Bern Baby Bern

I thought it was "burn", but I see you spelled it "Bern" like it was somebody's name, so I'm not sure that I know what you're talking about...... Oh, you must mean Bernie Sanders. Duh!

I don't think our RINO governor was ever involved with the Tea Party. Our gubernatorial elections are in the off years, and he's into his second term now, so he must have been elected in 2010 and assumed office in 2011. His main claim to fame was that he wasn't a politician, just a savvy businessman who could restore Michigan to economic stability. He did balance the budget, which couldn't have been too hard because he had both houses of the legislature on his side. He caught a lot of flack because he eliminated one of the business taxes and made up the difference by taxing retired people's pensions, which Michigan had never done before. That pissed off the liberals. He said that he wasn't in favor of a "right to work" law and, while he didn't push for it, he signed it when it came across his desk. That pissed off the union people. The Emergency Manager law that I told you about was never popular with anybody that I know of, and the conservatives are pissed that he bailed out Detroit. The liberals are pissed about the Flint water crisis, although I'm not sure how that was his fault, and the conservatives are pissed that he's kissing up to Obama for federal aid to fix it.

I've heard good things and bad things about Hispanics, probably because there are some good Hispanics and some bad Hispanics, just like with everybody else. The fact that there are so many of them makes me a little nervous, but any kind of large crowd has always have made me nervous, which is one reason I left Chicago. The fact that they can come here illegally and just settle in like they belong here says something about our legal system. I have always believed that, if a law is not going to be enforced, it should be repealed. I think I learned that in Sawyer Elementary School.

Another consideration is all the cross border drug dealing that has been going on for some time. I understand that a large part of Mexico is currently being ruled by drug gangs, and that their own government is either unable or unwilling to stop them. I seem to remember your girl Hillary saying that this is all "our" fault for providing a ready market for illegal drugs. I don't know about her, but I don't use illegal drugs, so I don't know who she means by "our". That's another thing that could be solved by repealing some laws, which has already happened in a few states. It really needs to be addressed on the federal level, and maybe it will be someday if it goes well in the states that have tried it.

Is Jeb Bush still a contender? One would thing that this country has had enough Bushes in the White House, and enough Clintons too for that matter. I was on Wiki today because those sub zero wind chills were not conducive to outdoor work. It looks like the race is narrowing down to Trump and Cruz, but I suppose it's still too early to tell for sure. I guess I could live with Cruz, but I really wish they would resolve that citizenship issue before the national convention. I would hate to see Cruz nominated and then disqualified, leaving Trump to win by default. What a jerk!

Funny that you should say your ilk is losing control of the country. I always though they took over in the 60s and my ilk has been trying to take the country back ever since. Come to think of it, the pendulum has swung both ways a couple of times, but it always seems to swing right back again. Maybe that's all for the best. If one side or the other ever gained permanent control they would likely become too powerful and arrogant. Then we'd need to have another revolution or something. I don't know about you, but I'm too old for that shit.

maybe I am feeling the Bern

I think Trump is exactly what you see, a big windbag egotist.  It's been said that if he took the fortune he inherited and invested it in the S and P he would have made more money off that than from his wheeling and dealing, so I don't go for that he's so rich he must be smart baloney.  I don't think it's an act, he genuinely believes he is the smartest guy in the world, so whatever is on his mind he just says it because he must be right.  Everybody knows some asshole like that so to most people he is kind of a regular guy unlike the rest of the guys who are odd in that politician way.

It sounds like your guv ran as a tea party guy, and then maybe ran into practical things he had to do, and maybe people he couldn't just bulldoze so that he had to compromise.  Tea partiers make good senators and representatives because all they have to do is make speeches and if the government gets shut down they don't care if the rest of the country hates them because their constituents at home love them.  They are not so hot as governors because they actually have to try to get things done and work with other people and if they fuck up then it's their own constituents that get hurt and not just like liberals somewhere else.

But I am just talking out of my ass as far as Michigan.  I don't really know anything about Michigan.  I suppose I could do some internet research, but I am afraid when I googled his name all that would come up is Flint.

We have a sizable illegal immigrant population here in Chicago and in some of the suburbs.  They don't seem to cause any trouble, they are certainly not trying to take over.  Even Mexicans who are citizens don't vote very much.  Some of them do some drug smuggling, but that's just giving the people what they want, and if you don't like drugs don't buy them.  It's not like they are toppling the government.  As a matter of fact I can't think of the last time that we had a terrorist incident here and you know we have a lot of muslims living here too.

There's a lot of these Mexican immigrants who have been here like twenty years and have been working and having kids and going to church and all that jazz, just like native born Americans, except that they know that if they get stopped for driving without a license or maybe even get drunk one night and get caught bam, after some legal finagling they are riding that big airplane leaving their jobs and homes and families behind.  Just doesn't seem right does it? 

And yet when Obama tried to do something to ease their situation the reps stood against him, and when he tried to do it by executive order he was accused of gutting the constitution.

The bully, Christie, is taking a day or two off to think things over so he is probably gone and Carson and Carly are so far behind probably nobody will even notice when they officially drop out.  That leaves just five, you should be able to keep track now.  The clown car is headed south so that should favor Cruz and Bush.

Myself, well as I've told you I have been reading about the 1890s radicals who lived in the gilded age when the rich rode roughshod over the peons, and though the radicals mostly met up with bad ends their causes were taken up by the progressives and we ended up with a much more egalitarian nation, which we are rapidly losing today.

Maybe the progressives can do it again.  Maybe I am feeling the Bern.

Anyone But Trump

No, I was never on the debate team at Gage Park. I didn't like the idea of being assigned "pro" or "con" by the flip of a coin, I wanted to be able to choose my own side.

I was kind of kidding about that paranoid "They" stuff. It does make me wonder, though, what a guy like Trump is doing there. He has no political experience and it seems like he just says anything that pops into his head, but maybe that's all an act. You don't get to be as rich as he is by being stupid. And, speaking of makeup, does he have a lousy makeup team or does he really look like that?

I understand that lack of political experience is considered by many to be a good thing because they are fed up with politicians. That's how our RINO Michigan governor got elected. He was some kind of rich businessman who had never held political office in his life. His campaign slogan was "One tough nerd.", and he actually won with that. Our former governor had trouble getting her budgets passed, mostly because the legislature was usually controlled by the other party. Snyder promised that he would balance the budget, and he did, but it was mostly downhill from there. I was surprised when he was re-elected because he made a lot of people from both parties mad at him. It's like he just does what he wants to and doesn't care what anybody else thinks of him. I hate people like that!

I don't know what to think about this illegal immigration thing. We didn't get into this mess overnight, and I don't think there is an easy quick fix for it. For a century or more, the Mexican border has been pretty porous with people coming and going at will. Now they are trying to tighten it up, but I don't know if that's even possible anymore. And what are we going to do with all the illegals that are already here? Even if we could round them up and deport them, they could just sneak back in whenever they wanted to. If we make them citizens, that would just encourage more of them to come here. Maybe the Libertarians had the right idea. I don't know if they still believe this, but they used to advocate just throwing the gates open and letting people come and go as they wish. It sounds kind of radical, but what's worse, abolishing an unenforceable law or letting people make a mockery of it, which just breeds disrespect for all the other laws?

One reason I haven't been following this primary race very closely is that I find the sheer number of candidates overwhelming. I hope the pack thins out substantially in time for me to research the survivors before I have to vote. I seem to remember that's what happened last time, but I don't remember who I ended up voting for. I know it wasn't Romney, but I voted for him in the general election because I figured that anybody would be better than Obama.

Saturday night debates 2

One thing about those Nixon Kennedy debates, which I think were the first televised debates, was that people listening to them on the radio thought that Nixon had won and people watching on tv thought Kennedy won. 

I think you told me you were on the debate club at Gage Park.  I had been on the debate club at Tilden and wanted to be on the Gage Park one, but I think Mrs Kew wouldn't let me.  Anyway remember they had all these rules about how you had to respond to your opponents points and this and that, and you were awarded points, and the side with the most points won the debate.

Of course these debates are nothing like that, it is mostly like you said, tearing each other down.  Rubio stands rigidly upright with a tight smile on his face and responds ratatat with a little speech, like that one about Obama, which he has clearly practiced so many times that it sounds phony.  I call him the boy scout.  Christie slouches at the microphone and talks kind of regular guy like, but kind of also tough guy like, and he is the bully.

I think Canada is like the US where if you are born there you are automatically a citizen and you remain one until you formerly renounce it.  Cruz just recently denounced it, claiming that he never knew he was a Canadian citizen which is doubtful.  The question of whether an American born in a foreign country is a natural born American as far as being president has never been decided in the courts.  Most legal experts think that there is no problem with Cruz becoming president, but lawyers are lawyers and of course someone will sue.

And this whole thing comes from the showman, Trump.  Remember how he did the birther thing on Obama?  As far as I know he still has guys in Hawaii investigating.  And he brought it up like it was just something he heard, and he himself didn't know, but he thought it should be looked into, and he had heard from some very smart lawyers, who he, of course, never named, that there was something there.  And now he has done the same thing on Cruz, and I can tell by your reaction that it is working. 

Rubio was part of the gang of eight who wanted to do immigration reform, I think they had four dems and four reps and they were going to be a bipartisan force for change.  After Romney went down establishment reps realized that if they kept bashing Mexicans they could never win the presidency, and there was some talk of reaching out to Mexicans and Rubio jumped onto that bandwagon, but soon realized the most reps hated immigration/Mexicans and jumped off that bandwagon right away and denounces it at every opportunity, but it has dogged him ever since.

Cruz, in the same spirit of that long ago time, made a proposal, something along the lines of not deporting Mexicans, nothing leading to citizenship, but anything that looks favorable to Mexicans is instantly branded amnesty in today's republican party.

And that is the extent of the republican debate on immigration, Cruz and Rubio accusing each other of being for amnesty because long ago they both made a half-hearted gesture towards reform which they both have repudiated ever since.

Basically since all republican candidates believe pretty much the same thing, the only thing they have to talk about at their debates is to tear down each other. 

Oh there is another thing about the debates I forgot to mention yesterday.  While the Iowa caucuses were going on CNN reported that Carson was leaving for Florida instead of New Hampshire.  Cruz's people picked up on this and let out the word that Carson was dropping out and that his candidates should switch their allegiance to him (they both appeal to evangelicals).  It turned out that Carson was just going there to pick up clothes he said, he is such a nut.  Anyway it was a dirty trick and it pissed off Carson who is said to be looking for revenge, but he is so soft-spoken who can tell?  It also pissed off Trump who is blaming Cruz for cheating him out of victory in Iowa.  He is always sure to mention that the first thing in every interview.  He later on declares that it is water under the bridge and he is moving on, but like I said he always mentions it.

New Hampshire vote today I will be sitting here with my beer and popcorn, rooting for, i dunno, I guess Donald because I think he will bring down the republican party.

As for Beagles' vote, let's see, he doesn't want to vote for who They want him to vote for, but he must realize that They are onto him, so They will try to get him to think that They are against the candidate that They really want him to vote for, but maybe he is onto Them on that so They should try to make him think that they are, well whatever.

Or you know, you could vote for Cruz, and then when Trump's smart lawyers disqualify him it will be like you voted for none of the above and they won the election.

Who Are These People?

It's not surprising that Nixon is starting to look good to you after all these years because, by today's standards, he would be considered a liberal. I remember the first televised presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy. Kennedy looked impressively healthy and Nixon looked like death warmed over. At the time, people thought that it was because Nixon wore makeup and Kennedy didn't, but I read later that wasn't the case. Everybody wears makeup on television, but Nixon didn't know that and came unprepared, while Kennedy brought his own makeup people with him. Nixon's people tried to coble something up at the last minute, but they didn't know what they were doing, and that's why Nixon looked so bad.

I haven't been watching the current debates and, from what I've heard, I haven't missed much. Instead of an honestly discussing principles and issues, all they do is take turns insulting each other. I believe that's what's known as a "pissing contest". Most of what you said about the debates is lost on me because I don't know any of the candidates by the pet names you have given them. Actually, I don't even know most of them by their real names. I looked up Ted Cruz on Wiki yesterday and couldn't find him at first because I got him mixed up with Tom Cruise the movie actor. My hypothetical wife knows most of the actors and can even recognize them when they are playing a different part years later. I have trouble recognizing them in different scenes in the same movie. If a guy or girl comes out wearing different clothes than they did in the last scene, I have to ask my hypothetical wife if it's the same person.

I suppose I'm going to have to start paying attention because I have to vote for one of those turkeys next month, and it sounds like my man Rand is out of the running. I could almost vote for Cruz except that he has citizenship issues. He was born in Canada, which would seem to disqualify him right then and there, but I understand it's more complicated than that. I think his mother was an American citizen who moved to Canada, or at least was living there when Ted was born. That would normally make him an American citizen, but I understand that his mother had him naturalized as a Canadian, and then he later switched back to being an American. I don't know if that fulfills the constitutional requirement that he be a "natural born citizen", and his opposition is bound to make an issue of it, if they haven't already. It's like these people really need something else to argue about!

I also looked up Marco Rubio, and he isn't half bad except for his position on immigration. He wants to give amnesty to the illegals, but he accepts that the American people just aren't ready for that yet, so he proposes a three or four step program that will give them amnesty a decade or two from now, by which time he hopes nobody will care about it anymore.

As usual, whoever I vote for, I will consider it a vote against somebody else, Trump in the primaries and Hillary in the general election. I am tempted to vote for the one considered to have the best chance of beating Trump, but how do I know that isn't what they want me to do? Maybe the only reason Trump is there is to make somebody else look good by comparison. That would be Hillary in the general election, but I don't know who that might be in the primary. What I've got to do is figure out who they want me to vote for, and then vote for somebody else. That would be easy if there were only two candidates instead of a dozen or so, but I'll have to do the best I can under the circumstances. It's my civic duty.

tricky dick and the saturday night debates

Tricky Dick there was a guy.  A man of fearsome social ineptness who wanted to be president.  Always an evil little fucker, always fighting dirty, nobody liked him, and he didn't trust anybody.  Ike looked down on him, treated him very shabbily, tried to dump him from the ticket, but Dick gave the Checkers speech.  Then we didn't have him to kick around anymore and then he was right back and I was too deep into lala land thinking I would vote the Peace and Freedom party too even register to vote.

He said he had a secret plan to end the war.  I don't know if anybody believed him, but he won the election.  His plan was apparently to escalate the war for about four years and then, when that didn't work, bug out, except under the cover of Vietnamization so that when that failed, as anybody with half a brain surely knew it would, it was not his fault, it was their fault.

But in retrospect he did end the war, or our involvement in it, and that whole domino theory looked silly when the surrounding countries didn't tumble into the red sinkhole, but America had lost interest in the whole thing by then. 

Then he went to China.  I think one thing he hoped to get out of that was China reining in the Vietnamese,  but China hated the Vietnamese, they were getting their aid from Russia who China also hated.  The first war the Vietnamese fought once they got their own nation was with China.

But was he all that bad as president?  If he dicked around four four years with our lives and treasure, he did in the end get our boys home, and other politicians have taken longer to end wars.  And everybody except that hard kernel of Bircher types liked the opening to China, though in retrospect I'm not so sure that it did much for us.

The Saturday night debates were fantastic.  My favorite two moments were when Jeb and Donald, and then the boy scout and the bully got into it. 

Jeb attacked Trump on eminent domain from the time he was trying to take away granny's house.  Donald went full in on how if you didn't have eminent domain you could never have like highways or that pipeline the reps used to be so crazy for, and actually he was sounding kind of reasonable and then Jeb uncharacteristically tried to butt in, and Donald shushed him, and then the whole audience erupted in boos.  Trump looked up surprised, he isn't used to being booed, but quick on his feet, he claimed that the audience was full of donors.  The republicans have made attacking the moderators part of their repertoire, but nobody had attacked the audience before and for a moment he looked like Joe Citizen taking on the fat cats until you realized that he is the fattest cat.

Then the bully sniped at the boy scout, and the boy scout stuttered and spit out this strange little speech to the effect that Obama is not merely incompetent but evil incarnate, and when the bully poked again he repeated it, and then again and then again, like a stuck a record.

The speech itself was an odd thing.  I guess he was trying to say that Obama is even more evil then any of the reps thought he was, but so what?  They all hate Obama anyway and in he will be gone in a year, and then on the Sunday shows he doubled down on it.

He was looking to have the 'moderate' lane all to himself, but that is probably done now, and it's hard to say who will get it now.  The Ohio guy and the bully are too yankee to make it in the sunny south, so that gives slumbering Jeb a shot I guess.  Well you just never know.

None of the Above

I have written people in a few times, but never for president. I seem to remember voting for Mickey Mouse once because I heard that people in Europe sometimes do that as a way of voting for "none of the above". I wrote my old army buddy's name in once for township constable because there were no other candidates on the ballot for that office. I didn't even know what a township constable did, but I later found out that he was sort of the sergeant at arms for the meetings of the township board and, if nobody runs for the job, the board just reappoints the same guy who has been doing the job for decades.

Township boards themselves don't do a whole lot, and some states have abolished them, but Michigan still hangs on to theirs. People use them for ombudsmen, if they have an issue they bring it to the board, and the board directs them to somebody who can actually do something about it. The township supervisor, who is also chairman of the board, used to assess property valuations for tax purposes, but I think most townships hire a professional assessor for that now. The thing is, the state sends somebody out every year to check up on whoever does the assessments and, if he doesn't like what the assessor did, he just over rules him. So why doesn't the state just do he assessments in the first place? Your guess is as good as mine. We pay our property taxes to the township treasurer, but they just pass the money on to the county treasurer, so I don't know why they cling to that old formality either.

You know, I can't think of anybody right off hand who I would like to see in the presidency, but maybe I'll come up with somebody over the weekend. Most times, when I vote for president, I am trying to pick the lesser of two or three evils. There really ought to be a way to vote for "none of the above" and, if he wins, the office just goes unfilled. Maybe, after that happened a few times, people might come to the conclusion that we don't really need somebody in that job, and the office would be abolished. It's like that old joke: "Kennedy proved that a Catholic could become president, Johnson proved that anybody could become president, Nixon proved that we didn't really need a president so, ever since then, we haven't elected one." Well, I suppose we need some kind of president, but there are lots of other government jobs that, if they were abolished, nobody would miss them.

I suppose we need a Supreme Court too. Although I sometimes disagree with their decisions, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't even play one on TV, so what do I know? I think the idea of three branches of government checking and balancing each other was a good one. God only knows what evil might  befall us if any one of them had unlimited power.

I wasn't all that interested in the controversy surrounding Bill's blow job at the time, but I think people were more mad at him for lying about it than for getting it. Bill later claimed that he didn't deliberately lie abut it, His exact words were "I never had sex with that woman." and he later claimed that he didn't know that a blow job counted as sex. I don't remember any confusion about the definition of a blow job, just about the definition of sex, but a certain amount of memory loss is normal at my age. I do remember that a story was going around the bus garage that attributed the whole incident to a misunderstanding. It seems that a new cleaning lady had hired on and Bill was describing her duties to her: "Clean the upstairs rooms in the morning, clean the Oval Office while I'm gone for lunch and, after lunch, below me." Get it? With that southern accent of his, the lady though he said "blow me" instead of "below me".  

Y'all have a nice weekend too.