The alternative to Trump is scarier! The "Cyrus Effect." And what you can do.

Obsessed with the midterms? Planning to help register folks and then join a Get Out The Vote effort, on election day? Maybe volunteer for a local candidate? Good for you. Then you aren’t an all-talk-no-action lazy bones. What Tom Paine called a “summer soldier.” 

Only dig it, Congress is not the most important show. Your excuse: “how will anything I do matter?” might apply at that level. But the real action is in statehouses, where corrupt GOP secretaries of state deliver the goods with cheat after cheat, while Republican-controlled legislatures gerrymander and close DMV offices, so women and young people can’t get ID.

Look at this map. In green and blue states, the future of America will be decided. Volunteers who help flip a state assembly seat will meet and work closely with the candidate! She’ll know your name. You’ll feel your efforts affecting the balance, day by day. 

A $50 contribution at that level can make a real difference. And you’d learn a lot. Maybe get a friend in high places. Especially Minnesota, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania… but yes, also Texas, Colorado, Florida. 

If you’re not living near any of the colored states on this map, do you know someone who does? If you do live in those states, how far from a swing assembly district where you could make a difference?

== Don't trade acne for cancer ==

I've repeatedly asserted there are far worse things than Donald Trump. For one thing, almost every member of the “deep state” — or faithful/intelligent civil servants, FBI, Intelligence agencies and military officers — see plainly how dangerous an infantile narcissist controlled by foreign despots can be. They have cauterized around this fellow pretty carefully and Two Scoops currently has less practically-executable power (except the damned judicial appointments) than any president in modern history. But all of that might go away, in the outpouring of national relief, if our current, foul-mouthed schoolyard bully gets replaced by the smoother, more soothing-voiced Mike Pence. Smooth, but in fact vastly more dangerous.

Here’s an op-ed from The New York Times - Mike Pence, Holy Terror -  that lays this down in some terrifying detail. Frank Bruni points out that Pence "adds two ingredients that Trump doesn't genuinely possess: the conviction that he's on a mission from God and a determination to mold the entire nation in the shape of his own faith, a regressive, repressive version of Christianity. Trade Trump for Pence and you go from kleptocracy to theocracy." (Not scared by that? Read Robert Heinlein's prophetic novel Revolt in 2100.)

Mr. Bruni raises the possibility “that Pence could end up in the White House sooner than you think. In addition to the prospect of Trump’s impeachment, there’s the chance that Trump just decides that he has had enough.”

Consider how amplified Trump will be, in such a political martyrdom.  How freed and empowered. The only thing worse could be a Donald Trump who was actually, physically martyred. If that happened - and thousands of fools celebrated in the streets — then we would pass into a time of searing flames.  I pray for his health. Yes - and for several more reasons - I sincerely do.

(Mind you there are lesser versions of the same trap. Say, if Trump gets his “Big Parade,” and a few hundred lefty imbeciles gather along the route to spit on soldiers and vets, the resulting, edited images could drive millions of crewcut fact-people back into a mad GOP they’ve recently been fleeing, in droves.)

But the core element in this article… and in my own missives for a year… has been Mike Pence. He would transform today’s scatterbrained, demoralized, raving-leaky White House into one that is utterly disciplined, close-lipped, and stuffed with Dominionist fanatics eager to use the nuclear button to bring an apocalypse they already pray-for, daily. And I do not exaggerate, even slightly. They do. Pray for an end to human civilization. An end to democracy. An end to all human curiosity, striving, excellence, improvement or ambition. Damnation for 99% of their neighbors. An end to all further generations of children! And an end to the United States of America. Explicitly. They pray for exactly that.  And Mike Pence will be their Nehemiah Scudder, their deliverer on some or all of those promises.

== A Closer Look at Pence ==

A more detailed look at Pence can be found in the soon-to-be-released biography: The Shadow President: The Truth About Mike Pence, by investigative journalists Michael D'Antonio and Peter Eisner, who warn that Pence has become "perhaps the most powerful Christian supremacist America has ever seen."

Even the person I call the “worst American,” for having helped to forge today’s cynical confederate cabal, the conservative columnist George Will, has said that Pence had dethroned Trump as “America’s most repulsive public figure.”

So for all of you on the Union side in this phase of the civil war, I have one piece of advice — patience.  Bide your time. I mean, how long can the oligarchs maintain a universal and open war against every single fact-using profession? How long before some democratic politician stumbles into the polemical power of invoking the Greatest Generation and Franklin Roosevelt? 

(Fun fact.  Around 60% of military chaplains are Baptists. Oh, they are in it for the win, long term.)

Stephen Colbert (bless him) and Rebecca Solnit (deep respects) are absolutely wrong about one thing.  Donald Trump is not the disease. He is a symptom. The disease is a cynical oligarchy waging open war upon the American/Western Experiment.  The disease is every single advertiser on Fox. The disease is you, if you buy anything from any advertiser on Fox! And the disease is Kremlin-promoted division in the Union’s great big, wide blue tent.

There are times when you need to buck up and stop whining about symptoms and unite over the long haul to cure the disease.

== The Cyrus Effect redux ==

Polls show that most Republicans are fully aware that their nominee and president is a deeply immoral person. So how do they rationalize continuing to avidly support him? Of course to the oligarchy "It's taxes and sweetheart contracts, stupid." To GOP pols "It's the courts, stupid," hoping to stymie any future reform of election laws or getting money out of politics. Okay, I can understand those evil, but rational motives.

But the rank and file are problematic. "For decades, Republicans, and especially conservative Republicans, insisted that character counted in public life," says Peter Wehner, who served in three previous Republican administrations. "They were particularly vocal about this during the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal, arguing against “compartmentalization” — by which they meant overlooking moral turpitude in the Oval Office because you agree with the president’s policy agenda or because the economy is strong. Senator Lindsey Graham, then in the House, went so far as to argue that “impeachment is not about punishment. Impeachment is about cleansing the office. Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”

But all that - like suspicion toward Kremlin despots - lies in the past. "A party that once spoke with urgency and apparent conviction about the importance of ethical leadership — fidelity, honesty, honor, decency, good manners, setting a good example — has hitched its wagon to the most thoroughly and comprehensively corrupt individual who has ever been elected president."

One rationalization offered among evangelical Christians is the "Cyrus Effect." The King of Persia who freed the Jews from Babylonian captivity was clearly a pagan, yet also "the instrument of God."  Likewise, the spectacularly un-Christian and dissolute-immoral Donald Trump delights heaven and believers every time he galls all the people they hate, especially city or university or fact-profession elites.

Of course there's a theological answer in the form of a question: "Is Cyrus in heaven?" If he is, for being a sacred instrument, then it means that you can get there without performing the rituals and incantations that fundies claim to be the only route to salvation. If not, then Two Scoops ain't going, either.

==The perfect hypocrisy storm ==

Those claiming that the president's acknowledged immaturity, narcissism and moral turpitude are "irrelevant" should read these op-eds by Mike Pence, back during the MonicaGate Scandal (so charmingly limited in scope.) Pence wrote:

"If you and I fall into bad moral habits, we can harm our families, our employers and our friends. The President of the United States can incinerate the planet. Seriously, the very idea that we ought to have at or less than the same moral demands placed on the Chief Executive that we place on our next door neighbor is ludicrous and dangerous. Throughout our history, we have seen the presidency as the repository of all of our highest hopes and ideals and values. To demand less is to do an injustice to the blood that bought our freedoms."

You can bet that when ... not if... Pence replaces his boss, he will claim there's no hypocrisy! That he had been merely biding his time. And sing hosannas that a decent man is in office! And fools will rush to proclaim relief, unaware that our danger will then multiply a thousand fold.  (See where I urge you all - don't be in such a rush to impeach!)

From The Atlantic: "In 2011 and again just ahead of the 2016 election, PRRI asked Americans whether a political leader who committed an immoral act in his or her private life could nonetheless behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public life. In 2011, consistent with the “values voter” brand and the traditional evangelical emphasis on the importance of personal character, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants agreed with this statement. But with Trump at the top of the Republican ticket in 2016, 72 percent of white evangelicals said they believed a candidate could build a kind of moral dike between his private and public life." 

In a head-spinning reversal, white evangelicals went from being the least likely to the most likely group to agree that a candidate’s personal immorality has no bearing on his performance in public office.

"Fears about the present and a desire for a lost past, bound together with partisan attachments, ultimately overwhelmed values voters’ convictions. Rather than standing on principle and letting the chips fall where they may, white evangelicals fully embraced a consequentialist ethics that works backward from predetermined political ends, bending or even discarding core principles as needed to achieve a predetermined outcome," writes Robert P. Jones in The Atlantic.

What this cogent article never says is that the predetermined outcome openly and eagerly desired by a large minority of these folks is the fulfillment of prophecy in the gore-drenched Book of Revelation, including death and torture for 99% of their neighbors, an end to all human curiosity or achievement or democracy, no further children born into the world, and an end to the United States of America. 

Truly, you never parsed it that way before? Is there any other way to parse it?

Discerning the Real vs the Unreal

Before weighing back into the political morass, let me link to this article on why we seem to be eating – instead of investing in – our innovation seed corn.  Combine with failure of management with foreign theft of intellectual property from the Inventing Nations… plus the War on Science (and every other fact-using clade in American life), and you get an assault upon the wellspring of all our successes as a nation and as a civilization.

Take the 58% cut of the Fossil Energy Office which is not a den of evil, folks. FEO research enabled scores of small players to do the slant drilling that had been limited to Big Boys, like Exxon. The resulting plummet in natural gas price is what made coal virtually extinct in the U.S. and brought us (under Obama) so close to energy independence we could (and did) shrug off threats from petro sheiks and Russian oil mafiosi. Til they bought themselves a White House.

How bad can it get, when the new Trump Budget – in order to fund yet another insane Supply Side tax gift to oligarchs – is slashing research at every level, from cancer and biomedicine to canceling California’s $10 million earthquake warning system. And if that sounds like a petty child taking revenge on a state that did not vote for him, sift through the budget and find scads of other examples. For example, arm-twisting Boeing and Lockheed to move production from Washington and California to (in order to to prop up) failing Kansas, or else lose out on Saudi contracts.

Let’s be clear, this is not “politics.” Under Democratic administrations, gushers of net tax money have always flowed from blue states to red states. Because we are one nation and our brethren have needed help. Oh, but you know brothers. Some are smart and generous. Others….

Only note the latest news. Over-riding a veto by their insane Gov. Sam Brownback, the chastened Kansas legislature has rescinded most of the Supply Side tax cuts for the rich that Brownback pushed for almost a decade. Like every single other Supply Side experiment, it delivered only deficits and pain and red-ink and bankruptcy and pain for everyone except those oligarchs. But prepping for another round at the federal level is the number two reason for Trump's slashing attack on R&D and other federal investments in our future. The number one, of course, is just hate.

== Impeachment redux - and the Great Despotic Axis! ==

There was a lot of commentary and feedback from my earlier posting: Don't Impeach! Plus why is Trump really in Saudi Arabia?

Regarding the first of those two topics, a Constitutional scholar weighs in with perspectives on why, if possible, we should approach any talk of impeachment with cautious and grownup deliberation.  (And please re-read that posting of mine! Every reason I gave just doubles, every week. Leave Trump right where he is. Seriously.)

Regarding the second topic from that post, some of you offered hope that Rouhani's landslide re-election in Iran might put the kibosh on Saudi-centered drums, beating a call fro the U.S. to attack the Persian Republic. The hate-Iran screeches are growing frantic! Some are railing that Iran will attack and conquer the entire Sunni world any minute now... despite being vastly outnumbered, out-gunned and their nearest Sunni neighbor having stacks and stacks of nuclear weapons!

Oh, but then the connivers can always try a Tonkin Gulf or Gleiwitz Incident, alongside their terrorist Reichstag Fire. And they might get complicit help from the Iranian mullahs, who can see their grip on power gradually slipping away. A nice little war would suit them, too, reinforcing their grip. And Putin would love seeing stupid U.S. attacks drive Iran into his orbit. Winners all around - that is among despots.

Along similar lines, note the cozying of Trump with Ankara... and here’s a basic IQ test. Why is Philippines President Duterte jumping like a lapdog for Vladimir Putin in Moscow? Putin's anti-western axis now stretches from Ankara and (he hopes soon) the mullahs of Iran, all the way past partial ally Beijing to Manilla and... yes... Washington D.C. And if none of you can put the pieces together, I hope and pray our Intel Community has.

== Can we set up a fact-checking service immune to "partisan" charges? ==

The portion of that blog getting the most attention was a small suggestion I made, toward the end, that strong bipartisan efforts be made to develop something the nation and civilization desperately needs – a fact-checking service that is above all conceivable dogma-based reproach. 

Our counter-intelligence professionals are deeply worried about new kinds of attacks upon America by foreign powers that are vastly more sophisticated than the ones that meddled in our 2016 elections. They are struggling to  understand the battlescape of this new information war. “As Americans tweet and like and upvote their way through social media, they generate a vast trove of data on what they think and how they respond to ideas and arguments--literally thousands of expressions of belief every second on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and Google. All of those digitized convictions are collected and stored, and much of that data is available commercially to anyone with sufficient computing power to take advantage of it," writes Massimo Calabresi in Time.

This  excellent journalistic exposé takes you through the scary path that this underground campaign of social sabotage has taken — following patterns that Fred Pohl eerily predicted in The Cool War — revealing how our own technologies have been turned against us, and why we are so vulnerable.

What the story leaves out is the central, core fact that ties it all together. For you see, most of these failure modes rely on subjectivity — the ability to sway people with appeals to emotion, group loyalty, crowd momentum and rumor mongering. 

All of these approaches fail when people are calmly willing to weigh facts. So the agenda relies utterly upon demolishing two things… both calm and facts.

In my recent blog posting, I propose four reforms that could be enacted if just thirty mature-adult Republicans joined with Democrats in Congress. But the most important would be to appoint a commission to find some way that all Americans could verify clear facts or refute blatant falsehoods. Clearly, if facts do not start gaining advantage over lies and rumors, we are doomed.

 == Is a truly trustworthy fact checking service even possible? --

Here is how I answered one noted journalist.

I suppose my main point has to do with the much-better alternative to impeachment that might solve so many more things. That would be the Great Adult Republican Defection (GARD), that so many of us have been hoping for, across the last 25 years. Sure, it never happened, despite the ever-deepening spiral into madness on the American right, for a number of reasons.

1. Brain scans show that conservatives have much stronger reflexes for both disgust and loyalty. Hence, millions of them, who wince and admit "Yes, my side has gone crazy" will also grimace at anecdotes about screaming Berkeley protesters, and growl: "But liberals are worse." That is the essential Fox line, nowadays. At the high end, it is the mantra smoothly conveyed by the Worst American -- George F. Will.

2. Republican politicians have been terrorized into tight discipline, first by the Hastert Rule, then by the Tea Party and Fox, and now by the ferocity of Trump supporters.

3. Some, like John McCain and Susan Collins and David Brooks, may now just be waiting for the right time and for the right excuse-narrative.

It's vital that we offer the remnant community of adult conservatives a way to step up that both saves face and will not seem - at surface - to be a betrayal.  I think they might be persuaded to view the deliberate Demolition of Facts - and the accompanying war upon all fact-using professions - as an existential threat to the republic, one that is orthogonal to the left-right spectrum.  Moreover we now know that foreign foes have weaponized lie-based propaganda, making this a matter of national security. See: Inside Russia's Social Media War on America.

At present, both Facebook and Google are struggling to come up with systems to identify rumors and refutable lies, but it's not easy.  

Long ago I saw this coming and proposed a method that would truly solve this, over the long run. But we need something quicker.  (My concept was lead article in the American Bar Association's Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition."  Available on Amazon.  

No, what we need right now is a means to grade fact-checking services and protect them from the standard-reflex dismissal that they are "partisan." This can happen in a number of ways, but they all boil down to seeing the top, venerable sages of grownup conservatism step up to bolster the effort with their reputations.  In addition to McCain, Collins, Brooks, Rubin and so on... envision Sandra Day O'Conner, Warren Buffett and -- yes -- George W. Bush... all backing a temporary bipartisan commission (non-governmental) to come up with trustworthy ways people can refute what's false.

Why would these Republicans do this, joining with eminent Democrats and others? Well, for one thing, it would combat the madness without explicitly betraying their party. They could even say it's for the long term good of American conservatism. (It is.) 

Of course, one can foresee screams of outrage from the Murdochians, calling this an attempt to form a "Ministry of Truth." Hence a counter-narrative must be ready -- e.g. that the commission aims to help design a framework for competitive fact-checking, distributed among rivals and with citizen level involvement. But the framework must have at-top a supervising layer of the most reputable Americans - especially adult conservatives - who can say "these fact-checkers are mostly non-partisan. We vouch for them."

In essence, this restores the old rebuttal rules that Fox fought against, decades ago. Indeed, if I had my way, the GARD would include restoration of those fairness doctrines. But the key point here is that this issue would give the long-awaited (and till-now cowardly) Adult Conservatives a platform to act in ways that are ostensibly not a betrayal of party. An act that could do more for the republic than any other.

My other proposals from that blog posting -- e.g. giving the joint chiefs authority, if unanimous, to passively delay rash presidential orders, or opening the president's appointments calendar, or for moderate senators to vet his appointees together -- all are emergency measures that might ease the panic and pressure, if impeachment talk starts to boil. Those three would demand more guts from McCain & co... more desperation.

But the fact-checking suggestion is different. It is urgently needed, whatever the state of the "I-word." And it could happen in ways that save some face.

Nostalgic for Reagan Republicans? And do facts matter?

First an announcement that is that's pertinent to today's topic. A bold new site "Evonomics.com" makes economics much livelier. Among other intriguing and enlightening pieces, they recently featured my 'classic' about the root method of our Enlightenment renaissance -- flat-open-fair competition. While citing Adam Smith, F. Hayek, Ben Franklin and Pericles, I show how far today's libertarians and conservatives have drifted away from their own core underpinnings. How they have been suckered into betraying the very thing they claim to support. 

Drop by Evonomics to try out this and other challenging articles, daring us to think -- and rethink -- as if we were proper heirs to those revolutionaries... as well as avid 21st Century minds.

== My, my how you have changed ==

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush actively promoted measures to combat climate change, with Reagan in 1987 overruling objections within his own Cabinet to a major proposed treaty to protect the ozone layer, according to recently declassified records. Both presidents’ secretaries of state, George P. Shultz and James A. Baker III, played key roles in blocking efforts by other Cabinet secretaries to frustrate implementation of more environmentally friendly policies. 

For example, memos for senior State Department officials noted that “Global climate change is the most far reaching environmental issue of our time” and that notwithstanding the need for continued research, “We simply cannot wait – the costs of inaction will be too high.”

These discussions led to success in the 1989 Montreal Protocol, which phased out production of industrial chemicals linked to the destruction of the Earth’s ozone layer. An example of where we saw a problem, acted (like adults) and (largely) solved it.

Back when it was not a core GOP principle to hate science.

== Then boomers took over ==

Who would have expected the U.S. “boomer" generation to be so sanctimoniously stupid? Politically, I mean? Take this recent example.

The new transportation infrastructure bill “is a landmark moment for a Congress that is reviled by many Americans as a do-nothing body, most notable for the bitter fighting between its most extreme elements.” For the first time in 10 years it does more than a continuing resolution but actually addresses national needs.  It also quietly reauthorizes the U.S. Export-Import Bank. (So much for that “enemy number one” on the conservative action list.)

Why the decade of obstruction? Because republicans know that spending on infrastructure is the very best form of economic stimulation, directly helping the country while most of the cash immediately becomes high-velocity dollars - spent and re-spent with the biggest economic “multiplier” possible.  More than enough reason to block it, so the resulting economic improvements would not happen on a democrat’s watch.

Too late. All economic indicators are up, and now GOP leaders fear bridges are about to start collapsing, and they’ll be blamed.  Still, they managed to avoid any sort of funding that might be reliable or long term, paying for this increase by a one-time raid on the Federal Reserve. The very opposite of fiscal conservatism.

== Facts matter ==

The Republican debates are great theater.  But all the fact-checking services are in despair because it is like trying to drink from a firehose. At any given moment, the odds of a candidate’s utterances being even half true are around 50%.

Are facts even slightly pertinent, anymore?  When every attempt at creating a fact-checker service is immediately rendered impotent, because scores always look bad for the GOP?  Take, for example, the stark difference in actual, measurable outcomes across the spans of Republican administrations versus democratic ones. By any actual metric – by dozens – the outcomes are diametrically opposite.  Should that change a person’s mind? If true, would it change yours? 

In wake of the recent Paris Climate Summit, the biggest were-elephant in the room is climate change. The inconvenient fact? That 2015 will have been the hottest on record and 2016 could be even hotter. 

This will make it hard for Ted Cruz, Sean Hannity and other outright-deliberate liars to use their favorite gambit of pegging their “before” comparisons always on the specific year 1998. In other words, in 2013 they said "there hasn't been any warming in the last 16 years!"  In 2014 they said "there hasn't been any warming in the last 17 years!"  In 2015 they said "there hasn't been any warming in the last 18 years!"

Why so specific? Why did they always peg 1998 as the ‘before” year?  Because that was the previous record holder for hottest year in all of recorded human history…. Allowing them to then proclaim that the years since then show “no warming.” Like a woman choosing as her “before” peg the last year she was pregnant, then declaring “I haven’t gained a pound since 2005!

If you ditto-nodded to that nonsense-lie by Cruz and Hannity etc., or repeated it, then welcome to a foretaste of your ultimate destination.

Oh, but there is a long series of actual truths that are so inconvenient to the fox-narrative of gloom. Take the favorite rant-topic of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio – that the US is being swamped by waves of illegal immigration.  Except that… we’re not. 

In fact, the flow has gone from an inward flood, under George W. Bush, to negative under Obama.

"There are many reasons for the historic reversal of migration between the U.S. and Mexico, according the Pew Research Center, which announced Thursday that more than 1 million Mexicans headed south to re-establish their lives in the last five years, while only 870,000 migrated north to the U.S."

But it gets richer when one contemplates that confederates, like angels, have no memory.  Remember the screeches and flapping chicken-little panic when a few thousand unaccompanied minors from south of the border appeared, briefly surprising our government agencies, who had not encountered the phenomenon before?  Oh the sky was falling!  Except that…

…except that crisis ended within weeks, as measures taken by the administration worked.  Simply and quietly worked. But sensationalist media ignored that fact. And the United States of America – once again -- did not come to an end.

Does that disappoint candidates who actively pray for the United States to come to a rapid and violent end?  Let’s be clear; that does describe the average Republican candidate today. Many openly avow to praying for exactly that.

No wonder Mexicans are leaving.  So much for the core Trump talking-point. (See here for more on why almost everything you believe to be true about immigration is diametrically opposite-to-true.) 

== More inconvenient facts? ==

Crime rates have been at historic lows during the Obama administration, and police deaths have also dropped to their lowest level in a lifetime.  So how does NJ governor Chris Christie get away with saying the exact opposite, in railing against Obama during a recent debate? Simple. Any attempt to set up or refer to a Fact Check site soon devolves, because no matter how sincerely non-partisan the group's original intentions, they will soon be dismissed as "partisan," for one simple reason. Because there is no longer even a figleaf correlation between dogma and actual fact on the American right. It is the basic reason for the War on Science…

…and against every other American clade of skill and knowledge, from medical doctors to teachers, civil servants, law professionals, economists, journalists. (Name an exception.) 

Getting back to the GOP debates… we will talk more about front-runners Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.  But lest we forget that “establishment” republicans are no more honest or competent. Take Jeb Bush’s howler that his brother “kept us safe from terrorism.”

This admittedly biased article on Salon puts the lie to such nonsense.  “The more we learn about the last Republican administration, the more obvious the truth becomes. We now have enough evidence to say not only did George W. Bush fail to keep us safe; he was criminally negligent in his refusal to heed the warnings his administration was given in the months before 9/11.” Indeed, the author asserts that “more Americans were killed (by enemy action) on U.S. soil during George W. Bush’s administration than under any other.”  

The latter part I’d like to see documented.  But certainly there were more successful terror attacks under G. W. Bush – and more victims – than across the Clinton and Obama administrations combined.  Facts that confederate voters blithely ignore because to of the narrative-fable that Republicans are stronger on defense. 

Indeed, one measure of the delusion dominating America's gone-around-the-bend right wing is the matter of military readiness. At the end of the Clinton Administration, 100% of major U.S. military units were rated fully combat ready. By the time G.W. Bush left office, not a single major army or marine unit was so rated. Most have now regained that status. So much for muslim-traitor Obama.

I have left out so many other inconvenient facts.  Like the blatant way that almost every conceivable metric of U.S.economic health has done better (by far) across the span of the Clinton and Obama administrations than across those of either Bush.  Indeed, most plummeted across spans of republican rule and most went up across democratic administrations. And this includes the trend lines of budget deficits!  When outcome variance is that huge, only a fool would let dogma trump our own self-interest.  See the comparison made extremely clear, including the staggering fact that any prudent fiscal conservative must choose to be a democrat. The facts regarding deficit spending are overwhelming.  

The crowning of Hillary? And the Pope Francis Effect

==  A premature coronation? ==

The pre-ordination or crowning of Hillary Clinton as the presumed Democratic Party nominee in 2016 was deeply premature.  Even if she winds up with the nomination, why would democrats forego the drama and press coverage of a contested series of primaries and debates? Hundreds of well-vamped and amped opportunities to put forward their shared -- or somewhat varying -- messages – what? Are they really so stupid they would bypass that? 

Even if Clinton were inevitable, the DP’s brightest should step up to tear some spotlight away from the GOP’s astonishing gremlin-frenzy, if only to contrast favorably against the giant rugby scrum of seventeen fanatics racing each other over right-wing cliffs of insanity.

 Hence I was interested to read this argument that the dems ought to take another look at Al Gore. Wow.

Oh, without any doubt, it would be a stronger America today, had cheating not robbed us of the legitimately-elected Gore Presidency, in 2000.  You cannot name a single metric of U.S. national health that did not plummet across the misbegotten reign of either/both Bushes -- one of them the worst president of the 20th Century and the other (I hope will turn out by 2100 to have been) the worst of the 21st. Even a tepid Gore span would have been brilliant, by comparison.  

(Please, please just accept the challenge and offer up one, even one, unambiguous statistical national health metric that attributably improved across either of the last two GOP-held presidencies. One. No? In which case, why should the Republican Party ever again be trusted with a burnt match?)

In fact, though, I do not yearn for Al.  He proved the adage that Democratic Presidents choose, as running mates, people who are qualified for the job, but uninspiring. From LBJ and Humphrey and Mondale to Gore and Lieberman and Biden, this trend is almost perfect. Of course, it is far better than the GOP's alternative fetish – wherein Republican nominees always appoint unqualified fools or horrors to be their Vice Presidential running mates. 

All right, there was one exception to that pattern – Ronald Reagan picked a VP who on-paper was eminently qualified, but who -- lest I reiterate -- ironically went on to become the worst president of the last 100 years. Even worse than his awful son. 

But no. A guy like Al Gore is not what we need right now.

What we do need is someone who can stand up next to Hillary, during debates, and rock the boat!  Alas, while Bernie Sanders sort of qualifies, the stuff he is saying is pretty standard on the left wing of the party. And no, I am not talking about Elizabeth Warren, though she might gain administrative experience for one term as Vice President or a cabinet secretary. No, neither she nor Bernie rock the boat the way I want -- by shattering the narrative.

Okay, since I started writing this missive there have been a couple more DP entries, Jim Webb from Virginia, for one, who represents the Blue Dog wing of the Party, a wing that should be nurtured! There are millions of Americans who are genuinely and sincerely somewhat-conservative by temperament, but who also know the Republican Party has gone  completely insane. They'll need reassurance that the other tent is big enough for them, and that it welcomes a diversity of (sane) views. Democrats who reject a sane Blue Dog out of hand are pure fools. Sane vs insane is vastly more important than "centrist versus slightly-left-of-centrist."

 One quirk that I might be the first to mention. A major NASA project might have to be re-named, if Jim Webb does become president.

Lincoln Chafee and Martin O'Malley have also declared in the Democratic race, and I am willing to look. And now there is renewed talk of Joe Biden. Already the five DPs are more varied than the seventeen GOP fellahs, all of whom get 90% of their talking points from Roger Ailes.  (Though yes, Trump does entertain.)

Still, I am unsatisfied.  We need stronger drink. Maybe not for the nominee, but certainly earlier, during the debates and media discussions leading up to that decision!

No, I mean someone who would take the discussion off at vertical angles to the hoary, lobotomizing so-called “left right political axis!” Someone with solid administrative credentials and popularity and sanity and purpose – but who is bored with all the standard clichés, that are so expertly manipulated by Fox News.

I am talking about Jerry Brown.  

Okay, he’s old and would likely serve just one term. (Dig it, Warren fans?) But he is a masterful politician, hugely successful and popular in the U.S. state that outproduces all but maybe seven nations on the planet and is the source of half our world’s innovative drive. 

Moreover, California is the one place where Obamacare (formerly RomneyCare and HeritageCare and the GOP plan for ten years) has been executed absolutely flawlessly, delivering on every promise and defying every doomcast.

And Jerry despises clichés! They bore him. He would take any and every Fox-Ailesheimers talking point and shred it, just for fun.  He would do what Hillary has proved incapable of ever doing –

-- he’d refuse to play Rupert Murdoch’s game. And hence, even if Hillary winds up being the nominee, she would sally forth from the convention across a landscape where every old-saw and hoary assumption has been up-ended. 

Will Jerry run? Alas, I doubt it. But oh, the fun we'd have! Heck he could even declare that he's doing it "for fun!"

... which brings up a weird hypothesis about Jon Stewart's suspicious timing. But save that for another (fun) occasion.

== Who would be the GOP’s “Jerry”? ==

Where to find one for the other side? A republican who hates clichés and gets bored by standard positions and who would laugh at attempts to discipline him to the Murdoch-Adelson-Ailes-Saudi-Koch party line? Okay, okay... I guess that sort of describes Donald Trump.  But let's also add "somewhat good person" and "sane" shall we? (Note: all I ask is "somewhat"!)

Let’s see… is there one state in the U.S. that routinely produces such characters? Did I mention those mould-breakers Reagan and Brown? Well, sure.

Arnold Schwarznegger has uttered the words that so many of you ought to be saying, by now.

”As a Republican, I’m furious.”

The “Terminator” star and former California governor on April 3 blasted Indiana’s recently passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which many believe to be a thinly veiled attempt to excuse discrimination against gays and other minorities.  But our former “guvernator” went on to blast members of his party who “choose the politics of division.”

Oh, how I would love to see him take the stage, in coming GOP presidential nomination debates, and say that “emperor” Rupert Murdoch has no clothes! That the party of Goldwater and Buckley has been hijacked down paths of sheer insanity.  And that it is time for decent conservatives to save American conservatism, by getting mad at the hijackers.  

And no, I don't care whether he's "native-born." Remember, I am talking about the next 11 months of theater before the conventions.  That is when the actual national dialogue takes place. And boy do we need to shake up that dialogue!

Oh, but then there’s this... California trounces Texas, other states in job creation. And in almost every other category. Heck even if the official nominees are (sigh) "Bush versus Clinton,"*** we could still demand a special California debate.

 Jerry Brown vs Ah-nold in 2016!  

== Did Heinlein exaggerate with “Nehemia Scudder? ==

Via David Ronfeldt: It's evidently from an odd book by Norman Cohn, the expert on millenarianism famed for his book "The Pursuit of the Millennium". The quote may fit a discussion about some current U. S. political trends, though it was originally written for a different audience.

"It is a great mistake to suppose that the only writers who matter are those whom the educated in their saner moments can take seriously. There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies disguised as ideas are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history."   --From Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Oxford University Press, 1970, p.14). From the posting Fatal Attraction.

Radicals are starting to simmer, and the fellows who are pulling the latest oligarchic putsch need to understand where it might all lead.  Those of us pushing for a normal, rhythmic moderate-pragmatic “reset” of the flat-open-fair social contract envision something like what Americans have done in most generations, including the two Rooseveltean flattenings… preventing the routine efforts to rebuild feudal pyramids of privilege that ruined 99% of societies, and keeping our flattened-diamond experiment going for another generation.

But read here, how others have already given up. The putsch has already gone too far, they claim!  Elias Isquith interviews Chris Hedges: “We have, to quote John Ralston Saul, “undergone a corporate coup d’état in slow motion” and it’s over. The normal mechanisms by which we carry out incremental and piecemeal reform through liberal institutions no longer function. They have been seized by corporate power — including the press. That sets the stage for inevitable blowback, because these corporations have no internal constraints, and now they have no external constraints. So they will exploit, because, as Marx understood, that’s their nature, until exhaustion or collapse.” 

Is this right?  No, not yet.  There are far too many positive trends, especially since 2013 was the best year for U.S. civil liberties in two decades or more. Something the far-left and the entire right – both of them allergic to optimism – will never admit.

Still, heed the sounds of pitchforks being sharpened and tumbrels being oiled. The Roosevelts were moderate–pragmatic alternatives to Trotsky, to Hitler, to Stalin, or Bakunin.  As I portray in Existence… any new feudal caste had better try lots harder to be actually smart, instead of delusional (like every other feudal caste, across all of time). Or else they should picture a Billion Bakunins, many millions of them armed not with pitchforks, but genetically engineered bugs. Then, envision them getting jobs serving drinks at high class resorts.

Negotiate with us. The enlightenment made you rich. Try showing it some loyalty.

 == The Pope Effect ==

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory real..“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said. 

Further -- in words likely to anger some of his conservative critics, the pope backs the science of climate change, saying "plenty of scientific studies point out that the last decades of global warming have been mostly caused by the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxide and others) especially generated by human action" 

Yep… one more gol-durned "elite" trying' to use reality to bully the plantation -- er oligarch -- er, Fox -- er, "job creator" (yeah, that's it) lords.  Down with every elite who's not a confederate plantation lord!  You listening, God?  

Okay, okay, this fellow seems to be on his way to becoming the most reasonable and insightful and most humane pope any of us have seen.  Still, and while the messages have mostly been positive, so far, I have my limits. For example, when Pope Francis “denounced what he calls the “great powers” of the world for failing to act when there was intelligence indicating Jews, Christians,homosexuals and others were being transported to death camps in Europe during World War II.”  

While I agree with the actual statement, I find it hard to swallow coming from the Vatican, whose behavior during that same time was utterly accommodating to evil forces committing those crimes.

See this simple dissection of why certain religious dogmas are absolutely tantamount to treason.

Oh, but finally then there's this...

As we speak, Republicans are pushing hard to retract all accountability measures from their own No Child Left Behind reform of U.S. education. 

Now why would they do that? I thought the whole purpose of NCLB was to use testing and comparable metrics to find out where schools are failing so that attention can be focused on them... so that no child would be left behind! 

Remember when testing and accountability were the conservative catch words?

But oh... okay. It turns out the GOP is running as fast as they can to cancel all real measuring and accountability -- for one simple reason. The accountability testing under No Child Left Behind was blatantly showing that Red States are failing. They are falling more and more behind blue states and getting worse. 

So... shall we re-evaluate processes and try to do better? What... no? Um, did I mention these are republicans? Perception is all that matters! The solution is "don't you dare look at us! Especially if we're failing!"

Oh, boy. The next year will be "fun."  Come on Jerry and Arnold ... and Jon... take off those quotation marks.


==================

*** I am still looking for a bold urban guerrilla theater ensemble to look at my script for a very easy political video. One that would be hilarious, pointed and devastating... regarding the problem of political "dynasties." Hey, don't get me wrong. Given any choice between a Bush and a Clinton (and their respective armies of factotums), it's a no-brainer. Another Bush could kill us all. And I got no beef against Hill. Except that we would never know a moment without shrill (even if unearned) rancor. This nominee cannot sooth Phase Eight of our Civil War, no matter how hard she wants to, or tries.

Still... do I have a bit of satire that could at-minimum make you all laugh and cry? Sigh.