A cantankerous political climax (at last).

A midweek political posting, as I get ready for our flight home from Vegas.  Re this awful election, I think we've mostly said what there is to say.  

Heck, Clinton and Obama seem at last to get what I (separately and unbeknownst, alack) have been calling for. Going after the troglodytic Roger Ailes puppets in Congress. Nothing would be better for human civilization, for the nation, and for the possible resurrection of a sane-grownup version of US conservatism, than the banishment from power of the Ryan-McConnell cabal that's continued the "rule" of Ailes and Dennis Hastert, two sexual predators who dominated the Republican Party for decades.

Republicans, this is your chance to clean house! Dump them all, down-ticket, including state assemblymen! You can come back in just 2 years with adults. Grownups willing to break with Hastert and Ailes and actually negotiate the way mature citizens (and yes, conservatives) are supposed to do. Come on. The GOP dominated Congress for 20 of the last 22 years. Can you name an accomplishment? Are you happy with those bozos?  Send us mature men and women, in 2018... not scary clowns.

== Cleaning up political snippets ==

Okay, okay... this posting will convey to you some of the snips and rants I had shoved aside for the last couple of months, in favor or more timely, or pertinent... or lucid... political commentaries.  Still, even if some of them are... well... stale, they may still carry some bite!

Such as:

The New York Times editorial board threw its support behind Hillary Clinton “rooted in respect for her intellect, experience, toughness and courage” and making only parenthetical references to her rival, Donald Trump.

While commenting on her mistakes, the Times board adds: “Over eight years in the Senate and four as secretary of state, she built a reputation for grit and bipartisan collaboration. She displayed a command of policy and diplomatic nuance and an ability to listen to constituents and colleagues that are all too exceptional in Washington,” the board wrote. “She is one of the most tenacious politicians of her generation, whose willingness to study and correct course is rare in an age of unyielding partisanship.”  

The board made a single brief but pointed mention of the GOP candidate as the “worst nominee put forward by a major party in modern American history” before declaring that “the best case for Hillary Clinton cannot be, and is not, that she isn’t Donald Trump.”

== After the first debate ==

So much to comment on.... So many things she could have done so much better. For example... One fascinating thing from this debate... Donald Trump essentially backed my claim that the Mexican middle class is rising spectacularly and largely due to NAFTA. And to be clear, the Mexican middle class is rising vastly, vastly more than the American middle class has suffered, and most of the US suffering was not due to NAFTA but allowing our oligarchs to seize passive wealth, hand over fist. Via Supply Side (Voodoo) "Economics" or SSVE.

It is the stunning U.S. accomplishment no one will talk about, but which should have been - and is - among our highest national priorities, because a middle class, prosperous Mexico -- another Canada -- is more in our interest than almost anything else. A fantastic accomplishment of the American Pax... and never mentioned by anyone.

Um, some logic here? Isn't it better and easier to defend Mexico's narrow border with Guatemala than the huge US-Mexico one? (BTW that is happening right now, as the US assists Mexico beefing up its southern "wall." And Mexico is eager, since their rising middle class is now complaining about illegal immigrants from the south, stealing jobs.)

Those in the U.S. who screech "those should be OUR jobs!" are just dumb. These are mostly jobs that would have otherwise gone to China. And where one was lost in the U.S., it was with a multiplier of dozens in Mexico.

Seriously, you think a rising Mexican middle class is a ZERO SUM situation? Idiots. They are already buying more US products, by far than when they were poor. And that will only skyrocket. Moreover it helps to explain why net immigration from Mexico - especially illegal - has plummeted across the last 8 years and gone into reverse!

And not mentioning that... and similar stats... showed that Hillary badly needs to get different debate coaches.

 == Try a sense of proportion ==

Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House “lost” 22 million emails. ... Like Hillary Clinton and her predecessor Colin Powell, the Bush White House used a private email server. Only the Bush administration failed to store vastly more of its emails, as required by law...

...and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of them. “It’s about as amazing a double standard as you can get,” says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. “If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers’ emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton’s emails set up on a private DNC server?” 

“Bush administration emails could have aided a special prosecutor’s investigation into a White House effort to discredit a diplomat who disagreed with the administration’s fabricated Iraq WMD evidence by outing his CIA agent wife, Plame. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who was brought in to investigate that case, said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in Cheney's office were in the administration's system but he couldn’t get them.” 

The supposedly lost emails also prevented Congress from fully investigating, in 2007, the politically motivated firing of nine U.S. attorneys. When the Democrat-led Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed related emails, Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzalez, said many were inaccessible or lost on a nongovernmental private server run by the RNC. 

All of which adds up to one word describing those who now screech at Hillary Clinton for mistakes that were literally… and I mean “literally” in the most literal sense – minuscule by comparison. What is that one word? Hypocrites.

== The opposite of dirty is...? ==

Why has President Obama’s White House been so scandal-free? Like Sherlock Holmes's "dog that failed to bark in the night," that lack of scandal is important, not least because it offers some clues to how the next White House can do the same.  See: Five policies and practices seem to have led the way, by Norman Eisen.

The author makes powerful points. But he leaves out a bigger picture.  In fact, GW Bush assigned scores of FBI agents to dig for "smoking guns" to send to jail "the most corrupt" Clintonite politicians.  What did the most extensive witch hunt in U.S. history accomplish?

 . . (1) agents distracted from counter-terror before 9/11... in other words outright treason, and

 . . (2) ZERO clintonian officials even indicted for malfeasance of office, a first ever for a two term administration. The first time. Ever.

Especially since a real witch hunt, extending across 24 years, costing upwards toward a billion dollars, diverting public resources and involving Vesuvius-spews of bile from talk-radio hosts across the land, never resulted in a single Clinton era official ever being imprisoned or even indicted for actual crimes having to do with malfeasance in the performance of their official duties. Not one, ever. 

To a scientist, this would come as close to disproof by failure to find supporting evidence as one could get.. (Absence of evidence can be evidence of absence, when the search for evidence was so relentless and thorough.) Indeed, the implication -- galling to all of my Republican friends -- is that the Clintonites were the most honest governing clade in U.S. history.

Now we have a second U.S. administration to go eight years without a single demonstrably culpable malfeasance of office. (The current House GOP is desperately trying to deny the dems that double record, by attempting to impeach the IRS head for things he never did, ever, even remotely-at-all.) Only in the case of the Obama Administration, it’s not just the second to have no malfeasance indictments, but the first to have gone essentially *scandal free.*

Oh… you ravers who raise “scandals” of an utterly picayune nature? How about you first put up money that I can’t respond with things done by the Bushes that were literally orders of magnitude worse? Two orders? Three?  Four?

== Never Mind Trump ==

And now we have the main campaign slogan being pushed by John McCain and the Koch Network of PACs is “Never mind Trump! Vote Republican down-ticket for Congress and state legislature, so a GOP Congress can hold Hillary’s feet to the fire and block anything she tries!” 

Again, it’s the “Hastert Rule” concocted by Dennis “friend to boys” Hastert, and enforced fiercely by the head of Fox News, Roger "friend to women" Ailes, that turned the world’s greatest deliberative body – and its oldest political party – into wretched opium dens of glowering, indolent-slothful cronyism and turpitude. 

And treason, for the harm they have done to a nation where science and innovation and moving ahead have been key to our leadership of the world. Remember, Trump is not the disease, but a symptom. Burn out Rupert Murdoch's mob of nasty confederates. It is the only chance to restore and revive a conservatism of adults.

== Miscellany ==

A cute moment as Barack Obama cheerfully chides Bill Clinton to get up the stairs and into Air Force One to take him home (from the Israel funeral of Shimon Peres.) One president, highly disciplined and self-controlled, urging one who – well – was an LBJ style glad-hander and certainly a bit self-indulgent.

But both of them the most popular and most accomplished presidents in a long time.  The only 8 year presidents in U.S. history to see not a single one of their appointees topple or be indicted for malfeasance of office.  With almost every large metric of US national health rising instead of falling (as happened under both Bushes.)  

Oh, but what will she do with Bill?  A cabinet post to keep him busy? Picking drapes and hosting teas? Ambassador to France, to keep him both busy and happy and out of her hair?  Ambassador to Libya, to make a point? Both revenge and rewards can be served cold. I guess we'll see. 

Debate followup: Why 'fact-checking' won't work without... judo!

Okay okay. I give up. I’ll comment on the presidential debate...

First off, it appears that the press and punditry are overwhelmingly declaring Hillary the winner.  And certainly she was, in most ways, first by displaying fiercely intelligent grasp of policy issues. Second, she succeeded in drawing Donald Trump to avow smugness in his true record, a past riddled with predatory and dishonest business practices.  Reports tell of sample groups of undecided voters “gasping” when DT proudly claimed to be “smart” by paying little to no federal taxes on annual incomes in the $500 million range.

Still, I don't see it as a blowout. In fact, I am highly ticked off at Secretary Clinton, for a rather shallow performance. Too many times, she wallowed in a Sumo match with Trump over this or that line in the sand, instead of using Judo to send him flying.

== The fact-check trap ==

Oh, there are plenty of sober sites and individuals out there doing truthiness checks. (Some of the best were done by NPR , PolitiFact, and The New York Times.) As someone on Twitter quipped: "We're going to need a bigger Snopes."

Alas, early on, Hillary Clinton invited viewers to go to her own web-site to scan a real time truth inspection of the debate. Seriously? You expect that to sway undecideds? All it did was add weight to the notion that “facts” are a matter of partisan interpretation. Trump has been very effective telling his followers that when a site like CNN or Politico debunks one of his statements, it only means that they are members of a liberal, “lamestream” conspiracy.

What would be effective? Try the following:

“Okay Donald, you dismiss any fact-checking service as biased. Yet the American people need fact-checking they can rely on! So here’s a challenge. You appoint six sages whom you trust – august and respected Americans who will likely serve on your cabinet or as court appointments. I’ll do the same. And we’ll ask retired Supreme Court justices like Sandra Day O’Conner, most of them republican appointees, to pick another six.

“Those 18 folks will meet immediately to set up a truly non-partisan fact checking service, with a million dollars from my campaign and from yours, getting it up and running by the next debate. Come on, let’s get this done, Mr. Businessman! Let’s do it for the nation, on time and under budget!”

That sort of thing would corner him. If he refuses or stalls, that fact becomes instantly clear. If he appoints shills, then those twits will compare unfavorably to HC’s choices and O’Conner’s. And if he goes along, he’ll know he’s about to be fact-checked by a service partly of his own devising, designed from scratch to be impartial.

In fact, there are dozens of areas where Clinton and the dems could issue simple, direct and unavoidable challenges. For example, below I’ll offer one that would corner Trump regarding his tax return.

It is called jiu jitsu or judo.  And by now Clinton should be good at it.  Alas, she seems stuck in sumo mode. And I find that unimpressive.

== The Missing Elephant ==




Want more such off-angle perspectives? I got a million. Here’s one that’s simply gigantic. It’s… well… huge. I have to wonder – am I the only one who noticed the elephant that was missing from the room?  

Go ahead and do a word search in the debate transcript. Except for a couple of blithe, offhand references to bipartisanship and past officials who have defected to her, there were no uses or instances of the word "Republican." None by Clinton or Trump.




Indeed, if you scan the transcript, you'll find zero uses of the word "Congress," the other and equally important political branch of government that is at-stake in this election.  

This despite the fact that the Republican Party has dominated Congress for 20 of the last 22 years. Two decades of sullen, glowering indolence, during which role models like Dennis (convicted child molester) Hastert and Tom (convicted felon) DeLay transformed the world's greatest deliberative body into the nastiest and laziest in U.S. history, completely obedient to Fox chairman Roger (sexual predator) Ailes.

Sure, democrats have accused these and other GOP leaders of dogmatism in the past. But it is the laziness charge that I find sticks in even conservative voters’ craws. 

Seriously, who is advising Clinton to lay off Republicans? 

She could ask: what kind of party does not even mention its last two presidents, during their national convention? 

Indeed, tally up every GOP leader between Reagan and Ryan -- only one of them was even mentioned at the recent Republican National Convention! The words “Bush” and Hastert, DeLay, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gingrich, McConnell and so on are unutterable by Donald Trump, or any other Republican, so why does Hillary refrain?

Apparently, she has been advised not to go partisan because some moderate Republican voters might make a lifetime exception, hold their noses and vote for her instead of Trump. Also, Trump is ready with a comeback – “I’m a rebel against all those jerks who ran the party before me!”

Fine. Then use that!  The more he says it, the more he’ll undermine and anger down-ticket Republicans. It’s called judo.

Oh, this is stunning foolishness in several ways! 

(1) Because these associations will help, not hinder, her campaign to defeat Donald Trump. Moreover…

(2) Suppose she does win, but those same Republican voters then reward GOP down-ticket candidates, returning the Senate and House to GOP control. Then Hillary Clinton’s "honeymoon" as president will last three minutes and the rest will be a volcanic, accomplishment-free, living hell. There is only one way to prevent that, and to give the American people what they need, a functioning second branch of government filled with pragmatic, negotiating adults.

(3) Conservative Americans will benefit if their party is demolished – immolated - in 2016, giving them a couple of years to rebuild something that is not just another mad, sequel-froth of Bushes, Cheney, Trump, or Rupert Murdoch. Conservatives might come roaring back as a party of grownups, no longer sending us lazy, dogmatic, gerrymandering cheaters who wage war on science and every other knowledge profession in American life.

Hey, it could happen! Two years in the wilderness and you might achieve that wonder!  But first. Get out of the peoples’ house.  We have work to do.

== Tax returns ==

Clinton did really well exploiting Trump’s refusal to release tax returns, luring him into admitting – in fact proudly avowing – that he was “smart” to avoid helping pay for roads, schools and national defense. She’d have done better still by asking everyone in the audience if they paid any federal income tax last year, suggesting it was probably more than Donald Trump did on 694 million dollars.

And yet, DT can continue to weasel out by claiming the “IRS audit” dodge, leaving this a matter of (again) sumo pushing and shoving to sway the next 1% of voters.

How could it be done as judo? Simple:

“Donald, the IRS has said you can legally release your return during an audit, but you claim your lawyers forbid it. The IRS could choose to waive any audit, removing that excuse. But then you could scream they did it for ‘partisan reasons.’

“Fine, then how about you right now publicly ask:

(1) the IRS to confirm that you are currently under audit – (so far all we have is your word for it) – and

(2) the IRS to drop the audit, in the national interest, so you can release your returns before the election. By asking, you’ll let them do it without accusations of partisanship. I’ll be happy to go along with it, so the American people can find out what you’ve been up to.”

It’s another of those jiu jitsu challenges that would leave him cornered. How could he not ask to have the audit canceled and to get immunity for this year’s returns? Any excuse he made at that point would sound way beyond smarmy and contrived.

== Come on, Hill, stand up! ==

Sure I know your advisers are saying that the public is too angry to listen to good news.  That any attempt to brag over the country’s direction and gains will backfire on you.

They are dead wrong. You can find ways to combine “things are getting better” with “there’s a lot wrong that needs fixing.” You have tried to do that, I admit… and done miserably.

Sure, you offered one sentence about how crime has overall declined. A lot, since your husband was in office. One sentence. Almost as if you were embarrassed.

Sure, FBI crime data published Monday said violent crime rose slightly in 2015 but remains near record lows. A few hot spots like Chicago have surged with violent crime, but even in Chicago, it’s limited to a small number of neighborhoods. Yes, we have some degree of crisis. But cowering and whimpering and dividing Americans will not help. 

Hey how about mentioning how technology is empowering both good cops and citizens, and law and order should be a lot better, once we work out the kinks on this transparency thing.

(Oh, by the way. I don’t expect this as a debate point, but crime was highest in the southern United States, the report found. At 45.9 per 100,000 people, the murder and manslaughter rate in the region was more than twice as high as in the West, the Midwest and the Northeast, according to the FBI. Rates of rape, assault and property crime were dramatically higher as well.  Just saying. We do not need lectures from the Confederacy.)

I’m not done. There are so many other places to angrily (!) stand up, Hill. Like this travesty by DT:

“Our energy policies are disaster. Our country is losing so much in terms of energy, in terms of paying off our debt.”

In fact:, as related by Scott Horsley in that NPR fact-check: ‘Domestic oil and gas production have increased steadily during President Obama’s time in office. The U.S. has been the world’s leading producer of natural gas since 2011 and the top producer of oil since 2013. The Energy Information Administration says gasoline prices averaged $2.17 a gallon last week — about a nickel cheaper than a year ago, and about 30 cents a gallon less than Obama’s first year in office, and about a buck and a half less than during George W. Bush’s last year in office.’

The Foxites have blocked sustainables at every turn. But they are arriving anyway. Arriving huge.

And I will offer further post-debate appraisals… more ways to do judo… next time.

== Continue to Part II: Fact-Checking the Presidential Debate