Where Did All the Charisma Go?

Last night, I attended a meeting of local New Hampshire Democrats. There was one good looking woman, but, for the most part, it was a sorry looking crowd of aged, bent and halt citizens, whose voices cracked and hands shook.

The speaker was a bright man, a lawyer, who said he was thinking of running for governor. He was five feet tall if he stood on a soap box.

Gets your attention

All I could think was, these people are bright, and they are right in their opinions, but they are losers. Not economic losers, for they were clearly affluent. But politically, losers. Nobody wants to be on their team.

Wrong Cause, but Charisma Plus

What ever happened to the Democrats who had dazzle? The Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the people who had charm, grace, charisma?

A general we can believe in

The closest thing we've got to charisma on the Democratic side is Bernie Sanders, who is tall, but stooped and looks every one of his seventy plus years.

We like Our Team

This morning, on TV, Sanders hosted a rally "Medicare for All" and he had Corey Booker (NJ) and Richard Blumenthal (CT) and Elizabeth Warren speak.  Nice people. On the right side, but weak voices, no energy.

Don't Mess With Our Team

I don't know.  I think we need someone new.

Band of Brothers

Democrats Need Don Draper

What the Democratic Party needs is marketing.

Reading "Dark Money" the thing that stands out is the Republicans have treated political discourse as marketing.  They know that Democrats have the arguments which should keep them in power:  1/ we need some form of universal health care 2/ We need regulation of markets to protect consumers from unscrupulous profit driven businesses  3/ we need to pay people enough money to keep them in the game, to give them a stake, so they want to cooperate enough to insure the continued flow of goods and services they want directed to them. 4/ we need to allow for the free expression of opinion and for free exchange of information so bad products and bad companies and bad practices (like cows standing in their own poop and chickens crowded shoulder to shoulder for their whole lives) can been exposed and rejected 5/ we need a planet unsullied by poisonous fumes and toxins.

So the Republicans have needed to come up with some appealing goodies to sell and they have hit upon keeping government off your back, resisting taxes and regulations and the knee of government on the neck of entrepreneurs who are our best hope for driving new knowledge, innovation.

Then the Republicans monetize these ideas by paying enough people enough money to keep them marketing these ideas--Rush Limbaugh has found his own pot of gold but there are numerous "foundations" and "think tanks" which employ people to get and remained "impassioned."


They know and know how to use anger.

President Obama, for all his great and many virtues did not do well with anger.  He failed, to the extent he failed, because he could not bring himself to get angry enough or often enough. He saw the American economy shoved to the brink of death by--well, who knows who was responsible really?  My best guess comes from reading "The Big Short" and stuff like that.
But Obama could not bring himself to rail against Wall Street greed, and nobody went to jail. NOBODY WENT TO JAIL!  In Iceland, after their 2008 crash, lots of bankers wen to jail. Made everyone feel a lot better. I saw the jails when I visited. And I thought, "We should have some American bankers, and American credit rating agency CEO's in jail. I'd feel a lot better.

Now Bernie Sanders writes an editorial in the NYT:

This is a pivotal moment in American history. Do we, as a nation, join the rest of the industrialized world and guarantee comprehensive health care to every person as a human right? Or do we maintain a system that is enormously expensive, wasteful and bureaucratic, and is designed to maximize profits for big insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, Wall Street and medical equipment suppliers?

We remain the only major country on earth that allows chief executives and stockholders in the health care industry to get incredibly rich, while tens of millions of people suffer because they can’t get the health care they need. This is not what the United States should be abo

Notice how he clearly identifies the bad guys, the bad values, the enemy.That's what you need in war, an enemy. FDR knew how to do that. Elizabeth Warren sometimes can identify the enemy, but she seems saddened by their perfidy rather than angered by it.

We need somebody to get angry.

Police Acting Badly (Again) Now Utah

Just how stupid are some police?  
As I have it from various news sources, a nurse at the University of Utah hospital apparently knows her job and the law better than Detective Jeff Payne, who arrived to draw blood on a comatose patient who had been struck by a speeding vehicle in a police chase, as an innocent bystander. 

Alex Wubbels, RN

One can only imagine the police wanted blood to show the driver was not under the influence of drugs or alcohol when he was assaulted by a speeding vehicle.

The patient's nurse knows that drawing blood on a patient without the patient's permission is assault, legally, as we were all told when we were in training in hospitals.

The detective apparently was not taught this point of law.

Detective Jeff Payne, Salt Lake City Police 

The nurse calmly schools the detective that to draw the blood he needs: 1/ The patient's permission--not possible in a comatose patient  2/ A warrant, which can be obtained electronically or 3/ The police can arrest the patient.

The nurse does what we are all trained to do: She gets her supervisor on the phone and the supervisor tells the cop to back off and the detective claims he's talked to his superior officer, "my lieutenant" who orders him to arrest the nurse, over the phone. 

So, now we have two supervisors, not on the scene, who are part of the problem, not the solution, although only one of them is dead wrong about the law.

Since the patient happens to be a victim of a crime, namely the car chase crash, arresting him apparently did not appeal to Detective Payne, so he arrested the nurse instead and hauled her off to his police car, for the crime of "obstructing justice."

Who is the bad guy in this picture?

So many questions leap to mind:
1/ Where was hospital security?
2/ Where was the nurse's supervisor?
3/ Where was the hospital administration?
4/ Where were the interns, residents, other nurses who might have rallied to her defense, or at the very least, called the police.
No, wait, it was the police who were assaulting the nurse.

5/ Why was the detective allowed to walk past the waiting room to the patient's room?
Ordinary citizens are not allowed in a patient's room or in operating rooms or on wards without security screening.  Should we not demand the same of police, given this behavior? If the patient was actually in the burn unit, he would be under protective isolation and you'd have to gown and glove to draw the blood. Did this detective know how to draw blood in a sterile fashion?


Another question: Why was this detective not fired summarily, immediately and seriously? Why was his lieutenant not fired? 
And where is the mayor of Salt Lake City in all this?

The other thing you might note is this all happened after a high speed police chase. How was the public served by this chase, and by putting this truck driver, who, as far as any responsible official has said, was an innocent bystander and still does not know his nurse stuck up for him.

But more to the point: What level of arrogance do police function with daily? They give an order and expect you to obey?  Where is that in the constitution?

The Child is the Father of the Flim Flam Man

Norman Vincent Peale died in 1993, but for 50 years before that he wrote best selling books and ran a church in New York City and a  psychiatric/religious "clinic" next door.

Norman Vincent Peale

He wrote a book, "The Power of Positive Thinking" which I have never read, but I've read Wikipedia and other internet excerpts and it seems to be an argument that a positive mind set can overcome all adversity, and you are going to be afflicted in life, you're going to have reversals but you can slide right by all those, and use that to make yourself a success--the old that which does not kill me will make me stronger stuff. 



“Change your thoughts and you change your world.”  

“Be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind. Talk health, happiness, and prosperity to every person you meet. Make all your friends feel there is something special in them. Look at the sunny side of everything. Think only the best, be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.

Stand up t

Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution. If you don't have any problems, you don't get any seeds.

 your obstacles
and d

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities -- always see them, for they're always there.

o something about them. You will find that they haven't half the strength you think they have

Peale did not like the Catholic in Kennedy and supported his opponent, Nixon and the Democrats pointed to Peale's book and said this country was built by realists who took action based on facts, and Peale's book was larded with examples of how well his positive mindset works which were invariably anecdotes about unnamed people who prevailed through thinking happy and constructive thoughts and made lemonade out of lemons.

President Tripe was an acolyte of Rev. Peale and you can hear it in his refusal to cite facts, statistics and numbers but in his pattern of simply saying what he wants to be true and that's enough. So Mexican rapists are pouring across the border because he heard about a woman who got raped by one in San Francisco, and vaccinations cause autism and mental retardation because he had a friend who had a child...and as for positive thinking, well we are going to have so much winning when President Tripe gets into office and drains the swamp you'll be tired and bored of winning.


Bless his soul. President Honey Boo Boo.


In his time Rev Peale was called "the flim flam man" because he asserted so many things which were supported by nothing more than tales he had clearly simply made up.

Choosing to be positive and having a grateful attitude is going to determine how you're going to live your life.

When you focus on being a blessing, God makes sure that you are always blessed in abundance.

You can change your world by changing your words... Remember, death and life are in the power of the tongue.

Reading about Joel Osteen and his prosperity gospel of read my book and you will be rich, there are distinct echoes of Peale.

I wonder if President Tripe will invite Rev Osteen to the White House for dinner with him and Sheriff Joe Arpaio.


Wouldn't you like to be there for that?

Carol Shea Porter In Exeter: Oh, Democrats!

You have to love Carol Shea Porter, who represents  New Hampshire's First District in the United States House of Representatives. She has authored a Medicare for All bill which has found no other sponsors in the House. She has been for increasing the minimal wage for years, fighting against that canard from Republicans that increasing the minimal wage will decrease jobs, as if every owner of a McDonalds franchise will close down his store rather than share his profits more equitably, as if exploitation of labor is a good thing.

You also have to love a lady who was thrown out of a George W. Bush rally for wearing a bright red T shirt which said, "Turn your back on Bush."


And you have to respect her fighting spirit for beating Jeb Bradley twice and Frank Guinta twice, having also been beaten twice by Frank Guinta.


On the other hand, she is exactly what is wrong with the Democrats: Heart in the right place, right on all the issues, but milquetoast. Her voice is too quiet.


She spoke at Exeter last night and I lost count of the times she mentioned how nasty Washington had become, how upset she had been by the shootings of Republican Congressmen at a baseball field, how she hoped for more pleasant conversations with Republicans and more comity in the halls of Congress.


Her most ardent meme was opposition must come from people like us, in the audience, "grass roots" ordinary folks. This the same thing Ray Buckley tells us every chance he gets. Which is to say, "You are not going to get any leadership from us--you do it."  Or, put another way, the ship has hit an iceberg and the captain and crew are powerless, so you passengers organize yourselves in boats and get off while you still can.





The last question of the night was the one I wanted answered:  Who do the Democrats have who can beat President Honey Boo Boo in 2020? 


Oh, we have lots of people, good candidates. And we all sat forward on the edges of our seats and waited to hear. Ms. Shea Porter struggled, well, Kirstin Gillibrand, maybe.  And someone, a name I'd never heard and quickly forgot. Another couple of names like that. Sherrod Brown. And Al Franken.
Al Franken? Really? That's the best we can do?
I mean, I like Al, but he was never that funny on Saturday Night Live and he won his Senate seat by like, two votes.

So, we are left with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer as the face of the Democratic Party, while the Republicans have Jim Jordan, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, John Cornyn, Rush Limbaugh, John Thune and a host of other big voiced, smooth talking fair haired boys who hammer away at the wimpy sounding Dems, who, until recently were led by Harry Reid whose voice could barely ever rise above a whisper and who was beaten up by a snapping exercise band and had to retire, passing his mantel on to Chuck Schumer who thought hard and consulted widely and came up with the slogan "A Better Deal" for America. Which is like, "Well, we may not be much, but we are probably better."

There was a lot of talk from Congresswoman Shea Porter last night about the things President Honey Boo Boo had done, but there was precious little about what we will do, why the Dems ought to be leading the government, how we will address immigration, the war in Afghanistan, healthcare, the loss of manufacturing jobs, the withering life in the non urban parts of America.
We need warriors. We've got nice ladies who are wonderful, good hearted people, but they are not leaders.

The President's Favorite Joe

Joe Arpaio does not disguise what he thinks.  He thinks dark skinned Hispanic immigrants are criminals and threaten White America. 

And he says he's the toughest sheriff in America, and he bought himself a tank and painted flames on it just to show that off.

He rounds up people, claps them in handcuffs for the crime of looking suspiciously Hispanic, which in a border state like Arizona, means his police are kept busy. 

He is a hero to the White supremacists because their greatest fear is non white immigration. People like Kris Kobach of Kansas have figured this out, and he panders to those quaking voters by agreeing with callers to radio shows who imagine the coming "ethnic cleansing" once Hispanics arrive in sufficient numbers to wipe out the Whites the way the Whites wiped out the  Indians. 

I had a secretary once who was a very smart woman, who learned our computer system quickly and did the job of three people, so she was an asset.  But she was  a big fan of Joe Arpaio. She had grown up in a desperate hollow in West Virginia and never got past the third grade and lost all her teeth by age 50. Her husband could never keep a decent job, but would scrounge a job here and there delivering flowers. When he found out about the retirement money I had put into an account for her, he drained that account to buy himself a new pick up truck.  

That didn't bother her though. What bothered her was the Spanish speaking teenagers who worked at the McDonalds who would laugh and chat in Spanish with customers and then switch back to English to take her order.  

"I don't even feel like I'm in America any more," she said. "Can't understand what half the people in that McDonalds are saying." 

A Chinese family moved in the rental house next door to her rental house and they gutted fish in their back yard and then cooked the fish on a wok. That disgusted her.  

"But didn't men gut deer in West Virginia?" I asked her.
"Yeah, sure, but they didn't squat down in their back yards like they wanted to poop and jabber in Chinese."

What really bothered her, I think, is that she had finally got a well paying job, felt secure economically, bought a new car every 3 years, but she found herself living with people who were just starting out in this country, and that made her feel she had not made any real progress in life. "Moving on up," had not happened for her.

She was still living among people who were on the first step of the ladder in America.

The courts told President Snowflake he couldn't just bar a class of people at the airports. The court held Joe Arpaio in contempt for continuing to imprison people for being Hispanic. Well, Snowflake could do something about that court--he just over rode the court's action with a pardon. 

Checks and balances.



From Wikipedia:

On July 2, 2011, when the temperature in Phoenix hit 118 °F (48 °C), Arpaio measured the temperature inside Tent City tents at 145 °F (63 °C). Some inmates complained that fans near their beds were not working, and that their shoes were melting from the heat.^[47] During the summer of 2003, when outside temperatures exceeded 110 °F (43 °C), Arpaio said to complaining inmates, "It's 120 degrees in Iraq and the soldiers are living in tents and they didn't commit any crimes, so shut your mouths!"^[48]

In 1997, Amnesty International said Arpaio's tent city jail was not an "adequate or humane alternative to housing inmates in suitable ... jail facilities."^[49] Tent City was criticized by groups contending that there were violations of human and constitutional rights.^[50]

Arpaio stated he reserved the punishment of living in Tent City "for those who have been convicted."^[51][52] In April 2017, it was announced by newly elected Sheriff Paul Penzone that the jail would be shut down.^[53]

Volunteer chain gangs

In 1995, Arpaio reinstituted chain gangs. In 1996, he expanded the chain gang concept by instituting female volunteer chain gangs.^[54] Female inmates worked seven hours a day (7 a.m. to 2 p.m.), six days a week. He also instituted the world's first all-juvenile volunteer chain gang; volunteers earned high school credit toward a diploma.^[55]

Pink underwear

One of Arpaio's public relations actions was the requirement that inmates wear pink underwear in order to prevent its theft by the released inmates. He claimed this saved the county $70,000 in the first year the rule was in effect.^[56] Arpaio subsequently started to sell customized pink boxers (with the Maricopa County Sheriff's logo and "Go Joe") as a fund-raiser for Sheriff's Posse Association. Despite allegations of misuse of funds received from these sales, Arpaio declined to provide an accounting for the money.^[57]

Arpaio's success in gaining press coverage with the pink underwear resulted in his extending the use of the color. He introduced pink handcuffs, using the event to promote his book, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, America's Toughest Sheriff.^[58] Arpaio has said "I can get elected on pink underwear... I've done it five times."^[59][60]

Selective Service registration

In 2004, Arpaio ordered all undocumented immigrants currently in jail to register for the Selective Service System.^[61]

What Liberals Can Learn From Derek Black

Derek Black, the son of Don Black a Ku Klux Klan grand dragon, founder of "Stormfront" a website which serves as a platform for White people who are in a tither about White genocide, racial purity, immigration, "preserving" America for the White race, wrote a thoughtful and altogether wonderful article in the NYT Sunday August 20 Sunday Review.

Derek Black 

He noted that the history of the idea of preserving America for White people of European descent, excluding White Jewish Europeans is not new but was embodied in United States immigration law until just 50 years ago.

He also noted the Jefferson memorial in Washington, DC has the words "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these [Negro] people are to be free," but does not include the second half of that sentence, "Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government . Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them."

Zealotry of the Convert

He notes that Lincoln hoped to deport all coloreds back to Africa, to Liberia. He would free them, but deport them. Only when that did not work, for practical reasons, did he agree to simply set them free in place.

Having been raised in the White nationalist subculture he notes the most important and fundamental issue for these racists, what keeps them up at night is the oncoming demography, that immigration will mean by the yer 2040 Whites will be in the minority.  What Hitler called the mongrelization of a nation is well under way in the United States.  Clinton remarked on this, and celebrated it.  For Derek Black, David Duke, the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan nation, this is their greatest nightmare.

This is why Donald Dubious's "Build the Wall" resonated so thoroughly with the crowds of White nationalists who cheered him. 

Frightened White Men

Derek Black had his own radio show for White people at age 10, and his father had one, in addition to the website.  One thing about the conservatives, they do mass communications as the first step.

They talk a lot, marshal arguments, test them out. 
Liberals, not so much.

We had a Democratic Party meeting at which the Free State Project was presented by a young woman who was trying to make a career by tracking this group of ultra libertarians, who do not believe in government beyond protecting individual rights, which means no public roads, no public schools, no public health funded by government, no vaccinations, basically, no government beyond an army. Everything but national defense can be done by private enterprise. Or at least, that's what some of the Free Staters believe. They are so into not being part of a group, they refuse to even call themselves "members" of the Free State Project because they so cherish the idea of their own individuality.

Six Free Staters were in the audience but they were hardly allowed to speak or defend themselves. The presentation was all about whipping up anxiety about how the Free Staters were trying to take over New Hampshire. This was what Democrats were doing--declaiming from the pulpit, not allowing a free exchange of ideas.

I think what Democrats, and liberals of all stripes, need to do is to engage in open and spirited debate with the Free State Project, and with other kooks like  Kris Kobach, who believes White genocide is imminent. These folks have arguments which are easy enough to demolish, but when we do not give them a hearing, they have an easy claim to the status of a suppressed minority.

The other thing we need is a liberal Rush Limbaugh. The first effort, Air America, failed because, as Rush Limbaugh observed, they did not know how to entertain.

Liberals need to find their showmen and show women.

When he stepped out on that stage in Chicago on election night in 2008, and Barack Obama said

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our Democracy; Tonight is your answer.”

there was no better show on earth. He had that exultant crowd in tears, and he was better that night than President Snowflake has ever been.  
We need somebody who can take the stage, as Obama once did and observe, "We worship an awesome God in the blue states." 

How clever that sentence, at once disparaging the idea of those sanctimonious Bible Thumpers in the red states that only they are pious, and at the same time reaching out to those in the red states who think the Democrats up north are godless. 

In a country of 320 million, one would hope there is one more Obama out there, if only the Democrats would allow him or her to flower.  But, looking at the pathetic Chuck Schumer and, God Bless her, but Heaven Help her, Nancy Pelosi, the only thing one can conclude about the Democrats is they value seniority over real leadership and over winning. 

What Democrats need is a war consigliore; we need a pugnacious Churchill who wants to fight, who does not care about offending people or being politically correct. 
We do not need people who are preoccupied with stupid things like a sports broadcaster who says a black tennis star engages in guerrilla warfare and thus has uttered a racial slur by suggesting a black woman might be a "gorilla." 

We've been through all that stupidity back in the 60's when youths cut off the alligator patch from their LaCoste polo shirts as an anti elitist statement.

First, we have to stop looking like fools. Second, we have to stop worrying about what Donald Dubious is going to say or do and then, thirdly, we have to start thinking about what we can do to Donald Dubious.