Author Archives: willykay

Dr. Gina Loudon – a Missouri Tea Party (not so) golden oldie defends Trump’s mental fitness

14 Friday Sep 2018

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Remember Missouri’s would be Tea Party “glamour couple,” former State Senator John Loudon and his wife, Dr. Gina Loudon? After John was term-limited out of the state legislature, the couple moved to San Diego where Dr. Gina continued to opine on right-wing radio and occasionally opines on national cable news. Apart from a surprising turn on TV’s sleazy “Wife-Swap,” where the ostensibly evangelical Loudons’ “swapped” spouses with a free-living “polyamorous” family, the couple have been relatively quiet.

Quiet, that is, if you ignore the 2,000 word essay Dr. Gina published, analyzing her responses to her adolescent daughter’s relationship with a 57 year old D-list celebrity. There’s been just a little local right-wing rabble-rousing also, which, cognizant of the themes that are most popular with Trumpies, have emphasized immigrant-baiting and sanctuary city slamming in their new home town.

But it would have been too much to expect that a chancer like Dr. Gina would not try to cash in on the Trump phenomena sooner or later. Armed with nothing more than an online Ph.D. in something called human and organization systems, and without any training or certifications in clinical psychology, she has published a book in which she devotes an entire chapter to claims that Trump might be the “‘most sound-minded’ president in history.” To give you a taste of her methodology in assessing Trump’s mental soundness, consider the following assertion:

Citing “anecdotal research,” Loudon writes that one key to Trump’s mental fitness is the fact that he is the fourth of five children. “Birth order seems to be the foundation for all other factors that create and define the psychology of the person” she writes, citing the book Life’s Fingerprint by Robert V. V. Hurst—a trained dentist who studied his dental patients.

In case, you’re wondering, it’s not so, according to a meta-analysis of sibling and birth order studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But junk-science theories applied with a total unawareness of nuance is only one of Loudon’s tools. She also filled out the Meyer-Briggs Personality Inventory selecting those answers that she thinks best describe Trump (who is not a close personal friend, but who is an an acquaintance), and concludes that he must have “mad presidential skills!” since the test-by-proxy identifies Trump as “ENTJ,” dubbed “the commander” on Personalities.com. Personalities.com yet!

Loudon doesn’t confine her analytical insights to Donald Trump, however. She also asserts, in her role as Dr. Gina, Ph.D, that the recent anonymously-authored New York Times Op-ed showed clear signs of “Trump derangement syndrome.” Stop and think. It’s one thing for a toady to produce a lick-spittle assessment of Trump from afar – and still yet another to go on national TV, as the unqualified Loudon did while hawking her book, and pretend to diagnose a completely unknown individual.

To give Loudon credit, she admits that she lacks the requisite training to substantiate her pronouncements; instead she contends that her ” gut instincts, which have nothing to do with my professional training, are pretty solid.” Remind you of someone else who relies on his (substantial) gut to conduct foreign policy? And indeed, while attempting to refute the commonly held belief that Trump suffers from narcissistic personality disorder – in terms that show she does not actually understand the behavioral characteristics of the condition – she reveals that testing has put her on the “narcissism spectrum.” Quelle surprise.

The book is titled Mad Politics: Keeping Your Sanity in a World Gone Crazy, and it looks like it might be a laugh a minute. Of course, I’m not recommending that anyone buy it, no need to enrich Loudon for producing a book described by one authority on psychological testing as “frankly idiotic” – but libraries were made for books like this. Or, if it’s too embarrassing to check it out,  just skim it over the proverbial liberal latte at your local bookstore cum coffee shop.

Is Josh Hawley a theocrat or an intolerant fanatic. Or are they the same thing?

06 Thursday Sep 2018

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The English Oxford Living Dictionaries defines a fanatic as one who exhibits “excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause.”

So what’s a theocrat? According to Mirriam-Webster, it’s “one who rules in or lives under a theocratic form of government,” which is defined as “government of a state by immediate divine guidance or by officials who are regarded as divinely guided.” In other words, a theocrat is a religious fanatic who wants to make sure we all defer to his God and jump to order when he legislates what he believes to be his God’s preferences.

An example of a wannabe theocrat here in Missouri is our current Attorney General and Republican Senatorial candidate, Josh Hawley.

Many have noticed that Hawley is just a bit uninspired when it comes to his regular duties as AG – such as fulfilling promises that he would fight against Jefferson City’s culture of corruption. But Hawley doesn’t always run on empty; what gets the the boy’s blood primed is any perceived slight to the power of the state to insist that we we all defer to his brand of Christianity.

Hawley calls it defending religious liberty. Others have pointed out his religious liberty amounts to repression and a license for bigotry. But judge for yourself; here’s a few examples of our AG’s religious crusades:

  • Hawley’s current bête noire is the Johnson Amendment which he wants to eliminate. so that churches can make official political endorsements and still retain tax-free status. He seems to believe that it violates his and like-minded folks religious liberty and freedom of speech if I, a nonbeliever, don’t have to subsidize their political views via a tax exemption for their politicized churches – a point of view, by the way, with which most Americans and numerous religious bodies disagree. And, of course, GOP candidates like Hawley are salivating over all the dark money that will be funneled into campaigns via donations to churches once the Johnson Amendment is history and the total politicization of religious life – along lines they favor – has been achieved.
  • Hawley, while running for AG, advocated for state legislation to “ensure that churches and businesses will not be compelled to “participate” in same-sex marriages” – a bit bizarre since the Fist Amendment clearly protects churches from such coercion already, and, since Missouri does not provide anti-discrimination protection for LGBT people, there could be no possible legal grounds to try to force the issue. He may have finally figured this out since, so far as I know, we’ve not heard about it since he won the AG race.
  • Hawley also claims credit for his somewhat nominal participation in the famous Hobby-Lobby case which gave “closely-held” businesses permission to refuse to provide their female employees with insurance that paid for birth-control if doing so clashed with the owners religious or “moral” beliefs.
    • He attributes his support for this decision to his belief that “abortion is not a right,”[… .] It is a violent act against the defenseless. It violates every principle of morality and should be barred by American law.” Immoral? Yes. Because Hawley’s believes his God says so.To hell with my God.

What are the implications for regular people if their AG – or, God forbid, their senator – is a religious zealot? Consider the following:

A 34-year-old painter is suing Dahled Up Construction, a company based south of Portland, Ore., for allegedly firing him after he refused to join a Christian Bible group for employees. [… .]

Coleman told The Washington Post that when he explained to the company’s owner, Joel Dahl, that he had different beliefs, Dahl said: “If you want to keep your job, everybody needs to attend. If not, I’m going to be forced to replace you.”

Where do you think AG Hawley would come down? Do you trust him to understand what we’re supposed to be in America?  Theocrats want the power of a specific religion to be pervasive and all-encompassing – and bear in mind that the desire of persecuted religions – those not endorsed by the ruling theocrats – to escape theocratic rule is one of the reasons that our country exists.

 

Immigration: Trump says jump; Hawley leaps into the muck

24 Friday Aug 2018

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Josh Hawley, we are frequently reminded, went to Stanford and Yale. He’s supposed to be a smart man. He also claims to be a religious man and as such is supposed to be compassionate toward those who are needy and persecuted.

As a consequence, Hawley faces a serious dilemma. He clearly believes he has to stick to Trump like a burr lest the deplorables be aroused – no matter how absurd, dishonest, cruel, or destructive Trump reveals himself to be. This dilemma is especially evident when it comes to Trump’s favorite hobby, keeping dark complexioned people from sh*****e countries out of the U.S.

It’s obvious that it’s a difficult slog. When Trump announces that we must deport immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers “with no Judges or Court Cases,” Hawley does his best to evade the issue. He has refused to tell us whether or not he supports constitutionally mandated due process for immigrants, a question that ought to be a no-brainer for a guy with his background. In the words of one of his primary opponents, Austen Petersen, “Josh Hawley is an ivy-league educated, constitutional lawyer, who is either constitutionally illiterate, or too much of a coward to admit what he knows is true. The 14th Amendment is clear.”

When it comes to family separation, an almost universally denounced policy, Hawlely  tried to deflect. A the Kansas City Star put it, he “stopped short of calling for the policy to end immediately and put the blame on McCaskill” (WTF!) Even Mr. Test-the-Wind Mumblecore himself, Roy Blunt, managed to do better than that.

Sad as it it, these efforts represent the extent of Hawley’s self-assertion – he’s mostly a good little Trump trooper. He calls for “securing the border and building the wall,” while blaming Claire McCaskill and by extension Democrats, for failing to fix a broken immigration system in a Congress totally dominated by risk-averse Republicans. Hawley evidently doesn’t seem to know that his fellow GOPers have refused again and again to consider bipartisan immigration efforts, including those in which McCaskill participated. As for that storied wall – the one that could cost billions and do little or nothing to protect the border, well, we all know baby knows better, but, hey, talk is cheap.

Seriously, though, isn’t it kind of sad to see a guy endorsed by that supposed moral arbiter, former Senator John Danforth, go along to get along? I guess Danforth’s hoping he’ll clean up good after the election. In case he can’t get it together, though, I offer the following list of what I have learned about immigration over the past couple of years. Perhaps, after he’s washed off the Trump filth, Hawley might find it informative:

  •  Conditions in the Central American Northern triangle and in the Middle East from which so many are fleeing are truly horrific.
  • That horrific situation is in many respects the result of past actions by the United States:
    • In the eighties the United States backed vicious right wing dictatorships in Central America and helped train death squads while we participated in or instigated civil wars that displaced thousands.
    • Later, the U.S.-led war on drugs “succeeded” in South America by pushing violent cartels north, into Central America.
    • Lax U.S. gun laws also factor into the levels of violence; an estimated 200,000 guns purchased in the U.S. are annually smuggled into Central America.
    • The violent MS-13 gang that Trump uses to scare his immigrant-averse base was, in the words of one writer, “made in America” and exported to back to Central America.
    • I’m pretty sure I don’t need to detail the role played by the U.S. in destabilizing the Middle East, an area from which another group of demonized immigrants hail?
  • Immigrants do not contribute to crime in the U.S. at a higher level than native born citizens.
  • The Washington Post notes that studies have shown that “states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through 2014.”
  • Anecdotes about specific immigrant wrongdoers do not substantiate the assertion that an entire group is crime prone. Numbers tell the true story.
  • Immigrants do not “take” jobs from native-born Americans.
  • Currently, several industries are threatened by worker shortages that have resulted from the Trumpian anti-immigrant jihad (see here, here , here and here).
  • Legal immigrants pay taxes.
  • At least 50% of undocumented immigrants also pay state and federal income taxes and contribute to the Social Security trust funds – to the tune of billions of dollars.
  • The taxes paid by immigrants help makeup the shortfall in tax revenues and Social Security reserves in the U.S. where the birth rate has been slowing for decades.
  • Anti-immigrant sentiment has been highly racialized in response to political demagoguery – which has also encouraged already existing anti-immigrant, racist, hate groups.

Given the facts listed above, maybe Hawley ought to answer these questions next time he’s asked about one or another of Trump’s immigration tirades:

  • As professed a Christian doesn’t Hawley have a moral responsibility to generously respond to “the least of these,” which today’s Central American and Middle Eastern refugees surely are?
  • Wouldn’t Hawley, were he to be elected to a powerful national position, have an equally heavy moral responsibility to help clean up after foreign policy blunders and try to undo the harm we have done to these people?
  • Wouldn’t Hwley be endangering our future by catering to racial and cultural fears and ignoring the important role immigrants play in our economy and could continue to play if he were to to act in good faith to try to “fix” our immigration policy?
  • Does Hawley really want to be allied with white supremacists, neo-nazis and other hate groups?

How about it Josh Hawley?

Josh Hawley: Not as smart as they thought?

16 Thursday Aug 2018

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So what about Josh Hawley? There’s this little morsel (as noted by Michael Bersin here) which indicates that perhaps the guy just isn’t working with all the lights burning:

In Missouri’s U.S. Senate race, Josh Hawley (R) slammed Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) this morning for “hiding out” in Washington, D.C. For the record, the Senate is in session, which means McCaskill just went to work.

One twitter commentator suggested that Hawley might need a tutorial on how government works. In fact, lots of folks have been wondering this summer if Hawley’s really up to speed when it comes to “work,” and “politics” stuff – an impression that this post-primary awkwardness reinforces. Perhaps a tutorial would be just the thing.

Want more evidence that our hero is a little slower on the uptake than we’d expect from a Yale and Stanford graduate? How about Hawlely’s inability to let us know what he thinks about major issues in Missouri politics like the ballot initiatives that will come before the voters this November: we’ll vote on a higher minimum wage, clean government measures, including fair redistricting reform, increases to the gas tax to pay for sorely needed infrastructure improvements, and legalization of medical marijuana.

“Yes” or “no” stuff for any thinking politician, right? But Hawley seems to be a little worried that he might get somebody’s dander up if he expresses a real opinion on possibly controversial topics, which may be why he’s so willing to temporize. He declares that:

… he needs to read through all of the proposals and is still making up his mind. He said he’s inclined to support medical marijuana, but he said he wants to make sure there are enough protections to limit it to medical uses.

We’ve known that these initiatives would probably be on the ballot for some time – and even if we hadn’t, each of them is important enough, and most have been swirling around in the national conversation with such force, that we should be able expect a serious candidate for statewide office to have well-thought out opinions.

Senator McCaskill, I notice, is able to discuss the propositions straightforwardly without obfuscation or withdrawing into a shuddering heap. What we get are clear cut answers about what she believes will work best for Missourians. She likes all the propositions – expressing serious enthusiasm about clean government measures, something that all ethical politicians should be able to endorse. She even approves of the gas tax – a position that takes courage in these days when a sizeable section of the electorate has been brain-washed to think that you don’t have to pay for what you get – or that the other guy doesn’t deserve what you get.

There is one aspect of the questions raised by the ballot propositions that Hawley is willing to commit to. Our prim, proper and very religious AG is pretty clear that no one should be able to toke up who isn’t suffering from an agonizing or terminal disease. Easy-peasy decision if you’ve got your priorities straight.

Who’s the phoney, Farm Bureau? Hawley or McCaskill – or is it just plain old racism?

12 Sunday Aug 2018

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I was surprised by the decision of the Missouri Farm Bureau to endorse our lackadaisical Attorney General Josh Hawley in his run for the U.S. Senate. You might be surprised by my attitude since the Farm Bureau has for some time been reliably Republican, a position practically dictated by the perceived competition between out-state (GOP) and urban (Democratic) interests. But it’s true.

Remember when our Attorney General and GOP senatorial contender Hawley first tried out a little lame trash talk trash about Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill? He called the down-to-earth Missouri Democrat, one of the few Missouri pols to hold town halls – even during the height of the raucous Tea Party anti-Obamacare frenzy – a phony who was out of touch with Missouri voters. Rich B.S. indeed, as we have shown in an earlier post, coming from an elite Washington lawyer who, according to emails to colleagues, only returned to Missouri in 2011 to enter politics.

But more important to the question at hand, are farmers likely to get anything out of Hawley that’s good for them? Consider the question of Trump’s mindlessly escalating trade war which has triggered massive agricultural tariffs: Not good for Missouri Farmers, especially in the long run since Trump doesn’t seem to know how to find a way out now that he’s escalated the hostilities.

McCaskill has the backbone to call Trump out on an an impulsive and sloppy approach to the issue. Hawley, on the other hand, resolutely sticks to vague GOP talking-around-the-issue-points. Despite the looming potential for disaster for many Missouri farmers – if not this year, next – Hawley will just “trust” that the attention-addled reality TV-star and failed construction mogul Trump knows what he’s doing when it comes to economic theory and all will work out before there are too many bankruptcies in that out-state Missouri that loves to hear GOPers tell it like (they think) it is.

Nor do these highly flexible folks, such as our prim little Josh Hawley seem to want to stand up for the principles that they espoused so fervently during the Obama years: you know, that stuff about bailouts – bailouts that, incidentally saved our auto industry and which were repaid. But hey, a $12 billion in one-year farm bailouts to be  handed out right after a budget-busting, deficit-building tax cut for the wealthy – no big deal to folks like Hawley – who doesn’t seem to care about much more than fighting the far-right religious wars and pushing conservative evangelical orthodoxy down the throats of the rest of us. How’s that for phony?

So why has the Farm Bureau decided to go with Republican comfort food? even though it could end up killing them? Don’t despair. I think I may understand just what the real appeal of GOP – and Josh Hawley – right or wrong, weak or strong, might be.

In an article in the St. Louis Post Dispatch today on why so many Trump supporters voted against the anti-union Proposition A,  a union man – after praising the ways his union gave  him a good life – and apparently unaware of Trump’s bad history with unions –  justified his support for Trump and, presumably, anti-union Trump supporters like Hawley, by appealing to the demographic fears that the “good old days” of white privilege will disappear if too many of those brown folks make it over the southern border:

“I like what Trump is doing for the country, though I don’t agree on all of his policies,” [ Scott] Long said. “If you want to be a citizen, you shouldn’t just walk across the Southern California border. … I like how Trump wants to close the border down.”

And, even more explicitly:

Dennis Brinkler, a union electrician who voted against the legislation, also cited immigration as a reason he’s supporting Trump and state Attorney General Josh Hawley, an anti-union Republican who is challenging Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Democrat, in November.

If you doubt that there’s an underlying racist theme there, the same article cited some union leaders who attributed union support for Republicans like Trump and Hawley explicitly to “protests of police shootings of unarmed black men” and fear of black protest against a repressive status quo:

“Some of the guys I represent in their 50s, it’s hard for them to grasp shutting down a highway because of an incident that may have happened with the police, and often that’s people on our side of the party,” White said, referring to protests in Ferguson after Michael Brown was killed by a police officer four years ago. “That’s hard for a lot of the old white guys to grasp.”

There you  have it. Trump’s calling card: playing on white resentment and the old folks’ racial fears.

And you can bet that the oh-so-educated and refined  Hawley is going along with it, helping to demagogue the thinly disguised racism of Trump’s immigration policies. As the St. Louis American put it after Hawley defended Trump’s cruel and ill-considered immigration policies, particularly the forcible separation of children from parents seeking asylum in the U.S., an undeniable human rights violation carried out so incompetently that many of the children cannot be reunited with the parents:

[…] Hawley backed and defended Trump’s political play of using the forcible separation of children from their families to force Democrats to support the construction of his absurd border wall and pursuit of more punitive immigration policies. Hawley should return to whatever rock he crawled out from under and leave it to actual human beings with blood in their veins to enact public policy. Hawley is a representation of a new generation of Republicans willing to accede the party and its values to the disaster of the Trump administration.

I expect Hawley’s – probably more timid – dog whistles will increase over the next couple of months as Big Daddy Trump gets even more explicit about  his overt racism. Sadly, it looks like lots of Missourians are inclined to be responsive

* 1st word in title changed from “whose” to “who’s” (8/18, 4:35). Thanks to comment noting the original error.

Republican Billy Long, charter member of the Party of Corruption

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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When GOP Rep. Billy Long (R-7) first ran for Congress there were whispers that, in today’s parlance, he was more than familiar with the swamp that his idol, Donald Trump – evidently facetiously – promised to drain. With the arrest of New York GOP Rep. Chris Collins for insider trading, the swamp gas miasma around Long has thickened. Collins has been stripped of his position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee and he is under investigation by the House Ethics Committee. The question is why isn’t Rep. Long under similar investigation – or maybe he is and we just don’t know about it?

As The Daily Beast reported last year, Collins authored four bills that would likely have benefited the company. Two of them, separate versions of the same bill introduced in the 114th and 115th Congresses, had just one cosponsor: Rep. Billy Long (R-MO), a member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, which has oversight over the Food and Drug Administration. While no one has accused him of any legal wrongdoing, Long also held stock in Innate. Long signed on to both pieces of legislation the day they were introduced. The first was filed in December 2016, and didn’t make it out of subcommittee before the session ended.

Then in January, Long bought between $15,000 and $50,000 in Innate stock, apparently as part of a Fidelity retirement account. In July, Collins once again introduced his bill, which would have expedited FDA approvals for treatments such as Innate’s, and Long was once again an immediate co-sponsor.

Long’s staff is of course denying that Long had any insider info from his colleague Collins with whom he coordinated to pass legislation that would enhance both their financial bottom lines – instead, his spokesperson claims, he just happened to decide to buy the Innate stock ” ‘when it became a daily topic on the nightly news in January of 2017,’ a timeline that suggests that Long, not a financial brokerage, made the decision to purchase Innate stock.” However, the circumstantial evidence amassed by Talking Points Memo (TPM) that Long and other GOP colleagues may have received insider information from Collins is somewhat compelling. As TPM notes:

[…] they all say they were just following the market and doing their own research. It had nothing to do with Chris Collins. Well, lots of reporting says Collins was pitching colleagues on it hard. And it seems like quite a coincidence that 5 members of Congress, all Republicans bought in. This seems to bear a lot more scrutiny.

Certainly, we know that Rep. Long is inclined to go easy when it comes to forestalling corrupt behavior, as would befit a guy with a reputation for being on the make. Remember Long’s 2017 vote to gut the Cardin-Lugar anti-corruption rule, “a major bipartisan law that helps safeguard trillions of dollars of payments to the US and governments around the world.”

However, given that most GOPers in the House voted the same way, – the party of corrupton perhaps? – I’m not holding my breath and would recommend that you also refrain to do so if you expect to see Long perp-walked out of Congress. The law got Collins fair and square, looks like Long may weasel out – and his fellow GOPers will probably be just fine with that -particularly those who may be equally guilty of conspiring with Collins to line their personal pockets.

Who’s the elite insider? McCaskill or Hawley

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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Ever notice how politicians who haven’t anything much to deliver try to exploit “culture”?

When Josh Hawley, Missouri’s current Attorney General and, as of last Tuesday, the GOP candidate seeking Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill’s senatorial seat, was in High School, he was driven two hours round trip to the expensive, private, Catholic Rockhurst High School in Kansas City. No reason for the local banker’s son to mix with the hoi polloi in his home town of Lexington, population ca. 5000. There’s no doubt that the banker’s son’s privileged upbringing helped fit him into the rarified east coast circles, first in Yale and Stanford, and later in a high-powered law firm and the conservative non-profit that he inhabited for 15 years prior to returning to Missouri in 2011.

Yet, oddly, now that he is running for office in a rural, agricultural state, he has asserted that folks in cities like New York and Washington D.C. “look down on the kind of upbringing I had.” Even more laughably, Hawley seems to think that growing up in a farming state equals dirt under the fingernails, declaring that “farming is a way of life, it’s a way of life that you live everyday, it’s a way of life that I grew up in … .” Perhaps they inhaled Eau de Manure at Rockhurst High.

Meeting with farmers at a get-together sponsored by the Missouri Dairy Association, the elite lawyer even came in costume: jeans and boots. Maybe he was taking his cue from GOP Senator Roy Blunt’s blue-jeaned, plaid shirted tour of the state in a rented pickup during his 2010 campaign. Hey, it’s worked a few times for elite, high-living GOP pols why not for the otherwise prim and proper-seeming Hawley.

One problem with Hawley’s salt of the earth act? Claire McCaskill’s backstory.

A middle class daughter of the state who worked as a waitress to secure a Mizzou education, and then worked her way up serving in local and state elective offices before running for a federal position, is, from my perspective, in much better position to understand the needs of the state than Johnny-come-back-lately, Josh Hawley.

And even though McCaskill is ending her second term as a denizen of D.C., Babylon reborn to some Tea-Party turned Trumpie types, she’s been undeniably tireless in her efforts to keep in touch with the temper of the region – her listening tours and kitchen cabinet meetings have taken place regularly, even in off-election years. While she’s struggled to remain true to basic Democratic principles, she’s also listened and learned from those who see the issues differently, sometimes angering those among us who are more progressive in our leanings. But I wager that many of us, such as myself, respect her effort to represent as many of her constituents as she conscientiously can.

McCaskill’s work-ethic and her approach to meeting the obligations of her job also contrast with the pampered Hawley’s easy-going approach. In fact, he seems to have handled both the job of Attorney General and his role as a senatorial candidate in such an anemic fashion that, according to some reports, he’s inspired some in his own party to claim that he’s “allergic to hard work.”

Think it over. Who’s really the birth-right elite insider here, the one who lived a sophisticated life among political movers and shakers in Washington D.C for over a decade and came back to Missouri to play the role of the chosen one in state Republican politics. On the other hand, who’s the politician who’s earned whatever insider status she has by working hard and never forgetting the needs of the people who sent her to Washington D.C.  Remember, you usually get what you deserve – which will be determined in the voting booth come November.*

*Paragraph revised to improve clarity 8/9, 11:22 PM

 

Trump’s negotiation (governing) strategy explained

28 Saturday Jul 2018

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Forgive me. I know it’s bad form to post a piece that does nothing more than quote another blog, but, folks, the following summary of the Trumpian process (strategy?) we’ve all been watching is the most succinct version of the real, true, truth that I’ve seen to date:

Print it out and post it on your refrigerator. Memorize it. Coupled with an effort to discredit reliable information resources (Rush Limbaugh, Fox News as pioneers?) that the conservosphere has lovingly built up over many years,  it’s how President Moron  got elected. (Funny how what Trump characterized as American carnage became a rich, powerful country just days after the Russian gambit succeeded in the 2016 election.)

But once enough of us understand the way Trump plays the game, the rules automatically change. It’s a simple if lethal formula and it’s been successfully put in play by much smarter wannabe dictators. However, our guy has evidently only read the “for dummies” version of the playbook.You’re not supposed to telegraph your lies – or contradict them within hours.

But what did you expect? Trump has shown that he’s no genius after all – not even the very stable variety.

Onward to the midterms.

The gun floodgates open

27 Friday Jul 2018

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It’s hard to know how many guns are floating around  in the United States. Gun ownership is  not well-regulated so exact numbers are hard to come by. Various studies, however, put the number of guns at somewhere between 265 million – 300+ million.

There’s a  little more than 320 million people in the U.S.

That’s a lot of guns. Lots of guns produce consequences.

The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population, but 31% of global mass shooters. Murder by gun runs 25.2% higher in the U.S. than in comparable countries.

As an exercise, try reading  your city’s daily paper tomorrow and count the number of deaths by shooting that are described there. Better yet, do it for a week or a  month.

And it might just get worse:

Americans will soon be able to make 3D-printed guns from their homes, widening the door to do-it-yourself versions of firearms.

The choices will include the AR-15, the gun of choice in American mass shootings. All 3D-printed guns will be untraceable, and since you can make them yourself, no background check is required.

A settlement earlier this year between the State Department and Texas-based Defense Distributed will let the nonprofit release blueprints for guns online starting Aug. 1, a development hailed by the group as the death of gun control in the United States.

Gun-loving Missouri crack-pots are already trying to get in on the act:

Nearly a year after  he was temporarily booted by Facebook for raffling off an AR-15 rifle, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate is giving away a machine capable of printing parts for a similar firearm.

Austin Petersen, who ran for president as a Libertarian in 2016, issued on Tuesday a press release and a letter to potential donors announcing the giveaway, saying that Republicans had not done enough to protect gun rights.

[…]

Petersen plans to give away the Ghost Gunner 2, which costs about $1,200. The machine is capable of milling parts for a firearm.

Brian Krassenstein of 3-DPrint.com observes that at this point guns manufactured in this manner are not especially durable, but that the technology does exist to print more durable guns and it is advancing regularly.

The floodgates will soon be wide open. Unless something is done, anyone will be able to print an undetectable gun and take it anywhere. And shoot anyone.

This development won’t be a victory for the good life Americans aspire to. It’s already scary to be exposed in public places in America. There’s lots of anger floating around. Lots of politicians using it to make hay. Resurgent racist thugs glorify force. Things may soon get much worse than we imagined they could.

Congress could push back against the court decision legislatively and Sen. Schumer and a handful of Democratic legislators are making sounds about doing something. But as long as Democrats are in the minority, “sounds” will probably be all that is forthcoming.

One thing for sure; if long-shot Austin Petersen were to make it to Washington, we couldn’t count on him to help us.

Maybe somebody should ask GOP senatorial primary front runner Josh Hawley how he feels about 3D gun printers.

 

The Russian Perils of Claire

26 Thursday Jul 2018

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Who is it who really, really wants to keep the congress in GOP hands? If  you wanna know just take a look at who’s targeting Missouri’s Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill, widely perceived to be vulnerable to raging Trumpites when she comes up for reelection this November.

There’s the 1% -the folks like the Kochs who – via their front group, Americans for Prosperity – are throwing $1.8 million dollars in ad buys at her. They think that emphasizing the GOP shaft-the-middle-class tax cut will do the trick. I guess the richest of the rich really like increasing the national debt on the backs of working Americans. (Didn’t Republicans oppose debt once  upon a time? Like when it was a question of providing Americans with healthcare? And there wasn’t any debt increase in spite their efforts to gull the gullible?)

But, hey, we’ve known for years about how wealthy Americans try to purchase elections with their talking – no – their shouting, money. Nothing new to see there. Sadly.

There is, however,  a new wrinkle:  Russians:

The Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 election cyberattacks targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill as she began her 2018 re-election campaign in earnest, a Daily Beast forensic analysis reveals. That makes the Missouri Democrat the first identified target of the Kremlin’s 2018 election interference.

McCaskill responded with her usual verve:

“Russia continues to engage in cyber warfare against our democracy,” McCaskill said in a press release Thursday evening. “While this attack was not successful, it is outrageous that they think they can get away with this. I will not be intimidated. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is a thug and a bully.”

McCaskill was one of three midterm candidates targeted by “spearphishing” efforts. We’ve known that such attacks (and other types of meddling) were likely for some time but our intrepid GOP-majority congress and the Russia-friendly Trump administration  have dithered and done little to forestall the threat. Missouri’s own Secretary of State, jolly little Jay Ashcroft, has said domestic election fraud is a bigger threat in November – despite no evidence to that effect.

But, hey, Senator McCaskill doesn’t need to worry – no less an eminence than our reality star president has acknowledged the threat. He just declared that the Russians are hard at work to help Democrats.  Because he’s so hard on the Russians (not).