Dream

Breaking crazy: Donald Trump's press conference

Though I haven't been blogging, that's not because I haven't been paying attention. And certainly, it's not because the crazy in Washington has diminished in any way. I'm just worn out, I guess - depressed and dispirited.

But I had to post this. The fact that President Dumb-as-a-Trump can't see the difference between George Washington, a guy who did everything he could to support our country, and Robert E. Lee, a guy who did everything he could to destroy it, just blows my mind.

It doesn't surprise me, though. And it doesn't surprise me that Trump continues to encourage neo-Nazis and white supremacists, either. After all, we saw that during the campaign, when he tried to avoid criticizing David Duke and the KKK. So of course that's not surprising.

Will the Republican Party succeed in destroying America before they finally destroy themselves? It's looking more and more likely, isn't it?

And Stephen Colbert's audience goes wild

Funny, isn't it? It's not enough that Donald Trump throws tantrums like a child, but he's actually stupid enough to say something like this in public! Does our president know nothing?

The oily crust of corruption

Will the Trump White House end up as the most corrupt in history? Check this out:

You’ve probably heard that the Kushner family was caught over the weekend literally selling visas to immigrate to the United States in exchange for funding a $150 million dollar New Jersey real estate project. [See this article.] The sale itself is actually legal. It’s part of a highly controversial and widely abused program which provides visas to foreign nationals in exchange for $500,000 investments in US projects which by certain standards are judged to create jobs in impoverished or economically distressed parts of the United States. It’s become a widely abused vehicle for real estate developers looking to fund luxury development projects.

Setting that controversy aside, what sets this apart of course is that Jared Kushner is the most senior advisor to the President of the United States, as well as being the President’s son-in-law. While nominally stepping aside from his family business, his family is in China openly trading on the Kushner family’s ties to President Trump to rake up money. As much and as quickly as possible. Kushner’s sister Nicole actually led the presentation. Reporters from the Times and the Post were on hand at the presentation in Beijing (where they were able to get in) and at a second in Shanghai (where they weren’t.)

Trump – as well as the Kushner family’s connection to him – was explicitly invoked as the “key decision maker” in getting the visas. A Times reporter posted this picture of the presentation to Twitter, which I’ve marked up to identify the people in the slide …



This is, needless to say, the most open and flagrant kind of monetizing of the Presidency – as bad as anyone could have imagined from the conjoined Trump/Kushner families. The fact that this ‘nationalist’, ‘crack down on illegal immigration’ White House is connected to cash for visas activities like this just adds a layer of oily crust to the corruption.

The article goes on to point out that reporters only happened upon this event (and weren't allowed into the Shanghai presentation at all). As it notes, "We see hints and shreds of evidence popping up – Ivanka Trump securing numerous trademarks for her company in China," but we are highly unlikely to have seen it all.

The Trump/Kushner families do seem to be cashing in on the Donald Trump presidency, don't they? But then, he is, himself. As he's been doing since the start of the campaign.

***
And speaking of corruption, here's an article about scientists being removed from the Environmental Protection Agency to make room for lobbyists industry representatives. I'm sure those industries will be very grateful to the Republican Party when it comes to campaign donations, don't you think? Even secret campaign donations? (And thanks to the Republicans on our Supreme Court, that's even legal these days.)

Ivanka & Jared

More than any other late-night comedian - and just think for a minute of the worrisome state of our country when I have to say this about a comedian - John Oliver takes the time for an in-depth look at the issues.

I know we'd all like to think that there's someone in the White House who's not batshit crazy, but hope isn't evidence.

John Oliver: A man like Putin

The funny thing is that the comments section of this video clip is overrun with pro-Putin trolls claiming that his critics "are all Jews" and otherwise pushing the idea that Putin's Russia is no different from America.

Clearly, we need John Oliver, don't we?

Keith Olbermann is back!

My thanks to Jeff for the link and the title of this post.

And here's the text version, with links backing up everything Olbermann says.

It's pretty shocking heard all at once, isn't it? Donald Trump has diarrhea of the mouth. Every day, there's something new - many somethings, often enough - which keeps any particular bit of crap from seeming noteworthy. After all, tomorrow there will be another bit, just as bad.

The media love it, because they're in business to make money. It's the same reason we see the most sensational crimes reported in the 'news.' It's the same reason gawkers crowd around accident scenes. It's human nature.

And a lot of us seem to have lost the ability to distinguish 'reality TV' from reality. But when it comes to our democracy, it's very frightening, isn't it?

The miracle of Mother Teresa

(Jesus and Mo)

Pope Francis made Mother Teresa a saint yesterday, on the basis of two miracles. But the real miracle is that people actually buy that bunk, here in the 21st Century.

Here's one of those 'miracles':

[Monica] Besra, who is from a tribal community in eastern India, was so sick she could barely walk when nuns from the Missionaries of Charity, the order founded by Mother Teresa, helped her to a small prayer room one day in 1998.

She paused by a photo of the nun and suddenly felt a “blinding light” emanating from the portrait, and it passed through her body. Later, other nuns pressed a religious medal on her belly, swollen from a tumor, and prayed over Besra as she lay in bed.

She says she awoke at 1 a.m., her body feeling lighter, the tumor seemingly gone.

“I was so happy at that moment I wanted to tell everyone: I am cured,” Besra recalled Wednesday during an interview at her home. ...

Mother Teresa was considered a living saint by many believers during her lifetime, but Besra’s story has always been treated with skepticism in India because doctors and the state health minister debunked it at the time.

They have long maintained that Besra had been suffering from a cyst, not a cancerous tumor. The doctors have said she recovered after she received tuberculosis treatment for several months at a government hospital in Balurghat, about 270 miles north of the city where Mother Teresa spent decades ministering to the destitute and dying.

“I’ve said several times that she was cured by the treatment, and nothing has happened,” one of the doctors involved, Ranjan Mustafi, said in a brief telephone interview.

But saints are big business for the Catholic Church - and very popular with their customer base. 'Mother Theresa' is also very popular, although she shouldn't be. But that popularity made it inevitable that they'd make her a saint.

Monica Besra probably believes what she says (although she's getting a lot of attention for this, and lying for attention certainly isn't unknown). Presumably, those really are her memories of 18 years ago (not that memories are reliable either, of course).

For what it's worth, her husband doesn't believe it:

All this irritates Monica's husband Seiku. "It is much ado about nothing," he says. "My wife was cured by the doctors and not by any miracle." He is peeved at his wife's fame, in part because the press is constantly at his doorstep. "I want to stop this jamboree, people coming with cameras every few hours or so." He concedes that the locket is part of the story of Monica's ordeal but says no one should suppose there was a cause-and-effect relationship between it and the cure. "My wife did feel less pain one night when she used the locket, but her pain had been coming and going. Then she went to the doctors, and they cured her." Monica still believes in the miracle but admits that she did go to see doctors at the state-run Balurghat Hospital. "I took the medicines they gave me, but," she insists, "the locket gave me complete relief from the pain."

Well, we all know faith-based people, don't we? Nothing will stop them from believing what they want to believe. And nothing will stop the Catholic Church from taking advantage of that.

The second 'miracle' accepted by the Catholic Church was that of a man who recovered from a brain infection after his wife supposedly prayed to Mother Teresa. (I've heard it called "multiple brain tumors," but it was apparently an infection that caused abscesses in his brain. That's how doctors diagnosed it, at least. There's always a question of how accurate any diagnosis might be.)

It was a serious condition, certainly. But the man was being treated for it in a hospital. Was the man's recovery remarkable? Perhaps. But was it miraculous? Why would you think so?

Think about this. When Catholics get sick, how many of them don't pray to get well? How many of their family members don't pray for them? And Mother Teresa has been very popular among Catholics for a long time.

Yet, given all this, the Catholic Church can only come up with two miracles (at least one of them extraordinarily dubious)? What about all of those people who prayed and their loved ones still died? What about all of those people of other religions - or no religion at all - who also had remarkable recoveries? Remarkable recoveries might be uncommon - since, otherwise, we wouldn't consider them to be remarkable - but they're perfectly normal.

There are seven and a half billion people in the world. Occasional remarkable recoveries - especially when under modern medical care - are exactly what we should expect naturally. There's absolutely nothing that points to a god here. Indeed, I'd say it's just the reverse. If praying to Mother Teresa - or anyone else - actually made a difference, it should be far more obvious than this!

After her death, we learned that even Mother Teresa doubted God:

Although she publicly proclaimed that her heart belonged "entirely to the Heart of Jesus", she wrote to the Rev Michael Van Der Peet, a spiritual confidant, in September 1979 that "Jesus has a very special love for you. As for me, the silence and emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak."

This is supposed to be a saint. How could she pray and find nothing but "silence and emptiness" if her god - this saint's god - really did exist? And yet, none of this makes any difference to true believers. Rev. Richard McBrien of the University of Notre Dame, for example, actually said, "This can only enhance her reputation as a saintly person..."

When even your saints can find nothing through prayer, and even that doesn't cause you to doubt your beliefs,... what would? Well, again, the faith-based tend to believe what they really, really want to believe.

And the Catholic Church will always use that (just as they use the Shroud of Turin, despite knowing for centuries that it's simply a medieval forgery, just as 'saints' don't even have to be real people).

I don't know. Maybe the celibate old men who run the church actually believe this stuff (being faith-based, themselves). Maybe they'll just cynically use whatever is popular with their customer base. I suspect that it's some of both.

But the real miracle of Mother Teresa is that people are still gullible enough to buy this bullshit. Even in our modern world, where scientific and technological advancements do cure people, there's still widespread superstition and just... astonishing levels of gullibility.

Well, it's easy to fool someone who really, really wants to be fooled.

___
Edit: I added the cartoon a few days after posting this. It was just too fitting.

Trump is crazy in small ways, too

Note that Donald Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, like suggesting that gun nuts kill his political opponent. He's crazy in small ways, too. He's petty in small ways. He's unhinged in small ways, not just the big ways.

Here's a little more about that elevator incident in Colorado. This, too, shows what kind of person Donald Trump is:

Last month, Donald Trump thanked a Colorado fire marshal who rescued him and his entourage from a stalled elevator by accusing him of intentionally keeping supporters out of his rally.

What Trump didn't divulge was that a member of his entourage apparently fiddling with an elevator bypass key got the group stuck in that elevator in the first place, internal emails obtained by local TV station KMGH and published Wednesday revealed.

Yeah, this was even crazier than it seemed at first, since Donald Trump's 'entourage' apparently caused the problem in the first place!

I'll skip the details here - read the whole article if you want - because I want to include this part:

Though Trump and his companions were evacuated through the top elevator hatch by members of the fire department, the incident resulted in Trump arriving an hour late to his rally on the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs campus (UCCS).

Upon arrival, Trump proceeded to criticize the fire marshal for keeping some of his supporters out of the venue.

"We have thousands of beautiful, wonderful, great people outside, and we have in the room next door over 1,000 people,” Trump said at the rally. “They won't let them in. And the reason they won't let them in is because they don't know what the hell they're doing."

The emails obtained by KMGH indicated that the fire department, UCCS and Trump campaign all had been in communication about the exact number of people allowed in the main hall and overflow room. The limits allowed for 1,500 people in the event center and 1,000 in the overflow room.

Lacey expressed his frustration in an email to his friend.

"We had worked with UCCS of which we have a great relationship with and their security.. (University Cops)…. And our PD… and worked out the event loading on Thursday,” he wrote, as quoted by KGMH. “All was well.. until they wanted more people… Secret Service were butts too… wanted me to let more people in because he (Trump) was threatening to leave the room.. and they hadn’t secured the other location. I communicated to them that my problem was the public.. theirs was their candidate."

Lacey also wrote that it wasn’t his “problem” that the campaign allegedly “dispersed 10K on-line tickets for a 2500 load event.”

KMGH also obtained a contract the Trump campaign signed with UCCS promising to comply with the facility rules “prescribed by the Fire and Police Departments.”

Contacted by the news station about that new information, a Trump spokesperson said the campaign had no interest in keeping that particular story alive.

Yeah, I'll bet. Of course, with Donald Trump, no story stays alive for long, because he always follows up with something even crazier the next day.

And note that Trump didn't just accuse the fire marshal, Brett Lacey, of being incompetent (immediately after being rescued by the fire department from a screw up Trump's own people caused), but actually accused him of having a political motive for following the rules that Trump's people had agreed with ahead of time.

Within an hour, The Denver Post noted, the GOP presidential nominee was bashing the fire marshal at his rally.

“So I have to tell you this. This is why our country doesn’t work,” Trump said from the stage at his Friday rally, which began nearly an hour late as a result of the mishap. “We have plenty of space here. We have thousands of people outside trying to get in. And we have a fire marshal that said, ‘Oh, we can’t allow more people.’

"The reason they won’t let them in is because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing.

“Hey, maybe they’re a Hillary person. Could that be possible? Probably. I don’t think there are too many of them," Trump said.

Trump isn't just crazy in big ways, in dangerous ways. He's also crazy in the most petty ways you can imagine. And that's the guy Republicans have nominated to be our next president, with the control codes to the world's largest supply of nuclear weapons.

It's hard to imagine, isn't it?

Twelve reasons to not vote for Jill Stein

This shouldn't be necessary, since #12 should be obvious. We can't have the Republican Party picking more Supreme Court justices - especially given that Republicans in Congress have been unconstitutionally 'saving' a pick for Donald Trump (and especially after this).

And have we completely forgotten 2000 already, when Ralph Nader voters gave us George W. Bush as president? How stupid can people be to not learn from that?

Of course, Jill Stein is only polling at 2-3%. There aren't that many stupid liberals. But it will still hurt Hillary Clinton, who needs to crush Donald Trump in order for Republican Party leaders to get the message.

Besides, I mentioned Gary Johnson the other day, so I might as well do the same with Jill Stein. But I see no reason to waste all that much time with her, so I'll just point you to this list of 12 reasons to not vote for her.

If that's not enough for you, maybe you could check out her trip to Moscow. She's as chummy with Vladimir Putin as Donald Trump is.

The obvious

(Drew Sheneman)

Will Donald Trump drop out of the presidential campaign? (Note that he'd lose the election even if he won all of the "tossup" states in the current polls.) Will Republican leaders finally abandon their support of the GOP nominee?

As Josh Marshall at TPM says, I'll believe it when I see it. But he makes a very good point here:

There's a lot of chatter this morning - based on absolutely nothing, so far as I can tell - that Donald Trump might drop out of the presidential race. I emphasize: as far as I can tell, chatter based on nothing but what I suspect is wishful thinking on the part of Republicans. At the same time, reporters are quoting high level Republicans sources saying that in the next few days top tier Republicans might come out in opposition to Trump. I will totally believe it when I see it.

But I can't help but note what seems obvious.

We've had Judge Curiel, Megyn Kelly, the banning of an entire religion from America's shores, the demand to deport 3% of the US population, the Khan family, protester beatings. Tell me when to stop, okay? There's a lot more. And yet what seems to have been the red line was Trump refusing to endorse Paul Ryan and John McCain in their Republican primaries. Yes, the Khan debacle was big. But little more than a week ago we had Republicans coming out of Cleveland saying that Trump was killing it.

Even if you take a more generous view - an extremely generous view - and say that it wasn't really the non-endorsements, that it was just the flood of everything that's happened since the convention, still there's a problem. Because Trump can say, not without real credibility, that the GOP power structure only turned on him when he refused to endorse them. He has maneuvered them into looking deeply craven, having missed the opportunity to abandon him on their own terms. Of course this isn't that unfair since they are actually craven regardless.

In truth, I don't think it's really the Khans or the endorsements. It's the polls.

Let me just add two things. First, I've linked to a presidential scoreboard that changes all the time, and there's a long way to go until November. As I'm writing this, it shows that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency if she won all of the states that are currently considered "strongly Clinton," "favors Clinton," and "leans Clinton."

That means that Donald Trump would lose the election even if he won all of the current "tossup" states.

Yes, that's a ray of sunshine I desperately need. But it doesn't mean much right now. It's certainly no guarantee! Indeed, a convention typically gives a candidate a bounce in the polls, and the Democratic National Convention just ended. By the time you read this, things could be different.

Still, things are looking good for the Democrats right now (not nearly as good as they should be looking, though - I'm just amazed that the election is close at all). Republican leaders are worried, as they should be.

(Nick Anderson)

But second, this is the same political party which deliberately used racism for their own political advantage. The Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' set them to deliberately wooing racists in order to gain more political power. It was just unbelievably cynical, selfish, and flat-out wrong.

This is the same political party whose leaders, during the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression - while America was simultaneously fighting two wars - met and agreed among themselves to do nothing the upcoming president wanted, no matter what it was, as a strategy for winning back the White House four years later.

Again, this was a cynical political move, to deliberately harm America (or refuse to help, at the very least), in order to advance their own political power. Luckily for us, it failed.

And this is the same political party whose leaders in the U.S. Senate were arguably willing to commit treason against their own country, by sabotaging America's side in the negotiations with Iran. They may have rationalized that in their own minds - Republicans are nothing if not faith-based - but they were still willing to harm our country in order to advance their own political power.

So I'd suggest remembering all that when looking at how Republican leaders treat Donald Trump. Most of them had problems with Trump - and for good reasons. But when Trump was winning, they were eager to climb on-board. Sure, Trump made them cringe - mostly because he was too blatant about what Republicans are supposed to suggest more subtly - but what's a little racism if you can win with it?

After all, Republicans have made that decision before - indeed, over and over again since their 'Southern strategy' was begun by Richard Nixon and further developed by Lee Atwater in the Reagan years. Hell, the past eight years, they've gleefully ramped up the hysteria about our first black president. Trump himself was a 'birther.'

If there's any integrity left in the Republican Party, it's clearly in the minority. So Republican leaders were quite willing to climb on the Trump bandwagon as long as he seemed to be winning. But the polls aren't looking good now, and that is all that matters to most of them. That's obvious.

Will Donald Trump drop out of the race? Hmm,... maybe. Clearly, he has a real horror of being considered a 'loser.' He's already trying to run away from debating Hillary Clinton, it seems. Among his other bad qualities, he's a narcissist. He's going to look out for himself, regardless of anything else.

On the other hand, he's also been talking about how the election will be 'rigged.' Thus, he seems to be preparing an excuse. He wouldn't be a loser if the game was rigged, right? So that might be enough for him.

I don't think that Donald Trump himself knows what he will do. He's not a thinker. He just feels and reacts (one of the many reasons why he'd be a danger as President of the United States). It's possible that Republican leaders are floating the possibility that he'll quit without Trump even considering that... unprecedented option.

Either way, this whole thing is completely nuts, isn't it?

(Joel Pett)

PS. If you're not scared enough yet about the possibility of a Trump presidency, check out this story about his interest in using nuclear weapons. "If we have them, why can’t we use them?"

That isn't something we should have to tell anyone, let alone the guy with the launch codes!

Seth Meyers: a closer look at this week's Trump dump

I've commented about these things recently, but Seth Meyers does such a good job. And he's apparently decided to take the gloves off, too.

What next with Donald Trump?

Friday, I posted the video of a powerful speech given at the Democratic National Convention by the father of a U.S. army captain killed in Iraq.

So how did Donald Trump react to that? He has mocked the grieving mother of that American soldier:

Lawyer Khizr Khan gave a moving tribute to their son, Humayun, who received a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart after he was killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2004. During the speech, Khan's wife, Ghazala, stood quietly by his side.

"If you look at his wife, she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably, maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me," Trump said, in an interview with ABC's "This Week."

Ghazala Khan has said she didn't speak because she's still overwhelmed by her grief and can't even look at photos of her son without crying. ...

Trump's comments about Khan came a day after he criticized retired four-star Gen. John Allen and slammed a Colorado Springs, Colorado, fire marshal for capping attendance at the event. The fire marshal, Brett Lacey, was recently honored by the city as "Civilian of the Year" for his role in helping the wounded at a 2015 mass shooting at a local Planned Parenthood.

Is there no limit to how low Donald Trump can sink? Of course, I've been saying that about the Republican Party for years, and there's been no limit so far. I mean, look at their nominee for president.

And maybe I should note this, too, while I'm at it:

Senior Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, remained silent, as did vice presidential nominee Mike Pence.

The thing about Donald Trump is that everyone expects shit like this from him. His supporters cheer it. The media take it for granted. And by and large, other Republican leaders enable it, because winning the election is all that really matters to them.

When Trump makes outlandish remarks every single day, they cease to have any effect. Of course, he's a celebrity, and for a celebrity, no news is bad news. Being outrageous is the best way to remain a celebrity. Heck, it's won the Republican Party nomination for him. It's the 'reality TV' version of a presidential election.

And the media love it, because they're making money from it. They're not in business for their health, you know. The purpose of American media is to make a profit.

America is better than Donald Trump, but money and political power tend to be of more immediate importance to the people who have both riding on him.

And among the general public, there's enough ignorance, apathy, bigotry, and wishful-thinking to make this a close election. Not just on the right, either. In fact, this probably wouldn't be a close election if some liberals weren't completely clueless.

Nothing Donald Trump has said has hurt him. His demonstrable lies haven't hurt him. His bigotry hasn't hurt him. His refusal to release his tax returns (which would likely demonstrate that he's not as wealthy as he says he is, and maybe even reveal his connection to Russian oligarchs) hasn't hurt him.

His unprecedented comments about NATO haven't hurt him. His refusal to offer policy details hasn't hurt him. His many bankruptcies haven't hurt him. Donald Trump is just a big mouth with a comb-over. There's zero substance to him. And yet he's this close to becoming our next president.

I was astonished when George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, after we already knew what a complete disaster he was. But I'm more astonished this year that someone like Donald Trump has a real, non-zero chance of becoming President of the United  States.

AronRa interviews Rebecca Vitsmun

Rebecca Vitsmun is always great, isn't she? She's just so sparkling, so funny, so... likable.

The first 15-20 minutes of this is especially good, as she talks about surviving the tornado that destroyed her house (the whole community, in fact) and then being outed as an atheist on national television by Wolf Blitzer.

There's a reason why the video clip of that went viral, and that reason is Rebecca Vitsmun. Watching this, it's easy to see why.

Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan

(John Darkow)

Today is Ronald Reagan's birthday. Well, if he were still alive, at least. In honor of the occasion, maybe you'd like to read this obituary.

Even at age twelve I could tell that Jimmy Carter was an honest man trying to address complicated issues and Ronald Reagan was a brilcreemed salesman telling people what they wanted to hear. ... I spent the eight years he was in office living in one of those science-fiction movies where everyone is taken over by aliens—I was appalled by how stupid and mean-spirited and repulsive the world was becoming while everyone else in America seemed to agree that things were finally exactly as they should be. The Washington Press corps was so enamored of his down-to-earth charm that they never checked his facts, but if you watched his face when it was at rest, when he wasn’t performing for anyone, you could see him for what he really was—a black-eyed, slit-mouthed, lizard-faced old son-of-a-bitch. He was a bad actor, an informer for McCarthy, and a hired front man for a gang of Texas oilmen, fundamentalist dingbats, and right-wing psychotics out of Dr. Strangelove. He put a genial face on chauvanism, callousness, and greed, and made people feel good about being bigots again. He likened Central American death squads to our founding fathers and called the Taliban “freedom fighters.” His legacy includes the dismantling of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the final dirty win of Management over Labor, the outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base, the embezzlement of almost all the country's wealth by 1% of its citizens, the scapegoating of the poor and black, the War on Drugs, the eviction of schizophrenics into the streets, AIDS, acid rain, Iran-Contra, and, let’s not forget, the corpses of two hundred forty United States Marines. He moved the center of political discourse in this country to somewhere in between Richard Nixon and Augusto Pinochet. He believed in astrology and Armageddon and didn't know the difference between history and movies; his stories were lies and his jokes were scripted. He was the triumph of image over truth, paving the way for even more vapid spokesmodels like George W. Bush. He was, as everyone agrees, exactly what he appeared to be—nothing. He made me ashamed to be an American.

Yup, that about sums it up.

Oh, and he was elected, at least in part, thanks to the Republican Party's 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists. Remember those famous "Reagan Democrats"? They were working-class white people who'd been persuaded to see economics in racial terms.

Heck, Lee Atwater himself admitted it:

It has become, for liberals and leftists enraged by the way Republicans never suffer the consequences for turning electoral politics into a cesspool, a kind of smoking gun. The late, legendarily brutal campaign consultant Lee Atwater explains how Republicans can win the vote of racists without sounding racist themselves:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Anyway, you can read the rest of that if you want. But here's another perspective on Ronald Reagan:

No one had ever entered the White House so grossly ill informed. ... “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts,” a California legislator said, “and not get your ankles wet.”

In all fields of public affairs—from diplomacy to the economy—the president stunned Washington policymakers by how little basic information he commanded. His mind, said the well-disposed Peggy Noonan, was “barren terrain.” Speaking of one far-ranging discussion on the MX missile, the Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton, an authority on national defense, reported, “Reagan’s only contribution throughout the entire hour and a half was to interrupt somewhere at midpoint to tell us he’d watched a movie the night before, and he gave us the plot from War Games.” The president “cut ribbons and made speeches. He did these things beautifully,” Congressman Jim Wright of Texas acknowledged. “But he never knew frijoles from pralines about the substantive facts of issues.” Some thought him to be not only ignorant but, in the word of a former CIA director, “stupid.” Clark Clifford called the president an “amiable dunce,” and the usually restrained columnist David Broder wrote, “The task of watering the arid desert between Reagan’s ears is a challenging one for his aides.”

No Democratic adversary would ever constitute as great a peril to the president’s political future, his advisers concluded, as Reagan did himself. Therefore, they protected him by severely restricting situations where he might blurt out a fantasy. ... His secretary of the treasury and later chief of staff said of the president: “Every moment of every public appearance was scheduled, every word scripted, every place where Reagan was expected to stand was chalked with toe marks.” Those manipulations, he added, seemed customary to Reagan, for “he had been learning his lines, composing his facial expressions, hitting his toe marks for half a century.” Each night, before turning in, he took comfort in a shooting schedule for the next day’s television-focused events that was laid out for him at his bedside, just as it had been in Hollywood.

His White House staff found it difficult, often impossible, to get him to stir himself to follow even this rudimentary routine. When he was expected to read briefing papers, he lazed on a couch watching old movies. On the day before a summit meeting with world leaders about the future of the economy, he was given a briefing book. The next morning, his chief of staff asked him why he had not even opened it. “Well, Jim,” the president explained, “The Sound of Music was on last night.”

If I were the kind of guy who'd give up on America (I'm not), I'd say that Ronald Reagan was the beginning of the end for us. He might not have been as disastrous as George W. Bush - and even Bush looks reasonable compared to today's Republican politicians - but this is where we started to go downhill.

Reagan wasn't responsible for everything. He wasn't smart enough for that. But I never understood why he was so popular. With Republicans? Sure. Faith-based people will believe whatever they want to believe, and Reagan was just as shallow as television.

But why he still has a generally good reputation today, I'll never understand.

Who is Ted Cruz?

(Mike Luckovich)

The other day, I called Ted Cruz a "lying piece of crap." Was that really fair? Who is the real Ted Cruz?

Well, Mother Jones has an interesting article about the people who know him - Republicans, mostly, who've worked with him in support of their mutual interests. It's quite a read. Here are a few brief excerpts:

"Ted thought he was an expert on everything," says this campaign veteran, who asked not to be named. ... In fact, this Bush alum recalls, "the quickest way for a meeting to end would be for Ted to come in. People would want out of that meeting. People wouldn't go to a meeting if they knew he would be there. It was his inability to be part of the team. That's exactly what he was: a big asshole." ...

[Rep. Peter King] has called Cruz a "carnival barker," a "counterfeit" with "no qualifications" who appeals "to the lowest common denominator," and "just a guy with a big mouth and no results." ...

GQ reported that Cruz started a study group during his first year in Cambridge, but he announced that "he didn't want anybody from 'minor Ivies' like Penn or Brown." In an interview with the Boston Globe, another student recalled what happened when she agreed to carpool with Cruz: "We hadn't left Manhattan before he asked my IQ." ...

"I would rather have anybody else be the president of the United States," screenwriter Craig Mazin told the Daily Beast in 2013. "Anyone. I would rather pick somebody from the phone book." On Twitter, Mazin—who has called Cruz "a nightmare of a human being"—recalled that when he was a freshman sharing a dorm room with Cruz, he would get invited to parties hosted by seniors because the upperclassmen pitied him. Cruz, he notes, "was that widely loathed. It's his superpower." ...

Per the Daily Beast, "Several fellow classmates who asked that their names not be used described the young Cruz with words like 'abrasive,' 'intense,' 'strident,' 'crank,' and 'arrogant.' Four independently offered the word 'creepy.'"

And the Republican Party seems to be down to choosing between this creepy asshole and... Donald Trump (who hardly needs a description from me, given his penchant for chintzy self-promotion). Incredible, isn't it?

Are any mainstream Republicans beginning to wonder if deliberately wooing white racists, in their notorious 'Southern strategy,' was such a good idea after all?

(Tom Toles)

The story of the white guy in the photo

I remember this very well. It was a big deal in America and got a lot of press attention. But I never heard one word about Peter Norman.

Admittedly, I'm not a sports fan. Maybe this isn't news to others reading this? It's a great video, nonetheless.

Sarah Palin to be President Trump's Secretary of Stupid

Hilarious, isn't it? But ignorance isn't a disqualification to their faith-based supporters. Intelligence, education, knowledge - those are suspect.

Furthermore, they think that anyone can work in government, because government - their own government - is worthless. The Republican Party pushes that idea (and then demonstrates it when they get in power).

If they needed medical care, would they go to an amateur? If they needed legal help, would they go to an amateur? Heck, if they needed a plumber or an electrician - and they were paying for it - they wouldn't want an amateur. (They might do it themselves, or with friends, to save money, but they'd want to hire professionals.)

But they want amateurs in government - running our government, not just in low-level positions. And this degree of ignorance just demonstrates their amateur standing, I guess. (Of course, Sarah Palin was a governor - for one-half of one term - so she shouldn't be this ignorant.)

American heroes stop terrorist train attack

I know. This has had tons of media attention already. But do you know how seldom it is that I can post a feel-good video?

The Republican campaign for president, not to mention the continuing insanity in Congress, is making me ashamed to be an American. This makes me proud (even though I had nothing at all to do with it).

There are a lot more good people in America - and around the world - than there are crazies. It's just that the crazies usually get all of the attention.

Josh Duggar, family values lobbyist, cheats on wife

(Gawker)

You could have guessed this, right?

In 2013, conservative reality TV star Josh Duggar—of TLC’s 19 Kids and Counting fame—was named the executive director of the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying group in D.C. which seeks “to champion marriage and family as the foundation of civilization, the seedbed of virtue, and the wellspring of society.” During that time, he also maintained a paid account on Ashley Madison, a web site created for the express purpose of cheating on your spouse.

In May 2015, Duggar was forced to resign after In Touch Weekly reported that he had molested five young girls (four of whom were his own sisters) beginning in 2002. When the accusations became public, the family went into crisis mode, insisting that Josh had reformed and that the media covering the claims was intent on “exploiting women.”

Since then, Duggar has admitted to cheating on his wife. So much for reforming, huh? But will it even matter? Look at Sen. David Vitter, another right-wing Christian 'family values' promoter caught patronizing prostitutes. He didn't even lose his Senate seat, and he's currently leading in the race for Louisiana governor, still pushing God-based family values (i.e. one man and as many concubines as he wants, apparently).

None of this will matter to the faith-based, though. That's because reality doesn't mean anything to them. They believe what they want to believe, and that's that. It won't affect the power of the Family Research Council, either, or of the Republican politicians who genuflect to them.

The hypocrisy does make me feel good, though.