Offended By The Gadarene Swine Republicans? Is America About To Be Taught A Lesson For Tolerating Toxic Garbage In Our Midst?

Who knew what an advocate of an anti-trust agenda Trump is! He's now threatening to use political power against the owner of the Washington Post-- and using a distorted version of Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren terminology to do it-- for daring to investigate him during the campaign. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is, according to Trump, using the Washington Post as a political tool to keep his taxes low. "The whole system is rigged," he told Sean Hannity. "He’s using the Washington Post, which is peanuts, he’s using that for political purposes to save Amazon in terms of taxes and in terms of antitrust... Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise... He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed. We can't let him get away with it."

Apparently, Trump is trying to prepare the voters for some story Post reporters must have on him. I don't think, though, it's the one about how Trump masquerades as aides on the phone so he can sing his own praises in the third person. That's funny, but unlikely to cause the bloviating asshole to feel any embarrassment-- and unlikely to rattle the cages of the losers who support him.

The voice is instantly familiar; the tone, confident, even cocky; the cadence, distinctly Trumpian. The man on the phone vigorously defending Donald Trump says he’s a media spokesman named John Miller, but then he says, “I’m sort of new here,” and “I’m somebody that he knows and I think somebody that he trusts and likes” and even “I’m going to do this a little, part-time, and then, yeah, go on with my life.”

A recording obtained by The Washington Post captures what New York reporters and editors who covered Trump’s early career experienced in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s: calls from Trump’s Manhattan office that resulted in conversations with “John Miller” or “John Barron”-- public-relations men who sound precisely like Trump himself-- who indeed are Trump, masquerading as an unusually helpful and boastful advocate for himself, according to the journalists and several of Trump’s top aides.

In 1991, Sue Carswell, a reporter at People magazine, called Trump’s office seeking an interview with the developer. She had just been assigned to cover the soap opera surrounding the end of Trump’s 12-year marriage to Ivana, his budding relationship with the model Marla Maples and his rumored affairs with any number of celebrities who regularly appeared on the gossip pages of the New York newspapers.

Within five minutes, Carswell got a return call from Trump’s publicist, a man named John Miller, who immediately jumped into a startlingly frank and detailed explanation of why Trump dumped Maples for the Italian model Carla Bruni. “He really didn’t want to make a commitment,” Miller said. “He’s coming out of a marriage, and he’s starting to do tremendously well financially.”

Miller turned out to be a remarkably forthcoming source-- a spokesman with rare insight into the private thoughts and feelings of his client. “Have you met him?” Miller asked the reporter. “He’s a good guy, and he’s not going to hurt anybody... He treated his wife well and... he will treat Marla well.”

...“Actresses,” Miller said in the call to Carswell, “just call to see if they can go out with him and things.” Madonna “wanted to go out with him.” And Trump’s alter ego boasted that in addition to living with Maples, Trump had “three other girlfriends.”

Miller was consistent about referring to Trump as “he,” but at one point, when asked how important Bruni was in Trump’s busy love life, the spokesman said, “I think it’s somebody that-- you know, she’s beautiful. I saw her once, quickly, and beautiful...” and then he quickly pivoted back into talking about Trump-- then a 44-year-old father of three-- in the third person.

In 1990, Trump testified in a court case that “I believe on occasion I used that name.” He did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Well... technically he didn't respond, but he did run to Hannity and attack and threaten the owner of the reporter's newspaper. Then yesterday-- contradicting his sworn court testimony-- he was on NBC denying he had been passing himself off as Miller. "I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams-- doesn’t sound like me... It was not me on the phone. And it doesn't sound like me on the phone, I will tell you that. It was not me on the phone," he lied. Remember, Trump has made an art of manipulating the press and firmly believes that all press, good or bad, helps his brand (his business).

Carswell this week recalled that she immediately recognized something familiar in the Queens accent of Trump’s new publicist. She thought, “It’s so weird that Donald hired someone who sounds just like him.” After the 20-minute interview, she walked down the hall to play the tape to co-workers, who identified Trump’s voice. Carswell then called Cindy Adams, the longtime New York Post gossip columnist who had been close to Trump since the early 1970s. Adams immediately identified the voice as Trump’s.

“Oh, that’s Donald,” Carswell recalled Adams saying. “What is he doing?”

Then Carswell played the tape for Maples, who confirmed it was Trump and burst into tears as she heard Miller deny that a ring Trump gave her implied any intent to marry her.

Carswell, now a reporter-researcher at Vanity Fair, said the tape cuts off mid-interview, leaving out the part in which Miller said that actress Kim Basinger had been trying to date Trump. Hearing the tape for the first time in decades, Carswell said, “This was so farcical, that he pretended to be his own publicist. Here was this so-called billion-dollar real estate mogul, and he can’t hire his own publicist. It also said something about the control he wanted to keep of the news cycle flowing with this story, and I can’t believe he thought he’d get away with it.”

...“One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better,” Trump wrote in his bestseller The Art of the Deal. “The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”

Trump did not describe using false identities to promote his brand, but he did write about why he strays from the strict truth: “I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration-- and a very effective form of promotion.”

...After Carswell’s story appeared-- headlined “Trump Says Goodbye Marla, Hello Carla . . . And a Mysterious PR Man Who Sounds Just Like Donald Calls to Spread the Story”-- Trump invited the reporter out for a night on the town with him and Maples. Carswell says Maples persuaded Trump to issue the invitation as an apology for tricking her. A few weeks later, when People ran a story about Trump and Maples getting engaged, Trump was quoted saying that the John Miller call was a “joke gone awry.”

So far the joke looks like it will be on naive Republican primary voters.

Now even evangelical leaders on catching on the calibre of Trump's character and are warning their congregations that Trump's power play is a threat to "the fundamental integrity of Christian faith and the well-being of society itself" and "a moral threat" to society and to the country. This is from evangelical faith leaders:

The ascendancy of a demagogic candidate and his message, with the angry constituency he is fueling, is a threat to both the values of our faith and the health of our democracy. Donald Trump directly promotes racial and religious bigotry, disrespects the dignity of women, harms civil public discourse, offends moral decency, and seeks to manipulate religion. This is no longer politics as usual, but rather a moral and theological crisis, and thus we are compelled to speak out as faith leaders. This statement is absolutely no tacit endorsement of other candidates, many of whom use the same racial politics often in more subtle ways. But while Donald Trump certainly did not start these long-standing American racial sins, he is bringing our nation’s worst instincts to the political surface, making overt what is often covert, explicit what is often implicit.

Trump’s highly visible and vulgar racial and religious demagoguery presents a danger but also an opportunity-- to publicly expose and resist the worst of American values. By confronting a message so contrary to our Christian values, our religious voices can help provide a powerful way to put our true faith and our better American values forward in the midst of national moral confusion and crisis.

...Donald Trump, a celebrity from the worlds of real estate and reality television, is manipulating this anger for his own political advantage-- at the expense of the common good. Trump is shamelessly using racial resentment, fear, and hatred-- always dangerously present in our society-- to fuel a movement against “the other,” targeting other races, women, cultures, ethnicities, nations, creeds, and a whole global religion.

How many conservatives feel very much like Clinton-hater, PJ O'Rourke, who endorsed Hillary this week as the second worst thing thing that could happen to America.

I endorse her. And all her pomps. And all her empty promises.

Better the devil you know than the Lord of the Flies on his own 757. Flying to and fro in the earth, with gold-plated seatbelt buckles, talking nativist, isolationist, mercantilist, bigoted, rude, and vulgar crap.

...Better to root up the garden of free enterprise with the Democratic pigs than run off a protectionist cliff with the Gadarene swine Republicans.

Ever since Athens in the 5th century B.C. the great enemy of democracy has been the demagogue. But-- O tempora! O mores!-- now we’ve got a firebrand soap box orator who cannot so much as put a coherent sentence together. He likes to “talk bigly.”

Here’s to you, Hillary, for saving your best bloviation for your highly paid speeches to shady bankers. I would, if I could, pay Trump more to shut up.

Hillary, you are the crone in crony capitalism. I endorse you.

I choose Goldman Sachs’s milch cow over the cretin bull siring his herds of mini-Minotaurs-- half-men, half-bullshit-- laying waste to the country.

Better a Marie Antoinette of the left saying, “Let them eat fruit and fiber,” than a Know Nothing who would be Robespierre if he could spell it.

Let me tell you why Hillary is a great presidential candidate-- by comparison.

Don’t rush me here...

Did I mention that she’s the second-worst thing that could happen to America?

She’s a better real-estate developer than Donald Trump.

Trump Taj Mahal Casino, Trump Plaza Hotel, and Trump Entertainment Resorts went bankrupt. Trump restructured $3.5 billion in business debt and $900 million in personal debt. “Restructured” being the Trump way of saying he didn’t pay it. The $39.2 million that it cost taxpayers to investigate Hillary’s Whitewater scam is nothing by comparison.

She doesn’t cheat at golf.

True, Hillary screwed up during the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. As opposed to Donald Trump, who would have sent his supporters to boo and hiss the Islamic extremist attackers and then ask the police to take the extremists away.

Yes, unless Bernie wins the nomination-- you can help him at the thermometer below-- this is going to be the ultimate lesser-of-two-evils election.

Does Economic Inequality Really Do That Much Damage to The Nation?

Last night in this time slot we looked briefly at how American plutocrats-- and their servants in politics and the media-- think it's only natural that we raise the retirement age and the Medicare eligibility age. Well, of course! How little empathy this self-entitled masters of the universe have for ordinary people! I should have included a little discussion of Joseph Stigliz's OpEd in Saturday's NY Times, Inequality Is Holding Back The Recovery. It's so frustrating that Obama keeps picking Wall Street shills to oversee fiscal and economic policies rather than people like Stiglitz who have a real understanding of economics, not just an understanding about how to rig markets for the one percent. "[W]ith inequality at its highest level since before the Depression," he wrote, "a robust recovery will be difficult in the short term, and the American dream-- a good life in exchange for hard work-- is slowly dying." Somehow I fear Jack Lew is as unlikely to have ideas like this drive his work as Treasury Secretary as Tim Geithner was-- and did.

Politicians typically talk about rising inequality and the sluggish recovery as separate phenomena, when they are in fact intertwined. Inequality stifles, restrains and holds back our growth. When even the free-market-oriented magazine The Economist argues-- as it did in a special feature in October-- that the magnitude and nature of the country’s inequality represent a serious threat to America, we should know that something has gone horribly wrong. And yet, after four decades of widening inequality and the greatest economic downturn since the Depression, we haven’t done anything about it.

There are four major reasons inequality is squelching our recovery. The most immediate is that our middle class is too weak to support the consumer spending that has historically driven our economic growth. While the top 1 percent of income earners took home 93 percent of the growth in incomes in 2010, the households in the middle-- who are most likely to spend their incomes rather than save them and who are, in a sense, the true job creators-- have lower household incomes, adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1996. The growth in the decade before the crisis was unsustainable-- it was reliant on the bottom 80 percent consuming about 110 percent of their income.

Second, the hollowing out of the middle class since the 1970s, a phenomenon interrupted only briefly in the 1990s, means that they are unable to invest in their future, by educating themselves and their children and by starting or improving businesses.

Third, the weakness of the middle class is holding back tax receipts, especially because those at the top are so adroit in avoiding taxes and in getting Washington to give them tax breaks. The recent modest agreement to restore Clinton-level marginal income-tax rates for individuals making more than $400,000 and households making more than $450,000 did nothing to change this. Returns from Wall Street speculation are taxed at a far lower rate than other forms of income. Low tax receipts mean that the government cannot make the vital investments in infrastructure, education, research and health that are crucial for restoring long-term economic strength.

Fourth, inequality is associated with more frequent and more severe boom-and-bust cycles that make our economy more volatile and vulnerable. Though inequality did not directly cause the crisis, it is no coincidence that the 1920s-- the last time inequality of income and wealth in the United States was so high-- ended with the Great Crash and the Depression. The International Monetary Fund has noted the systematic relationship between economic instability and economic inequality, but American leaders haven’t absorbed the lesson.

Our skyrocketing inequality-- so contrary to our meritocratic ideal of America as a place where anyone with hard work and talent can “make it”-- means that those who are born to parents of limited means are likely never to live up to their potential. Children in other rich countries like Canada, France, Germany and Sweden have a better chance of doing better than their parents did than American kids have. More than a fifth of our children live in poverty-- the second worst of all the advanced economies, putting us behind countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Greece.

Our society is squandering its most valuable resource: our young. The dream of a better life that attracted immigrants to our shores is being crushed by an ever-widening chasm of income and wealth. Tocqueville, who in the 1830s found the egalitarian impulse to be the essence of the American character, is rolling in his grave.

Even were we able to ignore the economic imperative of fixing our inequality problem, the damage it is doing to our social fabric and political life should prompt us to worry. Economic inequality leads to political inequality and a broken decision-making process.

That, alas, is the actual goal, not an unintended consequence, of conservative economic policies and the agenda of an overly powerful One Percent. That's the arrogance of extreme wealth; they bought the political system and, they feel certain, it's up to them to run it for themselves and their families and class. They want-- more than anything-- low labor costs. If not actual slaves, then as close as you can get. High unemployment, part of the GOP agenda, drives wages down. So do neo-liberal, so-called "Free Trade" policies pushed vigorously by both Bushes, Clinton and Obama. As Stiglitz goes on the point out, "a typical male worker’s income in 2011 ($32,986) was lower than it was in 1968 ($33,880). Lower tax receipts, in turn, have forced state and local cutbacks in services vital to those at the bottom and middle." And has home prices have plummeted and incomes fallen, tuition has soared-- along with student debt. This is the goal of conservative economics. It's what the Ryan Budget was all about and what John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Miss McConnell dedicate every day of their miserable lives to. Stiglitz-- if not Geithener and Lew-- understand it didn't have to be this way.

Instead of pouring money into the banks, we could have tried rebuilding the economy from the bottom up. We could have enabled homeowners who were “underwater”-- those who owe more money on their homes than the homes are worth-- to get a fresh start, by writing down principal, in exchange for giving banks a share of the gains if and when home prices recovered.

We could have recognized that when young people are jobless, their skills atrophy. We could have made sure that every young person was either in school, in a training program or on a job. Instead, we let youth unemployment rise to twice the national average. The children of the rich can stay in college or attend graduate school, without accumulating enormous debt, or take unpaid internships to beef up their résumés. Not so for those in the middle and bottom. We are sowing the seeds of ever more inequality in the coming years.

The Obama administration does not, of course, bear the sole blame. President George W. Bush’s steep tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 and his multitrillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan emptied the piggy bank while exacerbating the great divide. His party’s newfound commitment to fiscal discipline-- in the form of insisting on low taxes for the rich while slashing services for the poor-- is the height of hypocrisy.

There are all kinds of excuses for inequality. Some say it’s beyond our control, pointing to market forces like globalization, trade liberalization, the technological revolution, the “rise of the rest.” Others assert that doing anything about it would make us all worse off, by stifling our already sputtering economic engine. These are self-serving, ignorant falsehoods.

Market forces don’t exist in a vacuum-- we shape them. Other countries, like fast-growing Brazil, have shaped them in ways that have lowered inequality while creating more opportunity and higher growth. Countries far poorer than ours have decided that all young people should have access to food, education and health care so they can fulfill their aspirations.

Our legal framework and the way we enforce it has provided more scope here for abuses by the financial sector; for perverse compensation for chief executives; for monopolies’ ability to take unjust advantage of their concentrated power.

...As Mr. Obama’s second term begins, we must all face the fact that our country cannot quickly, meaningfully recover without policies that directly address inequality. What’s needed is a comprehensive response that should include, at least, significant investments in education, a more progressive tax system and a tax on financial speculation.

The good news is that our thinking has been reframed: it used to be that we asked how much growth we would be willing to sacrifice for a little more equality and opportunity. Now we realize that we are paying a high price for our inequality and that alleviating it and promoting growth are intertwined, complementary goals. It will be up to all of us-- our leaders included-- to muster the courage and foresight to finally treat this beleaguering malady.

How Bill Maher wound up with the first standing ovation in the history of his show:



Later Grayson told Rachel Maddow how Wall Street predators and plutocrats wrecked the economy with the connivance of our political elites, Washington's Conservative Consensus.

Years ago, they took a healthy economy and they gave us 9 percent, 10 percent or more unemployment. And they destroyed 20 percent of our national wealth in the course of just 18 months from the middle of 2007, to the end of 2008, destroyed 20 percent of our national wealth accumulated over the course of two centuries. And nobody's been prosecuted for it. Nobody's been indicted. Nobody's been convicted.

So, first, there's no accountability. The second thing is that they've created a system that is enormously unequal. And the result of that is people are struggling to find a job to pay their bills, to pay their rent, to pay their credit card bills.

According to Wikipedia, there are only five countries in the entire planet that are more unequal than the United States in the distribution of our wealth. That's a system that Wall Street created, that Wall Street maintains, and that Wall Street enforces.

And the way that they enforce it is the third gripe. The third gripe is Wall Street controls and dominates our political system. One party is a wholly owned subsidiary of Wall Street and the other caters to Wall Street all too much. So, people got into the situation right now where they feel that the system is completely unresponsive and they're driven deeper and deeper into debt and misery.

...The economy has been grossly mismanaged by Wall Street and by others. And people see that Wall Street is running our economic policy. That big oil is determining our energy policy, and that the military industrial conflicts is determining our foreign policy and miring us in these endless costly wars.

People are just fed up.

So, what do they do? What's left to do? What is the one thing you can still do as a human being?

You can go someplace. You can go someplace and in this world of the Internet, you can show yourself. And that`s what the people on "Occupy Wall Street" are doing. They're doing the one last human thing left. They're going somewhere.

Join The Drum Circle!

No guest on Bill Maher has ever gotten a standing ovation-- until Friday night when clownish Republican Party chatterer P.J. O'Rourke accused Alan Grayson of being a hippie drum circle symp... and Alan tore him a new asshole (video above). The studio audience-- apparently also in sympathy with the 99% of his who were ripped off by the predatory banksters and their political enablers-- burst into applause for Grayson several times and then stood in the aisles cheering him, much to the visible chagrin of a sputtering, muttering O'Rourke. Out of the blue, small donors started flocking to the Blue America page donating to Grayson's campaign.

If any author inspired and set up the intellectual raison d'être for the OccupyWallStreet movement currently sweeping the country, it was surely David Korten in his 2010 book Agenda For A New Economy. The ecological aspects of this movement are yet to fully unfold, at least for the general public observing from afar. But, as Korten explains, it's as integral to it as banksterism. "This crisis," he writes, "is reducing Earth's capacity to support life and is creating large-scale human displacement and hardship that further fuel social breakdowns."

The failure of the credit system is only one manifestation of a failed economic system that is wildly out of balance with, and devastatingly harmful to, both humans and the natural environment.

Wages are falling in the face of volatile food and energy prices. Consumer debt, housing foreclosures, and executive pay are setting historic records. The middle class is shrinking. The unconscionable and growing worldwide gap between rich and poor, with its related alienation, is eroding the social fabric to the point of fueling terrorism, genocide, and other violent criminal activity.

At the same time, excessive consumption is pushing Earth's ecosystems into collapse. Climate change and the related increase in droughts, floods, and wildfires are serious threats. Scientists are in almost universal agreement that human activity bears substantial responsibility. We face severe water shortages, the erosion of topsoil, the loss of species, and the end of the fossil fuel subsidy. In each instance a failed economic system that takes no account of the social and environmental costs of monetary profits bears major responsibility.

I'm part of an e-mail discussion group that's filled with people who are as politically liberal as it is humanly possible for a conservative to be. Huh? Yes.

Today I noticed a fruit I'd never seen in my regular grocery store. I asked the fruit and vegetable guy and he waxed eloquent on how delicious they-- hachiya persimmons-- are when ripe, which would be in another 2 or 3 days. I bought a few. I put them in a basket on the kitchen table to ripen. I live in a high rent enclave on the east side of L.A. but there are almost no Republicans in the neighborhood and almost no one who dresses up in suits and ties on a regular basis. Kyle from up the street is an exception-- on both counts. It's a Saturday and he knocked on my door at 4 pm in a suit and tie asking to borrow a punch bowl because his broke and he's having some friends over. No problem. He followed me into the kitchen and immediately wrinkled his nose and pointed accusingly at the hachiya persimmons. "What are they," he demanded. I told him I'd never tasted one but that they looked interesting so I bought a few to add to my breakfast shake on Monday. He found that amusing, called me a "hopeless hippie" and left with my punch bowl as I asked him if he'd be showing reruns of the Values Voter Summit at his party later. Robert Jeffress wears suits and ties too.

On the way home from the store-- with the hachiya persimmons-- I spoke with my old friend Helen, a school psychologist who lives in Westchester County. She started telling me how "everyone" on the East Coast uses paper plates and plastic spoons and forks all the time... and that when she arrives at the local supermarket with her own cloth shopping bag, people laugh at her and call her a hippie. (Full disclosure: Helen and I were hippies in college in the mid-1960's and neither of us likes disposable plastic shopping bags.)

Back to the e-mail discussion group with the conservative liberals Gee they hate hippies. The immediate response to OccupyWallStreet from some of them was embarrassment that people "on our side" were dressed "like that" and not wearing suits and ties. Suits and ties-- like fucking Kyle up the street? And they dismissed the whole thing-- the way P.J. O'Rourke tried to do-- as a big giant drum circle... which I guess is some kind of crypto-conservative suit and tie way of saying a "circle jerk." Historian Rick Perlstein would seem as aghast by this idiocy as I was: "Rhythm," he wrote, "is the most powerful tool human beings have to coordinate their activities. Always has been, always will be. William McNeill even wrote a book about it. A gathering that harnesses it is a more powerful gathering. It's one of the things that makes the human microphone down there that Richard Kim writes about so eloquently a galvanizing thing. It's why people chant. Better, I think, to look beyond the aesthetic outrage and negative adolescent associations and recollections and figure this out as a resource."

When the OccupyWallStreet thing was just starting to roll, I asked New Jersey congressional candidate, Ed Potosnak what he thought about it. Like all progressives, he's very supportive. And he started talking about the right-wing media drum beat that the protesters have no focus and don't stand for anything or whatever the p.r. people hired by Koch or the RNC or whoever is hiring them keep repeating to journalists. Ed's take is that "media criticisms of the group’s lack of focus are ridiculous. What are they expecting, an OccupyWallStreet TV commercial and jingle? The focus of these REAL people is Wall Street and the pain our families and businesses are enduring at their hand.

"When I was in High School," he continued, "I boycotted McDonald’s for using polystyrene and you know what, they changed. Consumers are powerful when they stand up to the Big Guys. Together ordinary people can provoke changes the government has failed to accomplish by coming together, standing up, and pushing back. Hopefully Congress will fight back too, I know I will."

That's the kind of hope and the kind of change we all tried to persuade ourselves we were voting for in 2008-- even those of us who knew better. Won't be fooled again? Obama said he'd walk the picket lines with unions before he was elected. I haven't seen that as unions struggle for their lives against a powerfully coordinated and richly financed fascist assault. I hope from now on I'll only be voting for people who embrace drum circles for real. Alan Grayson and Ed Potosnak are on the same page.

Friday The Nation published Naomi Klein explaining why OccupyWallStreet is the most important thing in the world now.

If there is one thing I know, it is that the 1 percent loves a crisis. When people are panicked and desperate and no one seems to know what to do, that is the ideal time to push through their wish list of pro-corporate policies: privatizing education and social security, slashing public services, getting rid of the last constraints on corporate power. Amidst the economic crisis, this is happening the world over.

And there is only one thing that can block this tactic, and fortunately, it’s a very big thing: the 99 percent. And that 99 percent is taking to the streets from Madison to Madrid to say “No. We will not pay for your crisis.”

That slogan began in Italy in 2008. It ricocheted to Greece and France and Ireland and finally it has made its way to the square mile where the crisis began.

“Why are they protesting?” ask the baffled pundits on TV. Meanwhile, the rest of the world asks: “What took you so long?” “We’ve been wondering when you were going to show up.” And most of all: “Welcome.”