The Invasion of the Capitol Building

On January 6, 2021 a large crowd of Trump supporters and others approached the Capitol while Congress was in joint session to certify the electors from the states. Most of the Trump supporters wanted the Congress to send the electors back to some states for investigation and recertification. There was really not much hope for that once the Vice President declined to act.

A few of the people decided to invade the Capitol, while most stayed outside. There are varying and conflicting stories about who these people were, and how many actually broke into the Capitol Building. There is even some video indicating that the Capitol Police actually let some people in.

We do not know yet just who all of those people are, but certainly at least some were Trump supporters, and some were not.

The investigation is ongoing, and one hopes there will be transparency so we can all learn the truth of what occurred. Unfortunately, politics will likely intervene, and everything will be spun against the Trump folks and the President himself. That is just the way in Washington, D.C. Truth is rarely the objective there, sadly.

One thing is perfectly clear, however. Those who entered the Capitol Building violated the law, and they should be identified and prosecuted. One has First Amendmant rights, but that does not permit what we saw on that day and evening.

Another thing that should be perfectly clear is that those who are Trump supporters that participated in the invasion betrayed their President and their fellow law abiding Trump supporters. Actions such as that can never be tolerated.

We should all pray for those who died and were injured. And pray for healing in our country, as we await the results of the investigation.

Trump, the Media and the Rest of Us

A large number of the media, the political left and a few weakling Republicans really have their drawers in a wad over Trump calling out the media. Needless to say, none of them spoke up when Obama did it on several occasions.

It seems they believe that for Trump to criticize them, such would violate their First Amendment rights to freedom of the press. Let us take a look at the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.^[1]

 The first thing that should stand out upon reading this is that Trump is not Congress, and is not "abridging" the freedom of the press. He is merely being very highly critical of the media, something other presidents have done throughout our history.

Another thing that should stand out is that to prevent an individual from criticizing the media, or anyone else, would certainly abridge that person's rights to freedom of speech.

So everyone needs to relax. The First Amendment is not threatened by President Trump.

We should turn our attention to why Trump is critical of the media. There are so many instances of dishonest and mistake stories in the media, that there is no space for it. The Federalist ran a story about sixteen of the false stories some time ago. One can find it here.

There are many more. The latest is the false story about Trump telling about a terror attack in Sweden that did not occur. All o f the media ran with it, although it was clear from the beginning that he just flat did not say what they reported. It did fit the anti-Trump, pro-leftwing narrative, so they pushed it as long as they could. Once the truth came out, the story was already around for long enough that it could not really be taken back. A simple reading of his speech would have made clear instantly that he was not speaking of a terror attack, but of the situation in Sweden where they have lost control of the Muslim immigrants.

A few days earlier the AP ran with a story about an unsigned memo that had been leaked from DHS. It was written by some staff member and was not adopted. AP's headlines ran alleging Trump was sending 100,000 National Guard troops to round up illegal aliens. The memo in question did not  put a number on the troops  at all, but AP invented the number. Looks like 'fake news" to anyone.

In addition, AP apparently forgot that it was OK with them when Obama sent Guard troops to the border a few years ago.

What is made clear is that the media bitterly opposes Donald Trump, and will say or do anything to embarrass him or take him down. That latter is their object. One has to read all of the news with that in mind.

The question remains: "What should Trump do about it?"

There are not many options, and really only one that can be used without infringing upon the First Amendment. That is to simply attack the media back, which is exactly what he is doing.

In the past, wimpy Republicans, afraid of the media and wanting to pander to them, would have said nothing. John McCain comes to mind. He let the media destroy his vice-presidential nominee without ever really standing up to them. He also wouldn't let her defend herself. Now, in his cowardly way, he is highly critical of Trump for fighting back.

Right now, it appears that Trump is holding his own by attacking the media for their bias and dishonesty. He needs to continue. If he doesn't, all that will be before the public is what the media fabricates, invents or misconstrues. He would shortly be finished.

That would eventually leave us with the government the media wants: a leftist, progressive, socialist government that they can inordinately influence. That would be a sad day for the United States of American.

The Boy Who Cried "Wolf!"

Over 2000 years ago, Aesop wrote a fable about a boy, who tasked with guarding some sheep, continually alarmed the citizens by crying "wolf!" when there was no wolf. After a time of this falsity, the townspeople came to disregard the boy's cries. Then the wolf really did come, nobody believed it, and the wolf ate the sheep.

Most of us heard some version of this when growing up. It is pertinent now because much the same is occurring with our media.

The First Amendment protects freedom of the press because it was believed, correctly, at the time that a free and independent press was necessary to help guard our freedoms from those in government who would infringe upon them.

Ever since Donald Trump got the Republican nomination, the mainstream media has done everything it could to discredit and destroy him.

They have exaggerated, lied, invented stories, and falsely reported other stories. There has been a constant drumbeat of this from the entire spectrum of the media. If anything could be reported that would harm Trump or his supporters it has been done.

They even invented the term "fake news" to discredit sites which favored Trump. This apparently has backfired to some extent.

One can expect this to continue as long as Trump is President..

The Federalist recently ran a story about "16 Fake News Stories Reporter Have Run Since Trump Was Elected." This story only touches upon the tip of the iceberg.

Over the years, the media has remained free, but not independent. It is almost entirely owned or controlled by left wing establishment elites who almost exclusively support the Democratic Party. The result has been a lot of fake news, and failure to cover news that might be favorable to Trump.

The people are no longer fooled. A poll by Emerson College recently found that 49% of those polled viewed Trump as truthful, while 53% find the media untruthful. Last September, the Gallup Organization reported: "Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low." The poll found that only 32% of Americans trust the media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly." This was the lowest in Gallup's history, and probably explains why the media effort to defeat Trump failed.

The knowledge of the corrupt media by the public leaves us in much the same quandary as the townspeople in Aesop's Fable. There is no longer any trust.

So who is going to help guard our freedoms now?

Donald Trump was elected while violating all of the old political rules in terms of tactics and strategy. He came out of the blue with a message that resonated with a lot of people in the great center (politically and geographically) of the country and won the Electoral Vote, though not the popular vote.

Many of his proposed policies are controversial

In addition, Trump may be a successful businessman, but he has absolutely no experience in governing. Running a government is far different that running a business. It is as much about leading as demanding, and Mr. Trump is unproven to say the least.

He will certainly make mistakes.

Unfortunately, there is nobody believable to call him on it. The Democrats, of course, are rabidly partisan. And with the constant crying of "wolf" by the media, there is no one left to guard the sheep.

The Mad, Lame, Duck

About ten years ago, Barack Hussein Obama was looking like a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president. For those who were interested, there was a wealth of information available about him, if one were to look carefully.

His hometown newspaper ran a series on him in 2007 which were very revealing, yet kept the data of his prior years concealed, as Obama had continually fought to do ever since.

We have not seen his real birth certificate, though he released a fake one. We know very little about his schooling since he has religiously kept those records secret as well

There was, however, plenty of information available to anyone who really looked that told enough about him to raise grave questions about his suitability. Most of what he did as president could have been predicted. For reference, see the series in the Chicago Tribune here. Unlike in 2007, most of it is now behind a paywall, but it is there.

In addition, there were his books, rumored to have been ghostwritten by Weather Underground's Bill Ayers. What was there has been pretty predictive as well.

Then there was his membership in the church of Black liberation preacher and America hater Jeremiah Wright. Any person that heard or saw Wright's "God Damn America" sermon should have seen what Obama was part of, and where he would go.

Most voters didn't read about him, or did not care, so we ended up with him as our president for eight years.

Now, looking back on those eight years, we can see how his past has predicted his presidency. He was born to a black Muslim communist African from Kenya and a white mother who was the daughter and granddaughter of communists. He spent his early years in Indonesia with his mother and an Indonesian Muslim named Soetero. He attended Muslim schools where he prayed to Allah four times a day. Approaching his teens, he went back to Hawaii to be cared for by his communist grandparents, and be mentored by a known communist. He went to college first in California, then to Columbia and on to Harvard Law School. Records from those years have been scrupulously hidden.

His presidency has been about a fundamental transformation of America, and he has pulled out all of the stops to get it done.

The America we have all known and loved had learned through long years that a strong America was necessary to peace. Obama apologized to the world for the strong America, and set out to make it weak. And he has succeeded. He has turned our military into a hollow shell, and has them engaging in social experimentation to the detriment of readiness.

He has offended our friends, and bowed and apologized to our enemies.

He left a political and military vacuum when his red line in Syria meant nothing, and paved the way for Russian and Iran to fill the vacuum.

He has enabled Iran to get nuclear weapons, and provided them the money to finance that, and terrorism, around the world. He has allowed Iran to become a regional power and a formidable enemy.

Essentially, he is leaving the United States a much weaker nation than it was when he took office. There cn be no argument that this was deliberate.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Obama has engaged in multiple acts to try to make certain that American remains weakened.

Probably the worst thing he has done is stab America's friend Israel in the back. For decades, the United States had a commitment to veto UN resolutions affecting Israel. Jimmy Carter made a commitment as part of the Oslo Accords that Israel relied upon in making concessions to the Palestinians. Every president since has honored that until December, when Obama not only failed to veto the resolution that made Judea, Samaria and East Jerusalem "occupied" (and therefore Palestinian) territory, his administration actually orchestrated it all.

The worst part is there will likely be more to come. There is strong evidence that another resolution will be rushed through before Trump takes office that would recognize the Palestinian state and give them a seat in the UN.

This is shameful to the extreme. It is also something that one would expect from a man that was raised a Muslim, who in his book said he would side with the Muslims, and who was mentored by communists.

Anybody who wanted to do the research could have seen all of this coming. What will his last fifteen days reveal? We will see him continue to do as much damage as he can.

The Trump Phenomenon------And the Winner Is.....

The winner of the election, of course, was Donald Trump and those who supported him. Whether that will result in the electorate being winners will await history. After breaking all of the "rules' of retail politics, Trump scored a rousing victory in the Electoral College, which is what has always counted.

The loser(s)? That almost has to be a tie between Hillary Clinton and her Democrat supporters, and the corporate "mainstream" media, which lost all of their power and influence in one fell swoop. Of course they did so because the public discovered that with few exceptions, the media were Hillary's Democrat supporters as well.

The Democratic Party is now in disarray, with no leadership going forward. They have even sunk so low that the leading contender for their National Democratic Committee chairman is a known associate of and sympathizer with the Nation of Islam and militant Islam.

Also losers were the Republican establishment and the "conservative" pundits who were #NeverTrumpers. The establishment, of course, still holds power with the speakership of Paul Ryan, but that power is waning. If Ryan tries to hold up the programs that got Trump elected, he will be very vulnerable when the next election cycle comes around.

"Conservative" publications like National Review have lost much of their influence. They have clearly lost contact with the people and went off on a rigidly dogmatic series of rants about Trump.

Will Trump make winners of us all? That, of course, remains to be seen, but he is off to a pretty impressive start.

He has most of his cabinet much earlier than most, and has conducted it all quite openly, which is a big change. C-Span has had cameras on the elevators at Trump Tower, and recorded all of the traffic coming in to see Trump. Other administrations have conducted the cabinet search in secret. This is a welcome change.

Trump continues to tweet, which disturbs some. He is the first to ever use this kind of social media. The one thing it does is keep him ahead of the media, which has proved itself to be totally untrustworthy. He says he would not need to do it if the media would cover him honestly. That is pretty true. It is his way of addressing the public over the heads of the media, which will often slant what he says.

Even though the Electoral College has not met to ratify his win, and he has not been sworn in, Trump is already acting to set the tone of his new administration.

He and Pence "persuaded" Carrier to remain in Indiana instead of moving to Mexico. Obama mocked him for saying he would do it, but he got it done.

Trump has also begun to set an important line in foreign policy. During Obama's term, China has been very aggressively extending their power throughout the South China Sea, which is  a very important sea lane for the US and its allies in the region. Obama has not vigorously opposed this and China has become more aggressive as time has gone by. The message from Obama has been that they need not worry about the US, that we would just back off.

Trump put a stop to that and sent a strong message to China (and to the rest of the world) that China could no longer have their way in the South China Sea without serious consequences.

That is the meaning of the telephone call with the President of Taiwan, and of Trump referring to her as the President of Taiwan. This was a break with 40 years of diplomacy with China (started by, you guessed it, Jimmy Carter).

Perhaps the most important message he is sending is with his proposed appointments.

Mattis at Defense signals a tough approach to rebuilding our military, as trump has proposed.

Tillerson at State has spent his adult life negotiating tough international trade deals, including with Putin.

Price at Health and Human Services has long been an advocate of repealing Obamacare.

Puzder at Labor has long fought labor policies of the left.

De Vos at Education is a foe of Common Core and supporter of school choice and charter schools.

Perry at Energy has proposed abolishing the department.

Pruit at EPA has a long record of fighting senseless environmental regulations.

Gen. John Kelly, appointed to Homeland Security is an expert on defending the southern border as the former head of the US Southern Command.

There are more, and the sum total of them signal the direction Trump wishes to move when he takes office.

They also are very successful people, almost all from the private sector, who have long records of accomplishment. They will need that experience in dealing with the entrenched bureaucracies, which will fight very hard to impede change.

Can Trump and his folks succeed? Let us all hope so, for if he does, we all become the winners of this election.

The losers will remain the same.

The Trump Phenomenon......The End Game

It is Sunday before the Tuesday election, and over 40 million Americans have already voted. Trump, who has violated a lot of the "rules" of running a political campaign is doing so again.

He is campaigning in the so-called "blue states" that rarely vote for  Republican candidate. He is also drawing huge crowds there. Seven different states are on his schedule today.

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is following the "rules" and campaigning in two of the "battleground" states.

Seven appearances for Trump and only two for Clinton with two days left.

That raises the question: does she think she is that far ahead, or can she only physically do two appearances in one day?

Since the last post, Trump has become a much better candidate. He has gotten off of Twitter, and has kept on message. His speeches are smooth and coherent. His advertising is quite well done

He has drawn huge crowds everywhere he has gone. Enthusiastic crowds.

Clinton has been Clinton, with her team only drawing small, unenthusiastic crowds, except of course, when she has an entertainer with her to draw a crowd....entertainers like the crude, vulgar and racist Jay-Z, or the fanny wagging J-LO, or even anti-cop and vulgar Beyonce.

Strange bedfellows, indeed. But they say politics makes strange bedfellows.

Her money has bought the best advertising and "ground game" money can buy. Apparently the money cannot buy love, but it can buy votes. And the Democrat ground game has always been good at stealing votes.

The FBI gave Clinton another clean bill of health for breaking the laws with her email usage. That is not surprising. Obama has totally corrupted the Department of Justice, the FBI and just about every other Federal Agency in Washington. One cannot really believe what they say or do any more.

The polls, as usual, are all over the place, with the average giving Clinton a slight lead within the margin of error. Some are outliers and give Trump a lead. The individual state polls make it a very close race.

Who will win on Tuesday? Will we even know by Wednesday? This is so hotly contested, that barring the quite unexpected landslide for one of them, one can look for lawsuits and challenges from both sides. That, of course, will only divide our population even more. And the courts are not a good place to decide elections.

We should all hope and pray for a landslide for one or the other. Our country really needs to get this election behind us.

That does not seem to be in the cards.

The Trump Phenomenon------Falling Into the Trap

After he had lost a lot of momentum after the conventions by taking on the Khans and other errors, Trump got things back together. He did very well most of August and into September, gaining momentum back and even edging past Hillary Clinton in a number of the polls.

The came the debate. It was watched by around 90 million Americans. It was Trump's opportunity to really put Hillary away.

Of course, everyone knew the debate was going to be set up for Hillary, and Trump should have known it as well, and prepared for it. Instead, he was an amateur and did not do the hours of preparation necessary.

The moderator, of course, did not ask Trump important questions. Instead Trump was asked about completely inconsequential things like birtherism and tax returns. Trumps answers were off the cuff and unprepared....just as one might expect from an amateur. There was no effort to turn the questions back on the moderator as he probably should have done.

On the other side, Hillary was asked softball questions that allowed her to give canned responses consisting of the age old Democratic gobbledygook that they have been saying for decades without there ever having been any positive change. Trump was unable to really inject himself into that side of the debate.

This gave the advantage to Hillary, and she ran with it. She clearly was the "winner" of the debate.

The most important part of the debate from her standpoint was that she was able to lay a trap for Trump by asking him about "Miss Piggy." Trump fell for it. This move got Hillary inside Trump's OODA Loop just like he got inside the loops of so many of his Republican opponents in the primaries

Not only did he fall into the trap, like with the Khans, he kept doubling down on the issue instead of moving on. It became the "news" on the mainstream media for a week or more.

Trump lost all of the momentum and gains he had made. He is now back to the post convention situation with a lost lead and lost momentum......and just a bit over a month to go.

There are two more debates. Trump has to take them seriously and prepare while still getting out and campaigning. He also needs to get off Twitter. It only makes him appear to be not serious.

Can he do it? Maybe. There will be a lot more attacks on him from all directions. Will his ego and nature allow him to respond properly, or will he over do the response?

He is doing a lot of advertising into the election as he should. Most of the ads seem effective, but will be only if they are well placed and reach enough undecided voters.

This is an election between two very flawed candidates, one a rank amateur in politics and the other an experienced, hardened politician with a very shady, perhaps even criminal, background.

Who will win?

It is pretty easy to see who will lose.

The Trump Phenomenon.......Reality Strikes

As noted before, Donald J. Trump achieved the Republican nomination for President while breaking almost all of the rules for politicians that have been developed over history.

Having done so, he failed to recognize that once he was nominated, the strategy and tactics used during the primaries would no longer work. Once he got in the big arena, the mainstream media put him in their sights, and proceeded to parse every word he said and use them to beat him up.

And he provided them plenty of ammunition in the first weeks. It cost him a month in which the media and the Democrat they serve did their best to brand him however they wanted. In those weeks, his poll numbers fell accordingly. No surprise there.

In August, he has seemed to get things under better control, and he has stopped making the undisciplined statement and tweets that we saw during the primaries. This appears to have helped with the poll numbers.

To have a chance of winning the election, he is going to have to get the branding the media and his opponent have done to him reversed. This is difficult to do now. One cannot do it with rallies, however well attended. There he is preaching to the choir.

To reach the biggest part of the electorate, he is going to have to do it with media. During the primaries, he got free media from everyone. Now, only Fox and a few others report on him positively. The rest of the media, best described as Democrat operatives with bylines will only report him in a very negative way.

That means he will have to buy advertising, and therefore do a lot of fundraising. He has taken some pride in self funding much of his campaign so far, though he has been raising money since the nomination.

He will need to do much more in order to buy the advertising he will need.

Perhaps his biggest issue from the beginning has been illegal immigration. During the primaries, he was able to get by with generalizations. We are going to deport all illegals is very easy to say, and appealing to many, but again ugly reality raises its head.

Trying to deport 12 million illegals immediately is just impossible to do. Even if that is what is wanted, the resources to do so do not exist, nor will they. We have a system of laws in place that deal with the procedures for doing so, and although they are not being used by the current administration they would have to be followed by a Trump administration. The hope that the laws could be changed to facilitate mass deportation is not justified because Democrats would filibuster it in the Senate even if Republicans would pass it.

Trump appears to have realized that, and is modifying the policy a bit. We do not know how much change there would be, but he has said that he would follow the law. That is at least something that Democrats have failed to do for many years.

Some Trump supporter will be critical of any change, but my view is that the change is necessary and proper. Of course, many of those critics are people who would drive the bus over the cliff to stand for "principle." A good leader would not do that.

Trump is meeting today with Enrique Pena Nieto, the President of Mexico, in what is a very interesting development. That will be followed shortly with what is billed as a speech giving details about his immigration policy going forward. These things could very well make or break his candidacy.

Whatever he says and does today, Trump must face the reality that in order to get his ideas into the body politic, he cannot rely on the media for free publicity. He has to raise the money and buy ads.

So, we will see how it goes.

The Trump Phenomenon-----The Conversationalist

In my 58 year experience in politics, I have found that one thing that is learned by practicing politicians is to be careful and precise in the language used in a campaign. If one does not, then the candidate leaves oneself open to misconstruction of what is said. And opponents will leap at the opportunity.

The prior two posts talk about how Donald Trump has broken all of the rules of politics, and yet he has emerged as the nominee of the Republican Party for the office of President of the United States. Given the circumstances, that is an amazing feat for someone who is clearly a novice at retail politics.

Once he secured the nomination, he needed to pivot a bit away from the style of campaign he had been running. During the primaries, the media really gave him a lot of exposure that other Republican candidates didn't get. The reason, of course, is that the media is almost entirely Democratic, and they viewed Trump as the easiest for their candidate to beat.

Prior to the nomination, Trump's approach to the campaign was more conversational than a prepared group of talking points. When he spoke, it was right off the top of his head. He talked more like he was having a conversation at a cocktail party (after a couple of hours of drinking). His statements were broad and imprecise. He got away with it because the press let him.

Trump's big mistake has been not realizing that the minute he got the nomination, the press would turn on him with great vigor. He should have seen it coming, but he clearly did not.

Instead of turning his attention toward Hillary and Obama, the morning after he attacked Ted Cruz. Then he gets involved with criticizing the Khans.

He has not seen yet that he must have some discipline over his mouth or let the media destroy him. They will happily do so, and are proceeding with that as I write.

Every undisciplined thing he says will be parsed, misconstrued, and misquoted by almost every media outlet in the world.

Get smart, Mr. Trump. Put a governor on your mouth. Get on message and stay there. Let petty stuff go. You are on the big stage now. Act like it, or you will make Hillary Clinton the next President of the United States.

The Trump Phenomenum----Breaking the Rules

It has been a year since Donald Trump announced for the presidency. In that year he has gone from being laughed at for thinking he could actually win to being at least the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party. Amazing.

How did he do it? Certainly not in a conventional way. In fact, he broke many of the "rules" for running for office.

My first experience in politics was in 1958, when a student in college. Since then I have been engaged in politics, though I am retired now. As a candidate in eight elections and an active participant in many other campaigns, there were certain rules that one learned the follow.

The first was "money is the mother's milk of politics." In other words, money, and raising a lot of it, is usually the key to winning. Advertising is costly, and has grown even more so as the years go by. As the population has risen, advertising has become more and more the only way to reach most voters. This is why our elected officials spend so much time fund raising. Money provides them the power.

Though not completely, Trump has ignored this rule for the most part. Self funding, with some money volunteered, has financed his campaign to date. He has done very little advertising, and none in the major media. Instead, he worked the media, freely giving interviews to all comers. He has held rallies, but no ad buys.

Hillary Clinton, on the other hand, has raised nearly $200 million, and has already reserved large ad buys for the general election.

The second rule that one learns early on in politics is "you don't pick a fight with someone that buys ink by the barrel and paper by the ton." Of course, that refers back to an earlier time before the electronic media became so dominant, but the point remains the same. Don't fight the media. They can kill you if they want.

Trump, of course, has ignored that rule as well. Every speech I have heard, he has taken on the media, even though they gave him all of the free publicity. Now that he is the presumptive nominee of the GOP, most of the media has now turned on him, and will demonize him as best they can. I suspect it will make what they did to Sarah Palin look mild in comparison.

Another rule in politics is that "you have to go along to get along." That essentially means that you don't fight the party establishment or its powerful members if you want to be successful.

Trump, of course, has done the opposite. He has turned the party establishment on their collective ears. He has apparently won the nomination having done that.

That has embittered most of them, and they continue to oppose him. That means that although he beat them in the primaries, they can still deny him the election. We will just have to wait and see.

In any event, I believe this at least marks the beginning of the end of the Republican Party as it has been. It can either morph into a broader based party with considerably less influence by its old establishment, or go the way of the Whigs.

What Trump has done is hit a real nerve with a large segment of the population. Bernie Sanders has hit much the same nerve, with just a different constituency. Americans have grown tired of the "business as usual" in Washington.

It remains to be seen if enough of them vote to change it.

The Trump Phenomenon and the GOP

A year ago when I was contemplating this year's election and the race for the GOP nomination, we were considering a host of candidates: governors, senators, and the like. The GOP field looked wide and deep. Everyone was confident that the GOP would nominate one of those traditional politicians and have a very strong chance to win the presidency.

What a difference a year makes. In June, billionaire Donald Trump burst on the scene, surprising everyone.

Within weeks, Trump had sucked the air out of many of the traditional politicians' campaign. His media savvy and celebrity left little room for other candidates who were less well funded. Soon, one by one, they began to drop out.

Few really took Mr. Trump seriously in those days. It was just an instant  sort of thing and he would fade when faced with actual campaigning. Nobody really wanted to take him on. Those that did almost immediately regretted it.

Then he started winning. Not only was he winning, but he got a pretty good lead. Suddenly, the depleted band of politicians in the race took notice. So did the Republican establishment after most of their favorites bit the dust.

For the last two months there has been a concerted effort by the establishment and their PACs, the remaining candidates and their PACs, and the media to stop Trump, whatever it may take. No holds barred.

This barrage has seeming slowed the Trump bandwagon, and certainly has a chance to derail him. It will be close.

So what has caused this phenomenon? It is really easy to tell. He burst on the scene with issues that a lot of voters are very concerned about, but which got short shrift from the establishment Republicans.

Illegal immigration and the need to secure our borders.

The harm that unfettered free trade has done to our manufacturing base and its now unemployed workers.

The weakened military and as an adjunct, the total failure to provide good care for our veterans.

These issues and others resounded with a lot of voters across the political spectrum. They turned out for Trump at rallies and at the polls. The befuddled GOP just could not see what anyone could see in a brash, egotistic, non politically correct rich guy like Trump.

I think that what they saw was someone, anyone, who would stand up for the issues they were interested in and thought were vital. That is pretty simple.

Too simple for politicians who have spent their careers coddling the people who provided them money, and therefore power. Too simple for politicians who are more interested in their own welfare and that of their donors instead of the welfare and interests of the voters who elected them.

Trump is very clearly not a politician, and is woefully unprepared to make a traditional political campaign. It is almost as if he did it on a lark, and then was surprised by the outpouring of support from the grassroots voters. He has had no plan, no "ground game." The fact that he continues to do well in many jurisdictions is amazing to me.

The entire array of political forces are against him, yet he continues to win. Perhaps it is time for those forces to ask themselves why that is happening.

The Republican Party has utterly failed to deliver on promises made. The people have elected them to make changes in Washington, yet the leadership continues down the same old path of taking care of the money people and letting the rest of their voters go.

So we get Trump. It is amazing to me to see the forces arrayed against Trump, and wonder whether those same forces arrayed against Obama and the Democrats with the same aggression might have made a Trump unlikely.

Restarting

After a year and a half absence, I had the idea I should put my thoughts on things down, so I hunted up my old blog, and here I am.

The grand project that I was writing just kind of petered out. It occurred to me that every decade was much the same, except it kept getting worse.. So I lost my momentum.....and my interest in the subject. My apologies.

What is now occurring in our body politic is rather extraordinary, and I hope to put down some ideas about it over the next while.

I will refer back to my blog on June 15, 2014. In that post I mentioned the problem with money in politics, and pointed out that nobody seemed to care as long as they got their "stuff."

Obviously, this year people have started to care about the two parties and their directions. A lot of Democrats want a lot more stuff, so we have Bernie Sanders doing well. On the other hand, voter on the Republican side are tired of sending people to Congress to change things and having them stymied by the old order, or co-opted by it. So we have Donald Trump.

This will provide plenty to muse about the rest of the year.

But enough for today. It's nap time.

Great Changes, Delayed

I started a series called Great Changes in Progress a while back intending to bring the discussion decade by decade to the present. Unfortunately, that has been delayed a bit. My sweet bride has been having a bout with breast cancer.  Mammograms, biopsies, two surgeries, and she will start radiation treatments next week.

The cancer was ductile in situ, meaning we caught it early before it was able to spread, and the second surgery assured us as much as possible that all of the tumor has been removed. So we are very thankful to say the least. The radiation should take care that it does not recur.

As a result, the continuation of the series will have to await the time when I can get my mind back on it.

I do intend to finish it. For what it will be worth.

Great Changes in Progress; Part I

Introduction

After I posted Part I it occurred to me that this needed some kind of introduction so any reader might understand where I am going. I think great changes are coming to our country, some of which are already underway. What follows is my thoughts about these changes, starting with some history. This history is not intended to be all inclusive. It is all from my memories of the times unless I have provided a link. I am starting with the 1960s because this is the time I entered adulthood. Some of the trends had been in progress for many years before, but 1960 seems as good a point to start as any.

I do not know whether anyone is interested in my thoughts. I am doing this as an exercise for myself. But readers and comments are welcome. If you think I have made a factual error, please let me know and I will correct it if I agree.

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When I sat down to write the reflections after my 75th birthday, I first read those comments posted after my 74th, and determined that in that year, not much had changed.

Upon further reflection, I realize that that is not true. We are undergoing great changes in our country, culturally and politically. As an old timer, that is a bit unsettling.

I suppose every generation as it reaches elderhood thinks the younger generations have lost their minds, or is getting off the track, or are failing somehow. Mine is probably no different.

My thought today is that we have failed the younger generations.....our children and grandchildren. We have failed them both in our actions and our inactions.

My cohort (which is pre-baby boomer) had a great childhood. America was ascendant, everyone that wanted to work had jobs, and although the Cold War was in progress, and we had the "police action" in Korea, we had relative peace at home.

That world ended on November 23, 1963 when President Kennedy was assassinated. From that date, it seemed that the world we had known simply fell apart.

We had already gotten committed in Viet Nam, and that commitment soon escalated, even though there was no broad public support for the war. This of course led to the anti-war protests, which gradually escalated throughout the decade and beyond until the end of the war.

This was paralleled by the great civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr. and others. Although peaceful, this movement too frequently incited violence from die-hard segregationists.

Through the 1960s and well into the 1970s, these two movements led to a great deal of civil unrest throughout the country.

At the same time, our culture rapidly changed. The old social mores were thrown out, and license took their place. A revolution took place in our music, language and in sexual relationships. The Baby Boomers really fundamentally altered our society as they came of age.

With these revolutions came the beginnings of some really harmful trends. Divorce rate soared, as did the number of out of wedlock births. The concept of family began to fall apart, abetted by the welfare requirement that made a household ineligible if there was a man in the house. This latter requirement virtually destroyed the African American family and did significant harm to other groups as well.

All of the social and cultural trends remain in place today.

The economy has also seen great changes which stem from events and policies that began in the 1960s.

When Lyndon Johnson escalated the war in Viet Nam, he also began the War on Poverty. Nobody likes poverty, but LBJ determined that he was going to wage both of those very expensive wars without raising the necessary revenue to even start to pay for them. He would borrow the money.

This, of course, was very inflationary. Theretofore, the Bretton Woods Agreement had made the US dollar the world's reserve currency, used in all international trade. Other governments could freely convert the dollars they held into gold from the US Treasury.

The "guns and butter" approach by LBJ left the US with huge deficits, both fiscal and in trade, and other nations, particularly Switzerland and France, began to convert their dollars to gold. This forced Nixon, in 1971, to close the gold window, essentially ending to Bretton Woods Agreement, and detaching the dollar from gold. This made the dollar a purely fiat currency. It has also led to very large changes in the nation's economy which have been very costly.

More in Part II.

Great Changes in Progress, Part II

We left Part I with the end of the gold standard. This was the pivotal point in this history as will be shown.

1972 brought the election, and Watergate. The Viet Nam War was still in progress, with the attendant demonstrations and domestic violence from the anti-war crowd. With Nixon's re-election, he was able, at least some what, to pacify Viet Nam, and our troops were pretty rapidly with drawn, leaving a viable, but needy South Vietnamese government in charge, dependent upon American aid to be viable.

At the same time, shocks in the economy were constant, a result of the abandonment of the gold standard and a de facto devaluation of the dollar. OPEC caused oil prices to skyrocket, and the result was inflation throughout the economy.

The entire remainder of the decade saw inflation and a stagnant economy. This was commonly called "stagflation."

The 1970s was not a good decade for the United States. Stagnation, inflation, scandal dominated the scene. Viet Nam was ultimately lost when Congress pulled the aid from the South Vietnamese government, which promptly fell to the North, rendering the 52,000 American live lost purposeless.

We continued to have high inflation and energy woes through the end of the decade.

One may now ask why the gold standard was so important. What that did was require the US Government to exercise some fiscal restraint or face losing our gold. Without the convertibility, the government and the Federal Reserve had the ability to spend and print money as they wished, without an immediate apparent penalty, even though there would be an invisible penalty. Politicians love that kind of money availability, for they can then spend their way to re-election after re-election. And they did.

One thing that occurred in the overall economy was the beginning of the financialization of it. Manufacturing jobs began their decline, and Wall Street began to grow in power and influence. Money was "free" more or less.

And the invisible penalty began to be paid. Inflation adjusted earnings for men age 25 and up peaked in 1972, just as the gold standard was axed and the dollar devalued. They have never recovered to that point. Only the top quintile has done better, and particularly the top 5%. And these latter groups do better only when you count the households, not individuals.

We heard a lot about the "misery index" back in those days. Voters tended to hold the politicans responsible for that, and they were certainly partly to blame, but the Federal Reserve had the power to rein in the excesses, but failed to do so.

The president being forced to appoint a tough Chairman of the Federal Reserve marked the end of the decade. Paul Volcker would, in 1980, bring inflation to it knees. And that is where we will start Part III.

More Reflections, After My 75th Birthday

Three quarters of a century have come and gone, and there is much to reflect upon.

There are new scandals in our government since the last birthday, and some that we knew about then appear much worse than we thought back then.

Our politics are proving even more corrupt than I feared, and it is not confined to one political party. The dominant wing of the minority party is also corrupt.

What I refer to is the dominance of money in our politics, and the fact that politicians of both parties take money, in the form of political contributions, and pass out special legislative and regulatory favors to those who contribute.

A lot of those same politicians amazingly acquire fortunes while on the government payroll.

What the politicians do is give those individuals and corporations advantages economically that are not available to everyone else.

Special tax breaks, subsidies and regulations are all enacted to give those "friends" of politicians a leg up.

One example might be the Keystone Pipeline, which lacks only Obama's approval to be constructed. This would result in a cheap, and environmentally friendlier way of delivering the Canadian oil to our Gulf Coast. But Obama will not approve the pipeline, so it is now being delivered, at a cost of $30 per barrel, by rail. This is a lot more environmentally dangerous, of course. Why the hold up? Guess who owns the railroad? None other than Berkshire-Hathaway, Warren Buffet's company. Obama's big friend.

Everyone has seen how the megabanks have cheated and defrauded their way to great riches, got themselves bailed out at taxpayers' expense in 2008, then continued down the same path to this day. Not a single major individual at any of the big banks has been prosecuted. They are too big to fail and too big to jail. Why? Check out their huge campaign contributions to Obama and major members of his party. Also check out the contributions to politicians belonging to the members of the dominant wing of the other party.

This list could go on ad infinitum.

In our politics now, money is the only name of the game for most.

And too few people even seem to care.....as long as they get their stuff.

There is no rule of law in this country now that is applicable evenly to all.

Sad.

About Modern liberals

Andrew Klavan of PJ Media had an interesting post today entitled "A Pause for Life" in which he states something very close to my view of liberals, or Democrats, or Progressives, which are really all pretty much the same. I don't capitalize the term "liberal" because to do so might confuse things because a Liberal (classical) is something entirely different.

I don't really like the terms we all seem to use in a shorthand way to classify folks with different political philosophies. Terms like liberal, conservative and progressive are very difficult to use to describe the complexity of political thought. The meaning of the terms seem to be adjusted with some frequency.

I have always considered myself a classical Liberal.....Jeffersonian, with a touch of Jacksonian populism. That is a far cry from modern liberalism (or progressivism), but is also not really adequately described by the terms "conservative" or "libertarian".

I have dear friends who are liberals as well as many who describe themselves as conservatives. I often disagree with the former on policy, and occasionally with the latter.

However I might disagree however, the following quote really describes how I feel about the disagreement:

In moments when I do pause, it comes back to me that, while people like Barack Obama or Harry Reid may be small, dishonest and corrupt individuals whose actions and philosophies are antithetical to the greatest ideals of the American state, many of the people who voted for them are far better than the men they voted for. They are people of good will who make their political decisions in keeping with their reason and traditions and in accord with what they think they know. So many of their hopes for the country are the same as mine. Often it’s only the methods we disagree on.

LEAVING HOME

On my twelfth birthday, my family and I moved into our new home on the west side of Lubbock. We came from Austin, where I was born and completed elementary school.

The move, of course, meant that I was leaving behind all of the friends of my lifetime to that point, and coming to a town where I knew not a soul.

That was rather traumatic for a twelve year old. And so, on our second day, we had a very serious dust storm....called haboobs nowadays. Talk about trauma.

We settled in that summer and I started school at J. T. Hutchinson Junior High that fall. And started making friends, and continued to do so. Many of those original friends are life-long friends. No need for names....they know who they are, and I am afraid if I tried to start naming them I would leave one out.

Except for a brief sojourn away at college and a brief stop in Midland for a year and a half, Lubbock was my home for 62 years. I love Lubbock and the people there. I married my wife there and we had our daughter there, and raised her  until she left for college. Lubbock is/was home.

Times change, however. Our daughter went away for college, and except for a brief boomerang, has returned only for very brief visits.

She now lives in the area just south of Ft. Worth, has a small farm, and a full time job. Because she had so little time to come to Lubbock and visit, and because we wanted to be able to have her in our life much more than had been possible, my wife and I decided to move closer to her, and bought a home near Granbury, Texas.

More trauma! Murphy's Law is alive and well, as we have discovered. The remodeler screwed up, and from then on it seems like everything that could break down, did. Moving to a new place to live is not for sissies, I can tell you.

Of course, we miss all of our dear friends, and that is the sad part. On the other hand, we see our daughter with great frequency, and are able to participate in her life much more than we could before. That makes the whole thing worthwhile.

Otherwise, I would feel like I did when I was twelve coming into a new town.

But enough of that. I hope to blog more....it has been almost a year since the last one. I don't know if anyone is really interested in that, but it gives an elderly guy something to do.

Reflections upon my 74th birthday

Nothing much important happened in June of 1939. America was still mired in a long running Depression. Much of the rest of the world was as well. Around the world, many of the great powers were marching toward war, but it was not until September that the Second World War broke out with Germany's invasion of Poland.

It wasn't until December 1941 that America was attacked by the Empire of Japan, which unleashed the mighty power of our country against the Germans and the Japanese.

My Sis and I, of course, knew nothing about this until we were older, and  our early lives were not much affected by the war. The mobilization for the war did have the effect of ending the Depression, but with rationing, it was hardly noticeable.

Ice was still delivered for the ice box (no refrigerator then) and the milkman still delivered pasteurized (but not homogenized) milk to the back door.

The war was there, but we were confident we would win.

A 1944 picture in my scrapbook shows me with a military style  helmet and a toy rifle. I suppose this would not be politically correct now.

The war years went fleeing by. There was some awareness of what was going on, but the only real effects it had on our lives was the rationing. I can remember the stamps for sugar, gasoline and the like. Mother would use egg yolks on her stockings because they just could not be replaced. One didn't do much driving. Tires were just impossible to replace.

Toward the end of the war we moved to a new and larger house on the cliffs above Shoal Creek. Behind our house was a cliff, and below that a virtual wilderness, right in the middle of town. All kinds of critturs inhabited the area, and the creek had fish in it. This was paradise for a growing boy.

All of the boys in the neighborhood had a Red Ryder BB gun, and we almost daily deployed to the woods to hunt whatever we could find. It turned out that about all we could sneak up on were large red wasp nests in the trees. That earned us all numerous stings from time to time.

Later, in 1951, we moved to the South Plains. Talk about culture shock! But we soon got used to it, made friends of a lifetime, and went on about our business.

The post war years were fabulous for the most part. Our economy was sound and growing. Everyone was excited about what the future would bring. Perhaps every generation thinks that its coming of age years were the best years ever, but I don't think any generation had it as well as ours.

America after the war was proud, strong and very free. As yet, the government did not control so many aspects of our lives. It was limited in scope.

For many of those years we had a fear of nuclear war, but not so much until the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957. Suddenly, they had the means to deliver a nuke to our shores.

The "missile gap" among other things, led to the election of John F. Kennedy in 1961, with Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. JFK was the first of a "new generation" to take office, and created a great deal of excitement. Although he made some errors, he also had some successes. His commitment to land a man on the moon and return within a decade was symbolic of the confidence Americans had in their country.

As Kennedy took office, a new generation of youth were beginning to come of age: the Baby Boomers. They were to change America in drastic ways.

With the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963, the whole mood of the nation turned darker. Instead of having pride in our country, the Boomers had little but criticism. Over the next decade and a half, they changed our politics greatly. Everything became about race, gender and whatever other category that our people could be divided into. Instead of Americans, we became everything else: African-Americans, Mexican Americans, Anglo-Americans, American Indians; the poor; gays, lesbians, and so on.

The onset of affirmative action together with LBJ's War on Poverty divided the country into those who depended upon big government for favors, and those who just wanted the government to leave them alone. Too many have become dependent upon the government for their well being, and vote accordingly.

There is no argument that the poor should not be cared for, or that racial segregation was not terrible and needed to be ended. Racial discrimination just cannot be tolerated.  Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream that should apply to everyone:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Perhaps everyone should be judged, not by their classification, but by their character.

Big business has always depended upon government favors. But what we now seem to have is an oligarchy that uses the various groups dependent upon the government to stay in control of the government. At least one can conclude that from a study of campaign contributions to political candidates of both parties. This is fine for the people that clip coupons for a living, for the big bankers, and for those who are entitled to various government benefits of one kind or another. But it is terrible for our great middle class and the small businesses that class depends upon.

Just take a look at how the huge financial institutions perpetrated some of the greatest frauds in history that led to the financial crash of 2007-08, and to the depression that has followed it, but have totally escaped prosecution. Then take a look at the political donations to our president for 2008. They were led by the perps, and it bought them the attorney general and his chief deputy for criminal prosecutions, both of whom worked for a big law firm that represented most of the  institutions. No wonder there have been no prosecutions.

There are plenty of laws. Since 1963, thousands of arcane things have been criminalized. There are thousands of pages of criminal statutes and tens of thousands of pages of federal regulations. Every citizen is presumed to know each and every one of them, however vague or arcane. Federal prosecutors have the sole discretion to bring charges, so the result is that if you make an enemy in the government, they can probably find some statute or regulation you may have violated, then prosecute you for it.

This gives the government almost unlimited power, far in excess of the powers it should have. If we have a Nixon, or as we have seen, an Obama, this creates a great danger to America.

If you want to know what happened to our country, just look carefully at the years between 1963 and 1980. The radicals that created so much change during those years now inhabit the Congress, the Administration, the government agencies, and our schools and colleges. We have instance now where a convicted terrorist from that era now holds a responsible job at Columbia University, and the leader of the terror group is ensconced at the University of Chicago and is a close friend of the president.

My generation failed to stop this. I am not sure we could have. Our politics is controlled by the big money not by ideals or principles.

Who is going to step up? Hopefully, the two generations that followed the Boomers will come awake and return our government to its proper course.

Certainly, we cannot return to the idyllic days of my youth. Too much has happened for that. But we can restore our country to constitutionally limited government like we used to have.

A bit of perspective

This month I was going to post a bit about my thoughts upon turning 74, but other things have arisen that needs to be addressed first.

We have all been reading about the "scandals" in the current Obama Administration. The last one, that of the NSA snooping, needs to be put into some perspective.

When the program was started in 2007, there was no really good software available to get a lot of detail from the program. Since then, software that can do amazing things has been developed. This is a good program, and could help combat terrorism if used properly.

Obama wants us to trust the government on this, and, IF we could, I would have no problem with it, as long as it was not used for other than combatting terrorism.

This is where the other "scandals" come into play.

From the beginning, the Obama Administration has just ignored laws it didn't like. They do not feel like they are required to follow the immigration laws, for instance.

The Justice Department is rife with favoritism. They will not prosecute lawbreakers like those responsible for the 2008 financial train wreck, caused almost entirely by fraudulent behaviors by banks and bankers. There are many other such issues. The entire department has been unduly politicized.

The Administration lied and lied over the Benghazi attack.

There is a whole litany of acts and omissions by that bunch which render them completely untrustworthy.

Congress needs to vigorously inquire into this NSA program to make certain the law is and will continued to be used to protect our citizens, and not snoop on them for political purposes. Protections need to be put into place to make them accountable to the people. Absent that, it needs to be stopped.