The races to determine the traditional U.S. parties’ nominees for president is on.  Europeans, not worried about policy details (they probably worry about them more than the traditional U.S. parties and their voters, though), might look at the party names and seek comfort in that one party is called Democratic.  That probably doesn’t include Germans, who will remember that German Democratic Republic, and other European countries bordering the Iron Curtain, who remember all those Democratic Republics in the old U.S.S.R.  Indeed, the Democratic Party in the U.S. is far from being democratic!

Why do I say this?  Consider that Sanders tied Clinton in Iowa (yes, it was a tie) and beat her by a wide margin in New Hampshire, yet Clinton walks away with more delegates than Sanders!  Huh?  “How did that happen?” you ask.  Easy.  The Democrats have something very anti-democratic built into their primary process, whether we’re talking about caucuses (like Iowa) or straight votes (like New Hampshire).  That something is the notion of super-delegates.  Check it out.  After New Hampshire, Clinton already has a commanding lead in delegate count, 394 to 44, because she has committed super-delegates in most primary states already.  44% of the Democratic Party’s delegates are NOT determined by popular vote.

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Mrs. Clinton has been around too long.  Her past drags her down, especially those events reflecting on her trustworthiness.  Her lack of vision diminishes her future electability.  And she learned to waffle from her hubby.  In the last days before the Iowa caucuses, she said she was the better candidate because she is more moderate.  Now, in New Hampshire, she’s saying she’s the progressive.  I put her more toward center than the Bern, but her ties to big money, special interests, and lobbying groups all mean that whatever she’s saying at the moment just represents empty rhetoric on her part.

Trust?  It’s hard to imagine any politician being trustworthy.  “Trustworthy politician” is an oxymoron.  The longer s/he’s around, the more opportunities there are for a politician to lose our trust.  Part of young people’s distrust in Clinton and trust in the Bern can be attributed to two facts, of course: Mrs. Clinton has been around so long that people know she’s untrustworthy; the Bern has been around a long time too, but people don’t know him that well.  When that happens, any sane person focuses on policies (there are a lot of insane ones among voters, of course).  The Bern talks about policies—maybe not enough, but at least he does; Clinton talks in fifteen-second sound bites with zero policy content, keying her remarks to impatient media and TV viewers instead of intelligent people who look beyond all that to policy details.

Clinton’s references to her past service record remind me of job applicants who tout their wonderful past accomplishments (it’s bad when you see they weren’t so great, as in the case of Clinton).  First, they don’t tell me much about what the applicant will do in the future.  When Clinton says, “Look at what I’ve done and what I’ve put up with, so it’s my turn,” it just doesn’t cut it with me.  She isn’t promising a chicken in every pot, of course, so she tries to reduce our expectations.  In fact, she is promising more of the same.  She’s the establishment candidate with the constant litany that she’ll continue Obama’s programs.  That’s living in the past, not the future.  We need more than Obama’s programs!

Saying she wants to continue with what Obama started might eventually win that well-intentioned but ineffective man’s endorsement (he seems hooked on this legacy thing—not bad, but he could have done so much more), but the next Democrat in the White House should be trying to fix the things wrong with what he started, the first priority being to break all ties with one-percenters who are destroying this country (they might be only one percent of our population, but Sturgeon’s Law applies to them as well).  That’s a huge gap in any vision Clinton pretends to have—channeling Obama will not get the country’s problems solved and will piss off a lot of people who know he caved to special interests in too many circumstances.

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Conservatives read the Wall Street Journal, progressives the NY Times—that’s an old cliché that doesn’t have much basis in fact.  Progressives also read the Journal—one had to be stupid not to do so in the events leading up to and during the 2008-2009 financial implosion, even if it was just to see how much money your IRA or 401(k) was losing (or the money wonks were stealing, depending on your interpretation).  Today’s markets bring similar woes, thanks to China’s imploding economy and its decreased demand for oil killing the oil prices and tumbling markets everywhere, not to mention Greece, Spain, and other spending economies dragging the markets down.

This article is about journalistic integrity or the lack thereof, but I only will have bad things to say about the NY Times because we know where the Journal stands—it’s conservative, of course, reflecting its name.  The Times, on the other hand, is far from being the progressive bastion conservatives love to attack.  Consider it a sophisticated and arrogant example of yellow journalism, sort of like bile in color and use, sometimes good, sometimes bad, but never impartial.  Let me consider some examples.

First, a general comment: the Times’ reporters and editors decide what news is fit to print (probably mostly editors, of course—the worker bees generally don’t have much say in any big corporation).  This isn’t new journalistic practice, of course.  What’s egregious here is that the Times pretends to cover all sides of an issue but slants the news following an agenda that’s neither conservative nor progressive—their number one goal is the same as the Daily News and other rags, that is, to sell more papers (the Daily News covers are often classics).  The Times criticizes those other NYC rags, for example, if it even bothers to acknowledge them, but their brand of journalism is still yellow.  Sgt. Friday’s dictum, “Just the facts, ma’am,” is unheard of in many Times’ articles.  I can stomach that when the article is op-ed, opinions don’t have to be based in facts and op-eds are often slanted because they’re opinions.  I’m talking about what the Times calls news.

They censor or embellish the facts too often, often hiding sources under the cloak of freedom of the press, that old constitutional favorite the Founding Fathers never imagined would lead to so many lies and deceit.  Those “unnamed sources” or “sources close to X” are frustrating for concerned citizens who want to check facts.  (Maybe the Times doesn’t worry because there are so few left?)  If you believe for a moment that a reporter or editor is always truthful, you don’t understand journalistic legerdemain (this is one reason why I say a journalism degree is better than an MFA as prep for a fiction writer).  What reporters write and editors approve are always designed first and foremost to sell newspapers, no matter the official orientation of the paper or whether it’s op-ed or news.  My motto is always trust but verify, or maybe distrust and verify, but how can you verify when the facts can’t be checked?

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“Diversity is America’s super power.”—Will Smith

As a boy, my friends and I had a “secret club” where we could be boys (grossing each other out with bugs and snails, practicing fart noises or having burp contests, and talking about those strange creatures called girls).  Sometimes that childhood club only has one member, but that one kid can let his imagination roll.  (I’m being sexist, but I never observed this among girls until junior high when they created their cliques.)  These secret societies are relatively harmless (except when the school ones turn to bullying).

Grown-ups participate in them too.  There are the really obnoxious ones—fascist militias, the Ku Klux Klan, East LA gangs (street gangs anywhere, for that matter), the Mafia, and so forth.  There seem to be good ones—the Shriners, Masons, Key Club, and so forth.  There are also the ambivalent—Scientologists, Better Business Bureau, fraternities and sororities, and so forth.  Most of these represent people coming together to form some kind of tribe, people with a “me-against-them” attitude and agenda, and that’s where problems arise.  People amongst like-minded people feed off both positive and negative emotions and ideas, some recognized, others unconscious.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a secret society, a super-exclusive one.  According to the LA Times, its members are 94% white and 77% male.  They’re also old, most above sixty.  The first percentage compares to the Ku Klux Klan; the last one to the Klan and most men’s lodges, even if they have a lady’s auxiliary.  Moreover, no one knows who they are!  They are supposedly so-called “experts” and impartial judges who determine who in the industry deserves to be recognized for cinematic achievement.  The impartiality is questionable.  In most cases, the Academy’s nominating process is like asking members of ISIS to determine which evangelical in America is the best Christian.  Hollywood is dominated by old white men; they own the studios, they set the priorities, and they have zero qualifications for determining cinematic achievement precisely because they’re old members of the status quo.  As Spike Lee says, Hollywood is rotten from top to bottom (in Mr. Lee’s defense, that’s my paraphrase—I have no desire to be politically correct here by coddling the members of this institution).

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[All politics today, along the lines of “Did we deserve all these bad presidential candidates?”  I’m seriously depressed….]

Item. Daughter Chelsea shows her stripes.  It’s not enough that Hillary trots out old Bill to try to sell her brand of snake oil, but she also employs their daughter Chelsea.  Apparently the couple has coached her well in the art of dirty politics.  Her spin on Bernie Sanders’s healthcare plan?  She said he wants to destroy Obamacare.  Even Hillary had to backtrack on that one!  What Sanders wants is to improve Obamacare by eliminating the insurance companies and Big Pharma’s stranglehold on it.  It’s called single payer, folks, and I’ve been pushing it for years (Hillary did too, for a time).  That’s socialism, you say.

OK, is Medicare socialism?  Maybe.  Aren’t all government services?  In the tristate area, you can hear Wall Street bankers complaining about socialism while they ride in on the commuter rail from their million-dollar mansions in posh areas of Connecticut.  Socialism is only a necessity that recognizes that capitalistic corporate America isn’t service-oriented but profit-oriented.  But ask any elderly person whether we should eliminate Medicare and you’ll get a ration of you know what.

Sure, Medicare has some problems (not enough pursuit of scammers, for one), but it mostly works.  And it’s much better than Obamacare because it’s 100% single payer for Part A and 80% for Part B.  I’d upgrade Part B to 100% (insurance companies offering supplement plans would resist that, of course) and make Obamacare single payer too.  Even generalizing the current Medicare to all ages would be better than Obamacare.  That’s what Bernie is proposing.  Chelsea’s spin is a lie.

Item. Where’s my freedom of religion?  Did you notice the two nuns in the audience at Obama’s State of the Union address?  The new Speaker of the House invited them.  I thought it was a nice touch at first—who doesn’t love Mother Teresa?—but I wondered why they looked pissed most of the time, a bit like nun-teachers in a parochial school.  Turns out they’re business moguls because they run thirty for-profit nursing homes.  Because they’re a business with so many employees, they have to offer healthcare to their employees.  They fought paying for birth control services to female employees under Obamacare.  A work-around was offered so their female employees could go to a third party for birth control meds.  The nuns are still fighting it, though, because they don’t want anything to do with that dirty business.  Why do these nuns have the right to force their religious preferences on their employees?  That IS a failure of Obamacare, but it was imposed by the conservative Supreme Court.

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Readers of this blog know me as a progressive, so I usually lean toward Dems.  Unlike some, though, I cherry pick ideas because reasoned conservatism has a place in American society (Tea Party candidates and Donald Trump are excluded from any discussion about reasoned conservatism, of course).  Moreover, I can’t stand any politician who has the arrogance to think that her/his electability is her/his right.  Readers of the blog also know I find political dynasties despicable.  With Jeb! out of the way, we’re halfway there, but we still have to get rid of the Clintons.  Hillary is the nation’s shingles to Bill as chicken pox.  Remember Bernie’s gracious apology on the debate stage?  That was doubly gracious considering that Debbie Wasserman Schultz as DNC chairperson had gone overboard to punish the Sanders campaign.  Hillary agreed to open up her records in response to the apology but still hasn’t.  The reason?  First, I can only suspect that Hillary’s team did what Bernie’s did, only earlier, as Sanders said.  Second, things are tighter in Iowa and Bernie is leading in New Hampshire, so the Clintons don’t want a replay of 2008.

The Clintons play dirty politics, and they have the DNC in their stable.  Bernie doesn’t have a chance with their sycophant Wasserman Schultz and the DNC biasing the primary process in Hillary’s favor.  The GOP doesn’t have a monopoly on sleazy politics—the Clintons have been doing that for years.  Hillary already lost to one grassroots candidate—Obama came out of nowhere to stop the dynasty in 2008.  She and Bill are doing everything they can to go after any new threat they see threatening the continuation of their dynasty.  It’s old politics as usual for them.  They’re arrogant enough to move their agenda forward, but it’s an agenda many people want nothing to do with, and those people aren’t just Republicans!

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Given that the Donald and the other GOP candidates have made the rest of the world and many in the U.S. wonder what’s happening in America, the Land of the Free, it seems appropriate to list the things that we’re doing or might do to let ISIS win and return this world to the Dark Ages.  The GOP candidates own a lot of the hateful rhetoric described below—I refuse to believe all GOP voters do.  Here’s the list:

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Discriminate and persecute Muslims.  Trump and his supporters seem to forget that there’s freedom of religion in this country.  The Founding Fathers thought that this right was so important, it’s the first sentence in the Bill of Rights: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof….”  Trump, of course, is using hate and paranoia to pander to his base, which seems to represent about a third of GOP voters—that in itself is frightening—but he’s also proposing something he could never deliver without amending the U.S. Constitution.

While Islam faces the same problems as Buddhism, Christianity, Judaism, and their offshoots and alternatives—how to maintain an ancient faith in a world that’s increasing secular and expecting spirituality and beliefs to be more of a private choice, not a public demonstration that infringes on others’ rights—its members, as do all religious members, need to eschew discrimination and violence and convince its members to control and ostracize those members who turn to them.  Every religion has a bloody past.  The world must move on.  Religious strife does NOT belong in the 21^st century.

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This ramp-up to 2016 elections has been noted for outrageous statements from the wannabe presidential candidates, most notably from the GOP side.  Just recently Ted Cruz opined publicly that all the criminals are Democrats.  He went on to say that’s why liberals or progressives are so easy on crime and want to reform prisons and reduce sentences.  This buffoon’s bombastic and bloviating blathering (I can alliterate with the best) might have its genesis in the Canadian’s desire to out-trump Trump, but it’s an insult to most of the voting public: does he actually believe any sane person will buy into the sewage effluent springing forth from his mouth?  (Note that I said “sane person”; there are rabid elements in our society who will believe anything—Trump depends on that.)

Only two states allow felons to vote while in prison.  I assume a corollary to that factoid is that only two states allow felons to register as a member of a political party while in prison, but maybe that corollary is wrong.  Some people argue that disenfranchising felons isn’t a good idea—I’m not one of them (if they want their civil rights, they can stay out of prison, except when it comes down to wrongful convictions)—but the current state of affairs implies that the prison population isn’t comprised of registered Democrats.  So, the brilliant senator who should be a terrible embarrassment to the state of Texas (they have to own up to many embarrassments, of course) must be saying that there are criminal elements who haven’t been caught yet…and they’re all Democrats?

I won’t dwell on the absurdities Cruz has said and is saying more than this.  Instead, let me turn the question around: why doesn’t the GOP own up to the criminal label?  Let’s start with the NRA (there are many other examples, including the pro-life rhetoric—the GOP has no commitment to protecting lives AFTER birth!–but the slavish pandering to the NRA is the most deadly one).  Every NRA member is a criminal because s/he enables murderous elements to commit atrocities against innocent victims.  This lobbying group pushes back on every reasonable move to limit arsenals like the one the recent California shooters possessed.  It’s become so bad that the NY Times decided to put an editorial about this on the front page last Saturday (the first one since 1920 and not strong enough in my opinion—I don’t have to coddle readers, but the Times still does).

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It seems every GOP presidential candidate now has a tax reform plan.  Guess who it favors?  Their reforms are all various schemes for shell games designed to redistribute wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, of course.  No one wants to tax the poor because even the GOP knows you can’t squeeze blood from a stone (of course, they still won’t raise the minimum wage either).  But at least the GOP is up front about enriching the elites and robbing the middle class.  The Dems just might be worse because they blather double-speak about helping the middle class out but are beholding to the rich and their special interest groups and lobbyists.  Only Bernie Sanders has eschewed the largesse of the rich elites.  I wonder how long he’ll last.

Wealth redistribution via taxes is insidious.  First, there’s the infamous payroll tax.  If you’re receiving wages from a company or the government, you’re taxed.  But many members of the rich elites pay less tax than you do because of loopholes and other ways accessible to them because they are NOT on a payroll.  Even a poor fast food worker receives a paycheck that has state and local and often city taxes deducted.  S/he might get it all back at the end of the year, but meanwhile s/he’s giving a zero-interest loan to the U.S. government.  And none of this discussion considers percentages.  They’re completely skewed to favor those payroll workers making lots of money, like in high tech.  And don’t forget FICA.  There’s a cutoff for that.  Eliminate it, and Social Security and Medicare would never have any problems keeping up with retirees!

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My father’s opinion of politicians was that they are just failed lawyers.  I say, failed something.  You know this country’s in trouble when the most profound statement in that GOP debate came from our inimitable and mostly absent governor, Chris Christie, who has only been eclipsed as a barking attack dog because Donald Trump is around as a noisier barking attack dog.  This acerbic jerk and not a NJ favorite son said that focusing on Fantasy Football was absurd when there are so many other more important problems around.  Wow!  Of course, he was attacking both CNBC moderators and Jeb?, but even from the blathering mouth of this governor the occasional spittle of truth will spew forth.

Continuing with the governor (and forgetting about the Donald, the other aficionado of insulting rants), Christie actually mentioned ISIS and al Qaeda.  The rest of the GOP anointed mentioned terrorism only peripherally as part of that never-ending Benghazi fixation that they’re using to attack Hillary (that last whole grueling one-day session was a three-ring circus, with GOP inquisitors ending with rotten eggs all over their faces—the wannabe House Speaker had said it’s a witch hunt, and he is right).  While I might be giving Mr. Christie far too much credit, he nailed it: terrorism is the number one issue of our time.  All politicians should realize that; every citizen should too.  And it’s not something to analyze in short soundbites on a debate stage—it requires profound analysis and multi-dimensional thinking, both sorely lacking in this electoral season.

Maybe politicians think that they’re impervious to terrorist attacks when they’re sitting in their cozy little condos and houses in Washington?  They have $150 million dollar blimps loaded with electronics to protect them, right?  They have Pentagon experts at their beck and call, experts who have done such a great job against the Taliban, al Qaeda, and ISIS, right?  The politicians figure that the Middle East is just another way for their masters in the military-industrial complex to make money selling projects to the Pentagon that don’t work.  Everyone’s happy as long as they’re making money, right?

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