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I don’t like (Cyber) Mondays

I just spent another Thanksgiving weekend manually deleting emails that contain “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday.” Each year I consider configuring my junk mail filter to delete them all automatically. Maybe, next year.

While many head to the malls on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I am one of those who celebrate Buy Nothing Day. Again, this year, I did not spend a cent that day.

And Cyber Monday? I can’t understand why this still exists. It may have had a purpose back in the early days of the Internet when people only had dialup modems at home and had to wait to get back to work in order to shop via a high-speed connection. Now, the only thing special is that online retailers use this day to offer big discounts. There is nothing to stop a few renegade retailers from proclaiming a Cyber Sunday and offering their discounts then. They can even have a Cyber Thanksgiving, so people can eat and shop at the same time.

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving weekend offered US voters another chance to experience buyer’s remorse. It came in the form of tweets from Donald Trump. Now he tweets that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote through election fraud. That’s a first for American politics; we now have a sore winner.

George W. Bush was quite conciliatory when he lost the popular vote to Al Gore by a narrower margin. He even put a Democrat on his cabinet. If Trump wants to heal the country and bring us back together, this is not the way to do it. In the short term, I expect his handlers to take his Twitter account away from him again. Over the longer term, I am expecting a rather short Trump administration. He may not even make it to the mid term elections before getting impeached or being forced to resign. Settling the Trump University lawsuit and admitting his Trump Foundation was a fraud is just the start. His refusal to sell his international businesses will continue to raise questions of conflict of interest. Then wait until his followers discover he is either unable or unwilling to deliver on his promises. Putting Hillary Clinton in jail? He has more or less acknowledged he has no legal case against her. Building a wall along the Mexican border and having Mexico pay for it? Yeah, right.

That’s why I am against any attempts to keep Trump from taking office. If he is denied his votes in the Electoral College, his supporters will have good reason to believe the system is rigged against them. If he actually becomes President, they will soon enough discover that they have been conned by a Reality Show TV star who became our biggest political con man. Let his own supporters hound him out of office. Of course, then we’ll be left with President Mike Pence. Good grief.

November 28, 2016 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Woman in the Arena: another reason to reject Trump

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. – Teddy Roosevelt

The actual title of the speech was “Citizenship In A Republic” when it was delivered by Teddy Roosevelt in Paris in 1910. It has become known by the phrase that appears in one paragraph of that lengthy speech. It is no surprise that both US Representative Joe Crowley and President Barack Obama referred to it when they spoke at the Democratic Convention last summer in Philadelphia. They were both contrasting the experience of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and their fitness to be elected as our next president.

I have been blogging as many reasons as I can why Donald Trump is unfit for the office of President. Crowley and Obama make good cases for Clinton, and the links to the texts are below if you want to read their speeches.

Trump has consistently lied about or distorted his record. Let’s start with his position on the Iraq War in 2003. He now says he always opposed the war before it started, and he has better judgment than Clinton because she voted to authorize President Bush’s use of military force. There is no evidence that he opposed the war before the invasion, and there is a recording of an interview with Howard Stern in which he expressed support for going to war. I have viewed lists of celebrities who publicly stated their opposition in 2002. Donald Trump’s name is on none of those lists. Martin Sheen spoke at rallies organized against the war. In that case, Sheen has better judgment than Trump and, by playing the role of President on TV, has more experience.

I remember marching in those demonstrations in San Francisco, in February, and then March, before the invasion began. I went to an all-faiths religious service in the Mission District. I was praying for President Bush, as he had asked us to do. (At the rally, Sheen told KPFA, “I pray because I don’t know what else to do. Praying is all I can do.”) As I prayed, I considered the question that I always find myself asking as a challenge my own positions; could I be wrong?

Was Saddam Hussein the next Hitler, as Bush wanted us to believe? What if Bush is right and I am wrong? Was war the only way to save the world from a madman?

When the war started, I knew that there was nothing else to do than pray that it would be short and that Iraq would be become stable and democratic. Unfortunately, that would not come to be. As a result, I am more committed to non-violence and against war than I ever have been. Iraq shows that war is never the answer for achieving peace.

I remember the political climate after 9/11. I understand the pressure put on Democrats in Congress to back President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. To oppose Bush was considered to be unpatriotic. Whether you are willing to give Clinton and the Democrats a pass on their vote or not, the truth is that they were in the arena where the political battle was being waged. It is easy for Donald Trump to stand on the outside of the ring and criticize the decision. He was never in a position to be accountable by casting a vote. (To be fair, neither was Obama who did not enter the Senate until 2005. He did speak against the war while in the Illinois Senate.) In fact, Trump has never been held accountable for a vote because he has never held a public office.

Trump has never been a senator, a member of congress, or a governor. He has not even been a city council member or county supervisor. He has been a lobbyist, so he knows how that part of government works. He has given campaign contributions in exchange for political favors, showing he is not the solution but a big part of the problem.

If he has served on any civic commissions or provided policy advice to government agencies, I have yet to find it. He is mostly known for giving money to charity, and that amount has been called into question. Otherwise, he has been mostly concerned with advancing his own business interests.

Trump does have one loose connection to Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy used to say, “Bully!” Trump, on the other hand, is a bully. He is unfit to be president.

https://www.demconvention.com/blog/new-york-representative-joe-crowley/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/27/president-obamas-speech-at-the-democratic-convention/

http://www.theodore-roosevelt.com/trsorbonnespeech.html

November 4, 2016 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Myth of Trump as an Outsider

When I listen to his supporters, a familiar theme is Trump’s status as an outsider. He is outside the system, therefore he is uncorrupted by that system. This seems to make him uniquely qualified for public office. Of course, it could also make him totally unequipped to change a system he neither understands or has any experience with how it works.

Trump boasts that his great personal wealth makes him incorruptible. His primary campaign was mostly self-financed, and he was able to get a lot of free media on the cable news networks. Trump is not the first to argue that he is too rich to bribe. Nelson Rockefeller argued the same to the Senate when he was nominated by Gerald Ford to be Vice President. Of course, Trump has a history of donating to political candidates, which contradicts the image of being an outsider to the political process. Trump boasts of his ability to make great deals, which includes political deals. Trump has boasted of receiving political favors in exchange for campaign donations. Is Trump’s contribution to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is the reason she dropped an investigation of Trump University? And was that donation paid illegally from the nonprofit Trump Foundation?

http://www.politifact.com/florida/article/2016/sep/21/donald-trump-pam-bondi-and-25k-was-it-pay-play/

There is another question raised about self funded campaigns. Is Trump arguing that only those wealthy enough to fund their campaigns can be trusted to hold public office, uninfluenced by powerful interests? Isn’t his wealth a corrupting interest that can bias him against the needs of the poor? Trump has never been poor a day in his life. How can he argue that he shares the interests of the common man?

Bernie Sanders also argued that he was unbought by the special interests. He proved that by taking mostly small donations. He also has a voting record on issues of concern to the poor. Trump does not.

In fact, Trump has already acknowledged a debt with a powerful special interest, the religious right. Trump continually thanks evangelicals for his support. In turn, he has already made promises, including appointing conservative judges, pushing for more laws allowing discrimination against gay people, and removing restrictions on their tax exempt status. Is there any doubt that Trump will make good on his promises to the religious right? They will certainly hold him to those promises.

And who else owns Trump? Is that why he doesn’t want us to see his taxes? There is a lot of speculation about his ties to Vladimir Putin. Are his dealings with Putin in his taxes?

Another possible reason why Trump is not showing his taxes is that he may not be as rich as he wants us to believe. That would negate the argument that he is too rich to be corrupted. How much of his wealth comes from being on someone else’s payroll? We won’t know for sure until we see his taxes.

How The Trump Organization’s Foreign Business Ties Could Upend U.S. National Security

by Kurt Eichenwald on 9/14/16 at 5:30 AM

http://www.newsweek.com/2016/09/23/donald-trump-foreign-business-deals-national-security-498081.html

Politifact comparison of Clinton and Trump Foundations

http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2016/sep/23/politifact-sheet-comparing-clinton-and-trump-found/

September 25, 2016 Posted by | Uncategorized | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment