Year: 2018

My last post was about the wildly popular grifters who are capitalizing on the resistance by peddling simple minded (and almost entirely fabricated) pablum for Trump haters. This, my last post of the year is about “Never Trumpers”. If you’re not familiar with the term, it refers to both former and current republicans for whom Trump is just a bridge too far.

They have joined the resistance to speak out against Trump, and they have been embraced by the left for doing so. Why? I mean, I kind of get why but I don’t understand the (in my opinion) unearned credibility that is being showered upon them. These are a group of people for whom Willie Horton was completely acceptable. If you’re not familiar with the background on the infamous Willie Horton ad, please take a moment to read this very well written piece by Eugene Scott. Now that you know the background, here’s the infamous ad:

Every single Never Trumper saw this unfold with George HW Bush, thought it was swell, and decided that this was the political party for them. I was a fucking teen-ager when I saw this, and I was appalled. They all watched Reagan explode the deficit, thought it was fine, and crowed on about how republicans are the party of “fiscal responsibility”. They saw that Poppy Bush had to raise taxes because Reagan’s trickle down utopia was completely untenable and kept on pushing the virtues of trickle down economics in order to trick their voters into making their very wealthy donors obscenely wealthy. They all enthusiastically created a narrative in which we can’t have nice things like free education and universal health care because a brown person would be stealing from fine white folk if we did that.

This is who Never Trumpers were, and who they still are. With the exception of two people, none of them have done any sort of mea culpa and admitted that they were wrong about everything, and that they fucked over the middle class in order to make themselves rich. I’m sorry, but until you can demonstrate that you’ve reflected on your past and realized what you’ve done, you get no credibility from me.

The vast majority of these Never Trumpers have a very shallow opposition to Trump. They don’t actually disagree with most of his policies (except for the recent troop withdrawals). They fucking loved the massive tax cuts for the obscenely rich because they refuse to acknowledge that we now have a mountain of evidence to prove that trickle down is a giant load of crap. No, their issue with Trump is stylistic. The Southern Strategy was okay with them. The giant dog whistle that Reagan blew when he made his second campaign stop of his (third) presidential run in Philadelphia, Mississippi which is only known for one thing. Willie Horton (btw, he never went by Willie but that made him sound scarier and blacker): peachy. Sitting idly by while millions of Americans dies of AIDS: nothing wrong with that. George W Bush’s vicious attacks on basic human civil rights for the LGBTQ community: meh – we gotta win, right? These are all things that Never Trumpers were on board with and helped to cultivate. Their primary issue with Trump is that he’s a little to crass in his delivery. He’s a little too impolitic for their taste. They preferred it when George HW Bush hid behind the very thin veil of pretending that Willie Horton was all Lee Atwater’s doing so he wasn’t the crass one. Let me repeat: I was a fucking teenager when I was able to identify the source of the crassness.

Their track records are what we used to refer to as credibility. We don’t do that anymore, apparently. Now, when they say mean things about Trump, we gift them credibility. As I said, the majority of Never Trumpers have never apologized for their part in building the foundation upon which Trump’s viability was built. Nicole Wallace: no apology. Rick Wilson: no apology. Steve Schmidt: no fucking apology. I can do this all day, so for the sake of being concise, let me tell you who did apologize: Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot.

I apologize, I can’t find Jennifer Rubin’s mea culpa to save my life, but here’s Max Boot’s. The majority of reactions to this article on Twitter were vicious attacks. Mine was not:

I share that to let you know that I am not an unreasonable person. I’m actually a sunny optimist, which is why I’m so bitchy. Bitchy people are bitchy because they’re constantly being let down by the world. Happy people are the ones who are deeply jaded, and whose expectations are constantly being met and therefore have no reason to be bitchy. You laugh, but this is really my theory. Anyway, I digress. My point is that the mea culpa is the gateway to the road of credibility. It is not instant credibility, but it is the necessary first step toward eventually building some. Anyone who skips that step is merely a craven opportunist, looking to build themselves a lifeboat because their livelihoods can’t survive staying on the sinking ship that is the GOP.

So people like Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, and Rick Wilson have zero credibility. They are “resisting” only to save their miserable careers. They have not joined our movement: they’re here to usurp it. Please do not make the mistake of believing otherwise because they are snakes who will most certainly bite you someday, and you would be wise not to elevate them in a way that gives them more power to do so. The absolute worst among this pack of life boating wolves are Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski. These are two vapid, star fucking scumbags who can’t even apologize for their part in lionizing Trump. And on top of all that, they’re not very bright. I was on a business trip a few months ago, so I was staying in a hotel. I turned on the TV in the morning (something I never do when I’m home because I find cable news to be totally worthless) for some background noise and in the hope of getting at least some news. I landed on Morning Joe and I swear that listening to them for an hour actually made me dumber.

A couple of snakes have already emerged to undermine liberals and liberalism. Wanna know who they are? Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin. If you clicked on those links, you would see that they went right back home the first chance they got. Lionizing George H.W. Bush as some sort of honorable statesman clearly demonstrates a lack of understanding of the foundation that Trump was build on. Reading those articles made me super bitchy.

You wanna know who else has undermined liberals and liberalism? Liberal commentators like Rachel Maddow who allow people like Nicole Wallace to occupy a seat at the discussion table, when that seat rightfully belongs to a long list of people who were on the right side of politics all along. That seat should be occupied by someone with credibility (i.e. a track record of being on the right side of history). Perhaps Thom Hartman, Sam Seder, or Amy Goodman? How about Phil Donahue who was fired by MSNBC for opposing Bush and Cheney’s Iraq war at the very moment that Nicole Wallace was helping to make it happen. How’s that for an idea? Color me crazy, but I would prefer to hear the opinions of someone who has been right about most things over the past twenty years, than to hear from someone who started being right about one thing two years ago. Credibility is important. In some ways, the liberals who aid and abet the life boating of republican snakes are the most destructive members of the media.

I am not saying that Never Trumpers have no value, but I am saying that they have no credibility and that you should understand that they’re not really with you. They should be regarded as tools to be used by those of us who have been on the right side of history all along, to achieve our goals. Once those goals are achieved, they should be discarded because they’re only tools. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t listen to them, follow them, or share their content. You should. Some of them like Rick Wilson are delightful reads. He is extremely intelligent lots of fun to read but he’s a tool until he does a true mea culpa. And every time you share their work, you should remind people that, “the guy (or woman) who thought George W Bush was awesome has this to say about Trump”. Keep them in the tool box where they belong, lest they escape and hurt more people.

Steve Schmidt should not feel emboldened enough to tell democrats what to do. When I hear him comment on Bernie Sanders and how socialism isn’t the right path for the democratic party, I want to punch him in the face with every fucking thing he did to build a party that embraces Trump so whole heartedly. Hey Steve, you can take your advice and shove it up your ass! Maybe you don’t give democrats any advice until you’ve successfully fixed the republican party?

So that’s my final rant of the year. I would like to wish all of my readers and followers a very happy new year. I appreciate your support more than you will ever know. As an aside, I believe that 2019 will be a very good year, full of tasty treats like Michael Flynn’s court appearance a couple of weeks ago. I genuinely feel good about 2019 but then again, I’m a sunny optimist.

Everyone knows that, except that an increasing number of people have forgotten. For the purpose of this piece, I’m using the word “Pravda” to refer to all fake news designed to push an agenda. For example, Fox “News” is republican Pravda. Breitbart is far right wing whackadoodle Pravda.

If you’re reading this, you know who all the right wing propagandists are so this piece is about left wing Pravda. It’s growing, and it’s making me sad. I see more and more fake “news” becoming increasingly popular on social media.

If you follow me on Facebook or Twitter, you may have realized that I never post anything from (for example) Share Blue. Why? Because they’re not journalists. Share Blue was created by the democratic establishment to push their agenda. So when you read an article on their site, you should know that they don’t exist to inform. They exist advance the DNC’s agenda.

I only share articles from credible, journalistic sources but as with everything, there are some caveats. Before I get to that, let me spell out what a “credible, journalistic source” is. It’s basically any long established newspaper in the world. Your local paper is a credible, journalistic source. They all publish news stories from the AP or Reuters and they also have opinion pieces from either syndicated columnists or local writers. Newspapers are good because the “news” section is separate from the “opinion” section so it’s harder to confuse the two than it is online. That’s not to say that credible journalistic outfits can’t have a bias. They absolutely can, which is why I read multiple different sources. A journalistic outfit’s bias usually manifests not in how they report, but what they report. The Guardian is an excellent left leaning newspaper in the UK. They’re left leaning not because they twist the news to push a lefty agenda. They’re left leaning because they tend to select stories to report on from a liberal perspective. That does not mean that the stories they publish aren’t well sourced and demonstrably accurate. They are a very reliable left leaning source.

I do share articles from credible aggregators. An example of a credible aggregator is Raw Story. Raw Story only aggregates stories that demonstrate that left is best! They do not peddle bullshit stories that are full of distortions and lies, and they always either link to, or disclose the original source of their stories.

I do occasionally share links from credible blogs that I trust because I have been reading those bloggers for years and they have a good track record of good analysis. More often than not, I will share a news story that was the basis for an interesting blog that I read. Examples of blogs that I rely on to inform myself are Empty Wheel, Digby,  David Dayen (who writes for dozens of different publications), and Driftglass (for perspective).

I absolutely stay from left wing garbage sites, some of which I’m going to list because I see them everywhere and they annoy the fuck out of me. If I see another retweet or link to the Krassenstein grifters, I’m going to scream. Please click on that link. These guys are shady as fuck. They went from profiting from some pretty heinous grifting to suddenly being “resistance leaders”. They are grifters, and I have no use for the hyperbolic bullshit that they peddle. If Trump is about to be indicted by Mueller, I’m going to wait for The Washington Post to tell me. I don’t need to get it from two shady characters who call themselves “Hill Reporters” even though they’re nowhere near the hill, not affiliated The Hill (that fine establishment mouthpiece), and they’re not fucking reporters.

Another one I despise is the click baity (and frequently wrong) Palmer Report. This guy specializes in peddling (or furthering) total bullshit about the Russia investigation. All you have to do, is look at 1 weeks worth of stories from a year or more ago to find how wrong his “news” is. But people keep sharing his crap with no regard to his track record. Credible left leaning outlets are starting to call this guy out for his bullshit. Marcy Wheeler (empthwheel) is doing some really in-depth analysis on the Russia investigation, stitching together empirical facts to tell us what’s happening and she’s got 149,000 followers on Twitter. Palmer, who appears to have no regard for the truth because that won’t get him the clicks, has 249,000 followers. WHY?

Dctribune.org is pretty new (it was just registered in Ontario, CA 4 months ago), but it’s already getting social media traction. Most of their stories are 100% baseless but they’re anti-Trump so they get shared.

Here’s what I don’t get about these sites: Trump is doing so much fakakta shit every single day, what use does anyone have for the manufactured crap? How is it possible for liberals to be on the right side of history, and still have the taint of Pravda on them?

It’s maddening, and you all need to stop it. You’re making me unnecessarily bitchy about stupid bullshit I don’t have time for.

I figured out the formula for getting millions of readers and social media followers years ago, but I don’t want to run a stupid meme factory or peddle hyperbolic headlines for clicks. If I post a tweet that says, “Melania feels bullied. I don’t care, do you” I can get thousands of retweets. But if I post an article about the fuckery in Wisconsin, 3 people will be bothered to share that link.

It’s fucking pathetic and you can’t look down at Fox News viewers if you’re peddling the same kind of crap.

If you are reading this, your mind immediately went to Trump and his supporters when you read the title. And yes, Trump supporters are suffering from advanced stage Cult Of Personality Disorder (or COPD) but so is just about everyone else, and it must stop. You will never, ever form rational opinions or be able to truly protect your own self interests as long as you’re susceptible to being COPDed.

Why is this on my mind? Well, it’s always on my mind but a large volume of the tweets I’ve been seeing on Twitter for the past couple of days have really highlighted the problem for me.

A couple of days ago, TMZ reported that Michael Avenatti was arrested for felony domestic violence on his ex-wife. Now I didn’t know what to think, except that I did notice that the story was light on details and that I needed more to form an opinion. We knew that Avenatti was arrested, that he bonded out, and that he vehemently denied the allegations (who wouldn’t?). Yesterday, his ex-wife came out and said that she wasn’t involved in the incident and that he had never abused her. We also found out that he wasn’t charged with a felony. So some of the story is starting to fall apart, but he was arrested so something happened. Whether that something is just an allegation or an actual crime, we don’t know. People were really fucking quick to decide that he was either being set up, or a wife beating maniac. None of those people had any more information than I did. They were all projecting the opinions they had already formed about Avenatti on this situation to create a reality that would comport with the narrative they’d already established about him.

I have to confess that it was easy for me to have no opinion on the reporting, and to want to wait for more evidence because I’m conflicted about Avenatti as it is. I freaking loved watching him throw around Trump and Michael Cohen around like rag dolls when he first entered the public sphere. He’s clearly very intelligent, and an extremely skilled attorney. And then he started to do that whole, “I’m thinking about running for president” and “the next democratic nominee needs to be a white male” crap and I realized that he’s a time bomb ticking away, destined to blow up. He’s really fucking arrogant, and entirely too cocksure about his righteousness not to implode. So I didn’t feel any sore of irrational emotional attachment to Avenatti one way or another to come to a premature conclusion about what actually happened. I’ve said this a million times, but I’m not prone to see public figures in that way.

That said, I’m still slightly susceptible to being COPDed. Slightly. When news came out about Eric Schneiderman’s history of violence with women, I was sorely disappointed. I didn’t want it to be true, but I was still in the wait-for-the-facts camp. They did come out, and I was very saddened by what I learned about him. He was one of the best AGs New York ever had. But I accepted the truth and wholeheartedly embraced the calls for his resignation.

Michael Avenatti is not your daddy. He’s also not your abusive step dad. There’s no fucking reason in the world not to wait and see what we learn. And you can all wait a few weeks for your gratification or disappointment. There’s no reason to form an opinion now. Doing so, just makes you a child. And is makes you no better than a Trump supporter.

The same thing is happening with Nancy Pelosi. Before the election, it wasn’t acceptable to criticize her because “we need to stay united until the election”. This is not the right time to talk about another speaker of the house. Now that the election is over, this same twits have made her out to be the only savior of the democratic party. She is our great leader, and she is the only person who can do this job. And if you don’t agree, it’s because of misogyny. Well, some of us want a different speaker, and we’re not misogynists. We actually have excellent reasons for wanting someone whose priorities better align with the wishes of the constituents.

When Democrats took the house in 2008, did you know anyone who didn’t want investigations into the fuckery of the George W Bush administration? I mean, those motherfuckers took us into war by lying to us. They outed a CIA agent, and did a myriad of other things that expanded the scope of executive power far beyond what the constitution lays out. Republicans gave Bush the power to essentially declare war without congressional approval, for fuck’s sake. That had to be reined in to save our democracy. But no, Nancy didn’t want to look back because anything that happened in the past isn’t a crime, and we can only look ahead. Well guess what? The path ahead was exponentially more terrifying because you didn’t want to look back. President Obama enjoyed the powers that the previous administration gave him, and he didn’t always use them wisely. That’s a different discussion. My point is that she made a huge mistake that irreparably fucked our democracy.

“But she passed the ACA, and that makes her a goddess!” She did. I’ll give her that. She fought for a better bill than what Obama and his then Chief Of Staff was willing to fight for. But precisely no one in America was clamoring for the ACA. In fact, the majority of Americans wanted (and still do) single payer (or Medicare for all). In poll after poll, Americans want either the option of buying into Medicare or straight up Medicare for all. But Nancy took that off the table before negotiations even began. So we ended up with a fakakta version of Switzerland’s (the second most expensive in the world, after the US) health care system except where the Swiss cap “administrative” costs for insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies at 5%, we went with a much more generous 20%. Twenty percent. Administrative costs are all of the costs that aren’t directly spent on delivering health care. They include marketing, profits, and lavish executive salaries. Medicare’s administrative costs are 4%. And unlike in Switzerland, the ACA didn’t cap profits for medical device companies or big pharma. In fact, it extended the time that drug companies can keep their drugs (which we subsidize the development of) under patent for 50% longer than they could before.

The ACA was a fakakta plan that was better than the shit show we had before. And with precisely the same number of republican votes, we could have gotten Medicare for all. At the very least, if democrats had opened negotiations with Medicare for all, we could have gotten something more robust than the ACA. But Nancy couldn’t do that because she had to protect the corporate donors.

She is very good at being Speaker. She knows how to whip votes, and she never brings a vote to the floor that she isn’t going to win. That makes her exponentially more competent than Chuck Schumer, who couldn’t even keep his caucus in line when it came to appointing a rapey, beer loving boofer to the Supreme Court. But her agenda does not support my self interests so I don’t support her.

I don’t have to make her the devil or an angel to have my opinion. She’s both very competent in the job of speaker, and very bad for me in that position. So I would be willing on taking a chance at someone who might not be as good at the job, but whose agenda doesn’t include bullshit like pay-go, which hurts me personally.

In making decisions like an adult, you have to look at all of the evidence before you (or wait for it all to come in) and then weigh the pros and cons. You do not delete the cons and overstate the pros (or vice versa) to make it easier on yourself. When that is your practice, you’re most definitely going to fall into the cult of personality disorder trap and it doesn’t matter where on the political spectrum you fall.

You can’t accuse Trumpistas of doing exactly what you’re doing.

FDR committed one of the most abhorrent atrocities in US history when he interned the Japanese and he single handedly created the middle class in America by being a traitor to his class. You have to acknowledge both of these things when deciding how you feel about him as a president. I have my thoughts, and I’m happy to have an intellectually honest discussion about him and a myriad of different people and topics.

I’m just despondent over the fact that Americans aren’t capable of this anymore. I know it’s not easy not to fall for a cult of personality, but we have to try harder.

I’m going to keep this post short and sweet. It’s unlikely at this point, that Brett Kavanaugh is going to be confirmed to the Supreme Court. Very unlikely. Not impossible, but very unlikely.

But he isn’t going to make it for all the wrong reasons.

The very fact that a political operative would even get a confirmation hearing for the highest court in the land, has already burned down any semblance of integrity in our system of checks and balances. That what Brett Kavanaugh is: a political operative. He’s not an arbiter of justice. He does not interpret the laws. He has spent his entire career focused on doing what needs to be done in order for republicans to win. Full stop.

The thin veneer that we used to cling onto between partisan and jurist is gone. This asshole actively participated in the actual witch hunt against Bill Clinton, enabled every fucked up thing that George W Bush ever did, and perjured himself three times in regard to stolen materials that he used in order to win for his team. That’s not even getting into all of his other perjury. That repeated perjury demonstrates that he has no regard for the law.

Am I delighted that history of sexual assault is going to prevent him from a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court? Of course. But he never should have gotten a hearing. And frankly, I don’t know why the discussion is still whether he should be confirmed or not. The discussion should be around whether to start impeachment proceedings against him for the seat that he currently holds.

That’s what everyone should be talking about right now.

Republicans are acting like this is a criminal proceeding, and that Kavanaugh’s life is going to “be ruined” if he doesn’t get a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land. Much to my dismay, this is a job interview, not a criminal prosecution.

If republicans are going to be hyperbolic about democrats taking it easy on this piece of shit, then I say that the resistance should rise up and give these assholes what they’re afraid of.

As an aside, I’d like to address all of the people who are screaming about how suspicious these “last minute” allegations are. There is no last minute. Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court justices don’t have a set amount of time in which they must be completed. They can go on for years of that’s what senators want to do. So this “deadline” is completely artificial, and has clearly been set to truncate the confirmation process of a very shady nominee. The fact that we’re starting to learn some of the reasons for why republicans are trying to rush this through doesn’t make any of this “last minute” and you shouldn’t accept that premise with anyone you’re debating about this.

Kavanaugh’s implosion does make in unlikely that the senate will confirm a nominee before the election, which means that we have to fight like hell to take back the senate. Flipping it isn’t likely, but it’s doable. For the purists out there, this means supporting less than liberal candidates because they’re still more influenceable than their republican opponents.

Here’s the summary I posted to Facebook last week:

• Jacky Rosen is leading by 2 points in Nevada. She needs money to win this!
• Claire McCaskill is in a tie. We need to keep this seat, even though she’s not an ideal candidate.
• John Tester is barely leading in his race. We need to keep this seat, even though he’s not an ideal candidate.
• Joe Donnelly is only down two pints in Indiana. He needs money to win this!
• Kyrsten Sinema is up three points in freaking Arizona! She needs money to win this!
• Bill Nelson is only up by one point in Florida. We needs to keep this seat, even though he’s not an ideal candidate.
• Phil Bredesen is only down three points in TN. This one is the least likely on my list, but still totally winnable. He people to volunteer to phone bank (you can do this from any state).
• Beto rocks, and he totally has a shot at this seat. He needs money and phone bankers to keep up the momentum.
• Heidi Heitkamp is in trouble. We need to keep that seat. She needs money! She’s not ideal, but we have much more influence over her than we would over her opponent.

Notice how I didn’t try and sell you a bill of goods about how awesome each of these candidates are? Well, that’s because I’m not a liar for political expedience. You can trust that when I’m enthusiastic about a candidate, it’s because I truly believe that they will represent our self interests. You can also trust me when I tell you that the time for ideological purity is in the primaries. I’m a yuuuuuugggge advocate for ideological purity, when it’s logical to have those thresholds in place. That time has passed. The general election is time for pragmatism and protecting your own self interest.

So to recap:

• Primaries = promoting your own self interest.
• General election = protecting your own self interest.

I recently posted the followig thread on Twitter:

Here’s the deal, #Resisters and #FBRparty people: There are a lot of fake accounts joining our ranks. But that’s okay if you REALLY know what to look for. They’re not going to turn one day and start posting pro #MAGA crap and filling your feed with that. They’re going to flood your feed with fake stories that look GOOD to you. Stories about Roger Stone’s assistant flipping, for example. You need to FACT CHECK before you retweet. Don’t retweet because you LIKE a post. dctribune.org is BOGUS!

Retweet because you KNOW it’s true. If you can’t confirm a story on a credible JOURNALISTIC (i.e.newspapers) outlet, it’s not real. If you found it on Share Blue, or Palmer told you, FACT CHECK!  If it BASICALLY looks like CNN or CBS, FACT CHECK. If it’s a site you’ve never heard of w/ words like “tribune” or “times”, FACT CHECK! Reading fake pro #maga BS isn’t going to hurt us. Sharing bogus stories will. FACT CHECK!

If you see an account repeatedly posting crap, DON’T block. Expose them. Follow their bogus stories around Twitter and nullify them. In the meantime, FOLLOW back and unite.

• I DO NOT block out people who I don’t agree with on everything. I often get people on my Facebook or Twitter pages who want to let me know that they “like my stuff”, but this is just unacceptable so “I’m unfollowing you”. Good. You’re too stupid to follow me and if your opinions are so fragile that they can’t handle exposure to differing opinions, you won’t be contributing anything valuable to my page anyway.
• I follow a significant (maybe half) percentage of people who post things I don’t agree with. Not crazy bullshit like Pizzagate but (for example) Hillary supporters who still bash Bernie on a regular basis. Why? First, because I’m very confident in my decision to support Bernie in the primaries. I made a well researched, reasoned and unemotional decision based on my own self interest. Nothing that anyone who made a different decision has to say is going to make me melt or hurt my fee fees. Secondly, maybe we can have a discussion and have a meeting of the minds on some things. Or not. My point is that if you can’t talk to people who are on a different part of the spectrum on the left, you literally can’t talk to anyone. Lastly, you can’t earnestly say that you’re making reasoned decisions if you’re distilling what you’re consuming down to only that which supports those decisions.
• I earnestly believe that the entire spectrum of legitimate governing approaches exists only on what we used to call the left at this point. The “right” has no governing principals left, and are purely a vehicle for propaganda and divisiveness in order to distract people from realizing that they have no governing principals or ideas left. So the self identified left is the whole spectrum now, ranging from neoliberals on the right to democratic socialists on the left. I am decidedly a democratic socialist. For every piece I read that comes from my beloved democratic socialist perspective, I read one from a neoliberal (or democratic establishment type). You have to challenge yourself, if for no other reason, than to more finely tune your perspective. Sometimes I rethink things, and sometimes I end up with the tools to better craft an argument for my perspective. Absolutely nothing happens when you only read what you like.
• There is no one I agree with more than about 80%. If you find yourself agreeing with a website or TV commentator 100% of the time, you’ve turned off your brain and abandoned critical thinking entirely. You have to think about what you’re hearing or reading critically. If you don’t, you’re not being informed: you’re being programmed and you should immediately stop it! Think. Question the premise you’re being given, and most of all: fact check.

In the meantime, read nothing but this blog and the content I post on my social media pages, and never, ever question a single thing I tell you because there are NO facts in the world, other than the ones I present!

I originally posted this to my Facebook page on January 11, 2018. It somehow disappeared from my timeline but I managed to retrieve it. I wanted to have it in another location that I can backup and save so I’m reposting it here.

These are my thoughts after reading Glenn Simpson’s testimony to the senate.

Here are the things that stood out to me (they’re ALL things that everyone else skipped over).

There’s no way to explain this in a short post, so stay with me.

A couple of years before Fusion GPS was hired to look into Trump, they were hired by a US law firm representing a Russian “real estate” firm called Prevezon. Prevezon was being investigated by Preet Bharara for stealing and laundering $230 million dollars. The 2 very interesting things you need to know about this, is that:
1. The money was allegedly stolen from a hedge fund called Hermitage Capitol, which is owned by an American expat named Bill Browder.
2. The money was laundered through the purchase of high end real estate in Manhattan.

Okay, so in 2014, Fusion GPS is basically working FOR a company controlled by Russian oligarchs, and created for the purpose of laundering money in the US. One of that company’s lawyers, by the way was Natalia Veselnitskaya who met with little Fredo Junior at Trump tower in June, 2016 to talk about “adoption”. Wanna know why she was in New York at that time? To deal with the Prevazon case that Preet Bharara was prosecuting. That case was settled for a comical $5.9M ($5.9M to settle a $230M crime????) that the acting (remember, they fired Preet Bharara) AG for Southern District Of Manhattan came up with almost exactly a year later. So I guess she thought she would kill two birds with one stone and since she was already in Manhattan to represent Russian oligarch clients, she would just mosey over to Trump Tower to pow wow about “adoption” (I will explain that later).

I’m assuming that at this point I’ve got your interest, and that you’re definitely going to stick with me on this?

Fast forward about a year and a half, and Fusion has now been hired by a republican to investigate Trump. Glenn Simpson’s testimony extensively and emphatically stated that they were not just looking at Trump’s Russia connections, and that they were looking at all of his business dealings.

I call bullshit. I think that Fusion collected enough information when their job was to gather information that was going to help the Russian oligarchs, that they knew exactly where to focus their investigative efforts on Trump.

You guys probably already know everything about Chris Steele’s information, so I’m not going though that again except to tell you that in July, he discovered that the Russians have compromised Donald Trump, and that they’re also meddling in our elections to discredit Hillary Clinton. Steele immediately goes to the FBI with everything he’s gathered on Trump, but hears nothing back. He goes back to them in October, when his FBI contact told him that they never got back to him because they had also collected the same evidence he had collected, and were able to corroborate what he gave them. How? They had a source inside the campaign.

Okay, now on to “adoption”. For this, we have to go back to Hermitage Capital and Bill Browder. Browder realized that $230 million dollars was missing from his hedge fund. He hired a forensic accountant in Russia to investigate. The guy he hired was Sergei Magnitsky, who found that the theft was committed by (among others) Prevezon and that there was large scale theft from the Russian state that was carried out by the Russian oligarchs and Russian officials. He was arrested and subsequently beaten to death in a Russian prison. That prompted more sanctions against Russia, which the Obama administration imposed (it’s called the Magnitsky Act). Putin’s suspension of the adoption of Russian orphans by Americans was a direct response to the Magnitsky Act. Everybody who knows anything about Russian foreign policy knows that “adoption” is code for repealing the Magnitsky Act.

Is it possible that Fredo Junior didn’t know this? It’s extremely possible, given how ignorant these hillbilly Trumps are about everything, but it doesn’t matter because “adoption” was the talking point he was given by either little Natalia or her bosses after the meeting was reported in the press. We all saw the emails that clearly spell out that the meeting was about getting dirt from Russia on Hillary.  It’s also irrelevant because the massive money laundering by Trump had already happened.

There’s one thing about the testimony that has me completely flummoxed. Glenn Simpson spent approximately 1/4 of his testimony on portraying Bill Browder as a shady money launderer. If you don’t know anything about Browder, Hermitage, Fusion, or anything else involved in this, his laser focus on Browder would still sound suspicious. Simpson clearly has a hard on for Browder. There is nothing shady about Bill Browder. I know this, because Preet Bharara was the investigator on the Prevazon case, and after he was fired, he had Browder on his podcast to tell his story. I feel pretty confident that Bharara wouldn’t have done that if he had found anything to impeach Browder’s credibility. No, the smearing of Browder is purely a Putin creation. Browder outsmarted Putin by getting all of his money back, and Putin is steaming mad about it.  There’s something big we don’t know about Simpson and his motivations in furthering Purin’s propaganda in regard to Browder. But whatever it is, it has nothing to do with what they found in regard to Trump colluding with Putin (there’s NO chance that he didn’t). But, it does make me think that there’s something very shady about Simpson.

So basically everyone involved in this is a varying degree of shady as fuck. Everyone except for Chris Steele and Bill Browder.

Nonsense.

I read a dozen stories with this headline the day after every single election, and they’re all bullshit. They’re not bullshit because I want them to be. They’re bullshit because they’re bullshit, and I’m going to show you why they’re bullshit.

First, let me start with how to spot the bullshit. If the piece you’re reading doesn’t go into which candidate had the most money, it’s bullshit. If the piece doesn’t mention that in America, 94% of all house races (82% for the senate) are won by the candidate with the most money, than the story is bullshit. By the way, this was true of 100% of presidential races since 1960, until 2016, but that one had a major caveat in the form of the billions of dollars in free advertising that Trump got from “news” shows. If the article doesn’t spell out when an endorsement comes with funding, it’s bullshit. Some organizations or people endorse by lending their name. Others like Emily’s List endorse and include an avalanche of money. That’s important information to have, since Emily’s List consistently “endorses” the least progressive candidate in every race they get involved with.

So now that you know the historical numbers, let’s look at how Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and PCCC candidates are doing. First some quick background. The PCCC (Progressive Change Campaign Committee) has been around since 2009 so less than 10 years. Our revolution was founded in 2016, and Justice Democrats was formed last year.

They should be getting massacred in over 90% of the races they have endorsed candidates in, right? In fact, in order to honestly proclaim that Bernie’s movement is a failure, they would have do perform under that 6% baseline. So how are they doing?

Well, as it happens Five Thirty Eight took a look. Just so you know, they didn’t get into money, but I think it’s safe to say that nearly all, of not all of the candidates that these three organizations ran were outspent. If they weren’t, then it’s because they raised more money from small contribution donors than their opponents did from the DNC or (for example) Emily’s List. I promise you that none of the Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, or PCCC candidates got any outside help at all. Not even from local media.

In 2018, PCCC (who incidentally are nearly solely responsible for giving us Elizabeth Warren) endorsed (and financially supported) fifteen candidates. Of those fifteen, ten won. That’s a pretty fucking awesome 67% victory rate. That’s over ten times better than the 6% overall baseline number.

Five Thirty Eight broke out Bernie’s endorsements from Our Revolution’s. I don’t know why but I’m combining them since Bernie’s endorsements were the cashless version of Our Revolution’s endorsements that come with financial support. They put Bernie’s victory rate at 56%. I’m going to go with Our Revolution’s performance instead. In 2018, Our Revolution endorsed eighty-five candidates. Twenty-seven of those won, giving Our Revolution a 32% victory rate. That’s over five times better than the 6% overall baseline number.

I’d like to pause for a second to point out that if I was trying to bullshit you by trying to create the reality I want, instead of the one that we’re living. I would I would have used the Bernie figure of 56% and you never would have known that I manipulated you. But that’s not how I roll. Wishing doesn’t make it so, and deluding yourself doesn’t change reality. It merely disconnects you from being able to recognize it, and allows you your delusional happy thoughts for a little while longer.

Okay, now onto Justice Democrats. They endorsed (with financial support) fifty candidates in 2018. Seventeen of those candidates won (one more victory was called after the Five Thirty Eight article came out). That’s a 34% victory rate. That’s over five times better than the 6% overall baseline number.

Is Bernie’s progressive movement “dead”? Not even fucking remotely, and don’t let anyone tell you that it is. Don’t let them tell you it is because you want it to be, and don’t let them tell you it is in order to discourage you.

These articles are being written by establishment shills to discourage you from voting for anyone other than their selected candidate. They want to hang onto power, and they will do anything to that end.

I don’t know what sane person thinks that a primary in which a candidate with no money, no comb, and no tailor takes 43% of the democratic vote thinks that the establishment is in good shape. That should have been a major warning sign, but it wasn’t. The democratic establishment is doing exactly what they’ve been doing for the past thirty years, but they’ve added more propaganda to their repertoire to combat the insurgency.

The electorate in America is changing, and it’s not going to change back. So for all the die hard Hillary supporters who are rabidly anti-anything having to do with Bernie (they savage Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez more on social media more than republicans do): you are the ones who will be handing unnecessary victories to republicans because the changes you’re fighting against are inevitable. Liberals, by definition don’t move backwards. Millennials (they’re starting to turn 40 soon, btw), who have been fucked by thirty years of right wing and neoliberal policies are not suddenly going to embrace the democratic party because they suck less than republicans. That’s just not going to happen. Yes, Obama gave us the ACA but he didn’t even try for medicare for all, and Bill Clinton permanently fucked welfare. Democrats suck less. That’s the best thing you can say about them, and that’s how millennials and Gen Z (they’re 22 now) see them.

Fifty-seven percent of self identified democrats (or democratic leaners) have a favorable view of socialism. That’s ten percent higher than the percentage of democrats (or democratic leaners) who have a favorable view of capitalism. This bell isn’t going to be unrung, and it’s going to get louder as the electorate goes out with the old and in with the new. I’m sorry baby boomers, I know this is hard to hear but the changes are going to continue to happen whether you jump on board or not. You had your time, and things didn’t go well for the middle class. Maybe consider the idea that the new generations aren’t foolish (40 year old) kids? They, after all were not the ones who once called themselves proud “Reagan democrats”. Maybe you guys can listen to them? Or not, it really doesn’t matter.

Primaries are for voting your values. You should vote for the candidate who best represents your values and your economic interests. If that candidate for you is the DNC is backed candidate, then have at it. If it’s an “insurgent” progressive, than have at that too.

The general election is for falling in line, and I’m telling you that you have to fall in line in the general election because the worst democrat is going to hurt your interests less than the best republican at this point. That statement wouldn’t be true if you took the best republican from thirty years ago and put (let’s keep it real) him up against the worst democrat. But it’s true now. The republican party is a cesspool of greed, insanity, and corruption these days.

She announced this yesterday, and I have lots of thoughts on this. This post is seemingly going to be all over the place, but I have a lot to say and a lot of ancillary points to make so bare with me.

Before I get to her announcement, I’d like to share my thoughts in Gillibrand. Before she ran for Hillary’s senate seat, Kirsten Gillibrand was a congresswoman from a conservative congressional district in upstate New York. During that period, she described her own congressional voting record as “one of the most conservative in the state.” She was endorsed by the NRA, who gave her a 100% rating so she was the bestest kind of ammosexual who loved to brag about the gun she kept under her bed. She was not for marriage equality, but instead supported civil unions.

Needless to say, I had no interest in voting for Annie Oakley to become our next senator. I knew that there was no chance that she wasn’t going to win, but she wasn’t going to do it with my vote. By the time she ran for that senate seat again in 2013, her voting record in the senate had won my vote.

I changed my mind, based on new facts (so much more on this later.)

I wouldn’t say that at that (or any) point, that I was an enthusiastic supporter. She’s certainly never impressed me like Bernie or Elizabeth Warren but nonetheless, she impressed me enough to get my vote. I have always had a healthy skepticism about her for a couple of reasons:

• She’s clearly a chameleon, capable of becoming anything she needs to become.
• She’s pretty entrenched in the democratic establishment, which always makes me wary. I’m especially wary of democratic establishment candidates from the tristate area, since we’re the epicenter of special interest political contributions.

Healthy skepticism. That’s pretty much how I look at all politicians.What does that really mean? It means that I look at every vote they cast, every statement they make, and every action they take on an individual basis, completely siloed from every previous statement, vote, and action. So when a really scummy politician like Jan Brewer takes the Medicaid expansion money in the ACA, thereby expanding access to insurance for hundreds of thousands of her constituents in Arizona, I give her credit for doing the right thing. This doesn’t mean that I’ve forgotten every loathsome thing she had done prior to that day, nor does it mean that I became a fan of hers. It simply means that my mind can process each act on its own merit, and that my brain doesn’t short circuit when it needs to hold two seemingly (but not really) contradictory facts in my head. Jan Brewer made a string of terrible decisions that hurt the people of Arizona. She disrespected the president in a disgusting and racially tinged way and she helped hundreds of thousands of Arizonians get health care. My brain is perfectly content holding all of these facts for me to rely on later.

I don’t have the compulsion to lionize or demonize politicians because politics should not be emotional. When you do anything emotionally, you make the worst decisions.

Here’s another thing I don’t care about: why Jan Brewer took that Medicaid money. I don’t care. I don’t care if she did it for craven political aspirations, or if she did it with the purest of motives. Her thought process is irrelevant to the bottom line, which is that she helped her constituents in a monumental way that day. I am not capable or attributing motivations to people without projecting my own feelings on them, and neither are you. When we start to play the motive game, it’s really nothing more than a tool that we use to avoid that whole short-circuit-of-the-brain thing that happens when you have to hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts in your head.

She did a good thing with bad motivations, so I don’t have to process a good thing since I’ve skillfully negated it and therefore saved my brain the pain of embracing nuance.

This was a difficult habit for me to break, and I must admit that I haven’t entirely broken it but I’m close. We all need to learn to break this habit because it’s poisoning our political decision making process.

If there’s any one thing I’m trying to do with this platform, it’s to get people to think more critically. It’s also an exercise in refining and improving my own critical thinking skills.

I used to love Bill Clinton because he made me feel warm and fuzzy. And then I objectively looked at his record, and his part in shaping the direction of the democratic party. I no longer love Bill Clinton (expect when I’m talking to him – the man can charm like no human on earth should be able to). I have mixed feelings about Bill Clinton, as I do about every politician. So should you.

Now back to Gillibrand. She posted this to Twitter yesterday:

If you’re a longtime follower of mine, you would know that money in politics is my central issue. It is the issue that if solved, solves the lion’s share of our other issues. If you’ve been following me for a couple of years, you would never know this because American is a giant dumpster fire at the moment and I have to dedicate all of my time to addressing the Chief Arsonist. But I digress.

The fact that she has made this move is massive. She’s obviously seriously considering a presidential run. I sincerely hope she does run, because that would make her the second candidate in modern history not to take barrel fulls of corporate money. I want this issue to appear prominently in this next presidential election.

I haven’t spent a single second thinking about her motivations because she’s doing the best thing here.

I was a strong Bernie Sanders supporter in the primaries. He’s also clearly gearing up for a presidential run. Unlike most people, I’m not automatically supporting Bernie because I got so emotionally invested in him last time around that he’s my daddy now. No, I’m going to look at the options before me and reassess. I’ve already vetted Bernie, so the good news is that I don’t need to do that again. But as an informed member of the electorate, I must vet the options I get next time around and give each person running an earnest assessment without projecting my emotions on to them.

I am enthusiastically going to consider someone that I once referred to as “the Annie Oakley of New York” for president because what she’s already done furthers my central issue. I have no compulsion to negate that progress on my core issue by attributing nefarious intentions to her. It simply doesn’t matter to me, because I’ve already won.

So my  point in this post is twofold:

I wanted to share my own evolution of thought with you, and hopefully encourage you to leave your emotions behind and think critically about political decisions you make.

I wanted to let you know what a great thing Kirsten Gillibrand is doing, and hope that you take a look at her if she does indeed run for president.

This last presidential election fell apart for two primary reasons: corruption and emotional voting. I sincerely hope we don’t all go through that again (or worse, in perpetuity).

I haven’t posted in a long time because my day job has had me really busy, but I had an exchange yesterday on my Facebook page that prompted me to make time for this post.

The exchange came about because a Trump supporter didn’t want to comment on the article I posted about how Trump’s condos are increasingly being purchased by shell companies (and in cash), which are tell tale signs of money laundering. This commenter instead thought that it would be more convenient for him to talk about how the (legal) immgrunts are robbing him blind with their welfare and such. That didn’t turn out very convenient for him when, after he posted some erroneous (and on it’s face, suspicious) data suggesting that them rapey Mexicans are mooching the majority of that welfare money. I then produced data from several sources demonstrating that the “data” he presented was completely wrong, and selectively manipulated to make racists and xenophobes angry. It’s hard to imagine that it’s possible to find manipulated data, designed to bolster a nefarious agenda on the internet, but it is true. This particular source has a long history of not only bias, but flat out racism.

Anyway, I’m not going to get into any of the government assistance program data. Doing so would entail writing a 16 part series that needs to encompass not only laying out all forms of government assistance (but let me assure you that 86% of us are getting something), demographic consumption of said government assistance, institutional racism that keeps certain demographics from anything resembling equality of opportunity, and results (meaning, what happens to people at incremental stages of receiving public assistance). I will write that 16 part series some day when I’m retired and living in France, where I can get some of that sweet, sweet socialist healthcare (and delightful wine) in my old age.

I want to focus this post in on what I know from living and working in the three largest cities in America. Don’t worry, there will also be some very valuable data! As some of you know, I’m an HR professional. Throughout my career, my focus has largely been on talent acquisition, although I did do a good amount of consulting on benefits packages. I currently live in New York, but I’m working with a company in San Francisco. I’ve recruited engineering professionals on and off in the bay area since the mid 90s so I’ve been intimately aware of the labor market for “highly skilled” workers through a few booms and busts.

I always joke that I’ve been recruiting in the tech space, since Java was a child. It’s true. When I first started hiring Java developers, Java was fairly new and it was just a web development language. C++ developers didn’t take it seriously, and never thought that it would be usable on enterprise applications. The point is that Java was brand new, but in extremely high demand at that time (it was 1995) because that’s the language that the internet was going to grow on.

Here are some of my experiences and observations over the past two decades:

• In 1995, the most experience with Java that anyone could have had, was around 3 years. At that time, I was offering candidates with two years of Java development experience (in the bay area) between $130k – $150k. A senior developer (five or more years of experience – some of which would had to have been in C++) would get between $150k – $160k.
• Today, an entry level (meaning fresh out of their masters program) developer in the bay area will start at $125k. Senior level developers (five or more years of development experience) are making between $160k – $190k. That’s not much of an increase over the past twenty years. I’m going to get back to this in a minute.
• Back then (as is the case now), there were nowhere near the number of US citizens needed to fill these positions. That’s just a fact. And anyone who claims otherwise has never been responsible for filling an engineering position in any major city (you know, where all the jobs are) in America. Americans are simply not getting computer science degrees in the numbers that we need them to. If you don’t believe me, invest $350 on a job ad on Monster, Dice, or Indeed and see who applies. You will pay to re-up that post for months, waiting for a qualified native born American to apply.
• An interesting observation I made when I started off, was noticing that different types of engineers seemed to be concentrated in different countries. India was largely bringing us developers. Networking engineers were largely coming from China. QA engineers were mostly coming from Eastern Europe. These patterns largely held true until about five or six years ago. Those patterns still exist, although there does seem to be more diversification. We’re getting lots of developers from Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and China. Experts in Machine Learning (that wasn’t a thing twenty years ago) are mostly Chinese and Russian. Each country had their own ideas where the big money or big growth was going to be in the technology ecosystem.
• The entrepreneurs were largely immigrants, even in the early days of the internet (Sergey Brin and Jerry Yang come to mind off the top of my head).
• That brings me to data.  A recent Yale study found that 44 out of 87 privately held companies valued at over $1 billion had at least one immigrant founder. It estimates that each of these immigrant-founded companies created 760 jobs.

Here’s another article that says that immigrants start twenty percent of the new businesses in America. They account for thirteen percent of the population, but are creating twenty percent of the new businesses. Twenty percent of Inc’s Fortune 500 CEO list in 2014 were immigrants. From the article:

Immigrant-owned businesses pay an estimated $126 billion in wages per year, employing 1 in 10 Americans who work for private companies. In 2010, immigrant-owned businesses generated more than $775 billion in sales. If immigrant America were a stock, you’d be an idiot not to buy it.

By the way, those numbers and all of the numbers in all of the studies I’m posting don’t encompass the jobs created by first generation Americans, born to immigrants because I guess they’re old news or something?

Here’s another study that demonstrates that immigrants create jobs without lowering wages. From the study:

Each immigrant creates 1.2 local jobs for local workers, most of them going to native workers, and 62% of these jobs are in non-traded services. Immigrants appear to raise local non-tradeables sector wages and to attract native-born workers from elsewhere in the country.

And here’s yet another study from The Pew Research Center that reinforces the conclusions of the previous studies and articles, and adds that immigrants are self employed at a slightly higher percentage than native born Americans.

Okay, I can post data from a variety of credible sources all day but you get my point (also, you can find it on your own). Now back to me and my experiences.

The xenophobe from yesterday who inspired this post, made the assertion (naturally sans data) that the legal foreign workers are suppressing wages. That would appear to be bolstered by the wage numbers I shared above. But those numbers don’t tell a story. They’re just single data points. Immigrants categorically do not lower wages in “highly skilled” (meaning a degree is required) professions. Not exactly. What I left out of the wages I shared above, is what happened between 1995 and today. In both 1995 and today, we’re damned near the top of the employment market so the wages I shared are as good as it gets. Now, right after an economic bubble bursts, those wages go down for the same jobs. So an entry level developer will start at $90k – $100k instead of $125k. A senior engineer’s salary will drop to $150k – $160k for the same job because there aren’t thousands of startups or large, VC funded enterprises competing for the talent. So in 2001, Google will lower the wage for a senior engineer from $190k to 160k and they will collude with Apple and Amazon (among others) to make sure that $160k salary sticks. They will squeeze out the engineers making the 1999 salary of $190k (and that guy’s next job will pay $160 because he doesn’t have a choice). That’s why the wages for even professionals with graduate degrees aren’t going up. It’s not the immgrunts fault, it’s the never ending greed of corporate America and unless you know that Hadoop isn’t a Disney character, no one is taking your job or suppressing your wages.

Do I think that undocumented immigrants are lowering wages for unskilled workers. No, I’m not buying that, although I’m open to reviewing any credible evidence you might want to offer. Here’s that happened in Georgia when they cracked down on eye-legal immgrunts. Even with a high unemployment rate, and the possibility of earning $20 an hour, Americans don’t want to work in the fields. The same thing happened in Arizona, Arkansas, and South Carolina. Some of those farmers were offering the $20 an hour salary, and a 401k. This was still no bueno for unemployed native born Americans.

We do not have a manufacturing based economy. We have a consumption based economy, so we need as many consumers earning as much as they can to keep chugging along.

So to summarize, we have legal immigrants creating jobs and filling jobs that we don’t have the native born work force to fill. We have undocumented immigrants doing jobs that Americans simply won’t do. Are there jobs somewhere in the middle that are being adversely affected by immigrants? Perhaps, but I frankly can’t think of any, and my expertise really isn’t at the lower range of the wage spectrum.

So the xenophobe from yesterday kept asking me if I wanted to do something about immigration. I do. I want to incrementally increase it every year, with a review on ROI every ten years. The bottom line is that this is a country of immigrants, and if it hopes to survive, it needs to embrace its roots. Two hundred and fifty years of immigration has made America a place where very smart or very hard working (or very smart and very hard working) people from other countries want to come.

I say, that no immigrant comes from a shithole too big to deny entry to this country.

With that, I will leave you with Chinedu Echeruo. He came to the US from that shithole, Nigeria and rather than go back to his “hut” founded HopStop which he subsequently sold to Apple (which came to be because of a confluence of events that started with a refugee from Syria coming to America) for $1 billion dollars.