It’s nice to know that our benevolent President is aware of the hurricane that threatened the southeast coast. It would be even nicer if he had any ide as to what will be required of him and our FEMA people. This is an asshole that thinks he did a good, no a…… greatjob in Puerto Rico where almost three thousand people died mainly because of inadequate rescue and rebuilding services and where it has taken almost a year to get most of the power back on.
This means that if you are in the hurricane region you better get your act together and prepare to care for yourself because the idiot in the White House has no idea and little inclination regarding how to help you. Yeah it’s his job but when did that ever matter to him?
Yes, he’s been on the tube talking about massive amounts of water but just before this hurricane season started he shifted a million bucks from FEMA, who absolutely needs it in the immediate time frame, to ICE, his favorite Gestapo project. This dumb son of a bitch really thinks it’s more important to keep all those non-extant Mexicans from getting across the border than it is to save the people whose homes and property are being destroyed by weather that is at least partly caused by his denials of the poisons we are putting into our atmosphere.
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Watched Kamala Harris on Al Sharpton’s show and she’s a very smart woman but unfortunately she and Sharpton spent a lot of time beating the dead horse of Brett Kavanaugh’s candidacy for the Supreme Court. The Democrats have proved conclusively that they don’t have the votes or the stones to block Kavanaugh. It starts with not having the votes but it goes all the way back to Barak Obama not taking advantage of a shut down Senate to nominate Merritt Garland and block Mitch McConnell’s daring shut down of that nomination.
Harris may have put on a great show of trying to back Kavanaugh into a corner but she came to the fight with too little too late. The GOP has the numbers. The way to stop Kavanaugh would have been for the Dems to have the numbers.
With any kind of luck the Dems will have the numbers after the midterms. But even if they do they still have to figure out how to use them. There is a lot of early talk about various 2020 Presidential candidates. That shows a lot of enthusiasm but not too much in the way of brains or a strong desire to win. If the Democrats want to win in 2020, no matter who it is, they will be running against, they have to understand that they must come up with a candidate that has a broad general appeal. That means candidates that have a specific or pointed appeal must be quickly and definitively discarded for candidates who have a more general appeal. What do I mean by that?
Well, take a look at the recent New York state elections where Andrew Cuomo a middle of the road Democrat, loaded down with garbage but with a lot of government experience and a broad appeal, beat his opponent, Cynthia Nixon, a very progressive Democrat with a too specific an agenda, into the ground, winning over 60% of the votes. Ms. Nixon, a gay woman with serious far left bona fides didn’t stand a chance and that’s in liberal New York. In any mid-west state she might not have gotten a vote. Granted that Ms. Nixon came to the campaign with a basket full of enthusiasm and good intentions but she also brought a lot of extreme ideas and zero experience. We’re already dealing with a no experience President so that should tell us something.
The problem with Ms. Nixon’s candidacy is that there were enough Democrats that were willing to back her, allowing her to feel viable in the first place. If she had been a Republican they would have realized that she was a loser candidate and dismissed her immediately. That’s why the GOP currently has both houses of congress, the Presidency and the most governorships in the country and why they will soon have the Supreme Court. They want to win above all else. Unfortunately they don’t care how they do it and there are those of us who still believe that you can win without selling your soul. You just can’t discard your brains. And if you’re saying, but the GOP picked Trump, who had no experience and a background as a criminal: they didn’t! He entered the race with almost no GOP backing and beat the crap out of all their candidates because enough voters looked at him and saw themselves and isn’t that always the most appealing candidate?
And that is specifically the problem with Kamala Harris, who is a hell of a Senator from a liberal state but is also black and a woman. No question that is working very well in some states right now but there are a lot of other places in this country that are fed up with the mess they made with Trump but maybe not fed up enough to elect a black woman as our next President. We might get away with a white woman but we’d be a hell of a lot safer with a white or even Latino man and a woman in the VP slot. This is a concept that comes not from my heart but from my head, which is exactly the way the GOP picked the candidates that are now f **king up the country.
No, I am not suggesting that the Democrats follow the GOP strategy, which is to elect the sure thing even if he’s a Komodo dragon humping Scientologist. What I am saying is, the first consideration of any candidate should be his or her acceptability to a broad spectrum of the voting public. Then you start narrowing them down. Then you look to social acceptability, moral integrity, intelligence, how they carry and present themselves and what their political plans will do for the country. These are all things that no one seemed to consider when he or she voted for Trump. But if they can’t appeal to a broad base of voters all the rest doesn’t mean a thing because they can’t get elected, and the Democrats have run too many candidates lately who just can’t get elected. That, in this writer’s opinion includes a number of very appealing people who will never get to be President, people like Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and a host of others. The Dems have two years to get their act together and find someone to beat Trump or whoever the GOp runs in 2020. That search has to already be underway or they are already behind.
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The big legal deal this week was Paul Manafort copping a plea. He now agrees to cooperate completely with Mueller. So what does this mean? Basically Mueller wouldn’t be making any deal with Manafort unless Manafort can give him somebody up the chain. That’s just how it works. So who’s up the chain from Manafort? Manafort was the chairman of Trump’s campaign. So up the chain is Trump himself and pretty much only Trump. Sure you can throw in Don Jr., Kushner and Ivanka, but they’re pretty small potatoes for Mueller. The one that stands out is Trump and Manafort is the guy who can nail down Trump’s knowledge and cooperation in all kinds of financial deals that stink of being illegal, and even more importantly with the events of the big meeting in Trump tower that put this little train on the track to national prominence.
Rudy Giuliani has been busy telling us all about how this is a big nothing burger but nobody in their right mind pays any attention to Rudy anymore. He’s made himself into a complete joke.
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And now the Brett Kavanaugh extravaganza! It seems that just when Mitch McConnell was ready to push the wagon called Brett Kavanaugh over the finish line a lady named Christine Blasey Ford has created an enormous pot hole right in its way. This lady claims that around 36 years ago while she and Brett were in high school, he and his friend Mark Judge, forced her into a room and sexually assaulted her. It seems further that Ms. Ford had informed the Democrats of this circumstance a couple of months ago.
In 2012 Mrs. Ford told a therapist of the occurrence and opined that the perpetrator was now an important person in Republican politics. Mrs. Ford took a lie detector test in August and passed with the conclusion that Mrs. Ford’s allegations were accurate. Both Kavanaugh and his friend, Mark Judge denied the allegation.
So that’s it. We have an allegation and denials. Did Kavanaugh do this or is Mrs. Ford lying? The human ramifications are huge but they pale before the political ones. That’s because this allegation could very well derail the timetable of Mitch McConnell’s carefully planned coup. If it does, if enough members of congress demand a hearing on this and the hearing can’t be scheduled in the fast closing time frame before the election, Kavanaugh’s and McConnell’s little attempt to grab the Court will probably fail. For 20 years “Ole Pruneface” has been trying to lock up a conservative Supreme Court. Kavanaugh looked like the last piece in that puzzle but now the train is threatening to leave the track. Republicans Jeff Flake, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins are asking embarrassing questions, threatening to hold up the vote unless they get a hearing in which Mrs. Ford is able to accuse Kavanaugh and Kavanaugh is able to defend himself.
And of course, now it’s all politics. The questions being asked and pondered no longer bear any association with the actions of either Ford or Kavanaugh but only on how they appear to a voting public. One of these people is lying. Which one is no longer important. All that is important now is which story can the perpetrators make the public believe. The Democrats don’t care if Kavanaugh really tried to rape Mrs. Ford. They only care that they can make enough people believe her so as to hold up the confirmation long enough to elect Democrats into congress that will stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation. The Republicans don’t care if Kavanaugh raped this woman or her whole class, as long as they can get it out of the way in time to confirm him as a Supreme Court Justice. In the next few days you are going to hear pious pontifications from the GOP on the purity of innocence and from the Dems on the horrors of dragging a degenerate from the swamp to sit on our high court. In the meantime Ole Pruneface McConnell will be sitting in the background cynically ignoring all the sentiment and simply counting votes. Mitch may be a despicable human being but he sure is a realist and that’s why the GOP now holds the entire government in its infected grasp.
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Just looked at a picture of the Republican and Democratic Judiciary committee groups and it’s stunning in its revelatory implications. The Republican group is made up of 11 middle aged white men. Of whom is that supposed to be representative? The Democratic group is 6 men and 4 women, 2 of whom are of non-white ethnic derivation. While that’s still not there, it’s a hell of a lot closer to reality population in this country than the GOP bunch. These are the people who will be hearing the testimony of Brett Kavanagh and Christine Blasey Ford on Monday when they take the stand to testify as to whether Kavanagh attacked Ford at a high school party over 30 years ago.
The Republican bunch looks a hell of a lot like the same sleazy crew that sat in judgment of Anita Hill years ago. They decided that she was lying and that Clarence Thomas was telling the truth about sexually harassing her. So Scalia got Thomas to be his butt boy on the Supreme Court. Over the ensuing years Thomas has proved to be one of the most useless of all Supreme Court Justices, not once having spoken or published an opinion until last year after Scalia died. Up until then he just checked off any box Scalia told him to. We still have Thomas, a festering wart on the ass of the Supreme Court. Kavanagh will not be like him. Kavanagh will be a mover and shaker for all the wrong causes.
There is no way we will ever get to the bottom of what happened 36 years ago, certainly not definitively. We will hear evidence from Mrs. Ford’s therapist and we will hear evidence from Kavanagh’s friend who seems t have been there but no one will ever be able to prove his or her position. But the point of this hearing is to show that Kavanagh is morally stable enough to get a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court and there is no way he can do that. That means he must be rejected for the position. We don’t know if he is a moral human being. All we have is conjecture and that’s just not enough. What we need in that job is a man who has no blemishes on his record, no assaults on his moral stability. Considering the morals of the man in the White House, it is more important now than ever to get a judge on the Supreme Court who is beyond reproach.
If Kavanagh is rejected maybe we can see the weaknesses of the Democrats work for the good of the country. Maybe the Democrats can offer up a candidate for that job who is a lot more middle-of-the road, a candidate who is not driven by party allegiance or liberal or conservative ideology. Maybe, just maybe, we can get a judge on the Court who is able to look at all questions with open eyes and a clear mind and make judgments on the merits of the arguments. Maybe then we will be fulfilling he expectations of our founding fathers and the needs of our citizens.