Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Ghod it sucks to be Hillary Clinton doesn't it?

Grilled incessantly about ev-erything...I mean just ask Donald Trump....Monday night he wilted after forty five minutes of the scrutiny that is the very air Hillary Clinton has been breathing for twenty five years.


Tuesday, September 27, 2016

We can but hope....

That last night's presidential debate represents Donald Trump's Waterloo....Citizen Clinton passed thru the usual cataract of vituperation unscathed, giving as good as she got....hell around the 10:15pm she started smiling like the whole damn thing was somehow gun as Trump ranted and raved like Captain Queeg.

It was a demented performance and more worrisome an utterly barbaric one.

AND THAT is my big takeaway from last night, that Donald Trump is literally campaigning to be PostApocalyptic King of the Rubble....in other words his every word and phrase last night came from a firm belief that "Might is Right".
That...is the core doctrine of barbarians from Genghis Khan to Pol Pot, and the fact that it could be the very core of anyone's Presidential Campaign is a good sign that the cause of civilization is in deep  trouble in the USA.
If Abraham Lincoln asserted that the Union cannot endure "Half Slave and Half Free" so too it may not endure if it is "Half Barbaric and Half Civilized".
That Citizen Clinton comported herself with brains, wit and ability last night is a given, but the overall cause of Civilization took a bad hit last night.....so did decency, civility, restraint and all the like.
I enter the middle of my fifth decade on Earth worried that there are fellow citizens out there, so mad with fear and setback that they are prepared to secede from common sense itself....And. Trump I fear is the leading edge of a much worse phenomenon going forward.

Does Donald Trump still expect

the endorsement of "dozens" of "Generals and Admirals" after last night's dismal demented debate performance?  I'm sure The Donald is "Good to Go" with his Landsman Captain Queeg but other than that.....



Monday, September 26, 2016

According to current polling

Charlie Baker remains The Most Popular Governor In The Known Galaxy with something akin to a seventy percent approval rating despite a year given over to dodging Donald Trump, unsuccessfully selling off the State House Lawn and hyping Charter Schools.
It's a pretty underwhelming record of achievement to be sure, but combined with Charlie's Coolidgean gift for silence it's put him top o' th' pops.
But boy howdy he still loves Patronage Doesn't He? He appointed his driver one James McGinn the head of the State's Environmental Police Force.
Geez what is it about these republicans and their drivers they must really bond as they go from town to town haranguing the masses or whatever it is Charlie does when he is out and about. Remember Joe Lawless he was Cellucci's driver and he landed an infamously Cush gig at Massport back in the day, seems like a pattern is emerging here. I mean, just drive for the winning candidate and you can pick your spot so it seems.
We can't proof the whole of the bureaucracy from ambitious chauffeurs , but maybe we can make that job a civil service position or something. Assign drivers to the candidates who can't lobby for soft touch jobs or something....

Friday, September 23, 2016

Thoughts While Waiting for My Computer to Boot Up

Lee Harvey Oswald shot the President of the USA and a Dallas Cop during his half assed getaway....and still he got Taken Alive.

James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King and lived to die in bed, in prison.

Sirhan Sirhan shot RFK in a crowded kitchen, in the presence of the LAPD, and got taken alive.

Squeaky Frome tried to shoot President Gerald Ford, and was captured arrested tried and shipped off to a Nut House.

Ditto Sarah Jane Moore.

And John Hinkley.

All of these people were armed and dangerous with very serious crimes to answer for, nobody pulled them over in traffic and saw something they didn't like....but they all lived to sit before a Judge and Jury.

But then

Almost all of them were white....I mean that's the big takeaway as we go thru another spasm of Police African-American Shootings.  Just sayin'.....I mean look at the big picture here.

Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Kudos to Senator Warren

or taking Wells Fargo CEO Stumpf to the woodshed over that bank's abominable practice of forcing unwanted accounts and policies on unsuspecting clients.
This is outright economic piracy more akin to the financial practices of a Somali Warlord than anything a well run democracy should tolerate.
Yet without concerted congressional action we can expect more of these scandals, right down to the denunciations before congress, and then the miscreants duly retire with their golden parachutes & defy the world.
Too Big to Fail doesn't Mean Too Big to Bust Up.
A touch of the congressional vertical stroke is needed here, but until there is a majority in congress working on behalf of the average person we can look forward to more and more of this outright thievery.
So before we can clean out the banks, we need to clean out Dixie's Rotten Boroughs....GOP Bustin' then TrustBusting....

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Just remember at the end of the day, The Ayatollah Khomeini voted for Ronald Reagan

because he was hell bent on humbling Jimmy Carter and wished to derail the peace process in the Middle East. So he delayed the release of the hostages, gave Reagan some undeserved hero cred on Inauguration Day 1980 and hoped for the sort of chaos that all incendiaries dream of, every night.
So in the current bombing campaign, ISIS is clearly "voting with their bombs" for Donald Trump.....because true incendiaries always can spot one another a mile away it seems.
So lets not fall into the rhetorical trap of defending a fraught status quo...and we need to make the argument (however fine) that there is a clear and preferable difference between the current danger and  Trump's promise of Virile Anarchy.
And whatever else don't let the bastards see ya sweat.

Monday, September 19, 2016

So despite all those investigators and detectives

that Donald Trump put on the "Obama Birther Case" back in 2011, Donald Trump finally had to come clean and admit the President is Indeed a US Citizen. He also claimed in an outright lie recorded in public that said slur was originally propagated by Hillary Clinton.
Ah well so it goes....

My question to all you die hard grievance ridden movement conservatives out there, Do ANY of you feel betrayed by The Donald's Sudden Change of Heart?
Any of you at all?
Because your silence just makes the lie even more embarrassing and shameful....if any of the cited participants were capable of shame that is.....

Fox News....

gave serial sexual harasser, Roger Ailes a forty million dollar "golden parachute" before gently ushering him out the door.
The irony here is, Fox News is a notoriously conservative news outlet that remains a premiere platform for family values mongers and the like.
Now, I may be All Stupid Like....(to quote Alexei Sayle) but I think, chasing leggy on air talent around your desk like you are Jim Backus in a bad 1950's sitcom, is probably NOT embodying "traditional family values".
And yet, Ailes went on disporting himself in this lewd manner for years so we are told, until a few on air personalities finally took their complaints public.
So clearly one can create and administer a "Family Values News Platform" without any need to live up to said value structure.
Because it seems to be philosophy 101 that its a zero-sum game when it comes to family values versus philandering...you cannot embrace both concepts sans intellectual dishonesty and immediate cognitive dissonance.
Or can you?
Both stances frankly reinforce patriarchy and gender exclusion....philandering is the operational result of such attitudes, "family values" their totemization.
You can do this only by paying a high tax to the virtue mongering notions of family values, but horny conservatives like Roger Ailes are clearly willing to pay up.
So as long as patriarchy is reinforced and celebrated which is nothing but a nostalgic gender power relationship, both concepts can be "administratively reconciled" even if they are mutually exclusive on paper.
Well in the end this is about power where great power is concentrated there ought to be the maximum feasible transparency. Forty Million Large though, does a beautiful job of obscuring the above cited contradictions & practical compromises.



Monday, September 12, 2016

Ohhh Hillary is Sick....

she's got pee-new-moanyah.....
I just love the tidal wave of treble guessing that attends a minor incident like this, I mean shee-it from an actuarial perspective she is in the catbird seat pneumonia or no pneumonia, women outlive men by a country mile and occasion lower life insurance premiums in almost every case.
She should get Trump's Doctor to check her vitals, cuz according to that guy The Donald can leap tall buildings in a single bound....

Sunday, September 11, 2016

Last Week....

Jeff Jacoby insisted that overpopulation was a good thing, this week he swings his rhetorical baseball bat at the head of the head of that pesky popular franchise.
His argument low engagement voters shouldn't vote,  declining to vote is a defacto endorsement of the status quo so by staying home, non-voters are somehow being...patriotic.
This is in the face of strong polling that indicate a great deal of dissatisfaction with the status quo along gender, age and SES lines....per Jeff Jacoby though I guess none of this is fixed by...voting.

Well as a theory this does some merit (regardless of my criticism), but in practice low turnout and mass electoral disaffection routinely helps conservatives hang on to power in the face of the toxic effects of their policies....so in the end this is another one of Jeff's sneaky passive aggressive arguments for the fast decaying wingnut eschaton.

***
Speaking of conservatives...how the HELL does Mitt Romney's bootblack Eric Fehnstrom get a cush gig doing election commentary on the Globe's Editorial Page?? I don't see John E. Walsh getting any counterpoint space....
The Globe has this endless false consciousness liberal guilt trip, they feel obligated to give up space for outright GOP political hacks masquerading as pundits.
Its bad journalism....worse in an election year.....but then this is the Boston Globe institutionally its got a liberal outlook but operationally they haven't got a single liberal columnist worth two cents on the market.
If they really want a conservative voice then ditch that wingnut jobber Fehnstrom and hire someone with real journalistic cred, at least then standards would go up...but then this is the Globe and all us readers can do is sigh and go "tut tut..."

Thursday, September 08, 2016

Your Humble Blogger

(seemingly the last of the Single Combat Political Bloggers) was voter# 5 in his precinct this morning, and he hardly made an early start of it either.
So its gonna be a low turnout primary, which is a shame because either we have good nominees in need of support or else we need to take a second look at some office holders.
In the Governor's Council, a Superfluous Institution is home to an entirely Superfluous Personality,

Marilyn M. Petitto Devaney - District 3, is well worth dismissing from office, someone needs to tell her that lobbying local democrats doesn't start with passing out poorly xeroxed copies of Howie Carr's column.  I voted for Bill Humphrey which was mostly a vote against twitchy weirdness.

On the other hand I voted for Middlesex County's Incumbent Sheriff, Peter Koutoujian (sp), he seems able well informed and realistic I don't know why he rates a primary challenge so far he has done a good job and remains "a comer" as my white haired mother would say.

Buuuut lets face it, low turnouts favor incumbents so I'm hardly able to predict that my vote today is prophesy in the making.

Monday, September 05, 2016

Happy Labor Day....

You are working longer hours for less pay and retirement is many more years away than it was for your parents.
And Labor Unions are as dead as the Dodo Bird....and the middle class is being systematically robbed to maintain the topmost earners who themselves accumulate wealth without actually creating any of it. But hey... this is all about the Dignity of Labor Right?
Right???
Because Labor can have all the dignity in the universe as long as it settles for pennies on the dollar....frankly I've had enough of mere dignity pay me the money.

Thursday, September 01, 2016

The Only Takeaway I get from

from Donald Trump's visit with the President of Mexico is that the people of that Redoubtable Nation got a preview of the sort of malevolent boorishness they can expect from the GOP Candidate should he win in November.
Not even twelve hours after cooing unconvincingly with Nieto, Trump was in Arizona screaming for Blood Dynamite, Ethno-Purges and a Wall Built Up to Heaven.
So much for a pivot to moderation....
Reams of copy will be eructated by Columnistas trying to figure out what it all means, but I take Joshua Marshall's view in that Donald Trump is a stupid berserker who makes decisions associated with stupid berserkerdom. Rationality doesn't enter into it at any point, true north points directly to "DUMB & ANGRY" and thass it.
There is nothing to analyze there is no subtext or strategy here....and thats the scariest part of all this.