Our Beautiful Wall

Watching our President speaking before the crowd in Nashville, I was, once again, fascinated by the two guys visible over his left shoulder. There seem to be two grinning half wits, who look as if they've been drawn by some Mad Magazine artist, always there, just above his left shoulder.  These two chanted "U-S-A" and "Lock Her UP," and were having a grand time. 

The President talked about his beautiful wall, which will keep out undesirables, already has, people have told him: bad immigrants are deciding to simply not even try because they know that wall is coming. And he talked about the world's most dishonest people--that would be the press. 

But then, later in the day I listened to NPR and they had a story about H-1B visas by which American high tech companies import bright young soft ware engineers from India, engineers from China, computer nerds from Europe, which sounds like a good thing--American companies sucking in talent from around the world to forge ahead.  But, it turns out, the way this visa program has been used is not as lovely as it sounds.

What happened all too frequently is American companies fired long term, older employees who had built their computer systems and replaced them with young nerds from India, the Far East and Europe who were 25-34 years old, and could be paid 1/2 what the older guys were getting. 

What Trump is arguing, in effect, is that it is ruthless, heartless to the core, to bring in people to create your company, to build it, and then, once they've reached a position where you have to pay them what they are worth, and for what they've built, you fire them and move on. It's just business, as they would say in the Godfather.  Trump doesn't like that sort of bottom line thinking. It's the same thinking that moves the bosses at the Carrier plant to plan to move the plant where they build air conditioners to Mexico; it's the core value of capitalism. The bosses work to please the stockholders, and if that means throwing aside the American workers, well they do what's best for the bottom line. Ayn Rand would say that's the right thing to do. Trump doesn't care about that principle. He says there's another value; The value of doing right by the worker. He sounds like a damned Commie to me. Like Bernie Sanders, at the very least. 

Whenever you hear industrialists saying they just cannot find people to do the work they need done you must always edit that in your brain to hear it as, "We just cannot find workers who will work for the exploitation wages we are willing to pay."

You can always find workers for the right price.

With the economy approaching full employment, we should be seeing wages in certain sectors soaring--but we are not. The bosses have looked for people who can do the same jobs for far lower wages, and to find these people, they look abroad.  In the case of the poor Indian engineer, he will work for what you pay a Starbucks clerk, because he is getting his ticket punched to live in the USA.

Intriguingly, President Trump said, "I will end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program...No exceptions." 
You gotta love Trump. He will end something "forever" as if he will be President forever.  And "no exceptions."  That means he means it. 
Of course, he is all for allowing Haitians and Romanians to work at his Mar-a-Lago resort for cheap labor.  His explanation is they couldn't find Americans to do those jobs.
Not for the wages he knew he could get some starving Haitians for, anyway.

But this all goes to show that Trump may actually do some good things along his path to perdition, as he stumbles along.

He might even find jobs for those two guys over his left shoulder. 

Republicans and Personal Responsibility

The one thing the Right cannot tolerate are people who will not accept their just desserts for their own folly.


When the financial meltdown happened because, in part, wild bankers took crazy risks with other people's money and set their own banks afire, there were lots of Tea Party types screaming, "Let them burn!"


The Tea Party was organized around indignation over the Moral Peril of bailing out reckless bankers who were playing the game of private gain from public risk.


When Paul Ryan and Jim Jordan talk about health insurance they say, "Hey, if you are prudent and willing to spend the money you know you should spend on health insurance, fine, you win. If not, you lose and you die. It's your own fault."


That's fine for them to say and they are being consistent with their principles which say each man must be responsible for his own welfare and not expect hand outs from those of us who have been responsible.


It's the old grasshopper and the ants thing.


Anyone who has ever worked in an Emergency Room knows how hard it is to see a person come in, to see them suffering, and to send them away because they have not planned ahead. At that moment, faced with a man who is having a heart attack, who is writhing in pain sobbing "Help me!" it is hard to simply turn away. "Oh, you failed to plan."

Jim Jordan was a champion wrestler in college. He trained and built his body and mastered his techniques and he has no sympathy for the obese, slothful, the diabetic who lets his diabetes go.  That guy's a loser and deserves all the bad things coming to him.


But I bet he's never had to look that man or his wife in the eyes and say, "Hey, you lived for the moment. Well, now you're getting what you deserve."

Mr. Ryan doesn't want to make the young and the healthy support the old and the infirm. That's not fair.


It's those liberal Democrats who the undeserving, dissolute poor have wrapped around their fingers. It's the Democrats who said, "Look, people do not plan ahead. So we'll make them plan ahead--we'll force them to take a little out of each paycheck and we'll invest it so they can have social security and medical care when they get old."

The Democrats are the Party which looks at mankind and says, people are so caught up in the moment, they won't plan ahead, and we won't let their lack of planning become our problem 20 years later. 


The whole notion of Social Security is based on an appreciation of mankind's imperfections.  Medicare, too. These programs are based on the recognition that someone has to be the adult in the room and make the kids eat their spinach.

The Republicans are the parents with the rod in their hands. Go ahead, drop out of school, don't buy health insurance, don't save for retirement. When you come begging for health care and retirement don't bother.  We told you so.


What we have now is to see how that plays with the electorate.

Afghanistan Forever

Oh, joy: Eternal war.
Well, at least it's not my sons fighting.

Without a Veil: Is She In Danger Now?

Teachers who dare educate girls are beheaded in front of the offending students.

But that's the other side, in Afghanistan.
Our side merely chains young boys to their bedposts in police stations, to hold them until night, for repetitive raping.
Women are chattel on the hoof, bought and sold.

Offended Her Husband

Muslims who are unrepentant murderers war with Muslims who simply enslave women and defile children. Muslims on both sides in Afghanistan say they get their ideas from their faith. 
That is Afghanistan, not Indonesia, where Muslims are nothing like this, except for the headscarves, or Dearborn, Michigan, where Muslims are just like other Americans. 
Muslims in Dearborn are no more like Muslims in Afghanistan than Christians in Portsmouth are like Ku Klux Klan Christians in Mississippi.  

Taliban or Ally?  Who Can Tell?

Am I missing something? Why are American boys and girls, men and women in Afghanistan,  getting blown up, dismembered and traumatized?

Oh, we are denying safe haven to terrorists, are we? As if you could whack a mole in Afghanistan and he will not pop up in Somalia, Sudan, Libya, Egypt or Berlin?

The War on Drugs. The War on Terrorism. War without end, amen. 

Getting Ready for the Stoning

President Obama, our most thoughtful and articulate President since Lincoln noted:

"Make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al-Qaida's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism — it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” 

He said this as he prepared to launch 30,000 American men and women to Afghanistan, where, as it turned out, they accomplished nothing positive.  They defeated no army, captured no capital, accepted no surrender, changed no society. There is almost nothing in common with the war against Hitler except both were violent and both wars fought the worst sorts of people. 

Violence is necessary to oppose evil; we must all agree to that. Where I part ways with Mr. Obama is where he chose to employ violence.  You would have to kill every last believer in Afghanistan to cauterize the source of violence there, because the source of violence there is belief, vile, unreasoning, self perpetuating belief.  
Are we prepared to do that, to kill every last believer in Afghanistan?

She Offended Male Honor 

P.S.
Let us not forget Islam may be a major source of violence in this century, but in prior centuries it was Christianity. Faith, unreasoning faith, used as the excuse for bad behavior and, often, Machiavellian designs.

Democracy and Dog Poop In New Hampshire

This morning at 7 AM I found myself on line outside Winnacunnet High School, which was closed because of the predicted blizzard. The blizzard had not yet swept in, only a few skirmishers of  blowing snow had arrived, and no dire forecast prevented a thousand townspeople from showing up.

Route 1A

An octagenarian with a freshly applied eye patch, no doubt after some surgical procedure, was on line in front of me. We picked up our packets of "Warrant Articles"  twelve pages deep, and headed to the voting booths to mark our ballots.

Dog Pooper on the Ballot

There were questions about funding the four town schools and funding the fire men and a long list of questions, and some school board candidates,  but the one I struggled with most was the article about dog poop.  Should we fine $1000 for throwing dog poop down the storm drains, or failing to pick it up in a plastic bag and depositing it in a town approved garbage pail? I skipped that one, the way I'd been taught to skip the hard questions on the SAT exams and come back to them, if you had time at the end.

Plaice Cove, Hampton, NH

There is no time limit on the warrant voting. Well, the polls close at 8 PM, but that's an hour a page. 

There were some questions on which  I felt unqualified to vote--apparently sixty feet of road was found to belong to the town but it served as the driveway for some citizen, who asked the town give it to him given that he had lived in the house for twenty years and wanted to repave it.  Or something like that. Sort of a reverse eminent domain issue, I suspect. I skipped that one.  I don't think you lose points for no answers.

There was a young father with three kids below age 3, trying to mark his ballot while one of them pulled the hair of a younger sibling and the youngest tried to eat delectables she found on the floor near the voting booth.

Near Seal Rock, Hampton, NH

I met several neighbors in line waiting to feed my ballots into the scanner machine. One was there to vote against money for the schools, money for the firemen. 
"Cost money," he said. "Costs the taxpayers money. And you know who that is." 
I was tempted to ask whether he voted against  the article on property tax relief for home owners over 65 who are retired, as he is. That break for elderly retired citizens cost the not yet retired citizens money, after all.
 I, for once, kept my mouth shut, and kept my remarks to pleasantries.

Tugboat, Obadiah  Youngblood

I saw a dog walking friend from Plaice Cove. I asked her how she voted on the dog poop article and she looked surprised. She picks up her dog's poop religiously and she knows I do, too, so it seemed like a non issue to her. 

"But didn't a $1000 fine seem a bit excessive?" I asked, innocently.
"For throwing dog poop down the storm sewers?" She asked, aghast. "There's storm sewers in Hampton not a hundred yards from the ocean."
"You think the fish care?"
"I don't know about the fish, but there are seals out there. Mammals!"
She did not ask me how I voted, but I could see I'll have some repair work to do with respect to our relationship.

Salt Marshes Near Hampton, Obadiah Youngblood

I don't know how the dog poop article will fare. I do know last November our town voted for Hillary Clinton by about a hundred votes.  I suppose that should instill confidence about the wisdom of the townspeople, but I'm not sure if the same people who turned out today to vote on dog poop were the ones who voted for Donald Trump last November, or if they could tell the difference.

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."