Bedtime For Democracy

Richard Spencer is a latter day white Nazi afficianado.  He "wants to party like it's 1933, where Trump is concerned.  Spencer has said "Heil Trump" and says that America has always been of, by, and for White people, and America is the inheritence of white people, and white people have never needed minorities.  I haven't found yet where Richard Spencer was offered any position inside the Trump administration. We still don't know if Mitt Romney will be Secretary of State or whether it will be Nicky Haley of South Carolina or Rudolph Giuliani.  Giuliani is a shoot from the hip kind of guy and has gone very right wing political in the past several years.  Of course Donald Trump, who gets offended by the play "Hamilton" or who gets offended by various tweets- - his finger will be on a nuclear button.  We know Trump already has a record of extreme hostility to the press - particularly the New York Times- - and hasn't held a regular press conference in the past week but prefers to do a You Tube video.  His hundred day program includes the canceling of all of President Obama's orders on immigration, and he plans to give other executive orders wiping out pollution regulations.   But now Trump says he won't investigate Hillary Clinton.  Well as they say - the damage is done.  All of the charges and harrassment of Hillary have served their purpose in getting elected himself.  Meanwhile global warming has gone to hell in a hand basket.  Polar temperatures this year are 36 degrees above normal and the usual crop of winter ice has not yet formed.  In terms of lobbying, Trump says he wants to ban people from the executive branch from lobbying for five years.  This is a well designed specific slap at the Obama administration.  He didn't say one word about corporate lobbyists.  When he speaks of "ethics reform" I cringe because we all know what Trump's ethics are all about.

Then we have the election itself.  Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 1.7 million votes and growing.  It seems Trump will carry Michigan not that it was ever in doubt.  He still won't have as many electoral votes as Obama received four years ago.  They say that a shift of a hundred thousand votes in a few well placed key states could have swung the election.  It's too bad Hillary wasn't more 'preventative" in her blue fire wall against Obama.  We hear of the voter purges from the polls in Wisconsin and North Carolina.  That might have swung the election.   On this blog I announced- - quoted Republican officials as saying they were going to insure a Trump win not by campaigning on the issues but an all our purge of black, elderly, and student voters.  The Melinials didn't turn out for Hillary.  Of course Shawn Hannity was feeding this doubt by sticking up for Bernie Sanders, which is all well and good as far as accurate reporting goes- - but it fed the doubt machine and the milenials got fed up with it and stayed home.  Right now I guess the Obama 2008 vote tally stands out as the high water mark in voting- - with the 2012 level coming in second.  But at least now with all the votes in it seems Trump will be beating out Romney's 2012 vote tally.

In personal news my mother has the C-diff virus, which is horrible with extended vomiting and diaria and has spent the past few days in the hospital.  She's a little delirius and confused- - because she doesn't have those key electrolites in her system.  Now I hear she doesn't even remember being taken to the hospital by ambulance.  Today she'll be coming home.  I was invited to come along but I have other things to sort out today domestically.  The bathroom sink is clogged up and I have to remind the same people a dozen times for anything to be done about it.  I need a thicker bedspread on my bed.  And they need to turn on the heat around here.  Meanwhile I could end up going about eighty dollars in the hole in my bank account is an unauthroized withdrawal takes place tomorrow.  It's a 56 dollar bill with a 35 dollar overdraft fee on top of that I'll be digging myself out of a financial hole for weeks.  With all these worries I wasn't up to going to the hospital to get Mom today.   I'm also worried about my ten pound weight loss since mid summer.  They are starving us around here with shrinking portions.  Weather wise Thanksgiving will be the warmest day of the week- in the seventies.  We're getting rain now but we have that five, going on six year drought to contend with.  It would seem that we have undergone a permanent change in climate in California and the west in general where trees are dying in the Rockies and have been for decades.

This is after dinner.  I listened to Norman Goldman during the three o clock hour.  Dinner ran late because they were slow or something.  We had spinach queesh and hashed browns and catsup and a green salad.  Nora forgot my hashed brown and went back to get it.  But I went back there for seconds twice and was turned down both times.  Jeff didn’t seem to have any luck either.  Bill borrowed my key even though I thought I’d left it unlocked.  Eye Witness news is on now.  There was a bad earthquake in Fukashima, the site of the 2011 power plant disaster.  I’m still hungry.  I have one whole cigarette and a couple of butts left.  My instant coffee level is really going down fast.  If I didn’t know better I’d say Nora had pilfered some, but I just think I’ve been using a lot.  Coffee is good for staying awake and filling your stomach.  I’m not going to post a blog tonight.  The past day’s number was at 22 for readership.  They start the new day about now.  It’s odd.  But in all frankness I should be getting numbers at least over 100.  Now the news is that Donald Trump knows full well that Global Warming is a fact and has been proven nine ways to Sunday because Trump’s own experts tell him the world won’t be inhabitable past 2095 and Trump doesn’t care!  Presumably it’s because his whole generation will be dead by then or else it’s some perverse “capture” of fundamentalism and the End Times scenario.  

What Was Once A Vague Fear Is Now Reality

One thing is evident.  What was once a distant fear is today’s here and now reality when it refers to the emerging Trump administration.  Now we know how Trump plans to handle his “building the infrastructure” campaign promise.  Not by actual government expenditure, but by giving income tax credits for private businesses to build the roads and bridges we need.  Only what it will end up doing is to syphen off money revenue from the government and put that money into the hands of private business.  Conservatives want to privatize everything they can.  That’s why we have prisons for profit and encourage police to just throw anybody and everybody in jail.  But in this case these private companies will make them toll roads and bridges in areas where they aren’t now.  Besides this, these private companies won’t pay their workers as government legislation requires.  Of course we have Reinz Previs as Chief of Staff.  Steve Bannon used to work for Britebart.  He spoke of waving the Confederate high and proud as a reflection of Southern culture.  Rather than just having the founder of a magazine die, it’s too bad the entire writing staff doesn’t croke!  This Mike Pompeo guy is into torture and they discussed this on the show.  Last night’s first paragraph blog entry from Washington’s blog covered the same topic.  Just from the people they’ve had on the media lately it seems that returning to waterboarding and other forms of torture is very much on the table.  When I wrote Tim about a possible impeachment charge on torture- - I hadn’t put the pieces together.  Trump has congress now and he’s going to push for elimination of anti torture regulation.  Rather than close Guantanamo down- - now there will be more preventative detention without charges and people held for questioning.  And we all know how Pontious Pilate “examines” prisoners.  It’s Pax Romana!  Mike Flynn is Trump’s national security advisor.  He is famous for saying that Islam as a whole was not an actual religion but just a disguise for a political idiology.  Jeff Sessions isn’t too much of a racist.  He’s prosecuted KKK cases and favored a Rosa Parks monument.  All the same I can’t picture much in the way of Civil Rights cases going through this AG’s office.  But you can expect reversals on drug prosecutions of marijuana cases with the legalized states in jeopardy.

Back a few years ago I came up with the “Tulip” creation of the Universe.  It isn’t my primary view of the origin of the Universe but I mused over it for a time.  Instead of having a straight line “starburst” phenomenon where the lines remain straight, in this case all of the outward reaching lines curve and reach upward like a Tulip or a goblet of some sort.  This means that in the very early moments after the Big Bang that started the universe,  you don’t have real “events” that mean anything.  One event does not build on another because the elements were too hot to have formed all the bozons and leptons and other stuff that makes up the vacuum of space with no matter.  As such time and gravity didn’t really exist back then.  You couldn’t measure “incidents” in terms of events that take time.  Nothing builds on anything else but it’s all free-associative.  The same rings true for a lot of human lives.  Even as a very young child- - learning is more problematic because the human brain does not record events.  Eventually the cells of the brain gain traction and learning takes place.  The whole goal of life is for this traction and momentum to gain force and life takes on an upward hyperbola.  You’ve heard of these boys that built up a business out of sawing skate boards in half so that they would fit in school lockers.  You hear about these flash in the pan businesses on TV all the time.  If only life could be that way for everybody.  But all of the actions of the rest of us are seemingly “lost to the universe”.  These actions go off into space and it’s almost as though they didn’t happen.  So it is with the democrats in the recent years.  We know there are pressing issues that are important in the polls.  None of us wants another war in the Mideast.  We all want campaign finance reform.  We all agree that there is too much firearms proliferation.  We would prefer an Attorney General who wasn’t a racist if we had the choice.  And yet only the Republican issues appear to gain tractions.  Presumably we’re all obsessed with terrorism and Muslims and the Latino invasion of our borders and drugs.  It’s always the drug and gang problem.  That’s how it is.  We all want “local control of the schools” when as Thom Hartman points out what we really seem to want is rich school districts not having to fund poor school districts.   In short everybody gets Screwed.  Screw the poor, screw women, screw gays, screw minorities. screw students, screw the elderly, and screw Planet Earth.  And we, collectively, voted this monster into office.   

Trump Appoints Mike Pompeo As Head of CIA

President-elect Donald Trump’s selection of Kansas Congressman Mike Pompeo, an open aficionado of torture practices used in the “war on terror,” to be CIA director shows that Trump was serious when he said he would support “waterboarding and much worse.”  Earlier, there had been a sliver of hope that that, while on the campaign trail, Trump was simply playing to the basest instincts of many Americans who have been brainwashed – by media, politicians, and the CIA itself – into believing that torture “works.” The hope was that the person whom Trump would appoint to head the agency would disabuse him regarding both the efficacy and the legality of torture.  But such advice is not likely from Pompeo, who has spoken out against the closing of CIA’s “black sites” used for torture and has criticized the requirement that interrogators adhere to anti-torture laws. He has also opposed closing the prison at Guantanamo, which has become infamous for torture and even murder.  After visiting Guantanamo three years ago, where many prisoners were on a hunger strike, Pompeo commented, “It looked to me like a lot of them had put on weight.”  There is little doubt that the champagne was flowing on Friday at CIA headquarters, from the seventh-floor executive offices down to the bowels of that building where torture practitioners have been shielded from accountability for 15 years in what amounts to the CIA’s internal “witness protection” program.  Indeed, relief over the Pompeo appointment came in the nick of time. For one fleeting moment earlier in the week, there was some panic at the hint that the International Criminal Court might show more courage than President Barack Obama in bringing torture perpetrators to justice.  That suggestion caused a moment of angst up and down the CIA’s ladder of authority, from supervisory felons, such as Director John Brennan and agency lawyers, down to the thugs hired to implement the amateurish but gruesome regime of torture depicted in gory detail in the Senate Intelligence Committeeinvestigative report,

Perhaps you readers were confused when I said I didn't believe the "God of the Universe" gave moral laws.  Christians say to believe in Jesus because Jesus obeyed the whole law and fulfilled it.  So if you don't like what's in the Torah just take a Free Pass and say you believe in Jesus and pass Go and collect two hundred dollars.  Well the OT talks about stoning women for adultry.  There are injunctions against touching a woman who is on her menstral cycle as "unclean".  There are injunctions against eating lobster or pizza because it's a mixture of meat and dairy.  And there are laws about mixing wool with linen in your clothing, and it says whoever refiles his mother and father shall be put to death.  There are laws about keeping the Sabbath.  Many would ask me 'If you don't believe in a personal god, why worry about what he THINKS, if indeed he does engage in the sort of thought procsses we humans engage in.  My answer would be even if you don't believe in a personal god, many believe in Nature and 'Planet Earth" and worship the natural forces.  My theory is that it's better to live in harmony with nature rather than discord if you can.  Others would say to me "Nature can be brutal.  Wild animals kill and eat one another all the time".  But I think there are two regulations that come straight from God in the Garden of Eden when man was in a morally pure state.  I speak of "The Garden of Eden" as a metaphorical state of Well Being.  One was about "tending and keeping the garden".  This means think of ecology and not polluting the planet.  I guess this could be carried over into not polluting your body with smoking because your body could be "your garden".  The other moral injunction pertains to genetic research, and how man should not create new Life Forms on his own like GMO foods and combining cells with viruses and stuff like that.  Some are moral gray areas.  For instance should gene reperitive therapy be extended toward getting rid of the Gay gene?  On one hand being gay is a bad thing but on the other hand you're messing with God's sovreign creation and hence his will.  But I believe the principle is here is "You see this tree- - this one area is Mine and don't you mess with it because tinkering around with DNA is ucerping God's sovreign authority.  On the other hand if "God's Will" is "whatever happens" then it would seem that mankind has to be very passive about the future and be downright fatalistic about things, for instance, like a Donald Trump presidency.  To say that "God has a plan" may be literally true, but there's no reason why we have to "like it".  The early cabinet appointments of Donald Trump seem disturbing indeed. Personally I much prefer Bernie Sanders' "plan" for America such as reforming political contributions to campaigns and breaking up the big banks and helping college students out who are in deep debt.   Even Pope Francis today spoke of building Bridges rather than Walls to keep people out.  Classically, Christianity has been seen as a religion that preaches inclusion rather than exclusivity.  Even enlightened passage of the Old Testament say to get rid of the ritual and let mercy and justice flow down like waters from the mountains, or such similar words.  I think it's best if you have your own "Plan" for either your own life or for America at large, or you contemplate your hopes and dreams for a better America, to think on These Things, rather than follow the machinations of Donald Trump.   

"Keeping The Faith" with Bernie Sanders

So was this supposed to be Hillary's victory photo or something?

Faith as I see it is being true to yourself.  It’s being true to your Highest Self.  Some might call it God and that’s fine, if you believe all moral precepts come from the God who created the Universe.  I happen not to believe that for reasons I have gone into.  It’s being true to everything that’s just and true and right and good.  I would say the Bernie Sanders campaign was right and good and strived for what’s just and true.  I also believed Bernie when he said that his campaign was not about him personally but the beliefs, the cause, for which his campaign stands.  Therefore I believe that his supporters who refused to support Hillary were the ones “Keeping the Faith” and not the other way around.  I guess people see faith as an anchor or “center” in their lives.  It’s what keeps them moored to the Truth.  If they begin to veer off course their faith brings them back.  Of course in music faith is called fidelity so you have High Fidelity.  That is the music reproduction is true to itself.  You have all these categories of fidelity such as wide dynamic range and things called “presence” and “definition”.  Many will say that a “clean” sound has much more fidelity to what went down in the studio than a “muddy” sound.  So it is our lives should speak to others with a “clean sound” and we shouldn’t give off a murky or “muddy” impression where people aren’t clear on the issues that drive us.  I think as a Bernie supporter we all know what those issues are.  In addition to the ones listed in this morning’s letter to Judy there are the ones about corporate greed and inequitable distribution of wealth, which I believe personally to be an unchristian concept.  My notion of idealized Christianity is obviously a whole lot different from Judy’s.  I didn’t say it in this letter but she obviously believes in the Gordon Gecko doctrine of “Greed is good” when it comes to foreign powers stealing our trade secrets or manipulating their currencies to gain advantage or paying their workers two bucks an hour or less and then selling these products back to us where they compete with products made here where we pay fifteen bucks an hour for the same work.  Thom Hartman is right.  Traditionally we have used the economic terrif as a means of leveling the economic playing field.  We haven’t had this since the days of Ronald Reagan.  Blowing up the Shermon Anti Trust Act is something I mention frequently but something that sure got rid of competition particularly in the airlines and communications industries.   Most of this morning’s letter was about Trump’s economic policies and different ways it could shape up either for good or for bad.  Hopefully it will be for good.  Washington’s blog says Trump could still end up being a great president if he does what he needs to do.  All presidents start with a blank slate and can write what they will on it.   There is one area perhaps I didn’t make clear in the letter where Trump seems to have a good start but the dice may be loaded against him- - is on economics.  Just as President Obama had to clean up the mess left by George Bush- - President Trump was left a ticking time-bomb of the Federal Reserve that he will have to deal with one way or another.  I wouldn’t even want to make an economic bet with Judy how the economy will be in two years.  It would be too easy.  It would be like taking candy from a baby.  But the thing is – if Trump is true to his Highest Self then God will look down on him and say “You did all you could do, and you can’t expect any more than that”.    Short of being psychic- -doing the prudent thing at the time- - is the best you can do, and you just hope it’s enough.   And that’s my sermon for today.

One more issue that’s paramount to voters is that of Net Neutrality.  Indications are that Donald Trump will stock the FCC with people who want to blow up what we have had for nearly thirty years (since 1989) of Net Neutrality.    Do all carriers give equal treatment to all content providers or are some less desirable sites, perhaps for political reasons, get slowed down whereas if you are willing to pay enough money you get grade double A service.  There is yet another issue that is in the news according to Norman Goldman who just came on- - and that’s picking Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.  I”d still rather see him as opposed to Governor Christie or Rudolph Giuliani- - both of which would be so openly biased in their prosecutions of various people it wouldn’t be funny.  You must remember that all of Obama’s executive orders on immigration will be overturned.  There is another guy up for National Security and it’s this guy named Major Garret, and he’s your typical Islama-phobiac.  He believes in taking a hard line on all Muslims and not just terrorists.  The US Senate will have to approve Jeff Sessions for Attorney General.  Apparently he has racism in his past.  I’m going to look up this on the internet in a minute or two.   Chuck Schummer is the new Senate Majority leader and I’d just like to say that he’s such a good speech maker- - better than Obama and Hillary in my opinion, that the democrats, if they couldn’t stomach Bernie- - should have picked either Schummer or Dick Derbin or some eloquent democrat like that to be the party’s standard bearer this season.  

 I wrote Judy and complained that I thought I had lost a lot of weight in the past several months since I was last officially weighed.  I also mentioned a lot of stuff about Trump that I also plan to bring up at the holiday gathering this year.  Rather than respond directly to my letter, Judy wrote me several letters trying to de-bunk the global warming myth as she sees it.  Just after I read this I was listening to Thom Hartman who went into great detail about Global Warming.  There is methane or CH₄ that is frozen like snow or something in the rocks (?) of the Arctic vegetabion.  (?)  Once all of that is freed up because of all the polar ice melting it will throw the C0₂ rating of the atmosphere way beyond what it already is at 400 parts per million.   I so seldom get to use subscripts in Word.  At any rate there is still the whole problem with fissures or breaks, or extreme bends in the polar jet stream that dips it way south.  The jet stream dips way south and cools things off and then later the jet stream returns northward and brings all the warmth of industry northward to the poles with it.  I don’t care what Judy says, I still trust the world’s best scientists over her.  In the morning I went out and got iced tea.  At that time I didn’t see Gabby. 

It was late spring of last year that  I issued the astrological prediction that a Republican would be elected this November.  I also predicted a general downward trend in the stock market till the last two weeks before the election and then the markets would trend sharply upward.  While some of this prediction was not entirely correct- - I believe in Astrology.  In the past few years I have discussed such events that seem to occur "out of the blue".  That's an apt expression we have.  These are events that nobody foresaw ahd that once they occurred changed EVERYTHING forever.  I teach, for the benefit of you new readers or old readers with bad memories, that there are such things as fung chue "strings" that are energy forces released when they are "plucked" by the passage of time.  If there were a way to reverse Time maybe you could somehow un pluck these strings like running a tape backwards through the machine.  These fung chue energy strings are fifth dimensional transfers we call EVENTS that are RELEASED through the plucking of these often giant strings.  Since these strings are based on light- - it doesn't matter what "sign" Aldeberan is in at the moment of release or whatever- - go back 38 years and THIS is the "event horizon" you work with.  The gravity of Aldeberan (and I'm using this as an examples likewise is a "ghost" of reality.  This psychic energy doesn't "traverse" anything to get here but like a string being plucked- - the whole string vibrates and releases energy.  If feng chue is based on gravitational forces as some say- - - the objects can be much closer than the intersteller distances we are discussing.  So it can be said that events- - the arrangement of physical objects- - can trigger EVENTS.  In a sense it's "The Universe paying us back" for SOMETHING but we don't know what.  Since these configurations in the heaven are predestined- - - even though the events ilicit a Fifth Dimensional discharge of energy (as if from a parellel universe or a universe outside our own time-space universe - - - if you're a determinist you still believe the whole thing is predestined.  Some might say "It's God trying to tell us something" or you hear "If God made it happen then God has a plan for it".  But even the Bible reminds us that we don't have the Mind of God, and can't get inside his thought processes, assuming God even engages in "thought" as we humans think of it.

Can a Alligator Be Trusted to Drain the Swamp?

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE HAS SCREWED US OVER TWICE IN THE PAST TWENTY YEARS AND THAT'S QUITE ENOUGH, THANK YOU.  IT NEEDS TO BE ABOLISHED.

By Robert Parry, the investigative reporter who many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. Originally published at Parry’s Consortium News (republished with permission).

Donald Trump must decide – and decide quickly – whether he wants to be a great U.S. President or a robo-signature machine affixing his name to whatever legislation comes from congressional Republicans and a nodding figurehead acquiescing to more neoconservative foreign policy adventures.

Or, to put it in a vernacular that Trump might use, does he want to be “Paul Ryan’s bitch” on domestic policies? And does he want to surrender his foreign policy to the “wise guys” of Washington’s neocon establishment.

Donald Trump speaking with supporters in Phoenix, Arizona. June 18, 2016. (Photo by Gage Skidmore)

Trump’s problem is that he has few fully developed ideas about how to proceed in a presidency that even many of his close followers did not expect would happen. Plus, over the past few decades, the neocons and their liberal-hawk sidekicks have marginalized almost every dissenting expert, including old-line “realists” who once were important figures.

So, the bench of “confirmable” experts who have dissented on neocon/liberal-hawk policies is very thin. To find national security leaders who would break with the prevailing “group thinks,” Trump would have go outside normal channels and take a risk on some fresh thinkers.

But most mainstream media accounts doubt that he will. That is why speculation has centered on Trump settling on several neocon retreads for Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, such as former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former CIA Director James Woolsey and ex-National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, all staunch supporters of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War which Trump has denounced.

‘Team of Rivals’

If Trump is guided in that direction, he will make the same mistake that President Barack Obama made during the 2008 transition when Obama was seduced by the idea of a Lincoln-esque “Team of Rivals” and staffed key top national security jobs with hawks — keeping Bush’s Defense Secretary Robert Gates, hiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and leaving in place top generals, such as David Petraeus.

That decision trapped the inexperienced Obama into a policy of continuity with Bush’s wars and related policies, such as domestic spying, rather than enabling Obama to achieve his promised “change.”

Faced with powerful “rivals” within his own administration, Obama was maneuvered into an ill-considered “counterinsurgency” escalation in Afghanistan in 2009 that did little more than get another 1,000 U.S. soldiers killed along with many more Afghans.

Secretary Clinton also sold out the elected progressive president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, when he was ousted in a coup in 2009, signaling to Latin America that “El Norte” hadn’t changed much.

Then, Clinton sabotaged Obama’s first attempt in 2010 to enlist the help of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to work out a deal with Iran on constraining its nuclear program. Clinton favored an escalating confrontation with Iran along the lines dictated by Israeli hardliners.

Clinton and the other hawks succeeded in thwarting Obama’s will because, as Gates wrote in his memoirDuty, Gates and Clinton were “un-fireable” in that they could challenge Obama whenever they wished while realizing that Obama would have to pay an unacceptably high price to remove them.

As clever “inside players,” Gates, Clinton and Petraeus also understood that if Obama balked at their policy prescriptions, they could undercut him by going to friends in the mainstream news media and leaking information about how Obama was “weak” in not supporting a more warlike approach to problems.

Obama’s Real Weakness

Yet, by failing to stand up to this neocon/liberal-hawk pressure, Obama did make himself weak. Essentially, he never got control of his foreign policy and even after the Gates-Clinton-Petraeus trio was gone by the start of Obama’s second term, the President still feared angering Washington’s foreign policy establishment which often followed the heed of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

President Barack Obama stands with Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the President’s official arrival ceremony in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Obama was so worried about Israel that, at the apex of his power after winning reelection in 2012, Obama went on a several-day trip to visit Netanyahu in a craven attempt to show his love and obeisance to Israel. Obama took similar trips to Saudi Arabia.

Still, that was not enough to spare him the wrath of Netanyahu and the Saudi royals when Obama finally pushed successfully for an Iran nuclear deal in 2014. Netanyahu humiliated Obama by accepting a Republican invitation in 2015 to speak to a joint session of Congress where he urged U.S. lawmakers to repudiate their own President.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia demanded and got new concessions from Obama on arms sales and his grudging support for their proxy war in Syria as well as their direct aerial bombardment of Yemen – both part of a Sunni Wahhabist sectarian strategy for destroying Shiite-related regimes. (The Sunni/Shiite clash dates back to the Seventh Century.)

Indeed, the little-recognized Israeli-Saudi alliance targeting the so-called “Shiite crescent” – Hezbollah in Lebanon, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and Iran – is at the heart of what has been driving U.S. policy in the Middle East since the 1990s.

And, if President-elect Trump wants to truly reverse the downward spiral of the United States as it has squandered trillions of dollars in futile Mideast wars, he will have to go up against the Israeli-Saudi tandem and make it clear that he will not be manipulated as Obama was. 

 Barack Obama at Erga Palace after a state visit to Saudi Arabia on Jan. 27, 2015. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Facing down such a powerful coalition of Israel (with its extraordinary U.S. lobbying apparatus) and Saudi Arabia (with its far-reaching financial clout) would require both imagination and courage. It would not be possible if Trump surrounds himself with senior advisers under the thumb of Prime Minister Netanyahu and King Salman.

So, we will learn a great deal about whether Trump is a real player or just a pretender when he selects his foreign policy team. Will he find imaginative new thinkers who can break the disastrous cycles of Mideast wars and reduce tensions with Russia or will he just tap into the usual suspects of Republican orthodoxy?   

Testing- one two three four.  This is just before dinner.  If you are looking for the place where two of the Seven Cardinal Virtues are slightly modified- that is two words – Integrety and Dilligence - - this is in “For the Record” on the August 8^th 2014 blog about how Democracy can’t exist without responsibility. The question is whether Democracy can exist with the Electoral College.  Places like California are by design under-counted in such a scheme.  In a recent blog I quoted some official as bragging that they were going to disqualify as many blacks, old people and students as they can because they tend to vote Democratic.  They have openly BRAGGED about the fact that THIS is the REASON they are seeking to prune the voter registration rolls.  But we won't be able to get rid of the electoral college because I don't foresee a time when the Republicans, (by their own scheming) will NOT be in control, short of some unforeseen REVOLUTION of the PEOPLE.   "Tis a consumation most devoutly to be desired".  My lament about the latest election is that there was not enough Sol Allinsky "outside the box" manovers by the progressives.  If you want to read more moral precepts some of which relies on excessive inside humor, go to August 8th 2014 in "For the Record".   I’m puzzled why I refer to John Mc Cain as “Low hanging fruit” when it comes to ISIS.   Maybe I wanted to remind my readers how much John Mc Cain has suffered for his country but I honestly don’t know what I was referring to.  Jeff asked for coffee from Glenda at two thirty and then she mentioned coming over here again and at the same time gave me her key to get coffee from her room.  Glenda was over here at twenty to three trying to get her phone to work and for a while she had me talking to the phone lady.  I even gave her my number so she could call me back for some reason.  Finally Glenda got fed up herself and I resumed my word search of the word “Integrety”.   The seven cardinal virtues once again are 

FAITHFULNESS,  COMPASSION, PURSUIT OF JUSTICE, BRAVERY, INTEGRETY, PRUDENCE AND DILLIGENCE. 

Coming To Grips with the Major Political Set-back

It’s harder to come to grips with the magnitude of the political loss last Tuesday than I thought it would be a few days ago.  First of all the Supreme Court appoints President Trump makes will make the court ultra right wing for a generation to come, especially after Justices Brier and Ginsburg bite the dust.  This will be the first time since the 1920’s that the Republicans have had a hammer lock on so much of America, except for California.  I’d be open to Washington, Oregon, and California deciding to secede from the Union.  We are an island of liberalism in a sea of conservative insanity.  All of the worst fears of Americans, even on the right who didn’t like Trump, will now be realized.  I needn’t enumerate them; you know what they are.  But here are two new ones.  Steve Bannon is a high officer now in the new Trump administration who used to work for Brite Bart, who attacks the main stream Republican "establishment", which is in my view a fiction of Shawn Hannity.  Now we hear that Trump wants top security clearance for his adult kids.  The governors of Wisconsin and Michigan won’t be the only right wing dictators in town.  Now all of the hell they have put labor unions through will have no national court appeal.  The conservatives will run the courts nationally, statewide, and county-wide.  The whole process is already rigged what with gerrymandering and rural state bias in the Senate chamber.  Even the electoral college favors very small states slightly.  California is such a big state with a plurality to Hillary that all of those extra votes for Clinton are basically wasted.  But every vote in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was needed to win. 

Donald Trump appeared on Sixty Minutes last night for an hour for the first time since being President elect.  It reminds me of that scene in the Stephen King movie "Cat's Eye" where this cat was trying to make it accross this busy road without getting run over and they were taking bets on it.  Trump is like being in the real world of Washington for the first time caught in a giant game of "Wipe-out".   How is he going to "drain the swamp".  He has foreign policy to worry about and he can't just decide to "Take all of ISIS's oil just like that.  He can't just fire a general because he thinks he's smarter than the general.  On the other hand- -he's the president so he can.  That's scarey.  Then you have Iran.  Trump said he was going to tear up the nuclear arms deal his first day in office.  Paul just tells me he won't do that.  Because this is a multi lateral agreement and it would be too complicated.   Even Trump may not start WW III on a whim.  Shawn says there are already new threats of assassination against Trump.  I think the Secret Service and security is pretty good now.  They know what they are doing.  President Elect Trump did hold out a vague ray or two of hope though.  He will keep the power of college age kids through their mid twenties to stay on their parents’ health plans.  Some like Judy might say this is just a liberal plot to get the young people “into the system”, giving them a little taste of the “sugar”, which hopefully they’ll become addicted to, as Ted Cruz might say.  Also you can’t be canceled if you have a terminal disease or a prior existing condition.  This is good news, but he’ll have to sell these points to a Republican congress.  Congress itself will be a just a shade less right wing since according to Stephanie, we picked up six house members and two Senators.  Both Donald Trump and President Obama from the other side agreed they had a productive visit that Trump felt “at ease” attending.  Certain things were never brought up, according to Trump.  It seems on the immigration front President Obama an hour ago said that it’s his hope that “dreamers” won’t be sent back.  These are the minor children of illegal immigrants.  Also if you have joined the military and serving your country you won’t get sent back, hopefully.  But trying to sell the Republicans on this will be a problem because you know they will be champing at the bit for promised action.  Another area where congress will perhaps be the most difficult to deal with are these trade agreements we have either signed or are contemplating signing.  President Obama is not saying these bad agreements can be fixed, for example, to protect worker’s rights.  But as many have pointed out, the Democrats have had over twenty years to fix these problems and they haven’t dealt with it.  Another area that may be a problem for President Trump is the whole dealing with Vladimir Putin thing.  Congress may not be that amenable to cozying up to this particular despotic dictator.  Now we hear that Turkey’s government has become even more extreme than it was.  It looks to me like Turkey will have to drop out of NATO unless a major meeting of the minds occurs.  Last night on Sixty Minutes Trump stated that he won’t urge the revisiting of the gay marriage issue.  It’s seemed all along that the Neo Cons are now embracing the gay and lesbian movement.  You hear even Shawn Hannity making nice to the gays and lesbians like when he talks about rights being denied by Islamic extremist governments.  Trump came out and said that the gay marriage movement will not be visited but that Trump regards it as settled law.  Personally one of my biggest fears about a Trump administration is that he will explode the deficit the way Presidents and Bush took the deficets to new heights.  I’d like to make a bet with Judy about this.  Conservatives are in major denial about ballooning deficets of Republican Presidents.  Yet another area where Trump may have problems with congress is getting through what we might call jobs bills.  Public works projects to rebuild our highways and bridges and water works and airports.  Donald Trump has disparaged our airports as opposed to ones in major cities in the rest of the world.  The Republicans have been so darned proud of how they have stymied Obama in anything involving public works to get the government in the business of being employer of last resort.  Judy won’t like it.  Her view is that government and taxes are no good and good for nothing.  Expect roll backs of recent gun legislation, of which we haven’t had any to begin with.  We will continue to have all of this “stand your ground” and open carry nonsense where sexually inadequate rural White men will be swaggering down the street going into bars and political rallies with their guns just aching for a fight.  And they’ll eventually get one.  Lives will be lost.  And then there is the whole area of global warming and all of these conservation agreements we’ve already made with other nations.  The republicans in congress and Trump himself will want to blow these up.  He wants to “save” the coal industry when market forces are what’s shrinking the nationwide coal industry more than any so called Obama regulations.  We always here about “regulatory interference” but they never cite any specific examples.  Global Warming may already be past the crisis point.  We were supposed to not go past 365 parts per million of carbon or whatever and a few months ago we passed the four hundred per million mark.  So I don’t know what to tell you.  It looks pretty bad from here.  We can always pray to our respective gods of course.  My fear is that God has already “answered” all these prayers that have gone up to Him, and so put Donald Trump in the highest office in the land.  I don’t know any way of putting lipstick on a pig or being “philosophical” about it.  

This is Sunday November 13, 2016 after lunch and Leo Le Port is on.  I’ve just been reviewing some rock compilations.  The Rams were playing the Jets on FOX in the morning game before lunch.  I had the game on after lunch some but switched to Leo who had Chris Marquardt on.  Chris is fundamentally missing the point as far as wide angle photography.  One thing he completely ignored was straight line logic verses curved line logic the way a camera and the human eye see it.  This would work fine is you viewed everything on a completely flat screen no matter how wide the angle.  Ideally any fish eye or wide angle should be viewed on a spherical screen.  Then just as in Sketch camera angle- - you have to ask yourself how many degrees of field of view will this image be taking up?  No landscape will take up a hundred and eighty degrees of field of view but a much smaller amount.   For lunch we had baked ham and not much of that.  We had yams with that and mixed vegetables somewhat overdone.  We had yellow cake with whipped cream on it for dessert.  Afterwards on the benches Glenda gave me a double-decker ham sandwich.  Donald Trump will be interviewed on Sixty Minutes tonight.

Rhapsody in Black featured songs from November 1961 but they sounded more recent than that like ’63 or ’64.  They played a lot of the songs they’d played last year such as “Bristol Stomp”, “A Certain Girl”, “Hit the Road, Jack”, “I Love You, Gypsey Woman” and “The Morning After” by the Marquettes.  They played “One Track Mind” by Bobby Lewis and “Sweets for My Sweet” by the Drifters.  They played mostly however songs I’d never heard before or maybe just once like “Mind Your Own Business” and they played a version of “Little Red Rooster”.   It’s nice not to have money breaks.  I finally went to the store for cigarettes at two and then I had two cups of iced tea from Rico.  Glen wanted me to plug in some Christmas lights he couldn’t reach.  I did that but the lights still didn’t come on.  

I need to supply you readers with a good time-coded index of all our varied rock anthologies.  I would point out "Analog Ghost Chatter" for you out July 3rd of 2007.  Elsewhere I think we’ve doubled up on a couple of songs.  “Beer Nuts” appears both on “The Last Round-up” and “Demented Again”.  And “Refrigerator Heaven” appears on “Demented Again” and one other album I came across recently.  The “Radio Ready” massive compilation occurs in early June of 2007.  That’s where I found “Radio Radio” by Elvis Costello.  “Love or Confusion” goes back to March of 2007.  This is just after nine.  “Waiting for the End of the World” also occurs on “Demented Again” and that preliminary album.  This morning I got up before six.  I’ve been smoking too much.  I listened to “The Rude Pundit” and now suddenly more pessimistic about a Donald Trump administration.  When you think about it more than a nano-second you realized that the Supreme Court is doomed for a generation.  All of the people from FOX came right over into the Trump administration.  Reinz Previs is Chief of Staff.  I went to the store just after seven and spent my last dollar on coffee.  We had Cheerios for breakfast followed by scrambled eggs and French toast.  I got more syrup.  Then had the coffee in clear plastic cups and I got two packets of creamer for it.  “Before you open your mouth this week, make sure your brain is fully engaged.  The approaching full moon will cause you to say things you regret”.  This is some lady’s horoscope.  Now let’s check Thom Hartman.   This is later and it’s warming up outside.  I still had my red jacked on for nutrition.  I had two cups of grape drink from Rico.   Right now Thom Hartman is having a call-in guest about foreign trade. 

I observed the super full moon rising in the east.  Last evening after five Glenda agreed I could get coffee from her for free.  First I went to the liquor store while it was still not quite dark to buy a pack of John Blacks.  Then I went to her room and made myself a cup of coffee with creamer.  Seattle was playing the Patriots on Sunday Night football.  Last night was the Donald Trump interview on Sixty Minutes.  I caught the first long segment and the third long segment.  In the middle I was getting medication from Tom and the smell of the tuna sandwiches was strong and I declined.  The line was rather slow.  Then it was “Once Upon A Time”.  Yadera is coming back here to work after Tom leaves to rejoin the Army.  Tonight is Tom’s last day.  

Bernie Sanders Should Be President Now

ONE TACO SHORT OF A COMBO PLATE

The Red and the Black (Tyranies and Mutations)

Behind the Locked Door (All Things Must Pass)

Scared  (Walls and Bridges)  John Lennon

Poor Little Girl (The Best of Dark Horse 1976 – 1989)

Cooking In the Kitchen of Love (“Ringo” album out-take)

- - - - - Side 2 - - - - -

Michael Moore Movie Excerpt  (edited)  less than 5 min  This interview was aired on a recent issue of the “Democracy Now” program.

Love You Till Tuesday (David Bowie)   a CD extra

Protests All Over the World (audio excerpts) 2:22

Something that was Meant to Happen  (Linda Perry from Stephanie Miller Show)  extensively edited.  Some of the talk about music and electronics was included.  3:45

Fridays with John Fugelsang (telephone call on SM show)  Nov 11^th 2016 4:27

One Taco Short of a Combo  (six person roundtable discussion) 10:30

The front photo of the latest Sirius A album- - out in vinyl and CD- - is of a “Tacoria” taco place and there is one line (to the left) with the lead customer being handed a combo plate and there is a line to the right where the customer still hasn’t been served.  Hillary is standing between these two lines eating a taco.  The title “One Taco Short of a Combo” refers not to Donald Trump’s mental state but rather that Hillary was “Eating” Sander’s votes- - votes which Bernie Sanders would have gotten for President on Tuesday.  On the bottom of the back of the album are the popular vote tallies from 2016 and 2012.  It so happens that Romney got more votes than did Trump.  Romney got sixty million votes and Trump got not quite sixty thousand votes being high in the 59’s.   The rest of the back is kind of an off white background with the album contents listed in fairly big letters. 

This album will be released tomorrow and right now three tracks are still in the editing process.  The designation of 10:30 is the time on EST eastern standard time, that people realized- - a dawning, grim reality- - that it looked like Donald Trump might well win this election.  It was a horrible, sinking feeling.   This roundtable “talking heads” discussion was of  Stewart Sutcliffe, and that “friend of his” (so previously designated) who in his prior life was a Comic-Pundit who died around 1994 or something, and four others.  We are working now on editing it down to 10 – 30.   3 4 5 is used in the Pythagarean thermo.  4:27 is the same of 3:87 a favorite Dead Zone number of ours in our return addresses (387 Desolation Row) and also the cubic inches of an old time Chrysler V8 engine.  You will note there are two George Harrison songs and no Mc Cartney songs.  This is to even up the balance from past inequities.  In terms of the Michael Moore movie excerpt- - this is the official edited version where Moore predicts last summer that Trump will be elected President.  He says “These people are all in a blind rage and they’re going to all vote for Trump and it’s going to feel so good!”  And then we cut it off.  The next words out of Michael Moore’s mouth are “for a day or a week or a month”.   Then we’ll all have buyer’s remorse much like the Brexit people are all having buyer’s remorse, and the British population wants a “do-over” or some other way to legally get out of it.  Actually I personally was invited to have a hand in the editing process and the first time I have visited Sirius A in a long time.  

 (In E mails) As you know Hillary won the popular vote but she only got sixty million votes and Obama got 66 million votes.  Vast segments of the American population didn't vote.  As such the media lied to us when they said how great Hillary was doing and how many people had come out to vote for her.  Mitt Romney got sixty million and Trump was just less than sixty million.  Clearly if Bernie Sanders had been the candidate he would have beaten Trump because we've had a campaign about the issues and not personal attacks about "crooked Hillary".   Obama in 2012 won every state Hillary won plus Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Florida.  Clearly "the rust belt" is what did Hillary in.  Strangely I am in agreement with Trump that we need better trade deals abroad and how we need to make sure NATO pays their bills and maybe being friends with Vladimir Putin wouldn't be such a bad thing.  I also am a economic protectionist, as Trump is.  Some refer to it as "Economic Nationalism".  I'm one of those.  America first!  But I fundamentally disagree with his "guns, pollution, and slashing taxes on the rich" platform.  Donald Trump is going to explode the federal deficet.  Strangely the place where you got the least biased news on the whole Sanders campaign verses Hillary- - was the Shawn Hannity program.  Left wing sources were almost obsessed with white washing Hillary's problems and propping her up and not mentioning Debby Wasserman Schult'z role and the whole Bernie sabotage thing.  But the left wing media was looking through the world with rose colored glasses saying how splintered the Republican Party is and how unified the Democrats are, when in reality it turned out to be just the opposite.   One female singer called Stephanie Miller this morning and is philosophical about Trump's presidency even though she is a lezbian.  She says she isn't worried.  She says that "The Universe has a plan for us and is working it out" or something.  The stock market is on a surge and is at record all time highs.  This is encouraging news.  

Do you think Trump will crack down on the "abuses of Wall Street".  Do you think there ARE abuses or don't you care?    I do agree with Trump in a number of issues.  We're all Christians who don't want abortions or gay marriage, or unbridled genetic tinkering around with our food or mixing cells with viruses or whatever.   We're both against physician assisted suicide.  I trust you and Judy are against the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement and all these other "agreements" that are passed unconstitutionally with this illegal "fast track" approach of Congress.  We both agree that there has been too much Judicial activism- - both on the left and on the right, I might add.  I want to overturn Citizen's United.  THAT was judicial activism.  We're both against cyber theft and other computer attacks by either China or Russia.  And we can agree that cyber bullying of children is a bad thing.  Of course we must always be vigilant against child sexual predators, too.  I am confident my Social Security won't be touched.  I believe many people voted for Trump assuming their OASDI and SSI were safe.  On the immigration and "extreme vetting" issues I won't be personally affected by these issues.  I too believe we should "protect the borders" assuming we aren't doing that already.  It wouldn't be such a bad thing if we sped up deportations and allowed local police to check for immigration status when a crime has been comitted.  I too am against so called "Sanctuary Cities".  I admire Trump's spirit and enthusiasm.  It may be strange to call him "Mr President".   Donald Trump is "still not ready for prime time" in my opinion.  He has two months to "edit out" all of his flaws to get him ready for January 20, 2017.   He hasn't done that yet but he'd better!  So will Donald Trump's inaugural speech be peppered with phrases like "We're going to act decisively and we're going to accomplish the plan very quickly" and words like "Huge" and "Tremendous" will be used a lot.  

  But I don't like all this talk about pollution run amuck and forgetting about Global Warming.  Judy forever is saying "Well maybe some day we'll do alternative energy but that's way down the line when the technology proves itself.  If we do it now it will cripple the economy".  We're several decades down the road from when Al Gore wrote his book "Earth in the Balance" in 1991.   I don't think "trickle down economics" has ever worked.  The only reason why it seemed to work under Reagan is because Ronald Reagan along with a democratic congress- - exploded the federal deficet.  That wasn't Carter but Reagan.  Also I'm not a "Second Amendment" nut.  I know me and Judy will never agree on these issues.