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The Longest 100 days

February 17, 2023

"One of the key problems today is that politics is such a disgrace, good people don't go into government."

- Donald Trump


Donald Trump, has been President for about 100 days. These days have been schizophrenic exercises of surrogates and sycophants walking back his tweets, and a series of lies, misinformation and Orwellian newspeak.


Trump has told so many lies, received so many Pinocchio awards his staff has constantly battled to shut down his Twitter feed, when he often wanders the residence of the White House in his bathrobe at 3am generating them. His television presidency starts off with Fox and Friends and ends with Sean Hannity.

But it seems, after a series of disasters, he has appointed some adults to supervise him and that is a good thing. At Defense, State and a new non-conspiracist National Security Adviser, replacing Michael Flynn, currently under congressional investigation for his Russian patrons and their alleged connection with his campaign.  All of that will drip out of the faucet little by little as soon as the congressional Republicans learn that their constituents want to know. But perhaps not.


Trump was going to repeal Obamacare the first day he was in office. He was going to build a big “beautiful wall” along the Mexican border and the Mexicans were going to cough up the money to pay for it “one way or another, believe me.” He was going to do a “massive tax cut” for the rich in order that jobs were going to be created. The newly introduced corporate tax reduction from 38% to 15% will swell the deficit if the projected growth of 2% in GDP remains as economists predict at perhaps .08%.. Trickledown economics never worked, despite the recent emergence of Arthur Laffer. Voodoo economics remains in play.


Trump's magical thinking was going to restore coal industry jobs, never mind that there are now more jobs in solar, wind and hydroelectric that there are in an industry that is now being displaced by new 21st century technologies. Coal miners oozing gratitude could descend into the bowels of the earth, get black lung disease and earn a living. In fact, coal companies were already replacing those jobs with digging, blasting and drilling robots Natural gas is cheaper, cleaner and more efficient. The wall costing billions, running along the Texas border is questioned by Texan Republicans who fear the loss of net income from trans-border trade. Much of the wall area is owned by Native Americans, who already robbed of their land by a murderous Andrew Jackson whose portrait adorns the oval office as a populist Trump hero (Jackson is soon to be replaced on the $20 bill by Harriet Tubman). Placing the wall on our side of the Rio Grande would cede the entire river to Mexico! Maybe the President did not think of that during the campaign. And his move to stick the wall on the budget bill has been rethought as a non-starter in congress since the chance that Mexico will pay for the wall is about the same as the sun being replaced by a coal fired plant.


Trump, in these first 100 days, was going to slap a 35% tariff on Chinese goods, having labeled the Chinese as currency manipulators. Now that has changed. “Why would I want to label them manipulators when they are going to help us with North Korea," now becoming an existential threat to cities like Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles? Tariffed goods might become doubly priced at Wal Mart, where most of his gullible base shop. By the way folks, I am not making this up. The Chinese have had to revalue their currency upward to stop its decline.  Trump originally asserted that they were keeping it artificially low so that they could sell their goods here more cheaply.


And what about the massive infrastructure spending Trump promised?  That has not happened. Instead, the administration spends its time and capital trying again to repeal Obamacare, cut Medicaid, Education, deny climate change as a Chinese hoax, abolish the EPA, repeal the clean power act, and defend itself from congressional and FBI investigations. Ah, for the days of going bankrupt and stiffing workers at his casino. 


He needs some wins, and another shot at repealing Obamacare will not pass the Freedom Caucus (formerly the tea party).  And if he puts items in the bill that will pass muster, it will not pass the Senate or keep faith with Republican moderates. The Republican Party is in unprecedented disarray. Trump faces more problems with them than the Democrats.  It will be interesting to watch over the coming months, unless Kim Jung Un snuffs us. A second Korean War would divert the public's attention for sure.


Trump, they say, is learning how to be President of the United States, and he has hired some adults around him to guide him in issues for which he essentially remains clueless. That is true. He has competent generals running the Defense department and gave the insane conspiracy theorist Michael Flynn the boot in favor of H.R. McMaster, a sophisticated West Pointer, a highly decorated and dedicated patriot and author of a prescient history of the US involvement in Vietnam.  Trump did very well in those choices, since he realized he knew less about international affairs than even George W. Bush. Eureka! NATO is no longer obsolete, said Trump recently. 


Our President, adroitly tapping into the anger of his base, disaffected, unemployed and undereducated voters, never realized what he was getting into, but still has not been able to say he was wrong on anything, his narcissism overruling his sense of patriotism and concern for the American Public. He has still not released his tax returns and it is doubtful that he will, unless they are subpoenaed as part of a congressional investigation. But it is doubtful that the Republican congress will ask for them and so the Presidency has become a shamefully self-promoting business enterprise rife with conflicts of interest, and perhaps Russian monies. Vlady Putin thought he was getting a good deal by messing with Hillary’s election.  Maybe he is not so sure now, with a possibly demented President in the White House, who fires tomahawk cruise missiles, in this instance, impulsively, but correctly. One wonders if he really thought it out. Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn now and again.


I have Republican friends who are still drinking the Kool Aid. One told me that I would be happy with the Trump Presidency, however, I have not yet found a pleasant sensation, a warm and fuzzy feeling that everything will be all right.  All I do feel is pain every time I turn on the news. Some argue, “you lost the election, get over it.” Trump now enjoys an over all approval rating of about 38%, the lowest of any President at this point in his term, in US history. Seems to me, that was what Scalia said in an interview after the Supreme Court stopped the recount in Florida, handing the election to George W. Bush. To Bush’s credit, when he left office, he returned to Crawford Texas to paint, perhaps fancying himself another Winston Churchill, who in his essay, “Painting as a Pastime, extolled the virtues of putting oil on canvass. At least W had an acceptable hero.  T


The Republicans voted 62 times to repeal Obamacare before the Donald was elected (or got more electoral votes) in a distorted system created in the 18th century to protect slave states from being placed in a majority as new states entered the Union. This ossified system has allowed a person with the minority of the votes to be elected president 5 times in our history.  We need direct popular election of the President.


In France, for example, a publicly financed election is over in 6 weeks. Spending is limited, and candidates do not have to raise billions to advertise in swing states until those of us who have the misfortune, or fortune to live in them want to stick pins in our eyeballs not to listen or watch the commercials.  The system has been distorted by Citizens United, allowing corporations and billionaires to form super PACs with no spending limits as long as they do not coordinate with the candidates and they are “transparent.”  This is almost like insider traders who illegally do not tell their friends to buy before companies beat earnings prognostications.


Trump’s new acolyte Supreme Court justice, only confirmed when the loathsome Mitch McConnell did away with the 60 vote majority needed to confirm him.  This insured that a political partisan could be seated, further eroding the independence of the court. Trump counts this as his major accomplishment for the first 100 days.  And it is true, he accomplished the goal of life tenure of a 49 year old that can make decisions for the next generation. His first vote was to put someone to death. Gorsuch refused to answer any questions before the senate committee on his positions, and defended his 10th circuit court of appeals decision to vote against a fired truck driver who almost froze to death and had to move his truck, resulting in his being fired. Gorsuch’s logic was that he applied the law. So did dictators, Nazis and other authoritarian leaders such as Erdogan who has now consolidated his power with new anti-democratic legislation. Gorsuch’s decision was reversed unanimously by the Supreme Court. Now he sits there himself, a young relic, threatening to civil liberties, the working class, and modern society, probably even to the right of the late Antonin Scalia and even Clarence Thomas. Trump lists this as his signal achievement of the first 100 days.


Cheer up folks, the horizon does have a bright sunrise. Bill O’Reilly, serial sexual harasser, has joined Roger Ailes in a richly deserved hinter world of opprobrium.  Not that Rupert Murdoch has had an epiphany. He just saw 50 of his largest sponsors jump ship. President Trump said O'Reilly was a "good person."

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GOP Hypocrisy at its Highest

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
So the Supremes, appointed by Republicans, Bush I, Bush II, and three justices appointed by the Donald, who lost the popular vote by 3 million voters and who probably will soon be indicted in Georgia for election fraud, and maybe Federally for a failed coup d’état, have decided that 50 years of precedent be damned, that there is no constitutional right for a woman to make her own reproductive choices. Never mind an entire generation of women who have grown up under Roe. So let’s socially engineer by judicial fiat, what has been law for generations.N Let’s face the facts. The “justices” make up their own minds, and then build a constitutional rationalization to support their position from an infinite variety of decisions throughout the centuries of common law. And by the way, Bush II, like Trump, was also a minority president, except in the anti- democratic electoral college, designed originally to allow slave states to remain so. Our Constitution also ensured that woman and black people could not vote. So all you originalists and textualists can go back to where we were before Roe v. Wade, to that wonderful mid 20th century where segregation ruled, or the early 19th century where slavery ruled. Why not overrule Brown v. Board of Education to keep America white and segregated Justice Alito, that righteous avatar of Catholic abortion dogma rests at one of the pinnacles of governmental power, believes that American women should be the victim of state gerrymandered legislatures, representing a minority of the American polity. When Thomas Jefferson said famously, “keep the preachers away from government,” he surely should have included Alito. Let’s not forget the notion that the court is or should be not politicized. That train left the station in the early 20th century. When FDR’s National Recovery Act was shut down by the conservative Court, a court packing threat from the Democrats in congress caused the conservative majority to back off from shooting down the progressive programs that were to help the nation out of the great depression. The problem is now that there are not enough votes in the Senate to do any such thing because of successful Republican moves to suppress the vote; instead packing the court with ideologues, the most notable of whom is the handmaiden herself—Amy Coney Barrett, whom the Donald picked to fill the seat of a progressive giant, RBG. Never mind the hypocrisy of dissing Obama’s selection of Merrick Garland, not even given a hearing thanks to Mitch McConnell and his lieutenants, including Chuck Grassley, who should be in a nursing home feeding on double doses of Prevagen. Mitch at the helm has seen to our current “Justices”, helped by disinformation emanating from Rupert Murdoch’s FOX news, a money-grubbing Australian oligarch, no better than the Russian ones. Mitch’s net worth has increased ten-fold since he was elected and not on his Senate salary for sure, his wife benefiting from Chinese largesse to and from her uber wealthy family. Oh, and don’t forget Clarence Thomas, a black man who hates his own people, abetted by his wife, Ginny, encouraging the rioters to storm the capitol, sending emails to insurrectionists and GOP party leaders to stop the certification of the vote by the Senate. Thomas is all bent out of shape because of the dastardly leak, impugning the “integrity” of the court. But he will probably not recuse himself on Trump’s appeal if he is convicted of felonious conspiracy to precipitate an insurrection. Other dramatis personae include the repulsive Ted Cruz and the vituperative Josh Hawley, who voted against the purely ceremonial certification of a lawful election, necessary to enshrine the vote. Also, lets not omit a Bronx cheer for Bret Cavanaugh, the beer swilling frat boy, credibly accused of waving his penis in Christine Blasey Ford’s face at his fraternity house, assaulting her. While admittedly a college escapade, it does not speak well to his character. But no matter, he has absolved himself by joining in this sadistic exercise of Republican misogyny. “I like beer, Senator Klobuchar, don’t you?” Cavanaugh hubristically asked the Senator whose father died of alcoholism. No matter, there is no right to privacy in the Constitution, says the red spider veined nosed icon of the religious right. Now, poor women who live in Texas, Mississippi, or other places of enlightened Republican legislators will have to book an airplane flight or drive to a place where it is legal. But wait! They do not have the money to do so, instead they can carry them to term and drop their newly born at the nearest police station or underfunded Mississippi or Texas childcare facility. Thanks a lot, Amy. Perhaps you want to adopt some more children. This whole sordid episode of “Making America Great Again,” curdles the blood even of the most casual observer.

A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
"A house divided against itself, cannot stand..." - Abraham Lincoln From California to New York, from Oregon to Florida, a frightening division has descended upon our country. From rural to urban America, people wonder whether the nation and its institutions can survive this polarity. There have been times in American history that the nation was divided, never more so than in 1860. Throughout that history, there had been bitter partisanship and division. From the heat of the constitutional convention in steamy 1787 Philadelphia, the founders fought bitterly to a compromise that actually welded two nations into one in a constitution which just ninety years later devolved into a insanely bloody civil war, brother against brother, father against son, family against family. A partisan press with countless newspapers and pamphleteers spewed hatred and vituperative allegations against their countrymen both at the founding and throughout the years leading to the Civil War. Twitter has nothing on them. A rural south, an industrializing north, both parts of which employed slavery, regarded Negroes as inferior, abetted involuntary servitude and a racist ethos, challenging even the most enlightened of our citizenry. During the time between the founding and the Civil War forged compromises kept the Union together. The Missouri compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska act (1854) failed as attempts to reconcile admission to the Union of new states as either slave or free. The Constitution itself had slavery baked in to its original ratification (Article 4 sec. 2.3) imposing that, " No person held to Service or Labor in one State under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any Law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or Labor, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labor may be due," Later, the Fugitive Slave act of 1850 imposed the duty on citizens and officials of the individual states themselves to return slaves to their owners or face civil fines, and that persons harboring slaves to criminal penalties. Slave catchers roamed the North, collecting bonuses for bringing slaves in; captured slaves were not permitted a jury trial. Sound like a rickety Constitution? Of course, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments cured some of that, but still, it took the bloodiest war in the history of the Republic, 700,000 dead and wounded to get the amendments passed and only in the last few years was the Confederate battle flag removed from South Carolina government buildings. The Civil Rights act of 1964, race riots in Los Angeles, freedom riders, political assassinations of civil rights leaders, and a frothing George Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door shouting "segregation forever!" interceded in the 1960s, almost 100 years after the end of the war and ten years after the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education outlawed segregation in the public schools. Well, that same Constitution has given us the Electoral College, a Federalist exercise in balancing the interests of the various states, and which now presents us with a highly undemocratic underrepresentation of large populations, California for instance, with its 40,000,000 people and North Dakota with its 500,000 each carrying two senators. Do the math on fair representation. Yes, I know the House is supposed to do that, but with present gerrymandering, the Democrats are obliged to win by much bigger majorities than Republicans. With Republicans dedicated to disenfranchising voters in Florida, for example, contrary to the will of the voters, Democrats must win votes in far greater numbers than Republicans to achieve a working majority. We now have entrenched minority government. With an unleashed president, sociopathically bound to his vindictive agenda, extreme anxiety pervades the Democratic Party, fearing that this president will be re-elected, boasting that "he alone" is claiming responsibility for the booming economy, acquitted from his misdeeds by a kangaroo court, comprised of quaking GOP senators afraid of tribal banishment to an ignominious gulag of GOP opprobrium, losing their congressional health plans, positions, prestige and power andthe ultimate loss of the dignity which they inartfully tried to preserve. Instead, they have lost it anyway by their surrender to political expediency. We need either a constitutional convention or a huge movement among voters to recognize that the divisions among us are not the result of a political agenda, but instead, tribal cultism. Many of the policy agendas result from identity politics, rural against urban, wealthy against poor, a displaced working class losing out in the battle against inevitable technological displacement, climate change and nuclear proliferation, the greatest threats to the world. A leader who can heal these divisions and create forbearance and a spirit of compromise is what we need more than ever. A president of either party who can understand reality, not phantasmagorical narcissism. It is said that great crises manufacture an FDR, a Winston Churchill, an Abraham Lincoln. Where may he or she be?

Running from Ennui

By Engage Team • February 17, 2023
Passion seems to be bestowed as a blessing on few people but seeking it is a not inconsiderable chore conferred on the many. I am not officially retired, but it seems that way. The clients call less and the work I did as a trial lawyer has become less and less appetizing. Business has diminished, not only because I am seventy-nine years of age, but because I have zero desire to market myself like a snake oil salesman. I leave that particularly odious practice to well-funded and battle stationed Morgan and Morgan and others, whose legions of paralegals, investigators, paid experts and well-staffed soldiers battle with insurance companies, and “fight for you,” its overworked lawyers all the while complaining to their colleagues and family that they hate what they do. Fifty years at the bar, and I do not mean Flanagan’s, is enough, so I leave the task of transferring wealth from one party to another and taking a piece of the action the alleged passion of the many. I do still consult with clients, if I can be of help them. I wonder if I can achieve a modicum of mastery the piano, considering that when I took violin lessons as a youth, the bandleader working at my dad’s upstate New York hotel, a Catskill fiddler by the name of Billy Rogers (nee Rosenberg) who, admittedly, was not a music teacher, told my father, that I was the “dumbest, most tone-deaf child he had ever met.” But then again, he was no Isaac Stern nor even a music teacher. Music teachers do not scream at their beginning ten-year-old students. The sole reason Dad asked him to teach me was because a guest had left a violin in one of his hotel rooms. Before my dad’s discovered violin aspirations for me, I had expressed neither the interest nor the inclination to play the most difficult, annoying instrument, or torturing everyone within hearing distance. “Press the strings until your fingers bleed and you develop callouses,” said Billy. I do not recall what happened to the violin or Billy, although he was aged in 1952. Dad either sold the violin or most likely, gave it away. Another serial disappointment from his son, I guess. After becoming a lawyer, I decided I would learn to play tennis. And I loved it. I was addicted. I became reasonably competent, starting at the age of 35, and playing regularly until I hit 70 and had spine surgery laying me up a few years. I was never the best, but I was pretty good, had a good serve and tried to play again a few years ago, losing to a younger fellow who had been playing just a few years. I had beaten him soundly before. Never fast on my feet, my molasses-like movements said, time to hang up the sneakers. Life is a series of things being taken from you. At 55 I had taken up golf. I think I have a pretty good swing, but athletically, I needed time to learn, ( a nice way to say I am a slow learner) and time is running out. Although that would not stop me, if I had some agreeable companions with whom to play. Many of the friends whose company I enjoyed have died or fallen away. There is nothing worse than spending 18 holes with someone monumentally annoying. “Nice putt,” they said, as my ball sped past the hole. Plus, most golfers do not share my politics and, inevitably, an afternoon of enjoyment turns into a dumpster fire. Most players who are Republicans, cheat. The shoe wedge or miscounting the score is a frequently insufferable habitude of the right-wing selfish, individualist, “let them eat cake” crowd. Now, when my days are not consumed by interminably long doctor’s visits or some new ailment appears, I am seeking something to do with my spare time. Going to the hospital or delivering goodies to the ill and infirm is too depressing, since I already am depressed about most people walking past me as though I did not exist. I have become irrelevant and invisible, both not particularly enviable results of my wrinkles and weathered skin and increasingly whitening hair. A grey ghost. I suppose I should take comfort that a geezer like Joe Biden could be president, gaining inspiration from him. But he seems so delicate, so frail now, that a stiff breeze would blow him over or he might stumble coming down the stairs of Air Force One. It is frightening to behold. Still, Joe beats the alternative--the orange-colored crook who is still peddling the big lie. The country is in the worst crisis since the great depression, and Joe is not FDR.  Which brings me back to the piano. I asked a neighbor who is a music teacher at an exclusive private school, “Is learning the piano at 79 doable?” He replied, “definitely, it will be good for your mind. Always keep two hands on the keyboard and learn musical notation.” I replied that I had purchased a book that said I will be able to play a Bach prelude within six weeks if I practiced 45 minutes per day. Encouraging. I guess I will find out if it can be my new passion.
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