Category: Uncategorized

The BRD Chancellor, I hear

Was anointed Person of the Year.

She helped refugees

Who were down on their knees

It will cost her some votes, I do fear.

The New Yorker ran an article about Rubio about two weeks ago in which he was asked questions about climate change.  In a nutshell, his response was that his experts told him that the measures being proposed to limit global warming would not work, and would cause significant economic dislocations.  As a result, the better course of action was to do nothing.

The opinions of Marco’s “experts” are inconsistent with the scientific consensus, which logically leads one to ask who they were.  I am guessing they were either spokesmen for the Koch brothers or the man in the mirror, in which case, notwithstanding the modesty in his previous disclaimers, one would have to conclude that Marco is, in fact, a scientist.

                       Trump World

We’ve all been to Disneyland.

You picture it, I’m sure.

Castles, rides, and princesses.

Things that never were.

 

Consider this:  another world

Where things aren’t quite so fine.

A place that really just exists

In Donald Trump’s sick mind.

 

Mexicans pour through our gates.

Refugees, as well.

We’re powerless to stop the flood.

As far as we can tell.

 

The military’s lost its way.

The bad guys run amok.

The poor white people in our land

Are just ____ out of luck.

 

We make trade deals with friend and foe.

They always screw us over.

Our workers end up on the dole.

Our enemies in clover.

 

To hear this story, you would think

We live in a dystopia.

But everybody else agrees

It’s more like a utopia.

 

Unemployed at five percent.

Dollar’s on the rise.

Crime continues to go down.

Market’s very high.

 

Disneyland and Trump’s new world

Are both a big mirage.

But only Trump’s faux nightmare land

Is full of fake garbage.

A lot of what Bernie Sanders says about climate change is sensible.  His comment at the last debate that global warming is our biggest foreign policy challenge sounded untimely in light of the present circumstances, but in the long run, he may well be right.  His proposal for a carbon tax, and for targeted spending to mitigate its impact, is also perfectly reasonable, and you can make a case for his suggestions about new regulations.

Unfortunately, however, he insists that the root of the climate change problem is the overweening power that fossil fuel industries wield in Washington.  There is no doubt that coal and oil interests are influential, particularly in the Republican establishment, but the responsibility for using their products falls on all of us.  If you could somehow banish all oil lobbyists from Washington, people in this country would still be buying SUVs, and there still would be no economically viable alternative to the use of fossil fuels in a variety of different contexts.

I suppose the next thing he will say is that Big Soda is forcing sugary drinks down my throat.  This is the caricature of the nanny state that pushes people who might otherwise know better to vote GOP.

1. Put the focus on adopting regulations at a state and local level where such legislation has broad popular support.  Since the market for guns operates on a national level, this isn’t an idea approach, but it is politically viable.
2. Continue to press the GOP for federal legislation to keep guns out of the hands of potential terrorists.  It won’t pass, but the issue will resonate in the 2016 campaign.
3. Try to show more public sympathy for rural gun culture.  The Democratic Party is cratering in rural areas that don’t contain national parks and ski resorts–this could help a bit.

1. The country is already awash in guns.  It is questionable whether a few million less or more will make much of a difference.
2. Any attempt to address the existing gun inventory will either be prohibitively expensive or run afoul of gun owners’ reasonable right to privacy (or both).
3. Republicans at the national level are so infatuated with gun ownership that they won’t even support measures to keep guns out of the hands of potential terrorists.

As a result, the field in which gun control advocates can make headway is fairly limited.  This will be discussed tomorrow.

                   Red State Rage

In the winter of our discontent

Obama was the king.

We thought we’d seen the worst of times

But they were just beginning.

 

Now marriage is for perverts, too.

Legalized gay sex.

Man on man and women, too.

Will animals be next?

 

The future lies with sun and wind.

They launched a war on coal.

Now everybody in our state

Depends upon the dole.

 

Terrorists can run amok.

Debt up to our ears.

Is it any wonder that

We’re prisoners of our fears?

 

The GOP will save the day.

Hope eternal springs.

So vote for Ben or Trump or Cruz

They stand for the same thing.

We resolved to travel far

As New Year’s Day kicked in.

Europe and domestic, too.

So where do I begin?

 

We arrived in France and Spain

Towards the end of May.

Churches, chateaux, cities new

We traveled fourteen days.

 

We flew to Boston, then we drove

to northern Adirondacks.

For four days we enjoyed the view

Then we had to fly back.

 

September we flew north again

A weekend in Vermont.

The hills were green and full of charm.

It was all that we could want.

 

October and we returned

To mountains in NC.

We were looking for the place

Retirement to be.

 

Late November and we flew

To visit in Berlin.

We saw museums and the wall.

A cold war we would win.

 

Andrea works for the state.

Matt’s still on his own.

Marlowe’s getting up in years.

To jump up makes him groan.

 

Things were great, as you can see,

But next year could be finer.

Because our big ambitious plan

Is a trip to China.

 

So best of wishes to you all.

Don’t let events oppress you.

Keep the faith as you move on

And may the heavens bless you.

Violent crime is down significantly, and interest in hunting has fallen off over the last several years, yet gun ownership has gone up.  Why?

I would suggest three reasons:

1.  Local TV news coverage:  Our local TV stations have essentially given up covering local government;  their broadcasts are devoted almost exclusively to the coverage of crime and disasters.  Under the circumstances, it is easy to understand why people would believe that violent criminals are running wild in our community, even though the statistics show that it isn’t true.

2.  National media coverage of terrorism:  You would never know that your chances of dying from a lightning strike are greater than your chances of being killed by a terrorist.

3.  Guns are a Reactionary totem:   You will recall that the bumper sticker says that “God, guns and guts made America great.”  From the Reactionary perspective, God is no longer respected in this country, and their supposed representatives don’t have the guts to stand up to the liberal agenda, so guns are the only thing left in the holy trinity upon which they can rely.

Romney won the Republican nomination in 2012 by attacking Rick Perry from the right on immigration.  If the establishment wants to stop Donald Trump, they need to do it the same way; waiting for his reactionary constituents to recoil from his extreme statements about foreigners and Muslims is not going to work, because their prejudices on this subject are nearly boundless.

There is plenty of material available.  All they have to do is use it.

I pride myself on providing purely original material, but the insight in this post comes from a book called “The Quartet” by Joseph Ellis.  Here is what he tells us:

1. Madison was responsible for collecting and editing the proposed amendments that became the Bill of Rights.
2. There was great concern in the process of ratifying the Constitution about the need to promote state militias in lieu of a large federal standing army.  This was particularly true among those who felt that the Constitution was an unwarranted step towards the centralization of power in the U.S.
3. While Madison and the other supporters of ratification rejected any notion that ratification could occur with the adoption of amendments as a condition precedent, he promised that such amendments would be considered and approved expeditiously after ratification.  The adoption of the Second Amendment, and the rest of the Bill of Rights, was a good faith effort to keep that promise to the Anti-Federalists.

If this is true, and I see no reason to doubt it, the notion that the Second Amendment was intended to protect individual, not collective, rights is historically inaccurate.  Nevertheless, the current Supreme Court has decided that the right belongs to individuals, which is an obstacle to the creation of national gun control legislation.

 

As I’ve noted on several previous occasions, Jeb’s immediate problem is to dispose of Marco Rubio and win the Romney Coalition subprimary, but he doesn’t have many plausible lines of attack.  Rubio’s most vulnerable spot is his previous support for immigration reform, but Jeb is not in a position to make that case.  Ted Cruz, however, can and will make the argument forcefully.

Cruz is competing with Donald Trump in the Reagan Coalition subprimary.  He needs to reduce Trump’s support significantly without disparaging him or his followers, whom he needs to inherit.  The most obvious person to take on Trump, given his pedigree, ideology, and available funds, is Jeb Bush.

Could the two campaigns enter into a non-aggression pact?

Cruzing in the Right Lane

Ted Cruz

Has right-wing views.

He lights the fuse.

Has little to lose.

 

Far right

Examines his plight.

Admires his fight.

Lends him its might.

 

What now?

Don’t have a cow.

Rivals won’t bow.

Stop him somehow.

Does anyone out there believe that Maduro will agree to follow democratic norms?  Me, neither.

(In light of recent events, this is the first of a series of postings on guns in America.)

As we know only too well, our country has more guns, and experiences more gun violence, than any nation on the planet that is not in the middle of a civil war. This is true even when we are compared with countries that are roughly geographically and culturally comparable (Australia and Canada).  Why?

I think there are three reasons:

1.  Standing armies and central government tyranny were linked in the eyes of many of the Patriots in the American Revolution, so the widespread ownership of guns and the use of militias is in our political DNA.  It is not surprising that some right-wingers view private gun ownership as a check against the unwarranted usurpation of power by the federal government, given the history of this issue.  You would not see that, or a Second Amendment, in other countries.

2.  The American political system gives an unusual amount of power to rural states in which gun ownership is extremely important.  I don’t think rural voters have the same degree of clout at the federal level in Canada and Australia as they do here.  As a result, it is very difficult to pass gun control legislation in the US even under the best of circumstances.

3.  There is a clear correlation between right-wing Christian evangelicals and passion for gun ownership that doesn’t exist in more secular countries.  The theological basis for this is unclear to me, but there is a reason why the bumper sticker tells us that “God, guns, and guts made America great.”