Stand-by for President JD "Childless Cat Lady" Vance

2017

2023

2024

What do Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have in common? Desperation born of criminal prosecution that can only be avoided if they or their own designated replacements stay in power… and are permitted to wield autocratic power. But unlike Netanyahu, Trump’s health and mental acuity are showing serious failings where it is difficult to hide the obvious.

As Biden celebrated his 81st birthday back in November of last year, Former President Donald Trump shared a report proclaiming his "exceptional" cognitive health. He even produced that document, signed by Trump's personal physician (Congressman Ronny Jackson), that was filled with superlatives but light on detail, describing the overall health of the Republican primary front-runner as "excellent" and his performance on cognitive tests as "exceptional."

Leaked but verified scans from earlier tests during his presidency showed Trump with significant coronary blockage and his being serious overweight (technically, obese). Despite that purported weight loss, photographs point to little or no change. His diet is legendarily heavy on meat, potatoes and fast-food favorites. Still, the report claimed, “Trump has ‘reduced his weight through an improved diet and continued daily physical activity’ and credits this as the reason his ‘laboratory analysis’ came back more favorable than in prior testing. But no specific metrics are listed.

“In August, Trump self-reported his height and weight to the Fulton County Jail as 6'3" and 215 pounds. Some on social media pointed out those were the same dimensions as Ravens Quarterback Lamar Jackson (though Jackson, at 6'2", is technically shorter.)” NCPR, November 2023. But Trump’s weight, on a simple visual inspection (see above pictures), clearly speaks the truth. He’s pretty much the same. During Trump’s political years, he has tended towards obesity.

“Trump weighed in at 243 pounds during a presidential physical in 2019. His doctor said then he was overall in ‘very good health,’ but was technically obese… A series of medical mishaps and apparent attempts to mislead the public have only ratcheted up the interest… In 2015, Trump's physician claimed he would be ‘the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,’ then later admitted that the patient himself dictated the memo.

“In 2020, Trump's doctors received criticism for offering contradictory or incomplete updates on the then-president's bout of the coronavirus, which turned into a superspreader event. And in the same year, Trump fueled days of media discourse for bragging about his performance on a dementia test, which he framed as an intelligence test. He said the questions involved identifying an elephant and repeating the words ‘Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.’" NCPR.

Yet, to MAGA faithful, no one can rally the base and stir up a crowd like Donald Trump. But his speaking patterns have veered farther and farther away from his focused target – “leaving” he says – off on tangents, conspiracy theories and anecdotal “examples” of his “policies,” some of which (like healthcare) are relegated to “concepts.” I am reminded that politicians who rely on anecdotes vs statistical evidence, which often afflicts both parties, really cannot prove their case with facts. Vance and Trump openly state they hate fact checks. Fabrication is a go-to practice.

But whether it is due to age, desperation or the stress over what’s at stake – freedom and power vs facing incarceration – Donald Trump is showing some very obvious mental deterioration. Still, even as he makes up alterative facts and spouts obviously insane conspiracy theories, you have to give him credit: he’s held his base despite conclusive proof – even just looking at Trump’s first three pre-pandemic years, Biden’s economic numbers surpass those Trump’s consistently. There are fewer undocumented border crossers today than during Trump’s years as President. Inflation is falling, joblessness is low and steady, wages are still up, crime is down. And MAGA power remains very much intact. Nevertheless, Harris is in a dead heat, one that could easily move Trump to victory.

Trump frequently mixes up names, cannot sustain an on-topic debate, flip-flops – sometimes to generate political contributions – and speaks with great rising dark, autocratic anger, depending on fear to hold the course. He pledges to round up his opponents, using the military if necessary, even suggesting if he loses, his followers should rise to protect that “rigged” election, by force if necessary, even though that “rigging” is coming from the MAGA faithful. His tone is violent, suggesting “bloodshed” if he loses.

Trump even rages at the very major donors he needs to support his campaign, like this moment at a small dinner of big hitters at Trump Tower in NYC: “Over steak and baked potatoes, the former president tore through a bitter list of grievances… He made it clear that people, including donors, needed to do more, appreciate him more and help him more… The rant, described by seven people with knowledge of the meal who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, underscored a reality three weeks before Election Day: Mr. Trump’s often cantankerous mood in the final stretch.” NY Times (October 12th). It gets worse every day.

MAGA followers ignore allegations that Trump in “unhinged,” “unstable” and incapable of focusing, notwithstanding proof to the contrary. Even as Kamala Harris passed medical tests that Trump will not allow for himself, DJT challenges Harris’ cognitive abilities and is demanding that she take the relevant tests. Trump’s strangeness abounds. Take his October 14th town hall in Oaks, Pennsylvania, moderated by South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem.

The heat in the venue was uncomfortable. “[The] Proceedings were paused while two attendees [,who fainted,] received medical attention, at which point Trump jokingly asked whether ‘anybody else would like to faint?’ He then said: ‘Let's not do any more questions. Let's just listen to music. Let's make it into a music. Who the hell wants to hear questions, right?’” Newsweek, October 15th. Huh? Has been ridiculed by those who find his answers to questions often show his instability. “Cat and dog eating” Haitians in Ohio, for example.

Indeed, some in the town hall crowd began to leave, as Trump told his team to play a succession of nine songs as he at times danced on stage. What sane politician does that? “Video of Donald Trump bopping on stage to the beat of his musical playlist - from Luciano Pavarotti to the Village People, for nearly 40 minutes after a truncated town hall in a battleground state - triggered more questions Tuesday [10/15] about the former president's mental stability… ‘Hope he's okay,’ said Trump's Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, in a post on the social media platform X.” USA Today, October 15th. Nevertheless, Harris is in a dead heat, one that could easily move Trump to victory. Huh? It is highly probable that if elected, Trump won’t make it through a full term. President JD Vance. Ouch!

I’m Peter Dekom, and do Americans so hate the notion of a woman of color becoming president that they just might elect a very unhealthy, enraged, mentally unbalanced racist instead?

"Crisis" for Fearless Leader and His Peeps Ain’t Necessarily Your "Crisis"

 Hurricane Helene in Florida

vs

&

“I know a lot about overtime… I hated to give overtime. I hated it. I’d get other people, I shouldn’t say this, but I’d get other people in. I wouldn’t pay.” 

Trump at a campaign rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, September 29th

Crises for autocratic-leaning leaders are often manufactured, embellished, repeated incessantly and often become the litmus test for loyalty to that leader. True or not. Those crises become prioritized to the exclusion of almost everything else. Putin didn’t need to invade and attempt to annex Ukraine, but the message to his people was the Kiev was a fascist government on their border, supported by Russia’s enemies in the West who were conspiring to topple the Moscow regime, holding territory that was always an inalienable part of Russia. There was nothing about that annexation effort that was particularly beneficial to the Russian people, just like the Peoples’ Republic of China’s parallel claims to Taiwan and vast stretches of neighboring seas.

Israeli PM Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu – who had been sending cash-filled truck to Hamas in Gaza for years to “buy” their submission – had long since abandoned the pretense of supporting the two-state solution Israel had embraced in the Oslo Accords of the early 1990s. Facing a continuation in his corruption trial, proverbial hardliner leader and recently unpopular Netanyahu – with the longest tenure as Israel’s prime minister – used the retribution against the October 7th Hama attack on innocent Israeli citizens as the opening salvo to maintain power and avoid a probable conviction. A fierce response was required… but overkill did not serve his electorate particularly well. Israel’s economy is at its worst in almost half a century. But we know his pager/ walkie talkie attack on Hezbollah forces in Lebanon and use of an American-made bunker-buster bomb to take out their leader-founder, Hassan Nasrallah, were wildly popular with his followers… buying him some additional time in power.

Russia and China are each also experiencing profound economic malaise, perhaps even recession. China’s manufacturing sector is no longer competitive with low-labor-cost nations, masses of its educated youth cannot find jobs, the real estate market has collapsed taking more than a few financial institutions down… so China is waging its territorial expansion ambitions (read: Xi Jinping’s personal ambitions) to distract and rally its citizens, allying with Russia in a new anti-American cabal against the US and her allies… but Russia is hardly a solid partner.

“War may be the only thing keeping Russia's economy afloat… According to Jay Zagorsky, an economist and markets professor at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, the Ukraine invasion is likely the only thing preventing the country from slipping into a recession. That's because Russia's hefty military budget is supporting its sagging economy. But that's a temporary solution for Moscow's mounting economic problems… Dilemmas faced by the Kremlin include spiraling inflation and lingering currency and budget issues.

“‘The Russian economy right now is being propped up by large amounts of government spending, so there's not going to be a slowdown in any sector in the economy that the Russia government is buying supplies from,’ Zagorsky said, pointing to Kremlin purchasing uniforms, boots, ammunition, and food as part of its war efforts against Ukraine. ‘So if there was no war, oh yes, I think there'd be an immediate recession.’” Jennifer Sor for the September 29th Business Insider.

The good old USA is hardly immune. Autocrat wannabe Donald Trump pledges to gut the EPA and reverse the Biden’s climate change initiatives, telling assembled masses that the worst that will happen, in 100 years, is a 1/8-inch sea rise. Climate change remains a hoax, even as red state Florida just faced one of the most devastating hurricanes ever. Insurance rates there are skyrocketing. But Trump’s cronies in heavy industry do not want restrictions on their resource extraction (even as oil production today is higher than in his years as President) and clearly prioritize corporate tax cuts above all else. Oh, and his championing the “working man” isn’t exactly what he and his Project 2025ers really believe as the above quote establishes well.

There is an interesting observation from a Yale Professor analyzing what may be a main priority crisis for an autocrat is very large difference from an overall societal crisis that merely affect those non-elite classes. Here are some excerpts from Rick Harrison’s interview, for the Yale Institution for Social and Policy Studies i (September 25th) with Dara Strolovitch, author of When Bad Things Happen to Privileged People and Yale professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, American studies, and political science:

Strolovitch: “I use [the term ‘crisis politics] to describe what I argue is a crucial but underexplored dynamic in the perpetuation of inequality and marginalization in the United States: the relationship between the kinds of episodic hard times — punctuated moments of difficulty or violence or economic strife that are typically understood to be crises — and the kinds of ongoing and quotidian [daily] hard times that I argue are more routine and structure the lived experiences of marginalized groups. I call this second type ‘non-crises.’ I argue more generally that crisis politics have become a mechanism for justifying the use of state power to protect privileged groups and for justifying its retrenchment or redirection when it comes to marginalized groups…

“I’m not really arguing that a non-crisis is a crisis but rather that ‘crisis’ isn’t an objective descriptor of an event or phenomenon. And that the same political processes that construct some problems and events as crises — that is, as critical junctures deemed worthy of and remediable through government intervention and resources — also construct other similar or analogous bad things as non-crises. In this way, they are treated as natural, inevitable, immune to — and therefore not warranting — state intervention or resources.”

Trump has stated that raging crime is soaring (it has actually fallen), that carnivorous immigrants are pouring across our southern border (it’s actually pretty quiet down there), that our economy is collapsing (even though it may be the strongest economy on Earth) and that we need to “drill, drill, drill” (although we are producing more oil than ever). Haitian immigrants are eating our pets, and blue states are conducting 9th month abortions … complete fabrications.

The real crises do not even exist: like gun violence, the number one child/teen killer in the nation, racial/ethnic/religious/gender discrimination and climate change-related disasters (fires, floods, intense storms and storm surges, etc.) which are merely normal cyclical weather patterns that will fade with time. Corporate price-gouging is also non-existent, even as hard numbers say otherwise. We have to trust that “stable genius,” as he has also stated as to the crises he has declared… “only I can fix it.” Just like Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Kim, the Ayatollah, etc.

I’m Peter Dekom, and when elites ignore our real problems and manufacture “fake” crises, you know nothing good with come of those efforts.

Fractious Fascists Falsifying Friendly Folksy Fraternizing Fellows … or Vice Versa

I wish there were a dependable oracle to answer a couple of questions that continue to bug me about the broad strokes of this election. With one more Menards reference, I have to wonder if Tim Walz… or anyone… can really be that folksy and have been a governor? Touch my hand to my heart-dude? As the Senator from Ohio continues to stress his “my roots are anchored in poverty-stricken Appalachia” essence, is J.D. Vance the only true “DEI Candidate”? With allusions to cat-and-dog-eating Haitians, references to a buzzing fly, an inability to stay on message and an obsession with crowd size, is Donald Trump actually experiencing clinical dementia? Does that hurt or enhance his cause, and if he loses, is that a reflection of ageist bigotry? I wonder if Kamala Harris believes that GOP appointed prosecutors ever ask witnesses or defendants if they are Democrats or Republicans? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but I do know that just about everything about this election is just plain crazy… except when you realize what’s at stake.

If the Donald is in fact clinically demented, what does that say about his pledge to pursue criminal charges and broadcast license challenges against ABC for imposing a left-leaning bias in their hosting the presidential debate between him and “Kamala” (mispronounce please), with similar charges against Google because their search engine releases “so many more negatives” about him as opposed to his opponent? We know that he believes that the Dems intend to defund the police, which notion doesn’t seem to be finding traction even in blue cities, but he has repeatedly stated that he will seriously defund a major federal police force, even one that still leans Republican: the FBI. He’ll disband the Environmental Protection Agency plus the Department of Education and turn the Department of Justice into his personal prosecution arm to ferret out his opponents, with direct intervention support from our military, with a pledge to incarcerate the lot.

But what is funny, not ha-ha funny (just odd), is how he and his supporters repeat how he soundly trashed Kamala Harris in their lone debate… but seem to be doing everything in their power to reserve an election and exclude minority voters by the millions. Are they afraid the Donald is truly losing, and if the post-debate polls that have substantially determined that Kamala beat him, does that mean that “mentally-impaired” Kamala (as he has referred to the Vice President at several rallies) won that debate against a self-declared “stable genius”? Hmmmm. That most of Trump’s supporters have made up their minds a long time ago and seem to enjoy his jousting and poking at the media with outrageous misstatements … makes a lot of what JD and the Trumpmeister are saying… unheard by MAGAns except at rallies and his social media.

With hopes of pushing the election results to the GOP-led House or the “we’ve got your back, Donald” US Supreme Court, remembering that Trumpers lost over 60 judicial challenges to the 2020 “stolen election,” the Republican Party (and many of its state offices) seems to be engaging cadres of lawyers, ensuring elections cannot be counted in time (the requirement of hand-count in Georgia, if sustained, guarantees they will not meet their own deadline) and working overtime to cull voter rolls of likely Democratic voters… and seemingly raising more money to challenge the coming election (or prevent it from functioning properly) than they are in traditional campaign support. After all, Trump has even admonished his followers, more than once, that they really do note have to vote at all. He’s got this! I wonder why his both running on fear and guaranteeing his victory.

Nobody screams “election integrity” more than those who are doing everything in their power to make sure that integrity leaves the building. Writing for the September 29th Reuters, Jack Queen, has drilled down on “we’ve got the lawyers in place this time, so we really don’t need the votes” vector that would otherwise suggest Trump’s advantage may have dissipated… and his MAGA party knows that: “In Arizona, one of seven competitive U.S. states that are expected to decide the 2024 presidential election, an advocacy group founded by Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller is advancing a bold legal theory: that judges can throw out election results over ‘failures or irregularities’ [determined without standards] by local officials.

“The lawsuit by the America First Legal Foundation, a conservative advocacy group, says the court in such cases should be able to toss the election results and order new rounds of voting in two counties in Arizona, where Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala Harris is leading Trump in the polls by a razor-thin margin… The Republican National Committee says it is involved in more than 120 lawsuits across 26 states, in a strategy that some legal experts and voting rights groups say is meant to undercut faith in the system.

“Republicans say the lawsuits are aimed at restoring faith in elections by ensuring people don't vote illegally. Trump and his allies have falsely claimed that his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden was tainted by widespread fraud… While the Arizona case is likely a long shot, legal experts say it fits with a pattern of Republican-backed lawsuits that appear aimed at sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the election before it occurs and providing fodder for challenging the results after the fact… ‘This is part of creating the narrative that there will be irregularities that will require outside intervention,’ said Columbia Law School professor Richard Briffault… A spokesperson for the Republican National Committee said the party's top priority is fixing what they say are problems with voting systems before Election Day to ensure no ballots are illegally cast.

“‘Our Election Integrity operation is fighting to secure the election, promoting transparency and fairness for every legal vote. This gives voters confidence that their ballot will be counted properly, and in turn, inspires voter turnout,’ said RNC spokesperson Claire Zunk.

“Trump and Harris are locked in a tight battle ahead of the Nov. 5 election, fueling a wave of litigation by both Democrats and Republicans as they spar over the ground rules… Republicans typically sue to enforce restrictions on voting that they say are necessary to prevent fraud, while Democrats generally ask courts to keep voting accessible… The Harris campaign said in a statement that Republicans are ‘scheming to sow distrust in our elections and undermine our democracy so they can cry foul when they lose.’” Are those election officials who intend not to certify results that do not favor Trump certifiable?

I’m Peter Dekom, and until this year, I have never seen a federal election that was anything but accurate and honest in my lifetime.

Arctic’d-Off: A Rising Phase of Sino-Russian Territorial Expansion Ambitions

 

Russia’s modernized Arctic fleet and its supporting bases outnumber Western nations sharing Arctic borders… with seriously upgraded technology, like the nuclear-powered Russian icebreaker pictured above. Now, paired with Chinese vessels, Russian military ships and aircraft patrol the region in force… with increasing frequently. Russia has already planted its “it’s mine” titanium flag under the North Pole and claimed the entirety of the evolving (as ice melts) Northwest Passage as its own. The Arctic is a Sino-Russian Ukraine/Taiwan equivalent, with vastly lower levels of defenses.

It does seem that if Russia is trying to undo the 1867 US’ purchase of Alaska from Russia (named “Seward’s Folly” for the American Secretary of State who negotiated the deal) for $7 million (2 cents an acre). Russia has stated that the Tsar did not have the right to sell the “people’s land.” Mainland Russia and mainland United States are separated by 55 miles (their islands are within 3 miles of each other). Sitka, Alaska is awash in Russian built structures (including a church), and the Bering Strait that separates the two countries is plagued by a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse between rival naval vessels and well-armed aircraft testing defensive limits. Recent incursions have involved combined Chinese and Russian fleets practicing joint military maneuvers, taunting US forces in Alaska.

But the United States is but one Western power in the region. Add Scandinavia and Finland to Canada and Greenland to the mix, and the entire area is both dangerous and volatile. Indeed, should the Ukraine invasion escalate into a NATO vs Russian conflict, it would not be surprising to see Russian forces, perhaps in concert with China’s PLA, moving to solidify their claims to these Arctic regions. That Northwest Passage could easily become one of the premiere trade routes on Earth, and the Arctic holds vast petroleum, mineral and sea life riches coveted and claimed by Russia, with Chinese support.

But there have been some transparent, with sufficient deniability, direct attacks by Russia against Western targets in the region. For example, “The world’s largest satellite ground station, on the Svalbard archipelago off Norway, is used by Western space agencies to gather vital signals from polar-orbiting satellites. This January [2022], one of two fibre-optic cables on the Arctic seabed connecting Svalbard to the mainland was severed. Norway was forced to rely on a back-up link.” Reuters, November 16, 2022. That Svalbard archipelago has become a major strategic arena that typifies the escalating conflict between this Sino-Russian cabal and the West. Writing for the September 28th Wall Street Journal, Georgi Kantchev explains:

“Nestled high above the Arctic Circle, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard is home to hundreds of polar bears and boasts prime views of the Northern Lights… Now the territory of fewer than 3,000 people is emerging as a front line in Russia and China’s attempts to dominate the Arctic’s trade routes and expand their military presence in the region at the expense of the West… Formally part of Norway, Svalbard—a collection of mountains, glaciers and fjords about the size of West Virginia—has an unusual status. A treaty signed in 1920 granted the Norwegians sovereignty but allowed signatory states, including the Soviet Union, to exploit resources and conduct research… But in recent years this quirk has provided a way for Moscow and Beijing to strengthen their foothold in the Arctic as tensions with the West worsened over the invasion of Ukraine, unsettling Norway and its allies in NATO…

“Since the [Ukraine] war, Russia has held a military-style parade, illegally erected an Orthodox cross and issued a stark warning to Norway not to challenge Russia on Svalbard. Earlier this month, a Russian lawmaker proposed building a prison for terrorists there. Just a month before the invasion, Norwegian officials suspected Russian involvement in a severed undersea fiber-optic cable near Svalbard…

“Norwegian officials, meanwhile, report a growing Chinese interest in acquiring land on the archipelago, including a recent proposal to establish a laser-research station. Svalbard has become an increasingly important espionage target for both China and Russia, they say, with Norwegian companies advising employees to turn off their phones when traveling to Russian-controlled dwellings. ‘We are seeing the return of geopolitical competition in the Arctic and Svalbard is a key piece of the puzzle,’ said Norway’s Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide in an interview.

“The competition for Svalbard is emblematic of the intensifying global race for the Arctic. The region contains up to a fifth of the world’s untapped oil and natural-gas reserves, as well as other minerals. As the ice melts, Moscow and Beijing want to use the shorter Northern Sea Route to ship goods via the Arctic, avoiding chokepoints at the Suez Canal and Malacca Strait.”

Few Americans take such Sino-Russian advances in the region seriously. They should! As both Russia and China face crippling economic woes, they see the Arctic as potential economic salvation. Further, as the United States seems to be in polarized self-destruct mode, both Russia and China are counting on a severely weakened United States, veering towards isolationism and perhaps even civil war, to let Russia and China have their way with rising claims to international territories, waters and even holdings of other Western nations. China claims Taiwan and has created a land-fill airbase in the Spratley Islands to assert control of the regional seas, paralleling Russia’s equally aggressive claims to the Arctic and Ukraine.

I’m Peter Dekom, and after reading the above, is there is any doubt why both Russia and China are pouring massive mis- and dis-information into our election universe, all focused on getting Donald Trump reelected?

Love Trump’s Economic Policies, But What Are They?

 

“While Trump promises to ‘make the foreigners pay,’ our analysis shows his policies will end up making Americans pay the most.” 

 From a detailed economic analysis from the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics, September 2024

There is a vast cadre of voters, clothespins on their noses at Trump’s deeply flawed character, who support him because of his “economic policies and expertise.” Expertise from a man who inherited his initial capital base, who almost had to bankrupt his major holdings requiring a life-saving bailout in the early 1990s by a consortium of Chinese lenders – whom he sued and lost big time – who has bankrupted a host of his companies (stiffing ordinary workers in the process), who along with his main company have been criminally convicted of falsifying official business records (low values for taxing authorities, high values to lenders on the same assets), who had to pay $25 million to settle a fraud action by students at the failed Trump University, with Trump products from Vodka to an airline that tanked, whose Trump Media & Technology (which operates Truth Social and is 57% owned by Trump) plunged about 80% since going public, and whose own alma mater, Penn/Wharton, projects budget deficits based on his discernible policies at double their projections for Kamala Harris’ economic policies????!!! Wanna buy a Trump Bible, some gold sneakers or Trump-endorsed crypto where 18-year-old NYU freshmen Baron Trump is a senior advisor? Is this the resume of a “trusted candidate with strong business credentials”?

In any objective company, such a track record would have long-since resulted in a pink slip noting “You’re fired.” Imagine looking for a financial advisor, who somehow makes enough money to live large as his fellow investors writhe in pain, with his background and saying, “oh yeah, he’s for me!” So much for his “business expertise”! Aside from the cost of deporting millions of lower paid workers for labor that that US residents will not do, this alone will push consumer prices up big time. But wait, there’s more, so much more!

Next let’s take a deeper dive into Donald John Trump’s stated economic goals. Maybe we should start with an objective determination from Trump’s own choice for his undergraduate education (he has no graduate degree): the August 26th Penn/Wharton Budget Model, examining his stated economic policies: “The 2024 Trump presidential campaign has endorsed several tax-related policy proposals. The Trump campaign supports extending the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) and recommends additional reductions in the corporate tax rate to 15 percent. In addition, the Trump campaign favors eliminating income taxes on Social Security benefits.

“Like our analysis of the 2024 Harris campaign, we do not include the non-taxation of ‘tips’ earned by service workers as originally recommended in public comments by Trump. The 10-year budget cost could vary significantly depending on the ability to reclassify current sources of income as ‘tips’ to the mutual benefit of employers and employees. The ability to reclassify income is often a major source of revenue response in conventional tax scoring. As such, a considerable number of additional details would be needed to score this provision.

“The Trump campaign has also put forward several trade policy proposals to impose new taxes on imported goods and services, including a 10 percent across-the-board tariff on all imports and much higher targeted tariffs. Key implementation details, however, are missing. While new import taxes and tariffs could raise several trillion dollars in new revenue over the next decade, they could also lead to revenue losses due to potential retaliatory actions from other governments and other economic dynamics. The implementation and interactions with Pillar 2 also remain unanswered…

“We project that conventionally estimated tax revenue falls by $5.8 trillion over the next 10 years, producing an equivalent amount of primary deficits. Accounting for economic feedback effects, primary deficits increase by $4.1 trillion over the same period.” As Jackie Calmes asks in her editorial in the September 26th Los Angeles Times piece, “Voters disdain Trump but ‘liked his policies.’ What are they talking about?... If you think the U.S. was better off under Trump 1.0, check the record…”

“What policies? The voters rarely say, nor do reporters follow up. Curious minds, not least mine, want to know: What are they talking about?... Trump was by far the most ignorant on policy of seven presidents I’ve covered, and four years in office didn’t educate him: As former advisors attest, he refused to do homework, trusting to his instincts. Trump had positions on many issues, often ill-informed and wrong-headed. As president he executed policies, of course, though the best known — cutting taxes, for example, and seating right-wing federal judges — were largely the work of Republicans in Congress.

“Filling in Trump’s policy vacuum was the impetus behind MAGA Republicans’ massive — and massively unpopular — Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term. But forget prospective policies. Does it really make sense to remember the Trump 1.0 initiatives fondly?... Are policies on the economy and immigration what these voters have in mind? Polls consistently show more voters prefer Trump over Kamala Harris in these areas… First the economy: [In 2016,] Trump inherited a growing one from the Obama administration, and left a pandemic-ravaged economy to Biden and Harris. His big edge in voters’ perceptions about economic matters reflects in large part their dismay over the rise in inflation on Biden’s watch, and the higher interest rates set by the Federal Reserve to tame it. But inflation has been a global problem, mostly a consequence of the spurt in post-pandemic demand for goods. Had Trump been reelected in 2020, he would surely have faced rising prices as well.

“With prices still elevated, voters haven’t yet felt how much inflation has abated, faster here than in other nations, and [in mid-September] the Fed finally cut interest rates, and signaled more cuts ahead. Meanwhile, growth in the economy’s output and employment has been greater under Biden-Harris than under Trump, despite Trump’s lies and voters’ vibes to the contrary.

“Trump had two main economic policies, and he’s now promising more of the same: tariffs, which raised prices on many goods Americans buy and cost jobs in import-reliant industries (Biden kept most of the tariffs in place, alas), and deep tax cuts that favored the rich and piled up debt. The $8.5 trillion in new debt that Trump ran up was twice as much as under Biden, and he did far less than Biden has done to trim annual deficits… We know they can’t be thinking of Trump’s major infrastructure initiative or his better, less costly alternative to the Affordable Care Act because, despite repeated promises, he never came up with even ‘concepts of a plan’ for either. ‘Two weeks,’ he’d say, and all would be revealed. We’re still waiting. Meanwhile Biden enacted an infrastructure program and expanded Obamacare.

“Speaking of inaction, for four years Trump did nothing to acknowledge let alone mitigate climate change, even as its effects were increasingly evident in eroded coastlines, droughts, wildfires and extreme weather patterns. If a do-nothing policy is what some voters liked, they’ll certainly get more of that should Trump get elected: He’s vowed to dismantle Biden’s landmark climate law, with its clean energy projects, and ‘drill, baby, drill. [Even as US oil extraction is higher now.]

“Amid the biggest crisis of his term, Trump’s policy to deal with COVID-19 was ultimately malpractice: Delays and misfires have been deemed responsible for tens of thousands of preventable deaths. Trump spurred on the historic development of a vaccine against the disease, only to surrender to anti-vax sentiment. It was left to Biden to get shots in Americans’ arms.’”

Further, the economic report noted in the above quote (The International Economic Implications of a Second Trump Presidency presented by Warwick McKibbin, Megan Hogan, and Marcus Noland) tells us that “If all of Mr. Trump’s economic plans came to fruition, the study projected that by 2028 consumer prices would be as much as 28 percent higher than current forecasts, with the inflation rate peaking at 9.3 percent. Gross domestic product could be 9.7 percent lower, shrinking output and dampening consumer demand. And employment — as measured by hours worked — could be down 9 percent because of the shock to the labor supply.” NY Times summary, September 26th. Trump is a self-professed “stable genius,” but apparently that does not include in economics. Trump hates facts, because only “alternative facts” support his economic theories.

I’m Peter Dekom, and those who believe Trump to be a business maven seem to conflate his ostensible “gold faucet” lifestyle with a knowledgeable economic policy leader who knows what best for the nation… but he does know what’s best for himself.

Is DEI Dying and Woke Going Back to Sleep?

It is so much easier to slaughter, disenfranchise, marginalize or subjugate an easily identified class of people by defining “them” as less than “us,” dehumanizing “them,” imbuing “them” with uniformly nasty personal traits and blaming “them” and blaming them for as much as you possibly can. Some Israelis have thus blurred “Hamas” and “Palestinians” resulting in the death of over 40,000 human beings. Police departments in many parts of the United States have policies that consistently subject people of color to more harassment, more arrests, more convictions and longer sentences and more sustaining stigma, compared to white residents, that prevents their getting sustainable employment at a viable level of pay to break the cycles the incumbent majority have imposed on them. Add truly inferior inner-city schools and ultra-dangerous neighborhoods where gangs have replaced the “jobs” that should have been available… but for the reasons above, are not. The Tulsa massacre and the Trail of Tears represent historical low-lights that have found parallels in contemporary America.

The current polarization has rendered the United States dysfunctional at a grassroots level (too many hate anyone who disagrees with them), shoved Congress into “complete inability to govern” gridlock, pushed political appointments of biased judges and justices (literally appointed to implement their biases onto the general public), legitimized political violence and has effectively imposed a white Christian nationalist mandate across the country, shoving blue constituencies face down into rightwing populist muck and mire.

“Woke” originally was about awakening to self-examining awareness. Unfortunately, the meaning shifted into pretending bad stuff never happens, and if it did, it’s not white folks who are at fault. If we are not willing to examine these self-destructive habits ourselves, the British The Economist (September 19th edition) – noting that MAGA pressure has shown, via “our statistical analysis,” that “woke opinions and practices are on the decline,” explains:

“Republicans love to blame everything they consider wrong with America on an epidemic of ‘wokeness’, by which they tend to mean anything that smacks of virtue-signaling or political correctness. Thus a bridge over Baltimore harbour collapsed earlier this year not, as it might have seemed, because it was hit by a wayward cargo ship, but because one of the nearby port’s six commissioners is a black woman whose human-resources firm helps companies assess how diverse their workforces are, among other things—or so a Republican candidate for governor of Utah asserted. Donald Trump, when accepting the Republican nomination for president in July, blamed ‘woke’ leadership for the failings of America’s armed forces. The party’s official platform this year complains of ‘woke…government’ spurring politically motivated prosecutions. The implication is that woke attitudes are proliferating, and that only Republicans can stem their rise.

“In fact, discussion and espousal of woke views peaked in America in the early 2020s and have declined markedly since. The Economist has attempted to quantify the prominence of woke ideas in four domains: public opinion, the media, higher education and business. Almost everywhere we looked a similar trend emerged: wokeness grew sharply in 2015, as Donald Trump appeared on the political scene, continued to spread during the subsequent efflorescence of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, peaked in 2021-22 and has been declining ever since [as illustrated by charts reflecting The Economist’s extensive surveys and content analyses]. The only exception is corporate wokeness, which took off only after Mr Floyd’s murder, but has also retreated in the past year or two…

“Our analysis subsumes both the advocates and the denigrators of woke thinking, by looking at ideas and actions associated with this sort of activism, for good or for ill. It measures, for example, talk of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’ (DEI) in the corporate world, regardless of whether it is being invoked as a way to correct the under-representation of women and racial minorities or as an example of pious window-dressing. Some of the yardsticks we use apply only to the more doctrinaire form of woke activism, such as the number of drives to censure academics for views deemed offensive. Others capture only the more positive aspects of the movement, such as polling data on the proportion of Americans who worry about racial injustice. Either way, the results are consistent: America has passed “peak woke”.

“The simplest way to measure the spread of woke views is through polling. We examined responses over the past 25 years to polls conducted by Gallup, General Social Survey (GSS), Pew and YouGov. Woke opinions on racial discrimination began to grow around 2015 and peaked around 2021. In the most recent Gallup data, from earlier this year, 35% of people said they worried ‘a great deal’ about race relations, down from a peak of 48% in 2021 but up from 17% in 2014. According to Pew, the share of Americans who agree that white people enjoy advantages in life that black people do not (‘white privilege’, in the jargon) peaked in 2020. In GSS’s data the view that discrimination is the main reason for differences in outcomes between races peaked in 2021 and fell in the most recent version of the survey, in 2022. Some of the biggest leaps and subsequent declines in woke thinking have been among young people and those on the left.”

The Trump reconfigured Supreme Court ruled against university affirmative action programs (DEI), many corporations followed suit, ESG (environmentally and socially responsible) investing came under fire and books, lesson plans (schools, public libraries) found their way to the exits. “We’re not banning books; we’re just making different selections.” Voting restrictions, unambiguously linked to race, reared their ugly heads, usually with Supreme Court approval… while the most egregious police aggression (conveniently caught on camera) produced a few “blue” convictions, courts and juries almost always continued to find ways to find cops “not guilty” in those “blue on black” assaults.

We seldom talk about that segment of voters who just will not vote for a woman president, and called into question both her “blackness” is and her qualifications challenged as a “DEI candidate.” Like China and Japan, we rewrite ugliness out of our recollection of history. Our latest classroom history books tell us slavery had benefits for the slaves, no mention of the harm is made in these revised texts, which eschew the reality of slavery and the continuation of discrimination, today expanded into religious, gender and ethnic attacks. Only German education seems to embrace the mandatory teaching of a historical horrible: teaching about the Holocaust to all public students in texts that do not hold back.

I have been dealing with these issues over many blogs, but for the most salient efforts, so I do not repeat myself here, please see the details in my September 17th The Disengagement of the Rich, the Role of "Woke" in Education and Lawyers vs Voters, September 3rd When the Supreme Court is Repulsed by Equality and Begins to Rewrite the Constitution, and my very recent Is DEI the New N-Word, Pretending to Be the New Equality Standard? blogs.  What’s so hard about living with the truth and trying to make the world a better place?

I’m Peter Dekom, and for integrity’s sake, we must prevent a repetition of past horribles, adjust for the wrongs that have not been righted, and assert the cherished American value set: diversity, equity/equality and inclusion.

Crying Meteorologists

 

“It has dropped 50 millibars in 10 hours.” South Florida’s NBC 6 Meteorologist John Morales, unable to hold back his tears, October 8th. “I apologize… This is just horrific… Where the seas are just so incredibly, incredibly hot—record hot… You know what’s driving that. I don’t need to tell you: global warming, climate change.”

“This is literally catastrophic… And I can say without any dramatization whatsoever, if you choose to stay in one of those evacuation areas, you’re gonna die.” 

Tampa Mayor Jane Castor on CNN, October 7th, as Milton approached.

Even as fabrication-master Majorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia MAGA Congressperson, suggested that “they” (Dems?) are controlling the weather from Antarctica – suggesting that man-controlled weather is possible even as she holds that man-induced climate change is a hoax (??) – her master lie-instructor, Donald Trump, falsely cried that the Biden-Harris administration was diverting funds from disaster relief to fund undocumented migrants… leaving hurricane victims with virtually nothing. Even as several Republican governors in hard hit Helene/Milton states – minus Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who would not take Biden’s call to offer Florida “whatever it needs” – praised the rapidity and level of the FEMA response. These deniers and marginalizers of climate change have managed to turn the worst set of hurricanes to hit the Southeast in a century into a political event. Can we vote out climate change? Will nature listen?

So, what are millibars and why are these measurements relevant? According to Sciencing.com, “Rotating storm systems that originate over tropical and subtropical oceans are called tropical cyclones. As a tropical cyclone gains intensity, it becomes a hurricane. Inside a hurricane, the barometric pressure at the ocean's surface drops to extremely low levels. This central low pressure draws in warm, moist ocean air, and thunderstorms swirl around the center of these massive storms.” Millibars are the measurement of mercury in a barometer, which rises and falls based on atmospheric pressure. Rapidly dropping mercury is a terrible omen.

The warmer the water temperatures (and the surface temperatures immediately above), the more a whirling storm system effectively fuels itself, carrying massive amounts of “inhaled” water, as wind speeds intensity in open water, pushing seas forward with unbelievable strength. So, you have three damaging components: powerful winds, deluge-laden rain and a massive ocean surge ready to slam into the first land mass it may encounter. The warmer the ocean water, the more intense the storm… And ocean temperatures in storm prone regions, like the Gulf of Mexico, have never been higher.

While some hurricanes burn themselves out over open ocean waters, dumping their load far from humanity, other killer storms slow only when they hit land mass. And while these storms do slow, their initial impact is often super-devastating; the heavy absorbed water they carry only keeps them over land longer, dumping massive rain, whipped up by the accompanying wind. Aside from the walls of seawater (often higher than a house) ocean surges and the humungous rain, the wind rips roofs off homes, turning debris in its path into lethal projectiles. The entire coastline of Florida is being reconfigured as these hurricanes carve away coastal sand and hammer bays and inlets. According to scientists, this pattern of horrific hurricanes in this region will accelerate the impact of rising oceans… and in the foreseeable future, wash away the Florida Keys, the North Carolina Outer Banks… ultimately sending as much as 30% of Florida underwater.

Look carefully at the pre-Milton-landfall NASA image above. There are three hurricanes in that photograph, the first triple such hurricane slam since 1851. This picture alone should tell humanity that the world of hurricanes (“cyclones” in the Asia Pacific region) has steadily and massively increased, both as to major storm frequency and intensity. As wildfires rage in the West, flooding storms and tornados intensify in the Midwest, the single most devasting impact on the United States, the one that will wreak the most economic devastation, death and health crisis in the trillions and trillions of dollars-worth (without even trying to put a dollar value on life) is unambiguously climate change. Further, searing heat and migrating disease-laden insects are the sustained killers that do not require a natural disaster to kill humans and animals alike.

As Kamala Harris is rapidly rising against Donald Trump in his once “strong suit” (the economy), Trump is forced to emphasize other issues, primarily immigration at our southern border, to push back. Only a baldfaced lie could tie immigration to federal disaster relief, but that is clearly within Trump’s standard playbook. That he can campaign in recently hurricane-devasted regions, with a promise to gut Biden’s massive infrastructure bill with a heavy emphasis on containing climate change, alone should be enough to tell voters that the United States cannot afford to reelect Trump. You will notice that I did not use any statistics or photos of the actual damage from hurricanes Helene and Milton… I am sure that you have been and will continue to be deluged with those images and reports in ample numbers from any news source you choose.

I’m Peter Dekom, and electing climate change marginalizers and deniers to high office is akin to implementing a slow suicide for many… and a very immediate suicide for others.

We Have the Best Healthcare in the World, if You are Rich

A Modern Generation of American Storytellers

The MAGA Fabricators

“The modern media cycle drives stories faster than sound research, science and peer review time lines can validate them.” 

Retired Pentagon physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick.

There’s no question that waves of political fabrications move between left and right extremes, but with the very recent advent of social media as increasingly the predominant source of information, one political faction has risen to dominate that medium. Trump’s MAGA base. Born of television and marketing, Donald Trump, the master of the outrageous, became a social media manipulator above the rest. With the overwhelming majority of SuperPac spends – released from truth and normalcy by Citizens United vs FEC by the Supreme Court in 2010 – veering populist and MAGA agendas exploded. The Dems barely squeezed by Trump in 2018 and 2020, generating numbers far better than they should have earned, largely because MAGA veered too far into the realm of obvious egregious fabrication to sustain a clear victory.

As numbers of working-class Americans have defected to MAGA world, feeling left behind – willing to embrace easy-to-believe policies of blame against dramatically identifiable people vs abstract realities such as globalization, the pandemic, Wall Street financial machinations or technology/AI – have played dramatically into the dark, deep state MAGA narrative. Easy to attack “DEI” minorities and “job-stealing criminal” immigrants with spoon-fed conspiracies, notwithstanding clear evidence to the contrary. Dark and hopeless vs light and optimistic?

The immutability of Trump’s evangelical base, triggering deep psychological reactions based on stress and fear, settled in, nonetheless. The coming election has become a contest of “everybody else.” The Biden candidacy, mired in the old campaign formulas exacerbated by his age, self-destructed. With a relatively short fuse, a younger, more invigorated Democratic Party is now using the same social media strategy trying to turn the tide in their favor.

But there remains one huge casualty entrenched on the political battlefield: truth. The era of mythology, “alternative facts,” conspiracy theory and out-and-out lying were the new American way. Call it hyperbole, storytelling parables to make a point or utter fabrication, lying had been legitimized into the mainstream, and deep fake technology plus foreign campaigns of mis- and dis-information infected a new pandemic into the American body politic.

One of my favorite columnists, LA Times writer, Michael Hiltzik, made some interesting observations in his September 22nd piece: “Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government’s lead investigator of UFOs.

“It was in that latter position — as the first director of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, that Kirkpatrick came face to face with the tide of misinformation and disinformation infecting America’s public discourse on scientific matters… ‘After painstakingly assembling a team of highly talented and motivated personnel to develop a rational, systematic and science-based strategy to investigate these phenomena,’ Kirkpatrick wrote in a Scientific American op-ed in January, shortly after his December retirement from AARO, he and his team were overwhelmed by a ‘whirlwind of tall tales, fabrication and secondhand or thirdhand retellings of the same,’ producing ‘a social media frenzy and a significant amount of congressional and executive time and energy spent on investigating these so-called claims.’

“Kirkpatrick’s observations would be familiar to scientists examining the origins of COVID, a field in which the overwhelming weight of the evidence undermines a partisan theory positing a leak from a Chinese laboratory; or the rise in anti-vaccine claims; or even those examining the false assertion by the Trump/Vance campaign of Haitian immigrants stealing and eating household pets… ‘In my case,’ Kirkpatrick told me a few days ago, ‘I’ve been accused of lying to the American people.’..

“He further revealed to the Guardian [UK] that he had experienced efforts of UFO true believers to ‘threaten my wife and daughter , and try to break into our online accounts — far more than I ever had as the deputy director of intelligence [of U.S. Strategic Command]. I didn’t have China and Russia trying to get on me as much as these people are.’

“That would also be familiar to other scientists on the front lines of such inquiries. Scientists whose work has validated the theory that the virus causing COVID-19 reached humans via the wildlife trade in southeast Asia have been hauled before a House committee to be shrieked at by the likes of Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), and to be accused of taking bribes and, yes, lying to the public. Vaccine advocates have been physically confronted and even assaulted by anti-vaxxers.”

Post-assassination attempts, NY Times writer Katherine Miller railed against the normalization of political violence in the modern era (September 6th article): “In the past five years, a man walked into the House speaker’s home with a hammer and assaulted her husband; a young man upset about the Supreme Court’s direction turned up in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s neighborhood with a gun; a man showed up at a district office of Representative Gerry Connolly of Virginia with a baseball bat looking for him and attacked two staff members; this year, someone lit the door of Bernie Sanders’s Vermont office on fire with seven staff members inside.

“The list goes on up to and including the many things that happened on Jan. 6, and the threats and harassment politicians, election officials and workers, judges and other public officials faced after Mr. Trump refused to concede the election and attacked political and legal efforts to hold him to account. This also leaves aside less targeted violence, like the carjacking attempt that took place near Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home.

“Things can feel alarmingly precarious: What kept the shooting at a Republican congressional baseball practice from turning into something much worse was the presence of Representative Steve Scalise, who suffered some of the worst injuries but also had an armed Capitol Police security detail who returned fire. Near Justice Kavanaugh’s home, the unwell young man with a gun never followed through, because his sister talked him into calling 911 on himself. Part of what made the attack on Paul Pelosi — which Mr. Trump has told jokes about — particularly harrowing is that Ms. Pelosi’s armed security detail was not there because she wasn’t there.”

Indeed, there are growing factions, very much reflected in the January 6, 2021 violent MAGA attack on the US Capitol and the polices charged to protect it (officially rationalized as “legitimate political discourse” by the Republican Party), that a Trump loss in November will trigger ultra-violence across the land. There are parallel threats from a much smaller faction from the left if Trump wins. Are we listening, America?

I’m Peter Dekom, and as I watch this malignancy of political violence redefine my country, I have repeatedly asked, “who are we as Americans?”… and I am still waiting for a cogent answer.