2017: The Year in Preview

Opinion | thepilot.com

Once again, as everyone else looks back, this column looks forward. Therefore, here’s the Year in Preview:

JANUARY: Frustrated by their inability to secure A-list performers for the inauguration of Donald Trump, the inauguration committee is saved at the last minute when Vladimir Putin sends a delegation consisting of the remaining members of the Red Army Chorus, the Bolshoi Ballet, and pop groups Plazma and Code Red. “Is least Putin could do,” the Russian president announces over Twitter, “considering.”

FEBRUARY: Former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton emerges from seclusion on Feb. 2, sees her shadow and retreats again, thus signaling that we will have at least six more weeks of winter.

MARCH: After the sudden and unexpected retirement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, President Trump announces his nomination for her replacement: former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin immediately announces her support of overruling not only Roe v. Wade, but also New York Times v. Sullivan, Marbury vs. Madison, and Kramer v. Kramer. When reporters point out that the last one is actually a fictional 1979 movie starring Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, Palin angrily tells them that “real Bible-readin’ gun-clingin’ Americans are tired of your coastal-elitin’ fake-newsin’ p.c. flibberdefloo, always talkin’ about your so-called Hollywood facts, you betcha.” Palin’s confirmation hearing is delayed as the Senate searches frantically for a translator.

APRIL: House Speaker Paul Ryan announces his plans for Medicare reform. Controversy ensues when it’s discovered that the bill mostly consists of funding to put the ailing elderly on ice floes in the Arctic and letting them drift away to die. Ryan defends the plan by saying, “The American people are tired of political correctness and want bold solutions to the Medicare crisis, so long as those solutions involve more tax cuts for wealthy people. This plan accomplishes that.”

MAY: President Trump announces that he’s canceling plans to put abolitionist heroine Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. Instead, Trump promises a “big, beautiful new currency” with the face of his daughter Ivanka on the 20, sons Eric, Donald Junior and little Barron on the 5, 10 and 50 respectively, wife Melania on the 100, and daughter Tiffany on the quarter. The visage of Trump himself will be on the newly announced $3 bill. The motto on the back of the bills will be changed from “In God We Trust” to “Suck It Up, Buttercup.”

JUNE: Energy Secretary Rick Perry announces that the Department of Energy has been disbanded. “I’m not sure how it happened, but I showed up for work yesterday and it was gone. Yay me.” Later, it’s revealed that Perry had actually just forgotten where the department was and gone to the wrong building.

JULY: Speaker Ryan’s Medicare plan is derailed when scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to locate any Arctic ice floes due to global warming. Congress responds by banning the use of the words “global warming” and any mention of “ice floes” in official documents before leaving town for their summer recess.

AUGUST: Unable to come up with a plan to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act that doesn’t cause 20 million Americans to lose insurance coverage, President Trump announces via Twitter that “Obamacare is gone. It’s called Trumpcare from now on. Problem solved. Trump = awesome!”

SEPTEMBER: Undaunted by the failure of his Medicare reform plan, Speaker Ryan unveils his plan to reform Medicaid in a bill titled “The Let the Poor Die Act of 2017.” Ryan responds to criticism with a terse statement: “Political correctness. Bold solutions. Tax cuts for the wealthy.”

OCTOBER: Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway is appointed head of a new government agency called “Department of Truth.” She issues a statement that “Obamacare never existed. Also, there were never any promises by President Trump to build a wall, lock up Hillary Clinton, or drain any swamp. Any and all evidence to the contrary is hereby declared ‘fake news’ from the ‘unfair liberal media’ and should be ignored.” Unprecedented Earth tremors in the area of Oxfordshire, England, are investigated by geologists and found to be the result of writer George Orwell spinning like a turbine in his grave.

NOVEMBER: Trump takes to Twitter to proclaim, “We should all give thanks that we can say ‘Happy Thanksgiving’ again. Go Trump!” Puzzled Americans note that we never stopped.

DECEMBER: In accordance with ancient prophecy, the Elder God Cthulhu arises from his resting place beneath the sea to begin his millennia-long reign of madness, chaos and violence. He takes one look at the world, goes “Dang, looks like you folks beat me to it,” and goes back to sleep beneath the waves.

Buckle up, buttercups. It’s gonna be another weird one.

Happy New Year!

What I'm Getting Mr. Trump For Christmas

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OK, so I checked on Amazon and there is actually a book called “The U.S. Constitution for Dummies.” That settles the question of what I’m getting our president-elect for Christmas.

Because — I’ve got to tell you folks, some of Mr. Trump’s latest actions and public pronouncements make me wonder if he’s ever heard of the document, much less read it.

Take, for instance, this tweet he sent at 6 in the morning this past Tuesday: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences — perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

For those of you wondering “where did that come from?” there was apparently a Fox News story that ran about that time on that issue, and of course, if Fox News does a story on it, the soon-to-be-leader of the fee world has to weigh in immediately.

The only problem is, it’s well-settled law that burning the U.S. flag as a means of protest is protected speech under that pesky First Amendment.

No less a conservative lion than the late Antonin Scalia stated that “If I were king, I wouldn’t go about letting people burn the American flag,” but that “we have a First Amendment which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged.” Scalia, however he may have gritted his teeth at having to do so, signed on to a Supreme Court opinion striking down a Texas law that made flag-burning a criminal offense.

Note, however, that Trump, a man who’s said he wants justices “in the mold” of Justice Scalia, was suggesting that maybe he’d go further than imprisonment, to outright revocation of citizenship.

This raises the question of whether Mr. Trump is aware of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” There’s no provision for the president or anyone else revoking someone’s citizenship, especially for acts protected under the First Amendment.

I’m sure some Trumpkins will fall back to their default defense, namely “But Hillary!” and point out that in 2005, then-Sen. Clinton co-sponsored a bill that would have criminalized the burning of the U.S. flag for the “primary purpose of intimidation or inciting immediate violence or for the act of terrorism.”

Well, let me say this about that: (1) She was wrong, and engaging in the kind of pandering that led me to describe her as “Republican Lite” for years; (2) The bill failed, as it bloody well should have; and (3) enjoy “But Hillary!” in the last few weeks you’ll be able to use it. Pretty soon she’s going to be off the public stage, and bringing her up will just seem more and more sad and desperate.

There are those who have suggested that PEOTUS is merely pumping out outrageous tweets to draw public and press attention away from the more serious issues posed by the many conflicts of interest posed by his business interests, both in America and abroad.

Here again, we invite Mr. Trump to peruse the Constitution, in particular the often-overlooked “Emoluments Clause” of Article One, which forbids anyone “holding any Office of Profit or Trust … without the Consent of the Congress,” from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Now, considering the negotiations and entanglements Mr. Trump and his worldwide enterprises have in foreign states and the desire of kings and princes to curry favor with the most powerful man in the free world, one would think that Mr. Trump might want to steer clear of not only actual conflicts of interest, but also of what we in the law biz call “the appearance of impropriety” in business concessions or payments from foreign leaders.

One might think that. But, as one of my old law professors used to say, one would be wrong. Mr. Trump has indicated that he’ll leave his businesses to be run by his children, but would “presents, Emoluments, Offices, or Titles” given to a Trump scion insulate Trump himself from charges of corruption? Let’s just say I have my doubts.

The House and Senate are all lovey-dovey right now, but Mr. Trump has said some pretty harsh things about the party he leads, and in particular about the Speaker of the House. Once the celebrations are over and the hard give-and-take of governing begins, he may be on thinner ice than he realizes.

So enjoy my gift of “The U.S. Constitution For Dummies,” Mr. President-Elect, and I hope that you read with close attention, particularly Article 2, Section 4. That’s the one about impeachment for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors.”

State of the Union: Not As Bad As They'd Have You Believe.

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This past Tuesday, President Barack Obama enraged the American right wing by going on national television and pointing out that the United States of America isn’t the barren, benighted hellscape of economic misery and brutal political repression that they make it out to be.

After being introduced by Paul Ryan, the reluctant speaker of the House, the president began his final State of the Union address by talking about the things that have gone right on his watch:

We’ve recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. Our automakers have had a better year than any year in their history. Millions more Americans have access to needed health care they weren’t previously able to get. Millions more Americans than before are “able to marry the person they love.” And, he said with a grin, “gas under two dollars ain’t bad either.”

The president even praised the reluctant speaker for not shutting the government down. The RS’s response was to sit there, stone-faced, as he did for most of the speech.

This may have seemed a trifle ungracious, but I just figured that the RS was trying to get his mojo back with the Teahadists who have been shrieking for his head since he declined to destroy the country in the name of saving it.

Actually, “stone-faced” was pretty much the entire GOP response during the speech. Republicans wouldn’t even applaud the usually dependable crowd pleaser about how “the United States of America is the most powerful nation on Earth.” They wouldn’t applaud the president saying we need to “hunt ISIS down and destroy them.”

They wouldn’t even applaud a proposal for a massive effort to cure cancer. Is the GOP so anti-Obama that they’ve actually become pro-cancer? I’m not saying they are, mind you, but as the folks at Fox News say, it “raises questions.”

Pessimism and doomsaying, it seems, have become the Republican brand. Their front- runner’s latest book is even called “Crippled America,” and his campaign theme is “America is losing everywhere.” (Funny, I remember when such talk was regarded as treason.)

Over the last seven years, the right has gone from sneering, “What has Obama accomplished?” to bitterly attempting to downplay everything he actually has accomplished.

They’ve held dozens of totally symbolic votes, for instance, to repeal Obamacare, that “job-killing takeover of the health care system” that didn’t take anything over and, judging from the low unemployment rate, doesn’t seem to have killed very many jobs.

There have been so many successful Democratic initiatives described as “job killers” that it’s a miracle anyone’s working at all, if the Republicans are to be believed. (Let me just suggest that perhaps they’re not.)

At least in the short run, pessimism appears to be good marketing. Gloom and doom seem to be striking a chord among far too many Americans.

A startling Pew Research study from last year shows that whoever they are — old or young, black or white, Republican or Democrat — more Americans will tell you that their side is losing than will tell you they’re winning. Another poll last year found that 75 percent of the Americans polled said, “The American dream is suffering.”

But in the long term, Americans are not born pessimists. In the second poll I just cited, fully 72 percent of the people who said the American Dream is “suffering” said they themselves were happy with their own lives and were either “living the American Dream or expect to.” That’s extraordinary.

If there’s one thing history has taught us, it’s that the person who brings us the most hope and the most optimistic view of America is the one we eventually choose to lead us. Remember, if you will, Reagan’s “Morning in America.” Remember Clinton’s “I still believe in a place called Hope.” Remember George Dubbya’s “A More Hopeful America.” And of course, remember Obama’s “Hope and Change.”

Those phrases were (and still are) widely mocked — by the people who lost to the candidates who embraced them. Both the Republican and Democratic candidates in the upcoming electoral slugfest would do well to remember that.

When the president ends his speech by saying, “I stand here confident that the state of our Union is strong,” and your only answer is, “Oh, no, it’s not,” then you are not, my friend, pursuing a winning strategy. Nor, more important, are you pursuing one that will lead to a better America.

Orange John Does the GOP a Favor

Opinion | thepilot.com

You know, I’ve been hard in the past on John Boehner, the weepy, carrot-colored soon-to-be-former speaker of the House. I’ve mocked him as perhaps the most ineffectual politician ever to hold that high office.

I was making fun of him as far back as his tenure as minority leader, when he whined that he couldn’t get Republican votes for Dubbya’s $700 billion bailout of the financial industry because Nancy Pelosi said something mean about his caucus. I jeered at him when he couldn’t even get the House GOP to vote “yes” on their own bill to keep the Department of Homeland Security open. And so on.

But now, as he prepares to step down from his position, I’ve got to hand it to Orange John: For once, he’s managed to keep his party from shooting itself in the foot, something that they were apparently just aching to do.

At issue was yet another wrangle over the twin issues of averting a government shutdown and raising the debt ceiling, that arguably unconstitutional imaginary cap the Congress puts on our ability to actually pay for things for which they’ve already authorized spending. Failure to raise the ceiling when needed would lead the United States, the greatest country in the world, to default on its debt like some Third World banana republic. Shutting down the government would result in an interruption of vital services.

Nevertheless, the fiscal terrorists of the far right have repeatedly threatened to bring these disasters down on our heads if their demands were not met. This time, they started pressuring Boehner to threaten a shutdown if Planned Parenthood wasn’t defunded. That, however, was apparently dropped in favor of convening a House Select Committee to investigate the already debunked accusation that Planned Parenthood clinics are illegally selling baby parts. After all, they need a new multi-million-dollar bogus witch hunt to get the rubes all worked up about after Hillary Clinton handed them their behinds over Benghazi. Again.

Enter the so-called “Freedom Caucus,” a group of Republican congresscritters so bold and forthright that they will neither confirm nor deny who’s actually a member. This shadowy cabal scotched the bid of California Rep. Kevin McCarthy to take over Boehner’s seat and made a list of demands to any other candidate wanting their support. Meanwhile, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell prepared his own ransom note. Both demanded, among other things, serious cuts to Social Security and Medicare as a condition of keeping the government open and avoiding default.

Then Boehner, much to everyone’s surprise, committed an act of actual governance. He and other Republican leaders negotiated a deal with the White House that raises the debt ceiling far enough that it doesn’t have to be addressed again until 2017 — after the next election. It also averts the possibility of a government shutdown until at least the end of the Obama presidency. And it did both without draconian cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

The Teahadists, of course, had a conniption. The deal was a sellout, they claimed, and shows just why Boehner has to go. “I think the process stinks,” fumed Paul Ryan, who’s in negotiations with the Freedom Caucus that might just allow him to take Boehner’s place as speaker without the daily fear of getting their knives in his back. Yet most political analysts think there’s not enough time for the deal’s opponents to stop it.

Inwardly, however, Ryan and the few sane Republicans must be breathing a sigh of relief. Because here’s the thing: Every time there’s a shutdown or a threat of default, their party’s image takes a walloping in the polls.

For example, in 2013, after even a partial shutdown, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 8 out of 10 Americans said they disapproved of it, 63 percent had an unfavorable view of the Republicans in Congress, and “4 in 10 had a strongly unfavorable view of the GOP.” That’s not the kind of damage a party who wants to hold the Senate and take the White House can absorb in an election year. Ryan at least is bright enough to know that.

For all the kvetching and calls of “betrayal” directed against soon-to-be-former-speaker Boehner, he’s handed his party — and the country — a gift on his way out. Most of them are probably too delusional to realize it, but Paul Ryan ought to send Orange John a case of his favorite Scotch for Christmas.

Life Of Illusion (The Director's Cut)

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[Note: this is the unedited version. The one in the paper eliminates the first paragraphs because the editor was afraid the Party of Love might firebomb the newspaper office.] 

So now, at long last, the election is over, and President Barack Obama will have his second term. Before we get to our discussion of what happened and why, let me just take the time to say: HAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAA!

Ahem. On to the post-election analysis.

I’ve said before that Mitt Romney was destined to be the John Kerry of the Republican Party. Each man was a rich, entitled Massachusetts moderate trying to convince his party's skeptical base he was one of them, despite having once supported the thing that that base purported to despise most (the Iraq War in Kerry's case, the individual mandate in Romney's). Both Kerry and Romney ran against controversial incumbents, with a central message that amounted to “I’m not him.” And both fell short. But Mitt Romney fell much shorter than Kerry. Why? Perhaps because the “him” Romney was running against didn’t exist.

The imaginary Barack Obama that the Republicans were running against bore little or no resemblance to the actual man in the White House. Imaginary Obama was a scowling, far-left radical, a socialist, a fascist or a communist, depending on who was yelling into the mike at the time. Imaginary Obama was simultaneously an evil schemer who was plotting 24/7 to destroy America and a guy who was too dumb to get into college without affirmative action or to speak without a teleprompter. Imaginary Obama was a divisive, harshly partisan figure, hated by all, even his former supporters. Worst of all, he was an incompetent, a miserable failure at absolutely everything he touched.

The problem with this strategy is that the actual Barack Obama that non-delusional people could see was a smart, calm, moderate with good likability ratings who’d brought the unemployment numbers down at a steady if sometimes maddeningly slow pace, saved the auto industry, and brought Osama bin Laden to justice. People heard the Right dismissing every bit of good news, crying doom and gloom, and insisting “everything’s getting worse,” looked around, and went, “hmmm, it really isn’t.”

Then along came Sandy. The quick Presidential response to the hurricane and the grateful reaction of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who only a few weeks before had been savaging Obama at the GOP convention, blew away any lingering doubts non-delusional voters may have had about both the President’s competence and his ability to work with Republicans.

As the polls showed the President pulling further and further ahead in crucial swing states, Republicans began pulling the blanket of delusion over their heads. Pundits like Dick Morris, Karl Rove, Michael Barone and even the usually sane George W. Will predicted a Romney landslide, with Will predicting 321 EVs for Romney.

 One expects this sort of thing from hacks like Morris, Barone and Rove, but Will really should have known better. The polls were “skewed,” they insisted, because they assumed that Democratic voter turnout would be the same in 2012 as it was in 2008. That wasn’t going to happen this year, they asserted with the all the misguided and uninformed bravado of a latter-day George Armstrong Custer.

Actually, had you asked earlier in the year, I might have said you had a point. There were a lot of disaffected Democrats, particularly on the Left. (Anyone who says liberals all think the same has clearly never been around any). But that was before the GOP, some of its prominent supporters, and its candidates began taking extreme radical positions on things like abortion, contraception, gay rights, and immigration, and saying things that frightened, offended or ticked off Latinos, LGBT people, African-Americans, and especially women. That fired up the very constituencies the GOP had told themselves would stay home.

So thanks, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Todd Akin, Rick Santorum, John Koster, Richard Mourdock, etc.! You fired liberals up and damaged the GOP brand with moderates, probably for years. And right wingers, dwelling as they do in their tightly woven cocoons where only Fox News and talk radio can penetrate, never even saw it. They still don’t. But numbers really don’t lie.

Now that the Republican leadership has failed in their stated number one goal of making Barack Obama a “one term president,” what will they do? Will they actually start pushing bills other than futile grandstanding attempts to “repeal Obamacare”? Will they actually deal in good faith on the budget?

Well, we live in hope. But first they’re going to have to do is stop deluding themselves that everyone hates the President and the Democrats as much as they think they do and that they’ll be rewarded for obstructionism. Reality, it’s said, has a well-known liberal bias, but it’s still reality. 

Ryan: Norman Schwarzkopf or G.A. Custer?

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In Winston Churchill's memoir of the Second World War, he relates his reaction to the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor: "I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful."

When I heard the news that Mitt Romney had selected Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, I thought Barack Obama must have done the same.

Because, while the Rabid Right may be patting themselves on the back and admiring the "bold stroke" of choosing Ryan, and the Beltway pundits like to wax rhapsodic over Ryan's "gutsy" budget plan, I can think of nothing Etch A Sketch Romney could have done that's more certain to ensure his eventual defeat.

You know how I know Ryan is a terrible pick? One of his biggest backers was the affable boob Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, who's frequently seen grinning his way across your TV screen and spouting nonsense, a veritable fountain of specious claptrap The two things Kristol's most famous for urging the GOP to embrace are Sarah Palin and the Iraq War, which he said would "pay for itself." How'd those work out?

Kristol gets props from his buddies in the Beltway media for urging the Republicans to be "bolder" and more "ambitious," as commentator Dylan Byers wrote in Politico. But in reality, he's like the half-bright, overly aggressive major general who's always urging some lunatic charge into the enemy guns that gets a lot of his men killed.

Insiders have been reporting for some time now that the Obama campaign had been trying to tie Romney to Ryan's proposed budget plans. Because here's the thing: Once people find out what's actually in the budget, it's highly unpopular, particularly his proposal to give more huge tax breaks to millionaires and pay for it by turning Medicare into a "voucher" system, where seniors would get coupons to buy insurance from private insurers.

A Washington Post/Kaiser Foundation poll this month asked people whether they favored keeping the current structure of Medicare, or going to a system "in which the government guarantees each senior a fixed amount of money to help them purchase coverage either from traditional Medicare or from a list of private health plans." Fifty-eight percent rejected the change.

You can see why, if you think about it. Given the amount of confusion and the grumbling of senior citizens over trying to choose between the various options in George Dubbya's budget-busting Medicare Part D plan (which Ryan voted for, by the way), I find it unlikely that they're going to welcome the fun and excitement of haggling with dozens of insurance companies over their coverage.

This is especially true since repealing the Affordable Care Act (which Ryan supports) means the insurance companies will once more be free to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. How many people do you know over 65 who don't have some kind of pre-existing condition?

It gets worse when you look at the rest of the plan. A recent Democracy Corps survey showed that "President Obama's lead against Romney more than doubles when the election is framed as a choice between the two candidates' positions on the Ryan budget - particularly its impact on the most vulnerable." And if the Obama campaign has shown one thing recently, it's that they know how to define an opponent and his positions.

You want to know how bad it gets for the Ryan plan? According to a report in The New York Times, when the pro-Obama SuperPac Priorities USA (they of the infamous "Bain Capital Killed My Wife" ad) was doing focus groups to determine what tack to take, they found that attacks on the Ryan budget plan and Romney's support of it didn't do all that well.

First because no one really knew anything about Ryan or what was in the plan, and second, because once people heard that it called for "ending Medicare as we know it" while giving bigger tax breaks to millionaires, "they refused to believe any politician would do such a thing."

Well, now they're going to hear about the plan, right from the blue-eyed horse's mouth, and the evidence is pretty clear that they're not going to like it at all. Bill Kristol and the Raging Right may think Romney's "boldness" in picking Ryan makes him into Gen. Stormin' Norman Schwarzkopf.

In reality, it may turn out to be more like Custer - except this time, Custer spent the day before Little Big Horn handing out quivers full of arrows for the Indians to shoot him with.