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I Will Never Be Governor

I slept with you (and you know who you are) and it was consensual).

I once dressed as Sandra Day O’Connor for Halloween. I understand that this is misappropriation on a a number of levels:

1. I am not a woman
2. I am not a Republican (one of my best features)
3. I have never sat on the Supreme Court
4. I would have ruled differently in Bush v. Gore, but I would concur in the other cases.
5. I never would have given up my seat if I knew it would go to Samuel Alito.

I occasionally adopted African-American idioms when in high school.

I have used the word “fag,” but only in the context of  Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

I have a Soviet flag on my desk and have since 1978. I also have several sets of Russian nesting dolls.

I have a friend who is African-American and he dressed up as Generic Man in college where he wore white-face. The party proceeded without incident.

I’m sure there are other examples and please remind me of them if you have a recollection

None of these keeps me up at night the way too much barbecue sauce does these days, but the issue is obviously a national social concern. Clearly, there are lines that no adult should cross and we should not tolerate reprehensible behavior related to harassment, assault, sexism, racism and other obnoxiousness.

But I am also a great fan of redemption, personal growth, reckonings, sincere apologies and, of course, context. And I also look at the direction a person’s life has taken. Doing something offensive early in life, but growing and learning and making up for it with words and/or deeds will, in my mind, earn you some redemption. Continuing to be offensive throughout your life shows you to be the unrepentant, ignorant person that you really are.

Which is why, and I’m really a broken record here (and obviously old because I’m using that reference), nobody should resign until the president does. He has shown himself to be growing as a racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobe, xenophobe, and homophobe rather than recognizing that his words and actions are harmful for this country’s reputation. When he is held accountable, then we will have made progress. But as long as he can spew his hatred and vitriol, then we can’t have justice.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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The NFL Has Its Day

I remember when the Super Bowl was played at 2:00 in the afternoon on a Sunday. Some people remember the game when it didn’t have a number attached to it. Others don’t care at all.

I think I might be moving into that third group.

The National Football League has become what our other national pastime, baseball, never really attempted: to be everything all at once. A sport, an institution, a media empire, a repository for the nation’s values, and an unquestioned source of correctness that has come back to cause serious trouble for its credibility. Baseball had a long, lazy season with plenty of games and no time limit. Football has a frenzied limit. George Carlin did a bit on that. Go watch it.

The Super Bowl is now, of course, an informal national holiday with all the trappings and fixin’s, and for the past 20 or so years the game has actually been pretty close near the end, as opposed to many of the games in the 80s and 90s that were over before halftime, instilling cold fear into the advertisers who paid exorbitant rates to reach drunk men. Don’t worry; we still watched.

But the NFL’s real-world problems, which it always had but decided to minimize or ignore, are now morbidly apparent.

Players trying to live day-to-day with the pain from their playing days are addicted to opioids.

CTE ravaging the brains of former players.

Ensuring that all players, not just the Hall of Famers, have health insurance, pensions, and benefits.

I know that unionized, highly paid professional athletes in all sports don’t elicit a great deal of sympathy from many Americans who earn less and live a productive, local life, but most athletes have a short professional existence and in the NFL’s case, play a brutally violent sport. And you simply can’t ignore the visuals that show an extraordinarily wealthy owner elite making billions, collectively, and a collective of players, many of whom are minorities, getting paid well while they play, but being ignored when they’re done.

The NFL needs to make a dramatic gesture concerning these players. The league is wealthy enough to afford it and the players have earned it.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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The Waste of Time Presidency

You could probably see this coming from several miles away. I mean, why would the president put his presidency (shudder) on the line for a wall that he would have likely had if he pushed it harder when the Republicans controlled Congress? Why wait until a master politician like Nancy Pelosi is his adversary rather than trying to push the Human Marshmallow, Paul when he’s already oozing out the Congressional door?

Looks like the art of the deal is a crayon drawing that’s mostly outside the lines. And the great negotiator most of us knew we never had turned out to be the feckless blowhard that he really and truly is. And as is usual in these types of standoffs, the deal that came first, in December, was the deal that the two sides finally agreed to. And the collateral damage was the 800,000 public workers who have families, bills, lives, and dreams that the modern GOP sees as taxpaying suckers who do nothing useful. Like inspect our food. Or ensure our safety in the airports and the skies. Or gather key data for public use and the private sector. And keep our country beautiful. And secure.

The Republicans have been running against government for so long that they’ve forgotten that they benefit from it too, and that most Americans do not share their reactionary ideology that says the private sector and laissez-faire economics are the only systems worth protecting. Can you feel the air and water getting dirtier? No?

Just wait.

This short term deal is good for the country because the Democrats did not give anything back in return for the president agreeing to reopen the government. If they had, then Trump would have been emboldened to use it as a matter of Republican policy with the expectation that he could get what he wanted.

Let’s be clear: Both parties should pledge here and now that they will never, ever shut the government down. Both parties have their spending priorities and they should make them known in enough time for serious debate and public scrutiny. For the president to try and add money for a wall in response to right wing media condemnation is not governing.

It’s blackmail.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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This Is Not What Dr. King Had in Mind

I suppose if you really want to bury a less-than-serious proposal that would attempt to solve the most vexing issue of the day, then you should announce it on the Saturday afternoon of a long holiday weekend. And you should make sure to propose something that gives you everything you want, but only three years and not cover everyone that the other side wants.

Such is what the president (shudder) proposed on Saturday. Perhaps it’s just an opening gambit, but history has shown that Donald Trump doesn’t favor protracted negotiations that don’t end with him getting his way. I suppose that Nancy Pelosi leaving town is the Democrats’ answer.

Education is also roaring back into the country’s news feed, what with the Los Angeles teachers on strike over working conditions, yes, but mostly about…Charter Schools. You know, those lovely places that are publicly funded, but privately run. It’s a setup that drains resources from public schools and aims to suppress union activism from teachers, and the research we have is that charters are really no better that public schools when it comes to student achievement and educational effectiveness.

Couple this with the walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma and other states last year, and you have a trend that will only get stronger. Plus, the new congress includes liberal members who not only support public education and teachers, but are also willing to point out that President Obama and Arne Duncan were both wrong to support the testing movement and faux teacher evaluation systems that did more harm than good. Most public school teachers are effective, and that has been substantiated by the fact that teachers have not been fired in large numbers, as proponents of the new system said would happen. And now, at least in New Jersey, the standardized tests that wrecked the curriculum are gone.

But just in case you thought that the purpose of education was to prepare students to live, think, and work in the modern world, we have the story of Karen Pence, wife of the Vice President, who went back to her teaching career this year at a school that, well, you have to read it.

And you thought that the right wing’s denial of science was limited to the climate.

Here we have an instance where the denial of human rights, human intelligence, human compassion, and human acceptance is the curriculum. I understand the right of religious people to live a religious life, but I do not understand, nor can I countenance, a school where children are taught that their neighbors should be disrespected, hated, marginalized, and emotionally harmed in the name of an ideology that blames rather than accepts.

Democrats need to be very careful about what they wish for when they want president Trump to go away. We have worse waiting in the wings.

Might I suggest that you take a moment and read/listen to or view some Martin Luther King this weekend. His words are everything we need now: uplifting, resonant, powerful, positive, human, moral, thrilling, emotionally-charged, and truthful.

We used to have that.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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Trump’s Action Caused “Grave” Security Threats to Pelosi and Dems

The man who supposedly has the title of “president of the United States” is putting members of the government in grave danger! That was the message from Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew after Trump childishly pulled Pelosi’s military flight to a war zone.

According to Hammill, after Trump grounded the military flight commissioned to take Pelosi and congressional Democrats to Afghanistan and Brussels, the House members were planning to fly commercial, but the White House disclosed that secret information, and in so doing, alerted the enemy of the plans, thus putting the lives of Pelosi and Congressional Democrats in danger.

In a fierce attack on Donald Trump, Pelosi’s deputy chief of staff, Drew Hammill, said the security of the trip has been compromised due to “grave threats caused by the President’s action.”

“In the middle of the night, the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service provided an updated threat assessment detailing that the President announcing this sensitive travel had significantly increased the danger to the delegation and to the troops, security, and other officials supporting the trip,” Hammill said in a statement. “This morning, we learned that the Administration had leaked the commercial travel plans as well.”

Hammill previously said the group of lawmakers was scheduled to depart Thursday evening, briefly stop in Brussels to meet with top NATO commanders, U.S. military leaders and “key allies–to affirm the United States’ ironclad commitment to the NATO alliance.” From there, the delegation planned to travel to Afghanistan to meet with troops. 

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The Wall Meets the Wall

President Trump made his case for building a wall on the Mexican border on Tuesday night, but there was just one problem: there is no case for building a big wall on the Mexican border. After all, illegal border crossings have been dropping for more than two decades and most illegal substances cross the border into the United States at legal ports such as airports. Plus, there is no verifiable crisis at the border save for the one the Trump Administration created by separating children from their parents. And to top it off, the president seems to have lost the argument.

In political terms, the president’s best chance for wall funding ended as soon as the Democrats won a majority in the House of Representatives in November. Prior to that, the Republicans controlled the government, and if they couldn’t cobble together funding for the wall, then it’s not going to happen now. Plus, prior to November was the optimal time to be able to blame Democrats for the lack of funding, since a filibuster would be the only way to stop it. Trump could have gone twitter-crazy blaming Chuck Schumer for foiling the popular will.

But instead, we have…this. The president proudly shut down the government thinking that he could bully Nancy Pelosi (bully Nancy Pelosi!) into giving up her power because, well, I’m not sure why he thought he could do that. After all, most Americans do not support the president’s agenda and voted against it in 2016 and 2018. He’s tried a number of different strategies to discredit the Democrats and blame the shutdown on them, but that’s not working well.

In the end, the president’s negotiating position seems to be that he wants the Democrats to fund the wall, then he will sign spending bills to reopen the government. That doesn’t seem like a great deal to the Democrats because they really get nothing in return except the status quo when it comes to their agenda. President Trump’s threat to declare an emergency to fund the wall also shows him to be a less committed deal-maker than he pretends to be because, in the end, he might just do whatever he thinks he can get away with rather than to negotiate seriously.

For now, though, the more important wall is the one the Democrats are constructing as a barrier to the president’s wishes.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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Mitch McConnell Blocks Bill to Re-open Government

Since taking over the House of Representatives, Democrats have tried tirelessly to end Trump’s g Shutdown. But if nothing else, Republicans have demonstrated unwavering support of their dear leader, Donald Trump, and they are united in making sure Americans suffer so that Trump can get his wall.

Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) and Ben Cardin (D-Md.), surrounded by roughly two dozen of their Senate Democratic colleagues, tried to get consent to bring up a bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through Feb. 8, as well as a separate package that would fund the remaining agencies without current-year appropriations through Sept. 30.

But McConnell objected, arguing they would be “show votes” and saying that he and Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) made an “explicit commitment” to avoid such votes.

“The last thing we need to do right now is trade pointless – absolutely pointless – show votes back and forth across the aisle,” McConnell said. 

Under Senate rules, any senator can try to force a vote or pass a bill, but any one senator can block them.

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Another Trump Lie – Obama Supports My Border Wall – Video

It’s not my job to constantly point out Trump’s lies, that will be a full-time job with guaranteed overtime. No, I don’t have the time or the resources, or quite frankly the web-space on my server to point out all the lies coming from the Trump White House. My server is only capable of holding a few hundred thousand pages. I wouldn’t be able to keep up!

However, every once in a while, I am compelled to focus in on a lie, like when Trump said President Obama supports his border wall fantasy.

Before making the trip to the border on Thursday, Trump tweeted this: “President Obama, thank you for your great support – I have been saying this all along!“

Here are the facts:

THE FACTS: Obama’s remarks in the short video clip do not support Trump’s proposal for a border wall or endorse the path Trump is considering now: declaring a national emergency that might enable him to circumvent Congress and unilaterally spend money on the wall. Instead, Obama was asking Congress to approve an emergency appropriation to deal with a surge of tens of thousands of unaccompanied children and youth, mostly from Central American, trying to cross the border from Mexico.

“We now have an actual humanitarian crisis on the border,” Obama said at the time, accompanied by Vice President Joe Biden. He was referring specifically to the surge of minors that year.

That crisis eventually eased as the U.S. stepped up border enforcement, surveillance and resources for the waves of unaccompanied children. Now, a sharp increase in the number of families at the border, coupled with the Trump administration’s hard-line stance, is overwhelming border resources, worsening a backlog in the asylum system and leaving migrants to live in abysmal conditions on the Mexican side.

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Another Trump Lie – I never Said Mexico Will Pay For The Wall – Video

Now I must admit, I am not a doctor nor do I hold any medical training or certificates. But there is something obviously mentally wrong with the leader of the Republican party and so-called President of the United States, Donald Trump.

While talking to the media about his beloved wall, Trump blurted out the truth that “during the campaign, I would say is going to pay for it.” His very next sentence was a lie and a contradiction, as Trump said he “never said this.”

So he admitted saying that Mexico was going to pay for the wall, then, before you exhale, Trump said he never said it.

I mean, who does that?

Insanity, thy name is Trump…

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TSA Workers Quitting Thanks to Trump’s Shutdown

All work and no pay makes TSA workers poor, and makes the rest of America even more insecure.

Only in Trump’s America!

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents a chunk of TSA employees, said screeners were becoming increasingly panicked as the partial shutdown drags on, diminishing their chances of getting paid Friday.

“Every day, I’m getting calls from my members about their extreme hardships and need for a paycheck,” Hydrick Thomas, president of AFGE’s TSA Council said. “Some of them have already quit and many are considering quitting the federal workforce because of this shutdown.”

He added that a wave of resignations could create “a massive security risk for American travelers” since TSA cannot hire new screeners during a shutdown.

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Report: Trump Literally Did Not Understand The Effects of A Shutdown

This country is ran by idiots, plain and simple… and quite frankly, scary!

The Trump administration’s shutdown of the federal government over the last two weeks is a synecdoche for the way it has run the federal government over the last two years. They blundered into it almost by accident, without any understanding of what they are doing nor any plan for success.

Just as Trump did not expect to win the election and neglected to plan for his transition, he shut down the government on a whim, after right-wing media complained about his plan to approve a government funding bill. Nobody in the administration had a clear understanding of just what a shutdown would entail. Two devastating reports in the Washington Post over the weekend detail the horrifying scope of their ignorance. The administration did not realize that 38 million Americans lose their food stamps under a shutdown, nor did it know that thousands of tenants would face eviction without assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Administration officials “recognized only this week the breadth of the potential impact,” reports the Post, and was “focused now on understanding the scope of the consequences and determining whether there is anything they can do to intervene.” First Trump shut down the government, and then the Trump administration started looking into what effect this would have.

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Democrats: The Message Is the Medium

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., poses for a group photo with the House Democratic women on Capitol Hill on Friday. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Salwan Georges

It only took three days, so if you chose January 3 in your office pool as the date when the first idiot Democrat brought up impeachment, then congratulations are in order. That she also sprinkled her comment with impolitic language only makes it worse. I’m thinking that Nancy Peloisi had a chat with Representative Tlaib about staying on message.

I just want to be clear on this first post of the year that I have no patience with any Democrat who calls for any legal action against the president unless there is enough legitimate evidence that the president had committed an impeachable or indictable offense. Let Robert Mueller’s investigation do its job and let him release his report when it’s ready. The same is true about the other current investigations into the Trump Administration and the ones that the Democrats in the House will inevitably begin. Giving the Republicans any further reason to marginalize any opposition only takes time and energy away from what must be the Democrats’ central message, which is that they will address and attempt to solve the basic problems that face Americans on a day-to-day basis.

I understand that a new and younger group of much more liberal legislators are now in Congress and statehouses across the country. I understand that they are filled with passion and fury and that they were elected to move the country in a different direction. But the best way to do this is to stay on message and not to waver. If the new Democrats can learn anything from the almost 40 year reign of the conservatives, it’s that you need to frame your arguments in ways that people can digest and repeat them effortlessly, and you need everybody on your team to say the same things in the same way using the same language no matter what medium you’re on.

Democrats need to focus on health care that covers everyone, livable wages, family leave and a climate message that appeals to Americans on the local level. I know this might be heresy, but what do those Americans living in the middle of the country care about the tides and floods in Miami? Craft a message that educates people on the changes they’ve already seen in their communities, which might be about crop yields or water supplies or the increase/decrease in wildlife. You get the idea.

Or do you? Because if you still believe that angrily posting about the minute-to-minute foolishness of the president’s messages is the way to win hearts and minds, then I am here to tell you that you are wrong. President Trump’s base will follow him no matter what he says. The voters that will win the 2020 election are the ones who voted Democratic last year, even if they supported Trump in 2016. Most of them care only about how their lives and the country’s future will be secured. If they voted against the GOP despite a tax cut and an improving employment environment, then they will vote Democratic again if the Democrats continue to remind them about what Democrats will do for them.

That’s a winning message. And that’s the only winning message. So if you’re angry and frustrated and appalled, my suggestion is that you go analog: Find a field, a prairie, a noisy subway station or an insulated basement and scream about whatever will heal your heart.

Then let’s get back to work.

For more, go to www.facebook.com/WhereDemocracyLives or Twitter @rigrundfest

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