Donald Trump's Favorite Tunes

While Kamala Harris was in Erie, Pennsylvania pushing Donald Trump's incendiary, dictatorial banter about the enemy within, Trump was in the opposite corner of the state in suburban Philadelphia hosting a town hall in which his usual lunkheaded non-answers to questions got interrupted by people fainting in the overheated building.  At a loss for words - and his mind - Trump called for songs from his list of personal favorites to be played for, as it turned out, forty minutes - about the length of a long-play album - which revealed something far worse about Trump than his authoritarian tendencies - his taste in music.

Among his selections were Luciano Pavarotti's cover of "Ave Maria," "Memory" from Cats, "YMCA" by the Village People (which Trump must take literally as a song promoting wholesome activities such as basketball and swimming but not seriously as a song about gay culture), "November Rain" by Guns 'N' Roses, and Sinead O’Connor’s cover of Prince's "Nothing Compares 2 U."  In short, his tastes in music are like his policies - inconsistent, messy, diffuse, and somewhat kitschy.   

And Trump swayed and shimmied all the way through the music without saying very much.

Not much in the way of sixties and seventies classic rock and pop in the mix, which was too bad, because, given his promises of what to do to Harris supporters, a few songs of that description would have been perfect for his playlist.

You already know about these two.

Or how about this?

Or this?

I don't think I need to say any more. 

Going to College

It could happen again. It happened to Hillary Clinton in 2016, and it could happen to Kamala Harris in 2024, once again benefitting Donald Trump.

It's possible for Harris to win the popular vote and lose the presidential election thanks to the Electoral College, and every time the winner of the popular vote comes up short in the electoral vote, it always seems to be a Democrat holding onto the short end of the stick, thanks nowadays in part to Republicans dominating Texas, Florida, and a multitude of less populated states in the nation's midsection.

The reason for the Electoral College in the Constitution is usually given as slavery, mainly due to the slave states wanting an increased role in selecting the President and Vice President.  The constitutional clause basing the number of electors for each state on how many House and Senate members a state sends to Congress - at a time when slave states could count every five slaves as the equivalent of three citizens for the number of representatives they would send to the House -  certainly lends a great deal of truth to that, but it is hardly the only reason.  Another reason, according to Alexander Hamilton, was to ensure that the President and Vice President were chosen by private citizens who would vote on behalf or the people and who also could make sound judgments based on their better education and their deeper knowledge of the candidates.  In other words, Hamilton - and many of the other framers - didn't trust the judgment of the masses and and wanted people who knew the presidential candidates more intimately than the hoi polloi.  Each elector would vote for a first choice and a second choice, he runner-up in the election would be elected Vice President, and a bare majority of electoral votes - 35 in the first presidential election of 1789 - were needed to win, else the House would elect the President.

The plan worked perfectly - and then it didn't.  The states were left to decide how electors would be chosen, and most of them decided to have their legislatures choose them.  At the start, everyone agreed that George Washington should be President.  All of the electors voted for him in the first two elections, and John Adams, as the runner-up in each case, was twice elected Vice President.  Then, as parties formed, inconsistencies and difficulties started screwing things up.  Electors became more partisan, and the election of 1796 resulted in Adams, a Federalist Party member, being elected President and Thomas Jefferson, the leader of the Democratic-Republican Party, ending up as Vice President. When 138 electors were chosen in the election of 1800, 73 of them were Democratic-Republican electors, and they voted for Jefferson and Aaron Burr, resulting in a tie - the electors had intended for Burr to be Vice President, but there was no way to indicate that on the ballot.   The tie was broken in the House in favor of Jefferson, and the Constitution was amended in advance of the 1804 election to have electors specify and indicate their choice for President and their choice for Vice President (and it gave the Senate the power to choose a Vice President of no vice presidential candidate got a majority.

With the two-party system firmly established by the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans and the evolution of popularly chosen electors, the participating parties changing until settling into the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as of 1856, the Electoral College turned into a mere formality where the electors - once meant to be independent thinkers with educated choices based on sound judgment - became mere echoes of the popular choice.   While some states allow electors to vote their conscience, in many if not most states electors are expected to choose the nominee of their party.  For all intents and purposes, the Electoral College have mostly ratified the choice of the masses since 1828, when Andrew Jackson became the first popularly elected President.  In some states, as in New Jersey, the people vote for a whole slate of electors without even knowing their names.  That's how irrelevant the Electoral College has largely become.  This was fine, as long as it reflected the will of the people.

And after the disputed election of 1876, in which Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated Democrat Samuel J. Tilden by the barest electoral margin despite losing the popular vote, and the election of 1888, when President Grover Cleveland won the popular vote but lost the Presidency to former GOP Senator Benjamin Harrison in the electoral vote, the Electoral College did, for quite a long time, reflect the will of the people. Franklin D. Roosevelt won four presidential elections in huge landslides - especially in 1936, when he won 46 out of 48 states - and John F. Kennedy won a close race in 1960 that could have been closer if he'd lost Illinois. (Kennedy won by an electoral vote of 303 to Richard M. Nixon's 219. Without Illinois, Kennedy still would have won, 276 to 246.) With the more recent examples of Democratic popular-vote winners losing the White House in the Electoral College, there are calls to abolish the Electoral College and let the President and Vice President be chosen directly by the people.

Be careful what you wish for.  The Electoral College has been beneficial in many cases where the parties broke down and split apart in attempting to choose a presidential ticket.  The Electoral College may have saved the Union. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln came in first in the popular vote in a four-man race with two Democratic candidates, Stephen Douglas and John C. Breckinridge - the Democratic party splitting over slavery - and a centrist candidate from what was left of the old Whig Party.  However, Lincoln only won 39 percent of the popular vote because an overwhelming aversion to him from over six out of ten voters. In New York State, which ultimately decided the election, the Democrats ran a fusion ticket to block Lincoln and to split the electoral votes between different candidates. If 25,000 votes had gone the other way, Douglas or Breckinridge might have become President of the United States because Lincoln would have won only 145 electoral votes - seven short of a majority - and the election would have been submitted to the House, where Lincoln would have lost because the Democrats controlled that chamber. (Lincoln won New York and the election with 180 electoral votes.)  Similarly, in 1912, the split between President William H. Taft and former President Theodore Roosevelt caused a great fissure in the Republican Party that led to Roosevelt forming a rival party and standing for the Presidency.  The Democratic candidate, New Jersey governor Woodrow Wilson, whose liberal policy proposals were similar to Roosevelt's came in first in the popular vote with Roosevelt finishing second.  But Wilson was a minority President, winning only 41 percent of the vote, and his solid win in the electoral vote - 435 votes with 266 needed to win - sanctified his victory.

So how would we reform the presidential selection process, especially when the Electoral College increasingly relies on a handful of swing states as many states become less bipartisan?  Have the President and Vice President popular elected and have a runoff between the top two presidential tickets if no one gets a majority?  Sure, let's make the already interminable electoral process even longer!  If we're going to have a system like that, perhaps the best thing to do would be to reform the nomination process.  Since the mid-1970s, the presidential nomination process has mirrored the presidential election process, with party members voting for delegates pledged to vote for their choice for the presidential nomination and the convention delegates voting in a predetermined roll call just like the electors voting in December.  Before the modern primary and caucus system, though, the parties vetted the potential candidates for their presidential nominations with little input from the rank-and-file.  Women and people of color may complain about how this system was dominated by white men, but this system gave us Franklin D. Roosevelt (nominated on the fourth ballot in 1932),  Harry S. Truman (nominated for Vice President on the second ballot in 1944, when most party insiders knew that FDR could not survive a fourth presidential term), Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John F. Kennedy. The parties must once again vet the presidential candidates if the electors will not or cannot do so.     

In fact, the Democratic Party just did use this system to nominate Kamala D. Harris.  And the Republicans, counting on the will of the rank-and-file party members, renominated Donald J. Trump.

(Below is the current allotment of electors based on the 2020 census.)

The Enemy From Within?

People thought I was being hysterical and hyperbolic when I kept saying that, if Trump got re-elected President, he would make dissent a capital crime.  He demonstrated that quite clearly in an interview he gave to the insufferable Maria Bartiromo on Fox News.

"I always say, we have two enemies," Trump said to Bartiromo.  "We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries."

Trump added that he didn''t think the aftermath of the election would produce any violence , as President Biden recently warned, at least not from the side that votes for him.  Rather, the violence would come from his . . . opponents.

 "I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within . . ..  We have some very bad people we have some sick people, radical left lunatics." he said, adding that any unrest caused by anti-Trump demonstrators "should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary by the military, because they can’t let that happen."

In other words, Trump will arrest and subdue anyone who expresses opposition to him.

And he will likely, as I keep saying, make dissent a capital crime.

With three weeks to go in this presidential election campaign, the pro-democracy coalition fighting Trump must hang together in 2024 . . .

. . . or they will most assuredly hang separately in 2025! 😱

All News, All the Time

It's the only television I watch.

I can't be bothered with any of the new sitcoms and dramas that have premiered in the 2024-25 season, and I can't even name one.  As for other shows that have returned from the previous season, well, I haven't watched any of them either.  For the past several months, with the exception of the odd PBS documentary, I have only watched the news programs on MSNBC - mainly Nicolle Wallace, Lawrence O'Donnell, Jen Psaki (whom I must put on my beautiful-women picture blog), Katie Phang (ditto), and the Reverend Al Sharpton, as well as "The Weekend."  I keep watching for any good news, no matter how thin a sliver it may be, about the Harris campaign at a time when pundits are second-guessing her and critiquing her outreach efforts toward the voters she needs to win in November.  

I can't stop watching the news and analyzing the polls for as long as I remain unsure of how the election will turn out.  It's all about the campaign.  I don't even have time to watch the BBC News America report weeknights on PBS.  If I learn of any famous celebrity deaths, it's usually on the Internet, and I probably learned about more celebrity passings than I would have if I were still watching the PBS NewsHour.  

Why am I torturing myself like this?  Because I want to know if I get tortured by the Trump 47 administration if such an administration actually comes to pass.  See, I've been on my own since January.  I had a lot of plans for my life after I ended up on my own, but apart from adopting two kittens, I haven't realized them.  I'm in a holding pattern as I watch the latest news on the 2024 presidential election because, if Trump wins, it's game over as far as I'm concerned.

Yes, I still think it.  Trump will not only make himself a dictator if re-elected, he'll set up a system to opporess, incarcerate, and, yes, execute anyone who opposes him.  First he'll come for the press and the pundits, then he'll come for Democrats, then he'll come for state and local governments to root out anti-MAGA public officeholders, and eventually - perhaps somewhere in between - he'll come for bloggers who have spoken out against him.

That would include me.  

I can't make any long-term plans if living in a free and democratic America is a short-term deal.  I can't plan a trip to Europe for 2025, because either Trump will make emigration illegal or because I might have to plan on doing more than just visiting Europe.  I have to get ready to leave the country if necessary, and what research I've done in how to do that does not reassure me.  It can be so difficult that I might have to stay in America.  And if Trump is back in office, it will be an America where MSNBC is off the air. 

It shouldn't be hard for the Trump 47 authorities to find me.   In my area, there are numerous Trump lawn signs, and I put a Harris sign outside my door as a sign of defiance.

And I'm sure there will be many an informer to aid the Trump secret police to root out the rot.

I am probably a dead man already.  😱

Setting the Record Straight

Now that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (my condolences to him for the death of his mother) is no longer a presidential candidate and the remaining third-party candidates are little more than annoyances, it looks more likely than not that the results of the 2024 presidential election will not be affected by a minor presidential candidate as a spoiler.

But was any presidential election ever affected by a third-party presidential candidate?   Maybe once in awhile, like all of the young people in 1968 who may have made Richard Nixon President by voting for Peace and Freedom Party nominee (and Black Panthers leader) Eldridge Cleaver instead of Hubert Humphrey, but not so much in other presidential elections.  It's likely that the 1844 election was decided in favor of Democrat James K. Polk over Whig Henry Clay based on Polk's support for annexing Texas and that third-party candidate James Birney of the Liberty Party, which advocated abolishing slavery, brought out voters who would have supported neither Polk nor Clay, both slaveowners, or not voted at all. The 1860 election was such a hot mess that it produced four major candidates - Republican Abraham Lincoln, northern Democrat Stephen Douglas, southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, and Constitutional Union Party nominee John Bell - and the vote was so sectionalized between the candidates that an electoral deadlock was more likely than a spoiler effect.  Had Douglas won New York, Lincoln would have been denied an electoral majority and most likely would have lost the Presidency in the House of Representatives.  The only times third-party candidates played spoiler was when a faction of an existing party supported one of its leaders on another ticket - such as in 1848, when former President Martin Van Buren was nominated by a reformist faction of the New York State Democratic Party was and subsequently endorsed by the anti-slavery Free-Soil Party for his views against extending slavery into the territories.  Van Buren cost Democratic nominee Lewis Cass New York State and the Presidency, electing Whig Zachary Taylor.  And, in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt led progressive Republicans out of the party and ran on the Bull Moose ticket against his one-time friend, President William Howard Taft (they later reconciled), he split the Republican vote and helped elect Democratic presidential candidate Woodrow Wilson. 

I bring all of this up as background to correct two blatant misconceptions about the two most recent presidential elections in which the winners of the popular vote lost the Electoral College - that third-party candidates cost  Democrats Al Gore and Hillary Clinton the Presidency.  That theory may or may not be true in the latter case, but it is definitely false in the former.  And both theories, not coincidentally, involve the Green Party.

In 2000, as Vice President Al Gore (above) was running for the Presidency against Republican George Walker Bush, pundits expressed alarm at the support Green Party presidential nominee Ralph Nader was gaining from liberal-leaning voters dissatisfied with President Bill Clinton and said that Nader could win enough Democratic votes to deprive Gore of a victory that November.  When the presidential election results from Florida, the deciding state, ended up being disputed for five weeks and was ultimately decided in favor of Bush by 537 votes, pundits pointed to the thousands of votes Nader got and concluded that Gore did lose Florida and the Presidency because of Nader . . . and have consistently said so ever since.

In reality, as American University professor Allan Lichtman later proved, Gore actually won Florida, but the election was stolen for George Bush because thousands of Gore votes cast by black Florida residents were thrown out by the state, whose governor was . . . Jeb Bush! And the butterfly-style ballots were so antiquated and difficult to fill out that when noted anti-Semitic third-party candidate Pat Buchanan got a large number of votes in heavily Jewish precincts in Palm Beach County, even Buchanan himself said those votes for him had to have been cast by mistake.     

Also, 2016 Green Party presidential nominee Jill Stein is seen as the culprit who peeled off enough votes from Hillary Clinton (above) in that year's presidential election to cost her three states in the Rust Belt that then went to Donald Trump.  Well, I have to concede that, if you look at the numbers, Dr. Stein did win more votes than the margins between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in those three states - Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.  (I once said that if everyone in Pennsylvania who voted for Dr. Stein had voted for Hillary, it wouldn't have made a difference and Trump still would have won the state, but the numbers were revised and I turned out to be wrong.)  But did it ever occur to the pundits and politicos who blamed Dr. Stein for Hillary's loss that maybe Hillary Clinton blew it by not campaigning in those states enough oer at all?  Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell begged - nay, implored - Hillary to campaign in her state, but she blew her off, thinking she had Michigan in the bag.  And Florida was a state Hillary was supposed to win, but people in Florida who had never voted before and had never put much faith in politics came out to vote for Trump.  And that phenomenon was repeated in other states.

Here's another thing.  Dr. Stein was on the ballot in 44 states.  Libertarian Party presidential nominee Gary Johnson was on the ballot in all fifty of them.  As I noted on this blog once before, MSNBC host Chris Matthews, after the 2016 election, explained that moderate Republicans turned off by Trump who could have voted for Hillary voted for Johnson instead, and that the vote Johnson won in key states was greater than Trump's margin of victory.   At least that was Matthews' reasoning.  So, if third-party candidates are spoilers, how is it that Gary Johnson - who came in third and got double the number of votes Dr. Stein got nationally - had no effect on the 2016 election but Dr. Stein did?

And why isn't then-FBI director James Comey more to blame for reopening an investigation into Hillary Clinton's laptop just before the election than Dr. Stein is?

Come to think of it, why is Hillary Clinton, who was a lousy candidate, totally blameless? 

So again, the only way a third-party candidate can be a spoiler is if the candidate in question is from one of the two major parties and leaves to run on a separate presidential ticket and brings enough fellow members of said party with him or her - as liberal Democrat Henry Wallace did with his Progressive movement and as conservative Democrat Strom Thurmond did with the "Dixiecrats" in 1948 when they both ran for President against incumbent Democratic President Harry S. Truman, when the polls favored Republican presidential nominee Thomas E. Dewey.

Oh yeah, Truman won.  

Spoilers?                

Music Video Of the Week - October 11, 2024

"Dream Police" by Cheap Trick  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Back to the Park

When I was forced to remove the bust of Abraham Lincoln that I contributed to Waverly Park, the local community park in my neighborhood, I was convinced that I would never contribute anything to the park again, bar only a couple of flowers here and there.  But a couple of folks in the neighborhood implored me to keep up the good work.  How could I say no?

I later found a small garden pillar that someone had thrown out, with a blue metal bowl on top of it.  I immediately got out of my car to put the pillar in the back, only to find out that the bowl had been glued to the pillar.  But I managed to separate the two after I got home.  I put the pillar in a garden bed. This is the result.

For now, at least, this will satisfy my desire to have something resembling public art in the park.  But I'm already working on another idea.   I remembered that part of the vacant lot on which the park was created by the neighbors - a strip of land that runs along my back yard, approximately three feet wide - may actually be on my side of the property line.  So I can put another bust on land that's on my side of the property line in a corner of the park - and put it right up against the line - and then landscape the square footage around the bust on either side of the property line so it looks like the bust is part of the park.  Which, for all intents and purposes, it will be.

The bust will be where the strip meets the sidewalk so it will be accessible.  It won't be a Lincoln bust, though.  I donated that bust to a library in another town nearby, so having another copy of the exact same bust of Lincoln doesn't make sense when the original bust is just a few miles away in another town in the same county.   So it will be a bust of another famous American.  I've narrowed it down to John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, Jr.  And yes, I like that Dion song.   

Gaza

It's been a year to the day since Hamas terrorists from the Gaza Strip crossed into Israel and murdered young people at a music festival that started out as being like Woodstock but ended up being twelve times worse than Altamont.  You would think that after a year of relentless bombardment of the strip, Hamas would be completely obliterated and the Israelis would be in complete control and the war would be over, as the Israelis clearly identified the enemy as Hamas, not "terror," as the U.S. did after 9/11 and chose to fight a war against a tactic more than against an organization.   

One year on, not only is the war against Hamas is still going on , but a series of  military operations between Israel and the Iranian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon has begun and subsequently intensified.  What could happen if these military operations increase?  World War III, that's what.  Or worse.  How could it be worse? Add hostility from Arab-American and American Muslim populations in key swing states toward Kamala Harris and the evangelicals flocking to Donald Trump who believe that Armageddon is at hand, and, well, you can draw your own conclusions. 😱 

Paradise Lost

Hurricane Helene has done extensive damage to the Southeast in general and western North Carolina in particular, and Donald Trump is doing even more damage by suggesting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is doing nothing for the victims of the hurricane and diverting funds meant for disaster relief to help migrants.  Georgia governor Brian Kemp, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster, Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, Knox County, Tennessee maytor Glenn Jacobs, and North Carolina senator Thom TIllis have all said that FEMA is doing a great job, President Biden has been extraordinarily helpful, and  added that Trump is doing no one any favors with his lies. All of these officials are Republicans. 

Well, starting next week, Trump can stop lying about the federal government's response to Hurricane Helene in North Carolina . . . and start lying about the federal government's response to Hurricane Milton in Florida.   

Tropical Storm Milton just became a hurricane earlier today and is expected to make landfall just outside St. Petersburg and is expected to zoom up the Interstate 4 corridor and possibly lay waste to everything from Tampa to Daytona Beach before going back out to sea.  Because the area is heavily populated - thanks to Interstate 4's mere existence - you can expect a lot of damage as early as this coming Wednesday.  Florida could see Disney World laid to waste.  Fortunately, that wouldn't be very serious.  But the loss of life could be devastating, and my advice to the residents in central Florida is to pack up their vehicles and head north.  Central Florida, with its numerous resorts, will no longer be heaven on earth after Milton blows through.

On the plus side, this could be an October surprise that helps Kamala Harris upset Trump in Florida - a scenario that former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele has predicted - and also gives Democratic Senate candidate Debbie Mucarsel-Powell an advantage of the horrible incumbent Republican Rick Scott, who has voted against FEMA funding in the past. 

Good thing he turned down funding for a high-speed rail line in central FLorida when he was governor, because at least we won't have to worry about high-speed trainsets being wrecked.

Interstate 4, on the other hand . . . 😧

Music Video Of the Week - October 4, 2024

"Louisiana 1927" by Randy Newman  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

October Surprise

Many Democrats feared that an October surprise would be coming this month (well, what other month would it be) to disrupt the Kamala Harris campaign.  Maybe it would be Jill Stein surging among Arab-American voters in Michigan and costing Harris the state and the White House.  Maybe it would be the longshoreman's strike that would threaten the economy. Maybe it would be the fact that she hasn't visited western North Carolina in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, even though President Biden did visit the area.  These are all important topics, and I hope to return to them later - maybe even in one blog entry to play catch-up.   But the new October surprise this week concerns not Harris but Donald Trump.  

Special prosecutor Jack Smith unsealed documents in his new indictment of Trump regarding the January 6 insurrection, superseding the old one.  The documents show that, by the standards of the Supreme Court's ruling granting Presidents immunity from being prosecuted for "official acts," Smith has been able to indict Trump for acts that our clearly non-official - acts that Trump and his supporters committed as part of the Trump presidential campaign, not the executive branch.  The charges show Trump threatening Vice President Mike Pence with mob-rule retribution if he didn't send the electoral votes for Joe Biden back to the states (and sure enough, he sent out messages to the January 6 demonstrators to ensure that), and he expressed fear that Pence was "too honest" to to send them back.  (Upon hearing that the Vice President had to be escorted to a safe location to precent him from being attacked, Trump said, "So what? 😲).  Also, Trump campaign operatives spent much of November 2020 attempting to disrupt vote tabulations in swing states and one unnamed co-conspirator exhorted another to incite a riot at one tabulation center in Detroit.  (As serious as this sounds, it is sort of humorous to imagine white people working for a "law and order" candidate inciting a riot in, of all places, Detroit.) 

Trump, of course, will inevitably appeal on the grounds that he was officiating as President, even though it's obvious to anyone who can breathe - with or without a ventilator - that he was acting as a candidate and not as the President of the United States.  But the mere appearance of efforts to overturn a free and fair election should give pause to enough voters in swing states - particularly extremely close states like North Carolina and Arizona - who were ready or on the verge of being ready to vote for Trump because they were unsure of Harris . . . before they end up voting for Harris.

Veep Creep

The best way to understand Tim Walz and what a nice guy he is (and why Jim Gaffigan was the perfect fellow to portray him on "Saturday Night Live") is to consider his answer to a question in last night's vice presidential debate.  When asked about a misstatement he had made in saying that he had been in Beijing during the Tiananmen Square massacre in April 1989 when he wasn't in China until later that year, Walz prefaced his answer with a rambling recapitulation of his background to set up his reason for going to China and Hong Kong (then a British colony) on an educational trip in 1989 and eventually got to his explanton that he had simply misspoken, meaning to say he had been to China the same year as the  Tiananmen Square massacre.

In other words, Walz talked like a regular guy, an average Joe. James David Vance, his vice presidential opponent, was polished, glib, and disciplined, which is why he sounded more like the seasoned, Ivy League-educated debater he is.  And he used his abilities to spin a policy argument that was total BS.   For one thing, he actually insisted that there was a peaceful transfer of power between Donald Trump and Joe Biden on January 20, 2021, which made about as much sense as saying that the World Trade Center site was the safest place in New York on September 25, 2001 because the terrorists definitely weren't coming back.   He also expressed sorrow for Amber Furman's death in 2022 for being denied reproductive care in her home state of Georgia while slickly evading responsibility for advocating for a national abortion ban.  But his lies, fibs and other sorts of prevarications were a sideshow for Vance's biggest Jedi mind trick.  He actually expressed  agreement with Walz over the need to do something about child care and climate change, but he doesn't care at all about those issues, at least not in the abstract.  He only cares about how his wife can handle her career and their children, or how American corporations can profit by having government tariffs to promote solar-panel manufacturing to fight climate change (not that Vance would get solar panels for his own home).  He was clearly appropriating issues prosecuted by Democrats and fashioning to his own personal situation without regard to anyone else's.

For that reason, I believe Walz did better, despite some of his reticence in pushing harder on issues like January 6.  He spoke more forcefully on issues he cares about, like reproductive rights and care for veterans.  And he also hit Vance hard on the Ohio senator's advocacy for building affordable housing on federal lands, which wouldn't help build more affordable housing in New Jersey, because the only federal hands we have for Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base. Walz wanted to know where thes efederal lands are, and whether they would be oil drilling on those same federal lands.

Even though vice presidential debates are considered irrelevant, this one may matter, simply because Vance is the educated, erudite demagogue that many people have already feared would arise.   And if Trump returns to the White House and dies in office after establishing a dictatorship, Vance, who at 40 would be the youngest Vice President since Richard Nixon, would become President and likely hold on to power until 2064.  It is not always true, by the way, that people vote for President, not Vice President.  If it were always true,  the Democratic Party wouldn't have swapped out Henry Wallace for Harry Truman as Franklin Roosevelt's vice presidential running mate.  In 1944, FDR, who was visibly in poor health, won only 53 percent of the popular vote and a shift of 300,000 votes  in the right states would have elected Republican Thomas E. Dewey.  If the politically arch-liberal Henry Wallace had been on the Democratic ticket in 1944, the election - and history - might have turned out very differently.

Kudos to CBS News' Norah O'Donnell and Margaret Brennan - two Irish gals - for their masterful debate moderation. 

America's First Centenarian Ex-President

Happy birthday, Jimmy Carter!

James Earl Carter, Jr., the 39th President of the United States, is one hundred years old today.  He was already the longest-live President in American history, so this birthday celebration is a milestone on steroids.

His Presidency was a single term, so he only spent one twenty-fifth of his life as the most powerful person in the world.   And his term in office did yield some unfavorable outcomes - airline deregulation, the Iran hostage crisis and the subsequent failed rescue mission, and the hamfisted and wrongheaded Moscow Olympics boycott.  Also, he was the last President in an era of Democratic politics that had begun in 1933 with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal and yielded Democratic victories in eight out of twelve presidential elections and control of 22 out of 24 Congresses - an era that ended with Ronald Reagan's victory over Carter in the presidential election of 1980.

But I come to praise President Carter, not bury him.  He managed to leave a solid legacy for a one-term President who had never served in Washington before, such as a sane energy policy that emphasised conservation and alternative fuels, he kept the nation out of war, and he achieved peace between Israel and Egypt.  Also, when things got tough - specifically in the horrible year of 1979, when gas prices hit a dollar a gallon for the first time (making gasoline more expensive than it is now, when adjusted for inflation), when we had prices rising faster than today, when Iranian militants seized the U.S. Embassy, and when we almost lost Philadelphia to nuclear error at Three Mile Island - President Carter didn't try to sugarcoat anything.  He told us the truth.  Things were bad, they'd get worse in the short term (as anyone who remembers 1980 would attest), and we had to gird our loins, grit our teeth, and bear it.

The election of 1980 proved that Americans don't like to be told the truth.  But Jimmy Carter went on to be the greatest former President since Republican Herbert Hoover (who, coincidentally, was the last President of a political era for his party), serving humanitarian causes such as building houses for the poor, getting fresh water available for Third World countries, and monitoring elections in various nations.  Now that he's a hundred, he can take it easy and look back on his long life with pride.'

Again, happy birthday, Jimmy Carter. 😊

Sunset for Florida Democrats - 2024 Edition?

How much to the Democrats hate their own losers?  Let's return to Florida to examine the evidence:

Democrat Val Demings gave up a safe House seat to challenge Republican Marco Rubio for his Senate seat in 2022.  Needless to say, she went down to defeat.  When Rick Scott's Senate seat came up for election in Florida this year (2024), Demings didn't even run for the Democratic nomination.  I suspect that Florida Democrats made it clear to her that she would not be welcome to make another try for a Senate seat.

Contrast that to the Republicans.  In 2002, there were two Democratic U.S. Senators from South Dakota - Timothy Johnson and Tom Daschle.  Johnson ran for a second term that year.  The Republican Senate nominee who ran against Johnson in 2002 lost, but in 2004 that same Republican got to try for the Senate again by running against Daschle, then the Senate Democratic leader, and this time the Republican won. That Republican is Fred Gwynne lookalike John Thune, now the second highest ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate.  This is just one example of a Republican U.S. Senate nominee who, having failed to get one of his state's Senate seats, simply tried for the other seat and succeeded; there are many more.  If there's a Democrat who lost a first bid for a Senate seat and then won his or her state's other Senate seat two short years later, I must have missed it.

How about gubernatorial candidates?  For this we can go back to Florida.  Jeb Bush lost his bid for the governorship of Florida in 1994, a great year for Republicans overall, against incumbent Democrat Lawton Chiles, but four years later, Jeb ran for the governorship of Florida against Lieutenant Governor Kenneth "Buddy" MacKay, Governor Chiles having been term limited, and won.

(MacKay never ran for elective office again, of course, but he did become governor of Florida when Governor Chiles died after the election but before Jeb Bush was to be inaugurated,  and so MacKay served out the remaining weeks of Chiles' term.  No one knew that Chiles would become and remain for thirty years and counting the last Democrat to by elected governor of Florida.  His death in office now seems prophetic.) 

This year, 2024, a double-surnamed woman named Debbie is taking on Rick Scott for his U.S. Senate seat.  No, not Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the woman responsible for Donald Trump - Debbie Mucarsel-Powell (above), an Ecuadoran-born academic administrator who served in the U.S. House of Representatives.  For one term.  She lost her seat in an upset in 2020. But she's well-spoken, she's telegenic, and she is a fierce advocate of reproductive rights in a state where such rights are severely curtailed and where a referendum codifying reproductive rights is on the ballot.  Mucarsel-Powell could win.

Or not.   It's a tossup now, and there is even talk about Kamala Harris upsetting Trump in Florida, but I have my doubts.  First of all, it's Florida.  Second of all, while Republican women - and some Republican men - might vote for the reproductive-rights referendum, they might do so without voting for Harris or Muscarel-Powell.   Third, Rick Scott, who ran a health care company that fraudulently overcharged Medicare for its services, has an undeniable and inexplicable talent for winning elections, having been elected governor of Florida twice and elected to the Senate over far worthier Democratic opponents.  Having crippled and/or ended the political careers of his earlier Democratic opponents, Scott is now poised to sign Mucarsel-Powell's political death warrant.

After all, as I've said, it's Florida.

Banned In the U.S.A.

My local supermarket sometimes plays classic rock on its P.A. system, and while I was shipping there today, I heard a song I hadn't heard before.  I listened carefully to the lyrics and memorized enough of them to Google them on my laptop.  It turned out to by "Keep Pushin'" by REO Speedwagon, released a few years before the Illinois band released Hi Infidelity, their nationwide commercial breakthrough.   Anyway, I punched up an audio-only video for the song on YouTube to hear it again, and I got a title card saying that the video was banned in my country because of an organization called SESAC.  I tried someone else's upload of "Keep Pushin'" and I got the same message.  What was going on here?  I then Googled SESAC and found out the awful truth.

SESAC is an acronym for the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers, a sister licensing organization of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcasters Music Incorporated (BMI), the groups that govern song rights.  YouTube was allowed to offer recordings of songs published under the auspices of SESAC until yesterday at 4 P.M., when a contract between SESAC and YouTube expired and negotiations to renew it had proven fruitless.  The result is that any songs written and/or recorded by music artists whose work is protected by SESAC are no longer available for hearing on YouTube.  Not just audio-only video clips, but also official promotional clips.  Not only is REO affected, so is R.E.M., as well as Nirvana, Green Day, Bob Dylan, Cheap Trick, and Adele.

And as you can see, you can say goodbye to Adele's "Hello."

The good news is that the ban on SESAC content is likely to be temporary. The bad news is that no one knows just how temporary it will be.  A YouTube spokeswoman  responded to requests for the state of affairs regarding SESAC-licensed artists.  

"We have held good faith negotiations with SESAC to renew our existing deal. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an equitable agreement before its expiration," the spokeswoman said through a press release.  We take copyright very seriously and as a result, content represented by SESAC is no longer available on YouTube in the U.S. We are in active conversations with SESAC and are hoping to reach a new deal as soon as possible."

I don't know how much this is going to affect my Music Video Of the Week segment on this blog, but given that SESAC is smaller than its sister licensing groups, so it will probably be more of an annoyance than a major inconvenience.  Those who want to hear either of the two live Budokan albums from Bob Dylan or Cheap Trick might as well just buy them rather than hear them on YouTube (though you should just get the Cheap Trick album, because their 1978 Tokyo performance was as wonderful as Dylan's was horrid).  As for YouTube's efforts to regain the rights to uploading SESAC-licensed recordings . . . I hope they take REO's advice and keep pushin'.  

A Turkey of a Mayor

Eric Adams assumed the position of Mayor of the City of New York promising to do something about crime.

And he did.  It seems he got involved it. 

The federal government indicted Mayor Adams for seeking and accepting improper gifts, including luxury travel and illegal campaign contributions from wealthy foreigners.  Some of those foreigners were from Turkey, who bribed him an enormous sum of money to get a large building in Manhattan approved for the new Turkish consulate in New York.  And the mayor was even accused of overruling the Fire Department of New York - who know a thing or two about the dangers of fire in large buildings, particularly two very tell buildings in the Financial District - when the building the Turks wanted to set up shop in failed fire-code inspection.  

Oh yeah, this had been going on since Adams was Brooklyn borough president. His alleged undisclosed travel dates back to 2016, totaling more than $100,000.

Mayor Adams deserves the presumption of innocence until he's proven guilty in a court of law.  But with so many issues besetting New York - an affordable-housing shortage, a larger migrant population, education - how can Adams serve effectively as mayor and still seek his vindication in a court of law at the same time? 

Music Video Of the Week - September 27, 2024

"Can't Get It Out of My Head" by the Electric Light Orchestra  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)

Liz and Dick

I don't mean Taylor and Burton.

Former U.S. Representative Liz Cheney and her farther, former Vice President Dick Cheney, recently announced that they will be both be voting for Kamala Harris for President.  And to top that, Liz Cheney also said she is supporting Democratic U.S. Representative Colin Allred's campaign for the Senate against incumbent Ted Cruz in Texas. 

Having both represented all of Wyoming in the U.S. House, the Cheneys are among the most conservative politicians in recent history - some would call them reactionary - but one thing they agree with the Democrats on is that Donald Trump is a danger to a free, democratic representative government and that he must be stopped.  They're essentially giving Republicans a permission slip to vote for Harris.

I don't think that's going to be very successful.  Most Republicans have already left the party because of Trump. and those few remaining registered Republicans who oppose him are outnumbered by the new MAGA voters Trump brought in in 2016 and continues to bring in to this day.  As for Republican officeholders, they're too scared to speak out against Trump.  Half of them are afraid of losing their offices to the MAGA voters and the other half are afraid of losing their lives - to those same MAGA voters, who are likely uncowed by anti-lynching laws.  (They wanted to hang Mike Pence on January 6, 2021, remember.)   

In order to convince the few anti-Trump Republicans that remain to support Harris, the Cheneys have their work cut out for them.

On the Mark

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, the Republican candidate for governor, an arch-conservative MAGA man, was recently proven to have called himself a "black Nazi" and claimed to have watched live porn while eating a pizza and liked to peep into women's public gym showers as a teenager.

I'm sorry . . . what am i supposed to do with this?

I can't ridicule this scumbag over what he has claimed - proudly - to have done because he has effectively ridiculed himself.

I will say this much.  Robinson denied these charged, telling North Carolina voters, "You know my real words."  Yes, and that's just the trouble.  He once said that some people need killing. 

Some people need quaaludes.

Music Video Of the Week - September 20, 2024

"Come and Get Your Love" by Redbone  (Go to the link in the upper-right-hand corner.)  

An All-American Town

During Labor Day weekend this month, I went to a car show celebrating German automobiles - Volkswagens, Porsches and Audis, to be precise - in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and even though I partially grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, I had never been to Pottstown before. 

I liked the town - it was typical of many small boroughs outside of Philadelphia, with its orderly street grids, its charming rowhouses, its grand, mansion-like homes on North Hanover Street, and the tree canopies along some of the streets.  And High Street, shown below with North Hanover Street intersects with it, is the town's main street.

But then I dug beneath the crust.  High Street certainly was buzzing and humming with activity when I was there, but that was only because of the car show.  This picture of High Street is from Google Street View, taken at a time when no special event was being held.  Back in the middle of the twentieth century, High Street would have been and was humming with trade, as people in town and in the area would go there to shop.  Nowadays, most of the stores people are more likely to go to stores in the strip malls along State Route 100 just outside the borough, and more people are likely to live in greater proximity to those same strip malls.

In other words, the car rendered downtown Pottstown obsolete.  You don't have to point out to me the irony of attending a car show  in the middle of town, although, the Germans never let their own car culture overwhelm their centuries-old living pattern. 

Many of the downtown stores in Pottstown are the sort of specialty stores designed to appeal to tourists who go to towns like this because they find them so darn quaint.  As for the residential areas around Pottstown, they leave a good deal to be desired.

This is Chestnut Street in Pottstown in the photo above.  It looks sort of worn, with little street life . . . no visible neighbors to interact with each other. There are a couple of storefronts here and there on this street and other residential streets nearby. In another time, they housed local merchants who were part of the community and in some cases likely lived in the community.  Neighbors were likely to know and look out for each other - a far cry from today's auto suburbs. 

At least there's this grocery store on the corner of Beech and Evans Streets.

Of course, it looks rather run-down and drab.  It sort of resembles the grocery store run by Art Carney's character Abe in Defiance, which, for those who have seen the film, anchors a Manhattan neighborhood Abe describes as a place that "used to be a nice place to live . . ..  All of a sudden, it's changed."  Except that this store bears the ambience of a neighborhood where the change was more gradual.   

This is the American small town or urban neighborhood in the collective minds of older generations, who are now dying off.  Pottstown was a town where people lived in proximity to the main business district, either by foot or by streetcar.  They had neighborhood stores to get things in a pinch, with the better stores selling clothes, kitchen utensils, records (remember records), and other items on High Street.  They had a library to walk to, or the park, and the town hall.  And if you wanted to go to the biggest cultural and commercial attractions in the Philadelphia area . . . you took the train to Philadelphia.  For the record, Pottstown hasn't had passenger rail service since 1981.

Residents of Pottstown and other older towns in America left to move out to the new housing developments that offered larger yards and more greenery but no public amenities to walk to or even to drive to.   Yes, they'd gained space to spread out in.  Here's what they lost - nay, what they gave up.  

This is Walnut Street just west of Franklin Street in Pottstown, with an assemblage of modest rowhouses of varying colors and unassuming front entrances that honor the streetscape.  The effect of these rowhouses is to create an outdoor room where people can congregate and talk, and get to know each other as neighbors, possibly as a second family, and it could even be or have been a place where an extended family might live, where your grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins would be at arm's length.  (If you're thinking of Barry Levinson's 1990 movie Avalon as a comparison, you're on the right track.) This is the sort of neighborhood your own grandfather might have told you about at Thanksgiving dinner once.

What amuses me is that folks affiliated with the Congress of the New Urbanism, a group of  developers and architects who aim to restore traditional neighborhood development and create places to live that are worth caring about, with all the charm that implies, have built places like Seaside in Florida and Kentlands in Maryland.  These are nice places, and it's good that they exist for people to see, but such places that follow the roles of urbanism and traditional development of human habitats already exist - like Pottstown, Pennsylvania.  Towns like this have people who already live there.   Some of the places within these towns are underserved, with some neighborhoods being blighted and unkempt, as evidenced by the first two pictures of Pottstown that I have shown here.  Perhaps the Congress of the New Urbanism should focus more on restoring existing towns like Pottstown and not just building new ones.

If people who had the means to leave Pottstown and did leave were to come back and invest in the town, you'd have a community again.  You'd have renewed life on these tired old streets.  You'd have people walking down High Street again and treating each other like neighbors rather than strangers.  And the only time you'd need a car is when you went out for a weekend day trip or week-long road trip, not for commuting to work or going to stores out on Route 100.  Pottstown could be a real community like the new places built by New Urbanists.  It would be a community once again.

Vance Depresses Me

Someone took a shot at Donald Trump again, but this time Trump wasn't it and the shooter was captured alive.   I'm actually beginning to worry about Trump and his chances of survival, because well, it's like this . . . he could still be President, but if he's elected and something happens to him before Inauguration Day, that means James David Vance will become President!

Vance depresses me.  He depresses me mainly because he makes Trump look like Robert F. Kennedy - Senior - by comparison.  He has a shockingly vicious attitude toward women - not just dismissing unmarried women as childless cat ladies but belittling the abortion rights movement and wanting to keep women in loveless marriages with abusive husbands by opposing no-fault divorce.  But the most jaw-dropping think that Jaw Drop Vance has done is to dig in on pushing discredited rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, a town between Dayton and Columbus, were eating pets even after this debunked tidbits were leading to bomb threats there and forcing the locals to suffer the consequences.

I ask again . . . why is he a U.S. Senator? 

And how is it that he could be one heartbeat - one beat of a heart congested with high levels of cholesterol - away from the Presidency? 

Vance is a cartoonish parody of a U.S. Senator with his fictitious life story, his faked interest in ordinary people's lives, and his glib, indifferent attitude.  When he first appeared on the national stage in 2016, he put on a good act, hawking his memoir, a book as bogus as those pet-eating rumors, and he even got an interview with the PBS NewsHour (which, incidentally, I still haven't gotten back to watching), presenting himself as a street-smart tech tycoon with a boy-next-door demeanor.  The media took his memoir as seriously as a Zakiya Dalila Harris novel. The real Vance is a fascistic sycophant with an unfulfilled lust for power. 

I've been hearing how Ohio voters have buyer's remorse over favoring him instead of Tim Ryan for Ohio's open Senate seat in 2022.  I don't think so, mainly because Ohio has become so reflexively Republican that when it changed judicial elections form nonpartisan to partisan, Democratic judges that had been elected repeatedly on nonpartisan ballots went down to defeat once they had to identify themselves by party.  But if I'm wrong and Ohioans do have buyer's remorse over Vance if the Trump-Vance ticket loses in November and Vance stands for re-election in 2028, could Tim Ryan defeat him in a rematch?  I think he could, but he won't get the opportunity, because the way the Democratic Party works, the party does not want to nominate a candidate that had been defeated by the Republican incumbent to oppose the same Republican.  Ohio Democrats will likely fear that Vance, having defeated Ryan once, will know how to defeat Ryan again, and therefore Ohio Democrats - assuming there are any left by 2028 - will tell Tim to take a hike.  Chances are they would have told Ryan to do the same had Sherrod Brown not run for re-election this year and had there been an open Democratic U.S. Senate primary.

And yes, I still think it.  Washington Democrats are glad to be rid of Tim Ryan because of his own driving ambition, which led him to an ill-advised challenge to Nancy Pelosi's House Democratic leadership and put him forever in her doghouse and then led him to an ultimately quixotic campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  I think part of the reason U.S. Senator Gary Peters of Michigan - the chairman of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who served concurrently with Ryan in the House - was happy to find a way to keep the Senate in Democratic hands without helping Ryan in Ohio, because he probably couldn't stand the guy.

But even if you think that Timothy John Ryan deserved to lose his Senate bid and be consigned to the Archipelago of Failed Democratic Candidates, does anyone in Ohio really deserve James David Vance?

And does America deserve Vance as Vice President?       

Post-Debate Post-Mortem

To be honest, I wasn't looking forward to the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump presidential debate.  I was certain that Trump would own the stage with his talent for self-promotion and his innate media savvy and that Harris would come off as being too prosecutorial for her own good.  When I heard that Linsey Davis, not Rachel Scott, was to be David Muir's co-moderator for the ABC News-sponsored debate, I was certain that ABC News had gotten the wrong black woman to moderate the debate, because it had been Scott who had shown an ability to make Republicans squirm - not just Trump but GOP members of Congress, one of whom had told her to shut up when she asked about Speaker Mike Johnson's role in the January 6 insurrection in a press conference.  

Well, I needn't have worried. From the moment Harris entered Trump's space and forced him to shake her hand, Harris owned the stage and owned Trump. She was able to meticulously pick apart each of Trump's arguments for his re-election - which were mostly cast as arguments against Harris - and bait him into defending issues of vital unimportance like the sizes of the crowds at his rallies.  She particularly humanized the abortion issue by mentioning women bleeding out in parking lots.  Her expressions of disbelief with the things he was saying - inevitable, given his ludicrous statements - added to her domination of the debate.  And not only did she get help from Linsey Davis in calling out Trump's lies, she also got help from David Muir, especially on immigration.  That was supposed to be Harris's weakness but she turned it into a strength at Trump's expense when she spoke in clear, concise language that any moron - like a MAGA Republican or Trump himself - could understand in describing how Trump killed an immigration bill that would have hurt him politically had it become law.  In doing so, she baited an unsuspecting Trump into repeating the since-discredited story that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating pets.  (Apparently, Haitians are the new Koreans.)

Geez, it was like watching a sing-off between Sly Stone and Kid Rock.

Kamala Harris looked presidential.  Trump looked the dotty old fool he'd always made Joe Biden out to be . . . and worse. 

So now we can put aside our contingency plans to move to Canada in the event of a Trump victory, eight?  Kamala's got this right?  El wrongo!  The debate changed few if any minds.  Trump still has a whopping 46 percent of the cote locked in, because MAGA morons are determined to ignore Trump's flaws no matter how nakedly he exposes him.  Forget shooting someone on Fifth Avenue - Trump could have masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks and not lost any supporters.  He did mastermind (such as he did) the 1/6 terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol and didn't lose any supporters - that's why Republicans continue to worship him like the false idol he is!

To those who still think Harris can't lose, look at this.

This is an overhead banner over someone's yard promoting Trump's presidential candidacy with a flag flown at half-mast, presumably to mourn the fact that a Democratic administration is in charge of the country.  Was this picture taken in Springfield, Ohio?  Lewisburg, Pennsylvania?  Racine, Wisconsin?  Warren, Michigan?  No, this wasn't taken in any of the swing states.  It was taken in heavily Democratic New Jersey, in heavily Democratic Essex County - in Caldwell, the birthplace of Grover Cleveland, the first (and hopefully, even after November, only) U.S. President elected to two nonconsecutive terms. (I'm the one who took the picture.)  While there are Harris supporters in Caldwell and other towns in northwestern Essex County, New Jersey, there are plenty of Trump supporters - most likely the same white folks whose families came from Newark and still blame people who look like Harris for that city's decline and who moved out to get away from said people who look like Harris.  And they never let you forget it.  Their pro-Trump lawn sign displays generally overwhelm Harris lawn signs.  One household in my neighborhood has a giant Trump sign on the lawn with a light focused on it so people can see it at nighttime.  Trump supporters in this part of New Jersey are not only proud of their support for their orange idol, they're smug about it.  And such people exist not just in the swing states but in all fifty of the states in the Union.

Kamala Harris insists, despite all of the numbers and momentum in her favor, that she's still the underdog.  The picture above is why.

Music Video Of the Week - September 13, 2024

"What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" by R.E.M.  (Go to the link in the upper-right hand corner.)

Make America What Again?

"'Make America Great Again?'"

"Yes, that's what Donald Trump wants to do, and that's why I support Donald Trump."

"Well, when was America last great?"

"Oh, I'd say, around the 1950s or so."

"So you want to go back to what made America great then?"

"Yes."

"What was it, then?  Was it rock and roll records from Chuck Berry and Little Richard?  Or Elvis?"

"Uh, no." 

"Was it the vibrant urban downtowns in cities like Detroit and Newark?"

No.

"Studebakers?"

"No."

"Streetcars?"

"No."

"Hollywood movies like Mister Roberts and Rebel Without a Cause?"

"No."

"Social mores that had everyone dress in their best clothes even to go shopping?"

"Er, no."

"Malt shops?"

"What?"

"President Eisenhower's steady, stable leadership?" 

"No." 

"Three-cent first-class postage?" 

"Nuh . . . no!"

"Well, then, what was it that made America great then?"

"You don't know?"

"Oh, wait . . . white people being 87 percent of the U.S. population and having all the power?"

"Yes!  You couldn't get that sooner?  Are you kidding me?"

(Oh yeah, the 1950s, when this country was supposedly great, we also had Joe McCarthy, the Korean War, suppression of socialistic ideas, Pat Boone, Roy Cohn, the Edsel, sexual repression, racial segregation, chrome on just about every appliance you bought, no rights for women, and a lot of black people hanging on trees.  What's so "great" about any of that?)

Pardonez Ma Affaire

Fifty years ago today, President Gerald R. Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, for crimes he committed or may have committed during this five-and-a-half-year Presidency. 

Once reviled by the nation, this decision to pardon Nixon was meant to heal the country after nearly a decade of acrimonious tumult over Vietnam and especially Watergate, but many Americans would come to believe that it was the right thing to do because it spared the U.S. a divisive trial of a former President that would have exacerbated the raw feelings over the scandals of the Nixon administration and precented the country from dealing with the sputtering economy and an oil shortage.  Ford would even receive a Profile In Courage award from the John F. Kennedy Library for issuing the pardon, aware that his decision would cost him his bid for a full presidential term in his own right in the 1976 election.   

Now, however, the pendulum has swung back.  Many people now believe that a trial of Richard Nixon was necessary to make it clear once and for all that a President is not above the law.  But the pardon not only let Nixon off the hook for crimes he committed or may have committed, it paved the way for a future President to do something criminal and claim the right to do it ("If the President does it, it's not illegal - Richard Nixon).  Taking note of the Ford pardon of Nixon in 1974 was a 28-year-old hotshot real estate hustler from Queens named Donald J. Trump.

Trump has managed to convince nearly half the country - including six Supreme Court justices - that he should have immunity for official acts, and he now plans for a second administration in which he aims to do anything, no matter how illegal, to stay in power, enrich himself from his office, and silence dissenters who call him on it.

And he'll get away with it.

The United States sucks big at time at holding Presidents to account for high crimes and misdemeanors, and the justice system has allowed Trump to get away with everything he's already done - even his sentencing on the hush money case has been pushed back to after the election.  The mainstream media also suck in holding Trump to account for his carious offenses and also for his promises to rule as a dictator - "Oh, its just Trump being Trump" - because Trump stories have become mere entertainments like the latest Cardi B "music" video or some godawful teen flick whose title ends in a numeral.  If we don't hold Trump to account at the ballot box, he'll be President again and amuse us to death.

Gerald R. Ford's decision to pardon Nixon now looks as wrongheaded as it did in 1974.   Our long national nightmare was only just beginning.