February 6, 2022

I get a little concerned when anyone compares the former President with the likes of Hitler, Stalin, or Mussolini. Maybe it is hyperbole for effect. Many of us took offense when Trump said there were good people on both sides when one of the sides was displaying the swastika, but that doesn’t make him a mass murderer or card-carrying Fascist.

However, I do think it is fair game to compare Trump to another controversial and disgraced leader, Silvio Berlusconi, of Italy. Berlusconi was a media tycoon and politician. He was a master salesman, who made his initial fortune in real estate. He came to national prominence via television. He became Prime Minister of Italy with no prior governmental experience. While in power, he surrounded himself with friends and loyalists. He demonized the media, and used his media empire to restrict freedom of information. He owned a football team. His net worth was estimated to be $8B. He represented a center-right coalition called Forza Italiana. He was accused by his political enemies of being an authoritarian. He had a charismatic personality, and sought to exploit divisions amongst the Italian people. His public policies focused on tax deductions, which plunged the Italian economy further into debt. He had numerous conflicts of interest as he abused his position to further his private investments. He was infamous for private indiscretions, the most famous of which was the “Bunga Bunga” scandal. He was the subject of blackmail attempts by spurned women. He was known for using lawsuits as a political weapon.

Berlusconi was convicted of tax fraud, and spent time under arrest. One can only hope. Forza Stati Uniti d’America!

February 4, 2022

Legitimate discourse is dead. It met its untimely death today at the hands of the Republican Party. Admittedly, it was on life support like an unvaccinated patient on a ventilator, but it was the “right to life” party that killed it while it was struggling to survive. Dr. Kevorkian is now the Surgeon General of the GOP. The Republican Party called the January 6th insurrection legitimate political discourse. If that is legitimate political discourse, then what have the rest of us been engaged in? I suppose it is not surprising given that the Insurrectionist-in-Chief decided to offer pardons to the great patriots engaged in political discourse. I guess “Hang Mike Pence” qualifies as discourse.

Legitimate political discourse used to be debates in the well of the Senate. It used to be bull sessions late at night in your dorm room. It was reporters having it out on national television. It was David Brooks debating Mark Shields in the Springfield Public Forum. It was Lincoln vs. Douglas (Stephen, not Frederick.) It was Kennedy-Nixon; it was Bush v. Gore. That was political discourse, warts and all.

The only thing I can say in response to the Republican Party’s reprehensible position on legitimacy is “Illegitimi non carborundum.” February 4th can now join January 6th, September 11th, November 22nd, and December 7th in the annals of American history because that is the day American political discourse died.

February 2, 2022

I am getting a little sensitive about ageism in my golden years. I know that I have lost more than a step going to first and that I can hear my drives land, which is fortunate because I certainly can’t see them, but I am just as good as I never was as long as I can take a nap. I am not as old as Joe Biden (or Donald Trump or Mitch McConnell), but I do know that nothing gets easier. However, characterizing President Biden as feeble and cognitively-impaired is pernicious. I hear this argument from some of the most disingenuous people on television, who wish they could use cognitive impairment to excuse their own ignorance. Biden accorded himself well, if not perfectly, in a two hour press conference recently, even handling some questions from “dumb son-of-a-bitches.”

Let’s put his age in historical perspective. In 1945, the alliance against Germany was led by Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. Their ages were 63, 71 and 70 respectively. We have to throw out FDR because he died that year after a life long struggle with polio. The average life expectancy (ALE) for a man in 1945 was 63.6 years. In other words, Churchill was 7 years beyond the ALE when he was leading Great Britain in WW II over Germany and a much younger Hitler (56). Stalin was 6 years beyond the ALE as he led Russia. Today, the ALE for a man is 76.1, which puts Biden (79) only 3 years beyond.

You don’t have agree with Biden’s policies or even like him as a person, but using age as an attack line is lazy. As Ronald Reagan, 73, famously said to Walter Mondale in a presidential debate, “I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Similarly, I am not going to exploit the malicious ignorance of Biden’s detractors.

January 30, 2022

According to a recent letter writer, the January 6th Commission is a kangaroo court. According to Merriam-Webster, a kangaroo court is “a court characterized by irresponsible, unauthorized, or irregular status or procedures.” Nothing about the commission is irresponsible or irregular, but let’s not let the facts get in the way of a good narrative. The only thing that was unauthorized was the attack on the Capitol.

In June 2016, USA Today published an analysis of litigation involving Donald Trump, which found that over the previous three decades Trump and his businesses had been involved in 3,500 legal cases in U.S. federal and state courts, an unprecedented number for a U.S. presidential candidate. That’s a lot of kangaroos. You would think we lived in Australia.

Kangaroos have been sighted everywhere. There are kangaroos in the DA’s office in lower Manhattan looking for tax cheats. There are kangaroos in Fulton County, Georgia where local officials take offense at being strong-armed for fake votes. There has been a plague of kangaroos tormenting fake electors in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Arizona. We have the kangaroo courts that impeached Trump twice, the second time for withholding funds from Ukraine. We have the kangaroo court that sent Michael Cohen to jail for funneling funds to Trump’s porn stars.

The one thing that all of these kangaroos have in common is Donald Trump. Trump should have his own reality TV show like Crocodile Dundee where he hunts down kangaroos in the Australian Outback. Unfortunately, as are most things Trump does, that would be illegal.

January 26, 2022

“Owning the libs” is a political strategy used by some conservatives that focuses on upsetting political liberals. Users of the strategy emphasize and expand upon culture war issues intended to be divisive to provoke a reaction in others, according to Wikipedia. More recently, the strategy is associated with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. This method was adopted by the alt-right and alt-lite as a form of trolling and antagonism in the mid/late 2010s.

Which begs the question. How would one “own the conservatives?” Then it came to me. President Biden has promised to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court. Many qualified candidates have been mentioned except one. I would like to nominate Anita Hill. Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a university professor of social policy, law, and women’s studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment.

I call it “con-trolling.”

January 26, 2022

Here is a thought experiment. Who would you rather have dealing with the crisis in Ukraine…Biden or Trump? Lest we forget, Trump was impeached for withholding authorized foreign aid from Ukraine, demanding dirt on President Biden’s son. It was called a “quid pro quo.” In Helsinki, when he was standing next to a smirking Vladimir Putin, Trump refused to answer a question about Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, saying that he took Putin’s word that it wasn’t him. Trump did whatever he could to sow divisions within NATO, threatening to walk away from the alliance while he tried to shake down individual countries for more money. He attacked Macron and Merkel, and pushed the President of Montenegro out of the way for a photo op. Trump was subservient to Putin at best. There is no reason to believe that he would stand up to Putin at this moment.

Biden’s experience with Russian affairs spans more than 38 of his years in federal public office under seven US presidents other than himself. Joe Biden has served as the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He served for eight years as the Vice President. He has met with at least three Soviet leaders and two Russian presidents. With the exception of SALT-I, he played major and minor roles in each of the most consequential arms treaties between the two nuclear powers over the past 50 years. He previously met with Russian President Vladimir Putin when Biden was vice president and Putin was prime minister.

We don’t know how this is going to turn out. Regardless, I will take my chances with Joe Biden.

January 25, 2022

Inflation is problem, economically and politically. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.7% in 2021. It was worse for food. The prices of food eaten at home rose 6.3%, and the prices of food eaten away from home (restaurants) rose 6.5%. Buying groceries and putting food on the table has become a challenge for many people. It is more of a problem if you don’t have a job, but that is another discussion.

Another inflation problem is the inflation in American waistlines. The adult obesity rate is 42.4%, up from 30.5% in 2000. The obesity rate is up 26% since 2008 per the CDC. Obesity is a major cause of heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes, and some forms of cancer. There is evidence that there is a high correlation between obesity and COVID deaths. Since 2008, medical costs related to obesity are estimated to be $147B. Obese adults generate $1,429 per person more in health-related costs than non-obese people.

Here is an unpopular idea. Maybe we could eat less as one way to control inflation? Maybe a better idea is that we could eat better? One of the healthiest things to come out of the pandemic is that we are eating out less. We are eating at home, eating better, and eating less. We are not super-sizing ourselves. Nothing good dietary-wise comes from eating out. The dirty little secret in restaurants is the amount of salt that goes into everything. Cut out fast food. Cut out junk food. Exercise portion control. How about exercising? Dessert should be a treat, not a right. If the average overweight person cut the number of calories he or she consumed by the rate of inflation, that would come to about 150 calories per day, which is the equivalent of three Oreo cookies or half of a McDonald’s hamburger with cheese.

January 23, 2022

Seth Myers does a bit from time to time on Late Night called “Stories We Need More Of.” They are generally off-beat, uplifting stories that give you hope in troubled times. I came across one of these articles in The Atlantic recently. It was titled, “Is Old Music Killing New Music?” The writer goes on to say, “Old songs now represent 70 percent of the U.S. music market…But the news gets worse: The new-music market is actually shrinking. All the growth in the market is coming from old songs.” How great is that?

The song catalogs in most demand today are by musicians who are in their 70s or 80s (Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Bruce Springsteen) or already dead (David Bowie, James Brown).  Did anyone mention The Beatles? Some people, especially Baby Boomers (like me) tell the writer that “this decline in the popularity of new music is simply the result of lousy new songs. The old songs had better melodies, more interesting harmonies, and demonstrated genuine musicianship, not just software loops, Auto-Tuned vocals, and regurgitated samples.” There will never be another Sondheim, they say, or Joni Mitchell, or Bob Dylan, or Cole Porter, or Brian Wilson. In other words, “Why can’t they be like were, perfect in every way?”

In a recent spin class, the instructor introduced her playlist by saying she was going to be playing oldies…from the 80’s. Yikes! We were immediately assaulted with a medley of hits from the boy bands of the day. Class couldn’t be over soon enough as far as I was concerned. With this latest news, I don’t feel as irrelevant and uncool. Now, when I play my music in spin class for my spinners, I can say, “This is what everyone is listening to.”

January 23, 2022

I have sworn off chocolate for the month of January. Like most people, I love it, but it became much too easy to grab a handful of M&M’s, redesigned or otherwise, and tell myself that they were so tiny what damage could they do. Eventually, I will get my just desserts.

Fortunately, some very famous anti-vax professional athletes are getting their just desserts right away. Aaron Rodgers, who got suspended for a game for misrepresenting his vaccination status after having contracted COVID, just got bumped from the NFL playoffs by our almost own Jimmy G. I guess guest hosting a game show was not enough Jeopardy for him.

Antonio Brown, a New England Patriot for a New York nanosecond, ripped off his shirt, and walked out on Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Bucs. Apparently, he was angry that defensive backs were not respecting his right to have them stay six feet away. AB was suspended by the NFL for lying about his COVID-19 vaccination status. TB was apparently okay with that. After all, vaccinated All-Pro wide receivers are hard to find.

Lastly, Serbian tennis player, Novak Djokovic, was deported from Australia for flouting its vaccination mandates. Tennis greats like Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall put Australia on the map. Novak Djokovic has now put Serbia on the map, which is a good thing because how many of you could actually find Serbia on the map? If I told you it was near Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, would that help?

All of these entitled professional athletes can now sit at home and enjoy their just desserts…unlike me. (Sigh)

January 21, 2022

The President of the United States has been falsely accused of recommending the defunding the police. Just because you repeat it over and over does not make it true. In the face of increased pandemic-induced crime in some major cities, I think most responsible people want to both fund the police at the same time reforming some police practices. However, our Republican friends want to take funding the police to the next level.

Politicians in three states, including Ron DiSantis in Florida and David Perdue in Georgia, want to create a new and separate police force whose sole objective is to ferret out election crime. Arizona is the third state. Beyond the fact that this is an incredible waste of money and morally indefensible, these poor police officers will be looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. They will be looking for something that does not exist. They would be more productive looking for the Yeti or the Loch Ness monster.

These are the same people, who refuse to condemn the January 6th seditionists, who attacked and killed police officers. But why stop with the election police? Texas has virtually overturned Roe vs. Wade. Gov. Greg Abbot of Texas should create a police force dedicated to finding abortionists and the women seeking abortions. Gov. Glen Youngkin of Virginia should have a police force knocking on the doors of private citizens looking for books espousing Critical Race Theory or books written by Toni Morrison. DiSantis already has his police force effectively looking for people advocating for vaccines. In Florida, this is a crime. In parts of America, if you now don’t like something, hire some cops. Nobody is going to malls so there are plenty of cops available.