I'm Gonna Be Rich

I'm working on a plan to make a lot of money. I'm gonna set up a website for sending thoughts and prayers with just a couple of clicks. Because why not make it even more effortless? Sure, Facebook makes it pretty darn easy, but it's kinda impersonal, right?

My site would have options for the object and the subject: families, friends, victims and stuff; shooting, injury, cancer, etc. "Other" ought to work, too. And there'd be the ability to send just thoughts or just prayers. Maybe I'll toss in choices of deities to whom the prayers would be directed; maybe a list of expected or desired results.

Pictures of flowers and teddy bears would be a nice touch. No need even to travel to the location to deposit them or spend full price. Click, click, message sent, tastefully decorated and sincere.

I suppose providing a choice of thoughts would require too many clicks. "Thoughts" pretty much covers it; specificity is too effort-intense. Prayers? Not sure if it'd be worth making people choose. For healing, or cure, or even that the entity to which the prayers are directed might retroactively prevent the particular tragedy in question. Too much of that might generate uncomfortable questioning of the entire concept of prayers. Not good for business.

I'm thinking of allowing reduced charges for groups. Somewhere around $1.50 to start, $1.25 per person for groups of ten or more. Maybe get down to a buck apiece for a whole churchful. There'd be an option to make it repeat daily or some other time interval until the thoughts are effective and/or the prayers answered. Also, the user would have the option to feel even better by paying a voluntary surcharge, part of which I could donate somewhere.

Now I need to come up with a good name.

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A Man Of Temperament

As an example of his unbelievable (that I can tell you) presidential temperament, Donald Trump's campaign pointed to his great restraint in not mentioning Bill Clinton's infidelities in the debate. Yes, the serial adulterer who swaps wives like out-of-warranty cars, held back on criticizing a woman for staying with a man of similar but much lesser proclivities. A woman who, evidently, considers marriage vows worth holding through thin.

But don't despair, Trumpophiles: he's promised to get tougher next time around. Please, oh please. Let that mean he intends to bring it up. Because it's not like she won't be prepared for it.

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One Of These Is Not Like The Other

My latest newspaper column:

How many Trumpophiles have discussed his bribery to quash investigations of his phony “University?” Of those who have, how many consider it irrelevant, while believing donations to the Clinton Foundation indicate pervasive corruption? Something mysterious is going on. 

Trump makes a generous donation to the campaign of Florida Attorney General Bondi four days after she announces the investigation. A month later, she shuts it down. After which he hosts a fundraiser for her at Mar-a-Lago. No quo or pro in that quid? Same with a fat donation to then attorney general, now Texas Governor Abbot’s campaign after the investigation into the same thing was dropped, deep in the heart. Perfectly fine. For, quoth Donald, “I’ve got to give to them, because when I want something I get it. When I call, they kiss my a$$...” Pure as Trump Water. Trump brushes off questions like orange dandruff. But Hillary? Flagitious. 

Trump’s Florida “donation” was doubly illegal: “charitable” foundations are prohibited from contributing to political causes. Nevertheless, a much larger contribution went to a group attacking the New York prosecutor going after Trump U. In the past several years, Trump has given little to his fund; so its few donations come from other people’s money, as did his purchase of a portrait of himself for twenty grand. And he’s used it to settle legal problems, including a fraudulent hole-in-one contest. His “foundation” is little more than a slush fund.  

Compare to the Clinton Foundation, which does enormously important work around the world. Investigations have found no significant granting of favors to donors. Nor were those requests comparable to payoffs for dropped criminal investigations. (Appealing for help freeing Korean hostages!) How many know that the Clinton Foundation, which, among other things, provides AIDS medication for millions of people, receives the highest ethical ratings for charitable organizations, higher even than The Red Cross? How many even know what it does? 

Trumpites seem unbothered by his blatant bribery and cheating. Maybe many are unaware of it. Why? Because not just their favorite sources, but also so-called “liberal” media had until recently virtually ignored it, while pumping out repetitive innuendo about Hillary’s relation to her foundation. “Liberal” media concluded, evidently, that nothing they discovered about Donald Trump enlightened or mattered to his voters; for eyeballs, better to go after Secretary Senator Clinton. Only when bloggers kept highlighting Trump’s unscrupulous actions have they started covering them. Will people ever hear about his payoffs for tax breaks on Fox “news?”  

A few years back, Trump paid three-quarters of a million dollars to settle an antitrust lawsuit (“I never settle lawsuits,” he’s said). Briefly, we saw some of the business owners Donald bankrupted by refusing to pay what he owed them. Then, like Trump casinos, coverage folded. How long has it been, though, since major news organizations mentioned the Clinton Foundation or her conspiracy-theory-laden emails? In the midst of a Congressional investigation into improperly influencing US Attorneys, George Bush’s White House “lost” twenty-two million emails. Republicans were unconcerned. Hillary’s deletions? Treasonous. 

Have mainstream articles described Trump jacking up prices at his properties when used by his campaign, billing the campaign, paying himself from its funds, scamming donors? If the race is tightening it’s because of this imbalance in reportage. 

Of course the press should investigate Hillary Clinton. Done impartially, that’s their job. (They blew it with those hammered phones.) But their months of obsession with her while only now awakening to Trump’s conspicuous corruption is as puzzling as the fact that Republicans nominated such an irrefragable fraud in the first place. It seems they’d succumbed to inundatory right-wing claims of media bias, designed to shut down investigative journalism. Without irony, a Trump surrogate recently associated fact checking with liberalism. Besides, the more Donald Trump’s lies are exposed, the more he repeats them. 

Lately the weight of Donald Trump’s career of deception and malfeasance might, at last, be forcing mainstream media to do their job. That his career is one fraud after another is obvious, and it’s just as apparent that his supporters don’t care. The question is whether those who consider both candidates equally bad will, as the evidence mounts, ever open their eyes.

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For Which We Stand

My latest newspaper column:

In college, I played Conrad Birdie in a production of Bye Bye Birdie at a neighboring women’s school. Washing cafeteria dishes for dollars, a friend and I did Everly Brothers well (or maybe just loud) enough that other students came by to listen. I still love singing. A song with a suitable arrangement gets me belting it out, especially harmony-rich Christmas songs and our National Anthem. Baseball games, Sounders games, I’m standing up, harmonizing happily. 

I dislike singers turning the Anthem into a dirge, or adding their personal trills. I love the guy who leads it for the Sounders. The best I ever heard was at a Dodgers playoff game: Linda Ronstadt. (Wasn’t there. Saw it on TV when making rounds as a tired and otherwise deprived surgical resident in San Francisco. With her impossibly pure voice, wearing a Dodgers jacket, she sang it straight up.) If for no other reason than the joy of singing, you’ll never see me sitting during the playing of The Star Spangled Banner. Plus, I’m not that brave. 

It’s curious that the people lining up behind a candidate whose campaign is based on declaring how terrible America has become are outraged at the simple act of sitting, or kneeling, or locking arms during the playing of the National Anthem. If you think about it (couldn’t hurt!), there’s no greater homage to what America stands for (pun intended). Try it, for example, in the country run by Donald Trump’s inamorato, Vladimir Putin, or in any of the others for whose dictatorial leaders he’s expressed admiration. The freedom we enjoy in this county began with, is predicated on, and is directly descended from the right to criticize government openly, to take actions, symbolic or otherwise, aimed at making things better as one sees it. 

That people, whether athletes or protesters in Ferguson or Selma or Stonewall or Standing Rock or (illegally) Malheur feel moved to demonstrate their displeasure at aspects of our society is, in fact, a much greater tribute to the republic for which our flag stands than standing during a song. Activism for change assumes it could happen; in the US, we know it can. At its essence, then, protest is an expression of confidence in America, acknowledgment that in our society, as opposed to those whose leaders Trump would emulate, committed people can effect change. 

Our view of patriotism has turned upside down. Is it defined by standing up for songs or for what you think is right? Who was more patriotic: Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettis Bridge, or those who beat them? People searching for survivors at Ground Zero, or Donald Trump bragging after the attack that his building was now the tallest in lower Manhattan? Children courageous enough to integrate schools, or the people who spit on them as they walked through hate-spewing mobs? Our veterans, or Republicans in Congress who voted down bill after bill aimed at providing for their needs? Working people who pay taxes, or Donald Trump who stiffs employees and brags about not paying taxes? People burn Colin Kaepernick’s jersey, but not those of football players convicted of spousal abuse. Whose is the greater transgression against American values? 

While I served in Vietnam, my wife worked for anti-war candidates. She sent packages of goodies for me to share with other troops, and joined hands with war protesters. Some would call me a patriot (not now, of course, because I’m a liberal writer) and not her. I got drafted. She chose to commit to what she thought was (and which turned out to be) right. Who’s the better American?  

Our Constitution was crafted around the idea of protecting individual rights, and on the recognition that wrongs, even in its own words, need a framework for amelioration. Words and actions of protest have always (if slowly) awakened our better instincts, engaged us in difficult discussions, called the complacent to action, made this country better. In the midst of WWII, the Supreme Court recognized this, too. To misunderstand that is fundamentally to misunderstand America. Like Donald Trump, who has threatened, were he to become president, to punish those who disagree with him; and like those despots whose praises he sings.

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Bag. Cat. Out.

Not that it was ever mysterious, but here's proof of the cynical politics behind claims of voter fraud, from another Wisconsin newspaper.

Hours after polls closed in the closely contested 2011 state Supreme Court election, Republican consultants and lobbyists traded emails about launching a potential public campaign to allege “widespread” voter fraud, newly released emails show...

... The emails became public Wednesday through a report by Guardian US, an arm of the British newspaper, which included leaked court documents from the secret John Doe investigation into Gov. Scott Walker’s 2012 recall campaign...

... Steve Baas, a lobbyist for the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce and former Republican legislative staffer, floated an idea on the email thread:
“Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number? I obviously think we should.” 

Scott Jensen — the former GOP Assembly Speaker turned lobbyist for American Federation for Children, a private school voucher advocacy group — quickly responded:
“Yes. Anything fishy should be highlighted. Stories should be solicited by talk radio hosts.” 

In another email, Jensen writes that Prosser “needs to be on talk radio in the morning saying he is confident he won and talk radio needs to scream the Dems are trying to steal the race.”

It should be noted that these emails have become public only because they were leaked somehow. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, to which the person in question in these emails was elected in the race in question, ordered them destroyed.

Gee. Anyone shocked? And, in addition to the obvious use of a false premise for political gain, confident they can count on the gullibility of their voters, they mention using talk radio as casually as you use a spoon: it's there, we know what it's for, we use it to feed ourselves.

Once right-wing news sources cover this, letting their listeners and readers know how they manipulate them with lies, the public will finally understand. Right after the sun turns off.

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Painting The Whole Picture

Said Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the "conservative" majority in Citizens United v. FEC, “... independent expenditures do not lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption."

Says the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel:

Madison — Gov. Scott Walker and the GOP-controlled Legislature approved a measure aimed at retroactively shielding paint makers from liability after a billionaire owner of a lead producer contributed $750,000 to a political group that provided crucial support to Walker and Republicans in recall elections, according to a report released Wednesday...

Donald Trump would end, along with the EPA and other such Republican-hated entities, "onerous" rules aimed at protecting people from such cruel corporate avarice. Because free market. Because profit. Because government.

Lead paint, ferchrissakes. And yet, they were elected. Probably most of them reelected. What is it that moves ordinary citizens, the ones most at risk, to vote such deplorables out of their baskets and into office? Or, more likely, what motivates ordinary citizens to not give a shit, and not vote?

Lead paint is the least of the toxins Trump and a Republican congress would unleash upon us. If they win, it'll be because of lazy indifference on the part of voters. Because who the fuck wants lead paint in their homes? What families, especially those with kids, want to end regulations aimed at clean water, or workplace safety, or environmental pollution? You can't tell me it's a majority of eligible voters. What you can tell me is that a potential majority of actual voters have been deliberately frightened into voting against their own interests, ignoring the real agenda, to protect themselves from Mexican rapists; and you can tell me that an even bigger potential majority has simply signed off from paying attention or even caring.

Forget what an unqualified, egomaniacal, clueless and dangerous would-be tyrant Donald Trump is. The fact is that, well before his appearance on the stage, people have actually been electing leaders like those in Wisconsin, Kansas, North Carolina, etc, etc, etc; and it's inexplicable.

Lead paint. Think about it. Lead stupefying paint. And, in effect, they're voting for it.

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Clever, They Are

It occurs to me: just as Rs have spent the last almost eight years doing everything they can to obstruct President Obama in order to blame him for the consequences of that obstruction, so they've spent, like, decades attacking the Clintons for pretty much everything including the air they breathe, and are now criticizing Hillary for protecting her privacy in certain matters. And, in yet another example of media complacency and complicity, journalists are repeating the trope that this "health thing" wouldn't have mattered if only she weren't so obsessed with a need for privacy.

Yep. They're good. If cynicism were candy, every Congressional R would have diabetes.

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I Had A Hammer

We've been cleaning out a room. I found an ancient external hard drive, which I intended to take to an electronics recycling center. Having no idea what was on the drive, my level of expertise in wiping it led me to the decision: I pounded it with a sledge hammer, and dropped it off.

Hillary's people, as required by law, destroyed devices before recycling them, too:

... If Clinton had in fact used a federally-issued Blackberry like President Obama does, it might well have been destroyed after she used it, too. In accordance with a 2012 General Services Administration bulletin, all agencies must either recycle or donate used electronics for reuse. The State Department abides by that policy, too; if Clinton had been using State-issued devices, they would have gone through a similar, if more standardized, process of data deletion. A State Department official explained in a statement to WIRED that “department security policies mandate that all electronic devices are cleared of sensitive or classified information prior to reuse or disposal.” Some devices are wiped and reused, in other words, while others are destroyed as part of the recycling process...

So here's my question: am I as tech-savvy as Hillary Clinton's people, or is it the other way around? Like other relevant questions, i.e., when the press might get around to reporting the facts instead of the headlines, it'll remain unanswered.

Good One

Context

For the record, here's the fuller context of what Hillary Clinton said about that basket of deplorables.

... You know, just to be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of these folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket–and I know this because I see friends from all over America here–I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas–as well as, you know, New York and California–but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well...

Not, of course, that it'd make any difference to those whose outrage could fill many a basket.

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They Report, You Decide

1) Hillary Clinton has an illness and shouldn't be president.

2) Despite having pneumonia and being advised to rest, Hillary Clinton went to a 9/11 memorial event because it's that important to her.

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Trafficking With The Truth

My latest newspaper column:

Let’s talk about Donald Trump’s recent speech on immigration. Before we do, though, we’ll need to remember a few facts so we can forget them. First: immigration from Mexico, legal and illegal, is at its lowest in years. Second: President Obama has deported more illegals, by far, than his predecessors. Third: legal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Fourth: illegals receive no benefits under Obamacare or most other programs. Fifth: undocumented immigrants pay billions in taxes, at a higher average rate than the top one-percent. There’s more, but the point is to forget the facts; gets harder if I list them all. 

Of all the problems we face, in other words, illegal immigration has moved well down the list. On a ten-point scale I’d put climate change at eleven. Immigration, maybe a three. If you listen to Donald Trump and his corybantic surrogates, though, you’d believe “they” are swarming past unguarded borders like Congress-ignored Zika through a proboscis, after which they go on to roam our streets, especially the one outside your door, “crime-ing” (as one of them said) at will, while patriotic legal Americans cower inside their barricaded homes. “It’s a Paul Revere moment,” said Trump’s spokeswoman, meaning we’re about to be overtaken and (I assume) enslaved, or worse. A few days ago, Alex Jones announced the official beginning of The New World Order, while babbling something about cannibalism. In what world does any of this make sense? How is this the leg on which Trump stands, the thing among things his supporters love the most? It’s as if Trump were selling galoshes (made in China!) in the middle of a drought and his audience were buying them furiously (at a huge markup!), donning them in a panic, even as parched dust filled the air. 

Watch that speech. Yes, he said a few reasonable things: other than certain employers, we don’t want illegal immigration. We do want immigrants who’ll be responsible, have jobs, appreciate our country. Can’t argue. But when he got rolling, uncorking his real agenda in all its darkness, it was the most disturbing oratory I’ve witnessed in a major candidate for president. Chilling, horrifying demagoguery, it was definitional hate speech straight from Berlin in the 1930s. Except for his lack of charisma, he’s a modern-day Elmer Gantry. His were the classical words of a would-be dictator, right here in America; his tone, his gestures, his dire warnings, his inveighing against hordes of dangerous and scary people, different from us, darker, people to be reviled, repelled, feared, risen up against. He spoke of an existential horror, of which he and only he can and will rid us; of an enormity, if you’ve forgotten to forget, that simply doesn’t exist. But there it was. 

And the audience cheered till they were hoarse. Booed those despicable people, adored the savior, oblivious to the dishonest demagoguery because the execration felt so good. Did I say galoshes? I meant jackboots. America. This happened in America. A candidate for president, choosing fear and hatred and scapegoating as his vehicle, counting on the gullible, fearful, and ill-informed to buy the snake-oil he’s selling, calculating he can ride their disproportionate fears to victory, to become a “real leader,” like his unrestrained hero Vladimir Putin. How much more obvious must it get before his diehards recognize how they’re being manipulated? Because he’s convinced them that they’re one breath away from being murdered by a Mexican, people of modest means are lining up to vote for a man whose taxation and spending priorities will make life better only for the very wealthy. “The bad ones” he’ll get rid of in his first hour as president, and that’s a promise. The cops know who they are, he tells us. Evidently they’ve just been waiting for Donald to take office before rounding them up, because… well … because he says so, I guess. 

Do we need to do something about illegals already here? Sure, some of them. Is illegal immigration an ongoing threat? Minimally. Except, maybe, for Donald Trump himself, illegally importing models, schooling them on avoiding discovery, and paying them slave wages. If it were Hillary, it’d be called human trafficking. For Trump, just good business.

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More Bullshit From The Most Fabulous Bullshitter Of All Time

Remember that secret, amazing, foolproof, beautiful plan to defeat ISIS? The one Donald J. Trump has been promising to reveal and enact once he takes office, the one he doesn't want known before that because someone might steal it? Remember how he's assured us he knows more about ISIS than "the generals?"

Yeah, well, turns out his secret plan is to ask for a plan. From "the generals." Smart. Because I guess no one has thought of asking for that yet. Because I guess until Donald Trump, they didn't even know what planning means.

... "I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing," Trump told Fox News in May 2015, the month before launching his presidential campaign. "Unfortunately, I’ll probably have to tell at some point, but there is a method of defeating them quickly and effectively and having total victory.”

He added: “All I can tell you it is a foolproof way of winning, and I’m not talking about what some people would say, but it is a foolproof way of winning the war with ISIS." ...

Then, in a June 2015 meeting with the Des Moines Register editorial board, he offered a different reason for keeping the plan under wraps — that his opponents would steal it. "The problem with politics is if I tell you right now, everyone else is going to say, 'Wow, what a great idea.' ... But no, I have an absolute way of defeating ISIS."...

I believed him, didn't you? So this is a little disappointing, fabulous foolproof-wise:

... Well, now we know what Trump's "foolproof" and "absolute" plan for defeating ISIS is — to ask the generals to come up with a plan, quickly. That's what he said he would do during a speech Tuesday. "They'll have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS," he told supporters in Greenville, N.C.

These are the generals, mind you, who Trump has said don't understand ISIS like he does. "I know more about ISIS than the generals do," he said in a rambling Iowa speech in November. "Believe me."...

The wall, though. We'll definitely get the wall.

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Standards. We Got Standards.

Interesting, isn't it, that every person (we can safely assume) outraged at Colin Kaepernick for not standing for the National Anthem is an enthusiastic voter for a guy whose campaign is based on how not-great America is. And, as others have pointed out, that they're burning his jersey but not the ones of players convicted of rape, wife-beating, and robbery.

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No Time For Vanity Voting

My latest newspaper column:

This is for Hillary-hating liberals. And it’s for independents, self-respecting conservatives, and reluctant party-line Trump voters who understand the damage he’s doing and will do to their party and to our country: The man who wrote the “Benghazi mom” speech at the RNC, in which the lady read his words blaming Hillary Clinton for the death of her son, now says that whereas the thought of voting for Hillary is uncomfortable, under the circumstances (i.e., Trump), not voting for her is “terrifying.” Or how about that WSJ poll of all living economic advisers to presidents? If they see it, why not you? 

Liberals of the farthest left can be Sarandonally self-righteous, vowing they’ll never vote for Hillary, no matter what. Jill Stein, they think, or Gary Johnson. (Stein is another physician – the rest of whom are Congressional Republicans -- who completed medical school without learning to evaluate data. Her V.P. choice calls President Obama “Uncle Tom.” Johnson is typically Republican on health care, taxes, entitlements, abolishing the Department of Education, publically funding private schools. He’s not sure the climate is changing. Maybe the liberal appeal is his attitude toward weed. I like Bill Weld, though.) Willing to register a symbolic vote, conceivably Naderizing the election, empowering a horrifying candidate and the nastiest of his supporters, those “liberals” invoke higher morality. Some even deny the Nader/Bush/Gore connection. 

I’m not bonkers for Hillary Clinton, some of whose comments make me squirm. Like all successful politicians, she has a record to defend, and it’s not perfect. Along with the rest, she takes money from big donors; she’s said and done dumb things about those emails. Yet, after millions of tax dollars spent on unending camera-ready investigations, there’s no finding of willful wrongdoing, of any quid pro quo regarding the Clinton Foundation (which is saving millions of lives), or of breaches of her private server. In contrast to Donald Trump, she educates herself on issues. She’s a policy wonk; he gives policy a wink. Unlike Trump’s, her domestic policies would actually keep America great. And safe. Her career has included promoting women’s rights and helping those in need around the world. But even some liberals have bought the distorted, dishonest, highly effective Foxolimtrumpian attacks. Pretending away his expanding compendium of dishonesty, full time liar and grifter Donald Trump calling Hillary Clinton “crooked” is Jeffrey Dahmer extoling veganism. 

Donald Trump, unmoored, is a multi-tool threat to democracy, to the environment, science, public education, health care, to stability around the world. The lies he’s told about trade, borders, Hillary, the climate, and himself could fill Xfinity Arena* and, by golly, they did; after which he went to Mexico and lied about that! He’s unbridled the worst among us, legitimized, in their heads, ominous threats and actions by supporters, and, yes, engendered some disturbing responses to his ugliness from the left. Confirming his perfidious character, he’s hired as his campaign manager Stephen Brannon, the tax-evading, wife-beating, illegally-registered, allegedly anti-Semitic head of the right’s most toxic, dishonest, conspiracy-promoting website. Trump’s announced intentions to stifle press freedom with lawsuits, to ignore our intelligence agencies, to delegitimize a losing election while enlisting people to intimidate voters, to use government entities to punish detractors (or, as his “minority outreach” czar Omarosa said, make them “bow down to him”) should be frightening to everyone, not excepting conservatives. 

There was a time when liberals and conservatives worked together. They didn’t build a wall, as it were, between each other. Trump, who says anything and believes in nothing, and those of his supporters who are faux-conservative, nativist, bigoted, simplistic, Constitution-rejecting, lie-ignoring people he’s brought out from under their rocks need not only to lose, but to be electorally vanquished, ushered off the national stage forever. Somewhere inside them, true conservatives know this. Real conservatism will have its day; if libertarians or Greens demonstrate ability to govern somewhere, so might they. But the enormously consequential stakes in this election – climate change denial alone ought to do it for every sentient voter -- demand that thinking people on all sides reject the allure of vainglorious or habituated votes. Reflect on the clarity of the aforementioned speechwriter and economists. There’s no time for self-indulgence.

* Trump just spoke at this arena in my town. 

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Not As Bad As All That

Defying and denying reality, per usual, the Foxolimtrumpian view of Barack Obama's presidency is that it's been horrible in all ways, for everyone. I assume this newly-released Gallup poll will change their minds, and we'll be hearing about it real soon:

... In 2008, fewer than half of Americans said their life was good enough to be considered "thriving," according to Gallup. But that's changed: "The 55.4% who are thriving so far in 2016 is on pace to be the highest recorded in the nine years Gallup and Healthways have tracked it," according to the report.

Gallup

Not only that, members of each ethnic or racial group in Gallup's study feel better about their lives.

"The percentages of U.S. whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians who are thriving have all increased during the Obama era," Gallup notes. The percentage of blacks thriving has risen by about 6 points, as has the percentage of whites and Hispanics. Asian thriving has risen by about 10 points since 2008...

No doubt the rising tide hasn't lifted all boats. But by pretty much any measure, things are better domestically than when George Bush left office. A lot better. That an entire party and its preferred nominee make so much hay claiming otherwise is just another example of how far we've fallen, and how little the truth matters anymore.

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