"Freedom isn't free"

This aphorism is proudly shouted out by those in the USA who believe  the 2nd amendment is the most important in the US Constitution. Eternal vigilance, they say, preferably armed and ready is the price of freedom.

"Freedom isn't free"

The USA has just endured yet another mass shooting, this time at a grocery store where ten people were murdered while freely shopping for dinner simply because a well armed individual decided to shoot them. Fans of the second amendment lay the blame squarely on the shooter. "Guns don't kill people", they say, "people kill people". As if the shooter could have just as easily ended ten lives with a kitchen knife.

Freedom isn't freedom

Americans actually argue over the definition of "mass shooting" and "school shooting" as if such sophistry matters to the victims. American kindergarten children are subjected to active shooter drills as part of their introduction to school. These drills are repeated at each grade level until they graduate or die in yet another mass school shooting. The list of American activities which could end with a bullet in your body now includes: Attending school, Attending a concert, Partying at a bar, Shopping, Going to work, Staying home, Driving. Nowhere is safe. Fans of the 2nd amendment think the answer to this is more guns and more active shooter training. They seem to prefer the "freedom" of the old American wild west where, as they imagine it, every real man had a gun and would travel. Such "freedom" is neither freedom nor free. There is no freedom in active shooter drills, hardened spaces and arming for the next threat. No state of existence can be free while its cost is a body count.

The Democrats control the White House, the House of Representatives and have a thin edge in the Senate. However tenuously, they hold the power to do something about America's mass murder problem. If they do not, they will have to accept blame for every subsequent mass shooting, just as much as the person who pulls the trigger.     

  

 

I have started this group due a a recent "debate" I've had over fishing rights. I realized during the course of that exchange that the person arguing with me had no real experience or understanding of the purpose of arguing. Sadly, very few of us do. Arguing is the less formal version of debating. Though less formal, arguing is still a good way to fully understand an opposing viewpoint. This goal is most likely realized if all parties understand the purpose of a good argument.

So lets start with some rules:

1) There is more than enough discussion about BITCOIN on this site so no arguments about BITCOIN are allowed in this group.

2) Participants are considered to be seeking a greater understanding about some topic.

3) While an argument might start with some egregiously offensive statement, the poster is not assumed to be locked into the idea expressed therein. In other words the originator and all other participants are expected to be open to other viewpoints and to listen to each other.

4) Repetition of a point is not tolerated as a tactic to win an argument. This is a written medium, if a participant feels they have been misunderstood, asking a question to seek out the misunderstanding is better than merely repeating a point.

5) Gainsaying is NOT an argument.

6) Insulting a participant will result in the offender losing the argument. The insulted party has the option to allow continued participation.

I don't want to make this more complicated than need be so this seems like enough rules.

Let the arguments begin! Keep it civilized. I'll give a few days for someone else to post some contentious idea and see what happens.

 

And the season is open! This is the planetary record - so far!

Post 45's tempestuous administration, the Grand Old Party's members are engaging in a wary game of sniffing each other's arses as they sort out who is and is not really a Trumpista and how much power said cult still retains within the party. While the Republican/Royal party sorts that out the rest of us can get a sense of what is really happening by watching a few select people over the next few months. 

The first to keep an eye on is Marjorie Taylor Greene. You may be forgiven for not knowing this newly elected Republican congresswoman from Georgia. But you will hear about her eventually and probably quite soon. MTG is either one of the craziest people ever to sit in Congress or the most craven opportunist. She has denounced the massacre at Sandy Hook School as a "false flag" operation. Her Facebook account is replete with calls to murder various Democrat opponents with whom she now shares the floor of the people's house. She is an enthusiastic cheerleader for QAnon and the erstwhile occupant of the Oval Office. She is so far off the scale that within a month of her swearing in a motion has been tabled to have her expelled from Congress. That requires a 2/3 majority. She will only be tossed if a significant number of Republicans agree with the expected unanimous vote of the Democrats. Whether or not that happens will be heavily influenced by what price GOP representatives think they will pay for purging what has to be one of the least consequential performers in the Trump circus.

Next is Sara Huckabee-Sanders. The daughter of a former Republican Governor of Arkansas and the erstwhile Trump Liar-in-Chief at the White House Briefing Room is hoping to lever her name and loyalty to the Orange Outrage into her own stint in Arkansas' gubernatorial mansion. Naturally there are a few others who are also interested but SHS is considered the front runner due to her high level of sycophancy to the dearly departed aspiring monarch. How well she does in the primaries will be a major test of the endurance of DJT's hold on voters and the spines of Royalists throughout the GOP.

Finally there is Liz Cheney. The Third highest ranked member of the House GOP has openly defied the loser of the 2020 Presidential race and even voted to impeach him on the matter of inciting insurrection. This has drawn fire from small hands and some of the remaining flying monkeys that still orbit his mass. There are threats of a primary challenge in 2022 and maneuvers to curtail her power. For now she portrays an aura of no-concern about the threats. She is probably right that over time she will be the hero in this drama. The question is: How much time must pass?

If MTG and SHS go down in flames while LC sails on, the GOP has a chance to redeem itself as a real Republican Party of Ideas.

If MTG is not purged, SHS becomes the Republican Gubernatorial candidate for Arkansas and LC is banished, the Republican Party will have betrayed itself and become a party in search of a monarch. but they will undoubtedly continue to call themselves Republicans. None of them will see anything wrong with that.

 

Its been a long four years you know

We can all remember how transitions

Used to make us proud

Peaceful and respectful too

Out with the old, in with the new

And often we’d be happy for a while

But 45 made Liberty shiver

With every tweet that child did twitter

Fake news on the small screen

We all hoped it was a dream

I do remember that I cheered

When his opponent was declared

Winner of the POTUS race

The day Trumpism died

So bye-bye, you un-American guy

Take your small hands to the southlands, wave the Whitehouse goodbye

You lost big-time and now the end it is nigh

You’ll be a LOSER til the day that you die

A LOSER til the day that you die!

I guess he just got tired of all the winning. The Orange Outrage Machine's infantile behaviour since LOSING the election on Nov 3rd will be the defining act of his time in office. The string of LOSSES his legal team has racked up is considerable and every one of them is a condemnation of the client forcing the lawyers to risk disbarment by wasting the court's time with mere speculation and baseless claims.

The White House Horror Show of the last four years has claimed enough of my time and energy, I am determined to end that.  It was necessary to pay attention because he held the awesome power of the US President in his tiny little hands. Come noon hour on January 20, 2021 his only power over us will be what we grant to him by paying attention to his tweets and the news stories about those tweets. He will commit and utter other outrageous things to keep our attention. If he keeps it he maintains his hold over the GOP.

I refuse to play his game. So the next post from me on the topic of the Abominable President will be on January 21st, after noon, Washington time, when he officially resumes life as a private citizen who is now the LOSER of the Nov 3 2020 Presidential Election. In the interim I plan to avoid reading any articles about him. I encourage all of you to do the same. News websites count clicks on their articles and produce more on topics that collect the most clicks. Less clicks on articles about Trump will create a death cycle for them and hopefully they disappear. The only response, if any to a story about Donald Trump should be "Why pay any attention to that LOSER?

When asked about his role in dismantling the NSA Pandemic Office, the Peach President of the United States finally said something true. His reply: "I don't take any responsibility at all". Truer words have never been spoken by this poor excuse for a human being. The Democrats should include this admission in their campaign ads from now until November.

Conventional governmental fiscal policy is to stay the course on taxes and interest rates whenever possible to promote stability. Raise taxes only when needed for programs, cut taxes when possible or when a crisis requires more money in the pockets of business and consumers. Raise interest rates when the economy threatens to overheat, cut them when confidence disappears.

in 2017 Trump cut taxes for the expressed purpose of boosting the economy into 4% growth. The cuts will pay for themselves he said. They didn't and the US Federal Debt exploded while growth stalled out at far less than the target rate. Trump also hectored the Federal Reserve into reversing planned interest rate hikes and even making a slight cut in order to boost what was already well performing economy.

These two actions left the US with very little room to act when the Covid - 19 crisis shattered world economic confidence and sent the global economy to the edge of a cliff. The US federal reserve rate has been cut to 1.25%, leaving virtually no room for further lowering borrowing costs. The record high US debt load has left even Republicans balking at Trump's proposed payroll tax cut and other spending to inject liquidity into markets. In short, Trump failed to understand that using the tools he had to pursue political goals meant he didn't have them when needed to protect against real threats.

This failure to understand the value of maneuvering room explains much of Trump's horrible business record. A man who managed to bankrupt his casinos knows nothing about contingencies. His short sightedness is now in the White House and costing the USA, and the world far more than would otherwise have been necessary. Let's hope the loss is just measured in money. 

 

Media of all types are the first draft of history. With the exception of Fox News' routine of ignoring anything negative towards Trump media reports on his handling of the COVID-19 crisis are that he is not doing his job.

What is the President's Job in a medical crisis? There is only one task required of POTUS. Reassure the nation that competent people are in place and doing the best they can to keep everyone alive. What is Trump doing? 1) Calling the illness a hoax 2) Accusing the Democrats of scaremongering to hurt his re-election campaign 3) Undermining his own experts' public statements about the seriousness of the outbreak 4) Providing overoptimistic estimates of the availability of a vaccine 5) Claimed that warm weather will make it go away 6) Suggesting that some people will get better by going to work 7) Blaming his predecessor for restricting the production of test kits for a virus that did not exist until almost 3 years after Trump took office.

This collection of pronouncements is called gaslighting, a term that means to deny what is obvious in an effort to confuse someone into doubting their own eyes. It is Trump's go to practice for anything as he attempts to define truth itself.

There are still some competent people left in this administration and within state and local governments. Their efforts will be what gets Americans through this. I'm betting they are all wishing Trump would just go golfing and keep his nonsense out of their way. I certainly do.

 

It is said that anyone can sail the ship when the seas are calm. Meaning the most competent sailors are identified by the storms they have sailed through. A less frequently heard test is whether a sailor can avoid storms if at all possible. But I digress. 

Ever since his inauguration pundits have fretted about what would happen when Trump is confronted with a real crisis. We have avoided a serious crisis since January 2017. Less serious challenges that have caught our attention have been mostly of Trump's own making. Intangible damage to the US' international reputation, constitution and norms of governance aside the US has been muddling through at least for now.

The three years he has been in power have provided ample evidence for concern about Trump's management of a real crisis. His shaky relationship with the truth has rendered him an incredible (i.e. not at all credible) source for reassurance when it is needed most. His preference for loyalty over competence has created a government run by inexperienced yes-people intent only on implementing the President's agenda - an incoherent mix of anti-government opportunism focused only on his re-election.

The COVID 19 virus aka Coronavirus presents a potential crisis that will have far reaching effects. Beyond its lethality, the virus has the potential to badly damage the global economy. I'm not just talking about the stock market. Disruption of global trade and manufacturing will soon lead to shortages of all sorts of goods thanks to industry's adoption of "just in time" inventory management. That practice kept costs low but eliminated the capacity to keep operating when supplies are interrupted. This is what caused last week's stock market crash. Business as we know it may shut down for an unforeseeable length of time. It is the fear of this, more than the reality of it, which will do the most damage. The US health system, recently badly damaged by Republican failure to replace the Affordable Care Act even as they effectively destroyed it, may be heavily taxed by people who are both ill with COVID-19 and afraid they might be.

The Peach President has proven himself a master at stoking fear and anger toward others. His self created challenges have been spun so that he may claim that he won. But this time he needs to calm peoples' fear, he needs to display competence - not just his own but that of his Cabinet. His legacy of lies and preference for lackeys does not inspire confidence.

Trump's supporters like to crow, without evidence, that he is the "Best President Ever". Events of the next few months may provide an objective basis for history to make that call.