Category Archives: national news

national news, political news

Needing help accepting this outcome … fully

o-donald-trump-facebook

A friend of mine has acknowledged a greater-than-normal disappointment in the presidential election result.

He said he’s having trouble accepting that Donald J. Trump is now the president-elect of the United States of America.

I am now going to admit the same thing.

Just as my friend said, I’ve voted for losing presidential candidates many times over the years. I’ve voted in 12 presidential elections, dating back to 1972. My record as of Nov. 8 is now 5-7 … that’s five winners and seven losers.

I know how it feels to be on the losing side.

This one is different than all the rest of them. It’s even different from my first vote, when Sen. George McGovern got smashed to smithereens in a 49-state blowout to President Nixon. I was young, full of piddle and vinegar, just home from service in the Army, newly married and I worked my butt off in my hometown to elect a good and decent man to the presidency.

It’s not that I believe Trump was inferior to his chief opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton. It’s deeper than that. He’s patently unfit for the office. I will maintain that belief more than likely for the entire time he serves as president.

That could change. Trump could prove me wrong. He could turn out to be a quick study. He could muster some semblance of the decorum needed to serve as head of state and the leader of our government. Trump could actually grasp the concept of limited presidential power and he could accede to the will of another co-equal branch of government, the one on Capitol Hill, aka Congress.

I cannot get past the notion, though, that he’s going to try to run roughshod over the system. That he’s going to do some incredibly stupid things, issue some incompetent — or unlawful — orders.

I want none of that to happen. I want the new president to succeed. In some perverse way, I’m actually pulling for him. I know that sounds like a huge contradiction, given what I’ve written already in this post, along with what I’ve stated in countless previous posts on this blog.

It’s not. I have declared already that I do not subscribe to the hope that he will fail. Presidential failure means failure for the entire country. I will not forsake my citizenship; I won’t move to another nation. I will stay put and speak out whenever I feel like it. I’ll praise the good things Trump does and will criticize the bad.

So help me, I cannot yet come to grips with the notion that this guy — the former reality TV celebrity, the hotel mogul, the guy who admits to cheating on his wives, who acknowledges seeking to impose his sexual will on women, who mocked a physically disabled reporter, denigrated Gold Star parents and flung insults at opponents — is about to become the 45th president of the United States.

It’s not like the previous times I’ve voted for the losing candidate. Yes, I know Trump won the election fair and square. I accept the fact that he won the required number of electoral votes. And yes … he will be my president.

I’m just having trouble moving forward and putting the result behind me.

Do I need an intervention?

national news

New president might face huge intraparty hurdle

mcconnel-and-trump

Donald Trump has good reason to smile.

He won the presidency over someone thought to be the prohibitive favorite. He is now selecting members of his team … to mixed reviews to be sure. Hey, what difference does it make? He won the election.

Now comes the sternest of tests for the new president. He has to govern alongside the very members of Congress he disparaged whenever he could; he demonized them; he called them names, such as “loser.”

I’m not talking about Democrats, mind you. I’m talking about Republicans who control both congressional chambers.

They’re grinning these days, too. I’m not sure whether they’re happy to be working with a fellow Republican (In Name Only) or whether they’re anticipating being able to stick it to the guy who called them all those nasty names.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/republican-party-obstructionism-victory-trump-214498

The Politico story attached to this post talks about how the Republicans’ strategy of “no” worked so well against President Obama. It also reminds us of how that strategy enabled them to win back the House of Representatives in 2010, the Senate in 2014 and now the White House in 2016.

Who do they get as president? The guy from within Republican ranks who ran against them!

All this sets up an interesting dichotomy for Republicans, many of whom are those “establishment” types who don’t trust Trump as being truly one of them.

It’s a given, of course, that Democrats who detest Trump are going to do all they can to stop anything the new president wants to do — much like Republicans sought to do when Barack Obama arrived in the Oval Office. The Politico article reminds us that the president got his $800 billion economic stimulus package approved in 2009 with virtually zero GOP support.

How is Trump going to cope with those Republicans who will resist him on, say, his enormous proposed infrastructure project? They keep telling us the Treasury doesn’t have the money.

I guess Trump could remind them that they didn’t have the money to go to war against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in 2001, but they did — while approving tax cuts proposed by President Bush. My guess is that GOP leaders in the House and Senate wouldn’t like to hear such a thing coming from one of their own.

We talked during the length of the election campaign that we were entering a new era. This would be the most unconventional election in history. That presumed a Hillary Clinton victory, for crying out loud.

The other person won. Let’s get ready for the most unconventional governance in U.S. history.

My often-trusty trick knee tells me the Republicans who run Capitol Hill might try to wipe the smile off Donald Trump’s face.

International news, national news

No equivalency between phone call and comments about Castro

2 Comments

ttd_chinataiwan_hate_thumb_oo

Mike Pence knows better than to attach a false equivalency to two events.

One of them involved comments from U.S. officials about the death of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro; the other involved a phone call from the leader of a nation — with which the United States has no diplomatic relations — to the president-elect.

The vice president-elect said this morning he cannot understand why the phone call is getting all the criticism while praise to Castro is overlooked.

Please, Mr. Vice President-elect.

Donald Trump’s 10-minute conversation this past week with the president of Taiwan has smacked decades of U.S. diplomatic protocol right in the face. The People’s Republic of China has filed a formal complaint, declaring that the “one-China policy” that the United States has followed has been compromised egregiously by Trump’s congratulatory phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen.

Meanwhile, according to Pence, the death of Castro has drawn some muted praise of the late Cuban dictator from Obama administration officials. Even the president himself has delivered remarks that some have interpreted as complimentary.

The Taiwan-China dustup, though, is far more serious.

Taiwan’s very creation came at the end of a bloody civil war in China that the communists won. The nationalists who once governed China fled to Taiwan in 1949 to set up a new government. The United States recognized the Taiwan version of China until 1979, when it declared it would recognize the PRC.

You want a complicated relationship? There you have it.

What if China decides to retaliate against the United States by launching, say, a trade war? What if the PRC decides to yank its ambassador out of Washington? What if the PRC goads Taiwan into declaring its independence from China, giving the Chinese a pretext to launch a military attack against the nation it considers to be a “renegade province”?

There can be no equivalence attached to saying some mildly nice things about a dictator and the serious breach of protocol that the president-elect has committed.

business news, national news, political news

‘Emoluments clause’ to be put to stern test

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I am not a constitutional scholar, but I know enough about the document to be able to talk about most of its contents with at least a smattering of intelligence

But a new phrase has popped up on many Americans’ radar in recent months. It’s the “emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution.

It’s contained in Article I. It’s the final clause in Section 9. It reads:

“No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”

Why the interest in this relatively obscure portion of the nation’s government document?

http://www.heritage.org/constitution/#!/articles/1/essays/68/emoluments-clause

We have a president-elect, Donald J. Trump, who possesses business interests that span the globe. He has done a lot of business with kings, princes and foreign states. He’s gotten money from them, enriching himself — and his family.

Now that he’s about to become president of the United States, we’re hearing more chatter about this emoluments clause … just as we did during the campaign when Trump’s allies used it to describe the so-called favors Hillary Rodham Clinton earned while she and her family ran the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Those Hillary haters are quiet about Trump’s dealings.

Trump has announced he’s going to turn everything over to his children: Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric. He’s going to walk away from the myriad business dealings.

That would be OK, except that he is planning to hand it all over the Younger Trumps. My hunch is that they’ll remain in his family and, thus, will rake in the revenue derived from whatever deals they strike.

What’s the better option for Trump? Sell it all. Liquidate everything and remove yourself entirely from every single aspect of the business. Give the kids their portion of what you get from the sale and let them invest their largesse any way they wish.

Absent a  complete and total severance from these business dealings, we are about to hear a lot more about the emoluments clause. It will not be pretty.

national news, political news

On second thought, Palin talks herself out of job?

palin

Sarah Palin must not want a job in the Trump administration after all.

How else does one explain the former half-term Alaska governor going after the president-elect’s deal to save those Carrier jobs in Indiana? She calls it “crony capitalism,” which is shorthand for a policy that gives tax breaks to political allies and large corporations.

Donald J. Trump took credit for allegedly persuading Carrier — the Indiana-based air conditioning and heating company — from moving jobs off shore. In exchange, the company was able to get a big tax break from the state of Indiana, which is governed by Mike Pence, the soon-to-be vice president of the United States.

Palin, meanwhile, had emerged as a possible candidate to become secretary of veterans affairs. Ugghh! Perish that thought.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/308575-palin-slams-crony-capitalism-after-trump-seals-carrier-deal

Now she pops off — goes “rogue,” if you will — by declaring the Trump deal with Carrier is no good.

“When government steps in arbitrarily with individual subsidies, favoring one business over others, it sets inconsistent, unfair, illogical precedent,” Palin wrote in an essay. “Then, special interests creep in and manipulate markets. Republicans oppose this, remember?”

OK, the Carrier deal has nothing to do with overseeing veterans issues. So, is Palin wrong to speak out against this crony capitalism idea? Not really.

Then again, she has just tossed a mud ball at the guy with whom she supposedly is trying to curry favor. She wants a job in the Cabinet.

I would say her chances of getting any nod in a Trump administration normally would be tossed into the crapper … that is, until I recall all those mean things Mitt Romney said about Trump during the GOP primary campaign.

What does Mitt get for speaking the brutal truth about the president-elect? A nice dinner at a Trump-owned eatery and a possible nomination as secretary of state.

media news, national news, political news

Media actually called the ’16 election … really!

voting

This just in: The media called the 2016 presidential  election correctly … sort of.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is leading Donald J. Trump by just a shade less than 2 percentage points in the popular vote. She’s up by 2.5 million votes and the number might climb.

So, why are the media taking such a battering over “missing” the results? Oh, yes. The Electoral College.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2016_general/president/map.html

The media and the pollsters all across the country might have been too transfixed by the overall national mood and less intrigued by what was happening in rural communities blanketing those critical “swing states” that voted for Trump on Nov. 8.

I won’t give the media a pass.

I’ll just note that the RealClearPolitics average of polls had Clinton leading Trump nationally by 2 to 5 percentage points. She’s going to finish with a 2-percentage point “victory” in the popular vote.

That won’t get her a ticket — let alone the keys — to the White House.

If the media fell short, they missed the signs that were developing in rural America that propelled Donald Trump to the victory that shocked ’em all.

national news, political news

Why is Trump resisting a Wisconsin recount?

donald_trump_lies

I have a theory as to why Donald J. Trump doesn’t want the vote recount in Wisconsin to proceed.

It’s not that the president-elect fears it would overturn the result and hand the state to Hillary Rodham Clinton. Nor is it that it’s going to put the nation’s faith in local elections officials in jeopardy.

Quite the contrary. My theory is that a recount is going to suggest that there’s nothing inherently and critically wrong with the way the votes were tabulated in Wisconsin, and possibly in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-is-a-hypersensitive-tantrum-throwing-sore-winner-but-the-recount-must-go-on/

You see, such a discovery snatches one of the Trump’s favorite talking points right out of his pie hole. It delivers the strongest rebuke yet about the defamatory remarks he made about a “rigged election.” He was talking about possibly losing to Hillary Rodham Clinton and whether he would accept the results as announced.

Hey, the man won the election, but he’s keeping up the drumbeat of allegation and innuendo about the integrity of a political system from which he drew direct benefit.

Might it be that a recount would douse all of that careless rhetoric and reveal the foolishness and recklessness of our next president?

media news, national news, political news

Presidential failure takes us all down

donnie-trump

“Failure is not an option.”

Hold that thought, expressed by the actor Ed Harris portraying NASA flight director Gene Krantz in one of my all-time favorite films, “Apollo 13.”

Donald J. Trump is about to become president of the United States. I have made it one of my missions to call attention to the many — the seemingly countless — shortcomings of this man’s ability to do the job he is about to assume.

I make no apologies for using this venue to criticize the president-elect with as much harshness as I can muster.

However …

Do I want him to fail? Do I want the country to suffer because of some wrongheaded decisions I believe he is entirely capable of making?

No. Not in the least. I do not wish this individual to fail.

Just as the actor Ed Harris noted, failure is “not an option” for a nation that relies on its president to propose policy directives that govern all 300 million-plus of us out here, even those of us who didn’t vote for him.

Daddy Dittohead, aka the right-wing radio gas bag Rush Limbaugh, once (in)famously declared over the air that he “wants” President Obama to fail. He wished for failure, he yearned for the president’s economic stimulus package — which he and Congress enacted to help bail out collapsing industries — to take us down the road to ruin.

What the hell kind of alleged patriot wants his fellow Americans to suffer because a president’s policy fail?

I retain little faith that Donald J. Trump will succeed. Hell, I’m not even sure what the guy stands for!

If he does succeed, I will join millions of other Americans in the round of applause.

I do not, though, wish for failure. It ain’t an option, man.

business news, national news, political news

Jobless rate falls; look for the critics to chime in

jobseeking

The U.S. Department of Labor has just released its latest job report.

The nation added 178,000 private-sector jobs in November. The unemployment rate fell to 4.6 percent. Both numbers were better than economists had forecasted.

Good news, yes? Well, not exactly. That depends on a single political factor, or so it seems: your political persuasion.

President Barack Obama has overseen an astounding string of consecutive months with job growth: the count now stands at 81 months. When he took office in January 2009, the nation was shedding three-quarters of a million jobs a month; we were in the midst of that worldwide economic/financial collapse, if memory serves.

Jobs are up.

The jobless rate is down to 4.6 percent. That’s the lowest since the days of the Clinton administration.

Good news, yes?

http://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/stock-futures-mostly-flat-after-jobs-report-beats-expectations/ar-AAl2Dyb?li=BBnbfcN

Hold on! Not quite. Obama critics cite something called the “workplace participation rate.” That includes a metric that measures the number of people looking for work. When the jobless rate falls to this kind of level, the critics suggest that’s a symptom of folks who no longer are “participating” in the job search.

Thus, the good news becomes bad news … according to the critics.

There used to be a time when you could measure joblessness and economic health using the number of jobs being created and the rate of unemployment.

Jobs are up. Joblessness is down.

That’s no longer good enough.

My head is spinning.

national news

Trumps won’t be ‘slumming it’ in White House

white-house

The Donald J. Trump family is quite used to an opulent lifestyle.

Posh resorts, jet airplanes, gawdy fixtures … all that kind of thing.

What are they getting now as they prepare for their new lives as the world’s most visible and gawked-at family — except, perhaps, for the Kardashians?

More of the same, only to a somewhat lesser degree. They’ll be fine.

The Man of the House says he’s going to forgo the $400,000 annual salary. He doesn’t need the money. The president-elect intends to collect a dollar a year, which he said not long ago is required by law. That means he can return nearly $1.6 million to the U.S. Treasury during the four years he’s in office.

It won’t amount to more than spitting into the ocean, but hey, it’s still a good bit of dough.

But think of this, too. The Trump clan is going to get to live in a pretty nice house. They’re going to have security like they’ve never seen. That airplane the president uses for official business — dubbed Air Force One when he’s aboard — ain’t bad, either. The Trumps can rest assured that the big blue-and-white Boeing 747 is decked out with the finest technology ever assembled for a single flying machine.

The Trumps won’t be driving their own motor vehicles for at least the next four years. They’ll have chauffeurs at the wheel, highly trained Secret Service security agents opening doors for them and staffers ensuring that their every wish is met and every command is followed to the letter — which likely is something to which they’ve become quite accustomed already … given the old man’s reported penchant for that kind of detail.

All this speculation is quite relevant, given the Trumps’ lifestyle and y-u-u-u-g-e success — which the president-elect boasted about continually while running for the first public office he’s ever sought.

I’m just hoping now as the new first family gets set to step into the public spotlight we don’t hear any griping from them about how they’re slumming it on the people’s dime.