Nitecap

It’s been awhile since I opened the virtual bar. I’m more of a social drinker these days. Just with friends and only a little. Tonight I want scotch. I once went to a B&B in New Hampshire where the snug had about 200 different Scotch from all over Scotland. Didn’t think I liked scotch until then. Turned out I was wrong about that. 

Next year, I want to go on a hiking tour of Scotland. I need to renew my passport. You know, just in case I need to make a quick trip abroad for an extended period of time to an island in the South Pacific that has sufficient elevation and fresh water. There probably won’t be any scotch there. 

I was going to say, “Fear no nightly noises” and we shouldn’t. Get some sleep. The journey starts in earnest tomorrow. 

I’ll have a Macallan, please. OTR. What are you having? 

Winter is Coming, Wahoo Dorus

One of the best political podcasts this year has been Slate’s Trumpcast, hosted by Jacob Weisberg. It’s funny, surreal and serious. 

The lastest episode features chess master Gary Kasparov, who is a political exile in the US having made enemies at the Kremlin in Russia. He’s probably already thinking 5 steps ahead and has Plans B thru H if something goes wrong. 

Anyway, this episode is insightful. I’ve compared Trump to Henry VIII and I think that’s a comparison Kasparov would agree with. He tells us how a dictator thinks: it’s not as long term as you think. And he makes a good case for why Trump should never be president. I think Obama has been reading Kasparov’s latest book when he said in his press conference that Russia is a small country. But Kasparov says Putin sized up Obama as being a weak and indecisive president. 

Just go listen, especially the end where Kasparov tells younger American’s to look to the future by concentrating their efforts in the present. This is going to be a difficult four years. We need to focus our attention on what we can do in the short term. We need to pull ourselves together, get over some of the shock and get ready. 

And as flamboyant, chaotic and careless Trump is, our attention might be better fixed on Congress and allying with our Trump friends and family to oust as many mercenaries who are about to betray us as we can. 

Winter is Coming must have been created by a Girl Scout. Be prepared. 

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One other thing: The Washington Post reports today that 52% of Republicans think Trump won the popular vote. I guess we should be alarmed by that but I don’t think Republicans make up 52% of the population. Let’s put this in perspective. Republicans are something around 40% of the population. So if 52% of 40% of the population believes that Trump won the election, that’s still only about 20% of the population is accepting the lies. The majority of the rest of us know now that Clinton won by 2,800,000+ votes. That’s about 2.1% of the vote. The raw numbers make Clinton more popular than any white male who has ever run for president. 

The electoral college as currently set up favors property owners in sparsely populated states. If it reflected one person, one vote as it should, Clinton would be president hands down. By the objective standard of who won more votes, she won. And not all of them were in California. They were in NJ, WA, OH, FL, TX, PA and WI. They were all over the place. She won. Decisively. 

Never forget that you voted for the winner. You voted for an honest, ethical, hard working, self-actualized, mentally healthy, strong, capable, experienced individual who scared the shit out of Vladimir Putin in a way that Donald Trump will never be able to achieve with all his money or all the tea in CHI-NA. 

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Onto more cheerful things. I’m getting a tree today. Normally, I get fresh because my kids always insisted on it. But they’re not here, I get to make all the decisions now  and dammit I’m tired of stringing lights. So, I’m going to break down this year and buy a prelit tree. Unless someone has had any experience with those light rings that you loop over the top of the tree and artfully drape over the branches. The problem with those is that there aren’t enough lights. There are only 64 lights per package. Seems a little skimpy. 

Anyone got an opinion? Fresh or artificial? Light ring… thingies or bite the bullet and string them by hand?  One thing for sure, THERE WILL BE A TREE. This is non-negotiable. 

This season has been interesting. It’s been full of surprises. Some of them good, some pretty awful and some that just came out of nowhere. Regardless of what happens tomorrow, I’m going to try to enjoy my Christmas. And make plans. And allies. 

Hold hands, stick together. Look out for one another. 

Wahoo-Dorus

Something that puzzles me greatly

Donald Trump ran not only to “Make America Great Again” but to “Make America SAFE Again”.

But he doesn’t take intelligence briefings on a daily basis and he doesn’t believe the CIA.

Also, threats of terrorism and terrorist acts have subsided over the last couple of months. It seems unusually calm after the turmoil of the last year with Paris attacks and Belgium.

If acts of terrorism are more likely to occur during transition periods, what’s in store for us next year?

And what would Trump do about it?  I mean, other than blame the victims.

Hmmmmm….

Ok, well, that was a sunny, positive thought!  Have a nice day!

Another something:

I’m reading the new Michael Lewis book, The Undoing Project. Chapter three explains exactly how Trump won the presidency. It’s the chapter on the Tversky similarity index and decision making. There’s no math in the book as far as I can tell and the similarity index is easy to understand. The pharmaceutical industry relies on it and the tanimoto similarity index when doing data analysis on high throughout screening of compounds for activity against protein targets. Ok, gettin too geeky here.

Anyway, after this chapter I put the blame on the press. Yup. Can’t get around it. They took the ill gotten booty and published it. They made a BFD over the FBI probe of Hillary’s email and the Comey Letter.

Yes, Russia hacked. Yes, the Republicans highjacked the FBI. Yes, yes, yes, the Trump campaign was complicit in both. But it wouldn’t have gone anywhere if the media had not been determined to have an exciting photofinish by creating a false equivalency. Some of this has already been said but it’s HOW it was done and how Americans’ decision making process was manipulated that makes this seem like a really stupid move by the media or just malicious.

Someone once told me to never confuse malice with stupidity. If that’s my working hypothesis then my conclusion is that the vast majority of media “journalists” and “editors” need to be fired.  We can’t have this shit and operate as a free Democracy.

They’re responsible.

He’s not going to change.

This is who he is. 

He’s got a specific affliction. He isn’t going to mellow with age. He will not mature in his job. He will not become more serious. 

When things go wrong, it’s not going to be his fault. He’s going to make excuses. And when you start thinking they’re not very convincing, he’ll turn on you. He’s going to say it’s your fault for not working hard, for not capitalizing on your opportunities, for not saving enough. 

He didn’t get here on his own. You were set up. His friends told you to let down your guard for the past several years. They told you that it was ok to be unacceptable. Just because it’s hurtful or mean doesn’t mean it’s illegal. Unacceptable became normal. Twenty years ago, you’d never tolerate such rude, unfair, cruel behavior. Now you will. 

He will lie about everything even when it appears to serve no purpose. It does have a purpose. He and his friends want to confuse you, make you dizzy, disorient you. That’s how they will get away will taking anything that isn’t nailed down. 

He’s going to rob you blind. He’s going to spy on you. He’s going to upend your life and everything you thought was normal. That is because he wants what he wants and he takes what he wants and there will be no one to stop him. Even the people who think they can control him or use him and then dump him will find out too late that it’s impossible. He will have the means and the will to crush them. 

He wants to be admired. But as long as the rest of this peers fear him, that’s ok. 

Either way, you’re screwed. Some of you don’t know it yet. 

If we’re extraordinarily lucky and we join in common cause, we might not have to know. 

Does anyone believe…

that the candidate who steadfastly refused to release his tax returns because a.) they were too complex  b.) they were under audit and c.) releasing would hurt his candidacy, is really going to completely divest himself of his companies and all of his holdings in order to eliminate any conflicts of interest? 

Anyone? Anyone?

Bueller?
Didn’t think so. 

Scorecard

I was in a bar a couple of weeks ago with a co-worker who told me she didn’t vote this time around. She drinks considerably more than I do these days and after a few rum and cokes, she said that she couldn’t vote for Hillary because she was pretty sure she was going to drop a nuke on some country.

I was still sober, having only sipped a hot sake and played with some spicy tofu. It was the day after the election. I needed comfort food.

I laughed about the nuke comment. That’s ridiculous, where did you read that? I glanced over to my companion to see her swaying slightly on her stool. She said her husband told her. He was the one who was always searching the news sites. And besides, she believed it.

Damn, I thought, I gotta stop going to the bar with her.

But it wasn’t just there where I heard the most insane stuff about Hillary. I went to a wedding in early October and sat next to a woman who with eyes all wide and fearful told me that Hillary and Bill had killed 80 people. I felt uncomfortable sitting next to her and told my sister what she said. “Don’t be silly”, she said, “Everyone knows it was only 40.” She was kidding but she’s also a staunch Republican and she sat out the election. Couldn’t bring herself to vote for Trump.

So, for what it’s worth, I personally know *one* Republican with a conscience.

During the past year, I talked to many people who seemed to have lost all direction when it came to politics, truth and morality. They didn’t know what to believe. They weren’t getting the truth from their media sources. All cable and newspaper sources let us down this year. They grossly exaggerated the email problem for Clinton and barely touched on Trump’s myriad conflicts of interest.

I suspect that the biggest threat was Facebook. If you’re a social animal and not particularly tech savvy, Facebook is your gateway drug to the internet. It’s also somewhat flattering when people want to be your friend. Back in 2008, I got thousands of friend requests from people on Facebook. I accepted only a handful because A.) I didn’t know most of those people  B.) I don’t like Facebook’s kludgy interface. If feels claustrophobic. C.) I had a suspicion that it was going to be used as a method to spread propaganda. It turns out this was correct.

Bottom line: some of us know what is going on for whatever reason and some of us don’t know what’s going on. At. All. Some of us forgot what we believed in and threw away all semblance of morality and voted for a con man for president because we were discombobulated. We don’t know what the truth is anymore. We don’t know who is good and who is bad. We don’t know what is important and what is trivial. We don’t believe in climate change even when we see satellite images of ice caps melting. We don’t believe that Humans could be responsible for that or making that happen more quickly. We believe that a man who has a history of federal housing discrimination lawsuits, a record of not paying his workers and video tape of him boasting of sexual assaults is more trustworthy than a dedicated, experienced career public server who wants to simplify her email accounts.

At this point, there is almost nothing the two sides can agree on. Ok, maybe gravity. We can agree that gravity holds us to the earth.

And there is maybe one other thing that we can all agree on that everyone playing a long game should be paying attention to. I’m going to call this, the Scorecard. It’s the precise layout of the swamp that Trump claimed he wanted to drain. This is the breakdown of government by the numbers. It’s a short scorecard. We’re only going to be looking at the three branches of the federal government. These are numbers that no statistician can manipulate to make them look like something they are not. They are absolute numbers, prescribed by the Constitution. They represent the checks and balances one branch of government has on another branch of government. Can we all agree that the quantity represented by a number increases as the number gets farther away from zero? In other words 1>0. 45> 3. 238>195, etc. Right? Ok, great. Here’s the scorecard:

	2016			2017
	R	D		R	D	Undetermined
President	0	1		1	0
Vice President*	0	1		1	0
Senate	54	46		51	48	1
House	247	188		239	194	2
Supreme Court	4	4 (1)		4(1)	4

These numbers can be found at the non-partisan site The Green Papers.

The asterisk next to the Vice President means that in the event of a tie in the Senate, the Vice President can cast the tie breaking vote.

More info: There are more Republicans in Congress (House and Senate) than there are Democrats. It has been like this since 2010. If Obama wanted to initiate any changes, they have been able to block him. I am not an Obama fan and have always thought that he was an awful, naive, inexperienced negotiator. But even if he were any good at this, the Republicans would have blocked him and not because he was African American but simply because he was a Democrat. This is why nothing has gotten done since 2010. Since 2010, Congress has had an unsurpassed record of non-accomplishment by design. (You can check the statistics here but only if you feel comfortable with graphs. Otherwise, just stick to the Scorecard which cannot lie according to the Consitution)

The Senate has the power to advise and consent on Supreme Court nominees. Presently, there is a 4-4 tie in the Supreme Court since the very conservative Antonin Scalia died early this year. Scalia is one of the justices who voted for the Citizens United case. In that 5-4 split on the Supreme Court, it was decided that rich people and corporations could dump as much money as they liked into political campaigns. This disadvantages poorer candidates and average citizens. Scalia was also one of the 5 who voted to roll back part of the Voting Rights act. Maybe you don’t think this affects you because you’re white but if you ever decide you need to form a coalition with African Americans to get a candidate elected, you may find there is a structural imbalance due to voting rights restrictions in southern and some northern states that will make this impossible. That is what the current post election audit (aka Recount) is about.

The Republican Senate refused to carry out this Constitutional duty because they were hoping for a Republican president to make a new appointment. There was nothing in the Constitution to compel them to rule on Obama’s appointment within a specific time period. It’s just the norms that we have run the country with for 240 years. So they sat on it.

In summary, the swamp was not drained. The swamp prevented any meaningful legislation from occurring for 6 years. It lost a little volume but it’s still in charge. In fact, the swamp now has allies in the White House and it will soon have allies in the Supreme Court.

Now, if you are the kind of person who sees no useful reason for government to exist except to go to war with other countries, hates Social Security and thinks Medicare should be privatized, then you should be absolutely delighted by the way things turned out. Republicans have been waiting for this moment since the 1930’s to get rid of all the things you rely on. (Of course they will. They don’t care about you.) Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R- Wisconsin), has plans that will make you very, very happy. He can’t wait to get rid of Obamacare. And while I think Obamacare didn’t go far enough, like many of you have told me (“Why can’t we all have Medicare??”), there are some people who rely on it for pre-existing conditions. They’re about to lose their lifeline- literally.

Forget Medicare for All. Paul Ryan and his Republican House members are sharpening their knives to dismantle it. No, I am not kidding. Who’s going to stop them? Go back and look at the scorecard.

If that’s not what you thought you were going to get when you voted to let Trump “Make America Great Again”, then you are going to be sick about what you have done to your retirement benefits. Your vote will affect your children and grandchildren and your great grandchildren. You, voter, know now that when you look at your grandchildren, you are responsible for making their futures significantly harder. Trump is going to appoint the next Supreme Court justices and you can bet he’s going to nominate more Scalias who love the rich and well connected and not so much you and yours. By the way, the Supreme Court had 5 solid votes to overturn Roe v Wade until Scalia died and it didn’t do it. They were never serious about it. They just wanted to keep us all at each other’s throats.

I think we can all agree that this is the current state of affairs in the US Government, right? We are all talking about the same things now.

Cut out this scorecard and stick it to your refrigerator. The next opportunity you will have to drain the swamp is in 2018.

And for God’s sake, get off of Facebook.

Happy Thanksgiving 2016 or Thank Goodness It’s Almost Over

I thought 2014 was the worst year ever but 2016 is giving that one a run for its money. I’m getting a better sense of what we’re in for with Trump. I caught the tail end of All In with Chris Hayes yesterday when he had an Italian journalist describing what happened under Berlusconi. One of these days, we’re going to point at those stunned Trump voters and call them suckers except that they’re going to pull the rest of us under with them. When the transcripts are posted, I’ll excerpt them. Then we can all watch the next four years together to see it all play out unless the media buys a clue. Won’t that be fun?

In the meantime, it looks like we might get a serious recount. Maybe Jill Stein woke up and realized there really was a difference between the two candidates. If there was vote hacking, i’m betting they covered their footprints very well. Do I think it happened? I don’t know. Do I think Trump would do such a thing if he thought he could get away with it? Absolutely.

But enough of that for now. Let’s do the T-Day thing. I’m having some friends over for dinner. And now that I look around this place, I have a lot of picking up to do. What are you cooking today? Got any special recipes? I subscribe to Entertaining with Beth on YouTube and she has some dead simple appetizer ideas that you can do with puff pastry, which I just happen to have in my freezer. How conveeeenient. Check out her video below and tell me which one you think I’m going to make:

See, Greg, no hot peppers. And no beets.

Next year, I hope to have a lot more friends for parties. I met a lot of new people this year while I was staging for GOTV and I’m looking forward to seeing them again in the coming years. I hadn’t realized until the GOTV how much I missed being around other people who shared my point of view, sense of humor and their own generosity of spirit. So, to those of you new friends, drop in any time. Thanks to all of the Ground Gamers especially:

Barb, Greg, Matt A., Kyp, Reverend Beverly, Darlene, Carolyn, Suzanne, Daria, Alex, Chris, The Three Marys, Beth, Jeff, Larry, Pete, Sandra, Andria, Nadene, Michael and Raja (our organizers).  There were so many more people who I met this year and I wish Michael had left the sign in sheets so I could find all of you. But I hope to run into you all again in the Giant Eagle.

Thanks as well to all you Conflucians who kept me company this year and are some of the best friends I’ve ever had. Thanks to Ivory Bill Woodpecker, Lady V, Sweet Sue, Quixote, TDraicer, William, SeaGrl, GA6thDem, MsMass, CB, MDMDStork, Ownaa, Bellecat and Katiebird, who took a hiatus but I hope returns someday. And to all of you commenters who I’m so glad to read everyday including some new faces and return visitors. (Well, not some of you but you know who you are because we haven’t heard from you in awhile. Hehehe.)

And finally, Many Thanks to Hillary who set a beautiful example of intelligence, perseverance, grace under pressure and presidential leadership. She is MY President and having bested Trump by 2 million votes and counting, should be THE President. I will always be proud of my support for her. She exceeded my expectations in every way.

Happy Thanksgiving, Madame President.