Chuck Schumer, Comedian

My senator, Chuck Schumer of New York, wants me to call my senator to express my displeasure with Trump's Supreme Court nominee.

The rights of organized labor depend upon my phone call, but even more, the fates of Roe v Wade and the "Affordable" Care Act depend upon me and a couple hundred million other Americans picking up the phone and imagining, if only for one minute, that we still live in a democracy and that our voices count.

Chuck. for some reason probably related to sheer longevity, (he's never had any career but that of a Democratic machine politician) is now the senate minority leader. Proving that longevity doesn't equal strength, he has written an op-ed in the New York Times as much as admitting that his party has thrown in the towel over the Supreme Court. The only pathetic gambit he has left is gaslighting and guilt-tripping liberals:

Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement has created the most important vacancy on the Supreme Court in our lifetimes. Whoever fills Justice Kennedy’s seat will join an evenly divided court with the ability to affect the laws of the United States and the rights of its citizens for generations. Enormously important issues hang in the balance: the right of workers to organize, the pernicious influence of dark money in politics, the right of Americans to marry who they love, the right to vote.

Perhaps the most consequential issues at stake in this Supreme Court vacancy are affordable health care and a woman’s freedom to make the most sensitive medical decisions about her body. The views of President Trump’s next court nominee on these issues could well determine whether the Senate approves or rejects them.

As a big recipient of Wall Street largesse himself, Schumer can well afford to ignore the fact that the very unlamentable Kennedy is the Supreme who actually wrote the odious majority opinion in the Citizens United case, glibly granting wealth the same rights to speech as flesh and blood humans. And the "affordability" of the political football known as Obamacare is very much up for debate. If anything, the moniker is downright cynical, given that much of this non-surance is too unaffordable to use for way too many people.

 Deep-pocketed conservative special interests are chomping at the bit to take down the health care law. They will sponsor any conceivable litigation against the Affordable Care Act with the potential to reach the Supreme Court. A reliably conservative majority makes it much more likely that one of those attempts succeeds.

Of course, President Trump’s nominee will not admit that they would vote to overturn a woman’s freedom to choose or gut protections for Americans with pre-existing conditions. Just like Justice Neil Gorsuch, and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Roberts and Samuel Alito before him, the next nominee will obfuscate and hide behind the shopworn judicial dodge, “I will follow settled law.” (But as we have seen in many decisions, including the Janus ruling this past week, settled law is only settled until a majority of the Supreme Court decides it is not.)

Chuck doesn't mention that enough of his Democratic colleagues, not least of whom was then-Senator Joe Biden and his defense of  then-nominee Clarence Thomas over sexual harassment claims, have regularly, albeit "reluctantly" voted to confirm these conservative nominees. They will likely do so again - reluctantly and with the deepest of reservations, of course. Because in the end, the interests of their most important constituents - the very wealthy donor class - are what matter. 

Now, get yourselves ready for Schumer's inevitable dog whistle to his most important constituents:

For Americans who value our rights and the progress our country has made over the last decade, it is no longer enough to wait until November to safeguard the rights and opportunities we enjoy today. The Republican majority in the Senate is razor-thin. One or two votes in the Senate will make the difference between the confirmation and rejection of an ideological nominee. If the Senate rejects an extreme candidate, it would present President Trump the opportunity to instead select a moderate, consensus nominee.

Who has made "progress" over the past decade other than the rich? What opportunities and rights are regular people supposedly enjoying right this very minute? Schumer pretends to care about the evisceration by the court of  collective bargaining rights, but I don't ever remember him championing the rights of striking teachers. The big giveaway in that paragraph is that the feckless Schumer will gladly confirm a more "moderate" candidate of Trump's choosing, someone who will defend private insurance predators and abortion rights but will not necessarily defend the rights of poor and working people to live. He will happily confirm a centrist judge who will allow the wealthy few to continue enjoying their inordinate rights, privileges and progress. Chuck ignores the real extremism: that deaths from despair in the US are increasing solely because of corporate-friendly policies, and that the CEO to worker pay ratio is more than 300 to 1.

To that end, the Senator from Wall Street gives Times readers with phones and email accounts his preferred talking points:

  If you do not want a Supreme Court Justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade and undo the Affordable Care Act, tell your senators they should not vote for a candidate from Mr. Trump’s preordained list. Democrat, Republican, independent, liberal or conservative — we should all want a more representative process for choosing the next Supreme Court justice.

If you want the rights of the poor and working classes to be protected more than you want the Great Insurance Protection Racket Act protected, then don't bother.

My published response to Chuck has been disappeared from the thread twice so far. So while it's still standing, for the time being, here goes:

Well, Mr. Schumer, since you are my senator, there is no need to call you with regard to Trump's Supreme Court pick. We know where you stand on Roe v Wade and the ACA... although I do seem to remember that you threw health care under the bus in 2014.

It was a mistake, you said, to pass it in 2010 when most Americans were struggling to survive in the wake of the Wall Street collapse. You remember - that time Main Street got screwed so that the Big Finance could get even richer off the backs of the rest of us?

Fast forward to 2016 and the merely technical election of Trump - a man who rose to power amid the austerity politics of 1970s New York, with the full complicity of the Democratic machine. And now fast forward to 2018 and you have the gall to write that "we" have to stop Trump - because the New York machine never stopped him when they still had the chance, all those many decades ago. Instead, the state and city gifted him with untold hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of tax breaks and incentives. That's when the Dems themselves began turning right and favoring the interests of the big banks and business leaders over the rights of the working class. Hospitals and fire stations were closed so that Trump could prosper.

This goes so far, far beyond the appointment any one reactionary unelected Supreme Court justice. But nice self-serving try, Mr. Schumer, pretending that our phone calls to a corrupt Senate have more clout than the corporations running the place.

For the lowdown on how Trump rose to power and fortune in the 1970s with the help of the Democratic machine and the rightward lurch of liberals into the arms of finance capital, and the invention of manufactured crises and ensuing austerity policies nationwide, I highly recommend reading "Fear City" by historian Kim Phillips-Fein.

As noted in the New York Times review of the volume, published last year:

Of course, the definition of liberalism was shifting too. The postwar boom that had enabled the ambitious Great Society programs of the 1960s was over, and so too was the full-throated commitment to progressive bulwarks and principles, to labor unions and an activist government. Many of the men — and they were almost all men — who emerged from the private sector to help steer New York out of the fiscal crisis were Democrats, but not of the Beame vintage. A case in point is the financier often credited with rescuing the city, Felix Rohatyn, the master fixer who helped bring together the banks and unions, while persuading the city’s leaders to reduce their spending and rethink their budgets. Here he is portrayed in a less flattering light, not as ill-intentioned but as the most prominent member of a group of unelected financial executives making critical decisions about the future of the city without any input from or accountability to its citizens.

(Chuck was getting elected to the New York State Assembly at around the same time Donald Trump was making his moves on distressed properties and people in the Big Apple. They've always had a "pragmatic," transactional, deal-making kind of relationship. As Nancy Pelosi once put it, these two guys can speak Noo Yawk to each other. Chuck even thinks that Trump "likes" him despite everything. And that is most likely true, insofar as someone as paranoid and dogmatic as Trump can actually like anybody).

So, as Kim Phillips-Fein recounts in her excellent history, Trump had hired Democratic Governor Hugh Carey's chief fundraiser to lobby New York City's unelected, banker-heavy Urban Development Corporation for the acquisition of the Commodore Hotel. To date, Trump has pocketed well over $350 million in public money from that deal alone. Despite, or really because of, his sleazy bombast, Trump was a valuable commodity to the liberal politicians (in thrall and in onerous debt to the big banks) in office at the time. He continued to be a valuable commodity, because his success encouraged other sharks and investors to come buy and sell property in the near-bankrupt city, thus appeasing the bond-holders and possibly even averting a worldwide bond market collapse, due to the fear and jitters of the investor class. Trump's addiction to publicity and risk was instrumental in making New York a "home away from home" for the global elite. He was a key player in the Democratic Party's rejection of the New Deal and the Great Society, and the transformation of the metropolis into the wealth disparity capital of the US, if not the entire world, that it now is.

In light of the shock victory of democratic socialist candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of The Bronx in last week's Democratic primary, I found this passage in Phillips-Fein's book to be particularly and deliciously ironic:

 Donald Trump and the developers who exploited the city's desperation to build their towers had little interest in the rest of New York. The fact that millions of dollars went to subsidize their building projects instead of restoring public services or promoting recovery in the poor and working-class neighborhoods of the city never registered as a moral concern. Quite the contrary: the mood among the city's new elite in the wake of the fiscal crisis was confident and upbeat.... As the seventies drew to a close, Trump commented to the newspapers that he believed things were looking up for the city -- it was clearly on the road to recovery. 'I'm not talking about the South Bronx,' he elaborated, perhaps unnecessarily. 'I don't know anything about the South Bronx." (quoted in Wayne Barrett, Donald Trump Cuts the Cards, Village Voice, 1/22/79.

Suddenly The Bronx is right back on the map. The corporate Democratic machine is running out of gas, grinding its old rusty gears in feeble protest. And the only voice the Grand Old Guignol Party has left is Donald Trump's own tooting, off-key clown horn. The concept of a "moral economy" is again on the ascendant due to the blatant immorality at the core of the class war.

Maybe, just maybe, things are turning around.  They are revolving. And I don't mean the revolving doors between Washington and corporate America, either. I mean revolving as in revolution.

Never has the directive to "call Congress and make your voice heard" sounded more ridiculous, especially coming from the minority leader of the Senate. I gave up calling him when he answered my questions and views about Single Payer health coverage with the same boilerplate email, saying he is really liberally open to having conversations and debates about how to make the "Affordable" Care Act better.

This is a guy who once called for Homeland Security TSA agents to man all the New York subway platforms and do Rapiscan probes and body searches on terroristic commuters as well as establishing "no ride" lists for trains.

People are out on the streets, displaying some actual solidarity with immigrant and refugee families. The struggle might not be ultimately successful, but at least it's a struggle, after a whole stultifying decade of neoliberal Obamism/Clintonism.

Culture War Cats Edition

Just in case you still had any doubts, Donald Trump's official job description is our self-proclaimed culture warrior-in-chief. His latest act was to disinvite Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles from a White House celebration. He instead used the occasion to outdo embattled Culture Warrior Princess Roseanne Barr in belting out one of our great national hymns. Donald didn't have to take a knee to disrespect the flag. He kneed the sensibilities of the entire nation with his botched lip-synced rendition of God Bless America. The god in question, of course, being himself.

Vying for attention with the latest rendering of Great American Culture Wars is the new game show sensation, "Where In the World is Melania Trump?" Except for a blurred glimpse at a different, closed military-themed White House affair this week, she hadn't been seen in public for nearly a month, ever since undergoing a minor kidney procedure in May. My own catty theory is that she had a little cosmetic surgery - a facelift, an eyelift, a whatever-lift - along with, or even instead of, the alleged kidney embolization. This is what extremely wealthy, famous women do after plastic surgery. They go on an extended vacation to a secret location, or they stayed holed up in their mega-mansions until the scars and bruising fade, a process which can take many weeks. So when I read a report that Melania had been spotted wearing dark glasses indoors as she strolled through the West Wing, my cat-sense went into high alert.

If my theory is true, then my recommendation to Melania would be to go the iconoclastic Betty Ford route and become a national spokesperson for the benefits of cosmetic surgery. Betty was the trailblazer, having had the first ever public First Lady Facelift, frankly admitting at the time that she had an eye job and neck tightening because "I wanted a fresh new face to go with my beautiful new life." 

Betty Ford was also forthcoming about her mastectomy during her husband Jerry's truncated White House tenure, an announcement that encouraged many women to seek out mammograms and detect early cancers. She was later famously honest with revelations about her drug addiction.

  Again, assuming that I'm right about Melania, she could even out-do Betty and become an advocate for making cosmetic surgery available under Medicare and Medicaid --  or, to make her hubby and his party really pissed off, Obamacare silver and bronze plans.

Of course,Donald (who decades ago underwent his own scalp reduction surgery) would probably nix the idea, given how he'd so cattily Twitter-mocked former friend Mika Brzesinki's "bleeding face" last year at Mar-a-Lago (she later staunchly denied having had had a facelift) as well as mean-spirited remarks from Trump supporters about Hillary Clinton's own rumored work and reputed Botox injections.

***

Speaking of cattiness, Paul Krugman has been having a field day lambasting fellow Ivy League academic Niall Ferguson for urging his conservative Stanford students to do "oppo research" on the life of a liberal student activist on campus.  This act of unseemly cattiness, the New York Time's chief Bernie Bro-bashing intellectual writes, is emblematic of the "bad faith" of conservative intellectuals in general:

And yes, I do mean “conservative.” There are dishonest individuals of every political persuasion, but if you’re looking for systematic gaslighting, insistence that up is down and black is white, you’ll find it disproportionately on one side of the political spectrum. And the trouble many have in accepting that asymmetry is an important reason for the mess we’re in.

But how can I say that the media refuses to acknowledge conservative bad faith? While some journalists remain squeamish about actually using the word “lie,” and there’s still a tendency for headlines to repeat false talking points (which are only revealed to be false in the body of the article), readers do get a generally accurate picture of the extent to which dishonesty prevails within the Trump administration.

True, Trumpism is infectious -- but the anti-Trump oligarchic resistance antidote of more austerity and more corporate Democrats in Congress and more allegiance to the authorities of the "intelligence community" is an equally addicting and dangerous off-label regimen. Manufactured "divisiveness" sells, and both sides of the corporate Duopoly profit, whether they be electoral winners or losers.

My two-part published response focuses on the suppression of free speech and dissent:

 "Registered Republican professional historian" is an oxymoron.

Phony intellectuals like Ferguson are, in fact, really nothing more than the "snowflakes" they love to accuse liberals of being.

Meanwhile, a recent survey by the PEN press rights group shows that more journalists are actually self-censoring out of fear of government reprisals.

With no real ideology other than Greed is Good, the right wing's m.o. is the stifling of the very First Amendment rights they purport to champion.

Take the case of Cal State writing professor Randa Jarrar, who sent the phony moralizing hordes to the fainting couch this spring when she tweeted that the late Barbara Bush "was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal."

Although the college initially seemed to bow to demands from reactionary media for her firing, she kept her job.

These same reactionaries are now having conniption fits because Samantha Bee got away with calling Ivanka Trump a bad name for her insensitivity to Daddy's ripping tots way from their mothers' arms at the border, while complaining that Trump Show prima donna Roseanne Barr got unfairly fired for her louder, crasser racism.

Ferguson is simply a bully and a coward for "punching down" on a student from his position of power. He might as well declare himself Roseanne's replacement as best supporting actor in the Trump Show, which is what the GOP might actually rename itself.

If it were honest, that is. Which it most definitely is not.

(And following up with a reader pointing out that renowned war critic and historian Andrew Bacevich is a registered Republican) --

Notice that I used the term "reactionary" -- not conservative -- to describe the modern Republican Party.

Not all conservatives are alike, and of course they should not be painted with the same broad brush. Maybe Ferguson is a smart guy, but he was very stupid to buy into the divisive tactics perfected by Trump.

I hadn't realized that Andrew Bacevich, whose work I admire, was still a registered Republican. He writes for, besides outlets like TomDispatch, The American Conservative. While I strongly disagree with much of this site's sexist and even "colorblind" racist content (Pat Buchanan is a regular), it is also reliably critical of American imperialism, endless war and especially neoconservatism. They publish a variety of viewpoints.

Here, for example, is an article on the US drone war, which has gotten especially vicious and unaccountable under Trump:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/targeted-killing-donald-...

***
 To his great credit, centrist Times columnist Frank Bruni is not taking Bill Clinton's appearance on the Today show (see my Monday post) kindly. In a scathing piece aptly called "the Sultans of Self-Pity," he writes:

Move over, Alec Baldwin. Bill Clinton does a much better impersonation of Donald Trump.

The hair is wrong but the air is right — self-righteous, self-pitying and suffused with anger that anyone would peddle a version of events less heroic than the one that he prefers. We’re shaming him about ancient groping when we should be showering him with eternal gratitude. And what about his pain?

“I left the White House $16 million in debt,” Clinton said, in an interview that NBC’s “Today” aired on Monday, batting back questions about whether he had demonstrated sufficient contrition for converting a 22-year-old’s romantic idolization of him into sexual favors and setting off a sequence of events that savaged her. I don’t know what legal bills have to do with a moral ledger. But I can see that his fixations on money and martyrdom are intact.

The Clinton team is now in full damage control mode. The Times swiftly disappeared Bruni's column from the top right corner of the digital home page, and Stephen Colbert invited Bill on his Tuesday show not for a comb-over gag, but for a moral makeover - or as Colbert termed it, a "do-over." Now that Bill has summoned up enough moral courage to finally utter Monica's name right out loud, maybe he hopes he can get on with his book tour without further ado. Let us hope that he cannot. (Hiss, scratch.)

My published response to the Bruni column:

One common theme in the MeToo movement is that the perpetrators aren't getting called to account until relatively late in their lives,often decades after their predatory behavior was an "open secret" within the overlapping spheres of power they inhabit.

Better late than never, of course, but oh what damage these men have done, not only to their female victims, but to the country and society at large.

During the Lewinsky episode, leading feminists, most notably Gloria Steinem, came to Bill's defense. His abuse of power was cast as a purely partisan issue, with blame deflected from him onto the much nastier and hypocritical Republicans. At the same time he was castigating Bill, Newt Gingrich was cheating on his own wife.

Meanwhile, Bill had connived with Newt to "end welfare as we know it" with the ensuing cruel reform package condemning millions of women to whole lifetimes of poverty.

 It's not surprising that Trump and Clinton, who were both once considered "outsiders" in New York high society, golfed together at Trump's club. It's not surprising that the Clintons attended Trump's third wedding. Not because they liked Trump, of course, but because these "transactional" things are what rich and famous people have to do to maintain their lifestyles and images and status and power.

How ironic that Bill is now promoting pulp called "The President Is Missing."

In reality it's the presidency that's missing, since Trump's organized crime cartel has effectively hijacked it.

(photo credit: Bob's Blog)

The Great White Rant

Not for the first time has Donald Trump dehumanized people by calling them "animals" during one of his habitual rants. Last month, it was alleged gang members. On Wednesday, it was the immigrants entering the country from Mexico, all for the lack of a magical wall to keep Whiteness safe.

 But this time he revved up his violent rhetoric to maximum overdrive:

 "We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — we’re stopping a lot of them,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room during an hourlong meeting that reporters were allowed to document. “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before.”

Well, not quite. Trump still hasn't deported as many people as his predecessor, who set the real record. That probably explains at least part of his spittle-inflected rage. He gets away with it, though, because Barack Obama was not one to brag about his own inhumanity. On the contrary, he herded them out of the country very quietly, to little outrage from his own party, no credit from the Republican Party, and nearly nonexistent coverage by the corporate media. When his administration was rarely confronted over his mass deportations, officials soothed it was only in order "to send a message" to future border crossers. 

And if outright deportation wasn't feasible, especially for those migrants claiming refugee status because of violence in their home countries, Obama's immigration bureaucrats did the proper public relations thing and locked them up in immigration jails, often euphemised as "family detention centers."

Trump, of course, is far from the first American official to dehumanize dark-skinned people. The US was founded upon slavery and the expulsion and extermination of the continent's native populations, the xenophobic language of which survives to this very day in military jargon and the naming of sports teams.

Along with tens of millions of other modern-day citizens, Trump became a true believer during the post-civil rights victory decades which featured the reactionary law-and-order regimes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Hillary Clinton herself was a true believer, touting the harsh sentencing reforms of her husband's administration by infamously calling young black men "super-predators who must be brought to heel," as though they were vicious dogs. That remark came back to haunt her during her latest ill-fated presidential bid.

But the autocratic Trump brings the institutional racism, long a part of the American fabric, to a whole new level. His diatribes act as much as a rebuke to "politically correct" liberals on behalf of his army of proud Deplorables as they are a reflection of his own bigotry.

From the New York Times: 

His harsh criticism came as American and Mexican officials were at a critical stage in their efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mr. Trump’s heated remarks on immigration, both private and public, appear to have resonated with his advisers, who have been moving to put in place ever-stricter policies in line with the president’s vision. Mr. Sessions said the Department of Justice would be adding immigration judges and prosecuting twice as many immigration cases this year.

“The president has made clear to all of us that we have to do better,” he said. “We are going to do better.”

My published comment on the article:

 With every hateful rant, Trump gives tacit permission to his base and all manner of disturbed individuals to act out their most violent fantasies. When you consider that, according to polls, at least a third of this country's citizens heartily approve of him, I think it's fair to conclude that this potential for violence is increasing exponentially with every passing day.

This applies both to state-sanctioned violence, as in the average of three people now getting killed daily by law enforcement, and the non-state sanctioned violence of people taking matters into their own hands, specifically their own hands gripping guns.

Not that our politicians seem to care. They're actually complicit. Trump doesn't seem like such an anomaly when the Senate has all but confirmed a known torturer and war criminal to head the CIA.

Trump refuses to feed any other belly besides the bloated one of the de facto oligarchy. The only thing he's interested in feeding to ordinary people is resentment.

Too many of us have become numbed to Trump's relentless bursts of projectile verbal vomitus. I don't know what's more noxious: calling immigrants "animals," his cruel demand to break up immigrant families, or his call for the prosecution of a democratically elected official acting to protect these same families.

This isn't a dog whistle to his fans: it's a bullhorn giving them permission to be brown-shirted vigilantes.

It's a very scary time to be alive.

And not just in America, of course. Witness SLOTUS (son-in-law of the United States) Jared Kushner's dehumanization of the Gaza Palestinians shot to death by Israeli snipers this week as mere propaganda tools who deserved to die by daring to venture too close to the barbed-wire fence of the world's largest open air prison.

Trump might be nothing but an ignorant con man riling up the base for the benefit of his own business empire. But Kushner, whose own relatives were killed by the Nazis during the Holocaust, should know better. Violent language aimed at rendering people less than human is historically the prelude to actual physical violence, ethnic cleansing and genocide. If nothing else, this language serves to terrorize entire populations for the crime of simply existing.

Mad As a March Hare In Trumpistan

I think I may have jumped the shark when I wrote that this week's official corporate Narrative was the Liberal Fire and Brimstone centered around the Stormy Daniels scandal.

I'm sorry to say that this is already semi-stale news. It's just a hop, skip and jump from steamy sex and bribery to sleazy political murder.There was the just-revealed Monday Afternoon Massacre (Trump's body man mysteriously and forcibly removed from Trump's body and environs); the Tuesday Morning Massacre (Rex Tillerson fired by Trumpian Tweet); and the Tuesday Night Massacre. This wasn't really a massacre at all, even though the corporate media were prematurely describing the still too-close-to-call Pennsylvania special election as such. A right-wing Blue Dog Democrat was slightly ahead of a right-wing Trump Republican. This was despite The Leader's rousing Nuremberg rally in steel country over the weekend, when he called for death to all drug dealers. (Update: the Democrat, Conor Lamb, came in like a lion cub and will able to serve his one term before his district is un-gerrymandered.)

Trump is acting weirdly chaotic, even for Trump. And it's still only Hump Day. Maybe he is more sleep-deprived and cranky than usual, given the Daylight Saving Time torture bug that's been going around. Speaking of which, his elite factotum's last known official act before getting bounced was setting all the clocks in the personal residence ahead by an hour on Saturday night. Perhaps Trump's sense of personal security was breached more by this effrontery than by his manservant's suddenly discovered history of alleged financial chicanery. Where's Jeeves when you need him?

The corporate pundits are, of course, blaming Trump's purge of the State Department on Tillerson's heretical stated opinion that the Kremlin is to blame for the poisonings in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter. But perhaps just as likely (besides the trauma induced by Daylight Saving Time) is that Stormy is threatening to spill her guts on national TV.  I suspect Trump is not so much worried about having been caught cheating and later having his lawyer pay her off. I suspect Trump is worried that Stormy will reveal that he is a total dud in the sack. So he's got to prove his virility however he can.

  It's March, the rutting season for horny hares. So Trump could be on a firing binge because he feels like he's been stuck in a different kind of rut. He doesn't drink or do drugs so he's got to get his jollies somehow. I'm sure he misses hosting Celebrity Apprentice, too.

 He is certainly exhibiting all the classic symptoms of hare-brained weirdness. From Wikipedia:

  This odd behaviour includes boxing at other hares, jumping vertically for seemingly no reason and generally displaying abnormal behaviour. An early verbal record of this animal's strange behaviour occurred in about 1500, in the poem Blowbol's Test where the original poet said: Thanne þey begyn to swere and to stare, And be as braynles as a Marshe hare (Then they begin to swerve and to stare, And be as brainless as a March hare).

 Herr Trump reportedly has swerved his withering braynles stare in the direction of his Veterans Affairs honcho. But not before he hopped Air Force One over to California to eyeball samples of designer walls against immigrants. Ever the wascally wabbit, Trump quipped that the wall has to be really high because those Latino dudes sure are great jumpers. And just to make sure, his "Justice" Department is suing California over its sanctuary polices which protect immigrants, both with papers and without, from Trump's ICE brigade.

All of this compulsive punching and swerving is not to say there aren't any upsides to the the Blowbol President's March Madness. At least we're no longer being tormented by the corporate media's fawning blow-by-blow accounts of Barack Obama's boring obsession with his college basketball brackets as he went out about quietly deporting a record number of immigrants, more than all previous administrations combined. For despite all his vicious rhetoric, Trump still has a lot of catching up to do in that department.

The major upside to the latest bout of insanity is that the long-protected torturer whom Trump has tapped to lead the CIA will finally be subjected to a public grilling in the Senate. Of course, this will probably be a mostly theatrical grilling prior to Gina Haspel's ultimate confirmation. But at least the public will be reminded of this deliberately buried and sordid chapter in our nation's long, buried and sordid history. The appointment of a war criminal to lead the spy agency is forcing politicians from both legacy parties to take a stand and reveal who they really are. Supporters of Haspel - for example, Clinton campaign adviser and former acting CIA Director and current CBS consultant Mike Morell - are already defending her as a poor misunderstood Adolf Eichmann type of gal who "was only following orders" as she ran a secret black site prison and later oversaw the destruction of incriminating evidence. She is, after all, among the people described by Barack Obama himself as "patriots who tortured some folks" before he ordered the full Senate report of the Bush-era torture program to be classified for at least another decade.

The public will also be reminded of Secretary of State-designate Mike Pompeo's sleazy financial ties to the Koch Brothers.

Still, Minority Weasel Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street) has signaled he'd be just fine with the hawkish and xenophobic Pompeo, as long as he's "tough on Russia." He will not, therefore, urge his caucus to stall the confirmation process. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CIA) will vote to confirm Haspel on the grounds that she is "respected" by other spooks and torturers. Because, just like Obama said when he refused to prosecute war criminals, "we have to look forward, not back."

And as the World Socialist Website has just so brilliantly documented with its exhaustive lists of congressional candidates actively recruited by the Democratic Party from the ranks of the CIA and the State Department and the Pentagon, we're already as good as living under military and surveillance state rule anyway.

So let's look for at least one more silver lining. Trump's firing of the State Department's public relations flack, Steve Goldstein, along with his boss means there is nobody officially in charge of the just-released $40 million in excess Pentagon funds to fight Russian trolls and other nefarious sowers of domestic discord. This money was to have been shared by Silicon Valley and various unnamed corporate media outlets "to fight the spread of divisive content" on the Internet. In other words, the  express purpose of this slush fund is the censorship of both sock puppets and legitimate independent news sources, along with an even more intensive spreading of oligarch-friendly propaganda on approved, consolidated platforms.

Maybe Trump can appoint DOTUS (Ivanka) to dole out this money as she sees fit while her own security status is still so conveniently fuzzy. Who wouldn't kill for an Ivanka-branded line of mix-and-match accessories after the fact? Instead of sowing divisions, women can be empowered to sew on buttons and bows for pennies an hour in sweatshops all over the world. Somebody's got to ensure that Ivanka will continue to clear her millions in profits every year, so it might as well be entrepreneurial feminists in Bangladesh and Pakistan and Thailand.

As an homage to Daddy and to the first woman ever nominated to lead the CIA, the Ivanka Collection's Little Black Site Dress could well be the hit of the Paris, London, Milan and New York Fashion Week runways next season. 

State of the Bunion, With Heel Spurs

Since much of Donald Trump's speech to the Congressional Joint last night consisted of his own hands, Mussolini-like, clapping for himself, and his  frequent pauses to look around and see who was applauding him, the reviews saying this was one of the longest harangues of its type are misleading.

Before I get into the rancid meat of the speech, let's get the fashion sidebar out of the way first. Paul Ryan wore a suitably lighter shade of blue tie than Trump's, although he did botch his own opening line: "I preven-- present the president of the United States!"

First Lady Melania chose the Hillary Clinton nominating convention look: a blinding white pantsuit. There are already plenty of articles on the possible cultural symbolism and hidden meanings of this choice of couture, so I won't bother. As I previously reported, the Democratic ladies borrowed their style from the Golden Globe ladies, and wore funereal black. Nobody shouted "Shut up!" or otherwise disrupted the spectacle - which is, after all, the political equivalent of Hollywood's own multi-part orgy of theatrical self-congratulation. There were one or two nonverbal outbursts that sounded like projectile vomiting, which I swear came from my TV and not from me or my pet goldfish.

Now, to the speech. If I were asked to give it a title, it'd be a toss-up between "It's Always Sunny When You Got Somebody To Hate" or  "It'll Take a Trillion-Dollar Military Industrial Complex To Crush One Little Latino Gang From Long Guyland."

No way, as the New York Times cheerfully posited in its usual insane deference to the "occasion" of the S.O.T.U. if not the man, was this an appeal for "unity,"  unless a more cohesive jelly mold of fear and hatred was what Trump had in mind.  When read rather than listened to, in fact, it sounds like many bullshitting presidential victory laps of hope which came before it.

Here's my interpretation (his actual words are in italicized quotes.)

America is a lot like Dante's trilogy, folks. There's both a heaven and a hell and maybe a purgatory, but I've never really been one for centrism, so I'll keep maniacally spinning from hell to heaven and back again throughout this diatribe. If there is anything I'm a master at, it's keeping people so seriously off-balance they won't know what's really hitting them until it's way too late.

Ordinary people look out for ordinary people. Because America is a bootstrapping nation which hasn't had a safety net for so long there's no need to even talk about it in this speech.

So, thank you, Mr. Helicopter Rescuer in the audience, for being a human prop next to the White Pantsuit Supermodel, so we don't have to talk about how the government has turned its back on the people of Puerto Rico and "the Harvey."

Thank you, too, Mr. Firefighter dude for rescuing 60 people from the Inferno in California. It only goes to prove that just because you're trapped in a raging fire you don't necessary die from it. 

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Mr. Congresscritter Steve Scalise, who proved that just because you get shot along with many other people every single day in America, you can come out of your own trial by fire looking just fantastic, 10 years younger in fact, all because of our great health care system. (Scalise jumps to his feet to prove it and he even blows a two-handed macho Hollywood-style kiss to the president. Because gun ownership for anybody and everybody is what America is truly all about. This happy-ending shooting proved we are one great big happy country-family.

"If there is an opportunity, we seize it." Because predation and greed are what we're all about.

Even though wages are stagnating, I'll do like all my predecessors did and insist they're rising. Plus, since I can't get Jay-Z calling me a germ out of my head, I'll dig in a little deeper and claim that black people have never had it better. Also Wall Street is booming, which is great for the pension accounts it's appropriated until the bubble bursts and somebody who is not a billionaire loses their shirt, their house, and maybe even an eye.

So anyway, here's a shout-out to Steve and Sandy, who own a small factory in Ohio.  Also to their black employee, an all-American welder who is a great welder because his bosses told me he was. You think I personally have the time to look at his welding? So that's another racist dog-whistle completed, sending the message that black people are either uppity Jay-Zs, or not hard-working enough to score a seat next to the White Pantsuit Goddess. How can I be a racist when I highlight a black guy on my special night?

"If you work hard, if you believe in yourself, if you believe in America, then you can dream anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything." This is a subtle dig at the 800,000 Dreamers, in the vein of critics who counter the Black Lives Matter Movement with "all lives matter." Trump hammers down on this "dream" theme several more times during his speech.

"In America, we know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of the American life. Our motto is 'in God we trust.'” (At this point the camera pans to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, who is caught applauding this line as robotically as any spellbound person who has ever been positively conditioned throughout life to loaded buzzwords and thus avoid thinking of how this country has always used the tropes of God and family to inflict a whole lot of Infernos both here and abroad.)

"And we celebrate our police, our military, and our amazing veterans as heroes who deserve our total and unwavering support." If you question endless war for profit, or complain about police brutality, you're not a real (white) American.

On that Orwellian note, here's another shout-out to a human prop. Young 12-year-old Preston up there, sitting right next to the White Pantsuit Goddess, started a movement to plant 40,000 flags on the graves of soldiers. Because unlike flowers, flags never die. "Young patriots like Preston teach all of us about our civic duty as Americans. Preston’s reverence for those who have served our Nation reminds us why we salute our flag, why we put our hands on our hearts for the pledge of allegiance, and why we proudly stand for the national anthem." Naturally, this was a dig at the mainly black athletes who have taken a knee in protest of racism at football games. Nothing like using a nice little kid as your racist cudgel, eh, Trumpolini?

Now it's on to the appointment of conservative judges who will allow people to keeping buying more guns because the Second Amendment rules. A quick pan to Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch doesn't elicit any emotion whatsoever.

 "All Americans deserve accountability and respect – and that is what we are giving them. So tonight, I call on the Congress to empower every Cabinet Secretary with the authority to reward good workers – and to remove Federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people."
Naturally, as the Underminer-in-Chief, this new rule would not apply to Donald J. Trump. But it'd be nice to see Congress take him at his word, just for fun.

Now it's on to the manufacture of more gas-guzzling, fuel-inefficient cars to keep the wheels of Capitalism grinding on until the whole planet erupts into one Dante's Inferno after another.

But before that happens, Trump wants terminal cancer patients to stop schlepping from country to country in search of a quack cure when they should easily have "access" to untested therapies right here in the Homeland.

Also, Trump has directed his new HHS secretary, fresh from the profiteering pharma industry, to "fix the injustice of high drug prices."  He might mean the injustice to the drug industry of laws against price-fixing, which prevent them from conspiring to raise and fix prices to even higher levels than they are already.

On to infrastructure improvement, a meaningless suggestion which seems to come up at every S.O.T.U. speech. Private corporations will not sink any money into such a thing, because it's risky and the returns are slower than would be gleaned by simply gambling with customers' money and making more money off of money than off of things. And no president in recent memory has ever suggested that public works projects actually be totally public. Where there is no profit motive, there is just no American way.

"We want every American to know the dignity of a hard day’s work. We want every child to be safe in their home at night. And we want every citizen to be proud of this land that we love.
We can lift our citizens from welfare to work, from dependence to independence, and from poverty to prosperity."

Notice he doesn't say that he wants every child to have guaranteed health care and a guaranteed public education. He does want every child to be afraid of "foreigners" who make them feel so jittery in their beds at night after they see his inflammatory Tweets. And ominously, he hints at more social safety net cuts to come in some very neoliberal language: "lifting" people from welfare to work and implying that poverty is some sort of cultural problem or individual foible. This is another classic racist and misogynistic dog-whistle employed mainly by the GOP, but also echoed by the Democrats' offerings of "ladders of opportunity."

Now it's on to fulminating the discredited trope of the "trickle-down" prosperity to be unleashed by the massive tax cuts for the rich. Oh, but let's throw in some paid family leave, because that's the pet project of Daughter Ivanka, a registered Democrat until Daddy ran for president.

Finally we get to the real rancid offal of the speech: Keep All Latino Furners Out with our big, beautiful fantastic border wall. To help him make his point, Trump points to a couple more human props whose children were killed by the notorious MS-13 Gang on Long Guyland. And then, using the old divide and conquer propaganda technique, Trump wags an approving digit at a Latino ICE agent who is patriotic enough to go after his own ethnic group.

Now that he got that out of the way, he doubles down on ending the visa lottery and thus barring immigrants from what he infamously called "shithole countries." And he again lies about so-called chain migration allowing any immigrants' distant relatives to get a free ticket into the country.

Next, he tiptoes around the crisis of opioid addiction by telling the heartwarming story of a compassionate Christian cop who adopted the baby of a heroin addict. The implicit message here is that there will always be people to care for the children of addicts, so the government and the oligarchs raking in the dough don't have to worry about it. Because if the children of powerful people become addicted, there are plenty of pricey rehab hospitals to take them in while other addicts either die in the streets, or go through withdrawal in overcrowded prisons, or some stranger comes along to "lift them up."

Would it be a proper S.O.T.U. if Trump didn't also demand unlimited Congressional funding for an already bloated military machine? Naturally, this last symphonic movement elicited the requisite fascistic chorus of USA!USA!USA! as a worthy substitute for fireworks and clashing cymbals. To get the crowd adrenaline flowing, he gushes over two soldiers who helped evacuate a hospital booby-trapped by ISIS explosives, because, as they would have us believe, American soldiers never, ever commit civilian atrocities.

And just in case you still had any doubts that the US military is planning a continuation (it never officially ended) of the Korean War, they should have dissipated with Trump's introduction of his final human prop, a North Korean refugee who lost a leg and whose family was forced to eat dirt helping him to flee to freedom. He further strove to overcome our sickly inhibitions about another war with the evening's most heartless use of human props - the parents of Otto Warmbier, who was apparently tortured by North Koreans before they released him back to the States, where he died of irreparable brain damage - although with the lack of an autopsy, the cause of death was never established.

This country belongs to the police and the military, Trump bellowed.

Is it a coup yet?

Hillary Is the Least Most Admired Woman In the USA

 

Although Hillary Clinton has again won the over-hyped Gallup title as the "most admired woman" in the United States, her slim margin of victory over Michelle Obama essentially makes her the least popular winner in the entire history of this horribly annoying poll.

In another wipe-out,  Donald Trump narrowly lost to Barack Obama. If nothing else, this result is sure to engender a torrent of new "it was rigged!" tweets from the president, in what is traditionally a very slow news week. If it's any consolation, Obama still has a lot of catching up to do to beat Dwight Eisenhower's own record as most admired man in America ever in the history of Gallup polling.

If it is any further consolation to Trump, although "Crooked Hillary" has retained her popularity title for the 16th consecutive year out of 22 total lifetime wins, finding even a couple hundred people to vote for her out of the thousand-odd who were polled was a fraught enterprise. "She managed to win this year because she remains arguably more prominent than other contenders," Gallup contended. "However, retaining that stature may be more challenging in coming years with her political career likely over."

Ouch. Well, it could always have been worse. Gallup could have gone the Vanity Fair route and advised Hillary to take up a new hobby, such as knitting. Although the usual purveyors of manufactured liberal outrage are screaming "sexism" at this harmless snark, I think the people who should be really offended by this hysteria are the knitters of America. Admired males and females alike can be, and historically have been, accomplished knitters. As a crocheter myself, I was even a little jealous that Vanity Fair hadn't recommended my needlework skill-set to this minimally admired person.

If it's any further, further consolation to Trump, Gallup also predicts that as a sitting president, he's bound to beat Obama sooner or later - provided, of course, that he is still the most unpopular President this same time next year. The pollsters predict that Barry's star will soon fade as well, despite that over-hyped interview with Prince Harry Saxe-Coburg (whose great-uncle the Duke of Windsor, by the way, became an enthusiastic knitter after his abdication) was "breaking the Internet" this week. No matter, though. If Obama can brag that he, out of hundreds of millions of other Americans, felt delightfully "serene" as he listened to Trump's bizarre inauguration speech last January, he probably doesn't get too needled when it comes to people admiring him or not.

The other runners-up in this year's popularity contest were a mixed bag, ranging from Pope Francis to Mike Pence to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren to Benjamin Netanyahoo to Beyonce.

For those of you who care enough to be actually knitting your brows over the poll results, please take heart. Because fully one-quarter of those contacted by Gallup could not name one single person whom they most admire. Another nine percent chose a friend or a family member over any of the usual Big Media Names. 

This exhibit of independent thinking from a tiny but "statistically significant" sample of the American populace is what actually gives me a smidgen of hope for the New Year.

The Seven Dirty Words of American End-Times

George Carlin's estate really ought to think about suing the Trump administration. That's because the reality TV president's ironically-named Health and Human Services subsidiary has outright plagiarized the routine that made the late comic so famous.

Carlin riffed on the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television; Trump's goon squad has made a list of the Seven Words you can never say if you work at the CDC.

Through endless repetition on bestselling records and sold-out stage shows, Carlin managed to take the shock value right out of the forbidden vocabulary at the same time that he satirized the squeamish censorship policies of the Federal Communications Commission and broadcast networks themselves.

Donald Trump, who in his own deranged way has satirized every single norm of how a US president should speak, nevertheless seems to have his own squeamish censorship needs. Since he relies on the GOP's evangelical wing to shore up the interests of the rapacious oligarchy of which he is an integral part, his wordsmiths have settled upon the Seven Dirty Words which traditionally have made Prosperity Gospel moguls spew green vomit and scream for an immediate mass exorcism. Not of themselves, mind you, but of an entire nation of godless Takers and Cadillac Welfare Queens.

The words that officials of the Centers for Disease Control are now only being "advised" to erase from all future communications are: Transgender, Entitlements, Vulnerable, Fetus, Diversity, Evidence-Based and Science-Based.

As the Washington Post reports, Trump officials have insisted that the words are being banned for purely budgetary reasons.  Anything that offends the great god Mammon apparently is their version of a very deadly sin. They're not going so far as to ban the original Seven Deadly Sins, which include greed, gluttony, hubris and lechery. Because this is not about their pathocratic personalities. This is about gagging and robbing the public, and then calling it a holiday gift to America.

Republican lawmakers can barely function, what with their group nightmare of vulnerable transgendered fetuses stretching out their little hands for government entitlements the minute they mature enough to burst out of the womb and breathe on their own thanks to the science-based fact of advanced lung development. The only diversity the misanthropic congress-critters care about is how best, and how tax-free, their sugar daddy donors can diversify their investments for the most immediate windfall profits possible. Too many vulnerable diverse people listening to all that trickle-down propaganda on TV might actually expect more than their fair share of a scant drop of water - especially if words like "entitlements" give them the crazy idea of someday collecting on the social insurance policies they've paid into all their working lives.

With the abolitions of "science-based" and "evidence-based," the Seven Banned Words take on an even deeper symbolic meaning, because as we all should know, God literally created the universe in Seven Days. Number Seven is an especially lucky number for the top One Percent, during this year of the Great Congressional Theft of the Public Purse.

From the Post:

(One)  longtime CDC analyst, whose job includes writing descriptions of the CDC’s work for the administration’s annual spending blueprint, could not recall a previous time when words were banned from budget documents because they were considered controversial.
The reaction of people in the meeting was “incredulous,” the analyst said. “It was very much, ‘Are you serious? Are you kidding?’ ”
“In my experience, we’ve never had any pushback from an ideological standpoint,” the analyst said.

It's getting so bad that before you know it, Trump might even issue a directive requiring CDC employees to rat each other out if they're caught writing the Seven Banned Words or even muttering them under their breath. Failure to spy on and report subversive bureaucratic activity in the workplace would be grounds for immediate disciplinary action, including demotion and dismissal and possibly even criminal prosecution.

Oh, wait. Out of the thousands of Obama-era regulations that Trump is gleefully axing, the Insider Threat Program is still thought to be every bit as safe as a billionaire's tax break. Federal government workers already are required to spy on each other at work, lest such activities as visits to independent news sites during their lunch breaks threaten national security.

Trump's attacks on the mainstream media are far from the first direct assaults on freedom of the press by a modern president. Barack Obama had already quietly decreed the leaking of information by government workers to reporters to be an act of espionage. McClatchy Newspapers reported in 2013:

The program could make it easier for the government to stifle the flow of unclassified and potentially vital information to the public, while creating toxic work environments poisoned by unfounded suspicions and spurious investigations of loyal Americans, according to these current and former officials and experts. Some non-intelligence agencies already are urging employees to watch their co-workers for “indicators” that include stress, divorce and financial problems.
“It was just a matter of time before the Department of Agriculture or the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) started implementing, ‘Hey, let’s get people to snitch on their friends.’ The only thing they haven’t done here is reward it,” said Kel McClanahan, a Washington lawyer who specializes in national security law. “I’m waiting for the time when you turn in a friend and you get a $50 reward.”

 Trump always prides himself on going the secretive and circumspect Obama one better, so perhaps he can hold a contest at the CDC. Since he's already donated his latest paycheck to HHS for the express purpose of "raising awareness" of the opioid epidemic rather than doing anything about it, I don't think we can expect him to part with any more of his untaxed cash, though.

So for the employee who can black out the most forbidden words in a budget document during any one eight-hour shift, the prize might be a year's supply of old freezer-burned Trump steaks. Runners-up will get their choice of vintage plastic Trump Christmas tree ornament or a Bible, a/k/a Art of the Deal, signed by the genuine auto-pen of the Big Man himself.

George Carlin explains further:

Welfare As Trump Knows It and Loves It

Just as news leaked out that Donald Trump's tax returns, a/k/a his corporate welfare award letters, are now locked up in a safe deep within the bowels of the IRS, he vowed that his next big Grab-A-Thon will be "reforming welfare as we know it." As a late Christmas gift to himself, he'll go after Medicaid, food assistance and disability benefits early in 2018. (Since Medicare and Social Security are insurance programs and not means-tested, his crusade to destroy them will be a separate front in the Class War.)

"Welfare for me, but not for thee," he as much as brayed to the nation last week, just in time for Thanksgiving.

Because his faux-nemesis Hillary Clinton bragged in her second memoir that by the time she and Bill left the White House, there were 60 percent fewer women on the welfare rolls, Trump can't leave bad enough alone. He would like to raise that pathetic D grade to a solid A+, or a 100 percent destruction rate, for himself. This will prove that he is both tougher and smarter than Hillary Clinton. He shows no sign of abandoning his insane quest to "win" against her even after he's already beaten her into a pulp. He's actually goading her to run against him in 2020.

(Given that Barack Obama earned a miserable F for his own "Grand Bargain" attempt to raise the Medicare eligibility age and to reduce Social Security benefits through the "chained CPI" gimmick, Trump can afford to ignore that part of the Obama legacy. It's not cruel enough to threaten him. Plus, the mere thought of one more bipartisan cat food commission probably makes him break out in hives.)

Even if he accomplishes nothing else, Trump has had the deplorable effect of making the Clintons seem like the kinder, gentler, more sympathetic and more pragmatic destroyers of poor people. Hillary's personal propaganda shtick during the 90s welfare reform campaign involved co-opting a poor, hardworking (possibly fictional) waitress and pitting her against lazy stay-at-home moms. The coddled poor, she implied, must be punished in order to placate the deserving and slaving poor.

As a result, direct federal cash aid to the poor stopped in the late 90s, and the program was block-granted to the states. It has resulted in a doubling of the extreme poverty rate in the two decades since its passage. 

Paradoxically, the mass punishment of mainly women and children has not saved the government any of the promised money. For one thing, the block grants ended up being used for other programs which had nothing to do with ameliorating poverty, or helping people kicked off the rolls to find work. Only 23 percent of poor families now receive help from TANF (Temporary Aid to Needy Families), the state-run programs which replaced the New Deal's Aid to Families With Dependent Children.

Millions of people are now living on less than $2 cash a day, with only the restricted balances on their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program e-cards (food stamps) keeping body and soul together.

This state of affairs had Trump so riled up that when he finally got wind of it, he practically choked on his overdone Mar-a-Lago steak with the catered side of McDonalds fries.

"People are taking advantage of the system!" Trump sputtered between Tweets and mouthfuls last week. But as is usual with him, details are lacking on how he'd like to make people even more insecure than they already are. So the Heritage Foundation, an ultra-right think tank in Washington, is salivating at the chance to fill in all the Trumpian blanks. To deflect attention from the fact that Trump and his kin are epic kleptocratic corporate welfare cheats in their own right, they'll use the tried-and-truthy methods of scapegoating, gaslighting and the politics of resentment.

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at Heritage, said he would like to see more work requirements for a range of anti-poverty programs and stronger marriage incentives, as well as strategies to improve results for social programs and to limit waste. He said while the administration could make some adjustments through executive order, legislation would be required for any major change.
“This is a good system,” he said. “We just need to make this system better.”
Administration officials have already suggested they are eyeing anti-poverty programs. Trump’s initial 2018 budget proposal, outlined in March, sought to sharply reduce spending for Medicaid, food stamps and student loan subsidies, among other programs.
Budget director Mick Mulvaney said this year, “If you are on food stamps and you are able-bodied, we need you to go to work.”

By sermonizing that the fraying American social safety net is already "a good system" which only needs improvement, Rector hides the ultra-right's real agenda. Far from mending it with stronger thread, the oligarch-controlled Congress will rip it to shreds and then call the remaining tatters the latest cool fashion for style-savvy poor people. Look on the bright side. You will no longer have to pay top dollar for Ivanka Trump's designer distressed jeans and pre-ripped tee shirts. You can get right back to basics, and let your nonexistent clothing budget take its own natural course. Be mindful that plutocrat-manufactured crises always seem beneficent whenever they're accompanied by some positive marketing spin and social solidarity.

You Too Can Feel As Too-Thin & Needy As a Rich Person

  

Grand Bargain Fashion, Obama-Style: Cutting the Waste in Thread & Sleeves

  

Old Pols Never Die, They Just Fashionably Fade Away (Not)

Evangelical Christians won't say a word, because starving people who die a lot quicker will go to heaven a lot quicker. Plus, it will force them to get married if they want to eat. The whole idea is that if they're working for food, they'll be too exhausted to have lots of extramarital sex.

And to help get you through your ordeal, always remember that Mick Mulvaney's needs are very important to you. He needs you to suffer as much as possible as he barges into his next gig of running the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau... right into the ground. 

Meanwhile, the Trump Food Stamp Reform Bill reportedly already has a marketing motto: "Let them eat pictures of Trump Steaks!"

 As God is my witness, you'll be too nauseated to ever go hungry again.

Yum, Yum: "I Love the Uneducated"