The special election in Pennsylvania’s 18 District may not indicate a wave but if I were standing on a beach I wouldn’t want to see this thing heading my way. In 5 of the last six special elections the vote count has flipped by double digits from Republican to Democrat.
Kansas 4th 20%
Montana 6th 15%
Carolina 5th 14%
Alabama Sen. 26%
Penn. 18th 20%
Maybe this doesn’t indicate a wave but it does indicate that the Democrats may finally be doing something right. They are picking candidates that have local interest and strength. They are conducting election plans that understand that all elections are local and that only presidential elections are national, but even those have local elements that influence them.
Even though Trump went to the district and spoke to a roaring crowd of his fanatical base, they lost. A deep red seat went blue as Connor Lamb a former Marine and prosecutor knocked the heavily financed Rick Saccone out of the box. He did it by appealing to the needs of the constituents while Saccone was babbling about how anyone who opposed him hated America and God. Really? If you believe in God it certainly looks very much like he is turning his back on the despicable liars and con men that are trying to rape this nation.
Now the Democrats must listen to their own message. This next election isn’t about attacking Trump. Trump has already succeeded in making what he is, glaringly apparant to those who are sick of his polluted governance. Every election for 2018 is local. Candidates must be found who fit each district where an election takes place. There are two things that must be apparent in those candidates; honesty and integrity. All you have to do is look at the GOP candidates who lost in Alabama, Virginia and Pennsylvania and you understand one thing. I would not buy a used car from that guy.
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Okay, let’s talk about trade. During his campaign Donald Trump made an awful lot of noise about how everybody was screwing us in trade deals. It seems that he made those accusations without any understanding of how international trade works. Now that he has been elected he is doubling down on his rhetoric. The problem is he didn’t know what he was talking about then and he knows even less now. The fact of the matter is that sometimes you make a good deal and you win and sometimes you flub the dub. Trump, because he spent all his time in school chasing girls or cheating on his tests instead of learning to read, has no knowledge of history. He doesn’t know how we applied tariffs in an early trade war that led to the depression. He doesn’t understand that by walking away from the TPP trade agreements with our Asian allies we have left the door open for China to turn the whole area into a Chinese lake. Even worse, he doesn’t understand the trade balance we have with Canada. In his ignorance, he lied about it to Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and then bragged about being a liar.
His lack of interest in learning anything about whatever the hell he’s talking about, leads him to make ridiculous statements that have led and will continue to lead to gross errors that will damage not only our national economy but also that of the whole world. Trump my not know it, but we don’t have a trade deficit with Canada, we have a surplus of about $12 billion. That ain’t hay! Starting a trade fight with Canada, with whom we do about $80 billion in trade a year is just stupid. The same goes for Mexico. Trump has railed against NAFTA. There’s nothing wrong with NAFTA that couldn’t be fixed by kicking Trump out of the White House and negotiating a couple of adjustments. He raves about China beating us in trade but he handed China the whole of Asia when he walked out on the TPP. Sure there were things that we shouldn’t have accepted in TPP but walking away from it sure in hell didn’t fix them. In the long run, it will make them way worse.
The trouble with Trump’s theories of trade is, he doesn’t understand trade. He doesn’t understand that if you create tariffs then other countries will reciprocate and the only result will be that goods manufactured in other countries will cost more here, thereby reducing our individual buying power. The way to fight unfair trade practices is by opposing them and forcing the offending nations to rescind them on an individual basis, not by putting a tariff on them. If China which makes more steel than it needs, is dumping steel in the US market thereby undercutting American steel makers the answer is not to put a tariff on steel but to block all steel that the Chinese government is subsidizing from coming into this country. As soon as the market stabilizes you open the trade again.
There has been a lot of noise about China’s trade policies but the main problem we have with them is their refusal to recognize intellectual patents and copyright. This is really not a trade problem, but a legal one and the only way we are going to solve it is with international legal action, not changes in international trade policy. We aren’t the only ones suffering from this problem. Most of the tech world is. The solution is for the US to lead an international agreement that would solidify all the major industrial nations in a pact shutting down trade with China until that nation does the right thing about patent infringement. This would be hard in any circumstances, but with the clown we have in the White House it would be impossible.
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Both NASA and The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have reported that the last four years, 2014-2017, have been the hottest in recorded history. Donald Trump’s administration has digested this fact and done exactly what one would expect. Nothing.
Actually that’s not true. They have done a lot, all of it wrong. Despite the evidence that global warming has been at least partially brought about by human emissions of greenhouse gasses, the administration has opened new areas for oil drilling and rolled back regulations, principally the Clean Power Plan, that attempted to reduce global warming. In addition Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement.
“The climate has changed and is always changing,” says White House principle deputy press secretary Raj Shah, in a statement that, for this administration, has astounding depth and clarity. In fact, as opposed to most of the drivel that comes out of the White House, it may even have a modicum of truth in it. But the fact remains that 99% of scientists agree that we are poisoning our own planet. Hell, even our dullard Energy Secretary, Rick Perry understands that it’s humans that are causing the planet to burn. I mean when Rick Perry gets it, the debate is long over.
So why doesn’t Trump get it? Well, it could be because he’s just too uninformed to understand how it works, but more to the point, it’s probably because he and his backers are too heavily invested in fossil fuels to take the hit required to switch to renewables. They would rather poison themselves and their grandchildren than lose money they don’t even need. This is the ultimate greed.
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As Trump stumbles toward impeachment or indictment, he more and more exhibits the tendencies that Robert Reich identifies as describing would-be dictators. I’m not going to list all 25 of them here but they include demanding total loyalty, loving military spectacles, firing anyone who dares to oppose or investigate them, , developing conspiracy theories, threatening to jail opponents, fighting the press, claiming voter fraud, threatening mass deportations and hooking up with foreign dictators.
It is now crystal clear that Trump never understood just what the American president did or what powers and limitations the office involved. His presumption that all government employees must first have loyalty to him rather than the country is one of his most glaringly incorrect assumptions. Another is that he seeks friends among the worst of the world’s crummy leaders. But it’s his hostility toward the free press that is the dead giveaway to his dictatorial desires. Many presidents have had openly hostile relationships with the press but none have so blatantly threatened and attempted to censor it.
I do not consider myself a member of the press. I am simply one who comments on the news and the state of the nation. I use the press to inform me and to provide facts. Anyone who is involved in any decision making process must understand that they need information in order to make those decisions in an intelligent and informed manner. In the political sphere, as well as in many other areas of life we depend on a free and unbiased media for facts and opinion that help guide us in our decisions. This is because most of us have to spend the majority of our time earning a living, taking care of our families or doing other things that have a more immediate personal effect, than do the political functions carried out by our governmental representatives. So when it comes time to have an opinion on what our legislators are doing and how they are doing it, we depend on a free media to help us arrive at the decisions we need to make to vote. But Trump doesn’t subscribe to that model. He wants to be the only one to tell us how to act. Just like every good little dictator. So it’s up to you to seek out some source of information that isn’t necessarily in agreement with those in the government. They don’t always have to disagree but if they always agree, you can be damned sure they are thinking about their ass and not yours. And if you believe them, you will find yourself in even deeper shit than you are now.
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The chaos in the White House seems to have reached the level of complete meltdown. Only 14 months into this presidency, huge numbers of Trump’s original staff are gone. Now working his way into third string replacements, Trump is faced with the problem that no reputable person wants to work for him because he offers no stability in jobs that are dependent on the will of an egomaniacal sociopath and the reward an applicant will inevitably face will be bankruptcy and jail as a result of his or her association with the Criminal-in-Chief, who possesses no loyalty or sense of morality.
It had seemed that the turnover, rivaling The Apprentice had slowed down but in the last two seeks week Trump outdid himself. He fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, replacing him with Mike Pompeo who had been head of the CIA. He replaced Pompeo with a candidate whose background includes accusations of torture that would normally limit her ability to be confirmed by a normal Senate. Considering however, the group of pathetic weaklings led by Mitch McConnell, who knows?
Then John Dowd, his lawyer on the Special Counsel hearings retired. Dowd and his partner, General George C. Custer otherwise known as Ty Cobb had tried to keep Trump under control over the subject of Mueller. But with Dowd gone and his suggested replacement none other than, the slobbering, tooth gnashing Joe Degenerate, the whole problem of Mueller’s ability to continue may be called into question. What Dowd understood but what Degenerate never will, is that an act of such monumental obstruction of justice will ultimately force enough of the cowardly GOP House members to institute impeachment proceedings much like what happened to Nixon. Somehow Trump was made to understand that neither Degenerate nor his wife was suitable to rep the President so they too went by the boards. That, of course left the White House with the continuing problem that no lawyer, not currently running behind an ambulance, wants any part of the Criminal-in-Chief.
Not satisfied with the carnage he had already created Trump made his next and most significant blunder, firing H.R. McMaster the National Security Advisor and replacing him with … wait for it… John Bolton, the fascist neo-com who helped lie us into the Iraq war. Bolton has already recommended a pre-emptive bombing of North Korea, the dissolution of the Iran Nuclear Treaty and the bombing of that country. This is exactly what we needed in that job, a raving, salivating war-monger, looking to kill as many humans as possible in as short a time available before someone punches his clock. Even after the Iraq war was proven to have been a disaster, Bolton continued down his mad dog path, never admitting that he had been wrong about any of the atrocious lies that led to that endless monstrosity. This war criminal definitely belongs in an institution, but not one labeled The White House.
The question of why Trump is having so much trouble staffing his cabinet and the White House is obvious when one looks at his latest appointees. He is looking for the wrong asset in his replacements. Maybe if he were looking for experience, expertise and functionality he would be on safer ground than he is with his sole current criteria; personal loyalty.
As he approached the presidency, Trump obviously saw the office as that of God or at least an unchallenged dictator. In that respect he displayed no real knowledge of the American presidency or in fact democracy at all. He achieved his goal by acting the demagogue, appearing at hate filled pep rallies in front of screaming, furious ignoramuses who modeled nothing so much as Adolph Hitler’s National Socialists. He was assisted in this attack on democracy by a decades long GOP attack on the Clintons, by Hillary’s failures as a candidate and by the general incompetence of the Democratic campaign. So here he is, our nationalist, bigoted, misogynist; destroying two centuries plus of respect, as head of our government and endangering the entire world with his immature personal behavior and his disastrous inability to plan policy further into the future than the end of a sentence.