The political reformation …

Some years back Glenn Beck used a graphic divided in half to  demonstrate how the media and politicians view Americans – liberal or conservative; Republican or Democrat. 

Then he took the same graphic and redrew it to show 30% on the left, 30% on the right, and 40% in the middle – this, he said, is what really describes Americans. There are more of us in the middle – politically and philosophically – than at either extreme. 

If anything, since then, the middle has grown even more.

Today’s political establishment – be they Republican or Democrat – has become ossified. Each party has created their own separate orthodoxies. To be a “true” Republican or Democrat and get the support of the establishment you must adhere strictly to the orthodoxy of the party. Otherwise you are an apostate no longer worthy to worship at the church of your party. 

I use this religious analogy because the Republican and Democrat parties function like fundamentalist religious institutions. It’s a grievous sin to question party dogma.   

Republicans are now fighting over who is a “true conservative.”  Democrats are fighting over who is a “true progressive.” There are litmus tests for each.

True conservatives must be opposed to abortion in any form for any reason. They must oppose any form of gun control. They must be in favor of smaller government, strictly enforced borders, marriage as only between one man and one woman, cutting funds to Planned Parenthood, prayer in school or anywhere, a stronger military (increased military spending), and school vouchers.   

Ted Cruz hits on all of these.  

True progressives must be in favor of wealth redistribution (higher taxes on the rich), increasing the minimum wage, restrictions on gun purchases, no restrictions on abortions, student loan forgiveness, a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, free universal healthcare, reducing dependence on fossil fuels, increased funding for public schools, better salaries for teachers, and more expansive government entitlements. 

Hillary hits on all of these.  

But do you really want either one?  

Take a look at those lists again. 

What are you?  Are you a conservative or progressive based on these?  Is anybody truly one or the other?  Or do most of us have mixed opinions? 

That’s one reason Trump is winning. It’s a broad rejection by Americans to being held hostage to the rigid orthodoxy of either the far left or the far right.

Like it or not, we are experiencing a political reformation. Trump speaks to the ambiguity – if not animosity – many Americans have toward political correctness and business as usual. His mantra is simple: overthrow the status quo.  And it has traction.

A vote for Trump is a vote against both the Republican and Democrat parties.  It’s a vote against the media on both the left and the right.  It’s a vote against every politician now in Congress. He defies traditional categorization between liberal and conservative – he holds somewhat liberal positions on many social issues, and somewhat conservative positions on others. 

In short, he’s more like most Americans than the politicians trying to appease their far-left or far-right constituencies.  He also changes his mind from time to time – something we all do – and refuses to be locked into traditional Republican or arch-conservative, issues.

His supporters like Trump as a whole; not for one hot-button issue or another. They accept that they may disagree with him on some things, agree with him on others, but in the bigger picture the single issues are outweighed by what Trump as a whole represents – radical change. 

And that, in a nutshell, is what his supporters want. They don’t really care if he’s not 100% on every issue; as long as he tells them what he thinks, not just what they want to hear, he comes across as the only honest candidate running for President. 

That explains why the political establishment and media who continue to apply single-issue parameters to Trump are so often wrong.

Pundits predicted Trump would not get the support of evangelicals because he wasn’t strong enough on abortion, traditional marriage, and other core “family values” issues.  They were wrong; he won evangelicals in recent caucuses and primaries.  They also predicted Hispanics would never support him because of his desire to seal our border; again they were wrong as he’s getting more of the Hispanic vote all the time. He couldn’t win with women; again wrong.

The truth is, the pundits and media keep applying the wrong metrics to Trump. 

Trump’s turned his back on the big-money donors, wannabe king-makers, and political pundits in the Republican Party. He openly mocks Karl Rove, Mitt Romney and John McCain as political failures out of touch with reality. He doesn’t care what the Tea Party or the Club for Growth wants. He isn’t worried about alienating “the base.” He’s making a new base.    

While Democrats rail against the rich, he proudly promotes that he is rich – or “really, really rich” as he put it. He is unabashedly proud of what he is, unlike Mitt Romney who always seemed to try too hard to be “one of the people”; Trump’s not like other people and flaunts it.      

And he keeps winning without party support, as well as in the face of their opposition.    

All of the above is probably why he’s winning with the disaffected of both major parties and overwhelmingly with independents.  Whenever he’s on the ballot, the number of voters soars, and he’s winning the lion’s share of those. 

The Republican establishment worries he can’t beat Hillary, because in head-to-head polling Hillary beats him. 

Again, there’s more to the story.  That presumes Hillary supporters turn out to vote.  Right now there’s a dramatic enthusiasm gap between Republican primary and caucus voters and Democrats in the same events.  The spread is spectacular. 

In Iowa, about 1500 people turned out for the Democrat Caucus; over 180,000 for the Republican Caucus. In New Hampshire about 30% more Republican voters showed up than Democrats; and Hillary got clobbered almost two to one there by a 74-year old Socialist.

Get used to Trump folks.  The political reformation has begun.   

Heather from account services …

Heather calls me on my cell phone a lot to tell me about special credit card rates now available to me.  Sadly, I’ve never taken her up on the offer. 

Before Heather, Rachel from account services used to call.  She also had special offers for me.  Again, I never took any of these.

Maybe that’s why Rachel stopped calling.  Maybe she was fired.  She seemed too young to retire.  Maybe Heather killed her and took her place.  Could have been one of those seed-pod things like Invaders from Mars. One day she’s Rachel; the next she’s Heather. The cheerful voice is almost identical but … I don’t know. Maybe Rachel and Heather are related?   

I hope Rachel is okay. She used to call me at least once every few weeks. Then nothing.

Don’t get me wrong, Heather seems nice and all, but it’s not the same. Rachel from account services and I had sort of a bond that stretched over years.  Rachel didn’t stand on formalities – she’d call me during the day, during dinner, while I was in a business meeting, while I was driving, on the weekend, even while I was at a funeral. 

Rachel from account services was just like that, impulsive. Part of her charm.   

I don’t know how Rachel got my cell phone number, but somehow Heather now has it. 

So do a lot of other people, apparently.

Lately I’ve been getting several voicemails at work and also on my cell from somebody who says he’s just following up on my interest in enrolling in ObamaCare. He always makes it sound like he just missed me, which is weird because my phone doesn’t even ring when he calls.  Even stranger is that I don’t remember ever expressing an interest in enrolling in ObamaCare.

He sounds nice, though.  Still, I haven’t gotten around to returning his call. 

Then there are the calls I get telling me how I’ve won a free cruise for two, or a trip to Disney World.  Sometimes it’s a woman, sometimes a man. They seem pretty excited.  I don’t have the heart to tell them I’ve already booked all the cruises we’ll take this year, plus we don’t have kids – now that we’re in our 60s Disney World doesn’t seem that appealing. 

Even if I might be interested, I’m kind of turned off because they never tell me their names. That’s odd. That’s no way to build a solid relationship. 

At least Heather from account services always introduces herself.  Even the emails I get from former soldiers who fought in Iraq, widows of Nigerian politicians, or lawyers for estates left to me by people I never knew, always, always introduce themselves. 

If someone isn’t willing to tell you their name, I tend to be suspicious.

Could just be me, but that’s how I feel. 

Privacy vs. national security …

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”   Benjamin Franklin

The FBI has a court order to force Apple to disable a password feature on the iPhone of the San Bernardino murderers so the FBI can look at data possibly stored on that device. 

So far, Apple has refused. 

Trump has said Apple is wrong, and that it should just do what the FBI wants. Others agree.

I don’t. 

The FBI isn’t asking that Apple simply unlock the phone – which is what the FBI and the Obama Administration want everyone to believe.  No, what the FBI is demanding is that Apple engineer a special program the FBI can use to defeat Apple’s built in protections against hackers. 

Right now if you enter the wrong password a set number of times, all the data on that device are deleted.  The FBI wants Apple to provide a tool so it can use what’s called “brute-force” hacking – generating and trying as many password combinations as needed – to access data. 

Those in favor of forcing Apple to do this say that in this day and age law enforcement should be able to access encrypted data to prevent acts of terror.  Further, they say that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be opposed to this; it would only be used under strictly controlled circumstances, and only with the approval of a judge, so your private data will be protected. 

To those people I have two words:  Eric Snowden. 

If Apple makes that tool to unlock data for the FBI, how long do you think it will be before the government, as usual, screws up and that tool gets out?  How long do you think it will take before China, Russia, Iran, and other totalitarian regimes have that tool to spy on their own citizens – or on our own citizens?  At the very least, they’ll demand Apple unlock phones just as for the FBI. 

Think of the data people have on their iPhones.  Many bank online. Access their medical records online.  Store passwords for all their accounts on their iPhone, as well as send personal and business e-mail though their iPhone.  Do you want all that available to the FBI and others? 

I’m not a big Apple fan. I think they make decent, well-designed products, but usually charge a ridiculous premium simply because of the Apple name.  Their services – like iTunes – are nice, but again overpriced.  Apple sucks at making browsers and a lot of other applications. 

They also make mistakes. But this time they haven’t. They intentionally built protections into their iPhones and related devices to thwart hackers, whether those are criminals operating out of Eastern Bloc countries or bureaucrats operating out of our own government agencies. 

Will this make it harder for law enforcement to track terrorists?  Probably. 

But the tradeoff in our freedom and liberty for greater security is far too great.  If the FBI gets its way, what’s to prevent other government agencies from also demanding access for “national security” reasons? 

When the government asks us to sacrifice our rights for security, they are overreaching.  And as we’ve seen too many times recently, the erosion of our rights ostensibly for the common good gives the government too much power which it will surely abuse.    

Apple is correct to resist. 

I don’t trust our own government to keep our private data private anymore.  

I certainly don’t trust that our government won’t ultimately misuse that data for its own purposes. 

There’s too much history that shows it will. 

Wackadoodle politics …

Has America gone nuts? 

On one side of the political spectrum we have people who ignore reality.  On the other side we have people who … well, also ignore reality. 

Here’s reality:

We’re out of money. 

We are over $18 trillion in debt. The Chinese hold a huge part of that debt. And that $18 trillion doesn’t include our future Social Security or Medicare/Medicaid obligations, government pensions, bailing out big company pensions that go bust, or a whole range of other things. We have to borrow more money every day just to fund current operations.

We simply cannot afford to maintain the entitlements we have now, much less add more. There’s no extra money under the seat cushions to pay for free college tuition for everyone, write offs of student debt, to bail out speculators, to rescue poorly run companies or cities, or to fund pie-in-the-sky pork-barrel projects.

We’re broke. We need to cut expenses. Not increase them. 

We have to raise taxes on everyone. 

We’re in such desperate straits that we can’t keep the tax system we have.  Right now – through various credits, exemptions, and subsidies set up by both parties – about half the population pays no Federal taxes at all, and some people who pay no taxes get a refund on taxes they didn’t pay.

That’s no way to run a country. Hell, you couldn’t run a lemonade stand like that.  If half your customers paid nothing, and some got more money back than they paid,  you’d go under.   

Yet that’s our tax system in a nutshell. The only solution is to tax everyone at some rate and at the same time eliminate all the extraneous credits and exemptions. 

For example, there should be no mortgage interest deduction.  There should be no offset against your Federal taxes for the state and local taxes you pay. There should be no earned income tax credit, no dependent exemptions, no child-care credit, no credits for buying anything. 

End all the exemptions, credits and subsidies and you can lower the effective income tax rate overall to something more manageable and responsible, and then apply it to everyone. 

All the blathering about a “fair tax,” a “flat tax,” a VAT, a national sales tax or some other variant is just hot air unless it gets rid of all the other crap in the tax code and makes everyone pay taxes.

If anyone says, “well, of course we’ll exempt the first X thousands of household income” they aren’t serious about solving the problem.  If they claim they can raise revenues by taxing the rich more and leaving the rest of the tax structure in place, they are too stupid for any elected office. 

Everybody, and I mean everybody, has to pay taxes. Until every American has skin in the game and their own money on the line, they won’t care how much government spends and on what. 

The economy sucks. 

It’s a mile wide but only an inch deep. The oft-heralded unemployment figures hide a lot. Most of the job growth is in low-paying jobs.  Or government jobs that only increase government spending and increase the debt further. Better paying manufacturing jobs are moving to lower wage countries abroad; there’s absolutely nothing anyone can do about that.

The unemployment rate is going down not because more people have jobs but the exact opposite:  fewer people are looking for full-time jobs.  Some have simply given up and are now living on various forms of public assistance or entitlements while they wait for Social Security to kick in. Others have settled for part-time jobs.  In either case, they are technically no longer looking for full-time employment, and that’s what the unemployment rate counts.  It’s a mirage.   

Actual household income has declined dramatically in recent years. Less income means less consumer spending, and less consumer spending means the economy isn’t moving forward.  

Too many immigrants drive down wages.    

That’s why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is in favor of allowing more immigrants – illegal or legal – into this country. Big Democrat supporters, like Silicon Valley tycoons, want more loopholes in immigration laws to hire cheaper talent from abroad, which will reduce good-paying opportunities for U.S. citizens.

Access to cheaper labor is also why businesses – particularly agribusiness conglomerates – oppose E-Verify and enhanced penalties on companies that hire illegals – cheaper labor helps them boost profits. Forget about the handful of illegals working in restaurants; they are just the tip of the iceberg compared to the thousands upon thousands working for next to nothing in meatpacking and chicken processing operations, and the thousands of South Asians making good money working on H1Bs in technology and big pharma companies.

The old line is that you can’t get Americans to do these jobs, or that you can’t find Americans with the qualifications needed to do these jobs.

The truth is you can’t at the wages these companies are willing to pay. The whole support by businesses of open borders and lax immigration enforcement is about one thing:  profit.  

And the only reason Democrats want to open our borders is pure politics. They love it when Republicans rant about illegal immigrants and closing our borders.  That drives those immigrants and their families into the open arms of the Democrats. 

We need a national identity card with biometrics. 

Enough already about how this would be an invasion of privacy – you need a picture ID to board a plane, buy cigarettes or liquor, or to purchase Advil Cold & Sinus tablets at Costco or Walmart. 

But for some reason that’s too much to ask for anything else, like voting. 

In this day and age a national ID card with biometrics makes sense. If we had one we would know who is here.  We could verify who is a citizen, and entitled to the benefits of citizenship, and who isn’t.  Yet that’s the very same reason why there’s such fierce opposition to it – a lot of folks and institutions have a vested interest in claiming not to know that.

Eliminating voter fraud is just one benefit. The real payoff would come from stripping non-citizens of benefits and entitlements they now receive but shouldn’t.  Democrats like to say that this fraud isn’t widespread, but it is – by its own admission, the IRS alone has paid out billions in fraudulent refunds and bogus earned income tax credits to illegals over the years.

While illegals aren’t supposed to get food stamps or other public assistance by law, do you really think they aren’t? 

Curiously, when we have trouble tracking down illegal immigrants once they get here, whether by jumping the border or overstaying their visa, nobody in either party has brought up a national ID card as part of the solution.    

Instead, they talk about building a wall or not building a wall. A national identity card would be a lot cheaper and a lot more effective.

The hardcore supporters of Trump and Obama are cut from the same cloth. 

They both want a king.  And they couldn’t care less about the Constitution.

Trump and Obama make statements that are blatantly false, ignore or try to rewrite history, resort to personal attacks when things don’t go their way, and say outrageous things that defy logic. Both are narcissistic blowhards and bullies who show a complete and utter disdain for the rule of law, or even good manners.

Their supporters don’t care. 

As Trump famously said, he could shoot someone in Times Square and his supporters would still be all-in for him.  As arrogant – and downright stupid – that sounds, he’s probably right.  Obama releases known Taliban terrorist leaders in exchange for a deserter and celebrates that in the Rose Garden, calling the deserter a hero, and his supporters don’t care.   

Trump blames George W. Bush for not preventing 911 and lying about WMDs as a pretense for invading Iraq – almost a word-for-word restatement of the far left’s position – and his supporters don’t care.  Obama tries to humiliate Justices of the Supreme Court, sitting right in front of him, in a State of the Union address and his supporters don’t care.

Trump says he would revoke the right of citizenship to children born on American soil to noncitizens, which is probably unconstitutional at worst and legally iffy at best, and his supporters cheer him on.  Obama claims that he doesn’t need the approval of Congress to do whatever he wants as long as he has “a pen and a phone,” and his supporters cheer him on. 

Too often Trump and Obama are wrong about history, wrong about what’s in or not in the Constitution, wrong about the powers of the President, wrong about a lot of things.

But they are dead on about what their hardcore supporters want – an all-powerful king.

Americans aren’t interested in solving our real problems. 

They’d rather watch cat videos online and spout bumper-sticker logic. 

That’s how Trump can get away with his “Make America Great Again” slogan without providing any details.  It’s how Sanders can get away with his nutso proposals that can’t possibly be paid for even if you sucked every dime out of the economy. And it’s how Hillary – a multimillionaire, former Senator and Secretary of State – can get away with claiming women still suffer from income inequality and lack of opportunities because of gender discrimination. 

It’s all bullshit. But nobody cares.        

A Puppetry major …

The University of Connecticut is setting up a special section in its dorms exclusively for black males. The big idea is that black males don’t do as well at UConn because they are dispersed across the general student population. That keeps them from getting the support they need from other black male students. Grouping them together supposedly will solve this. 

The plan was immediately attacked by black female students at UConn who wondered why only black males got their own separate section in a dorm. If black males got this, why shouldn’t black females also be entitled to the same? Other non-black students on the UConn campus seemed somewhat divided in their opinions. 

Now, I’m reading all this and can’t believe the sheer stupidity and hypocrisy of some college administration actively promoting segregation on a modern campus as a solution to poor performance among black males. If this were happening at a Southern school – there would be pickets and news crews around the clock.  How more insane can this get, I’m thinking. 

And then, near the end of the same article I see something that trumps all.  There’s a quote from some student that anyone opposed to this plan is simply a racist. 

He or she is identified as a “Puppetry major” at UConn.   

Seriously.  A Puppetry major. You can actually major in Puppetry at UConn.  Who knew?

UConn estimates annual costs – tuition and expenses – at a bit more than $25,000 for in-state students. You could easily spend $100,000 over four years and come out with a major in puppetry.  Which, I suppose, would qualify you for … what?  Is there a decent-paying entry-level job that might help a puppetry major pay that debt off? What are the upside career prospects for advancing in the field of professional puppetry?  Does that field even exist?  

In one article you can see the absolute insanity of today’s higher education system. Administrators protecting black male students from the very integration their grandparents fought and bled for.  Outrage by one group over special treatment given to another group but not to them.  Students majoring in subjects – like puppetry – that for most will never, ever yield jobs with incomes sufficient to pay off their college debt.   

Then you have Bernie Sanders and Hillary promising free tuition and elimination of college debt to woo the college-age voters and their parents. It's not surprising that a fairly large part of the voting public is eating this up.  

It’s just nuts. People wonder why today's college students aren't prepared for the real world. Or why they can't find good jobs once they graduate. 

Wonder no more.  All the answers were in the article I'm referencing.     

Someone posted an Internet meme the other day that  said, in essence, if you want to solve income inequality try majoring in engineering instead of feminist dance therapy. 

Or, I would add, Puppetry.   

One primary, one day …

If there’s one thing that absolutely must be fixed it’s our stupid primary system. It brings choosing nominees for President down to the level of American Idol or the X Factor. In short, it’s a popularity contest where people select based on ignorance and oppose out of prejudice.    

Worse, the current primary structure rewards narrow-focus candidates appealing to micro slices of the electorate who only want a candidate who agrees with them 100%. You can’t be like most of us – with mixed views depending on the issue – and expect to win in the primaries.

If you believe the Constitution guarantees your right to own a gun, you can’t also be in favor of reasonable gun controls. If you support cracking down on illegal immigration, you can’t also be in favor of providing a logical, legal path to citizenship for those already here.  If you are pro-choice, you can’t also want any controls on abortion providers.

The primaries are too either/or, just to appease particular groups.      

It’s at the root of how messed up our entire political process has become.

It causes candidates – and the media – to spend outrageous amounts of time and money wooing voters in places that simply don’t reflect the wants and needs of most Americans.  I mean, how often do ordinary Americans in parts of the country outside Iowa talk about ethanol and wind energy subsidies? Have you ever discussed the farm bill over a beer with your friends?   

The primaries are just a grand opportunity for locals to fleece outsiders, which they do, jacking up the rates for hotel rooms, doubling restaurant prices, gouging for 2-3 times the regular rate for everything. Local media gets a big payday from outsider money, people get temp jobs managing volunteers stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors. Venues get booked.  Flyers and mailers get printed.  Everything – including the pitch – has to be customized for each state primary.

It’s a huge boost to local economies.   But it’s all unnecessary bullshit. 

The money and attention are why states so jealously guard their individual primaries. The money matters most, however. Iowa’s Republican governor recently said he feared that if Hillary loses in the Iowa caucuses – again – yet this time goes on to become President, she’ll strip Iowa of its “first-in-the-nation” contest, which would cost the state millions. 

Please note that his biggest fear if she is elected is losing his state’s place at the trough.

And trough is what it is.  Unless there’s a mass shooting or aliens from outer space land there, what news organization in its right mind would send camera crews and reporters to Iowa in the dead of winter otherwise? 

Similarly, I love New Hampshire, but no one would campaign there – much less spend millions there – if it wasn’t one of the earliest primary states. It nor Iowa are hardly representative of the rest of the nation, racially, ethnically, occupationally, or by almost any other metric.  

But the Iowa caucuses and then the New Hampshire primaries are accorded the same reverence as prophets in the Old Testament, when they should be treated with as much seriousness as a fortune cookie. The last Republican Iowa caucus winner was Rick Santorum. The last Democrat Iowa caucus winner was Obama.  So what?  Same nomination odds as a coin flip. 

Despite the media crapola about “real America” reflected in the early primaries, these don’t mean a damn thing especially now. While the media and political wonks bloviate on about possible winners and losers and how this will affect the race, the real winners are the local economies.

Man-on-the-street interviews with possible Iowa caucus attendees may focus on how much they wish this were already over so the barrage of ads, mailers, and flyers would stop. Yet as Tucker Carlson noted this morning on Fox from Des Moines, a lot of Iowans wish the caucuses lasted much longer solely because all the money these bring in. 

This is a costly useless tradition that should end.  It doesn’t yield the best candidates; only those who survived the primaries by pandering to their most extreme followers. Make no mistake – the most polarized are the most likely to vote in primaries. 

The moderate middle of the electorate isn’t represented.   

The solution is simple. One national Presidential primary on one day – sometime in June of the election year; top two vote getters face off in November for a winner-take-all matchup.  

Could those be from the same party?  Sure. Improbable, yes; impossible, no.

To get into the one-day primary, only candidates polling more than 10% nationally by the end of April would qualify; not 10% of their party, but 10% overall among all registered voters. 

I think this would weed out the radicals and party establishment candidates.  That’s who loves the primary system we have now.  And why we keep getting lousy Presidents.