Month: August 2017

The New York State Fair began this week, which means we are at the end of summer and the snow should be falling soon.

I thought that would get everyone enthused.

It put me in the mood to ruminate about some random end of summer thoughts.

Weather-wise it wasn’t much of a summer.

It seemed to rain every day although it was probably every other day.

Instead of playing golf, my weekends were spent cutting the lawn although I do have to confess that even if I’d played more golf, it wouldn’t have improved my game.

I still have the highest handicap at the Pompey Club.

If it was any higher, they would probably put a handicap sticker on the golf cart. I could probably blame my lack of improvement on working full time this summer but that would be “Fake News.”

We own nineteen acres, which we share with two mules, a horse, two dogs, two cats and five chickens.

After the pastures are subtracted, I mow about seven acres. The lower acreage, which surrounds a two acre pond was so wet that weeks went by before I could mow it.

It remained too soggy for us to even get any use out of the pond.

The summer seemed longer than usual.

That may have been due to the fact that I have 8:00 A.M. meetings twice per week.

There was a time when the only way I could have attended an 8:00 A.M. meeting was if I was coming home after a night out.

Those days, or should I say nights, are long gone as I celebrate my 68th year.

Now, when I get out of the meeting I walk a mile through downtown and repeat it again at noon as part of my ongoing campaign to stay above ground.

The State Fair is another changed experience.

Many years ago I’d go with a group, late in the day, catch a concert and stay until the fair closed.

Now, I go early on a weekday with my five-year-old granddaughter and stay until the mid-afternoon.

I do have the good sense to avoid opening day when Governor Cuomo comes and announces his latest round of harebrained ideas to be funded with our tax dollars.

It won’t be long before gondolas are crisscrossing the state.

This year, he didn’t disappoint.

He announced that a fifty million dollar expo center ”the largest north of New York City” would be built at the State Fair.

He promised that it would change the Fair from “a 13 day venue to year round economic engine.”

Earlier this year he proposed that a gondola at the fair which would travel over route 690 would be year round attraction.

He has apparently lost his faith in the tourist magnet of being able to view Weitzman’s Scrap Metal yard from the air.

At the end of September my 50hj high school reunion is scheduled.

I can’t help but go back forty years to my 10th reunion.

I was sitting in my office at Hiscock Legal Aid, when I received a telephone call from one of my classmates seeking some help.

“What are you up to these days?” I asked.

“I just stared a six month sentence at Jamesville,” (the local correctional facility), He replied.

“You moron,” I said,” Do you know what day it is?”

“No,” he answered.

“Our tenth reunion is tonight,” I told him.

“Can you get me out?” he asked plaintively.

“Of course not,” I answered.

“Then will you say Hi to everyone for me?” he asked.

“Sure,” I told him.

That night I was asked to say a few words and told everyone, “I’m bringing greetings from some folks who couldn’t be here,” I said, “and some are a lot closer than you think.”

I’ll be curious to see if he can make it this year.

I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, between 1969 and graduation in 1971.

East Tennessee was a very conservative and reliably Republican bastion that supported the War in Vietnam.

During those years much happened.

Numerous marches and protests against the war were held in downtown Knoxville as well as in Washington, D.C.

In May 1970, following the shooting that took place at Kent State University, U-T, like many other colleges and universities, went on strike.

Picket lines protesting the shooting and the war were everywhere on campus.

Large meetings and assemblies were held on campus at which speakers railed against the war and the persons responsible for sending the National Guard onto the Kent state campus.

During this period police in Mississippi shot into a dormitory at the African-American college Jackson State University in Jackson, killing two students and wounding twelve more.

While this raised the temperature on and off campuses across the nation, events, for the most part, continued peacefully.

In the Nation’s Capital, a protest march drew 100,000.

I was one of them.

No violence occurred.

Shortly after the shooting at Kent State, President Richard Nixon appeared on our campus to address a Billy Graham gathering.

While several hundred protesters turned out, the protest was peaceful and respectable.

The following year I traveled from Knoxville to Washington, again. This march drew 200,000.

In San Francisco another 156,000 protested.

Both protests were peaceful.

I offer all of this background as a way of explaining my confusion and understanding about how we have arrived where we find ourselves in the wake of Charlottesville.

The events in Charlottesville and Trump’s reaction to them are nothing short of spine chilling.

On Friday night, a large group of racists drawn from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white “nationalist” groups marched through the University of Virginia Campus in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In true KKK fashion, they carried burning torches.

In true Nazi fashion, they chanted “blood and soil,” a phrase chanted in Nazi Germany to signify ethnic purity and the virtue of German agrarian life.

On Saturday, as the world watched, they engaged in violent confrontations with counter demonstrators that ultimately led to the death of three people and left scores of others injured.

In the immediate aftermath, one would have expected that the President of the United States would have condemned the KKK members, Neo-Nazi’s and other racist extremists who precipitated the violence.

Instead, he condemned “many sides” lumping the counter demonstrators in with racists and Nazis, one of whom drove his car into a crowd of people, killing a young woman.

Former KKK Grand Dragon, David Duke applauded Trump’s stance, observing that it was white people, like himself, that were responsible for Trump being in the White House.

This moral equivalence by Trump, led to an outcry across the political spectrum causing him to backtrack and condemn racism and anti-Semitism.

By Tuesday, Trump had doubled down on his earlier comments during a raucous press conference in which he said there were “many fine people” among the racists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who participated in the “Unite the Right’ rally.

Once again, David Duke took to the air to thank Trump for “your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville…..”

It is, to say the least, puzzling that Trump would characterize the alt-right followers that chanted “Jews will not replace us” and castigated Trump for allowing his daughter to marry a Jew as “many fine people.”

By the end of the week, Trump’s “chief strategist” Steve Bannon resigned and returned to Breitbart News, which he characterized as the “platform for the alt-right.”

Commentators have mused about whether Bannon’s departure will result in more moderation coming to the White House.

It’s time to face the sad truth.

Bannon is not responsible for Trump’s racism and bigotry.

Trump is responsible for that.

It is who he is.

He demonstrated it long before he began his racist “birther” campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the first African-American President’s right to hold that office.

It is manifest in his continued claim that the “Central Park Five,” young African-American men that were wrongfully accused, convicted and imprisoned for a the rape of a jogger remain guilty of that crime, despite being exonerated by DNA testing and the confession of the real perpetrator.

Only the most naïve or myopic can expect for a change in the man’s character.

It’s also time to stop sanitizing the characterization of Ku Klux Klan members, Neo- Nazis and other bigoted defectives by referring to them as “White Nationalists” and the “alt-Right” as though there was some moral or philosophical legitimacy for the hate they spew.

After watching the news reporting of the events in Charlottesville, I can’t see the “many fine people” that Trump saw among them.

Maybe, he saw them in the light from the torches that they carried.

Now that Congress is on recess, it is probably safe to get sick.

For the past seven years, the annual refrain of the Republican Party has been “repeal and replace.”

Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, once famously proclaimed that he “would pull out Obamacare root and branch.”

That was three years ago.

Republicans took control of the Senate that year.

They had taken control of the House of Representatives four years earlier, in 2010.

They have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act i.e. Obamacare over sixty times before taking control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

Then, they got their wish, complete control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

You would have thought they would have had a plan ready.

The first bill which they called the American Health Care Act would have eliminated health insurance for twenty-three million Americans according to the Congressional Budget Office.

It would have reduced the budget deficit by about one-percent over ten years.

It passed by the narrowest of margins and advanced to the Senate.
Following the House vote, Trump invited the Republican members of the House that voted for it to the Rose Garden to celebrate its passage.

Shortly after that, he described the bill as “mean” and urged the Senate to soften it.

Who would vote for a “mean” health care bill?

We’ll get to that shortly.

The Senate revised and renamed the bill, calling it the “Budget reconciliation Act of 2017.”

The senators heeded Trump’s call to soften the bill by eliminating coverage for only twenty-two million people.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that forty-nine million people would be without coverage by 2026.

When it became apparent that there were not enough votes to pass the bill, the Senate took up a “skinny repeal” bill which would have eliminated the individual and employer mandates. It contained no provisions for pre-existing conditions or essential health care benefits.

This bill also failed when Republican Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain voted against it.

McCain’s unexpected “no” vote made him the hero of the hour to opponents of the repeal and replace bills, which seemed unfair to me since both Collins and Murkowski had been steadfast in their opposition in the face of McConnell’s pressure tactics and Trump’s threats and at a time when the legislation appeared that it might pass.

Indeed, McConnell had crafted the legislation in secret without including any female members of his caucus, notwithstanding the fact that Planned Parenthood funding was an important component of the legislation.

It seems fitting that this chauvinism on his part may have further doomed his signature legislative project.

Although I refrain from blogging about local issues, we should return to the question of who would vote for a “mean” health care bill?

The answer is that five upstate Republican congressional representatives voted for it, ignoring the devastation it would wreak on the people living in their districts.

They are john Faso, Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney, Thomas Reed and Chris Collins.

In Faso’s 19thDistrict, 101,385 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Stefanik’s 21st District, 83,463 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Tenney’s 21st District, 67,539 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Reed’s 23rd District, 79,904 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Collins 27th District, 124,954 people would lose their health care coverage.

If any of the bills passed, 3,114,079 New Yorkers would have lost their health care coverage.

Faced with a choice between representing the health and well-being of their constituents, and siding with the powers that be in Washington, they chose the latter.

At this writing, Trump is castigating McConnell for his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and demanding that Congress return try again.

What “mean” measure he has in mind remains a mystery.

If you’re one of those people who is covered under the Affordable Care Act, there are two things you should probably do.

The first is to get medical treatment for any condition you are suffering from.

The second is to pray that Congress doesn’t return to Washington any time soon

They come and go like Halley’s Comet, bursting across the scenery in a bright flash before fading out in a blaze of glory leaving a streaking tail across the heavens.

So swiftly did the rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci as White House Communications Director begin and end.

“The Mooch” an investment banker with a law degree and no journalistic training was appointed White house Communications Director on July 21st and was gone ten days later.

He was Trump’s third Communications Director since last November’s election.

But what a ride he gave us during that brief tenure.

There were two things that leapt out at you during his first press conference.

He had mastered an impression of all of Donald Trump’s mannerisms, gestures and delivery.

He also sounded just like “Jimmy” in the Zyppah commercials.

It quickly became apparent that when dealing with Trump’s critics, he would be Trump’s id, maybe on steroids.

His arrival led to the resignation of Pres Secretary, Sean Spicer, who had no appetite for performing the duties of his position and Scaramucci’s and predicted it would simply add more chaos to the West Wing.

“The Mooch,” we learned, had been trying to secure a White House position since the inauguration.

He was so driven and focused in this quest that his wife filed for divorce a few days after the appointment, reportedly disgusted at his lust for power and position in the White House.

White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon had been united in their opposition to Scaramuccci’s hiring in any position in the White House.

Less than a week after his appointment, Scaramucci went before the press and characterized his relationship with Priebus as brotherly in the nature of Cain and Abel.

That Cain killed Abel, should have portended what was to come.

That night Scaramucci called a reporter and in a profane rant about Bannon and Priebus, predicted that Priebus would be gone soon.

By the following Monday, Priebus was gone.

Trump tweeted his resignation as they were returning from a speech on gang violence on Long Island. Priebus could be seen reading it on his phone.

Four days ago CNN obtained a copy of a seven page memo that Scramucci had prepared outlining his vision for the White House Communications staff.

The memo is interesting reading given Scaramuccci’s performance.

It opens with the observation that “Make it clear that horn tooting and denigrating colleagues is unacceptable.”

It proposes that “We need to improve the quality and quantity of interactions between [Communications Department employees] and its various constituents” and urges “treating colleagues professionally.”

Needless to say, those sentiments must have come as a surprise to Priebus and Bannon considering the observations Scaramucci made about them to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker during his famous telephone rant.

Perhaps the most telling reveal about Scaramuccci’s unfitness for the job was that he thought that his remarks to Lizza were “off the record” despite never having told the reporter that they were.

The “Mooch” memo offers a couple of other observations designed to cause some head scratching to the reader.

The memo also urges that they “…should use Kellyanne Conway more. She has consistently been the President’s most effective spokesperson.”

Anyone who has listened to her various defenses of the Administration’s mishaps recognizes that she should be permanently attached to a polygraph machine.

It proposes humanizing Trump “the best golfer to serve as President…we embrace it with a national lottery to play a round of golf with him…” and urges the staff to ” …help POTUS convey a Reaganesque “happy warrior” image…”

Trump brings to mind a lot of images but the “happy warrior” is not one of them.

Now that the “Mooch” is free to do more Zyppah commercials, a new Communications Director must be found.

As we got closer to the end of the week, there was chatter that Bannon’s assistant, Steven Miller, might become the new Communications Director.

It was reported that Trump was impressed with Miller’s denigration of the inscription on the Statute of Liberty taken from the poem by Emma Lazarus “The New Colossus” which reads “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…”

Miller has a long history in the alt-right world, shilling for various right wing dingbats like Michelle Bachmann, John Shadegg and former senator and current Attorney-General. Jeff Sessions.

He and his mentor Steve Bannon have found a kindred spirit in Vladimir Putin, whom they view as a “fellow nationalist and crusader against cosmopolitanism.”

In accusing a CNN reporter of being “cosmopolitan,” Miller embraced a term coined by Josef Stalin to justify his purges of cultural dissidents who did not share his nationalism.

If the Trump Communications job goes from Scaramucci to Miller, it will be the next chapter in an unfolding disaster.

The only one who will be able to straighten out that mess will be Mandrake the Magician.