Liberation?

I have too much to cover in one post, but as I have other things I want to talk about later on on this blog - possibly including comments about my other blog, which I am shutting down later this spring - I'll try.

First, Liberation Day.  Yesterday was Liberation Day, because Donald Trump said it was the day we'd been liberated from foreign domination of  American market.  We were "liberated" from German cars, French wine, Japanese electronics and Swedish furniture because Trump is placing an average tariff of 29 percent on all countries still part of the Paris climate accord.  As a result, every imported product sold here will be priced high above what they should be.  And any products produced domestically, be it by an American or a foreign company, will be priced higher because the manufacturers will know that they can't be undercut.  

Trump, by the way, ordered domestic manufacturers, including the Paris-based Stellantis, not to raise prices of their vehicles.  The muffled sound you hear coming from Detroit is suppressed snickering.

As for foreign products . . .  well, let me use Volkswagen as an example.  Trump's tariffs are meant to discourage us from buying foreign vehicles and en-courage us to buy Chevrolets and Fords.  Apart from the latter half of the nineties, when I owned a Toyota Tercel out of necessity, I have owned nothing but Volkswagens since 1990 because domestic cars are so dull.  Now, more than ever, I'd better hang on to my 2012 Golf tooth and nail because tariffs will raise prices so high on foreign cars that the Golf GTI and R (imported from Germany) and even the once-cheap Jetta (imported from Mexico) will be out of reach.  Parts for my car will be expensive enough, since Trump is imposing tariffs on them too.  And all VW will offer for sale in America are SUVs, just like Chevrolet (except for the Corvette) and Ford (except for the Mustang) now do.

In short, everything will be expensive, some products (including Post Shredded Wheat cereal, made in Canada) may be unavailable completely, and lots of merchants and merchants' employees, along with importers, import-car dealers, customs officers, and virtually everyone else will be out of a job.  And then comes a recession.  I'm luckier than most.  I own my house outright, I have a recession-proof job (as well as a second job that's not recession-proof) and I am single, with no family whatsoever to support.  But my long-awaited and long-postponed trip to Europe . . . well, it might be postponed a bit longer, because Trump's recession will make it impossible to travel.  A depression will also have the benefit (for Trump) to force any Americans ready to undertake the very expensive process of moving out of the country to stay where they are.

And for Americans who already have made the move, to, say, Germany . . . yeah, well, they're going to regret the move when the Russians, having reconquered Ukraine and Poland, march through Berlin a second time.

As for the tariffs . . .  financial institutions are rightfully alarmed, fearing the worst.  The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 3.71 percent as I type, with a 35 percent chance of recession.  The Standard & Poor's gross-domestic-product forecasts have fallen as a result of Trump's tariff effects, which could cause the weakest post-pandemic growth since 2022.

I mentioned automobiles . . . prices for cars could rise by as much as 31 percent, and not just imported models - also domestic models with high import content, which could see increases higher than the overall average.  (Forgot about that, didn't you, Trump?)  Foreigners are now boycotting American products, particularly those that come from Republican states.  Tourism is already being affected, as foreigners are canceling trips to the U.S., though Americans (at least those with the means to do so) are likely to continue traveling to foreign locales . . . unless Trump declares martial law in response to anti-Trump demonstrations, in which case no one leaves.

And while all this tariff business was going on . . .  Democratic U.S. Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey (above) - my Senator - stopped being a cautious moderate and rediscovered his progressive roots as a councilman and mayor of Newark.  He took to the floor of the U.S. Senate in a 25-hour speech that eclipsed then-Democratic then-Senator Strom Thurmond's record filibuster speech against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (which took place on August 28 of that year, exactly six years to the day before the March on Washington) from his first term representing South Carolina as the longest Senate speech in history.  Senator Booker deliberately wanted to break that record to make a longer speech for civil rights, as well as a speech that chronicled every violation of the rule of law committed by Trump Mark Two.  That is why he was guaranteed to break Thurmond's record, so long as he had a steady supply of coffee - he had more than enough material.  A Senate speech chronicle all of Trump's crimes from January 2025 to the beginning of April 2025 would have to go for a week - in relays. 

For doing something rare among Senate Democrats - standing up to Trump - Cory Booker not only won back the respect of progressives who dismissed him as a centrist hack, he left many Democrats wondering why on earth Charles Schumer is the leader of Senate Democrats.  As for Booker, this speech was definitely a liberation - for himself and any Democrats still taking the advice of an overpriced consultant.  

Well, that's the end of this post.  Did I cover everything that happened this week so far?  I'm not sure.  I think there were other stories, but I probably forgot them after Trump's tariffs flooded the zone.

I'm free.

And freedom tastes of reality.   

My Letter to Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ)

When the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America became reality with the Interior Department making Trump's whim official, I'd had it.

Even though I no longer have a country, I still have a state - New Jersey, which I wish would secede form the Union.  But since I am a New Jersey resident and so have representation in the United States Senate, I decided to take advantage of that and write a letter to Senator Cory Booker regarding the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.  

That letter is below.  This isn't an open letter to the senator.  This is an actual letter I sent - both postally and online to Senator Booker's office!

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Dear Senator Booker:

noted with interest Donald Trump's desire to annex Canada and to purchase Greenland. I am writing to express my eager support for Mr. Trump's initiatives. I believe that acquiring all of North America north of the border and east of Alaska would strengthen our economy and expand our gross domestic product. Also, I am pleased that the Gulf of Mexico has now been officially renamed the Gulf of America. Having elected a president named "Claudia," Mexico deserves no respect. Also, I am greatly in favor of the efforts of Representative Earl L. Carter (R-GA) to help Mr. Trump acquire Greenland and to rename it.

However, I believe more renaming of American geographical points is in order, along with renaming some of the newly acquired Canadian lands. Contrary to popular wisdom, Canada would not become the fifty-first state if we were to annex it; it would actually give us thirteen new states, the ten provinces and the three Arctic territories. One of them is called the Northwest Territories. Not only is it a singular territory, we can't have a state with the word "territories" in it.

Therefore, I propose we rename it "Fred." It's an easy name to remember.

Also, I disagree with Representative Carter's effort to rename Greenland "Red White and Blue Land" once we make the world's largest island the 64th state. I prefer that we rename it "Alan." Why? It's an easy name to remember.

Also, we have to anglicize place names in the United States to unite the country, which means no more Spanish place names and no more French ones, either - especially in Quebec. San Francisco would become St. Francis, Amarillo would become Yellowtown, Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin would become Dogland, Des Moines would become "City of the Friars," Terre Haute, Indiana would become High Ground - you get the idea. Since Detroit's name means "strait," we should rename that North Windsor, after Windsor, Ontario across the Windsor River. Windsor is a beautiful English name.

In New Jersey, Montclair should be renamed "Clear Mountain," and Belleville should not be renamed "beautiful village." Not because it's not beautiful; it's because it's not a village. South Orange is a village. Rename Belleville "Jim." It's an easy name to remember.

Also, we have to rename Colorado. It's a Spanish name and it's a word meaning "colored," and that's a pejorative. I propose that we rename it "Bob." It's an easy name to remember. Also, now that we've named the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America, we should rename New Mexico "South Bob."

Then there's Los Angeles. Its official name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Dama, La Reina de los Angeles." The name means "The Town of Our Lady, The Queen of the Angels." We should change that name - not because it's in Spanish, but because it clearly violates the separation of church and state. I remember that Pat Buchanan once rhetorically asked why we were more concerned about unrest in Lithuania than unrest in Burundi. Because, he said, Lithuanians "are white people. That's who we are. That's where America comes from." Now, I always thought America came from British settlements, but since we actually evolved from Lithuania, we should honor our real mother country by renaming Los Angeles "New Vilnius." Hopefully we can get that done before the 2028 Olympics. In the meantime, we should definitely abolish the Department of Education, as it has allowed too many Americans to graduate from school thinking we won our independence from Britain when in fact, as Pat Buchanan pointed out, it was Lithuania.

Thank you for your time. -- Sincerely, Steven Maginnis

P.S. There are two more pieces of legislation I'd like to propose. One is that the official language of the United States should be Lithuanian. The other is that everyone under sixteen years old is now . . . sixteen years old.

P.P.S. You realize this letter is sarcasm, right? Now that you have had a taste of my humor, let me be serious now. Please do what you can to stop Donald Trump. He is insane and does not belong in the White House.

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I'm hoping to write Senator Andy Kim on another issue.

Anyone Can Be a Senator

But not everyone can be President.

The Democrats have fewer U.S. Senate seats to defend in 2020 than Republicans - 12 versus 22 - and the only need four seats to win back control of the chamber, but as TV producer and political activist Brian Taylor Cohen recently pointed out, the most attractive Democratic prospects for the Senate are all running for President.  Most of them have no chance of winning the White House but are so fixated on Trump that they all think that they can take out Trump in a mano-a-mano match-up.  Ironically, the reason there are more then twenty Democratic presidential candidates in the first place is because they all saw Trump get elected and decided that, well, if a politically inexperienced businessman can get elected to the highest office in the land, any one of them certainly can.

No, they can't.  And right now, there's a bunch of Democratic presidential candidates who are better suited to win a Senate seat in 2020 . . . and they're all polling in the low single digits in their presidential campaigns.  As Taylor Cohen tweeted, you have Beto O'Rourke of Texas only getting two percent in the polls, John Hickenlooper of Colorado getting one percent in the polls, Steve Bullock of Montana not getting anything in the polls and having officially declared for the Presidency just yesterday, and Stacey Abrams of Georgia not even running for President yet and already having ruled out a Senate run.  All of them, Taylor Cohen noted, could defeat the Republican incumbent senators up for re-election in 2020 - John Cornyn of Texas, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Steve Daines of Montana, and David Perdue of Georgia.  And I would add that Cory Booker of New Jersey, who's already a Democrat in the Senate and is up for re-election in 2020, is concentrating on a presidential run. 

With the possible - possible - exception of O'Rourke, these candidates are unlikely to get out of the single digits in the polls.  Defeating Trump is only part of the challenge; the Democrats also have to hold the House, but it's especially important that they take back the Senate.  Because even a post-Trump Republican Party, with a Republican Senate led by Mitch McConnell, will be as obstructionist and as illiberal as the Trump-era Republican Party has been and as the pre-Trump Republican Party was.  A Republican Senate under a Democratic President will only block judicial appointments, delay Cabinet confirmations, and stymie international treaties that the rest of the world realizes are common-sense approaches to solving global problems but American industry hates because they're bad for business.  People like Bullock, Hickenlooper, and others are so focused on the big picture of the fight against Trump that they've lost the sight of the more local political competitions necessary for the Democrats to control Washington in order to govern.  It's not that they can't see the forest for the trees; they can't see the trees for the forest.

Focusing more on the Presidency than on state and local races is the reasons Democrats declined and fell from their lofty perch in 2009 when they controlled everything, and this mass rush to run for the White House is just another example of that.  The silver lining is that there's still time for these no-shot long shots to abandon their presidential ambitions when they see that they can't win - most likely you too, Beto! - and switch to a Senate run instead.  At least Cory Booker, who, to the best of my knowledge, is the only incumbent senator up for re-election in 2020 who's also running for President, is able to hedge his bets on his own political future.  The New Jersey state legislature passed - and Governor Phil Murphy signed - a law allowing Booker to run for both offices at once.

As Caitlyn Jenner once said of athletes back when her sex was still male and his forename was still Bruce, they're all good but only one can be the best. Likewise, the twenty-odd Democratic presidential candidates may all be good, but only one of them can be the presidential nominee . . . but that hasn't stopped long shots who have a better chance at running for something else from trying to win the Presidency.  It reminds me of what H.L. Mencken said to a friend of his while at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, looking at all of the politicians in attendance . . . "Every one of them thinks that he can be President of the United States."

Deconstructing Cory

Cory Booker has the looks, he has the charm, and he has the executive experience as mayor of Newark, New Jersey to possibly propel him to the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.  So why do I, an almost lifelong resident of Essex County, New Jersey, have a complete and utter disinterest in him?

Cory Booker should be my kind of candidate.  After all, he rose to prominence by becoming the mayor of an unlivable and ungovernable city and spending seven years in office making it . . . well, a little more livable and governable.  He has the same urban executive bona fides as Martin O'Malley; the only difference between the two, apart from their physical appearance (O'Malley has an almost full head of hair), is that Cory Booker was never governor of his home state,choosing instead after his mayoralty to go to Washington as one of New Jersey's U.S. Senators.  And during his tenure as mayor of Newark, he did get stuff done, reducing crime somewhat and getting real estate developers to re-invest in downtown.  And he even shoveled a guy's driveway out after a big snowstorm.

Of course, Newark hasn't exactly returned to its glory days, and I don't blame Booker for that.  Because, as with O'Malley in Baltimore, Booker was never going to make Newark the the nice, vibrant livable city that old-timers like my Irish uncle, who grew up in Newark, reminisce about, due to the anti-urban, pro-suburbia, pro-highway policies that persist to this day and caused American cities to rot in the first place.

So what is it about Booker that turns me off?  The fact that he shows a lack of an in-yo-face attitude that clearly identifies him as not being from Newark or even Essex County (he's from tony Harrington Park in nearby Bergen County)?  No, it's not that.

It might be because of his fantastically impossible utopian vision of bringing back a culture of love and understanding (he's definitely not a Newark native) that puts him into Marianne Williamson territory.  It may even be because of his theatrics at the Brett Kavanaugh hearings over unsubstantiated claims of Kavanaugh's support for racial profiling reported to be in previously released documents ("I am Spartacus!"). Actually, no . . . I think it's because of his ties to Wall Street.

And his ties to Big Pharma.

And his support for charter schools.  Yeah, that stuff.  All that.

President Booker?  I'll pass, thanks.  But if I ever need someone to shovel my driveway when the kid I usually get is unavailable, I know who to call.      

Martin O'Malley: Good News, Bad News

With the 2020 presidential election in Democrats' sights, Martin O'Malley, not having yet committed himself to another presidential run but clearly looking at pursuing one, had his political action committee (PAC) take a poll in Iowa, where his 2016 presidential campaign began . . . and ended.  He came out on top in a field of nine possible Democratic presidential candidates at 18 percent, a healthy number for any presidential contender in a group large enough to field a baseball team.     

That's the good news.  The bad news is that few political pundits paid attention to the results and those few that did dismissed O'Malley with their usual snark and sneer. Gabriel DeBenedetti of Politico noted that some Democrats, including Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, were left out of the poll, suggesting that the poll is not valid.  (The fact that Warren lost to Donald Trump in one other poll and that Sanders would be 79 if he ran again in 2020 didn't seem to cross his mind, and I haven't seen any indications of a Brown candidacy.)  Another Politico pundit, Edward Issac-Dovere, was more dismissive: "Martin O'Malley is willing to pay his own way to be taken seriously in a presidential poll, if that's the only way," he declared.

I've given up trying to figure out what pundits and leading Democrats don't like about O'Malley.  You'd think he'd gain more respect from both after warning Democratic Party leaders that they shouldn't "circle the wagons" around Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries - and look what happened when they did just that.  You'd think his progressive record as governor of Maryland would make him look like a more serious candidate than Oprah Winfrey.  You'd think his support for immigration reform and his rapport with Hispanics would count for something.  But no, the commentariat and the party continue to treat him like an alt-rock fan who accidentally walked into a hip-hop party.  But then, he does play the least hip instrument in twenty-first-century popular music.    

Even more baffling are most of the reasons given as to why Martin O'Malley can't win the White House.  They say he's too polished, unlike the "authentic" Bernie Sanders (but the polished Hillary Clinton, the eventual 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, won the popular vote in November), he comes from a politically unimportant state like Maryland (Sanders' adopted state of Vermont has three electoral votes to Maryland's ten, and Vermont's biggest city, Burlington, is less populated than the Baltimore suburb of Towson), and he's not as liberal as Sanders (which his record as governor of Maryland clearly disproves).  One reason, however, is a valid one - the police-based, criminal-justice policy he pursued as mayor of Baltimore to cut down on crime.  It cut down on crime all right, but it also produced a culture of over-the-top policing and left a festering distrust among many in the city's black-majority population toward the police, culminating in the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody in April 2015.  Although I believe that it's unfair to blame O'Malley, the most recent white mayor of Baltimore, for a police-brutality incident that happened eight years after he left City Hall, the timing of the incident - one month before he launched his presidential campaign - was certainly unfortunate.  

O'Malley actually had solid relations with the black population in Baltimore overall as mayor, and he did win a second term as mayor with 88 percent of the vote, but the criminal-justice issue persists.  It remains a sore spot not because of statements made against him by black commentators like Michael Eric Dyson but because of the characterization of O'Malley as an uncaring, cold-hearted technocrat by white TV producer David Simon, whose criminal-justice TV series "The Wire," set in Baltimore, featured an SOB mayor character based on O'Malley.  Someone I know suggested that O'Malley ought to try to bury the hatchet with Simon if he wants any decent shot at the Presidency in the future.  And he's right: O'Malley's mistakes as a presidential candidate in 2015 and 2016 suggested that he was his own enemy, but not his worst, as long as David Simon is against him. 

Still, this PAC poll news is encouraging, and as Graham Vyse's excellent analysis in the New Republic explains, O'Malley could benefit from Donald Trump's foibles and a desire for experienced political leadership.  His biggest obstacle, apart from David Simon, is running as a white guy in a party in love with the mushy idea of "diversity."  Right behind O'Malley in his own PAC's poll by a single point is Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of the Senate's black members, and it was his second-place showing in the poll, not O'Malley's first-place showing, that got attention from some news outlets.  Many in the party still want to get a woman in the White House - maybe even give Hillary another shot.  (She says she's ready to come "out of the woods," a reference to her walks in the woods outside her home in Westchester County, New York that only served to remind us how creepy forests can be.)    In fact, the desire for another female nominee is so strong that even Booker may be unacceptable.  The whole party's attitude was summed up at the 2016 Democratic convention, at which the theme music was largely comprised of girl-power pop tunes from Rachel Platten and Sara Bareilles, leaving classic rock for the Republicans to play at their convention over the objections of the classic rockers themselves.  

A columnist at HotAir.com has even said as much.  Jazz Shaw recently said that the Democrats are hell-bent on nominating another female presidential candidate next time, saying that any 2020 Democratic presidential candidate "with a Y chromosome is going to be at an additional disadvantage."  If the Democrats are so obsessed with identity politics that O'Malley has even less of a chance for the party's presidential nomination in 2020 than he had in 2016, then they deserve to go the way of the Whigs.