Trump's Supporters, Leviticus 19:16, Money Talks, Columns by Friedman and Krugman plus a New Chrissy Frost Story

Trump's Supporters

These are going to be harsh words about the Presidential campaign.  It is not about the candidates.  Rather, it is about their supporters.  "Dangerous" Donald Trump is what he is, an insensitive braggart, constantly changing his barely thought-out positions, and most of all totally unprepared by education and experience to fill the office he aspires to, and which he is unfit to hold. 

   

But Trump is not the problem.  It is the vast majority of his supporters who are.  By and large, they are naive and gullible, ready to swallow the half truths about his opponent, Hillary Clinton, and President Obama, which Trump is constantly mouthing.

It is very hard to confront these folks and tell them that they are naive and gullible.   But in 2016, that is the case.  It even extends to  smart people like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who does not support Donald Trump but who says he will vote  for him.   

                            

Why does a man like Ryan fall for Trump's pitch?  His naivete stems from the fact that he is willing to vote for, but not support, someone he recognizes to be a totally unqualified candidate, risking the survival of the nation, just because he values maintaining a Republican-controlled Congress as more important!  Ryan fails to see the consequences of his position.

When I hear that someone who doesn’t support Donald Trump but is going to vote for him anyway because they don’t want a Democratic in the White House making Supreme Court appointments, or simply feel that “anybody but Hillary” is a sufficient reason, I am amazed.  They remind me of those Germans who failed to see the danger in Hitler’s rise to power in 1932, when the choices were limited to Hitler's party, the Communists or continued governmental disintegration, the other alternatives at the time.  Once in office, he will “soften,” they believed.  But he meant what he was saying.  They, like many today, were naive and gullible.  When they finally woke up, it was too late.

I never had to deal with a problem like this with supporters of prior Republican Presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan, both Bushes,  Bob Dole, John McCain or Mitt Romney.  While I might have disagreed with the views of their supporters, I never considered them as being gullible, naive or having a screw loose somewhere upstairs.  But that is the case in 2016 with my friends and neighbors who support Donald Trump.  And when I see the crowds at his rallies cheering him on, listening to his simplistic solutions to problems he does not seem to even understand, I recognize that they are empathizing with him because they also have no real understanding of them either.  And what he says does not matter to them, regardless of how frequently it changes.  

Trump supporters, correctly or not, feel that for years they have been shortchanged by our economic, social and political systems and that from what he says, to borrow a phrase from Bill Clinton, they believe that “he feels their pain.”  Their support of him is no deeper than that. And believe me, he does not "feel their pain."  As much as one may love the cheerleader with the megaphone and pompoms, would you want her 

     

playing quarterback on your team? Only if you have a screw loose somewhere.  Watch the crowd at the next Trump rally you see on TV.  Listen for the rattling of the loose screws.

Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings (her email servers, her relationship with the Clinton Foundation and even her behavior at the time of the Benghazi tragedy) are far more smoke than fire, and on close examination, are far outweighed by Trump’s total lack of qualifications for the Presidency. Her supporters recognize this.  Trump supporters, immersed in naivete and gullibility fail to see this, overwhelmed by their candidate's slogans and innuendo based on unproven charges.  Hear them chant at rallies "Lock Her Up, Lock Her Up." What planet are they from?  What kind of country do they think they live in?

In regard to what unproven innuendo can accomplish, check out Paul Krugman's latest New York Times column.  Just click right here.    Krugman points out how unproven and false charges were among the factors resulting in Al Gore's defeat in 2000.   But such innuendo is what Trump's supporters feed upon, and Trump's campaign has nothing much else to dish out to them.  

Read some of the conservative, usually Republican, right wing columnists in the newspaper of your choice.  They have some good ideas.  But I question whether the typical Trump supporter can understand the ideas about which they are writing.  I wonder how many Trump supporters actually read newspapers. Trump himself gets most of his news from television and reportedly has a short attention span.  It takes a fair attention span to understand what George Will, Kathleen Parker, Mona Charen, Ross Douthat or even Charles Krauthammer are writing about.  Frankly, the Trump supporters I know just don’t have that.  They prefer TV lectures by Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh’s radio diatribes or heavily advertised superficial and shallow books dedicated to exposing the shortcomings of the Clintons and President Obama..  Their gullibility prevents them from absorbing anything any deeper.

Lest we forget, to lock in these supporters Trump has signed on a new campaign guru, Stephen Bannon.  It is said that he is a bigot (his ex-wife, in their 2007 divorce proceedings, contended he did not want their children going to a private school with Jews), but it is pretty clear that America's "bigot" voters already are in Trump's camp, so why bother hiring him, one might ask.  But Stephen Bannon's experience at Breitbart News indicates that he is an expert at handling the innuendo referred to in Paul Krugman's article cited above, and besides locking in the "bigot" vote, he knows how to appeal to Trump's naive and gullible supporters.  That's why he is, and makes Donald Trump, very dangerous! 
Jack Lippman  

The Bible Says So!

Although different versions of the Bible give slightly different wordings to Leviticus 19:16 of the Hebrew Scriptures (referred to by Christians as the Old Testament), part of that verse tells us not to stand idly by while a neighbor bleeds.  

                                   

In this world where suicide bombings occur daily and a significant portion of the population of the Middle East and Africa does not know where to turn, that injunction should not be ignored.  Certainly, we do not have the power to cure all of the evils in our world, but when questions arise as to helping or even admitting refugees from such terror to our country, it is wrong to oppose them.  It was wrong when Germany was persecuting Jews in the 1930's and 1940's and it is wrong today.  We cannot stand by idly while neighbors bleed.  The Bible says so.
JL

                                       

Mostly How Money Talks

Oh, there have been investigations and hearings about Benghazi, and nothing 

much new has come out of them.   Hillary Clinton’s emails have been investigated too and the FBI, other than saying she was extremely careless in what she did, said that no prosecutor would ever charge her with anything based on what they found.  And as for the Clinton Foundation, which pays for a lot of good things done by other organizations world-wide, its connection to former President Bill Clinton, and to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, cannot be shown to have led to any government actions which otherwise would or would not have been taken.  Clinton’s opponents see a lot of smoke but find no fire and certainly, nothing to justify the ridiculous cries of "Lock Her Up!" heard at Trump rallies.  Most of these screamers are not even aware that the Clinton Foundation receives higher ratings that even the American Red Cross from independent rating organizations such as Charity Navigator and Charity Watch!

Money talks.  If you gave a wheelbarrow full of money to a political candidate, would you expect to get at least a Christmas card from him or her?  And if you had some political views of your own, and that wheelbarrow had been big enough, would you expect them, or someone on their staff, to return your call and at least listen to what you had to say?  Sure, or next time, there might not be a wheelbarrow around.  But that doesn’t mean they will pay any heed to what you have to say!

And if you gave a couple of truckloads of cash to a charity which carried the family name of people who were or had been in high political office, wouldn’t you expect the same kind of treatment?  But note, getting a phone call returned doesn’t mean you have the power to influence political decisions. 

The Supreme Court in the Citizens United decision said that corporations and organizations have the same First Amendment free speech rights as individuals.  Of course, without money, corporations and organizations wouldn’t exist, so the Court in effect said that “money talks” and that it is unconstitutional to try to stop it from doing so.

Many of those who make the kind of donations discussed above expect something in return.  Whether or not they get it, however, is another matter entirely!  If they do, it very well might be a crime … and this is the chimera (go look that one up) for which Clinton’s opponents keep looking.

The sage Maimonides  once described three levels of charitable giving.  One is where a donor gives something, knowing where it is going, and not hiding the fact that they made the donation.  The second is where the giver makes such a donation anonymously.  The third and highest level is where the donor not only remains anonymous but has no idea where their money is going, except that they have been assured that it is a good and noble cause.  

The Clinton Family should accept the fact that from now on, donations to their Foundation should be made at that third level, or on a basis which would amount to its accounting and legal equivalent, so that other than for the bookkeepers and the tax people, the identity of donors would not be known, even to those who had established and ran the charity.  

Someday, political donations of all kinds will be banned and the Government will pay for all election advertising and activities.  Then, nobody will ever be in the position of being asked for a favor because of money having changed hands.

JL

                         (This is a clue!)

Division Among Us

At the end of August, Thomas Friedman wrote a fascinating New York Times column which rang a bell with me.  In the previous posting on this blog, I had talked about a video I viewed on line in which Canadian arch-conservative media person Ezra Levant urged American Jews to vote for Donald Trump.  I had asked Levant, via email, whether he believed that voters should vote for what they perceive as being good for their personal religious beliefs rather than what is good for their country, and pointed out to him that the United States is not the Islamic Middle East. 

  

Friedman’s column deals with the dichotomy developing in the United States between the left and the right where an unwillingness to compromise is comparable to the unwillingness of Shia and Sunni to work with one another in the Middle East, the same point I made in my email to Levant.  Please read Friedman’s column.  Click here to do so!  Could it be that in one respect, maybe we are getting to be more like the Islamic Middle East?
JL

                                                       

The Tin Bell -  Another Chrissy Frost Story

Jack Lippman

The assignment given to my "Writng Group" last month was to prepare a story based on "narrow escapes."

Narrow escapes were common in Chrissy Frost’s family.  Many, many years ago in seventeenth century England, a distant ancestor of Chrissy’s, Rufus, an itinerant troubadour, was kicked in the head by a horse.  He lay unconscious for days with a barely detectable heartbeat and breathing too weakly to fog a mirror held up to his nostrils.  Finally, after several weeks of being comatose, the local bailiff declared him to be dead.  The family scraped up enough for a simple wooden casket into which they shoved his body and dumped it into a hole six foot deep.  As the laborers shoved dirt on top of the casket, the sound of a bell tinkling was heard.  In those days, putting a small tin bell into caskets was standard procedure.  Historians have estimated that about a third of those declared to be deceased in those days were really not, so this was an excellent practice.  And for Rufus, it certainly was. Hearing the bell, they quickly lifted the casket out of the hole and pried it open.  There was Rufus, reclining with his arms at his side, smiling, and asking what the hell was going on.  That was indeed a narrow escape, all the more fortunate because embalming was not a common practice in those days either.  Rufus went on to be appointed as troubadour to the King’s Court, an honor comparable nowadays to winning an Emmy, where he served until 1655 when Oliver Cromwell had him beheaded.

More recently, Chrissy’s grandfather, an unemployed London clarinetist, was told there was an opening in a cruise ship’s orchestra.  He went for an audition and did just fine, except for the fact that the bandleader was an anti-Semite.  The family had not yet changed its name to Frost and the bandleader just didn’t want Chaim Finkelstein as part of his orchestra.  Chaim became so enraged when some musician friends told him why he hadn’t gotten the job that he ran right down to the docks fully intending to punch the bandleader in the nose.  Unfortunately, when he got there, he found that the Titanic had already sailed.  Whew, that was a close one, he thought when he read the papers a week later.

Well, Chrissy’s family moved to the United States, but the narrow escapes continued.  Her father had put most of his savings, as well as those of his elderly parents and his uncles and aunts, who trusted him, into the stock market which was producing tremendous returns at the time.  He even had put all of the funds of the synagogue of which he was the treasurer into his personal market account too, an act which was highly irregular if not illegal.  One day, finishing lunch in a Chinese restaurant, he cracked open the fortune cookie the waiter had left on the table with the check.  On one side it read “You are a wise man.”  On the other it said “Learn Chinese:  Word for today is ‘Mai’ which means ‘sell.’”  So he took a cab to his stockbroker’s office and told him to sell everything.  He did and the next day, October 29, 1929, the stock market crashed, big time!  Another narrow escape for a Frost family member.

If you sit down with Chrissy, she will tell you about her audition for the lead in a Broadway show that never took place back in 2001 when she mistakenly marked it for the wrong day in her appointment book.  She was supposed to meet the producers at 9:00 a.m. in their offices on the 88^th floor of the World Trade Center on September 11, not September 12, as her appointment book incorrectly read.  Another narrow escape.

Right before Chrissy came to South Florida to cap off her career by becoming the Queen of the Condo Circuit, she was booked to perform at several major venues in the Far East, which was hungry for American talent, regardless of how stale it might be, and by 2014, Chrissy was already pretty stale!  After being booed off the stage in Melbourne, she managed to put on a pretty good show for a non-English speaking audience at a hotel in Bali in Indonesia, but their failure to applaud convinced her to cancel her date in Beijing.  Anyway, she would have had to fly to Kuala Lumpar in Malaysia to connect with a flight to the Chinese capital, and that just looked like too much of a hassle for her, particularly since she was still using a walker.  So she flew back to the United States, cancelling her tickets to Beijing on Maylasian Air 307, which they are still looking for somewhere on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. 

                                             

In Chrissy’s pocketbook, you will find a small tin bell.  She doesn’t know why she always carries it, but her father gave it to her and told her never to go anywhere without it.  His father, who had gotten it from his father, had given it to him with instructions that it be passed on from generation to generation.  She had once shown it to someone in an antique shop who told her it looked about three or four hundred years old, and probably was of British origin.

                                             

HOW TO BE ALERTED TO FUTURE BLOG POSTINGS.

Many readers of this blog are alerted by Email every time a new posting appears.  If you wish to be added to that Email list, just let me know by clicking on Riart1@aol.com and sending me an Email.  

HOW TO CONTACT ME or CONTRIBUTE MATERIAL TO JACK'S POTPOURRI. 

BY CLICKING ON THAT SAME ADDRESS, Riart1@aol.com   YOU ALSO CAN SEND ME YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG AS WELL AS YOUR COMMENTS.  (Comments can also be made by clicking on the "Post a Comment" link at the blog's end.)

MOBILE DEVICE ACCESS.

DID YOU KNOW THAT www.jackspotpourri.com IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICES IN A MODIFIED, EASY-TO-READ, FORMAT?   

HOW TO VIEW OLDER POSTINGS.                                                

To view older postings on this blog, just click on the appropriate date in the “Blog Archive” midway down the column off to the right, or scroll down until you see the “Older Posts” notation at the very bottom of this posting.  The “Search Box” in the right side of the posting also may be helpful in locating a posting topic for which you are looking.

HOW TO FORWARD POSTINGS.

To send this posting to a friend, or enemy for that matter, whom you think might be interested in it, just click on the envelope with the arrow on the "Comments" line directly below, enabling you to send them an Email providing a link directly to this posting.  You might also want to let me know their Email address so that they may be alerted to future postings.

Jack Lippman 

Where Health Insurance is Headed, a Krugman "gem," Doing Something in Syria and a Canadian Interloper

Google "Adsense," which provides the advertisements which appear on this blog ... and which pays us a pittance when you click on them ... has just sent me a check for the last $100 worth of your clicks.  That money has been donated to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.  Keep on "clicking" to see the good deals these ads often contain!  JL

Health Care Needs a Fix

The Affordable Care Act has enabled many millions of Americans to obtain real health insurance for the first time in their lives, enabling them to have real healthcare rather than depending on visits to ERs or worse, ignoring symptoms and going untreated.

Its accomplishments include (1) requiring insurers to provide coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions, (2) enabling dependents up to age 26 to remain on their parent’s health insurance plans, (3) establishing cost guidelines for health care providers and (4) subsidizing the cost of health insurance through state-run Medicaid programs for low income families.

But the ACA has not worked well in other ways.  It is dependent on the private health insurance industry to provide policies to individuals, who are mandated to purchase coverages from these private insurance companies or pay a tax penalty.    Many young and healthy individuals have found it less expensive to pay the penalty than to purchase health insurance.  Unfortunately, older and sicker people have purchased it in great numbers.  This “mix” has caused some insurance companies to cease providing policies under the Act’s provisions (through State-run and Federal purchasing exchanges) and many, to keep premiums low, have offered policies with very large deductibles and co-payments.  This, along with unregulated prescription drug costs, have resulted in “sticker shock” when Americans get their bills from health care providers.

But these negatives are not present within the framework of Medicare, which is what most Americans age 65 and older have as their primary health insurance programs.  Of course, Medicare is not free.  Those covered under it pay premiums, usually deducted from Social Security payments, and the Federal government must also subsidize it from tax revenues.

 

The only involvement of private health insurance companies in Medicare is (1) to sell supplementary insurance to fill Medicare’s gaps, (2) to sell a wide a choice of prescription drug plans and (3) to sell Medicare “Advantage” plans where the insureds sacrifice an element of choice in how their health care is delivered for an all-encompassing lower premium, often paid entirely by the Federal government.   Thus, there is a vast difference between Medicare and Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act.  Those on Medicare have a better deal!

Bernie Sanders actually wanted to do away with the Affordable Care Act and make everyone eligible for Medicare.  This would basically wipe out the private health insurance industry, except for the supporting roles described in the preceding paragraph.  We would then have a “single payer” plan, and that payer would be Medicare or whatever the government chose to call it.  This would be a very costly program, although Sanders, and some health insurance economists, claim its total cost would be less than what we are paying for health care through private companies today.  Ultimately, it is inevitable that we will end up with a program approaching, but not quite realizing, Medicare for all.  But don’t hold your breath.  Read on.

Hillary Clinton has proposed making those age 55 and older eligible for Medicare.  Of course, this would be complicated since such individuals are not yet on Social Security.  They would have to purchase the plan and further tax increases certainly would also be necessary.  Most importantly, however, this would take many older, and sicker, people out of the pool of individuals purchasing private insurance through the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges.  Taking these age 55 to 64 folks into Medicare would reduce premiums for those remaining to purchase Obamacare private insurance and hopefully, bring still more younger and healthier people into the program.

I foresee that perhaps there might be a periodic change in such a program whereby the age at which the opportunity to select Medicare as one’s health insurance choice would periodically drop, perhaps one year annually, until ultimately, everyone would have the opportunity to opt for and purchase Medicare coverage!  The private health insurance industry, being more expensive since it involves making a profit, would then wither away. 

This leads to the question as to whether health care, in general, should be an area where profit-making, along with providing a service, should even be a factor.  And this includes the pharmaceutical industry.   Is more government regulation of that industry, and the rest of health care, on the horizon, and would that lead to a government takeover of all aspects of health care?  Would that be good or bad?  

There has to be a middle ground, a balance somewhere, and it will be determined, I believe, over the next quarter of a century.  The absence of what used to be the Republican Party, over those years, may make reaching this balance easier. 

 For that, Democrats and others who will back such a "single payer" plan will owe their thanks to one person, Donald Trump.

Jack Lippman

                                                            

Krugman! 

Last week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman concluded one of his columns by stating that “…today’s increasingly multiracial, multicultural society is a nightmare for people who want a white, Christian nation in which lesser breeds know their place.  And those are the people Trump has brought out into the open.”  And I might add that the place out from which “Dangerous” Donald has brought them is the woodwork, where many of them have been hiding, crawling and breeding since the Civil War.

JL

                                             

Now They Have to Import Conservatives! 

I recently received an email captioned "The Donald Trump Video Every Jew MUST Watch!"  So I watched it.  It was a shallow, fifteen minute diatribe by notorious Canadian ultra-conservative Ezra Levant (who comes across as your mild-mannered harmless second cousin) appealing to Jews in the United States to vote for Donald Trump for a variety of reasons, including his Jewish grandchildren, and filled with tired old accusations that Democrats, particularly Clinton and President Obama, were no friends of the Jews nor of Israel. 

Levant is known for his right-wing Zionist views which is just fine, but that does not entitle him to inject himself into our politics with an emotional message intended to appeal to the very gullible among us who are ready to agree with anything they believe is "kosher" because of the presence of a Magen David, literally or figuratively, in it.   And that's what Levant figuratively does, waving the Israeli flag in the face of American voters!   And it raised a few questions in my mind which I directed to Levant in an email to which I doubt he will reply.  You can watch Levant's message by clicking here.   And here is what I asked him in my email.

1.  If Donald Trump is so good for the Jews, how come he has appointed an anti-Semite like Stephen Bannon, who didn't want his kids going to private school with Jews, to run his campaign?

2.  If Donald Trump is so good for the Jews, how come he hasn't firmly denounced the support of avowed anti-Semites like David Duke and other white supremacists, about whom months ago, he said he didn't know anything.

3.  As someone who isn't even a citizen of the United States, why are you getting involved in our Presidential election?  Really, it's none of your business.

4.  Do you really believe that voters should vote for what they perceive as being good for their personal religious beliefs rather than what is good for their country?  The United States is not the Islamic Middle East.  You seem to be confused about this.
  JL

                        

Humanitarian Action Demanded in Syria 

It’s time that the political parties in the United States, and their candidates, spoke out about what is going on in Syria.  Too many innocent people, many of them children, are being killed there.  It is time that this slaughter be ended.  Military and political considerations should be put aside and a humanitarian solution given the highest priority.

To start this, an international conference should be assembled.  Mid-level diplomatic representatives from the United States, Russia, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and a major Sunni nation such as Saudi Arabia or Jordan should attend, as well as, of course, the Syrian government.  The Iraqi delegation must include Sunnis and Kurds, even though the government in Baghdad is primarily Shia.   A possible place for such a meeting might be Dubai or Cairo.

The agenda must include (1) the cessation of bombing and shelling of civilian areas, (2) the removal of all military installations from civilian areas and (3) the establishment of refugee centers, schools and hospitals in areas from which all military activity is prohibited.   Failure of any of the participants to agree to this kind of agenda would mark them as enemies of real peace in the Middle East and as deserving of condemnation as is the Islamic State, which all of them ostensibly oppose.

Once such a conference achieves a “humanitarian” victory in Syria, further diplomatic steps should follow in an effort to resolve political issues without resorting to military measures, other than those directed as eradicating the Islamic State … and that too should proceed along the guidelines suggested above.

It might be anticipated that such a “humanitarian” approach might result in unwarranted criticism of Israel, something which is automatic among Muslim states.  It is clear, however, that the military measures resorted to by Israel, only after extensive warnings to civilian populations, were only necessitated by the intentional placement of military targets in the midst of civilian environments.  Should this issue arise at the suggested meeting, it would be the role of Israel’s friends there to point this out.

And while on this subject, the United States has agreed to, and is in the course of accepting, 10,000 throroughly "vetted" immigrants from the carnage in Syria as a humanitarian gesture. European nations, less richly endowed than our country, are doing much more.  These people once had homes and jobs there, and children going to school each day, but all of that has been wiped out.  Other than Native Americans, there is no one in the United States who is not descended from immigrants who came here for similar reasons. There has always been some sort of "Golden Door" in this country. 


"I lift my lamp beside the golden door." ... from the famous Emma Lazarus poem

And those who scream to keep them out, fearing they are terrorists, are only repeating what was said about other immigrant groups since the Nation's founding; they forget that Americans themselves are immigrants or their descendants.  Shame on them.

JL

                                      

HOW TO BE ALERTED TO FUTURE BLOG POSTINGS.

Many readers of this blog are alerted by Email every time a new posting appears.  If you wish to be added to that Email list, just let me know by clicking on Riart1@aol.com and sending me an Email.  

HOW TO CONTACT ME or CONTRIBUTE MATERIAL TO JACK'S POTPOURRI. 

BY CLICKING ON THAT SAME ADDRESS, Riart1@aol.com   YOU ALSO CAN SEND ME YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG AS WELL AS YOUR COMMENTS.  (Comments can also be made by clicking on the "Post a Comment" link at the blog's end.)

MOBILE DEVICE ACCESS.

DID YOU KNOW THAT www.jackspotpourri.com IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICES IN A MODIFIED, EASY-TO-READ, FORMAT?   

HOW TO VIEW OLDER POSTINGS.                                                

To view older postings on this blog, just click on the appropriate date in the “Blog Archive” midway down the column off to the right, or scroll down until you see the “Older Posts” notation at the very bottom of this posting.  The “Search Box” in the right side of the posting also may be helpful in locating a posting topic for which you are looking.

HOW TO FORWARD POSTINGS.

To send this posting to a friend, or enemy for that matter, whom you think might be interested in it, just click on the envelope with the arrow on the "Comments" line directly below, enabling you to send them an Email providing a link directly to this posting.  You might also want to let me know their Email address so that they may be alerted to future postings.

Jack Lippman 

Trump's Forthcoming "Call to Arms," Kristof on Meanness, "Our Kids" and a Very Frightening Article

There's a lot of very important material on this posting, information which many people may not be aware of. Please pass this on to your friends, relatives and neighbors.

What's Behind the Trump Team's "Shake-Up"

What is “Dangerous” Donald Trump up to now?  By now you know he again shook up his campaign staff.  In a polite way, he has already said to “apprentices” Corey Lewandowski and Paul Manafort, “You’re fired!”  So where does he go now?

He has put Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News in a joint top campaign leadership role!  Wow!  This is a perfect example of “preaching to the choir,” designed to further strengthen the bond between “Dangerous” Donald and those who enabled him to win the G.O.P.’s Presidential nomination: the vocal far right-wing minority of the Republican Party, those whose lives have been changed by technology and world trade, and those who wish to turn back the nation’s socio-economic clock and tax rates half a century.  It will do nothing whatsoever to improve his standing with the rest of the G.O.P. and even less with Democrats and independent voters.

Bannon

Trump is not stupid, although in the eyes of many, he might appear to be.  His appointment of Bannon means that he has given up on any hope of winning the Presidency in 2016, regardless of what he might say.  Rather, his aim is to strengthen and expand his ego-based movement far beyond the borders of the Republican Party and cultivate and expand the anti-establishment, anti-immigration, covertly racist coalition which got him the G.O.P. nomination.  Right now, embittered by the lukewarm support he is receiving from the rest of the Republican Party, “Dangerous” Donald considers them an impediment to his being elected and wants to be rid of them.  Bannon’s conservatism includes a deep distrust of both Democratic and Republican leadership, and this seems to suit Trump’s purposes just fine.

“Dangerous” Donald’s eyes are already set beyond the impending election of Hillary Clinton.  I suspect that he is planning a four- year campaign of attacks on her on all levels commencing with his concession speech which will figuratively be a "call to arms" directed to all those who oppose Hillary Clinton.  His aim is unite all of the disgruntled in this country, Democrats, Republicans and independents, and recruit them in his campaign to “Make America Great Again.”

 

Whether he will do this within the framework of our existing party structure,or form his own party, intent on running in 2020, is still uncertain.  By then the G.O.P., minus its Trump supporters, will be impotent.  He may choose to ignore it entirely, starting his own party, or decide to build upon its skeleton. Having been their 2016 nominee is the equivalent of his securing an "option" to do that if he so chooses to. 

"Dangerous" Donald Trump is very, very good at this sort of thing; he has been buying properties for years and deciding whether to demolish them and totally rebuild, or make do with what he acquired.   He will paint whatever the Clinton administration will have accomplished as evil, dishonest, un-American and even traitorous.  For four years, on a nationwide basis, he will use the tactics which won him the 2016 nomination: insults and vague half-truths, designed to appeal to the gullible. Stephen Bannon is just the man to do this and it will start right now, continuing until Election Day in 2020.  (For those who are unfamiliar with Breitbart News, I personally consider it somewhere to the right of Rush Limbaugh. Trump has now moved "beyond the fringe" and is now venturing into unknown, uncharted and dangerous waters.)

That’s the way it looks to me, unless “Dangerous” Donald Trump is actually stupid, which I find it very, very hard to believe.  To think that he is would be a huuugh, huuugh mistake!
Jack Lippman
                               

Homework Assignment: For Extra Credit - Read this Article

In October of 2015, long before the Republican primaries, caucuses and Convention,  BloombergBusinessweek published an article with the following headline and lead-in:  "This Man is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America - Steve Bannon runs the vast right-wing conspiracy - and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush."  It was their cover story.



It is imperative that all of you, and that means YOU, take the time to read this frightening article.  Breitbart News, referred to in the article as a haven for those who think Fox News is too restrained and polite, is at the core of Conservative media, and its head, Stephen Bannon, probably has more brains singlehandedly than Trump, Pence, Cllinton and Kaine put together times two!  That's why Businessweek referred to him as "Dangerous." CLICK HERE TO READ THE ARTICLE.   
JL

                     

A Column by Kristof

About a week ago, the New York Times (and subsequently other papers nationwide) carried a column by Nicholas Kristof about the meanness Donald Trump is bringing to the American political scene.  It is very moving and well worth a minute or so of your time.  Click here to read it.  You may want to pass it on to others.
JL

                                                       

"Our Kids"

The following article appeared on this blog about a year ago.  It is reprinted because this afternoon, I happened to hear Dr. Putnam on NPR discussing his book.  It is worth reading.  
JL

I recently read a book that I must draw to your attention.  It is probably one of the most important books to come out this year.  I am referring to “Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis” by Robert D. Putnam.  Get a hold of a copy, read it and I hope, recognize the importance of the issues with which it deals.  Oh, yes.  He does offer solutions … but please read the book.

What is the American Dream?  It may be summed up in one word: Opportunity.  That is what brought waves of immigrants to our shores and sent Americans across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific.  It’s what created businesses, families and communities.  Robert D. Putnam, Harvard political scientist, in his book “Our Kids, The American Dream in Crisis,” focuses in on how over the past two or three decades, our society has been increasingly divided into two classes, defined by the interrelated criteria of educational level and income, and how that has closed off that “opportunity” to massive numbers of American children.

The “tracks” that these classes are in effect locked into include where members of each class live, where they go to school, what kind of families they have, when they have children, the nature of the communities in which they live and the way they earn, or fail to earn, their livings.  Mobility between the two classes is next to impossible, and results in the absence of growth opportunities for children in the “lower” class, whose status they inherit from their parents.

It always wasn’t that way.  As recently as the 1960s, rich and poor attended the same high schools, lived in neighborhoods that were not that far from one another, shopped in the same stores, and were considered part of the same community.  People were still able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.  But that world where mobility opened the door to opportunity has disappeared.

Putnam documents that this class division is not a racially determined; it is found equally among Blacks, Latinos and Whites.  We see the result of this class system in our decaying cities, in teenage pregnancy statistics, school dropout rates, drug usage, crime, family disintegration and unemployment.  These problems affect members of the poorer class far more than those who are more affluent and better educated.  And the ones who suffer the most are the “kids,” who in earlier generations had the opportunity for climb a ladder out of their class.  But that opportunity no longer exists.

The book includes detailed case histories of these “kids” which are enough to break one’s heart.  Bottom line:  Economic hardship translated as the inability of a “breadwinner” to get a good job contributes to family disintegration and turns life into a scenario where the struggle to simply survive so saps the energy of the lower classes that the nexus of the American Dream, opportunity, is in danger of permanently fading for them.

If you read one book this year, this should be it.

JL

                                    

                                                 

                                           

HOW TO BE ALERTED TO FUTURE BLOG POSTINGS.

Many readers of this blog are alerted by Email every time a new posting appears.  If you wish to be added to that Email list, just let me know by clicking on Riart1@aol.com and sending me an Email.  

HOW TO CONTACT ME or CONTRIBUTE MATERIAL TO JACK'S POTPOURRI. 

BY CLICKING ON THAT SAME ADDRESS, Riart1@aol.com   YOU ALSO CAN SEND ME YOUR CONTRIBUTIONS TO BE PUBLISHED IN THIS BLOG AS WELL AS YOUR COMMENTS.  (Comments can also be made by clicking on the "Post a Comment" link at the blog's end.)

MOBILE DEVICE ACCESS.

DID YOU KNOW THAT www.jackspotpourri.com IS ALSO AVAILABLE ON YOUR MOBILE DEVICES IN A MODIFIED, EASY-TO-READ, FORMAT?   

HOW TO VIEW OLDER POSTINGS.                                                

To view older postings on this blog, just click on the appropriate date in the “Blog Archive” midway down the column off to the right, or scroll down until you see the “Older Posts” notation at the very bottom of this posting.  The “Search Box” in the right side of the posting also may be helpful in locating a posting topic for which you are looking.

HOW TO FORWARD POSTINGS.

To send this posting to a friend, or enemy for that matter, whom you think might be interested in it, just click on the envelope with the arrow on the "Comments" line directly below, enabling you to send them an Email providing a link directly to this posting.  You might also want to let me know their Email address so that they may be alerted to future postings.

Jack Lippman