What this State Needs is a Good Talk Show

Reading Mikhail Gorbachev's history and memoir, "On My Country and the World." (1998).

"The Untold History of the United States" mentions it and it is well worth a read.

What becomes immediately apparent is while we had a profoundly demented leader in Ronald Reagan, the Russians sent us a gift we refused. Had Obama been President when Gorbachev was changing his Russia, we would likely have few or no nuclear weapons, no more endless war and a better economy.

Oliver Stone, Mad Dog knows, is a writer of screed, a conspiracy aficionado, but, as the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't meant there isn't someone out there who wants to kill you, and his "Untold History" is fascinating, troubling, motivating and wonderfully entertaining. It also points you toward a variety of revelatory sources, like "War is a Racket" by Smedley Butler. 

This past primary season is still washing over Mad Dog's canine brain, but one thing which is abundantly clear is very few people were actually listening, and of those who did, most remained silent, simply listening and not responding to candidates, not challenging their ideas and forcing them to rethink their positions, at least on the Democratic side.

This is, in fact, one thing the other side does exceedingly well, with Rush Limbaugh, Lou Dobbs and all those other airwave pontificators. They also invest in The Federalist Society and all sort of avowedly right wing think tanks, which the left does not. The left is always trying to be open minded and even handed, i.e., academic, thoughtful and respectful.

Mad Dog thinks what this country needs is not a good 5 cent cigar, but a good left wing radio show, e.g. "Radio Free New Hampshire."

He is well aware Al Franken tried this and it went down in flames. But, truth be told, fine as Franken was, in many ways, he was too often unfunny.

This show needs to be entertaining, with musical interludes, seductive, alluring, attractive in ways liberals neglect.

And Mad Dog would like to point out, liberal neglect is a major failing. Much as he loved Obama, who was by far the best President to hold office during Mad Dog's long and doggy life, Mr. Obama had some failings:
1/ He failed to extract us from Afghanistan. He should have emphatically stated this war had a purpose: to get Osama Bin Laden, but the idea of rooting out or denying "sanctuaries" for terrorists was always absurd--the 9/11 terrorists trained in Florida and Berlin. The day after Bin Laden's body was dumped into the sea, every last American man and woman should have been on an airplane home from Afghanistan.
And he should have closed Gitmo and called into his office every Democrat who opposed it and raked him over the coals until they agreed to do it.
2/ He did not pursue criminal charges against anyone involved in the financial meltdown of 2008-2009. The country needed some revenge. Anger required it. Obama neglected it. Millions lost homes, life savings and Obama was like, "Oh, never mind."
3/ He did not get out often enough to rally the troops, or if he did, he allowed the press to ignore him.
4/ He was, in general, too afraid of appearing to be an angry Black man, for fear of frightening those white suburban ladies in Peoria, when, in fact, there was anger building in the country and he thought the soothing word and turning the other cheek was a proper response.

And what can you say about the Trumpling?
1/ Well, you have to admit, whereas Obama docilely handed over his cell phone, his computer because he was told to do this, Trump said, "Screw you," and took to cyberspace and his daily tweets, as inane and somethings frankly insane as they are, they are the 21st century version of the fireside chat. He is saying to the American voting public, I am engaged with you. I am talking to you.
2/ His Presidency is one long campaign rally: He spends incalculable energy on stoking up the troops, and he is devoted to marketing above governing. Like Hitler, he knows the value of bread and circus, the good show. Hitler designed the Nazi flag himself, after many tries. 

He personally designed his huge rallies. When he wasn't poring over maps for the next country to invade, he was designing parades, night rallies, pageants and Olympic shows. (And never forget, the modern Olympic movement was his creation.)

3/ Hitler was a Keynesian economist: Mad Dog doesn't know where he got the money, but he poured tons of it into building the first major highway system, building the VW beetle, the "People's Car" literally--Volkswagen. And he poured money into the armaments industry, all of which meant jobs from infrastructure. He also helped the farmers.  So whether or not people thought much about the Jews, whether they hated Jews before Hitler or simply never thought much about them, they shrugged off whatever hate swirled about them as long as they had bread, jobs and really fun rallies. Trump understands all this.

4/ Trump also gets Hitler's formula: Keep it really simple and keep repeating it. It doesn't matter if a wall is an idiotic idea. It's a good symbol and you can pour money down a mine shaft and create jobs for those who will dig for it.  Immigrants crossing the Southern border are not the problem, in reality, of course. Most illegal immigrants arrive by airplane and overstay their visas. Most legal immigrants are well educated Asian--now those guys will take somebody's jobs--but you can vilify the brown skinned, tattooed rapist MS-13 and protect everyone from a trivial boogeyman and you'll have them screaming at your rallies.

All this and more could be discussed on Radio Free New Hampshire.
You could have thoughtful liberals like Terence O'Rourke expounding on why packing the Supreme Court would be a good idea to wrest the nation from the "rule of the dead."  You could examine the Trump base. You could dissect out the reasons underlying his appeal. You could evaluate the great white knights the Democrats may or may not have.
And you can explore ideas like, "I'm not looking for a knight; I'm looking for a sword."

All this and more, if only some money man of a liberal persuasion would sponsor it.

Dream on, Mad Dog.

Anti Trumps: Get a Grip

How many people did Hurricane Maria kill in Puerto Rico?
President Trump whines he's been saddled with 2985 deaths which weren't on him--those people died later and were not killed by the hurricane.
Reporters from CNN, MS NBC, NPR have assailed him for showing indifference to the facts and making up his own reality.


But what is a fact?


And how much more about that number of 3,000 deaths do the reporters know than the President?

I had wondered about this because I have filled out death certificates and if ever there was a "garbage in/garbage out" phenomenon, death certificates have got to be it. You can trust the fact the person named is dead, and maybe even have some idea of the time of death, better for the date of death, but cause of death? Forget it.


American medicine stopped doing routine autopsies decades ago--and if you want to know what really killed somebody, that is the way. The only people who get autopsies now are "medical examiner's cases"--dead people who died unexpectedly or under suspicious circumstances. Autopsies are for determining if there was foul play.

We need that balloon in Hampton

So when you have 3,000 deaths, how do you know what those people died from?


The News Hour had an illuminating segment about how the George Washington University School of Public Health did their study which provided that number of 3,000 deaths from Hurricane Maria. Turns out, what they do is they look at the number of deaths in the months of August, September and if there are typically 5,000 deaths in August but in the month of Maria there were 8,000 deaths, then they attribute those extra deaths to the hurricane.

The base

Individuals are not counted. No death certificates are examines. Causes of death are not assessed.

So maybe Trump has a point.
And how do you assess cause and responsibility?  If a man who has bad coronary artery disease dies walking up stairs instead of being about to take an elevator because the hurricane knocked out power, is that a hurricane death?


If a woman falls down the stairs in a dark stairwell because the power is out, is that a hurricane death?

Not a good messanger

So what Trump is really complaining about is the accounting system. Personally, I have never accepted the idea that if a pitcher is yanked from a game with two runners on the bases and the relief pitcher gives up a home run, the two base runners who scored are counted against the original pitcher, not against his relief. It's sort of like that with Trump and Puerto Rico--he did not make the mess. He did not cause the hurricane damage. He did fail to help avoid subsequent suffering, and it is notable, the white people in Texas who were also hit by the hurricane got way better treatment from the United States government. But then again, those Spanish speaking, brown skinned Puerto Ricans are not Trump voters.

What strikes me is not so much the peevish Trump, but the self righteousness of the reporters and pundits, who are all in high dudgeon because they KNOW the TRUTH and Trump is denying something they are sure of, which, in fact, is not a certainty.


If we are ever going to beat Trump, it can't be with stupidity.
We have to focus on what is really wrong with him. Don't even bother to comment on really stupid tweets, or if you do, make sure everyone is laughing.

Immigration: Ha! Ha! The Joke's on You, Build the Wall Freaks

So it turns out the threat is not coming from a flood of Mexican rapists massing on the Southern border hoping to defile White American womanhood, but it's the Yellow Peril!

The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.

“This is quite different from what we had thought,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

--New York Times 9/13/18


Now the Asians coming in have college degrees and it's just possible, in point of fact, they may be a threat to the indigenous white factory worker in Wilkes Barre or the coal miner in West Virginia, because these new folks are actually educated and can pay more for that house and will gentrify your neighborhood and move you out and you'll be living in a trailer with your mother and your girl friend and her three kids.

Building the wall won't help you now.

This kid would never have hurt you

Real World Democracy in New Hampshire

After 6 months of campaigning, the primary election results for the Democratic nomination to face the Republican Trump fan for the open seat in the New Hampshire First for the United States House of Representatives are in:

Candidate			Party	Votes	Percentage
	★	Chris Pappas i	D	26,875 votes	42% votes
	★	Maura Sullivan i	D	19,313 votes	30% votes
	★	Mindi Messmer i	D	6,142 votes	10% votes
	★	Naomi Andrews i	D	4,508 votes	7% votes
	★	Lincoln Soldati i	D	1,982 votes	3% votes
	★	Deaglan McEachern i	D	1,709 votes	3% votes
	★	Levi Sanders i	D	1,141 votes	2% votes
	★	Mark Mackenzie i	D	746 votes	1% votes
	★	Terence O'Rourke i	D	656 votes	1% votes
	★	Paul Cardinal i	D	317 votes	0% votes
	★	William Martin i	D	230 votes	0% votes
Total				63,619

What is remarkable is that nearly 64,000 citizens out of a population of 1,300,000 took the time to vote.

What is disturbing is that 70,000 is a pretty small number and those who did vote chose the "safe" candidate, a man who has worked in state government for years, made lots of friends, avoids conflict and prides himself on "reaching across the aisle."

His argument was that he has won in Republican districts and the New Hampshire first is deeply purple, having gone back and forth between Dems and GOP almost every cycle.

On my street, there are 11 families. Only two of these households bothered to walk down the street to vote. Most of my neighbor were blissfully unaware there even was an election and only one household had folks who could name a single one of the 11 candidates for the open seat.  Only two ever went to a "forum" which was the way the Democratic party presented its candidates.

The head of the Democrats refused to allow a real "debate" where candidates could exchange freely, saying with so many on the stage that would be too unwieldy.

The good news is the Stepford wife candidate, the pretty blonde Marine Corps vet who dark money had imported to run for the seat lost. You could not turn on the TV without seeing her for 2 weeks prior to the election. One would have thought she was the only one running, but she lost to a guy with deep roots and a long history in New Hampshire.

Particularly interesting was the showing of Naomi Andrews, who entered the race late, who sounded as if she was running for student government president, but who had worked for the former Congresswoman and presumably was known and liked by some regular party employees.  Somehow, she pulled in 10 times the vote of the really substantive, grown up candidates; she out polled a man who took fire in Iraq and won a bronze star. So much for "Thank you for your service."

Really, the rest of the news is pretty discouraging. It is discouraging because citizens did not care enough, even in New Hampshire, which is a state which claims it deserves to hold the first Presidential primary in the nation because its citizens are so engaged, so politically aware, so involved.
Bull.
The same citizens who go to the ball game and blubber about the national anthem, who rail against football players for "disrespecting the flag" by taking a knee, can't be bothered to go to a forum and listen to candidates for their national government. These same super patriot citizens who have American flag decals all over their cars and flags outside their houses cannot name even 3 real issues or where any of the candidates stand on them.
They could not be bothered to walk next door when a candidate came to their neighbor's house to discuss the issues.
For these patriots, making any effort at all, even mental effort, taking even three hours to think about political and social issues was too much to ask.
As if real patriotism requires no effort at all.

One of my neighbors who did go to multiple meetings to hear the candidates repeatedly came to a different conclusion about who to vote for: She voted for a woman because she thinks Congress needs more women and she liked Mindi Messmer's drive to protect the environment. I cannot fault her for that. This neighbor  is a patriot in the real sense of the word--she took the time to think to discuss to agonize over her choices.

For my money, there was nobody even close to Terence O'Rourke, whose intellect, whose grasp of the issues, whose boldness with respect to solutions--he would fix the rule from the dead in our Supreme Court by packing it--made him the obvious standout choice.

But he was spitting into the wind. He got all of 657 votes. That's the number of thinking citizens out of 1.3 million souls living in this state.
Since almost the beginning of our Republic, party machines have been able to turn out voters to vote for the candidates of their choice, and Terence O'Rourke was clearly not that; he was a challenge to entrenched party pols.

During the 1930's the world chose between fascism and democracy and large parts of it chose fascism. Democracy was too indecisive, too weak for many countries. Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, all chose fascism. Mussolini made the trains run on time and Hitler put people to work building the autobahn to connect up the nation with roads.

The strongman has his appeal.
Democracy, as we can see by the results this past Tuesday, remains dysfunctional 90% of the time and is lucky to be still alive.



PS: For all the talk about the Blue Wave coming in November, it's interesting to note that 21,000 Republicans got out to vote for their Trump booster, Eddie Edwards on 9/11/18, virtually the same number as Democrats who voted for Pappas.

Lessons from Russia on Obscene Wealth

"They tiptoed from room to room, afraid to speak above a whisper and gazing with a kind of awe at the unbelievable luxury, at the beds with their feather mattresses, the looking glasses, the horsehair sofa, the Brussels carpet, the lithograph of Queen Victoria over the drawing room mantelpiece...A unanimous resolution was passed on the spot that the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum. All agreed that no animal must ever live there."
--George Orwell, Animal Farm

You may have been wondering about the uncharacteristic reticence on the part of Mad Dog for the past two weeks:  He has been on a fact evading, impression forming journey to Russia and the Scandinavian nations and the Baltic.

One thing he learned is that these countries have histories which go back a long way before Hitler and Stalin, but recent history extends to 70 years ago, and while most of the people who suffered under the Nazis are dead or soon to be, memories persist.

German tourists with ear plugs smiling as their guides show them through the winter palace outside St. Petersburg caught Mad Dog's eye.  Our guide, a Russian, was describing how the Nazis plundered the paintings and the Amber Room, stealing whatever wasn't bolted to the wall, so I wondered what those German tourists were hearing through their earphones. 

In Berlin, the bullet holes from the Russian attack are not erased, but simply plugged, "To remind us," as our guide, who happened to be a Brit ex-pat now a recently naturalized German citizen, told us. 

Her story was interesting. She visited and fell in thrall to Berlin right out of college, 10 years ago and stayed--but once Brexit got voted through, she became a German citizen so she wouldn't have to leave. Her German is excellent. She likes the night life and the Bohemian life in Berlin.  Berlin was actually strongly anti Nazi in the pre war years, filled as it was with gays, artists, free thinkers, academics, scientists and people who were not impressed by a race baiting demagogue who had one simple message which he simply kept repeating: "You feel like losers; I'm going to make you feel like a winner again." 

Mad Dog was astonished by the obscene excess of wealth visible in Catherine's palaces--in all the palaces--where, apparently, the empress awoke every day and dreamed up some new way to spend boat loads of money in some revolting new way.  All you have to do is to walk the halls of these monuments to pathological ego and you know why the Russians had to have a revolution. They had workers all over these palaces and they must have taken home tales of what they saw, what they were working on, even if they were being paid.

The wonder is the Communists worked so hard to preserve it all--our Russian guide had no answer for this.  Unless the Communists wanted to march the masses through these gold gilt rooms with their elaborate hand inlaid furniture to say, "This is how these pigs lived. Look at how they lived!" as a lesson in the psychopathology of a capitalist, unequal society where the very few live every day playing with Faberge eggs and strolling among walls adorned with Rembrandts and the best Italian artists.

It is actually a little nauseating, this wealth. You find yourself wondering where all the money came from in a backward nation like Russia, where forests and coal and agriculture were all they had. But there was clearly more money than Catherine "The Great" could figure out how to spend.

You wonder, if we were shown the insides of the palaces of our own 1% whether President Trump would be President today.

But then you see the Soviet era housing blocks, where, it appears, the majority of citizens of St. Petersburg still live today, block after block of dreary, dilapidated high rises which dwarf New York's Coop City, stretching for miles. No housing project in Baltimore ever looked as bleak. And you wonder why they could not have spent just a little more to make these residences look just a little less depressing. 

Or maybe, that was the point: Look at where love of beauty and splendor get you--Catherine's palace.

Bring Down Trump: Ridicule Not Bombast

Watching a documentary about the nature of Hitler's "charisma" it struck me that Trump is playing by Hitler's playbook: Focus on the simple; find a small group to demonize and blame all ills on that group; repetition, chants; no subtly, which comes across as boldness and, above all: STRONG MAN!

And what undermines this show?  Answering with the following is destined to fail:
1/ Any sentence which include the words: "unprecedented" or "scary" or "it makes me sad" or "I'm so afraid."  What you are saying is "he is strong, I am weak."
2/ Dire predictions of the end of democracy.  Citizens awaken the next day and nothing has happened and they think, "Oh, he's not so bad."
3/ Talk of legal things: Lawyers focusing on details sound petty, wimp like, irrelevant.

There was a joke which ran through the Third Reich, which could get you shot for saying to the wrong people:  "Blonde as Hitler, tall as Goebbels, lean as Goering, the Aryan master race."

What really threatens a puffer fish trying to play the tough guy is ridicule.


And Trump is a prime target, pink, puffy, cowardly, afflicted by heel spurs.

He got away with denigrating John McCain for getting captured, having himself avoided even the risk of getting captured. How did that happen? Where were the Democrats on that one? Missing in Action is where the Democrats were.

Pia Guerra, the cartoonist, should be the load star here: Her depictions of Trump should be attached to every tweet, every posting. She gets it.

But, as in Hitler's case, the problem is not the man, but the weakness of his opposition and the strength of a determined core of imbeciles who feel empowered by hate and enraptured by myth.

Trump chose the perfect pitch:  What was the essence of his core? White trash was bitter about being losers and he told them when he was President they would magically be transformed into winners. He would simply declare them all winners.

But Adam Shiff, Obama, Hillary, everyone but Barney Frank and Bernie could not see it. They continued to sputter and they never hit him where it hurts.


Dems should start reading from the same chapter and verse: He's pathetic. He's weak. He's ridiculous.

The Rise and Fall of the Liberal Media

Every year I send checks to  4 NPR radio stations and the two PBS television stations within range of my electronics on the New Hampshire seacost.

I listen to NPR on the way to work and home again. I know those NPR reporters, I know their voices and their quirks and their back stories. Same for the PBS News Hour.  Judy Woodruff, David Brooks, Mark Shields and Gwen Ifil. Before her, Jim Lehrer and Robert McNeill.

Obadiah Youngblood --Lockhouse 8

Started watching the News Hour from the start, in the 80's when the editors were clearly worried they would not have enough news to fill an hour every evening and they experimented with visual "postcards" from around the country.

So it is sad to see the decline of these news outlets, who are finding their niche overwhelmed  by an invasive species which is better adapted to the new environment, the Fox News network and the right wing talk radio of Rush Limbaugh, Steve Bannon et al.

These news shows once upon a time would have been horrified to be described as "liberal." They strove to be neutral, neither liberal nor conservative, neither Republican nor Democrat. Their approach: Ask everyone hard questions; challenge everyone, especially people you might privately agree with.

To their credit, with the advent of Trump, these programs realized "fair and equal" treatment of a politician who breaks all the rules, in the environment when Fox News makes no such effort to present both sides, and when there are simply not "both sides" of equal value, when one side flagrantly and un-repentantly lies about the size of the crowd at the Inauguration, about whether we have a higher level of people living in the country not born here than "ever before," about crime rates among immigrants, about climate change being a Chinese plot, about whether or not Obama was born in Kenya, about whether or not the massacre at Sandy Hook ever really happened, about whether or not Hillary Clinton was running a child porn operation out of a Washington pizza pallor, about any number of things.  

It's hard to interview people who are demonstrably supporting falsehood as if, in the interest of fairness, we should accept their false witness as just their opinion, to which they have a right.

Someone said, you have a right to your own opinion, but not to your own facts. But facts are slippery things, and it is hard work to "fact check." 

But now PBS and NPR have chosen stories in ways which reveal just how lost they are.
Tonight, on the way home, I listened to an NPR story about a child who had been separated from her parents at the border, and the parents, given a "Sophie's choice" left the USA to go back to Honduras. 
This was followed by a long story about former CIA chief Brennan being stripped of his security clearance by Trump. 
And the PBS had a story on the big military parade which Trump planned for $30 million but cancelled when the price ballooned to $90 million, claiming he was now an economic hero to have save the nation $60 million. He blamed the cost explosion on the Democratic government of the District of Columbia and PBS never pointed out that even at $30 million, a parade would be a colossal waste of money for the sake of a politician's ego, or for any other reason.

Obadiah Youngblood--North Hampton along Rte 1A

The problem with choosing these stories about Trump and his policies is that none of them are really important news. In reporting on them, these liberal outlets simply play into the Trump marketing machine and its fundamental premise, that every day, every news broadcast should be about Trump.

There is not a story, hasn't been a news day, which starts with any line other than, "Today, President Trump." 

And none of this was news when President Obama was President. President Obama could deliver a well crafted, beautifully written speech at a Shriners' convention and not get even a sound bite. But now anything Trump says is the headline and half the news broadcast.

And why are we given that story about one of the 500 would be immigrant children still separated from her  parents?
 It's one of those "put a human face on..." stories, meant to play to the revulsion of putting children in cages or separating them from their parents. But we already know that story. Those of us who are revolted were revolted weeks ago and those who believe, "Well, if they wanted to protect their kids, they shouldn't have brought them here," will not be moved.

That discussion has been had.
And the story about stripping security clearances: Who cares? Some old goat wants to still be relevant and keep his perks in retirement. What do I care? Why does he even still need his precious clearance? To feel like he's still in the game? Well, he's not. Get used to it.
But now it's all about Trump trying to "chill" dissent from other former bigshots with security clearances. This is a story which plays in Washington but not in Portsmouth.

There are real stories, damaging stories out there, but they are more difficult to pursue: How are folks being damaged by not having health insurance which actually works for them? 
How about the guy who works on the assembly line who just picked up his insulin and got presented a bill for $600, which is what he makes in a week? 

• How is that burning "clean coal" working out? 
• How many factory workers actually got their jobs back? 
• How many factories or coal mines actually reopened? 
• How many solar panel workers lost their jobs? 
• How many soy bean farmers got reamed this week? 

The problem is, these liberal media types, the editors who choose the stories, they aren't all that bright. They just wait to be given stories and they run with them, because every tweet is "news."  Why not go to doctors who see the struggles of everyday people, or lawyers who see bankruptcies or factory owners who are closing down factories or farmers who can't bring in their crops or restaurant owners who can't find workers or scientists seeing once clean waters getting befouled by changes in EPA regulations? 

It would not be easy chasing those stories, but really, who cares about whether CNN can't get its reporter into the White House press room?