The Real Low Down On Donald Trump

Earlier this week, in the post Donald Trump Will Meet War Criminal Henry Kissinger, I pointed out the following:

Since clinching the Republican nomination, Trump’s true colors have started to emerge. He named a former Goldman Sachs partner to run his fundraising efforts, he named petty authoritarian, gangster wannabe Chris Christie to run his transition team, and he chose “everyone’s a terrorist” Rudy Giuliani as his planned head of the domestic gestapo, the Department of Homeland Security. He’s also been endorsed by Orc King Sheldon Adelson, who said he was prepared to spend $100 millionto get him elected. Now he’s off to kiss the blood-soaked hands of Henry Kissinger.

Apparently, that was just the beginning. Now he’s out publicly pandering to Wall Street in ways even Hillary Clinton wouldn’t dare do.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, said he intends to release a detailed economic policy platform in two weeks that would dismantle nearly all of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, he said in an interview Tuesday with Reuters.

“I would say it’ll be close to a dismantling of Dodd-Frank,” Mr. Trump said, according to the Reuters report. “Dodd-Frank is a very negative force, which has developed a very bad name.”

Mr. Trump also said he is “not an enemy” of current Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, although he reiterated he eventually wants a Republican to lead the U.S. central bank. “I’m not a person that thinks Janet Yellen is doing a bad job,” he added.

While I’m not a Dodd-Frank fan, it’s not because it was too harsh, but because it didn’t really do much of anything. It was the typical neoliberal bait and switch, designed to look tough for public consumption, while merely making tweaks around the edges of a financial system that requires systemic, paradigm level change.

Trump’s support of repealing Dodd-Frank tells you all you need to know. A Trump Presidency will see Wall Street felons who should be in prison, running as wild and free as ever.

He will be the same thing to distressed working class whites that Obama was to the black community. A fake messiah and a shyster.

The Preskness was run today and Exagurator won in a decisive spurt getting way out in front at the finish.  Nearly tied for second were Niquiis and Cherry Wine.  Niquis had defeated Exagurator four times in previous races and I wonder of the horses themselves are aware of such thing and this time Exagurator sees Niquis and goes “Oh no; not this time you’re not!”  It was an eleven horse field but a lot of the horses here didn’t run in the Derby.  Strataveri was definitely a contender in the late part of the race.  Of course the trainers help the jockeys get a leg up on their horses because they are so small.  The TV picture went haywire just before the race began and it worried me but it snapped out of it.  This is the first time the picture has wierded out like this after the picture was on and established.  I hope this isn’t the start of a trend. 

On Rhapsody in Black they had the long awaited May of 1965.  It’s the first year they’ve ever had 1965 since I’ve been listening to the show.  There were quite a few big hits which I think were “black enough” that Bill Gardener didn’t play.  They played “For Once In My Life” by the Rightious Brothers.  They played “Shot Gun” by Jr. Walker and the All Stars.  They played “What Are You Going to Do when I’m Gone” by Brenda Halloway, who is a Mary Wells sound alike.  But then they played a Mary Wells song she made on another label after leaving Motown.  They played “I Wouldn’t Be Dog Gone” and “Iko, Iko” by the Dixie Cups and “Back in my Arms Again”.   “I’ve Been Loving You for Too Long to Stop Now” by Otis Redding was apparently out that early.  They played “Peaches and Cream” – which is probably white girls.  They played “Ooh, Baby, Baby” by Smokey Robinson and the original version of “Mustang Sally”.   Actually I think the original has a little more personality to it. 

The fuel tank of the Space Shuttle right now is making its way through southwestern Los Angeles into the Science Center in Exposition Park in downtown Los Angeles.  They didn't have to remove any trees this time along the route like the original Space Shuttle a few years back.  They are going to have the whole thing in launch position rather than horizontal, which would be a lot easier to conduct tours of.  Right now Bill Clinton is in Southern California making speeches on behalf of his wife in Pamona right now.   A think a lot of us are becomming aware that there are a lot more reasons to vote for Hillary in November than we thought since we (I) discover there are a lot of issues me and her have in common.   

A Scarey Journey into Right Wing Land

Norman Goldman said today to think for just one minute about what a Donald Trump presidency would entail.  I would say to spend at least five minutes in silent meditation what a Trump presidency would entail.  It could mean the end of internet neutrality depending on who he appoints to the FCC.  He’s throw all environmental regulations by the wayside.  He’s already promised that.  How about Scott Walker as Dept of Labor or Chris Christie as Attorney General or Ted Cruz on the Supreme Court?  We’re getting a small taste of that in a lot of ways this week.  Oklahoma just passed a resolution impeaching President Obama for his bathroom regulation executive order.  But also Oklahoma passed a law banning abortion except in the case where an abortion would save the life of the mother, for instance an ectopic pregnancy.  We have that defense appropriation bill passed by congress yesterday seven republicans used illegal procedure to switch their votes from Yes to No.  A democrat had put forth an amendment that would disallow all of the new provisions of this defense appropriation law.  Basically this law just suspended the 1964 Civil Rights bill that now makes not only discrimination by sexual orientation legal but also discrimination by race legal again.  They did it with the voting rights law so why not?   If Donald Trump becomes president that bill to rig congressional districts permanently in favor of Republicans ruling is coming back once Trump realigns the High Court to his own liking.  This is the provision where they count congressional districts by the number of registered voters rather than the people actually living in the district as the constitution specifies.  If you want to void all these trade agreements with China and the Trans Pacific Agreement and all that- - you can’t count on Trump.  Trump is a blank slate about to have his etch a sketch moment as his brain is washed clean and filled with standard Republican agenda points.  It’s like that device in Star Trek where your brain is made a total blank slate and you black out or something and then the one in the master control booth spoon feeds you all of these post hypnotic suggestions you pursue with vigor.  No sane person would vote for Trump as a way of getting back at Hillary and the Democratic establishment.  I’d like Donald Trump to announce his vice president the same way that Ted Cruz did.  His choice would scare the begesis out of anyone thinking of voting for Trump in some sort of emotional fit.  One minute Trump wants to dialog with the North Korean leader and in the next he wants to jetizen NATO.  He's all over the place.

Israel is also having a right wing fit.  Their defense secretary quit there accusing Netenyahoo of right wing extremism.  As you may know Jimmy Carter already accused the Jews of Apartheid as it pertains to the Palistinians on the West Bank.  These are people with no rights.  There appears to be no legal code which protects them any more than any document proclaiming "borders" to Israel are worth the paper they are written on.  We got a taste of more hysteria in March of 2015 when there was a scare tactic of saying "All of the Arabs are going to vote for the Labor party so you better vote as a good "White American" or whatever conservative Israelis refer to themselves.  It was the first time a speech before an American congress was used in a Lekud campaign commercial.  Now they've carried it a step further.  They want to deport all Arab CITIZENS to the West Bank under Occupied territory.  This looks to be a first or perhaps second step in some sort of Final Solution I don't even want to think about.    

I wasn’t sure what to do after three PM today so I turned on KABC and watched one of these women’s talk shows for a while.  It was just a lot of jibber-jabber.  So I took the bold leap and turned Glen Beck on.  That one was an eye opener.  He opened with this philosophy class horror story about having a life boat that holds only eight people and there are eleven who are drowning so which ones do you say must drown.  The answer is that the ones who got in the life boat first- - no matter who they are- - deserve to stay in and the others deserve to drown.  And there are no “third alternatives”.   This is your classic “either – or” type dilemma of which the right wing is so fond.  Of course then we learn that the ones in the life raft or boat are Europeans and those not yet aboard the boat are refugees and immigrants wanting to come in.  Then there was a generous dose of ethno-centricity.  There was a discussion if you had fifty thousand people to let immigrate to Germany does it make a difference whether they come from Sweden or the Central African Republic.  The notion here is that cultures must be assimilated and if you’re already “drowning in progressive values” you can’t afford any more foreigners.  Glen Beck had a guest who was Jewish with a British accent and kept talking about Judeo-Christian values.  He then spoke of “Our two religions are the only two Covenant religions with God.  In the first place, this man like Prager is ignorant of basic Christianity.  Christianity is NOT a covenant as in "contract" of "You do this for me and I'll do A, B, C and D for you- like some kind of check list balance sheet.  In the next place - if it were a contract it would be an alltogether DIFFERENT contract than the OT Jews had with Jehovah.  But in this man's eyes, the Jew and the Christian are on. in Spirit. There was a vague inference that only the Christian and the Jew were hetrosexual because God "created a bi-polarity of the sexes with Adam and Eve."   The notion that the vast majority of ALL religions are hetrosexual is lost on this guy.   He almost reminds me as one of these people who wants to make Israel the 51st state.  Have you heard that one?  As such we have certain cultural things in common.  By the way “cultural” was redefined as “A Societies relation to God.  And one high Judeo-Christian principle is “Clenliness is next to Godliness”, which of course everybody knows isn’t in the Bible.  And the conversation was reduced to calling all non Judeo Christians as basically animalistic who wallow in their own dung, and the whole thing about the “piss Christ” and the Virgin Mary covered in elephant dung was brought up.  They went to commercial and I turned the radio off feeling like I’d just been slimed. 

I turned on Norman Goldman.  Norman was attacking a caller because he’s 63 years old and tired of waiting for this big change in the way Government opperates that’s supposed to happen after 24 years of a democratic administration.  Goldman responded by calling him an impatient petulant child.  Norman says we never get what we want but “everything is compromise till the day we go down to our grave”.  Well I have a long memory than that and remember President Obama’s book and the “Yes, we can” slogan and all the pie in the sky rhetoric of the 2008 campaign where we were ushering in a period of peace and brotherhood and no more Mideast wars.  That year, 2008 I was for Hillary because of the two candidates, she seemed the most credible in terms of how she handled herself in face to face debates with Obama.  If you assume that Barock Obama and Hillary are about equal in terms of being liars- - and Hillary is campaigning more conservative than "pie in the sky" this year- - what can we assume will happen in a future Hillary Clinton administration?  I would ask Norman Goldman that question.  Sometimes it is better to vote for a third party is you don’t like your other choices.  I voted for Ross Perot in 1992.  Bill Clinton also said he had doubts about NAFTA but he hoped to renegotiate the thing after he was elected.  I didn’t believe him and voted for Ross Perot anyway- - and I was right.  I was also heavily influenced by all of those “Taxula” Al Gore skits that Rush Limbaugh was going on his show then where we would all see draconian income tax rises and we’d all be broke if Bill Clinton were elected.  But Norman expended entirely too much energy attacking this one caller.  Like so many talk show hosts before him they pass that threshold where they shut the callers words out entirely and care to listen only to the sound of their own voices and somehow as if magically, they know everything there is to know about what a certain caller is thinking ahead of time.  

There apparently was a shooting on the White House grounds where a sniper perhaps after the president was shot down by uniformed Secret Service agents.  The President was out of town anyhow.  But it does make you think that assasinations are not out of the question.  I predicted a few years back that President Obama would not finish out his term.  With all these executive orders lately, this increases the magnetic attraction to would be assasins who would try and go for the Big Prize.  Meanwhile Donald Trump got his official endorsement from the NRA after speaking there today, so you know which side his bread is buttered on.  

Possible ISIS Strike of Egypt-bound Airliner

There was a down of an Air France bus or whatever flight off the Mediterranean shore of Egypt.  The plane went down and they strongly believe it’s a terrorist’s bomb that was placed aboard the plane by baggage handlers who may have been on security watch according to Shawn Hannity.  Shawn definitely believes it was a bomb.   The Boeing 747 and this Air Bus line of aircraft are about the safest commercial aircraft they make.  Nobody has claimed credit for taking down the plane yet.   We know ISIS will strike just about anywhere.  There were no Americans aboard this flight 804.  There were rumors of wreckage from the plane being found but these claims turned out to be false.  The plane was flying at 37,000 plane and was in “the safest part of the flight”, which is cruising altitude.  Then the plane took a drop; to ten thousand feet and made a ninety degree turn left and then circled right.  Greek authorities lost the signal two minutes after the last air traffic control check in, and everything was reported fine at that time.  Hannity also talked about the fact that Donald Trump’s women were misquoted in a hit piece article about him.  Trump treats his women better than Bill Clinton treats his women. 

There was some sort of anti gay or LGBT amendment being voted on and at the last minute several Republicans switched their votes from yes to no.  Then the chairman rammed through a bunch of resolutions and verbal mumbo jumbo.  It was very strange.   So I still don’t know if this vote bars LGBT people from the defense department or allows them.  Regardless of the specifics it shows that congress, unlike what I wrote yesterday, actually does ramrod bills through congress and treads carelessly over the rules.  We’re really going to see this steam roller get going if Trump is elected president.  It really be time to move to Canada or Denmark.  

Norman Goldman had about three major meltdowns today.  The first thing he did was to threaten all the young Bernie supporters who have written him with thirty years of a ruined life because Trump appointed far right Supreme Court justices.  Then he attacked someone who said that independents should have the right to vote for whoever they wanted to.  Norman took indignent exception to this saying that he’s a democrat and we’ll determine our own candidate without any help.  He went on to attack Bernie’s credentials as a democrat.  Finally he went off on a caller who said that Hillary should not be the nominee because Trump is now leading Hillary in the latest poll by five points after another recent poll that had Trump leading Hillary by three.  According to Norman polls don’t matter any more and shouldn’t be taken into consideration in choosing a nominee.  He then told a lie that the winner of the primaries has never been denied a nomination.  It happened in 1912 I recall when Taft was running against Teddy Roosevelt and Taft got the nomination despite Teddy winning the primaries.  And I’d also like to know how many primary elections Hubert Humphrey won in 1968.  Norman continued to lash out and said he didn’t have to put up with this radio job but would go off to Maui and retire or something because he’s already saved up enough money from his legal work.  In other words, Norman played the money card, which people like him eventually get around to playing. 

Longtime Sixty Minutes reporter Morley Safer died this morning at age 84.  He had a long, illustrative carrier as a news reporter.  He claimed he really didn't feel entirely comfortable being on television though he'd apparently he'd been with Sixty Minutes since 1970 or 46 years.  With him and Mike Wallace gone, the icons are falling.  There are fewer and fewer really great news reporters these days.  

 I caught Rhapsody in black but the thing was drowning in pledge drives.  We found ourselves in the black hole of May of 1960 where I recognized astonishingly few songs.   They played “Finger Popping Time” by Hank Ballard, which was from a year later in 1961.  They played “Don’t Know Much About Biology”, which they already admitted was really from the spring of 1959.  They played “Bessame Mucho” by the Coasters, which I had never heard.  They played the original version of “Money”.  They played Smokey Robinson, Jackie Wilson, James Brown, and Ray Charles, but they were all songs I’d never heard before.  Only the James Brown song had a beat.  Ella Fitzgerald sang “Mac the Knife”.   Among the few familiar songs were “You Got Timing” by Jimmy Jones (?) and Alley Oop, by the Hollywood Argyles.  It was “Madison Time”, a song I’ve heard very few times in my life. 

More on the Nevada State Convention

The news is rather vague about how much Bernie Sanders won Oregon by.  In Kentucky it was fought to a near draw.  Bernie Sanders was ahead in the late polling but Hillary apparently nosed him out by a half a percentage point in Kentucky though reports mid day indicated the race was still too close to call.  It’s yet another Wednesday where Sanders wins the elections but commentators like Stephanie and Norman rant and rave about how Sanders is toast and should drop out of the race or something.  The Democratic State convention in Las Vegas deserves more attention.  The media ignored it entirely over the weekend.  Earlier this week Rachael Maddaw raved about how the out of control violent anarchists and extremists were ruining the democratic party.  It was more of a remark I’d expect Shawn Hannity to say but Hannity held his fire and I admire him for that.  In fact I believe it was Shawn who said “If I were Bernie Sanders at this point I’d be pretty P O’d at the way I’ve been treated”.   Let’s review what happened.  The delegates were sent a lot of publications saying they had to have their credentials and be seated by ten in the morning.  The only problem is the convention started at nine AM, and the chairman was trying to do a fast run around the Sanders delegates.  Sanders people got wind of this and not only were they there at nine but also had a petition to overturn a preemptive resolution saying no floor resolutions could be voted on.  They had to get the signitures of twenty percent of the delegates present for any rule they proposed, and they had a whole list of demands they wrote out.  They presented these to the lady chairman but she just disregarded them.  Then there was a voice vote to vote the present rules up or down.  Now I’m old enough to remember as a young teenager the 1964 Party conventions and I knew that first thing up for business was credentials and then they would vote on the rules, and then they would tackle the party platform.  This is the area where Ted Cruz delegates still have a ray of hope because the rules for this year’s convention haven’t been voted on yet because the delegates are the ones who vote on them.  At any rate it was an up or down yea or nay vote and the “No” crowd was markedly louder than the “Yes” vote.  The chairman said “In the opinion of the chair, the Ayes have it”.  This is an expression I’ve heard before “in the opinion of the chair” but usually it’s a non controversial vote and in congress if a row call vote is asked for they have to grant it.  Not here.  The trouble is with people like Norman and Stephanie is that they have been negative on Bernie from the git go.  Even after the very first vote in Iowa in February there were people saying “Well that’s it.  Bernie lost despite all the campaigning he did in the state.  It’s over for him now”.

I listened to Shawn Hannity after two thirty and he had Phil Robertson, the Duck Dynesty guy and I expected to be repelled by it.  But instead I listened to what he had to say about God and man and Christianity.  But it didn’t have all the theological trappings of a Walter Martin lecture and Shawn himself admitted he’s not big on the technical theological aspects of the Faith but he does agree on the basics.  And I found myself in substantial agreement with him, as far as that is possible.  I have “Faith problems” from things in my own life but I don’t want to go around projecting them on to others, but let others make up their own minds.  I’ve been thinking how people like Ted Cruz are constitutional “originalists” and so am I.  In other words when you can’t tell from the words on parchment what to do about an issue that arises, you go back to the original intent of the Founding Fathers and glean from their writings of the day what was it they meant to say.  Certain things are “common knowledge” and assumed at the time and later liberals try and do acrobatics with the text until it’s unrecognizable.  It’s kind of line in first Corinthians it says for a woman to cover her head otherwise she might be mistaken for a prostitute.  These are the sort of things I’m talking about.  So the question is which things would be disallowed from government today.  I’ve always had problems with the gross abuse of the interstate commerce clauses of the constitution.  In fact in the early days some people were saying they couldn’t ban the use of marijuana because it isn’t in the constitution.  But then some bright boy came up with this interstate commerce clause.  It’s used to regulate and subsidize farm prices and ban farmers from growing what they want and a whole lot of other things.  I got to thinking whether charities would be considered beyond the constitution.  If they were to be ruled as beyond the bounds of Article One, then I guess private institutions would have to take up the slack and I really don’t think they’re up to that.  But beyond this it’s kind of a “state of mind” for these right wingers.  They hate and fear “the other” and wrap themselves in their guns and racism and dare I use the word - - homophobia.  There is also an abiding contempt for the poor which I have experienced myself.  So a lot of the right wing thing is a whole lot “a state of mind”.  

The Supreme Court Punts on Contraception

Donald Trump as an easier path to the Presidency than either I or Shawn Hannity dreamed of.  Here’s all he has to do to win.  He can win every state that Mitt Romney won, which shouldn’t be hard because Obama had a comfortable victory.  Then you just give him the states that are now “in play” because it’s Trump.  There are just four more states that he needs.  These are Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.  That’s it.  Should he fail to win all four of these “in play” states, all he need do is to pick up either Virginia or electoral vote rich Florida and he’s got the thing won.  Some of the state by state polls have been disturbing for us democrats showing Hillary with a real battle on her hands.  Stephanie reminds us that “The voters don’t trust Hillary” even though she’s gotten by hook or by crook the most votes so far.   I continue to feel that (like it came to me suddenly a few days ago) Ben Carson should be his Vice President. 

I had heard much about the way that Hillary was able to use control of the Democratic Party machine to suppress the challenge of Bernie Sanders. I had not fully understood it until I saw this truly shocking video of the Nevada Democratic Convention, a stage in the awarding of that state’s delegates to Hillary or Bernie. After the announcement of a narrow win for Hillary, which to many seemed improbable, the chairwoman of the Convention, Roberta Lange, a member of the National Democratic Committee, absolutely refused demands for a recount. She then closed the Convention after calling for a voice vote, again uncounted, on a rules change to allow her to do that.  Twice as many Sanders delegates to the Convention were disqualified by the Committee,for “administrative reasons”, as the supposed majority for Clinton, which even after those disqualifications did not appear to reflect the apparent balance of delegates present.  They made a rule to disallow any motions from the floor, which is insane!

Basically there are three broad areas of constituancies of voters out there at least on the right, but on the left, too.  There are the “economic issues” such as taxation and the pros and cons of government programs and involvement in the economy and helping the poor.  There is also a love of all things Wall Street and internationalist corporation with the Republicans.  There is the setting of Federal Reserve policy and the best way to “get the economy going and bring back jobs”, which never seems to happen.  Then there are the social issues.  These involve God, guns and gays among other things.  Race relations and “fear of the other” falls into this third.  There are also such topics as abortion, genetic research, homosexual marriage, and now this trans-sexual bathroom issue.     Then you have national security.  This also involves “fear of the other” though it’s ISIS jihadi terrorists crossing the border this time and security at airports and all of the endless wire tapping and Guantanamo bay and torturing of suspects, and our overall eagerness to start World War III in the Mideast.  According to Goldman there is much more of a rift on these issues in the Republican Party than the democratic party.  Norman promised that in the third hour he’d discuss in greater detail Trump’s 25% chance of winning with a possible path to victory where all sorts of things can go wrong.  Just last week it was only ten percent. 

The Supreme Court came down with a ruling today.  It was a decision not to make a decision on “Religious rights” and funding of conterception.  The court could have ruled four to four I guess but they chose not to do that.  In doing so they did make a "decision" or ruling - even if it's not to make a decision about who is right and who is wrong.  Instead they said both of the parties should get together and work out a compromise.  This could start a whole new trend in court rulings this season, which goes through the end of June.  

Norman Goldman had a guest expert on the parliamentary system.  It was invented in Spain in the twelve hundreds, and he said that the Spanish parliamentary system was different from all other parliamentary systems but he didn’t say how.  He spoke of the Prisident of parliament being like the Speaker of the House.  But does that mean he determines what bills will be brought and sent to committee by parliament?  He talked about mult-party systems and no confidence votes.  He said that the “Chief of State” was a little different because “The state or nation was an eternal thing and not dependent on parliamentary votes.  I guess that’s an interesting fact to know.  He started off by talking about “comparative systems”.  Usually when the word “comparative” is used in Christian circles no matter what they talk about they end up saying there are only two choice (between “The Devil” and God).  In other words you either embrace the free enterprise capitalist system and believe in fundamentalist Christianity or else you are doomed to failure.  I wish Norman had talked a little more about this. 

What Are Republican Core Values?

Republicans are defined not by what they love but by what they hate.  As long as you’re a well to do, white Christian male who looks down on everybody who is not like them, then you’ll be accepted in the Republican Party. 

President Obama campaigned in favor of closing down Guantanamo Bay in 2008 but did nothing to start the ball rolling.  President Obama campaigned against holding suspects for trial without charging them with any crime.  President Obama campaigned against the sort of serveilance President George W Bush was doing.  But as the previous posting suggests - - President Obama is worse than all of that because he just Drones people he wants bumped off.  But unlike the old days when the CIA brought in a hit squad for a surgical strike, if you Drone people you just bomb the whole area and nine tenths of the people who die are just innocent victims, civilian casualties, collatteral damage.  President Obama has as his core value of not prosecuting Wall Street crimes and not sticking up for labor unions, but prosecuting whistle blowers more than any previous president ever did.  The previous posting states that we have an assasination culture in America today that is commonly accepted.  It's really as though President Bush never left office.  So there really are no Democratic core values any more.  President Eisenhower was more progressive on the subject of rights of Labor Unions and Social Security than is President Obama, who was at one point prepared to negotiate SS rights away.  We get a glimpse of what Republican values are because Shawn Hannity said that three of his favorite Republican governors are Scott Walker of Wisconsin, Rick Scott of Florida and Bobby Jendell of Louisiana.  All three of these governors are really awful.  And if Donald Trump has plans to put any of these in his cabinet- - and you can add Governors Christie and Giuliani to the list- - then Donald Trump would have the Presidential Cabinet from Hell.

In the movie "Vaxed" they express concern about the MMR vaccine, which wasn't around when I was a child.  It's for measles, mumps, and rubella.  There are too many stories about children that were beginning to develop normally and then regressed once they got the MMR vaccine.  Apparently part of the problem according to Hartmann is that they used to have separate vaccines funded by the government for the three individual diseases, but then there was some private company that combined the three vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella- - and it's the vaccine put out by this one company that's the problem.  In other news they say that soon they will have a Northwest Passage through the polar ice cap because the ice has gotten so sparce in the poles such trips can be undertaken with regularity now, and conservatives would even consider it one good thing about global warming.  In a third story,  apparently they need slave labor now for soy and other crops because so many weeds have cropped up that are imune to the effects of Roundup made by Monsanto.  Apparently the machines they have can't hunt down and pull out the weeds.  I would imagine that with the passage of time we will have an increasing number of these super weeds.

If you can imagine yourself going back sixteen years to the 2000 elections I think we cal all agree that America was alltogether a more civil place.  It was a "kinder, gentler America" where there was a lot more hope and prosperity than there is now.  Think back to a time when there was no Tea Party.  We didn't have the rampant racism and gun crazy culture.  There was no 9 - 11 and Islam was just another religion.  We weren't electronic addicts then.  There were no I Pads, I Phones, and I don't even think there were I Pods yet.  I was still living at my old apartment and was in "psychotherapy" with Eileen at the Fullerton mental health clinic.  I took a single long bus ride there, Rout 25.  I felt I was "going through the motions" but at least I was making an effort.  My point is that I think today there is something of greater importance than "Core Republican values".  It's called having a meeting of the minds and actually communacating and compromizing with each other.  There was a time when this was actually possible in America because Clinton did it with the Republicans.  Today there is such dangerous emphasis on "doctrinal purity".  Back then I had a better image of myself but I think most Americans felt better about themselves.  There was an expectation that if they ever lost their job there would be a better job just around the corner.  We need to restore this psychological state in the Average American today. I myself didn't have money problems then, but part of it is because I'd gotten on housing and every May they would do an inspection of the apartment and you would go down to the housing office and fill out some forms and be set for another year.  This morning at the breakfast table I was musing over the cultural shock I experienced when I was informed in June of 1969 after my Mom had gotten me on "Vocational Rehabilitation" of all things - - that the only jobs open to me were Goodwill which I toured and I concluded the print shop was the only job vaguely acceptable.  But all those jobs were 75¢ an hour or maybe only fifty cents.  And of course they wanted me to move out of my family home into a board and care place.  Sometimes Al Kaders liked to do role reversals where he would be me and I’d try and be him giving the parody of myself advice, a totally futile effort.  After all since Al Kaders and I never had a real meeting of the minds- - he would do these highly distorted parodies of me.  And I had the additional problem of “How do I assume the role of an Asshole to give advice to a parody me myself?”  But we live in a culture now of starvation wages where the last hike in minimum wage was under President George Bush of all people.  But though the hikes in pay were slow in coming- - at least we got them.  Remember when President Bush wanted actual immigration reform?  Yes, he wanted to “bring these illegals out of the shadows”.   It really seems like a long time ago. 

John Fugelsang describes the Catholic Church’s policy on employment as “No knob – no job”.   If the Virgin Mary were to come back to life she’d be unable to say mass in a Catholic Church.  Pope Francis is pondering whether women are fit to be deacons.  I thought they already were.  They are ordained pastors but not Priests.  Meanwhile George Zimmerman is trying to sell his gun used to kill Trayvon Martin on Ebay or whatever.  He was kicked off of one web site and is now trying for another.  He wants to sell the pistol with an opening bid of five thousand but hopes to get much higher.  No doubt Capitalism is a “core value” no matter how distasteful.  I can hear Paul and Judy now saying “Capitalism is a sacrosanct value that trumps all other ethical considerations- - just like corporations going to other countries”.  I get a little disgusted when I hear the term “core values”.  Republicans are defined not by what they love but by what they hate.  As long as you’re a well to do, white Christian male who looks down on everybody who is not like them, then you’ll be accepted in the Republican Party.  Paul Ryan in his little meeting with Donald Trump wanted to make sure that Trump has the same “Core republican values” and will nominate judges like Scelia and Clarence Thomas.  This will make Shawn Hannity happy. Of course there is an avowed racist at the head of California’s republican delegation for Trump. Now Trump is coming under pressure to release his tax returns.  Trump says he can’t release them as long as he’s being audited by the government, but this like so many other things Trump says is a lie.  I’m finding after just a week that doing the unthinkable- - voting for Hillary- is a lot more thinkable than it was a week ago.  I sense as Trump morphs into Ted Cruz before our eyes more and more people like me who were thinking of perhaps voting for Trump will change their minds and vote for Hillary as the lesser of two evils.  If nothing else Hillary wants to raise the minimum wage to twelve dollars an hour and perhaps fifteen.  This will have an appeal to people like me.  Young people are enthusiastic about progressive causes but they don’t get out to vote like the old timers do, who vote for Hillary.  Most poles still show Hillary beating Trump, but neither side can be complacent.  If Trump morphs into Ronald Reagan as Hartman says- - they laughed at Reagan too.  But it’s if these far right people wave a magic wand and are suddenly the greatest thing out there since sliced bread and are somehow “just what America needs”.  You know, I remember sixteen years ago in 2000 when if Bill Clinton had run for a third term he would have won easily because he was that popular.  And Vice President Al Gore in the tradition of HW Bush- - appeared to be the natural and fitting successor to President Bill Clinton.  America was a very different place then.  There were no I Phones and we weren’t texting each other constantly.  There was no expectation then of a constant state of war in the Mideast.  I would say a great campaign slogan for this year would be "End this sixteen year long nightmare".  I think that slogan is a winner.  

Did God Create the Universe?

One lady caller on Shawn Hannity questioned whether God really was responsible for the big bang that created the Universe.  Let me weigh in on this right now.  I believe the universe would not have come into existence without the actions of God.  Shawn asked how all of that matter that had just been sitting there in some compacted, energy-less state could suddenly explode into the big bang without some divine spark supplying the energy.  Well first of all what we now as matter and time and space did not then exist.  There was no “time elapsing” while that matter or proto-matter was in its inert state.  The Higgs bozons that govern gravity and time had not yet even come into existence yet.  We are told the Universe began with tremendous heat where it took time for this material to cool into the bozons and quarks and such such as protons and neutrons that make up matter today.  As I said in September of 2004 we cannot even say when this occurred.  Even though there is a cause and effect trail that leads back to a point in time - - since from God’s point of view the “time” had not yet come into existence- - from God’s point of view he could have artificially created “the past” as well as “the future” and all we are experiencing now is just all this playing itself out.  It is our teaching that we usually show some exploding asterisk spreading out not into space but into Time.  Time and space were both what’s known as “not yet formatted”.   Picture time-lines spreading out in all dimensions.  They would seem virtually infinite in number but mathematically they are not infinite.  It’s a quantifiable number, however it is very large.  But not only did God create matter and time and space, he also created Life, and that’s a whole other complex ball of wax.   I would stress that the Big Bang has been all proven now and that the causal chain of evidence points back to a singular point in time.  The remaining question is whether there is any connection with the Big Bang and “What happens to a black hole once it’s formed”.  That question I don’t know the answer to.  Remember that black holes drop out of “formatted space” into a Void.  And when the Universe began expanding after the Big Bang it expands into a Void of unformatted space.  As such I do not believe that there is an “edge” to the universe because “infinity” is another mere artifact of God.  It’s speculation but since it’s a supposition that kills two birds with one stone it seems like as good of explanation as any.  That is- - - it explains what “happens to Black Holes” once they are formed and it also explains where all that “building material” came from in the first place.   

Bernie Sanders won West Virginia with just over fifty percent but Bernie got 14 delegates to Hillary’s ten.  Trump won both West Virginia and Nebraska.  Winning Nebraska was another death blow to Ted Cruz who up until yesterday was contemplating reviving his presidential campaign.  Now he won’t.  Thom Hartman still thinks that Trump is going to turn into Ronald Reagan as your “actor” who wants us to “feel good about America again” and do amazing things though he won’t say how.  Shawn Hannity wants any candidate who will slash taxes, particularly for the rich, and build up the military and eliminate regulations and hype up the energy business and get those strip mines going in West Virginia again- - and build up an America where the poor pull themselves up by their boot straps.  All of this would be to the tune of hysteria over Latino minorities and Islamaphobia.  As such Shawn’s view of America is fundamentally different from mine.  If the Republicans try and turn Trump into Ronald Reagan he will lose all those crossover votes that he had been getting from disaffected Bernie supporters.  Meanwhile Republicans are concerned about the Congress going democratic.  So who do I vote for if I don’t vote for Trump or Hillary.  There is Gary Johnson or Jill Stein of course.  I could write in “Ron Paul” just to be funny.  Norman Goldman is on now and he’s been talking about Venn diagrams and there is a definite overlap between the Trump circle and the Bernie Sanders circle as strange as that seems.  However I concluded that in the Venn diagram between myself and Hillary- - the overlap of our interests is a lot narrower than I would have thought four years ago, when I was a lot more inclined to vote for Hillary this year. 

Three people have returned around here from long hospital stays.  Bill has been gone exactly two months from March 11th to May 11 and he returned just after three thirty.  They wanted him to wait to return so he could walk half way decently on his leg- - that had knee replacement surgery.  He had two pairs of pants stolen.  Glen Nelson returned yesterday.  He wasn't that talkative and didn't want to give me any instant coffee for three brown cigarettes because he doesn't like brown ones.  David Shaner returned today at Dinner and was loud and boisterus in the dining room.  He was complaining a lot at Harbor Villa where it seems all three of them were.  I was never able to get information.  I had just heard that the food was better there and you could get all the coffee you wanted.  All three have been long time residents here.  

Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive, when presidents were obliged to go to Congress and tell lies and ask permission for wars, when torture, spying, and lawless imprisonment were illicit, when re-writing laws with signing statements and shutting down legal cases by yelling “state secrets!” was abusive, and when the idea of a president going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to have murdered would have been deemed an outrage?

All such resistance and outrage is in the past by mutual consent of those in power in Washington, D.C. Whoever becomes the next president of the United States could only unfairly and in violation of established bipartisan precedent be denied the powers of unlimited spying, imprisoning, and killing. That this is little known is largely a symptom of partisanship. Most Democrats still haven’t allowed themselves to hear of the kill list. But the widespread ignorance is also a function of media, of what’s reported, what’s editorialized, what’s asked about in campaign debates, and what isn’t.

The new book, Assassination Complex: Inside the Government’s Secret Drone Warfare Program, from Jeremy Scahill and the staff of The Intercept, is terrific to see even more for what it represents than for what it actually teaches us. We’ve already learned the details it includes from the website of the Intercept, and they fit with similar details that have trickled out through numerous sources for years. But the fact that a media outlet is reporting on this topic and framing its concerns in a serious way around the dangerous expansion of presidential and governmental power is encouraging.

The United States is now working on putting into action drone ships and ships of drone planes, but has never worked out how in the world it is legal or moral or helpful to blow people up with missiles all over the earth. Drone wars once declared successful and preferable alternatives to ground wars are predictably evolving into small-scale ground wars, with great potential for escalation, and nobody in any place of power has considered what candidate Obama might have called ending the mindset that starts wars, perhaps by using the rule of law, aid, disarmament, and diplomacy.

I recommend starting The Assassination Complex with the afterword by Glenn Greenwald, because he reminds us of some of Senator and candidate Obama’s statements in favor of restoring the rule of law and rejecting President George W. Bush’s abuses. What Obama called unacceptable at Guantanamo, he has continued at Guantanamo and elsewhere, but expanded into a program that focuses on murder without “due process” rather than imprisonment without “due process.”

“Somehow,” writes Greenwald, “it was hideously wrong for George W. Bush to eavesdrop on andimprison suspected terrorists without judicial approval, yet it was perfectly permissible for Obama toassassinate them without due process of any kind.” That is in fact a very generous depiction of the drone murder program, as The Assassination Complex also documents that, at least during one time period examined, “nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.” We should think of drones more as random killing machines than as machines killing particular people who are denied the right to a trail by jury but are suspected of something by somebody.  

Government Surveillance Is Out Of Control

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is on C-Span now because the government is filing a lawsuit against the North Carolina governor and legislature for passing the March 23^rd law.  This lawsuit is bogus.  They say it violates Title Nine or Title Seven or some sexual discrimination thing.  But what the government is doing is redefining sex, which they have no right to do.   Sex like marriage before it was generally understood to be certain things by society as a whole.  You could call it part of “common law”, which this AG lawsuit is trying to up-end.  There is a presumption of privacy in a locker or shower or restroom.  Common decency dictates that you don't shoot video inside these places and then put them up on You Tube.  If the government can arbitrarily redefine what one's gender is - - they can redefine words all over the place so that nothing can be counted on to mean what "normal" people think it means on a piece of paper (legal document).

Donald Trump has announced that he plans to “get rid of Paul Ryan” as chairman of the Republican convention.  A lot of time it is the speaker of the House who leads party conventions if that party is in power at the time.  I see it the other way around.  The truth is whether Paul Ryan will tolerate Donald Trump.  He has the power to set the rules.  Donald trump is not yet the party nominee.  He could change the rules even now to make it harder for Trump to be the nominee.  None the less Paul Ryan said he would step down, “If Donald Trump asked him to”.  So if I were Trump I’d say “Clean out your desk now”.  Norman Goldman has a theory that Ryan wants Trump to lose in November to he, Ryan can be king of the hill in 2020.  This new crop of conservative demagogues are in their forty and thus have many bites at the apple. 

This is Monday May 9, 2016.  Last night it was news and then “Eye on LA” featuring summer attractions.  They talked about “The Hollywood Farmer’s Market” and then it was water-jet packs in Newport Bay where jets of water lift you off the water.  Then it was propeller powered snorkeling off Catalina.  Then they had the Strawberry Festival in Oxnard and they talked about Lego Land.  Finally they discussed the many attractions of Lake Havisu, Arizona.  Then I switched to Sixty Minutes.  Their first segment was Russia doing massive cheating in the summer Olympics in London in 2012 and in the winter Olympics on the Black Sea.  There were steroids including testosterone for women, and also other kinds of “blood doping”.  Then it was ISIS invading the Ezittee culture in Syria.  They had been around for a thousand years and had an eclectic religion.  The Kurds and US forces waged battle for the town and leveled the city more than ISIS already had.  ISIS had a network of underground tunnels.  The final segment was on the explosion of plus 3.0 earthquakes in Oklahoma.  Their largest earthquake was a 5.6 – which was a record setter in that area.  Kansas also had earthquakes but they stopped pumping water into the bedrock and earthquake action calmed down.  You get unusable water with the gas and oil from drilling.  But officials in Oklahoma denied it was happening.  Finally you had more of Hades and the underworld on “Once Upon a Time”.  If you graduate it’s either to eventual salvation or the Lake of Fire. 

This is Monday May 9, 2016 and today is a transit of the planet Mercury across the face of the sun.  These transits occur on average of thirteen times in a century and they generally occur either in the months of May or November.  When Mercury transits the sun like this it's always in retrograde from an astrological basis.  But I think luck tends to be with me when Mercury is in retrograde, so I am not in the normal way of things here.  This morning I watched “Ring of Fire” from May 4^th, the latest episode they had.  They generally discussed pollution and did a whole review of the Flint water crisis.

Bill Binney is the high-level NSA executive who created the agency’s mass surveillance program for digital information. A 32-year NSA veteran widely regarded as a “legend” within the agency, Binney was the senior technical director within the agency and managed thousands of NSA employees.

Last year, Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together, and said:

We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.

But today, Binney told Washington’s Blog that the U.S. has already become a police state.

By way of background, the government is spying on virtually everything we do.

All of the information gained by the NSA through spying is then shared with federal, state and local agencies, and they are using that information to prosecute petty crimes such as drugs and taxes. The agencies are instructed to intentionally “launder” the information gained through spying, i.e. to pretend that they got the information in a more legitimate way … and to hide that from defense attorneys and judges.

This is a bigger deal than you may realize, as legal experts say that there are so many federal and state laws in the United States, that no one can keep track of them all … and everyone violates laws every day without even knowing it.

The NSA also ships Americans’ most confidential, sensitive information to foreign countries like Israel(and here), the UK and other countries … so they can “unmask” the information and give it back to the NSA … or use it for their own purposes.