Don the Con has a few weak points, among them an understanding of global politics. Thus it is not surprising that he would try to get closer to Sunni Arab countries and give Iran the cold shoulder– while at the same time claiming to want to have better relations with Russia, which heavily supports Iran and the current government of Syria:
Tamara Cofman Wittes, a former State Department official who worked on the Middle East under Mr. Obama, said Mr. Trump’s goal of aligning with the Sunni states fundamentally conflicted with his desire for closer relations with Russia, which has sided with Iran in bolstering the government in Syria’s civil war. Allowing President Bashar al-Assad to remain in power in Syria under Iran’s thumb is precisely the outcome the Sunni states and Israel oppose, noted Ms. Wittes, who is now at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
But no matter: our collaboration with Saudi Arabia will produce “jobs, jobs, jobs” for the defense industry. First on the list is a $110 billion package of weapons for the Saudis, including advanced weapons the Obama administration with-held because they could be used to target civilians in Yemen. Nor does it matter to Don that Saudi Arabia is a highly repressive monarchy, while Iran is a slightly less repressive democratic republic. These fine points of global governance are beyond Don the Con, who favors autocrats like Vladimir Putin (who has hollowed out his country’s putative democracy and kills his opponents with impunity) and Rodrigo Duterte (who has made his country a killing field for anyone suspected of involvement in “drugs” and who has recently banned public cigarette smoking.)
In fact, Don seems to have trouble with basic consistency (he’s a hypocrite, along with everything else):
Mrs. Trump stood near her husband with her hair uncovered, as is common for visiting American first ladies. The country’s tradition is for Saudi women to cover their heads in public. (In 2015, Mr. Trump criticized Michelle Obama on Twitter for not wearing a head scarf during an official visit here. Hillary Clinton and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany also did not cover their hair during trips to the country.)
This comment is in response to a Paul Krugman opinion piece called, “What’s wrong with Republicans?”:
lamsmy
africa
Historically, Mr. Krugman is correct. The Democratic party was founded as a platform to hash out varying ideas. The Republican Party was founded on the principle of pushing one main idea.
So the Republicans have always seen the Dems as unprincipled because they did stand for one binding “good”. But since Reagan, this has morphed into a place where Republicans see themselves as the only true patriots and protectors of America. Democrats are considered disloyal, untrustworthy socialists out to destroy the US.
Ryan, McConnell, and their ilk don’t really see any need to research issues, prepare and publish detailed policy, negotiate in good faith, all the essential steps in good governance, for the simple reason that they (in their own minds) are always right and the Dems are always wrong.
Too many Americans have a very poor grasp of history, current events, how science and journalism are supposed to work, and basic civics. Uniformed and scared, they will always cling to the simple feelgood slogans of the Republicans. Trump was the ultimate expression of this boastful head-in-the-sand approach.This does not bode well for the future of your country.
Comment of the Day: Sadomasochism
Henrik
Sweden
As a Scandinavian and European, I can not understand the sadomasochism of the American people. A sizable number of voters, and indeed congress delegates, admire the person who keeps penalizing them. For me this resembles the love-hate relation between the abuser and abusee. Normally, this kind of behaviour should be harboured in its infancy, instead we have a full-grown bull at the highest office in the free world, who keeps hurting most people around him. At the same time the co-abusers (read congress) applaud this behaviour. Why is pain excused so broadly in the American society? I can not get my head around this. Maybe the old proverb “No pain no gain” rings in everybody’s head, instilling them with the thought that pain is a precursor of success. Life is not beyond an insurmountable hurdle, but here and now!
Last fall, I wrote a blog note about this Pieczenik person that related an odd piece of text that I found at the end of the Wikipedia article about him. The text was as follows:
On November 1, 2016, Pieczenik announced on his youtube channel that Hillary and Bill Clinton “effected a silent civilian coup through corruption and coaptation. However, people in the intelligence community formally initiated a countercoup through supplying information to Julian Assange and Wikileaks in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming the next president of the United States, while also convicting and indicting President Obama, Loretta Lynch, and all others who were implicit in the cover-up of the massive corruption that occurred under the Clinton Foundation.” [34]
Well, I coincidentally and randomly checked Wikipedia today and found that text is gone. So, I guess this person is really a writer of fiction and probably is an evil behind-the-scenes conspiracy nut. I guess. I can’t figure it out. Maybe the text really refers to the Wikileaks stuff from the Russians that sank Hillary along with the voter suppression, propaganda, Don’s study of Hitler’s speeches, and all the rest. At least Obama and his crew aren’t in jail– maybe because Don thinks Barack is a “really great guy” for not criticizing him.
At any rate, I don’t think “people in the intelligence community” initiated a counter-coup; the information supplied to Wikileaks came from the Russians. That “silent civilian coup” by Clinton stuff is pure alt-right alternate facts. Writing fiction is good training for making up stuff to confuse the ignorant Trump voters.
Here’s a comment (from an opinion piece in the New York Times that complains that Don the Con is a child in a man’s body):
DianaID
Maplewood, NJ
Tony Schwartz, Donald Trump’s co-author of Art of the Deal, who had deep remorse regarding creating the myth of Donald Trump the deal maker. He is the man who said, in a New Yorker article that “I genuinely believe that if Trump wins and gets the nuclear codes there is an excellent possibility it will lead to the end of civilization.” And while you think he is a child, Roberts, who spent many months with him, considers him a sociopath.
He had to deal with his short attention span that left him with “a stunning level of superficial knowledge and plain ignorance” and an inability to concentrate or focus. He could not imagine him absorbing information in the Situation Room. And clearly he can’t or can’t focus and understand on what he should do or say as President.
All very accurately and sadly predicted.
The New York Times has written in an editorial that Don the Con’s Washington hotel, located in a government building, has suddenly started doing big business since the election. Before that, the hotel was deserted, with rooms going at steep discounts. Naturally, a naive person would think that the President owning a hotel in Washington that serves international government clientele (who are rushing to book rooms) is an obvious violation of the emoluments clause, which states that elected officials may not receive anything of value from foreign governments without the explicit permission of Congress.
That would be naive. Even though, in this case, a specific clause in the contract for the hotel (in an historic government building) prohibits elected officials from having “any share” or “any benefit” from running it. However, Don the Con’s appointed leadership in the General Services Administration has stated that they have no problems with his ownership. The only way to punish Don for this contract violation and unconstitutional behavior is to impeach him, which will not happen until there is a Democratic majority in the House.
Someone has filed suit against Don in federal court for this little bit of self-dealing, but it is too little and too late because the profits have started rolling in to his hotel. Foreign diplomats and roving officials have “thronged” the place, moving their parties in from other hotels. Don is profiting, bigly, from his Electoral College victory.
According to the acting assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs at the State Department, the Syrian government has built a crematory at its military prison outside Damascus to dispose of the bodies from the mass executions that it has been carrying out there. If this is true, it will show clearly that Bashar al-Assad and his administration are guilty of mass murder. This is an irresistible reminder of a certain German dictator responsible for WW II. Details on Syria’s incinerators can be found in this NYT article. I’d like to see Donald tweet about this.
I’m not kidding– this is a historic revelation. No-one who supports al-Assad is clean. The Iranians and the Russians are helping a mass murderer. The world is descending into another period that can only be described as the beginning of WW III. The Syrian government has responded to its devastating drought by oppressing its starving citizens and has now reached the logical conclusion that it needs to kill most of them.
In a completely separate but somehow intimately related situation in South America, a country is collapsing without an invasion: Venezuela’s economy shrank by ten percent last year, faring as badly as Syria. Venezuela’s autocratic leader and its elite have been feuding for twenty years and oppressing the citizenry with savage bands of thugs who kill demonstrators in the streets.
In yet a third totally unrelated country, North Korea, the unresolved enmity of a war left over from the retreat of Japanese forces at the end of WW II has led to an Orwellian situation for twenty-five million people. Their “dear leader” is threatening the US with nuclear weapons so he can counter our threats to annihilate him.
Thirty years ago, North Korea experienced a famine that required UN food aid. The US response to that crisis ( and to the crisis in Africa involving Hutu-Tutsi massacres ) was grossly inadequate and foreshadowed our failure to respond to current famines. Failure to respond to crises like these has led to a downward spiral of more oppressive local leadership and further deterioration of infrastructure.
These and other situations in the world today are at their roots related to fights over oil resources (Venezuela thought it could prosper purely on oil exports but failed to maintain its producing infrastructure because of corruption) and climate change that is causing severe droughts in the Near East and Africa (Syria has been in a drought for fifteen years that is said to be the worst in 500 years –see this Vice article.)
The basic problem is that the world is too crowded and too dependent on oil production; not enough emphasis has been put on developing agriculture, renewable power resources, and equitable distribution of goods. The US has not helped: instead of exporting our excess food and contraceptive technology, we have been getting fatter while poor people procreate and starve. The world is heating up and billions could die in a war that would make WW II look like a skirmish.
The story below is another example of how unrestrained capitalism can distort markets by creating enormous profits for a few while gouging many. Medicine is one area of life where the profit motive should not be allowed to reign supreme. Putting a high price on relief of suffering diminishes human lives.
Nuedexta is a combination of dextromethorphan and quinidine, two cheap generic drugs, that is effective for “pseudobulbar affect” (PBA), a disorder characterized by excessive or involuntary laughing and crying. The disorder is uncommon and often misdiagnosed; it is usually brought on by a small stroke or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease.) It is estimated to affect 2 million Americans.
The company that bought the patent from the researchers who discovered it was sold for $3.5 billion in 2014 and sales of the drug earned $218 million last year. Sales are lucrative because the drug combination costs about $700 a month (while the generic ingredients sell for less than $20.)
Sales have been driven by TV advertising, including a particularly effective spot done by the actor Danny Glover. Pharmaceutical companies spent a total of $6.4 billion on advertising last year, and anyone who watches cable TV news will attest to the ubiquity of drug ads. The US is one of only two companies in the world that allows TV advertising of drugs.
(All the above is sourced from an article in the New York Times from today.)
In order to give fair remuneration to those who researched the combination of these two drugs while at the same time not over-burdening the consumer, a patent on the mixture can be granted as per routine, but the price of the combination should be regulated so as not to produce an absurd result– a markup of over 3000%. Perhaps a 300% surcharge would be more reasonable. These issues call for fine judgements, not “whatever the market will bear.”
Crying in the Wilderness
As an officially retired person, on Social Security and Medicare because of arthritis, I believe it is my duty to get up every morning at dawn and go for a walk. I also believe it is my duty to express my opinion, because I haven’t survived 63 years as of April 26 without gaining some experience. Whether I have learned anything useful in that time is an open question. I will leave it to you, the lonely reader, to decide.
First, I feel obliged to enter an opinion on the subject that is on everyone’s lips and trending on Twitter, namely, Don the Con. Need I say more?
Second, I will say that I get it– the majority of the people in the rural, white, uneducated portion of this country are all for Don. Why? Because of propaganda, partly Russian propaganda, and nothing else.
Third, I will say that although I fortunately live in a blue state (in a depressed red county), I understand that the voters in this state are not much more educated than those in the red states. They just didn’t get as much propaganda because the Republicans didn’t bother to waste their money on a solidly blue state that happens to be minority white. They didn’t even bother to saturate my county, a red county, with propaganda because they knew it wouldn’t matter in a blue state.
As a long-term issue, however, I believe that Democrats need a strategy. They must first adopt the exact same methods (those used by Cambridge Analytica) and tailor their campaigns to get the most effective microtargeting of propaganda. And they must have good propaganda, 30-second spots that are punchy, truthful, and put the Democrats in a good light with the Republicans as the (not so terrible) villains.
The most long-term strategy, however, is a what-if: what if the Republicans manage to call a Constitutional Convention? They are only a couple of states short of having the votes already. If so, the Democrats must be prepared with a plan to demand new elections prior to the convention, based on new rules that emphasize one-man, one-vote, no gerrymandering, and universal participation. It is essential that we have 100% of the people voting in the convention– the 50% participation rate in presidential elections is unacceptable for purely democratic reasons. The Convention must be fully televised with multiple live streams.
Democrats should stand for a platform that includes the retention of virtually all of the original Constitution and allows for a few additions and revisions but essentially no deletions. None of the freedoms in the Bill of Rights can be touched (Sorry, folks, that includes the Second Amendment; the advocates of this one are in the minority, but they are armed, and I don’t think you want to argue with them.) The powers of Congress should be redefined to include matters that involve more than one state (as well as interstate commerce). An Inspector General and inspector’s office should be included in every department. Whistleblowers should be constitutionally protected. Adequate but not excessive regulation, checks and balances, should be understood to be the price for allowing capitalism as a monetary system (remember that our original constitution makes no mention of capitalism.) A progressive income tax should be enshrined in the Constitution, to pay for all those things that everyone depends on, and to substitute for regressive sales taxes and property taxes at the state level. Research and science have to have preservation by Constitutional wording (remember that God is not mentioned in the Constitution and we should resist all attempts to add His name as a sop to religious conservatives who will use it to drive a wedge through our society.)
These are things that an old man thinks about for the future. Oh yeah, and unions need support too, because they vote. Democrats must always support the majority of the people while preserving the civil rights of the minority. Republicans can say that they hold better opinions than Democrats, but if they’re truthfully in the minority (the way Don the Con is, by 3 million legitimate votes), they’re going to have to compromise on Democratic terms.
By the way, Don the Con has fulfilled one of his promises. He has set up a committee to investigate voter fraud, led by an advocate of strict Voter ID’s. Let’s see if they really investigate, and if they do, what they will turn up. Attorney General Sessions has tried this before, on a state level as a prosecutor, and he turned up a few prosecutions –all of black people– that were all shot down by juries. Doesn’t reality suck, Mr. Sessions?
This comment appeared in the New York Times attached to an editorial about Russian connections already known: (the sale of the Palm Beach mansion at a 171% profit in 2008 is especially noteworthy, because the sale occurred during a real estate crash known as the Great Recession. In addition, Don the Con’s positive comments about Russia date back to this time.)
David Parsons
San Francisco CA
Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev purchased Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for almost $95 million in 2008, right in the middle of a global real estate and financial crisis.
The transaction made headlines because he paid almost $60 million more than Trump had, a return of 171% in just 4 years.
Dmitry Rybolovlev is the largest shareholder of the Bank of Cyprus, the same bank Paul Manafort used to bank his 12.7 million slush fund from Putin.
Donald Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross bought into the bank 3 years ago and was the Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus.
In 2015 Ross sold the bank’s Russia-based businesses were sold to a Russian banker and consultant, Artem Avetisyan, who had ties to both the Russian president and Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank.
At the time, Sberbank was under US and EU sanctions following Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
After the election, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, met with the CEO of Russia’s state-owned Vnesheconombank in December 2016 to obtain financing for his building 666 5th Avenue.
Follow the money, follow the cyber-hacking, follow the disinformation.
For the President to fire the Head of the independent FBI during the middle of his investigation is a Constitutional crisis.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 