to be tolerant, open minded, a haven for social experimentation and free living.
In "The Wire"  when a police major decides to confine the drug trade in Baltimore to a safe zone, where drugs can be bought, sold, and  used without police interference, the hoppers and touts who sell the drugs are told this part of town will be like "Amsterdam."  Of course, given the differences in dialects, it becomes known as "Hamsterdam."  

According to the New York Times today and the New Yorker of 2002, the Dutch have been wrestling with the quandary of what to do when you open your country up as a beacon of freedom and tolerance and a group arrives who values neither, and in fact, hates both.
The Dutch responded by endorsing the first coming of Donald Trump, a man named Pim Foruyn.  Reading Elzabeth Kolbert's article about Fortuyn in the New Yorker, written 12 years before the election of Donald Trump, is a decidedly disconcerting experience.  So much of what Trump did was simply a replay of what Fortuyn did, and Fortuyn was dismissed as a "charlatan" in much the same way, before he won the first election he entered.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/09/beyond-tolerance

Pim Fortuyn

Within living memory, the Dutch were parochial--if you were Protestant, you married Protestant, and you were buried in a Protestant cemetery. Same if you were Catholic. This provided a reference point, a sense of identity and self.  But Protestant and Catholic authority crumpled as the world changed around the Netherlands, and industries were lost, immigrants arrived, and new ideas permeated the airwaves. 

For a time, the Dutch were able to accommodate, although the country folk became resentful of the more libertarian city folk,and there were cultural wars rural/urban much as we have in the States today. 

But then the Dutch had to deal with something the United States has not had to face:  Muslims arrived in substantial numbers, from Morocco and from the war torn states and these new arrivals did not want to assimilate, did not accept the idea that women should be regarded as anything more than domestic slaves and property. Women should not be allowed to go to school and homosexuals should be beheaded.

Dutch politicians like Pim Fortuyn and now Geert Wilders pointed to these Muslims and said what is verboten in open, tolerant societies: These people do not belong here, and we do not want more of them arriving. What we do with those already here is another problem, but let's not allow the situation to get worse.

Donald Trump is only the latest to pick up this chant.

The fact is, liberals like myself have no good answer for the question of what you do with an intolerant minority. Pim Fortuyn said, "The house guests have arrived and are determined to take over the house, which the house owner finds objectionable."

Our own Muslim communities in the States, for example Dearborn, Michigan, have not posed such problems here. From most reports, these Muslim Americans want to assimilate and do not find it offensive to see their neighbors' wives walking about with heads uncovered, going to work with men, going to bars unaccompanied, which would result in beheading in some of the countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia) from whence these Muslims came. 

But in the Netherlands, in France, in Germany, in England, the Muslim communities, or at least some members of these communities,  have posed the vexing problem: What does an open, welcoming, polyglot society do when a group says, "No!"  When that group says, "You are infidels. We know the word of God and the word of God says women belong in the kitchen, says women must not venture out of the house without a male relative as a chaperon, says women should be covered head to toe whenever they leave the house, says anyone who does not accept Islam should be killed?
The fact is there are basic values which are, I am told, embraced by at least some substantial number of Muslims,  which strike me just  as bizarre and offensive as eating brains of those you kill.  
That hundreds of people riot over cartoons lampooning the Prophet is disturbing and is, in fact, an expression of a cultural value. 
You are offended, I understand, but killing people over an insult, over a cartoon?  That a woman is stoned to death for adultery or for running away to marry the man she says she loves who is not the man her father bargained for?  Again: stone aged, revolting, unacceptable.  
We cannot change the minds of thousands or millions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Egypt, Libya. What the people of those countries decide to do within their own borders is their business. 

But what do we do when those people decide to come here to live? 
Am I sounding like Donald Trump?  
If this disturbs you, as it does me, because I never want to sound like Donald Trump, help me figure out what I say when I'm on stage debating him, to  answer these legitimate concerns.



My only answer, and the answer I suppose President Obama proposed was, "We'll deal with this on an individual basis. Whenever a Muslim acts on these beliefs in a way which violates our laws, we'll prosecute."

One can understand this is less than fully satisfying to the host citizens.

There is less problem when we are confronted with a group which wishes fervently to embrace our values: Work hard, stay out of trouble, raise your family. That may be the perception many of us have about Hispanic immigrants, even, or especially those who are here without legal permission to be here. 

There are two issues with illegal Hispanics:  1/ The fact many have broken the law to be here   2/ Even those who have worked hard and abide by the law have offended some "white" neighbors. 

A man told  me he was looking to sell his house and to buy another.  His wife is being treated with chemotherapy and this seemed like hardly the time to be buying a new house, but he said he just can't live in his  Methuen neighborhood any more and his wife wants out.  
Why is this? He says on a beautiful Spring day, he sits out on his porch and likes to enjoy the day, but now on one side his neighbors have booming Spanish music and on the other side there is a daily fight and the police are called to separate family members.  This may be a class thing as much as a Hispanic/racial thing, but the irony is, this man is Black. Likely he got his house in a neighborhood where Whites fled when he and his Black cohort arrived; now he is fleeing. 

The problem of what to do about the illegal status of the 11 million illegals is likely easier to solve: If this is a question of law, can we not change the law?  Our immigration laws, after all, have reflected political ideas.  When my grandparents came through Ellis Island, the quotas were set by country of origin. White Christian Protestants did not want too many colored people, or Catholics or swarthy people coming in. That got changed eventually so people who had family here could consolidate their families in the United States. Sounded compassionate--reunite families. But that meant that anyone who could get across the border could bring in large numbers.

Now President Trump is talking about making the rule, we'll take you in if you've got something we want--like computer skills.

I don't know the answers to these problems. I do know the typical kumbaya answers I hear from my liberal friends are unpersuasive and sound starry eyed, unconnected to reality and infuriating to the guy trying to sit on his porch and enjoy a sunny day in a neighborhood which has changed under his feet.

Excluded from Trumpcare: Powerball Winners

Donald Trump and Paul Ryan have done Paul LePage one better: In Maine, Governor LePage has been obsessed about people using food stamps to buy cigarettes, but the new Trumpcare bill has four pages devoted to excluding winners of lotteries from getting healthcare insurance.

I have not yet got the bill to read it and I'm relying on a comment from a reader on today's Paul Krugman's analysis of Trumpcare. But who could make this thing up?


Well, the Republican authors of this law certainly have a keen eye toward denying freeloaders and welfare queens any government largesse. You got to go after those Powerball winners and be sure if they are already getting one government pay out, they do not get another. There must be at least a couple of dozen Powerball winners out there, maybe scores.

In the same comment, the author, who apparently has actually read at least some parts of the bill, mentions that Planned Parenthood has been specifically and uniquely excluded from receiving any sort of Medicaid payments for any service whatsoever, screening for sexually transmitted diseases, etc.  No other health care facility is so named. 


So, what this means is the Republicans are willing to allow Planned Parenthood treat women who are wealthy enough to pay for care or who are wealthy enough to have insurance but no Medicaid dollars will be spent on that evil organization. Which means poor women will not be able to get their breast cancer screenings or their cervical cancer screenings or their contraception from Planned Parenthood.

This is like one of those Boco Haram  tactics: Get at the parents by holding a knife to the throat of their children.  Hold those poor women hostage to your insistence Planned Parenthood stop performing abortions.


I don't know if I can get hold of this bill, but it sounds like it provides some entertaining reading.

I wonder if there's a few pages on criminalizing contraceptive counseling, denying lung cancer screening to smokers,  cancelling food stamps for the obese, forbidding Medicare payments for emergency room fees for Democrats.

Paul Ryan and the Dirty Secret of How Insurance Works: Well, Duh!

I'm trying to think of how to break this to Speaker of the House, Republican Paul Ryan gently.

So take a look at this chart. The red slice here are what I would call people with preexisting conditions. People who have real health-care problems. The blue is the rest of the people in the individual market — that’s the market where people don’t get health insurance at their jobs where they buy it themselves. The whole idea of Obamacare is the people on the blue side pay for the people on the red side. The people who are healthy pay for the people who are sick.

It’s not working, and that’s why it’s in a death spiral.

--Paul Ryan

Mr. Ryan must have insured his house against destruction by fire, and he pays premiums every year for this policy.  Here is something he clearly does not grasp: When the house belonging to someone else burns down, it's premiums from Mr. Ryan and others like him which pay for the payout to the guy whose house burned down. The people with the healthy, unburned houses are supporting that guy.

This is the dirty secret of the insurance industry: You got a lot of lucky, unaffected people who never ask for a pay out supporting the guy who needs it when his house burns down, or, in the case of health insurance, when he gets sick.

So, Mr. Ryan rolled up his sleeves and explained, using a very colorful Powerpoint presentation, to the press, his colleagues in the House and to the American people this fatal flaw in Obamacare, namely that you've got this group of people who are sick, represented in the red slice on the pie chart, and you've got this much bigger group of healthy people, in the blue slice,  who support the sick people with their premiums. This is why Obamacare is in a death spiral!  You've got healthy people supporting sick people!

 Is this not the most twisted, unfair, dishonest, corrupt thing you have ever heard of?


It was so much fun listening to Kai Ryssdal play Mr. Ryan's explanation on "Marketplace," the NPR business report, and Mr. Ryssdal let a beat go by, and then said, deadpan, "Uh, that is exactly how insurance works."

Grand Gestures

Steve Bannon is right about one essential point:  Nobody on the left can figure out why Hillary lost and Donald Trump won.

Some news organizations are trying to figure this out by going to those counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan which "flipped" to Trump and asking questions of voters who flipped.


The problem with a country as large as ours is there is rarely just one thing to explain the vote. Usually the winner will claim to know why he won and he'll try to use that to say, "You have to repeal and replace"  because that's what the voters said.  They also said "build a wall" and "ban Muslims" because that's what I said and they voted for me. Of course he also said, "I will give you back your jobs" and "I will make America Great Again." 


So what the voters were responding to remains unclear.

When Donald Trump met with the head of the steam fitters union and the head of some other union in the early days after he moved into the White House and he asked them to send in some guys in hard hats and Carhart jeans, really working men, so he could shake their hands at the White House. And the guys showed up with their union heads and everyone was just so pleased.


How pathetic was that?  Donald wants to show he's the friend of the working man and so he invites them over to the White House. Such a friend. Of course, there are working men and women who are working three jobs, none of which provide health insurance and he is going to cut them off from Obamacare and give them Trumpcare or Ryancare or Swampcare or Rinocare (Republican In Name Only care) or whatever his Repbublican buddies are willing to give them, which is to say, nothing much.


But the mystery remains: How do you undo the pathetic mistake of a President Trump and all his men, including Bannon?

So far the only viable answer has been: We can only sit back and watch Trump fail, and do whatever we can to help him fail, but until the flippers can see they actually made a mistake, there is nothing much to be done about it.

Kris Kobach: Protector of the Realm, Star of PBS News Hour

If the PBS News Hour were around in 1933 during the Third Reich, they would have hosted Goebbels, Goering, Hess and Himmler as regular guests.  These men would have been consensually validated as normal human beings who might hold some extreme opinions, but you could consider inviting them to your next dinner party to spice up the conversation.

Immigrants, poor people, Blacks, laborers don't belong here

So it is with Kris Kobach, who is the New Hour's go to guy whenever President Trump signs a Muslim ban or whenever Steve Bannon suggests we should register all the Muslims in this country, just in case.


Kris Kobach, who is the secretary of state for Kansas, was on the News Hour defending Trump's latest attempt at a Muslim ban, saying that there have been 56 terrorists attacks perpetrated by Muslims from the seven countries targeted in Trump's order so it only makes sense to keep every citizen from any of these countries out of the United States, because, after all this all about protecting the American people.


Mr. Kobach has also gone on record favoring a Muslim registry. 


Illegal immigrants are something of an obsession for Mr. Kobach; in this he makes that blonde Hitler youth esque Dutch guy, Geert Wilders look like the Welcome Wagon lady.

Wilders:  doesn't like immigrants. Says they are troublemakers

But Mr. Kobach also believes in denying the vote to potential Democratic voters, like the poor, the Black and the labor union men. Mr. Kobach likes beating up on the have nots, the undesirables.

The thing about those 56 terrorist attacks is...they never actually happened. Professor Google and his trusty side kick, fact checkers says, actually, no, never happened. There are all sorts of ways to look at crimes committed by various groups, but the only people whose origins derive from the magnificent seven who have ever been convicted of any sort of terrorist related stuff were found guilty of sending money abroad, not stirring up trouble in the United States. The Muslims who have opened fire in the USA were born here and got alienated by guys like Mr. Kobach beating on them. Well, there was the wife of the American citizen who came from abroad, but she's the exception that proves the rule. 


Basically, Mr. Kobach uses that number, 56, like a bludgeon and sounds all intimidating in his conviction, but if you listen to him on youtube, and think, "Bull" he sounds a lot less intimidating and a lot more what he really is--a cheap thug with a tie.

Their spirit lives on in Mr. Kobach: Beat on the little guys

It is true those places (Somolia, Libya, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan) must harbor some pretty scary radical Islamic dirtballs, but nobody has shown simply denying entry to people trying to get on an airplane from those countries has actually thwarted attempts by bad guys from flying here and harming us.  It does make sense to think, well that's where the wild things are, why not simply stop flights from those places?

The argument is:
1. The wild things are just as likely to fly out of Berlin as out of Somolia--attracts less attention.
2. By the same reasoning, you would have denied entry to all those Jews trying to escape Mr. Himmler and his gang of merry murderers.  After all, all those fleeing women and children and their fathers were coming from a very scary, dark place.  The rule, in fact, used by the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull was that every refugee needed a letter from the local police to attest to the refugee's good character. The Gestapo, which was the local police for many of these Jews, was not inclined to vouch for these people, especially when they were intent on feeding their ovens.


Oh, well. We live and learn.

Stewart Abercrombie Baker

You would think they would have trouble digging up people to front for Donald Trump, especially when it's Donald tweeting about Barack Obama having wire tapped his Trump Tower--President Obama is just so BAD or maybe SICK.

But no, this is Washington, so they can always find somebody by dangling the bauble of 15 minutes of fame, and who rose to take that bait? Some gnome called Stewart Abercrombie Baker.

So here's how this Washington lawyer from the Steptoe and Johnson firm tried to talk past the latest Donald debacle:

"We know from multiple reports, including The New York Times, that there were intercepts and there were FISA orders in connection with Russian efforts to influence the campaign. And we know from Mike Flynn’s resignation that those intercepts covered conversations that members of the campaign had.

And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say, let’s investigate that. What we have heard from former Obama administration officials are very limited non-denial denials. That is to say, the president says, I didn’t order anything. Well, of course, he doesn’t.

But the Justice Department and the FISA court could have. We have Jim Clapper saying, we didn’t target the campaign or Mr. Trump.

There’s a lot of other people that could have been targeted that would look pretty political if it was done in bad faith. I think it’s fair to ask the question, what are the facts?

And that’s what your committee is for."

--Stewart Abercrombie Baker, Lawyer

Now, all this has the patina of respectability, until you realize, actually, Mr. Baker is obfuscating by changing the subject.  The subject was whether President Obama sent in the spooks to wire Trump Tower and listen in to whatever conversations might occur between, say, Ivkana and her lingerie designer. The subject is not whether the Feds were sent to listen to Russian agents and found themselves listening to Trump.
And what, pray tell, is "bad faith?" And how does anything in Washington not look "pretty political?"

 And to say we have "non denial denials" is simply inaccurate. Mr. Obama's men are saying, "We didn't do it. If anyone did do it, wasn't us." A non denial denial? No, simply a denial. What Mr. Baker wants is for Mr. Obama to claim omniscience.

Mr. Baker is picking up the only non lunatic spin you can make on the latest Trump tweet--if the CIA or some intelligence agency were listening to the Russians, as they ought to be, then if someone in Trump tower was talking to the Russians, well then Trump may be correct, someone was listening to Trump Tower for more than tweets.

Of course, as the saying goes, just because you are paranoid doesn't mean there's nobody out there trying to kill you. 

What everyone is arguing about is whether Mr. Trump has any justification for believing people are out to get him. So here we have a Washington lawyer claiming the proprietor of a house of ill repute should be taken seriously for complaining about men peeking through the windows and that is bad behavior on the part of the peepers.  Well then, we have to ask about the proprietor.

Looking this toady up on the internet, I was surprised to discover Mr. Stewart Abercrombie Baker  was in my class in college. We graduated the same year.
Looking him up in my yearbook, I surprised to find he didn't look the same then. The larger surprise is he was president of the parachute club. I didn't even know there was a parachute club.  Life is full of surprises. 

 So he went on to law school at UCLA, where he did not become a lawyer to the stars, but he did  become a lawyer to the third tier wannabes, i.e. the Washington, D.C. politicos, and an appointed toady in  various Republican administrative posts having to do with national security and the violation of civil rights in the name of keeping America safe again.

I, on the other hand, settled into happy obscurity, and have never been asked to appear on the PBS News Hour, where this toad was trying to hop into the limelight last night.  Listening to this guy pimp for Trump and the forces of darkness, I had to think, maybe it's better to keep your mouth shut and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
,

Instrumentalities

Never heard of this guy Mark Levin, but he says President Obama used all the instrumentalities of the government to place wire taps on Trump Tower, and the evidence is overwhelming.

Mark Levin, Master of Instrumentalities

We just don't have the evidence but you know it's overwhelming. Or it will be, when we find it. 

Personally, I have to believe anybody who comes up with the word, "instrumentalities."  Microscoft Word underlines that one in red as soon as you type it, so you know it's a great word.

And I thought President Trump had all the best words. Well, apparently one got by him:  instrumentalities. Fantastic. Just incredible. 

Those instrumentalities done tapped the Donald's phones in Trump Tower, which must not be easy, given how high Trump Tower is and how tight the security. You'd need some real serious instrumentalities to get by all that and tap the phones.

"Overwhelming" evidence, as a word, not so much. I like "irrefutable," better. When it comes to adjectives, you want one as specific to the noun as you can get.

Of course, the key thing is whatever the evidence is, nobody's seen it, which makes it really irrefutable. And overwhelming, I suppose.

Justifiably upset by instrumentalities

There was some Washington lawyer on the News Hour tonight who looked like Yoda in glasses, saying that it was perfectly reasonable to think President Obama would have tapped the Donald's phones because we all know President Obama takes politics "very personally." This Republican lawyer was saying, based on that very personal thing, the Senate committee investigating the Russians should investigate President Obama as well. 

One thing I don't quite get: When Wikileaks tapped the phones at the DNC, or hacked their emails or whatever, Donald said, "Oh, you got to love Wikileaks." He was all for listening in then. I thought he sort of liked eavesdropping. Well, maybe he's evolved on that one.

But the guy on the News Hour said the committee should investigate, which only sounds fair. We should utilize the government instrumentalities to investigate President Obama and his wire tapping mania.

A  user of instrumentalities

While we are at it, we ought to re open that Benghazi investigation, and wouldn't you like to know if vaccines really do cause autism?