I received an e-mail from Google advising me that this blog had not been updated and would therefore be deleted. Can't have that!

So, the last thing that was published, save for the short blurb below this, was written by Thomas B. Edsall of the New York Times. His articles are always thoughtful and always well researched - mostly quoting academics of one stripe or another. The following is more of the same, but it needs to be read by EVERYONE in this country - to re-elect The Donald to another term would be a disaster and would likely lead to the U S becoming more like Venezuela and like the good ol' U S of A.

Here is the entire article:

OPINION

GUEST ESSAY

The Roots of Trump’s Rage

Thomas B. Edsall

By Thomas B. Edsall

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges).”

Klaas asked:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II (which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

The media, Klaas argued, has adopted a policy in covering Donald Trump of “Don’t amplify him! You’re just spreading his message.”

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

This approach, according to Klaas,

has backfired. It’s bad for democracy. The “don’t amplify him” argument is disastrous. We need to amplify Trump’s vile rhetoric more, because it will turn persuadable voters off to his cruel message.

Looking over the eight and a half years during which Trump has been directly engaged in presidential politics, it’s not as if there had been no warning signs.

Three months after Trump took office, in April 2017, a conference called A Duty to Warn was held at the Yale School of Medicine.

The conference resulted in a best-selling book, “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President.” A sampling of the chapter titles gives the flavor:

“Our Witness to Malignant Normality,” by Robert Jay Lifton.

“Unbridled and Extreme Hedonism: How the Leader of the Free World Has Proven Time and Again That He Is Unfit for Duty,” by Philip Zimbardo and Rosemary Sword.

“Pathological Narcissism and Politics: a Lethal Combination,” by Craig Malkin.

In a review of that book, as well as “Twilight of American Sanity: a Psychiatrist Analyzes the Age of Trump” and “Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, a 500-Year History,” Carlos Lozada, now a Times Opinion columnist, wrote in The Washington Post that the political elite in Washington was increasingly concerned about Trump’s mind-set:

“I think he’s crazy,” Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) confided to his colleague Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) in a July exchange inadvertently caught on a microphone. “I’m worried,” she replied …. Even some Republicans have grown more blunt, with Senator Bob Corker (Tenn.) recently suggesting that Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence" to succeed as president.

The warnings that Trump is dangerous and unstable began well before his 2016 election and have become increasingly urgent.

These warnings came during the 2016 primary and general campaigns, continued throughout Trump’s four years in the White House and remain relentless as he gets older and more delusional about the outcome of the 2020 election.

Leonard L. Glass, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, emailed me:

He acts like he’s impervious, “a very stable genius,” but we know he is rageful, grandiose, vengeful, impulsive, devoid of empathy, boastful, inciting of violence and thin-skinned. At times it seems as if he cannot control himself or his hateful speech. We need to wonder if these are the precursors of a major deterioration in his character defenses.

Glass continued:

If Trump — in adopting language that he cannot help knowing replicates that of Hitler (especially the references to opponents as “vermin” and “poisoning the blood of our country”), we have to wonder if he has crossed into “new terrain.” That terrain, driven by grandiosity and dread of exposure (e.g., at the trials) could signal the emergence of an even less constrained, more overtly vicious and remorseless Trump who, should he regain the presidency, would, indeed act like the authoritarians he praises. Absent conscientious aides who could contain him (as they barely did last time), this could lead to the literal shedding of American blood on American soil by a man who believes he is “the only one” and the one, some believe, is a purifying agent of God and in whom they see no evil nor do they doubt.

In recent months, Trump has continued to add to the portrait Glass paints of him.

In March he told loyalists in Waco, Texas:

I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

“With you at my side,” Trump went on to say,

we will totally obliterate the deep state, we will banish the warmongers from our government, we will drive out the globalists, and we will cast out the communists and Marxists, we will throw off the corrupt political class, we will beat the Democrats, we will rout the fake news media, we will stand up to the RINOs, and we will defeat Joe Biden and every single Democrat.

At the California Republican Convention on Sept. 29, Trump told the gathering that under his administration, shoplifters would be subject to extrajudicial execution: “We will immediately stop all the pillaging and theft. Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store.”

Trump has continued to forge ahead, pledging to a crowd of supporters in Claremont, N.H., on Nov. 11: “We will root out the communists, Marxist fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible — they’ll do anything, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.”

Nothing captures Trump’s megalomania and narcissism more vividly than his openly declared agenda, should he win back the White House next year.

On Nov. 6, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey and Devlin Barrett reported in The Washington Post that Trump “wants the Justice Department to investigate onetime officials and allies who have become critical of his time in office, including his former chief of staff John F. Kelly and former attorney general William P. Barr, as well as his ex-attorney Ty Cobb and former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Mark A. Milley.”

Trump, The Post noted, dismissed federal criminal indictments as “third-world-country stuff, ‘arrest your opponent,’” then claimed that the indictments gave him license, if re-elected, to do the same thing: “I can do that, too.”

A week later, my Times colleagues Maggie Haberman, Charlie Savage and Jonathan Swann, quoted Trump in “How Trump and His Allies Plan to Wield Power in 2025”: “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family,” adding, “I will totally obliterate the deep state.”

In an earlier story, Haberman, Savage and Swan reported that Trump allies are preparing to reissue an executive order known as Schedule F, which Trump promulgated at the end of his presidency but which never went into effect.

Schedule F, the reporters wrote,

would have empowered his administration to strip job protections from many career federal employees — who are supposed to be hired based on merit and cannot be arbitrarily fired. While the order said agencies should not hire or fire Schedule F employees based on political affiliation, it effectively would have made these employees more like political appointees who can be fired at will.

Schedule F would politicize posts in the senior civil service authorized to oversee the implementation of policy, replacing job security with the empowerment of the administration to hire and fire as it chose, a topic I wrote about in an earlier column.

I asked Joshua D. Miller, a professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, whether he thought Trump’s “vermin” comment represented a tipping point, an escalation in his willingness to attack opponents. Miller replied by email: “My bet is we’re seeing the same basic traits, but their manifestation has been ratcheted up by the stress of his legal problems and also by some sense of invulnerability in that he has yet to face any dire consequences for his previous behavior.”

Miller wrote that he has

long thought that Trump’s narcissism was actually distracting us from his psychopathic traits. I view the two as largely the same but with psychopathy bringing problems with disinhibition (impulsivity, failure to delay gratification, irresponsibility, etc.) to the table, and Trump seems rather high on those traits, along with those related to narcissism (e.g., entitlement, exploitativeness), pathological lying, grandiosity, etc.).

I asked Donald R. Lynam, a professor of psychology at Purdue, the same question, and he emailed his reply: “The escalation is quite consistent with grandiose narcissism. Trump is reacting more and more angrily to what he perceives as his unfair treatment and failure to be admired, appreciated and adored in the way that he believes is his due.”

Grandiose narcissists, Lynam continued, “feel they are special and that normal rules don’t apply to them. They require attention and admiration.” He added, “This behavior is also consistent with psychopathy, which is pretty much grandiose narcissism plus poor impulse control.”

Most of the specialists I contacted see Trump’s recent behavior and public comments as part of an evolving process.

“Trump is an aging malignant narcissist,” Aaron L. Pincus, a professor of psychology at Penn State, wrote in an email. “As he ages, he appears to be losing impulse control and is slipping cognitively. So we are seeing a more unfiltered version of his pathology. Quite dangerous.”

In addition, Pincus continued, “Trump seems increasingly paranoid, which can also be a reflection of his aging brain and mental decline.”

The result? “Greater hostility and less ability to reflect on the implications and consequences of his behavior.”

Edwin B. Fisher, a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, made the case in an email that Trump’s insistence on the validity of his own distorted claims has created a vicious circle, pressuring him to limit his close relations to those willing to confirm his beliefs:

His isolation is much of his own making. The enormous pressures he puts on others for confirmation and unquestioning loyalty and his harsh, often vicious responses to perceived disloyalty lead to a strong, accelerating dynamic of more and more pressure for loyalty, harsher and harsher judgment of the disloyal and greater and greater shrinking of pool of supporters.

At the same time, Fisher continued, Trump is showing signs of cognitive deterioration,

the confusion of Sioux Falls and Sioux City, several times referring to having beaten and/or now running against Obama or the odd garbling of words on a number of occasions for it seems like about a year now. Add to these the tremendous pressure and threat he is under, and you have, if you will, a trifecta of danger — lifelong habit, threat and possible cognitive decline. They each exacerbate the other two.

Fisher noted that he anticipated the movement toward increased isolation in his 2017 contribution to “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump”:

Reflecting the interplay of personal and social, narcissistic concerns for self and a preoccupation with power may initially shape and limit those invited to the narcissistic leader’s social network, with sensitivity to slights and angry reactions to them further eroding that network.

This process of exclusion, Fisher wrote, becomes self-reinforcing:

A disturbing feature of this kind of dynamic is that it tends to feed on itself. The more the individual selects for those who flatter him and avoid confrontation and the more those who have affronted and been castigated fall away, the narrower and more homogenous his network becomes, further flattering the individual but eventually becoming a thin precipice. President Nixon, drunk and reportedly conversing with the pictures on the White House walls and praying with Henry Kissinger during his last nights in office, comes to mind.

Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, raised a separate concern in an email responding to my inquiry:

If the evidence emerging proves true — that Trump knew he lost and continued to push the big lie anyway — his character problems go well beyond simple narcissism and reach troubling levels of psychopathy. And psychopaths are far more concerned with their own power than preserving truth, democracy or even lives.

In 2019, leaked memos written by Britain’s ambassador to the United States, Kim Darroch, warned British leaders that the Trump presidency could “crash and burn” and “end in disgrace,” adding: “We don’t really believe this administration is going to become substantially more normal, less dysfunctional, less unpredictable, less faction riven, less diplomatically clumsy and inept.”

In 2020, Pew Research reported in “Trump Ratings Remain Low Around Globe” that:

Trump receives largely negative reviews from publics around the world. Across 32 countries surveyed by Pew Research Center, a median of 64 percent say they do not have confidence in Trump to do the right thing in world affairs, while just 29 percent express confidence in the American leader. Anti-Trump sentiments are especially common in Western Europe: Roughly three in four or more lack confidence in Trump in Germany, Sweden, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

A recent editorial in The Economist carried the headline “Donald Trump Poses the Biggest Danger to the World in 2024.” “A second Trump term,” the editorial concluded:

would be a watershed in a way the first was not. Victory would confirm his most destructive instincts about power. His plans would encounter less resistance. And because America will have voted him in while knowing the worst, its moral authority would decline. The election will be decided by tens of thousands of voters in just a handful of states. In 2024 the fate of the world will depend on their ballots.

Klaas of University College London concluded that a crucial factor in Trump’s political survival is the failure of the media in this country to recognize that the single most important story in the presidential election, a story that should dominate all others, is the enormous threat Trump poses:

The man who, as president, incited a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in order to overturn an election is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power. That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing.

draw a comparison between the perils of a collapse in the markets with a collapse built around an empty suit such as trump.

But to take this view, and to reject the liberal claim that any adaptation to populism only does the devil’s work, imposes a special obligation to recognize the profound emptiness at the heart of Trump himself. It’s not as if you could carve away his race-baiting and discover a healthier populism instead, or analyze him the way you might analyze his more complex antecedents, a Richard Nixon or a Ross Perot. To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void.

So in trying to construct a new conservatism on the ideological outline of Trumpism, you have to be aware that you’re building around a sinkhole and that your building might fall in.

The same goes for any conservative response to the specific riddle of mass shootings. Cultural conservatives get a lot of grief when they respond to these massacres by citing moral and spiritual issues, rather than leaping straight to gun policy (or in this case, racist ideology). But to look at the trend in these massacres, the spikes of narcissistic acting-out in a time of generally-declining violence, the shared bravado and nihilism driving shooters of many different ideological persuasions, is to necessarily encounter a moral and spiritual problem, not just a technocratic one.

But the dilemma that conservatives have to confront is that you can chase this cultural problem all the way down to its source in lonely egomania and alienated narcissism, and you’ll still find Donald Trump’s face staring back to you.

The Barbarians are Back at the Gate

Even with a cursory analysis of the "proposed" tax legislation wending it's way through congress, one can easily draw the conclusion that the schism in American society is well under way. It's been in the works for years and there is no-one to blame other than ourselves.

For those on the right (to some degree), there is a sense of satisfaction. For those on the left, there is a sense of dread.

For all of us who believe that the US of A is the greatest country on earth, there should a real sense of foreboding - something has happened, but what exactly, we're not really sure.

Go all of the way back to the fall of Rome - the first thing that barbarians did was to burn the books and kill anyone with any stature as an educator. Now, we see that this congress is, metaphorically, driving a stake through the heart of our educational system as well as lots of other programs and is using this bill as their cudgel. 

Minorities - any non christian, intellectuals, blacks, non-hetero people, any immigrant and lots of other Americans have lost confidence in the way the country is being run. That is, very few people actually feel that they are being represented by the political establishment. We all like to joke about politicians, but they have sunken to a new low. Their only priority is getting the money that they think they need to get re-elected. Therefore their constituency is not the citizens of their states or districts, but the lobbyists and other "special interests" that make the massive donations to PAC's that support the system.

This tax bill represents the absolute worst that the post Citizens United decision has wrought.

I have written, in these pages about how the system changed when Tom Delay took over as Speaker. Since then, the numbers of lobbyists has grown exponentially and has had a lot to do with the fueling of the rift between rich and average income people.

Those same lobbyists have written this bill - NOT US!

The following article appeared in yesterday's New York Times. It's worth reading and, I hope, inspires some level of thought and debate.

Opinion | CONTRIBUTING OP-ED WRITER The Self-Destruction of American Democracy Thomas B. Edsall NOV. 30, 2017 President Trump has single-handedly done more to undermine the basic tenets of American democracy than any foreign agent or foreign propaganda campaign could. “Trump is a political weapon of mass self-destruction for American democracy — for its norms, for its morality, for sheer human decency,” Henry Aaron, a senior fellow at Brookings, wrote by email: So if Putin backed him, and if he did it to damage the United States, then he dropped one extremely smart bomb in the middle of Washington. For the moment, let’s put aside the conclusion of “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections,” the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. joint report that was released in January, which said that: The Kremlin sought to advance its longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order, the promotion of which Putin and other senior Russian leaders view as a threat to Russia and Putin’s regime.

This determination, disputed by Trump and others, pales in comparison to the ruinous record of Trump’s 10 months in office.

First and foremost, Trump has gravely damaged the premises and procedures that undergird American democracy.

Partisan polarization, which helped give rise to Trump in the first place, is getting worse as discord intensifies with every slur and insult Trump hurls.

On Oct. 5, the Pew Research Center reported that partisan conflict on fundamental political values reached record levels during Barack Obama’s presidency. In Donald Trump’s first year as president, these gaps have grown even larger. And the magnitude of these differences dwarfs other divisions in society, along such lines as gender, race and ethnicity, religious observance or education.

In the introduction to their forthcoming book, “How Democracies Die,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, political scientists at Harvard, write:

Over the past two years, we have watched politicians say and do things that are unprecedented in the United States — but that we recognize as having been the precursors of democratic crisis in other places. We feel dread, as do so many other Americans, even as we try to reassure ourselves that things can’t really be that bad here.

Their attempt at reassurance is not comforting:

American politicians now treat their rivals as enemies, intimidate the free press, and threaten to reject the results of elections. They try to weaken the institutional buffers of our democracy, including the courts, intelligence services, and ethics offices. American states, which were once praised by the great jurist Louis Brandeis as ‘laboratories of democracy,’ are in danger of becoming laboratories of authoritarianism as those in power rewrite electoral rules, redraw constituencies, and even rescind voting rights to ensure that they do not lose. And in 2016, for the first time in U.S. history, a man with no experience in public office, little observable commitment to constitutional rights, and clear authoritarian tendencies was elected president.

In an email, Levitsky argued that “it is important that we understand that the U.S. has largely been doing these things to itself,” before adding, “obviously we should investigate Russian meddling to the fullest, but to blame Putin for the mess we are in today would be ridiculous. We Americans created this mess.”

Along similar lines, Ryan Enos, who is also a political scientist at Harvard, suggested that the question of Russian involvement in the election is a secondary issue:

It might be that all the distrust and rancor we see today would have happened without Russia’s meddling. There is reason, of course, to believe this is true: after all, the dysfunction in the US political system that put Trump in office existed long before Putin’s 2016 interference.

In addition, Enos noted - Trump’s ability to diminish the United States’ international standing is also made possible by flaws in our political system, for example a weak Congress that has ceded too much power to the executive.

Trump has not only taken a hammer to the code of behavior underpinning democracy at home, he has simultaneously diminished the international stature of the United States — and arguably accelerated the rise of this country’s major competitor, China.

Daron Acemoglu, an economist at M.I.T. and a co-author of “Why Nations Fail,” argued in an email that he believes that the battle between the Chinese-Russian axis and Western democratic institutions to be the defining struggle of the next century. And now the US is in an ambivalent position, led by a flawed character much more sympathetic to the Chinese-Russian axis.

Trump’s chaotic approach to foreign affairs has, in turn, served to strengthen both Russia and China, in the view of several experts.

Arthur Lupia, a political scientist at the University of Michigan, emailed:
As America is seen as an increasingly volatile and unreliable partner, the reduced credibility that follows creates new international opportunities for people like Putin — who can promise relative stability.

The net result?

“We now have reduced leverage in many international settings.”

A Pew survey of adults in 37 foreign nations released in June provides the clearest evidence of Trump’s effect on America’s international stature. It found that:

a median of just 22 percent has confidence in Trump to do the right thing when it comes to international affairs. This stands in contrast to the final years of Barack Obama’s presidency, when a median of 64 percent expressed confidence in Trump’s predecessor to direct America’s role in the world.

As the accompanying chart shows, confidence in Obama was higher than confidence in Trump in 35 countries. Tellingly, Trump did better than Obama in only two, Russia and Israel.
Critics of Trump’s foreign policy contend that the drive by Rex W. Tillerson, Trump’s Secretary of State, to “streamline” the department by forcing out as many as 2,000 State Department employees has had the effect of diminishing America’s international presence. By the end of this month, the number in the two top ranks — career ambassadors and career ministers — is scheduled to be cut in half, from 39 to 19.
In a Nov. 15 letter to Tillerson, Sen. John McCain, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, and Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Subcommittee on State Department and USAID Management, wrote:

Taken together, questionable management practices at the Department of State; the attitudes of some in the Administration on the value of diplomacy; declining morale, recruitment and retention; the lack of experienced leadership to further the strength and longevity of our nation’s diplomatic corps; and reports of American diplomacy becoming less effective paint a disturbing picture.

Their verdict:

These factors lead us to conclude that America’s diplomatic power is being weakened internally as complex, global crises are growing externally.
Trump’s assault — and that of his appointees — on democratic standards and principles is the central element of what might be called a brutalizing or “decivilizational” process. That’s part of what underlies the eternal return of the president’s mendacity, reappearing this month in his behind-the-scenes recitation of lies about Obama’s birthplace and the Access Hollywood tape on which he can be heard bragging about what you can do to women “when you’re a star.”
These developments have revived open discussion of Trump’s mental health.
There are “signs that Trump is sometimes incapable of discerning real life from fiction,” David A. Graham wrote in The Atlantic on Nov. 27.
On Wednesday, Trump pushed the envelope even further, retweeting videos from an ultranationalist group in Britain “purportedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence.” Prime Minister Theresa May explicitly faulted Trump, saying “It is wrong for the president to have done this.” As The Times reported, “No modern American president has promoted inflammatory content of this sort from an extremist organization.”
Trump’s extraordinary record of prevarication calls the truth into question. As Hannah Arendt famously put it, when this happens, nothing can be believed anymore:
One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust

that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.

Or as Arendt told a French interviewer in 1974:
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.

Add to Trump’s list of lies, his race baiting, his attacks on a free press, his charges of “fake news,” his efforts to instigate new levels of voter suppression, his undermining of the legitimacy of the electoral process, his disregard for the independence of the judiciary, the hypocrisy of his personal posture on sexual harassment, the patent lack of concern for delivering results to voters who supported him, his contempt for and manipulation of his own loyalists, his “failure of character” — and you have a lethal corruption of democratic leadership.

On Nov. 15, Acemoglu wrote in Foreign Policy:
It’s been one year since the election of Donald Trump as president and, despite his questionable commitment to the country’s political traditions, American democracy is still standing.
Acemoglu then asked, “Is it time to rejoice in the strength of American institutions?” 

Short answer: no.

Political norms that are the bulwark of our democracy cannot be easily repaired once damaged, even if Trump’s most dangerous policies are stopped. Nor can white supremacist, anti-immigrant, and nativist rhetoric be swiftly sidelined once condoned by the U.S. president. In the face of these threats, Acemoglu continues, “the performance of U.S. checks and balances so far gives no comfort.” The test facing our democracy now is whether the rules of engagement that make the system work can be restored. Trump trampled on those rules and won the presidency. That precedent may, in and of itself, have inflicted irreparable damage. Is there a legal remedy? From the Mueller investigation, for example? “Executive authoritarianism and lawlessness can be hemmed in and checked but not fully constrained by courts, the criminal law, or the written Constitution,” Jacob T. Levy wrote this week in “The Limits of Legalism,” published by the libertarian-leaning Niskanen Center: They ultimately have to be confronted by elected officials: co-partisans willing to exercise serious restraint, or if not, an opposition voted into office who will do so instead. At the moment, Trump’s co-partisans, House and Senate Republicans, have shown little willingness to confront him. The longer Trump stays in office, the greater the danger that he will inflict permanent damage on the institutions that must be essential tools in any serious attempt to confront him.

A Gambling Man?

What would any reasonable person do under the following circumstances:

• Tragically, a Supreme Court justice dies
• In accordance with tradition, the president nominates a replacement justice
• given a republican majority, the nominee is a moderate who has received republican support in the past - this time should be no different
• It is now up to the Senate to hold hearings and to vote on the nominee

Keep in mind that the Republican Party has been dreaming about a conservative majority on the court for a long time. The stakes are VERY high, especially in light of a HUGE lead by the Democratic candidate for president.

Would you:

• Not hold hearings - risking an even more liberal appointment and take the risk associated with stonewalling the President's nominee given that every poll in the country has the Democrat with a big lead
• Do the prudent thing and hold hearings and get the moderate a vote for confirmation

McConnell does not impress me as a real risk taker. You therefore have to ask, what did he know that the rest of us didn't?

To me, the answer is obvious.

Alfred E. Newman

What, ME worry?

The following is a quote from H.L. Mencken. It was written in 1920:

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Didn't Post it on Facebook

IF, any of you have noticed, I have never written anything on this site. Now however, I am compelled to offer my take on the upcoming presidential election. That anyone could possibly take Donald Trump seriously is WAY beyond my ability to comprehend. But, context is everything, consider, that the republican establishment has, for decades, been on a crusade to dumb down the American population. Readers of my blog -http://iloveginnymae.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2010-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&updated-max=2011-01-01T00:00:00-08:00&max-results=12 - may recall that I made a case for, what can be called, the-I'm-so-bogged-down-in-my-easy-credit-financial mess-that-I-can't-focus-on-anything-else-around-me syndrome. If you take the time to read what is stated in the link, you may think that it's a tad on the cynical side. I did, for a while, but now I really think that it could be true. Many Americans think that reality TV is the actual reality as created by the Carl Roves of the world, e.g., the stage has been set for the entrance of a megalomaniac to get elected as president. What's missing though, is that Trump is too obtuse to listen to anyone with an opinion other than his. The man is a con artist and a small-minded bigot who is way out of step with 21st center America.

PEOPLE SIMPLY DO NOT THINK

Please, do not vote for Trump - you may not like Hillary, and if she wins, the obstructionists will become even harder to deal with - but Trump does not possess the intelligence, the temperament or the diplomatic skills necessary to keep things moving forward. Like Obama or not, you have to admit, that we're way better off today than we were in 2008 - THINK!