What Part Of Trump's Real Base Is Made Up Of Lonely And Violent Right Wing Misfits He Manipulates With Ease?

History is filled with lonely, alienated misfits acting out in the public square-- sometimes with dire consequences. 19 year old Gavrilo Princip came from a desperately poor peasant family in Bosnia, lived alone in Sarajevo, joined violent fanatic groups, got expelled from school and assassinated the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, setting off a chain of events which led to the biggest deal in world history 'til then: World War I which, in turn, led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, the collapse of political stability throughout the world and, eventually, to World War II. If Gavrilo had only eaten better, had a better body-- he was a scrawny, malnourished little guy-- had a girlfriend! Today, the NY Times published an OpEd by Arthur Brooks, How Loneliness Is Tearing America Apart-- When People Have A Hole In Their Life, They Often Fill It With Angry Politics. In America today, we all have an a-hole in our lives and his classic, weak man's divide-and-conquer style of management has turned our country into a bubbling cauldron of angry politics.

Brooks himself is a bit of a misanthrope. He's a right-wing kook-- head of the neo-fascist American Enterprise Institute-- who grew up a musician when Seattle was rockin' and rollin'-- except his instrument was French horn. Perhaps if he had taken up guitar or drums, America would have turned out less insanely right-wing itself. Jimi Hendrix was getting all the girls. Bassonists and French horn players don't necessarily get laid after a gig. Violent right-wing domestic terrorists are virtually all lonely, desperate and mentally impaired males. They're also the tip of the Trumpist spear. "America," wrote Brooks "is suffering an epidemic of loneliness."

According to a recent large-scale survey from the health care provider Cigna, most Americans suffer from strong feelings of loneliness and a lack of significance in their relationships. Nearly half say they sometimes or always feel alone or “left out.” Thirteen percent of Americans say that zero people know them well. The survey, which charts social isolation using a common measure known as the U.C.L.A. Loneliness Scale, shows that loneliness is worse in each successive generation.

This problem is at the heart of the new book Them: Why We Hate Each Other-- and How to Heal, by Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska. Mr. Sasse argues that “loneliness is killing us,” citing, among other things, the skyrocketing rates of suicide and overdose deaths in America. This year, 45,000 Americans will take their lives, and more than 70,000 will die from drug overdoses.

Mr. Sasse’s assertion that loneliness is killing us takes on even darker significance in the wake of the mail-bomb campaign against critics of President Trump and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, both of which were perpetrated by isolated-- and apparently very lonely-- men. Mr. Sasse’s book was published before these events, but he presciently described what he believes lonely people increasingly do to fill the hole of belonging in their lives: They turn to angry politics.

In the “siloed,” or isolated, worlds of cable television, ideological punditry, campus politics and social media, people find a sense of community in the polarized tribes forming on the left and the right in America. Essentially, people locate their sense of “us” through the contempt peddled about “them” on the other side of the political spectrum.

There is profit to be made here. The “outrage industrial complex” is what I call the industries that accumulate wealth and power by providing this simulacrum of community that people crave-- but cannot seem to find in real life.

Why are we becoming so lonely? One reason is the changing nature of work. Work is one of the key sources of friendship and community. Think of your own relationships; surely many of your closest friendships-- perhaps even your relationship with your spouse-- started in the workplace. Yet the reality of the workplace is rapidly attenuating, as people hop from job to job, and from city to city, as steady work becomes harder to find and the “gig” economy grows.

Mr. Sasse worries even more, however, about a pervasive feeling of homelessness: Too many Americans don’t have a place they think of as home-- a “thick” community in which people know and look out for one another and invest in relationships that are not transient. To adopt a phrase coined in Sports Illustrated, one might say we increasingly lack that “hometown gym on a Friday night feeling.”

Mr. Sasse finds this phrase irresistible and warmly relates it to his own life growing up in Fremont, Neb., a town of 26,000 residents. He describes the high school sports events on Friday nights that drew the townspeople together in a common love for their neighbors and community that made most differences-- especially political differences-- seem trivial. He relates with deep fondness the feelings he experienced, after moving away for a couple of decades for school and work, when he returned to Fremont’s small-town life with his family, and the deep sense of belonging it created.

In what might be called “the social capital of death,” Mr. Sasse charmingly describes the sense of being rooted that it gives him, at a robust and healthy 46, to own a burial plot for himself in Fremont’s local cemetery. A précis of Mr. Sasse’s recommendations to America thus might be this: Go where you get that hometown-gym-on-a-Friday-night feeling, put down roots and make plans to fertilize the soil.

That can be a tricky proposition for many of us. On reading the book, I asked myself where I might get that hometown-gym feeling, where I have natural roots, where I can imagine being buried. No specific place came to mind. I have no Fremont-- not even Seattle, my hometown, which is a perfectly nice place, but one I unsentimentally left behind 35 years ago.

All this is particularly germane to my wife and me at the moment, as we prepare to move from Maryland to Massachusetts in the coming months. We fear the loneliness we are sure to feel as we enter a completely new place where neither of us grew up or has ever lived. Is a thick community and the happiness it brings out of reach for rootless cosmopolitans like us?

I recently put these questions to Mr. Sasse. He told me I had it all wrong-- that moving back home and going to the gym on Friday aren’t actually the point; rather, the trick is “learning how to intentionally invest in the places where we actually live.” In other words, being a member of a community isn’t about whether I have a Fremont. It isn’t about how I feel about any place I have lived, nor about my fear of isolation in a new city. It is about the neighbor I choose to be in the community I wind up calling my home.

And there lies the challenge to each of us in a country suffering from loneliness and ripped apart by political opportunists seeking to capitalize on that isolation. Each of us can be happier, and America will start to heal, when we become the kind neighbors and generous friends we wish we had.

TX-36 Could Well Be The Reddest District In America To Flip In November

Dayna with... well, you know

When Jon-Marc McDonald resigned as campaign manager for right-wing bigot Brian Babin in 1998, he wrote that "There comes a time when your convictions take precedence over your job, your title and your status," claiming that Babin thought "homosexuals should be shot." Babin's response was a snarky "I hope he gets the help he needs, and I wish him the best." Yesterday, McDonald endorsed Babin's 2018 rival, Dayna Steele:

I rarely endorse a candidate but, in recent months, I have gotten to know Dayna Steele and her family. Beyond her incredible experience, Dayna’s values and vision are true. She brings integrity to the ballot and will take Texas values with her to Washington.

As Brian Babin’s former campaign manager, I can see he has not changed much. Babin is serving only a select few of his constituents, leaving out most of the people who live in our district. He is not concerned with what is important to working families in Southeast Texas. He is more concerned with what people in Washington D.C. think of him. His slow response after Hurricane Harvey should be enough to end his career in Congress.

Dayna brings the Texas spirit of honor, decency, and honest talk that is so needed in politics today. I know Dayna will never take her constituents for granted. She is the type of person who will show up every day for the people of Southeast Texas. The best thing Brian Babin can do for Texas is return to being a dentist. He should let someone who will represent the 36th with dignity and honor take over. Dayna Steele is that someone.

That's heavy. Campaign managers get to know politicians a lot better than the public does and McDonald has valuable and unique insight into what kind of a character Babin is.

TX-36 is a tough district but in a wave cycle where Republicans are falling in special elections with gigantic swings away from Trump, anything is possible. In Dayna's own words: "It’s clear that we can win this race, and that the odds are shrinking every day. Democrats are energized, independents want real change, and even many Republicans are unhappy with what’s coming out of the White House and the Congress."

Half the voters in the district live in eastern Harris county in the Houston suburbs and exurbs from Deer Park, Channelview and Sheldon east through La Porte and Baytown to where the other half of the voters live, rural areas all the way to the Louisiana border and north through Lumberton, Livingston, Woodville and Jasper. The PVI is a daunting R+26, a district that gave Obama and Hillary just slightly over 25% of the vote.

It seems like an unlikely district for a strongly progressive woman like Dayna to be running, but hers is one of the most trusted voices in TX-36, having been the dominant radio personality first on KRBE from 1979 to 1981 and later on the dominant radio station, KLOL, all through the '80s and into the 1990's as southeast Texas' "First Lady of Rock ‘n Roll." Hers was the voice who first introduced people Dire Straits, U2, Pink Floyd, Ratt, Melissa Etheridge, ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, The Police, Van Halen, Queen, Bon Jovi, The Cars, The Eagles, Guns N' Roses, Aerosmith, Kiss, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Fleetwood Mac, Genesis. Imagine, for example, associating Dayna Steele with the first time you heard "Born in the U.S.A" and "Born to Run," with "London Calling," "Back in Black," "Highway to Hell," "Another Brick in the Wall" and "Rebel Yell." Compare that to what Brian Babin has ever done for anyone! If you'd like to make a bet on one of the toughest winnable races in the country please click on the Turning Texas Blue thermometer on the right and contribute what you can to Dayna's campaign.

Who Thinks Subsidizing Rich Sports Team Owners Is A Good Use Of Public Funds?

I was elected freshman class president at college and the first vote I remember taking on the student council was to oppose spending student funds on moleskin-- a cotton fabric some sports team wanted because it's resistant to wind and abrasion. Let them get their own moleskins; I had Fugs, Doors, Country Joe & the Fish, Who and Otis Redding concerts in mind, not to mention lectures by Timothy Leary and Julian Bond. Conservatives on the council didn't agree with me-- not on that vote, nor on any others... not ever. But I find myself on the same team with conservatives today when it comes to sports stadium funding. I haven't changed my ideas about public money going into sports. But wasn't I surprised to see this OpEd the other day by the New Jersey and Oklahoma state directors of the Koch Brothers' Americans For Prosperity opposing public funds for sports stadiums! It's also a story about two senators, Cory Booker (D-NJ) and James Lankford (R-OK), both reliably pro-corporate... until this issue came up. The idea is that "Maybe bringing together two senators from vastly different states and from widely different ideologies-- U.S. Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat-- will help inspire a fractious Congress to work together on a bipartisan bill to cut federal subsidies for sports stadiums."

The bill would end the federal tax giveaway for municipal bonds used to fund sports stadiums. It's a practice that has been going on for decades because shrewd team owners know that local politicians are under extreme political pressure from fans to make sure their beloved local teams don't move to greener pastures unless they get a handout.

Even if we ignore for a moment that such picking of winners and losers is a flagrant foul by the government, it's also a questionable use of federal tax dollars. "The federal government is responsible for a lot of important functions, but financing sports stadiums for multi-million dollar franchises is definitely not one of them," Sen. Lankford said in a statement.

Exempting the interest on municipal bonds from federal income taxes is a legitimate tool to lower the borrowing costs for cities to pay for public projects that serve to carry out core functions of government such as roads, sewer systems, and schools. Subsidizing ballparks for billionaire owners and millionaire players, however, shouldn't be part of the equation.

The carve-out hasn't been cheap. According to the Brookings Institution, the stadium loophole has cost federal taxpayers $3.2 billion for 36 professional sports facilities since 2000.

With the federal government $20 trillion in debt, excising this kind of pointless waste would seem to be the legislative equivalent of a slam dunk. But as with so much else in the federal tax code, it pays to be well-connected.

In 1986, when major tax reform was last enacted, there was a push to do away with federal welfare for stadiums. "We thought we shut down public financing to private sports stadiums in 1986," then-Sen. Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat told the New York Times a decade later, in reference to a similar measure introduced at that time.

But the subsidy lives on, like the hope that springs eternal in the fans of a team that gets to the championship game, only to see its dreams dashed yet again. (Sorry, Cleveland.)

So, here we are again, decades and billions of dollars later, and Congress is still trying to figure out a way to end this expensive handout.

It's a matter of simple fairness, according to Sen. Booker, whose home state lost the NBA's Nets to Brooklyn, where a new stadium was built with $161 million in federal subsidies. "It's not fair to finance these expensive projects on the backs of taxpayers, especially when wealthy teams end up reaping most of the benefits." The senator is right. Taxpayer subsidies mean that there are fewer state dollars to go around to address areas of true government need.

Congress should act to remove this misguided incentivizing of federal subsidies for stadium financing. If Washington gets out of the ballpark business, taxpayers will be the big winners.

These are the 10 current members of the Senate who have taken the biggest bribes from professional sports teams since 1990:

• John McCain (R-AZ)- $583,380
• Rob Portman (R-OH)- $225,083
• Chuck Schumer (D-NY)- $219,100
• Bitch McConnell (R-KY)- $174,200
• Bill Nelson (D-FL)- $167,700
• Marco Rubio (R-FL)- $135,865
• Todd Young (R-IN)- $128,900
• John Cornyn (R-TX)- $128,000
• Mike Lee (R-UT)- $109,900
• Richard Burr (R-NC)- $109,500

And here are the 10 current members of the House who have taken the biggest bribes from professional sports teams since 1990:

• Charlie Crist (Blue Dog-FL)- $143,350
• Tom Rooney (R-FL)- $107,985
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- $104,502
• Steve Chabot (R-OH)- $101,450
• Paul Ryan (R-WI)- $88,214
• Richard Hudson (R-NC)- $85,800
• Debbie Wasserman Schultz (New Dem-FL)- $74,625
• Steny Hoyer (D-MD)- $71,250
• Fred Upton (R-MI)- $69,700
• Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)- $68,900

Mostly corrupt Republicans with a sprinkling of 2 of the very worst of the corrupt conservative House Democrats, Hoyer and Wasserman Schultz. What else is new?

Fear Keeps Us All In Line

I haven’t heard Roger Waters’ new album— his first in 25 years, released last week— Is This The Life We Really Want?, yet, just the title track… which I urge you to listen to too. Sonically, the resemblance to Pink Floyd’s The Wall, will make you feel comfortable— and make the austere, even chilling, message, easier to digest and grapple with. I’ve been reading an anthology of essays, edited by Lori Perkins, 1984 In The 21st Century, which put me right in the proper head space for Waters’ music.

In his essay, How 1984 Can Decode Trump’s First 100 Days, attorney and self-described hacker with a Dali mustache, Alexander Urbelis, wrote of “the linguistic assault on, and blatant disregard for, the truth and rational thought by senior Trump administration officials and the President himself.”

We are now fighting a battle over who controls the very notion of what is real and fake, true and false. We cannot afford to mince words: President Trump and his staff have used and will use lies and deceit to create a false perception of reality that suits their political agenda.

They have espoused as truth unsupportable and untenable falsehoods on a daily basis, and it has become the near-full time responsibility of the media to call out the fictions of the administration. If we do not continue the struggle for basic honesty, we are warned by Orwell that uncorrected lies will be "passed into history and [become] truth."

1984 is a menacing tale about the fictional state of Oceania. It exists in a state of continuous and seemingly never-ending war, its institutions are notoriously revisionist and manipulative of public perception with no regard for historical facts or truth. Overseeing law and order and guarding against even minor rebellion is overt and omnipresent government surveillance; and in the seat of power directing all functions of state is Big Brother, a cult of personality demanding of the most intense personal and political loyalty.

Orwell's lessons, cautions and predictions have in my life never been more real and more serious than they are now. Those lessons and parallels merit serious consideration.

Much has been written about newspeak, the fictional language of Oceania, with its deliberately limited and constantly diminishing vocabulary, and how its assaults on truth and reason parallel Trump administration practices. The idea behind newspeak is that by reducing vocabulary it is also possible to constrict personal thought and the freedom of expression.

In Orwell's world, there is no such thing as the word "bad," it is instead "ungood." But could this very surface-level comparison between newspeak and Conway's characterization of Spicer's blatant lies as "alternative facts" really be spurring such a resurgence in interest in the 1984? Of course not. There is more.

In everything from his Cabinet appointments to the rationale for destabilizing executive orders, President Trump appears to have taken a cue directly from 1984’s fictional ministries, whose purposes are diametrically opposed to their names. Orwell's Ministry of Truth ("Minitrue" in newspeak), for example, had nothing to do with truth but was responsible for the fabrication of historical facts.

In that vein, President Trump has provided us, in the name of security, with a travel ban on immigrants and refugees from countries whose citizens have caused the terrorism deaths of no Americans, while leaving out countries whose citizens have caused the terrorism deaths of thousands of Americans.

He has provided us with Betsy DeVos, a secretary of education nominee who is widely believed to oppose public education, and who promotes the truly Orwellian-sounding concept of "school choice," a plan that seems well-intentioned but which critics complain actually siphons much-needed funds from public to private education institutions.

Andy Pudzer-- named to head the Labor Department, which is charged with promoting and protecting the welfare of wage earners-- has a checkered past with workers' rights and has actually praised the efficiency of robots over humans on account of automatons' inability to take vacation and file discrimination complaints.

And we cannot fail to mention that Scott Pruitt-- nominated to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which has responsibility to protect health and the environment-- as Oklahoma attorney general devoted his office to battling the EPA, actively sought deregulation of air pollution requirements, and spearheaded the attack on Obama's efforts to reduce global warming, the Clean Power Plan.

What is truly terrifying is that President Trump and his people refuse to recognize the contradictory nature of their positions, which is the condition perfectly described in 1984 as doublethink. "[T]o hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing both of them," is doublethink. And most germane: "To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed," is doublethink.

Going hand-in-hand with the concept of doublethink was the notion of blackwhite: "a loyal willingness to say that black is white when party discipline demands." Blackwhite, however, is more sinister, in that it "means also the ability to believe that black is white ... to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed to the contrary."

We saw this firsthand when President Trump addressed staff members at the CIA. As he recalled his mental impressions of the inauguration crowd, he said, "I looked out, the field was-- it looked like a million, million and a half people." And I do not think he was lying. I believe that President Trump believed this because he had to believe it: The revision of events one day prior to his speech was necessary because it was the only way he could assert legitimacy to control the present moment. The worst, however, is not that Conway and Spicer so easily and willingly followed suit with their own acts of blackwhite, but that they really believed that we-- the media and the people-- would in turn do the same.

Perkins chose to lead off her anthology with David Brin’s George Orwell And The Self-Preventing Prophecy. “One of the most powerful novels of all time, published fifty years ago, foresaw a dark future that never came to pass,” he wrote. “That we escaped the destiny portrayed in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four may be owed in part to the way his chilling tale affected millions, who then girded themselves to fight ‘Big Brother’ to their last breath. In other words, Orwell may have helped make his own scenario not come true.”

[In] Big Brother — Orwell showed us the pit awaiting any civilization that combines panic with technology and the dark, cynical tradition of tyranny. In so doing, he armed us against that horrible fate. In contrast to the sheep-like compliance displayed by subject peoples in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it seems that a ‘rebel’ image has taken charge of our shared imaginations. Every conceivable power center, from governments and corporations to criminal and techno-elites, has been repeatedly targeted by Hollywood’s most relentless theme... suspicion of authority.

…History is a long and dreary litany of ruinous decisions made by rulers in all centuries and on all continents. No convoluted social theory is needed to explain this. A common thread weaves through most of these disasters; a flaw in human character— self-deception— eventually enticed even great leaders into taking fatal mis-steps, ignoring the warnings of others.

The problem is devastatingly simple, as the late physicist-author Richard Feynman put it. “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself— and you are the easiest person to fool.”

Many authors have railed against the cruelty and oppression of despots. But George Orwell focused also on the essential stupidity of tyranny, by portraying how the ferocious yet delusional oligarchs of Oceania were grinding their nation into a state of brutalized poverty. Their tools had been updated, but their rationalizations were essentially the same ones prescribed by oppressors for ages. By keeping the masses ill-educated, by whipping up hatred of scapegoats and by quashing free speech, elites in nearly all cultures strove to eliminate criticism and preserve their short-term status... thus guaranteeing long-term disaster for the nations they led.

This tragic and ubiquitous defect may have been the biggest factor chaining us far below our potential as a species. That is, till we stumbled onto a solution.

The solution of many voices.

Each of us may be too stubbornly self-involved to catch our own mistakes. But in an open society, we can often count on others to notice them for us. Though we all hate irksome criticism and accountability, they are tools that work. The four great secular institutions that fostered our unprecedented wealth and freedom— science, justice, democracy and market— function best when all players get to see, hear, speak, know, argue, compete and create without fear. One result is that the “pie” we are all dividing up keeps getting larger.

In other words, elites actually do better— in terms of absolute wealth— when they cannot conspire to keep the relative differences of wealth too great. And yet, this ironic truth escaped notice by nearly all past aristocracies, obsessed as they were with staying as far above the riffraff as possible.

Orwell saw this pattern, perhaps more clearly than anyone, portraying it in the banal and witless justifications given by Oceania apparachniks.

How have we done with his warning? Today, in the modern neo-west, even elites cannot escape being pilloried by spotlights and scrutiny. They may not like it, but it does them (and especially us) worlds of good. Moreover, this openness has helped prevent the worst misuses of technology that Orwell feared. Though video cameras are now smaller, cheaper and even more pervasive than he ever imagined, their arrival in numberless swarms has not had the totalitarian effect he prophesied, perhaps because— forewarned— we act to ensure that the lenses point both ways.

This knack of holding the mighty accountable, possibly our culture’s most unique achievement, is owed largely to those who gazed at human history and saw the central paradox of power— what’s good for the leader and what’s good for the commonwealth only partly overlap, and can often skew at right angles. In throwing out some of the rigid old command structures— the kings, priests and demagogues who claimed to rule by inherent right— we seem to be gambling instead on an innovative combination: blending rambunctious individualism with mutual-accountability.

Those two traits may sound incompatible at first. But any sensible person knows that one cannot thrive without the other.

…Criticism is the best antidote to error. Yet most humans, especially the mighty, try to avoid it. Leaders of past cultures crushed free speech and public access to information, a trend Orwell showed being enhanced by technology in a future when elites control all the cameras. In part thanks to Orwell's warning, ours may be the first civilization to systematically avoid this cycle, whose roots lie in human nature. We have learned that few people are mature enough to hold themselves accountable, but in an open society, adversaries eagerly pounce on each others' errors. To preserve our freedom, we must not try to limit the cameras— they are coming anyway and no law will ever prevent the elites from seeing. Instead, we must make sure all citizens share the boon— and burden— of sight. This is already the world we live in. One where the people look hard at the mighty, and look harder the mightier they are.

Orwell's dark future can’t come true if confident citizens have a habit of protecting themselves by seeing and knowing… Despite repeated efforts by our own hierarchs to justify one-way information flows, the true record of the last generation has been an indisputable and overwhelming dispersal of knowledge and the power to see. People are becoming addicted to knowing.

A new poll from the Associated Press shows that most Americans think Señor Trumpanzee “has little to no respect for the country’s democratic traditions.” 65% of Americans think he doesn’t have much respect for the country’s democratic institutions and traditions or has none at all. “Nearly a third of Republicans and independents who lean toward the Republican party think Trump has little to no respect for the country’s democratic institutions, and a quarter disapprove of the job he’s doing as president. Nine in 10 Democrats and 6 in 10 independents say the same.”

I’ll just leave you with a paragraph from Marc Polite’s essay, Controlling The Present: How “1984” Predicted “Alternative Facts And “Fake News.” He reminded his readers that “In our political discourse soon after the inauguration of Donald Trump, a very curious term slipped into the lexicon. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway, in defense of White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer giving out false statements about the size of the crowds at the inauguration, said that he was giving out ‘alternative facts.’ Not lies, but ‘alternative facts.’ The term Orwellian applies her aptly.”

Remember the Ingsoc Party slogan: “Who controls the past, controls the future… who controls the present, controls the past.” Why not listen to Roger Waters’ song again?

Buyers' Remorse? Or Trumpy-the-Clown Can Do No Wrong?

Will Americans suddenly like obstructionism now that it's coming from the Democrats rather than from Republicans? Or will they agree that the collection of misfits and rogues Trump has been nominating for office are beyond the pale and really do need to be stopped? Or will Americans think the GOP needs to be taught a lesson for what they did to President Obama's nominations, particularly Merrick Garland? Or... is the plan to obstruct Trumps' nominees-- a plan that can only end in Trumpy-the-Clown victories-- going to further alienate the public from government and make them hate it more, something that always serves the long-term strategies of conservatives, who strive to make the public distrust and dislike government? You know the answer already-- in a deeply divided nation, all of the above will prove true, dividing the nation even more deeply.

Sure Democrats say it isn't just about revenge-- something Trump voters can at least understand-- but that some of Trump's "more controversial Cabinet picks-- such as Jeff Sessions for attorney general and Steven Mnuchin for treasury secretary-- demand a thorough public airing." Who says Sessions is "controversial?" Not the people of Alabama. Not voters who elected Trump. Of course the Democrats should "demand a thorough public airing," but why announce it as some kind of strategy that re-focuses the argument away from Sessions? Sherrod Brown: "They’ve been rewarded for stealing a Supreme Court justice. We’re going to help them confirm their nominees, many of whom are disqualified? It’s not obstruction, it’s not partisan, it’s just a duty to find out what they’d do in these jobs."

The tit-for-tat between the parties looks like it's here to stay.

“I’m not into retribution. I really think public service should be more than that,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “But they’ve set a pretty harsh standard.”

Republicans are betting that "the public" doesn't care about the Democrats' complaints-- and, at this point, they're probably right. Only 11% of Trump voters wish the election could be a do over and they could not vote for him. 23% say they would have voted for Bernie Sanders if they had the chance. But when that 11% number turns into 50%, that's when the public won't be buying into lies promoted by Michael Flynn about Hillary child sex rings in the back of DC pizzerias and maybe buyers' remorseful be strong enough for the public to rally behind the flawed and unattractive Democratic Party alternative.

Now... as Darren Samuelsohn reported for Politico yesterday, too many Americans just don't even care that Trump has more conflicts of interest than every president before him combined. That's what McConnell and Ryan are counting on to push their their toxic agendas. Republicans, he wrote, are "dismissing Democratic threats of investigations and ethicists’ calls for divestment out of a belief that the political landscape has shifted. Voters rewarded Trump in part on the idea that success in business will equal success in government, and Republicans are therefore unwilling to encourage the president-elect to put distance between the Oval Office and Trump Tower, or between himself and the children who serve him as trusted advisers." Newt Gingrich suggest the Democrats "get over it."

[P]olitically, Trump and many Republicans sense he is insulated from the heat Democrats intend to bring. He said as much himself last month amid a wave of news accounts and Democratic congressional oversight requests demanding closer scrutiny of his finances. “Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world. Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!” Trump posted on Twitter.

...Almost daily, Trump’s critics fire off letters demanding action or introducing resolutions with little chance of picking up speed. They’re circulating op-eds and news articles written by local and national news organizations that have seen their own power wane. They’re circulating petitions and videos on MoveOn.org and jamming congressional phone lines.

“It’s asinine,” Chris Wilson, a GOP strategist who ran the data and analytics shop for Ted Cruz’s presidential campaign, said of the Democratic attempts to confront Trump on his conflicts of interest.

“If there was a situation that came up in which later there was a true conflict of interest, that created a dangerous national security situation, the problem is now nobody would believe them... They’re just jumping into it so quickly and on such a stupid issue that it’s almost embarrassing to watch.”

Trump, of course, hasn’t been sworn in yet-- so much of what’s happening now lives very much in the realm of the hypothetical.

...At least for now, the early polling shows a divided county that’s still coming to grips with the complexities of the Trump conflicts. A CNN survey released last month found almost 60 percent of respondents saying they didn’t think Trump was going far enough with indications that he would hand over control of his company to his children. Another poll, taken before Thanksgiving by Politico/Morning Consult, had more than six in 10 respondents welcoming Trump’s children playing a large role in running their father’s company. But less than a third said they were willing to accept the idea that Trump’s family would be involved in his administration.

Democrats and a smattering of GOP voices are demanding Trump sell his whole business outright, moving his assets into a “blind trust,” like other recent presidents did, where he has no clear insight into his investments and therefore can’t direct policy in a way that would yield personal profit. What’s more, they insist Trump needs to remove his children from the White House and no longer include them in his transition planning and in meetings with foreign officials and other people who will be involved in his government decision making.

Trump’s supporters, however, see little reason to make such dramatic changes.

“You can’t take Trump as a name and a $10 billion system and hide it. It’s just stupid,” Gingrich said. He’s urging Trump to turn the company over to his children and establish a panel of three to five people who meet monthly and review the company’s activities “and make sure in no way it’s being used to the advantage of Trump.”

Republicans who fought Trump during the campaign saw the same signs among voters-- the conflict issue isn’t one they cared much about.

“His brand perception as a successful businessman was too strong,” said Tim Miller, a former Jeb Bush spokesman. “If we had a full year and put big money behind it, could we have changed that? Who knows? But during the small window we were working in, we saw no movement.”

And with a hack hyper-partisan Republican, Jason Chaffetz, chairing the House Oversight Committee, it's pretty clear that there will be no serious investigations into Trump's conflicts, like a concerted attempt it whitewash them. There's already a wikipedia page for this-- and Trump's conflicts of interest are already regular fodder for the late night comedy shows.

Another Brick In The Wall

British rock stars were never part of Hillary's crumbling firewall-- not like Georgia state Sen. Vincent Fort, the #2 Democrat in the Georgia Senate, who flipped his endorsement this morning from Hillary to Bernie-- but, nonetheless, another brick in the wall is now out of reach for her campaign which is being viewed world over as less and less believeable and less and less inevitable. Pink Floyd's Roger Waters was early in seeing the danger of the neocon monster that is so much a part of Hillary Clinton. Back in October he endorsed Bernie and said he was worried that Hillary "might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody."

The other day I was interviewed by someone writing a book about the early days of psychedelic rock and she knew more about me than I could remember myself. "Do you remember," she asked almost reverentially, "when you played See Emily Play on WUSB for the first time, the first airplay Pink Floyd ever got in America?" Oy. I don't remember much about my Stony Brook dj days. I was always up on the roof of the station getting high between long tracks like Revelation from Da Capo. But I do remember that I played Arnold Layne before I played "See Emily Play." So someone was misremembering something here. I liked "See Emily Play" way better and played it more often.

Waters can't vote in a U.S. election but he told Rolling Stone why he's hoping Bernie wins. "He's the only person in the race that I see with any credibility. He seems to speak the truth, far as one can tell at this point. He seems prepared to stand up against big money and the banks and stand up for the predicaments of minorities, the middle class and the working class in this country."

He says that Hillary Clinton is a "far better alternative than any of the Republican candidates by a long, long way," but he still has severe reservations about her. "Hillary worries me," he says. "I have an awful worry that she might become the first woman president to drop a fucking nuclear bomb on somebody. There is something scarily hawkish about her, and she has that politician look down of, 'You are never going to get a word of truth out of me.'"



Many Democrats say that if Sanders is nominated, it will hand the election to the Republicans because the Vermont senator is so radical. "It is true that people become marginalized if their politics appear too far to the left," he says. "That is why I admire Sanders. When he speaks the truth, he sounds very left-wing, but that is because we have been fed this right-wing bullshit by the whole of the mainstream media since the Second World War. And it has gotten worse and worse and worse, and the outlets for dissenting voices have become fewer and fewer. So he is bound to sound out of step, because he is! And that is what is so good about him."

Back to Georgia for a moment, where Senator Fort explained his switch to Bernie by saying, "After months of looking at Bernie’s record and studying his positions on healthcare, Wall Street, predatory lending and the minimum wage, I came to the conclusion that Bernie’s position on the issues that affect my constituents in Georgia the most conform most closely to my positions... He’s going to do well here. As people have a chance to listen to him, to have a chance to understand that he’s speaking to the issues that are the most critica. As people study and listen to him, I think there’s going to be movement toward his campaign." Fort is now the most high-profile Bernie backer in Georgia, joining state Rep. LaDawn Jones and Clarkston Mayor Ted Terry-- and putting him at odds with a very uninspiring party establishment.

Hillary and her surrogates have, predictably, floated the ugly Clintonian smear that Bernie is lying when he says he was involved in the Civil Rights movement. It's well-documented-- and though she doesn't bring it up when talking on the campaign trail, she admits it when cornered-- that she was a Goldwater Girl and subsequently the president of the Young Republicans at Wellesley College at the time. Bernie was at the University of Chicago, president of the local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Perhaps she's changed; she seems to on about everything-- but he hasn't. He's been a stalwart fighter for progressive values while she was a right-wing activist and a corporate shill, sitting on the Board of Walmart. Here's a video of him being arrested in 1963 at a school segregation protest in Englewood:

Have A Cigar-- A Guest Post From Nicholas Ruiz (D-FL)

After that sexy call from ‘David Koch’-- Scott Walker must have had a fat cigar. Feeling high on the perceived power of his makeshift Wisconsin fiefdom, he might have taken a big flaming stick match to the tip of his conceivably illegal hand-rolled Cuban stogie. Next, he may have thought about his next Reagan PATCO moment-- when Reagan, many claim, unjustifiably and unethically, fired thousands of striking air traffic controllers, in a vehement attack upon workers’ rights.

But he was wrong. Wrong about Koch, who was not Koch at all but a journalist, pretending to be Koch. Just like he’s wrong about ‘his’ Reagan PATCO moment that he describes in the phone conversation gone viral on the web. Walker and his brethren were born at the wrong time of history because there will not be another PATCO moment-– if there are representatives we can still call ‘Democrats.’

Rather, because of the thirty years’ war Republicans have wrought upon unions as the last major proxy for workers’ rights-– the Democratic reaction will be a remarkable, 21st century extension of labor laws, so that workers have the same protections as unions, regardless of whether they belong to a union or not. My candidacy for U.S. Representative in Congress for Florida District 24 includes this objective as part of my platform.

People like Rick Scott, whom Walker suggests is an ally while speaking with ‘Koch,’ with regard to his tyrannical plan to batter workers’ rights nationwide, is also wrong. Rejecting $2.4 billion in federal funds for high speed rail in central Florida, which Florida desperately needs to construct to allay the nauseatingly crowded I-4 corridor amid central Florida’s tourism hub, not to mention the work it would provide for one of the most unemployed states in America-- Scott flubbed off what he called the ‘ObamaRail’ in his Twitter stream, reported by Central Florida News 13 on Feb. 17, 2011.

Scott probably lit a fat cigar after that tweet, no?

In another sign of the wrongness of the times, first generation son of Cuban immigrants, and freshman Senator from Florida, Republican Marco Rubio, reported the Miami Herald on Feb. 23, 2011-– declares America is in danger of drowning in her debt. And of course, his probable tea leaf answer is to cut all the tiny social programs that don’t really contribute to the debt, and were already severely under-funded from the start, but yet a lot of people rely upon for everything from kidney dialysis to food in this current wasteland of an economy. Essentially, Rubio-- like Scott, like Walker, like NJ’s Christie who actually suggests we raise the retirement eligibility age and apparently exhibited boyish pride in espousing it on Feb. 16, 2011 at the American Enterprise Institute-– looks for deep nasty cuts, in all of the wrong places.

Truly, America is in danger of drowning, but in Republican fecal rhetoric, misinformation and sandbox mentality-- not debt, which we are servicing just fine.

We could stand a correction to our American revenue stream, however, by taxing more fairly, our citizens and corporations. And where cuts should be made, is where there is truly unfair excess, not where there is already unfair scarcity. And where American populations are growing and expanding, so too, should our government jobs and services. Progress is for everyone, no? America is only as strong as its weakest link. We must help the poor and less fortunate, where we can.

Yes, the government can and should create jobs, alongside the private corporations, hand in hand-- not as master and servant. Hire more teachers, postal workers, social workers and so on-- everybody knows we need more of them; build more schools, universities and medical clinics; invest in cultural infrastructure for the arts and humanities; build more libraries, community educational and environmental centers; expand the educational facilities of NASA, NOAA and the EPA, as well as the NEH and NEA-- teach people that both science and art matter. There’s plenty we can do to ensure that the 21st century is one of Democratic enlightenment, rather than Republican darkness.

So maybe you like cigars. Gordon Gekko likes cigars. We hear Clinton had a thing for cigars, no? FDR smoked. And we hear Obama is struggling to quit the habit-- cigarettes, cigars-- who knows? And lastly, maybe Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) should have a smoke, considering his latest stressor in Nevada.

Me? I don’t smoke-- but I sure like this song:



In 2012-- put a progressive Democrat in Congress.

----

Blue America PAC has endorsed Nicholas Ruiz for Congress. In fact, he's our first candidate of the 2012 cycle. You can donate to his campaign on our Act Blue page. His is an all grassroots race to replace a reactionary teabagger and hypocrite. He can use whatever help you can give. Take a look at this video from Wisconsin. This is what Nicholas' campaign is all about and why Blue America is supporting him and other candidates like him:

THE TIDE IS TURNING

If you're feeling inundated with all that trash on the TV about Rev Wright and all the anti-Obama garbage being thrown by the vile insiders and their media, take a minute to watch this Roger Waters song. (Although first take a look at this Wall Street Journal/MSNBC poll which basically makes the case that even with the entire corporate media smearing Obama 24/7 about Rev. Wright, the biggest problem any candidate is facing because of an association is McCain-- and the association is George W. Bush.

In the survey, 43 percent of registered voters say they have major concerns that McCain is too closely aligned with the current administration.

By comparison:

36 percent have major concerns that Clinton seems to change her position on some issues (like driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants and the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband signed but which she now opposes)
34 percent say they’re bothered by Obama’s “bitter” remarks
32 percent have a major problem with the Illinois senator’s past associations with Wright and the 1960s radical William Ayers
27 percent have serious concerns that Bill Clinton would have too much influence on U.S. policy decisions if his wife is elected

.

On my way back from the airport today I was listening to an interview on NPR about the political attitudes in a KKK bastion of Indiana, Martinsville. One guys who sounded like he may have spent some time running around in a sheet and pillow case once or twice in his lifetime, seemed very uncomfortable with the idea of a woman or an African-American president. But he absolutely dismissed out of hand the idea of voting for McCain who he said is too aligned with Bush. I don't think he reads the Journal. In the end he said his male chauvinist side was pushing him towards Obama. I was hoping he may have seen Pink Floyd's Obama pig (see above) floating by and that that had convinced him. But it wasn't.

"I think a lot of things would change. Probably the male chauvinist in me is going to vote for the man just because. I'm going to be honest, it probably won't be McCain, since he stands for everything George Bush stands for. I think [Obama] says he doesn't take money from the lobbyists, which I think can be real positive."

Anyway, here's Roger: