Category Archives: Politics

Can I Get A Do-Over?

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This morning, on the way home from the pool, I dropped my ballot in the box at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church on the corner of Henderson and North Street.

I voted for Biden-Harris.

Then, over breakfast, I read these tweets. 

I don’t want my 403b to crash or all that I’ve built to be destroyed. And I don’t want to lose my health care or pay more taxes. Nor do I want to be complicit in destroying our economy. 

What are my options here? How do I retrieve my envelope from the box? The only thing I can think of is dynamite.

Weekend Required Reading

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1. Defund police dogs.

2. The Trump Administration Says Diversity Training Can Be Harmful. What Does the Research Say? Make it voluntary and invest sufficient time. I remember how resistant some of my Southern white colleagues were to it at the North Carolina college I taught at. The starting point was an acknowledgement that “We’re all racist”. Or for them, I should say, the non-starting point.

3. How Hatred Came To Dominate American Politics. Our hatred creates serious opportunity costs. Instead of thinking about and planning for 2025, the current administration is fixated on 2015 and Hillary Clinton’s emails. Meanwhile, other countries are investing in infrastructure, social safety nets, and trade partnerships.

4. Dr. Dobson’s Open Letter To Christians Regarding The Election. If Dr. Dobson is a Christian, I need a different term to describe my religious worldview. He claims the Presidential candidate that is much stronger on “racial unity” also brings “more wisdom in handling the pandemic”. Can you guess which candidate that is? Then again, his audience is 800,000, the humble blog’s is a little less than that.

5. This is what I’m currently watching. Starts fast.

6. Magnus Carlsen extends his winning streak to 125 games.

Today’s Lesson—Some Violence Is Worse Than Other

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Like their leader, and Fox “News”, conservatives have repeatedly complained about radical left wing violence in places like Portland and Seattle.

Today we’ve learned a private militia planned to kidnap Michigan’s Governor and overthrow the government.

And funny thing, I haven’t heard anyone on the right condemn it at all, let alone with similar fervor. Granted, kidnapping and overthrowing the government don’t rise to the level of throwing cans of tuna, breaking windows, and graffiti*, but still, I’d expect some conservative somewhere to condemn the right wing extremists.

My naivety is one of my more endearing qualities.

*that’s satire

The All-Important Boater-Trucker Vote

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Never mind seniors and women.

Trump asked why the polls show him trailing: “I don’t know, I don’t understand it, I don’t believe them. I don’t believe the polls. Because we’ve never had this much support. They have a boat thing, they have 5,000 boats. They have thousands of trucks all over the country.”

Paragraph To Ponder

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David Remnick, “The Coronavirus and the Threat Within the White House”.

“In terms of scale, the West Wing is less like the Kremlin or the Élysée Palace than like the cramped executive offices of a medium-sized insurance company. The hallways are tight. The chairs in the Cabinet Room sit close to one another. The Oval Office itself, where Presidents routinely hold working sessions with many aides, is smaller than you might expect. And yet numerous reports in the press have described how, owing to the President’s attitude, employees, reporters, and visitors to the West Wing are disdained or mocked if they wear a mask.”

Bruni on Trump

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“It is time, at long last, to learn. To be smarter. To be safer. To be more responsible, to others as well as to ourselves. We cannot erase the mistakes made in America’s response to the coronavirus but we can vow not to continue making them. The way to treat President Trump’s diagnosis is as a turning point and a new start. This is when we woke up.”

The President Can, And Should, Order The Extrajudicial Assassination Of U.S. Citizens

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Stole that title from a  Ben Mathis-Lilley piece on Slate titled, “Eight Things That Were Somehow Not Takeaways From the Debate Because Everything Else Was So Deranged”.

Who the hell believes that?

Mathis-Lilley:

“On the subject of protests and accompanying violence—a pet theme of the Trump reelection campaign—Wallace set out to press Biden on whether he was reluctant to call out the National Guard. When Biden argued that Trump’s federal interventions in Portland, Oregon, had made things worse, Trump jumped in to boast about his performance: “I sent in the U.S. Marshals to get the killer of a young man in the middle of the street, and they shot him. For three days, Portland didn’t do anything. I sent in the U.S. Marshals, they took care of business.” The “business” the president was referring to was the killing of Michael Forest Reinoehl, a suspect in the shooting of a far-right protester in Portland. After initial reports that Reinoehl had died in a gun battle with the authorities, one witness told reporters he was “clutching a cellphone and eating a gummy worm” when the marshals opened fire on him without warning.”

You probably don’t give a shit about Reinoehl. A petty criminal, he drag raced his 17 year old son on an Oregon road recklessly endangering other drivers. His family didn’t want anything to do with him. Then he was caught on film shooting someone at point blank in downtown Portland. A heinous crime for which he deserved a severe punishment.

The right used Reinoehl to say “See BLM stands for ‘bad liberals metastasizing'”. They certainly didn’t care that he was gunned down by Trump’s Marshalls.

What about the left? There was nothing redeeming about Reinoehl, but every U.S. citizen who doesn’t demand a full accounting of his death is contributing to an environment where a President can kill a citizen like Duterte killing a  drug dealer. Maybe even in broad daylight, in some place like Lacey, Washington, about 7-8 miles from where I’m sitting.

PLEASE tell me some documentary film makers are going to build on Tim Elfrink’s Washington Post story about Reinoehl’s murder. Maybe you don’t give a shit. Maybe you prefer the way they do things in the Philippines. If no one cares about the details of Reinoehl’s final minutes, we will be the Philippines in short order.

Grifter-In-Chief

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I’m only halfway through the New York Times 10,000 word investigative report on Trump’s taxes.

So far, my favorite part is these seemingly innocuous paragraphs:

“To see what a successful business looks like, depreciation or not, look no further than one in Mr. Trump’s portfolio that he does not manage.

After plans for a Trump-branded mini-city on the Far West Side of Manhattan stalled in the 1990s, Mr. Trump’s stake was sold by his partner to Vornado Realty Trust. Mr. Trump objected to the sale in court, saying he had not been consulted, but he ended up with a 30 percent share of two valuable office buildings owned and operated by Vornado.

His share of the profits through the end of 2018 totaled $176.5 million, with depreciation factored in. He has never had to invest more money in the partnership, tax records show.”

One of Trump’s only successful business ventures was successful because he lost ownership of it. But the joke of course is on us because he’s doing to our country exactly what he’s done to the vast majority of his businesses.

He Apparently Earned A B.S. In B.S.

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Not normally a fan of Friedmans, but this is very good. “Trump’s Motto: Your Money or Your Life“. Still in a post-Warren funk, maybe I’m not fully appreciating Byedon. My enthusiasm for his candidacy has been based on one overarching thing. He’s not Trump.

“Imagine that your child is sick with a disease and you decide to take her to 100 different doctors to get multiple opinions — and 99 doctors give you the same diagnosis and prescribed treatment and one tells you that there’s nothing to worry about, that your child’s disease will ‘disappear … like a miracle, it will disappear.’

What parents in their right minds would follow the advice of the doctor with the one-out-of-100 diagnosis?

This, alas, is no hypothetical. This, alas, is actually the most important question facing voters in choosing our next president. Are you ready to trust your own child’s and the country’s health to the guy who holds the one-out-of-100 view on both climate change and Covid-19? He being Dr. Donald Trump, founder of Trump University, where he apparently earned a B.S. in B.S.

It is stunning to me how many conservatives want to go with the doctor with the one-out-of-100 diagnosis, since doing so is anything but conservative.”