No Democrat Concedes

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I called my congressman today to request that (a) they send the long range missiles to Ukraine and (b) that no Democrat should concede today.  If the vote tally seems to suggest that they lost, that means that there was voter fraud and we need an investigation and a lawsuit.  No Republican should be seated without a battle.  Its time for the Democrats to wake up and start defending the American people.

Which they will not do because the Democrats are weak and stupid.  But we can try to stiffen their backbone.

Russian Apt 28 Behind Attack on French Elections

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So it was APT 28 that hacked the French, eh? The same group that attacked Hillary and the DNC. Of course the FBI does nothing to protect us, but perhaps French counterintelligence is more, shall we say, effective and less politically motivated to aid the right wing than our FBI.

See this article in DefenseOne here.

The Candidate for Michael

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Now that it is almost certain that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, we are all being requested to fall in behind the standard bearer. And I expect that I will because the threat of another Republican administration, whether Trump or otherwise, is too horrible to contemplate. But I do resent it, because I do not like Hillary's policies, not even a little bit, its just that she is the lessor of two evils.

So to be specific, here are some positions I would like any candidate I support to have:

1. I would want any candidate I supported be in favor of canceling all H1B visas and that companies in this country should hire the many qualified Americans instead.

2. I would want any candidate I supported be in favor of a salary and compensation cap on executives, perhaps limiting them to some multiple of the lowest salary they pay, perhaps 35 (*) times the lowest salary.

3. I would want any candidate I support to be vocal about his or her desire to change the unemployment metric to include those who are long-term unemployed or underemployed.

4. I would want any candidate I support to be vocal about change to the poverty threshold to make it a more reasonable measure of those who are very poor in this country.

5. I would want any candidate I support to change the way we do loans for education, higher, lower or middle, to make it more along the lines of the Australian system.

6. I would want any candidate I support to be vocal about seeing that globalization is not artificially encouraged by lowering or destroying standards for environmental control, as has happened at the Port of Los Angeles.

7. I would want any candidate I support to be vocal about seeing that that those who encouraged and executed torture in our name to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

8. I would want any candidate I support to work to end the grossly unfair difference between criminal sentences for black people vs white and white collar crime. How can it be just for a black man who stole a stapler in Alabama go to jail for life while John Ehrlichman went to jail for 18 months?

9. I would want any candidate I support to be vocal about seeing to it that local police forces obey the letter and intent of the law, and that those who do not have criminal prosecution brought against them.

10. I would want any candidate I support to be especially vocal about ending the kinds of abuse that one finds in the Orange County Attorney General's office with its illegal use of informants and its perjury regarding the use of databases, and its use of such information to get convictions against innocent citizens.

11. I would want to know why the DOJ did not bring criminal prosecution against the DEA in San Diego.

12. I would want to know why the DOJ did not bring criminal prosecution against the many people in the savings and loan industry for their criminal malfeasance in the 2008 bailout.

13. I would want to change the capital gains taxes to exempt those with under a million dollars in capital, but greatly increase the rate as the capital went above 10 or 20 million dollars worth. In other words, no capital gains taxes for the poor or middle class, but much larger taxes against the very rich. And maybe even a tax on capital itself for those with over 250 M or some other suitably chosen number. In other words, I am not interested in hearing that we do not have the money for education when rich people fly around in their 100 million dollar jets. Just not interested.

14. I would want my candidate to attempt to restore many tax breaks to the middle class, such as the tax exemption for education which Reagan took away.

15. I would want to change our justice system so that the poor really do have access to good legal counsel instead of just paying lip service to it.

16. I would expect any candidate I support to be vocal about seeing that public education was as good as private education.

17. I would expect any candidate I support to work to bring a sense of justice and proportion to our corrupt medical system. I would expect doctors be required to work some percentage of the time in a clinic for the poor, that their salaries would be limited to that which a public servant makes, say, for example, teachers. I would want to evaluate what pharmaceutical companies charge for their medications. For example, I regularly do an off patent generic which sells for over 180 times its cost of production.

Of course, I would not expect any candidate to support all of these, but I might want him or her to support some of them. And I would not expect that he or she could get all or maybe even any of these through Congress, but I would expect them to try.

As Senator Bulworth said in the fabulous movie of the same name, to the black congregation of a church where he is speaking, “What are you going to do, vote Republican?”

I have no doubt I will vote for whoever the Democratic Party nominates.

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(*) Any numbers suggested here are examples only and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Understanding Our Cuban Foreign Policy

Just recently the US has “normalized” relations with Cuba, a country with which we have had an awkward relationship for decades. But this should not have been a surprise because the real reason that we have been estranged has become less of an issue as time goes by, but it is a reason that you will never read about in the popular press and even many foreign policy journals seem to be unaware, or choose not to bring it up in their analysis.

I will therefore, in my own words, describe why I think our policy towards Cuba has in the past been so intransigent and why it matters less today. It has to do with how we nominate and elect our President. The explanation goes something like this.

It is possible to win the nomination of one of the parties to be a candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America without carrying certain key states, such as California, New York, Illinois and Florida. However, losing such a state, with its vast number of delegates makes winning the nomination that much more difficult as you must make it up by winning a large number of “minor”, in terms of numbers of delegates, states.

Therefore, it follows that if you want to be President of the United States, you must work very hard to win these key states and each of these states has its own local politics and political forces who must be catered to and appeased. The politics of California are very different from the politics of New York and the politics of New York and California are both very different from the politics of the State of Florida.

If you want to win the state of Florida, then you pretty much have to win Dade County. If you don't win Dade County then it is still possible to win the state of Florida but its much harder and you have to win pretty much everywhere else in the state. But if you want to win Dade County, then you pretty much have to win the City of Miami. It is basically not possible to win Dade County without Miami.

It turns out that the City of Miami had a large population of ex-patriot Cubans and most of these Cubans had come to this country because they had to flee the island of Cuba when the revolution happened. These people all still had relatives back in Cuba and the whole thing was ugly and they are, or were, hopping mad.

Now you may say, well, we can not run the foreign policy of this country because one little interest group has a grudge because they lost a war. Well, thats easy for you to say, but if you pissed off this group you were probably not going to carry Miami, and if you did not carry Miami, then you probably would not carry Dade County and if you did not carry Dade County, then you probably lost Florida and if you lost Florida then you may very well have lost the nomination of your party for the Presidency of the United States.

As this Cuban population has aged, their descendents, although still not all that happy about Castro and the communists, are not as committed to the cause as their parents and grand parents were.

And that, I propose to you, is one of the key reasons that our foreign policy has been the way it has been for many years. It is not the only reason, but it was certainly part of the reason, and it is a reason that with time has become less important.

Voting Irregularities in Virginia and the Byrd Organization

When the Republican putsch put the Bush administration into power in this country in 2000, thus ending democracy and destroying the credibility of the Supreme Court in many people's eyes, there were some of us who were, and are, adamant that the issues of voting procedure had gone on far too long and needed to be dealt with now, completely, fairly across districts, and as comprehensively as possible.

To a Southerner who is tired of being bashed by ignorant Westerners and Northerners for being from a "racist part of the world", this was a particularly low moment.   "Fix the fucking voting machines, ok?" we thought to ourselves. This has been going on long enough.

But there have always been voting irregularities in American politics and some elections are more famous for this than others. Important political dynasties were created out of creative control of voting procedures, one need only think of the Daley machine in Chicago to pick one notable example.  The South had their political machines as well of course, and the one in Virginia from the mid 1920's through most of the 1960's was called the "Byrd Organization" led by former governor and US Senator Harry Byrd. These were Southern Democrats of the old school.

Governor and US Senator Harry F Byrd

So one day, sometime in the 1930's, my dad and his first wife went to vote in Virginia Beach, Virginia where they lived. All polling places have publicaly posted a list of who is registered to vote in that precinct and whether they have voted that day or not. This is all to reduce fraud and to increase confidence that the people who vote are eligible to vote and have only voted once.

The father of my dad's first wife had died many years before. But since he was a good democrat, he not only continued to be registered in his precinct, he had also voted that day, demonstrating excellent party loyalty.

I am sure nothing like that happens today, of course.

The Wikipedia page for the Byrd Organization:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byrd_Organization

Republicans and Oral Sex

Sometime near the end of the Clinton administration, I was sitting in my apartment in New York reading about current politics and the world in the New York Times.  One more time, Congress was deadlocked and could not debate or make progress on any topic, other than one. The only topic the Republicans would permit the discussion of was oral sex, presumably the oral sex between Monica Lewinsky and President Clinton, a subject which was, in my opinion, none of their fucking business.

It was oral sex this and oral sex that.  It was blow job this and blow job that.  Oral sex.  Blow job. That is what Republicans wanted to discuss.  That and nothing else.

I want to propose to you why this was a logical thing for them to do.  There is a legal aphorism that goes like this: "When you have the facts, you pound the facts. When the law is on your side, you pound the law. And when you have neither, you pound the table".

My judgment was that the Republicans had no ideas on any of the important topics and issues that faced this country.  So, having utterly failed to be useful to the nation, all they could do was pound the so-called "character issue" of Bill Clinton.  In reality, the people without character were the Republican Congressman who put the country last and their politics first.  But they felt they had to do that, perhaps, because they had no good ideas on any other topic.

They had no ideas about the economy.  They had no ideas about how to help the poor.  They had no ideas about how to bring peace to the world.   They had no ideas about how to educate people about global climate change or what to do about global climate change if we could even agree it existed.  They had no ideas about how to improve regulation of Wall Street and the banks and prevent the financial meltdown their greed and stupidity was about to cause.  They had no idea on hundreds of other issues, big and small, facing our nation at that time.   

No ideas at all on any topic.

Nothing.

Nothing at all.

All they wanted to do was to discuss oral sex, endlessly.

So, if I ever feel the need to discuss oral sex with a congressman, I know to call a Republican congressman. I would encourage you to do so as well.

But if you are concerned about any other issue facing America today, the Republicans are the last people you should call as they have nothing positive to contribute.