Fools' names and fools' faces

 

There are a great many people in this world who seem to have a very high opinion of themselves that is not always justified by the things that they say, or how the media covers them—which itself is an institution populated by a great many superstars-in-their-own-minds types. In the past week we have seen several examples of this. Take for instance Jennifer Weisselberg, who no one ever heard of until a few weeks ago, when she suddenly became “famous” for turning over financial records which she was given in a divorce settlement with the son of Allen Weisselberg, who the Manhattan District Attorney is attempting to persuade to “turn” on Donald Trump. Why she should be given such records was probably due to the fact she had no idea on how to “interpret” them.

Jennifer Weisselberg has also bragged to the media about the seemingly innocuous questions asked of her by the DA, and by way of “explanation” of why she doesn’t seem to do much, she claims to be the victim of domestic and sexual violence, although her ex-husband, Barry Weisselberg, has repeatedly claimed he never raised a hand to her. This seems like one of those Johnny Depp/Amber Heard cases; a CBS News story that otherwise inflates her “importance” and “victimhood” mentions this in passing without any further elucidation:

Barry, who in 2017 sought and then withdrew a request for an order of protection against Jennifer, citing “bodily harm,” ultimately received full custody of their two children.

There is almost no information to be gleaned on the Internet that reveals more about this apparently dysfunctional relationship, but being a former ballerina, we can infer that Jennifer Weisselberg is a bit of a “diva.” Anyways, I don’t think that this person looks like the kind who wants kids getting in the way of a good time:

Meanwhile, being a long-time Green Bay Packer fan, it was already frustrating to listen to a former “hero” reveal himself to be tone deaf before the last election by posting on social media his endorsement of Trump; it isn’t a shock” that a white guy in Mississippi would vote for a Neanderthal like Trump so long he is the right “color,” but we really don’t need to know the reasons for it coming from a state whose record of race relations is infamous in this country’s history.  But last week Brett Favre made news again when he complained about how he doesn’t like to see “politics” when he watches a football game.

That’s a bit hypocritical on a variety of fronts. First of all, the only “politics” you might see in a football game is before the game starts; secondly, people only know Favre as a former football player, and being a Hall-of-Famer he ought to know better than to make a fool of himself by openly supporting a fascist and a racist, because he is himself inserting his own politics in a sport that is majority black. Thirdly, Favre reveals himself to be tone deaf in the aftermath of January 6, and he seems to think that only right-wing athletes like himself have the “right” to intone on political and social issues.

And then there is Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, who had a little tiff with Dr. Anthony Fauci at a congressional hearing, before he was told to “shut your mouth” by Rep. Maxine Waters. What was interesting about the exchange was how they each framed the COVID-19 pandemic—Jordan as an issue of First Amendment rights, freedom and personal liberty, and Fauci as a public health issue. Who is right? You can’t exactly exercise your “liberties” if you are dead. You’d think that common sense dictates to “err” on the safe side, but Jordan—who former Speaker of the House John Boehner has called a “legislative terrorist”—is also a “terrorist” on public health issues. With nearly 600,000 dead from the virus in this country, with new and possibly more dangerous strains of the virus about, and younger people and children becoming the most likely candidates for infection, Jordan only wants to inject far-right propaganda one-liners.

Fauci became visibly upset by what he called Jordan’s “ranting,” particularly after he gave Jordan a number—10,000 a day or less—of new infections in combination with sufficient numbers of people vaccinated as a framework sufficient to begin a “gradual” move toward normalcy. That Jordan thinks that people’s rights are being “trampled on” because of “mask orders, curfews and capacity limits on businesses” shows plainly that he is playing to his base, particularly male Republican voters who polling claims is the demographic most opposed to vaccinations, let alone mask wearing. Jordan obviously believes that playing to a limited crowd of fools makes him look to them like a “constitutional scholar,” or a “man of the people,” or some garbage like that. The reality is that he is what Boehner said he is: a destructive little man who can’t shut his mouth.

So there you have it, a week where (and not even counting more mass shootings) how completely different people are “newsworthy” for the wrong reasons: a mostly nobody who gains “fame” because she happens to be accidentally attached, like a blood-sucking sea lamprey to a whale, to people who are in the news. Or  a hypocritical former star athlete who can’t get out of the way of his own tone-deaf politics, and a Republican politician who is the epitome of stupid is as stupid says—and there are a lot of those. And in all three cases, these people think that they actually are “important” in the grand scheme of things—or at least that is what they and the media think.

The latest evidence reveals that the "Oath Keepers" only kept their "oaths" as long as incompetent Capitol police allowed them to; facing jail time, they've suddenly forgotten their "oaths"

 

The other day I observed on a digital billboard a public service advertisement reminding people that there is still a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the man caught on surveillance cameras planting pipe bombs near the DNC and RNC headquarters in Washington D.C. the evening before Congress was to reaffirm the 2020 presidential election results. It is believed that the bombs were meant to be a “distraction,” but they never detonated. The fact that the perpetrator has yet to be identified, and the reward still stands, indicates that there is still much discover in what was clearly coordinated pre-planning before the attack on the Capitol building, an attack that many on the right (not to mention Donald Trump) still try to characterize as just a stroll in the park, save for a troublemaker or two out for a few laughs. This of course was far from the reality.

For example, we are not only discovering the extent to which there was “planning” by far-right extremists to engage in violent action “if necessary,” but that Capitol Hill police were not only aware of this could happen, but purposely chose to at least initially limit their response in order to avoid any kind of confrontation—a strategy that may have prevented even more bloodshed, but also resulted in “optics” that made the riot look even worse. The assumption that Trump supporters were more “civilized” and “law-abiding” than left-wing protesters proved to be not only demonstrably false, but posed the greatest danger to constitutional democracy since the Civil War. The January 6 insurrection was more than a merely existential threat—it was happening in real time, and something no one should take for granted will not occur again so long as Trump and his disciples (like Kristi Noem) remain threats to constitutional order (let alone public health).

While Confederate and neo-Nazi flags in support of Trump roamed the Capitol building, with offices ransacked and $30 million dollars in damage by “patriotic” thugs, emails had been exchanged by members of the extremist group Oath Keepers, who claim to take an "oath" to "defend the Constitution" from "foreign and domestic" threats. These messages revealed that there were preparations made to organize a “quick reaction force” to counter any action taken against them. They may have believed that they would face BLM or Antifa counter-protesters, but those groups were not in fact present. But law enforcement was sparing in their use of weapons of any kind—although it might have been quite a different story if police were not facing nearly all-white, supposedly law-enforcement “friendly” rioters.

Prosecutors have discovered messages that indicate that members of the Oath Keepers were instructed to bring “full gear”—meaning “combat ready” outfits—and that weapons would be supplied as necessary at a “farm location,” which turned out to be a Comfort Inn in Arlington, VA. Video cameras showed several people identified as members of the group were seen making multiple trips to the room carrying what appeared to be various concealments for weapons. 

A dozen or more members of the Oath Keepers or person associated with them are expected to be charged in a conspiracy to recruit, organize and possibly direct an armed assault on the Capitol. One of those being charged, Jessica Watkins, was neck-deep in all of it, yet she now “disavows” the extremist group. Watkins, who organized a personal militia group in Ohio, preposterously claimed in court that “Given the result of everything on January 6 and everything that has come out, my fellow Oath Keepers have turned my stomach against it. Which is why I’m canceling my Oath Keeper Membership. I have no desire to continue with people who say things like that.”

Some are calling Watkins—who is transgender—a “naïve patriot,” which is something you wouldn’t usually call someone who served in the military in Afghanistan, or as a “civilian” recruited and trained her own private anti-government militia. If she believed all of Trump’s lies, that doesn’t make her “naïve”—that makes her at least a white nationalist who is afraid of actually going to jail, as most of her fellow partners in crime are. She wasn’t just a member of the Oath Keepers, but as a recruiter and “trainer” she was one of the organization’s ideologists; she now claims she was “lied” to—but she was an eager participant in spreading those lies. Watkins also claims that “she” can’t go to jail because her “gender identity” might would put her in harm’s way—something Watkins should have taken into consideration before believing that if Trump was “immune” from accountability for his crimes, then they all were.

Watkins didn’t stop there with the bullshit either: “I am sorry for any inconvenience I have caused the court. I am not a criminally minded person. I am humbled and I am humiliated that I am even here today.” What? Note that Watkins doesn’t say that she is “sorry” for the “inconvenience” she and her cohorts perpetrated on Congress and the peaceful transfer of power. This is the same person who boasted on social media about her participation in the storming of the Capitol and that it was a “historical event”—even asserting that Fox News was “wrong” to criticize their actions. Watkins, of course, wasn’t the only cowardly Oath Keeper charged in the insurrection whose “oath” melted like a snowball in hell when confronted with the reality that trying to overthrow the government wasn’t like recess in the playground, and then it was back to the classroom; it seems unfathomable that so-called adults need to be “schooled” on the basics of civics, yet here we are.

Meanwhile, Politico is reporting that Inspector General Michael Bolton has found a completely inept response to the insurrection by the Capitol police, particularly by its Civil Disturbance Unit, which was poorly trained with outdated tactics, and apparently little has been learned since the insurrection. The police failed to take the intelligence they received seriously, including the threat assessment that the “target” of the pro-Trump mob was not likely to be counterprotesters, but the Capitol building itself. Rather than prepare for the worst,  the danger was “minimized” in official memos, even claiming that there was no substantial evidence that the pro-Trump mob was likely to have a high concentration of far-right groups which were violence prone—thus the resulting lack of readiness and the lack of effective riot control equipment, including riot control grenade launchers, by “an order from leadership.”

It should be pointed out that while it is easy to engage in “whataboutism” here, as the right tends to do in relation to the BLM and Antifa protests last year. But we are talking strictly apples and oranges compared to what happened on January 6—and that is being “kind” to the insurrectionists. Most of property destruction that occurred from activities on the “left” was perpetrated by nihilistic “opportunists” and “black bloc” groups who had no real “agenda” other than to be destructive. The January 6 insurrectionists, regardless of whether they actually believed that they could overthrow the election results and turn this country into a de facto dictatorship with Trump as their Fuehrer, the fact that they had actually attempted to do so makes what they had done far more dangerous than all the protesting in 2020 combined, and its repercussions will not be fully dissipated until Trumpism is defeated once and for all.

Trump continues to make inflammatory speeches and give Fox News interviews claiming that the election was “stolen,” but voters may (we hope) tire of Trump unamusing vaudeville act almost as quickly as they discover that they prefer “normalcy” over a steady stream of obvious lies and empty nationalist bombast. If so, then we will know just how pathetic excuses for human beings those insurrectionists were, and that it was they, after all, who were the real domestic threats against the Constitution. 

Don't look for "reality" on TV cop shows

 

In a Rolling Stone piece entitled “A History of Violence: Why I Loved Cop Shows, and Why They Must Change,” Alan Sepinwall opined, somewhat fitfully, that “cop shows” do not reflect the reality of the streets, and have gone too far in “glamorizing” or “normalizing” abusive behavior by police. To be certain, no one can honestly say that cop shows come anywhere near the “truth.” 95 percent of a typical police officer’s time is “looking” for something to do, and maybe 5 percent of it is actually “finding” something to do, and maybe one percent actually necessitating some kind of physical restraint. But those rare times when a police officer does something “newsworthy,” it tends to overshadow the mundane.

Thus there seems to be a never-ending storyline these days of police shooting black people, and the outrage that these incidents excite. To be honest, most (but not all) of these cases police used “excessive force” on suspects who either did not comply with police commands, tried to escape or physically altercated with police. Few were “law-biding” citizens, and many had outstanding warrants for their arrests—and some, like Michael Brown, had just committed a crime. But we live in an age now where everything is politicized; because there have been cases where police acted on “impulse” and killed innocent or unarmed people, the outrage from such incidents creates “suspicion” of the motives of police in all such incidents, or at least those involving black people.  

Yesterday, the “accidental” shooting of a black man, Daunte Wright, by a white female police officer, Kim Potter, in Minnesota has led to the usual widespread protests. Wright was no “innocent”; he was found to have warrants for his arrest and was in the process of being handcuffed outside his car. But bodycam footage appears to show Potter interfering with the handcuffing process, which apparently gave Wright an “opening” to escape back into his car in an attempt to drive away. There were calls to “tase” him, and Potter pulled out what she claims she thought was a Taser, but instead was a gun, which she fired off a round, striking Wright. Wright was apparently still conscious long enough to drive the car away, but soon crashed and died.

Police and city officials are calling it a “terrible accident,” but it is way too late for that, given the history of the state for police shootings and almost no police officer being held accountable. It doesn’t help that out of over 200 recorded cases of Minnesota police shootings in the past two decades, the only officer who has been convicted to date of homicide was a black officer, Muhammad Noor, who claimed to have heard a gunshot, and felt threatened by the victim, a white woman named Justine Ruszcyk Damond, who apparently made a bogus 911 call that led to the incident; Noor was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Damond’s family received $20 million in compensation. Was the shooting unjustified and worthy of punishment? Yes, but the question of why a white woman’s life “mattered” more than all the other victims of police shootings in the state remains—as well as if there may have been a different result if the officer who did the shooting was white.

That’s “real life.” But back in the “old” days, police and detective television shows and films tended to have more fisticuffs and one-on-one shootouts, or were dependent on the deduction skills of one’s own brainpower. In the first instance, Western town “marshals” were one-man depopulators, taking out the “trash” every week. In the second, the first season of Mannix—rarely shown in syndication—had our man Joe working for some “crime scene investigation” private detective firm that always seemed to a few steps behind Mannix’s own analytical, common sense detection know-how. Season 2 dispensed with the computerized nonsense as Mannix on his own had to occasionally take a beating or two (and dish some out himself) before all the pieces came together to solve a crime or mystery.

Yet the portrayal of police was always somewhat sanitized; TV shows like Dragnet and Adam 12 almost never showed cops engaging in violence, while Barney Miller and company never left the station house. In Sepinwall’s RS piece, he notes that police are generally “presented as infallible heroes who are professionally and temperamentally equipped to handle any delicate situation. Then, eventually, it began depicting less admirable cop behavior, but in ways that tended to explain it—and, after a while, to normalize it. These fictional stories have rewired many of us to assume cops are always acting in good faith, and to ignore or away those moments when they’re clearly not.”

Some beloved television shows were particularly egregious in retrospect in this regard. Take for instance “The Andy Griffith Show.” Sheriff Andy Taylor is just an “aw-shucks” kind of Southern guy, and his deputy Barney Fife was just a harmless, bumbling fool. But as Sepinwall notes, this was in direct contrast to what people were seeing on the evening news: “You might occasionally see a person of color as a background extra in the Mayberry town square, but they were almost never granted speaking parts, given all the questions that might be raised at a moment when other Southern sheriffs were turning dogs and firehoses on black citizens. The evening news provided one harsh image, and then primetime soothed us into thinking that all was well.”

While noting that victims and the falsely accused were “afterthoughts” on the show, Sepinwall was somewhat more forgiving of a cop show I hate immensely, the forever-running “Law & Order” which did attempt to provide some form of “reality” when Sam Waterston was present, but since then it has become populated by arrogant, pompous, self-righteous types who are never “wrong,” and unlike in real life where they are the demographic least likely to be a victim of a crime, white women are almost always the “victim.” This is not “reality,” it is presenting a patently false notion that white women are more “victims” than any other demographic—including black people, and mocking the “Black Lives Matter” movement. And you’ll never know by watching “Law & Order” that the vast majority of black men who spent years in prison for crimes they didn’t commit were there based on the testimony of white women for whom black people all look “the same.”

But even when television tried to put an element of “reality” into cop shows, there was always a “catch” to it. Sepinwall notes that “NYPD Blues” Det. Andy Sipowicz may have been “a fat, drunk, violent foulmouthed bigot” who “in an earlier era would have been a cautionary tale at best, but more likely a pure villain,” but “he quickly became the show’s hero, and one of America’s.” When evidence of horrific police brutality in New York, such as in the Abner Louima case in Brooklyn, television producers and actors tended to admit that there might be a few “bad apples,” but in general cops were “heroes” in a “noble system.”

More recently, cop shows like “The Shield” and “Justified” portrayed its law enforcers as “anti-heroes,” much like Clint Eastwood’s iconic character “Dirty Harry,” with cops who were “judge, jury and executioner.” Yet even in the case of “The Shields” Vic Mackey, he is clearly a worse character than many of the criminals he killed, yet the audience is still meant to “identify” with him—because what he did was “justified.” In this way, such cop shows are actually closer to reality for some demographics, like conservative white audiences. But there is still that disconnect between the way police are portrayed on television and in films for other demographics, particularly minorities who are not fooled by the fact that police forces are often portrayed as “integrated,” but which is just a way of avoiding the reality of what is really happening on the street.

The ACA survived Trump, but not unscathed. Now what?

 

It seems that the Affordable Care Act somehow survived the Trump administration, although not unscathed. After failing to strike down the law altogether in the U.S. Senate—assisted by the fact that there was no real “plan” to replace it with—the Republicans added a measure striking down the individual mandate in their let-the-rich-get-richer tax cut bill, which of course testifies to their social “priorities.” In 2017, Trump ceased making payments to private insurers that participated in the marketplace exchanges to cover costs.  

Last year, Trump signed two executive orders, one which he called the “America First Healthcare Plan” which was nothing more than an unenforceable drug benefit program, the other a “request” that insurers that were allowed by an earlier executive order to offer cut-rate, “skinny” medical coverage for up to 364 days, not to deny coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions. These “associated plans” were found to be an illegal “end around” of the ACA in district court, but the Trump administration appealed the decision, and the D.C. Court of Appeals has been taking its time on rendering a decision on the matter.

The Biden administration is reviewing Trump-era pin-pricks around the law’s peripheries, such as allowing states greater flexibility in “experimenting” with non-compliant coverage, and changing how out-of-pocket premiums are determined. Also under scrutiny is allowing states like Georgia to “opt-out” from the federal Healthcare.gov website, and allowing low-benefit red states that declined to implement the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, such as Texas, a 10-year waiver to convert Medicaid payments into “block grants” for hospitals to cover costs incurred from its huge number of low-income uninsured. One thing that Trump did which is not included in Biden’s executive order for review is the halting of payments to insurers in the exchanges. In fact, one of the few things that Biden has effectively overturned is the reduced six week enrollment period, and the return of funding for assisting in outreach and enrollment.

The question is where does the ACA stand now? Currently the U.S. Supreme Court is sitting on a lawsuit that it is expected to render judgment on by this summer which hopes to “kill” the ACA by asserting that if the individual mandate is “unconstitutional,” than the whole law must be. Many observers actually believe this is the weakest attack on the law yet, and even the right-wing justices in oral arguments expressed skepticism in the claims of the plaintiffs that they had been “harmed” by the law—thus questioning their “standing” to even bring the case—and that the individual mandate and the rest of the law was not “serverable.”

Regardless of the court’s ultimate ruling on the constitutionality of the individual mandate—which frankly is not unlike the requirement to have auto insurance, which you can be fined for not having—it would be very surprising if the court did not allow the ACA to stand. The justices must surely be aware of the repercussions of invalidating the law: putting tens of millions on the uninsured rolls, allowing insurers to put onerous restrictions on types and length of coverage, and putting millions more at risk by either allowing insurers to deny coverage to those with pre-existing conditions, or charge premiums beyond the reach of many.

Biden is proposing a revamping of the ACA that will offer a “public option” based on the Medicare model as a “transition” to a permanent public option plan. Biden also proposes to re-impose the individual mandate, but also expand the “options” that people will have in regard to their providers, and expanding eligibility. In order to rein-in drug prices, his proposal seeks to reverse the absurd law that disallows the government to negotiate with drug makers on prices. There is also to be changes in regard to eligibility and what percentage of one’s income can be spent on an individual market plan. Biden seeks to pay for this by repealing Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy.

So for now “Obamacare” is still on the books and still operating, and short of a “surprise” ruling by the Supreme Court, it will survive the latest attack on it, at least for now. However, that doesn’t mean that the pin-pricks it absorbed from the Trump administration will not cause long-term harm if not address by the Biden administration. Biden’s new proposals are not intended necessarily to re-plug those holes, but to somehow make it more "appealing" to both “average” voters and to the “progressive” wing of his party.

The only thing we know for certain about the pandemic is that it is worse than what the "official" numbers are

I suspect that many people have wondered just how accurate the COVID-19 numbers are. Does the fact the fifteen countries in the world with highest death rates are the U.S. and in Europe mean that their reporting is more “accurate”? Or the fact that only South Africa is in the top fifty outside of Western countries and Latin America is “meaningful”? Are we are to believe the relatively low numbers from east and Southeast Asia—especially China’s, which are likely for propaganda purposes? Or that Africa has a seeming “immunity” from the virus, with Nigeria with its densely-packed population of 210 million barely touched? Or that for months India reported almost no additional cases until recently, when there has been a surge of new cases far outpacing than the rest of the world?

It is fairly certain that getting an “exact” number is impossible, only that whatever the number is, it is “bad.” A recent Wall Street Journal analysis found that countries with more rigorous tabulations had three times the positivity and death rates as countries which did not. As early as this past summer the CDC was estimating that the number of people who were “positive” for the virus was likely 11 times the “official” number.

The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) asserts that “extreme undertesting and underreporting” renders estimates of the extent of the virus as unreliable, and that although reported deaths from the virus are a more reliable indicator of its spread, it notes that many countries (and in the U.S., states) have different interpretations of what qualifies as a COVID-related death. Frontiers in Public Health notes that despite the fact that it has reported the second highest number of deaths, there still may be significant underreporting in Brazil, in which a significant number of excess deaths have not been reported as virus-related—rather as by “respiratory insufficiency” and pneumonia—but which the virus is likely the underlying cause of such deaths.  

I have already discussed the issue of significant undercounting in India, and it is now seeing a “second” spike in cases that are such that in recent days constitute half the total daily rise in the world as a whole—proving that “herd immunity” works about as well as “trickle-down” economics. According to Aljazeera, this increase was due to “inadequate government measures and people not adhering to public guidelines, such as wearing face masks and maintaining social distancing.” This was a reckoning that could have been easily foreseen, and current number that suggests that only one-in-100 Indians have been infected is almost certainly an undercount by a factor of 10.

Through mid-March, the total number of cases in Africa is 4 million, which of course is barely a fraction the number recorded in the U.S. It has been suggested that the lower average age of the population, the climate, “swift action” to contain the virus, and the fact that there are few facilities for older people explains this. Climate, however, has been discounted as a factor and the usual suspects—undertesting and underreporting—accounts for much of the significantly lower numbers coming out of Africa. The availability of vaccines relative to developed countries should also be concerning.  

Meanwhile, The Los Angeles Times has reported that Mexico’s tardy response to the pandemic and the lack of mask-wearing requirements, as well as one of the lowest testing rates in the world, has taken a severe toll on the country, and officials have taken the rather extraordinary step of admitting that its current death count is 60 percent of what the actual number is, given the number of “excess” deaths compared to prior years.

And of course there is China, where this all started as early as October, 2019. There are reports that COVID cases went unreported because they were “handled” by “private” institutions which were not required to report them. Early on, cremation centers which normally only operated four hours a day were for weeks running round the clock, “disposing” of bodies at least six times the normal rate. It appears that China was hoping to "contain" the virus within its borders so as to hide it from the rest of the world, but was forced to reveal to the world the danger when Thailand reported the first case of the virus outside China in January, 2020. 

A report by MedRxiv.org last June charged that the actual infection numbers in Wuhan and elsewhere were more likely in the neighborhood of 2.2 million between the beginning of the outbreak and February 2020, and the total deaths of all causes of 36,000 was considerably higher than the “normal” total of 2,500—which “suggested” that total number of COVID deaths just in Wuhan and its environs was at least 10 times what was officially reported. Of course such numbers are “speculative,” but given the fact that China is a closed society that tightly controls information, it isn’t “difficult” for one to assume that China’s official numbers are both for public and international propaganda purposes.

Just what is the true number of COVID-19 cases and deaths will never be known, but the one certainty is that there have been severe and deliberate undercounts in many countries, even in countries which have more “reliable” data-gathering techniques and access to testing. Another “certainty” is that the current numbers reflect what governments in disparate countries are allowing the world to know, and perhaps it is also a measure of what people on the ground want to know themselves. 

Tim Eyman sets example for Stephen Miller on how to "earn" a living the dishonest way

 

In the state of Washington, Tim Eyman is someone you “love” to hate. Eyman has never really had a “real” job; coming out of Washington State University he used his business degree to set-up a home mail order “business” engraving Greek letters into wristwatches for college organizations (like fraternities). He supposedly made a living from something that was nothing more than a vanity item for a few years until—“inspired” by local right-wing curmudgeon Dave Ross—he got involved in signature collecting for a referendum opposing a $250 million public funding proposal to replace the old and ugly King Dome for Mariners baseball team. The “no” vote won, but with the Japanese owners threatening to sell the team, then Gov. Mike Lowry pushed through a bond levy that taxed restaurants and car rentals to pay for a new stadium.

This upset Eyman so much that he decided to become a one-man wrecking crew for anything he didn’t like. Eyman occasionally got himself involved in social issues—he was behind the anti-affirmative action I-200, and he tried and failed to gather enough signatures for a referendum to strike sexual orientation from the discriminated class—but mainly he was an anti-tax guy. He won some victories here and there, notably on car tabs and the requirement of a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature to pass taxes, although the latter was ruled unconstitutional by the state Supreme Court.

Eyman basically made his “living” being what one “tongue-in-cheek” initiative proposal sought to do, to declare him officially a “horse’s ass.” There were always questions about how Eyman was using money to pay for his referendum and initiative scams; following a 2002 Seattle Post-Intelligencer expose, state investigators discovered that Eyman had  paid himself almost a quarter-million dollars after claiming that he took no money for personal use from contributors to his “Permanent Offense” campaign. At the time, Eyman confessed to being a hypocrite to pretend to be morally “superior” to his opponents, but promised to be “upfront” about his expectation to be paid for his “work.”

But Eyman is as corrupt as he was a liar. In 2019, his “associates” in his signature gathering campaigns were fined $1 million for “secretly” funneling money into Eyman’s personal accounts, and this past February the Associated Press reported he was ordered to pay $2.6 million in penalties and banned from any financial dealings with PACS, his or anyone else’s. Eyman was accused of “soliciting kickbacks, laundering donations and flouting campaign finance law in a long-running scheme to enrich himself.” The problem wasn’t so much that Eyman took the money for personal use, but his failure to disclose to donors how much he was enriching himself with their money was, and knowing how much of their money was going into Eyman’s pockets would likely have soured many people on contributing to his initiative campaigns at all—most of them which have been either wholly or partially struck-down in the courts anyways.

Of course, Eyman isn’t the only thief in town trying to earn something less than an honest buck. Take for instance anyone who associated themselves with Trump. Vanity Fair noted that former graduates of Trump’s administration have found homes on Fox News; Kayleigh McEnany has a seat on the oddly-named Outnumbered, which is the right-wing version of The View. Chris Wallace is one of the few at Fox who actually qualifies as being “outnumbered.”  Sarah Sanders was a “contributor” until she decided to run for governor in Arkansas, while that frequent Trump “explainer” on Fox, Kellyanne Conway, appears to be heading in a different direction, not surprising since her husband was one of the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project (and there was that insurrection thing). Conway is currently writing a “tell-all” book that has been suggested by “insiders” will not be particularly flattering to Trump and his minions.

Mike Pompeo is hanging out with a right-wing “think-tank” while he contemplates a presidential run in 2024; if it is based on his “accomplishments” as Secretary of State, he will have even less credibility than Hillary Clinton. Ben Carson, whose tenure at HUD could be described as turning it into a homeless shelter for policy vagrants, is supposedly seeking to set-up a youth organization which is supposed to be even more right-wing than the old Boy Scouts—something called the “Little Patriots,” which wants to instill the spirit of the “real history of America,” presumably “history” that leaves out the parts about how white “settlers” created a country stealing the lands of Native Americans, used slave labor, and imposed imperialism in this hemisphere and elsewhere.

But out of all of Trump’s minions, who could be more radioactive than Stephen Miller? On occasion he shows up on Fox News, but as a “guest” for which he isn’t supposed to be paid a dime. It isn’t clear that his wife Katie has a job either, and the Millers have had to sell their luxury condo in Washington D.C., for a somewhat lesser habitat nearby. What hasn’t “moved” is Miller’s taste for evil (he even looks evil), and so let’s dispense with the bullshit—Miller is a pure and unadulterated racist, and you can throw the “legal” and “illegal” crap out the window, because Miller has made clear that if he had his way, this country would be populated by people with pallid complexions only. If the people crossing the border were white, he’d be trying to find ways to make it easier for them immigrate “legally.”

But talk is cheap and it doesn’t pay the bills, and organizations that deny that they are hate groups don’t seem eager to invite—let alone pay—for a Miller travelling road show making racist speeches. So what is an unemployable white supremacist to do to make money? Miller has come-up with an Eyman-like scheme to both get stoned on his Nietzschean Kool-Aid—which one of his “mentors,” neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, claimed was his own principle “inspiration”—and find a way to make it pay the bills too. Miller—along with former “Freedom Caucus” legislative terrorist and Trump chief-of-staff, Mark Meadows—has come up with something called  American First Legal, a front for conning people out of their money to finance efforts to blow-up Biden administration policies in the courts. Here is a screen capture of the white nationalist agenda Miller wants to “fight” for:

Like the Republican health care “plan” website, it links to nowhere, doesn’t provide any details about what they mean by such things as “equal rights under the law,”  and the “join the fight” only asks for an email address, so someone can get in touch with you to “ask” for money—and lots of it. Frankly, I wonder if there are many people dumb enough to give Miller their money, especially after reports of how Trump was forced to refund $122 million in campaign contributions to trusting folks who were tricked into making repeat donations without their knowledge. In a Wall Street Journal report, ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero pointed out that many Trump policies that Miller was behind were “overreach” and “disregarded the plain language of statutes and legal precedent,” and thus just begging to be disputed.

Like the numerous lawsuits Trump’s stooges brought to overturn the 2020 election, it is to be expected that Miller’s “legal” activities will have little success, although he may initially forestall the inevitable by putting cases before judges installed by Trump who place partisan politics above the law. If Miller piles-up a secession of defeats, then one may expect donations from even the most rabid believers in the “war on whites” to dry-up, and Miller will have to find a real “job,” and that would surely be a serious come-down for a fanatical racist who no one but another fascist like Trump would have given the time of day to, instead of being told to leave the room, and not to come back, ever.

As if the U.S. doesn't have enough problems at home, there is what's going on "abroad"

 

In this country, life is pretty much taken for granted, and the outside world only rarely intrudes, such as on 9-11. Of course that is not exactly true; between the Civil War and World War II, the U.S. military’s principle function was to serve imperialist aims, mostly in Latin America, the Caribbean, the Philippines and various Pacific islands. After World War II, the U.S. became a “superpower” and abandoned completely its prior commitment to international isolationism (WWI merely a brief road trip). International communism was the “enemy” to be defeated; why in a world where reactionary right-wing dictators still ruled would “communist” dictators seem so much more dangerous is baffling, save for the fact that they were backed by the other “superpower”—the Soviet Union—and thus a direct threat to unfettered U.S. world hegemony.

The Soviet Union may be “dead,” and communism’s last bastion is China, but Russia has decided that it still wants to be seen as a “superpower,” and Vladimir Putin has taken control of all the levers of power to return the country to what its people know and love best—a totalitarian regime that makes all the decisions for them, routinely imprisons or murders opposition leaders with little public comment, and a leader who every so often “tinkers” with the so-called “constitution” so that it is insured that he is “president’ for life, or at least until 2036.  Putin of course has his place in the history books to consider as well; he wants to be just as “renowned” in Russia as Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, and to do so he must appear “strong,” with or without a shirt on.

Given his diminutive stature—particularly embarrassing when he is has to stand next to world leaders a foot taller than he is—Putin must “compensate” by playing the “tough guy” on the world stage. Although Russians are technically European in “ethnicity” and “culture,” they have always seen themselves apart, and it isn’t a particularly inviting tourist destination anyways, so there is hardly any interaction with foreigners; frankly, that is true in the U.S. as well, where most Russian immigrants live in their own enclaves (I once came upon a Yellow Pages written entirely in Russian). What’s a Russian to do when they feel “left out”? Well, instead of being “friends” with the neighbors, they take out their frustrations like bullies.

Thus we have seen Russian agents poisoning expatriates, interfering in democratic elections, hacking into “secure” government and corporate computer systems, and spending massive amounts of its GNP on new weapons systems. This includes a so-called nuclear “super weapon”—the Poseidon 2M39, which stands six stories tall but is actually a “stealth” torpedo. Putin seems very excited about his new “toy,” the purpose of which is to penetrate U.S. shore defenses and cause biological havoc on U.S. coastal communities by delivering a payload of nuclear waste. Russia has notably been building up its military along its Arctic coastline; no one is “threatening” Russia militarily, but it appears that Russia wants to deploy its military as a threat to maintain its claim on Arctic resources, even in areas where it has no legal claim.

Why Russia doesn’t want to be “friends” with the West is clear enough. Putin has been imposing himself on former Soviet “republics” and probably would have re-absorbed these new states already if the West wasn’t always butting in on his business and applying sanctions on oligarchs.  Putin is just your typical tin-pot dictator with delusions of grandeur, and who else can he be friends with if not another repressive dictator, China’s Xi Jinping—who has also done away with rules meant to reign-in abuses by one-man rule. Neither Putin nor Xi take criticism of their oppressive moves at home and abroad very well (you know, like Trump), so they are a match made in Hell, bosom buddies for the time being. China has been providing Russia with technology being denied them by the West, and the two countries have already deployed joint military exercises. Putin claims that Russia doesn’t “need” a full-blown military alliance with China, although it is not “off the table.”

So we have seen that trying to be “friends” with Putin as Trump attempted to do was just another of the latter’s many failures on the foreign policy stage. China is of course another problem, asserting itself in the South China Sea both to claim islands for military bases, and to use that military to assert its complete control over oil resources in the region. But that may not be the most likely scenario where the use of the military comes into play. In recent years, China has been loading its shores opposite of Taiwan with ballistic missiles. China’s principle concern is that Taiwan not declare its independence, which would threaten the legitimacy of the Chinese regime, since Taiwan is considered by the Chinese government as the “property” of China; on the other hand, if China invades Taiwan, then the U.S. is obligated by treaty to supply Taiwan with arms, but not to intervene directly militarily. The Taiwan Strait importance as a sea lane would also likely draw Japan into the conflict if China attacks Taiwan.

But even if the U.S. intervenes militarily, it may be costly; China has developed an anti-ship missile system specifically designed to create havoc on the U.S. Navy. It is a dangerous situation; even though the U.S. has no treaty obligation to use its military to defend Taiwan, its international credibility will be in the balance if it does nothing. There have been calls for the U.S. to reinstate its commitment to defend Taiwan, but others simply wish for Taiwan’s political leadership to “behave” and not antagonize the Chinese.

Another problem area is Iran, although Israel is not being particularly “helpful” in that area. Israel always opposed the Iran nuclear deal, rejoiced when the Trump administration vacated the deal, and is now threatening the Biden administration if it reopens talks with Iran, claiming its right to engage in unilateral attacks where it sees fit. Iran certainly isn’t a country that excites much trust; it first denied any culpability in its own anti-aircraft missiles downing a Ukrainian passenger airliner only minutes after it left the Tehran airport in January 2020, before finally admitting that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard had “mistook” it for an American cruise missile. This incident occurred after the U.S. assassinated an Iranian general in Iraq; Trump’s response to the downing of the airliner was typical Trump: the plane must have been flying in a “rough neighborhood,” and someone “made a mistake.” Naturally, no effort at recognizing “context.”

One wonders in this day and age why the U.S.’ strategic interests in the Middle East must play second fiddle to that of Israel; Israel asserts that allowing Iran any kind of nuclear capability—even for what Iran claims is for “peaceful” purposes—is off the table for them, although this seems to be completely unlikely without a full-scale economic embargo, which the international community has little interest in doing. Whether or not simply trying to minimize the damage that Iran can cause that the 2015 agreement sought to do is enough, it is clearly a mistake for the Biden administration to be led by the nose by Israel on this issue.

The bottom line is that the Trump administration left behind a mess on the international front, with his “friends” taking advantage of his naiveté to make things even less solvable. And whether to do—or not to do—only creates their own set of problems.