Daily Musings 6/2/2016 - Trump in WAPO editorials.

WAPO: It's fair depiction of TRUMP? How WAPO defames him:


This is how fascism comes to America
In San Diego Trump shames local Mexican judge as protesters storm streets You are led to think his supporters were protesting and chanting obscenities, but is the opponents of Trump who are doing this.
In campaign chaos Donald Trump shows his management style Paints the successful campaign efforts of Trump as a result of:  promoting rivalries among subordinates, wary of delegating major decisions, scornful of convention and fiercely insistent on a culture of loyalty around him Another hatchet piece.
President Trump would hand china the world Ignatius quotes Wu Jun and other Chinese leaders like President Obama "Isolating or disparaging Muslims" sees him making deals without regard for individual liberties. Just libel upon libel.
Trump rails against scrutiny over delayed donations to veterans groups By David A. Fahrenthold and Jose A. DelReal More and More libel. See the "delayed". Who published a time line that it was delayed? 1M became almost 6M, some people have not even yet paid up their pledges. Have none of us been there with the differences between pledges and money? Just more libel.
Not Just Another Trump Vendeta, Attack on Judge alarms legal experts Now calling citing a Judge's Mexican heritage is describe as racial? Thought they were an ethnicity. At least the article uses Jeremiad as a descriptor of Trump's anti Judge Rhetoric, but his complaint's aren't that good, are they?
Trumps pattern of stiffing charities-Dana Milbank Another scurrilous attack based on ads for the Trump University. Milbank as usual finds it nefarious that ads promised more than they actually accomplished.  Where does the man live?
The Islamic state is fueled by Islamophobia--David Ignatius "the Islamic State .. is .. a youth gang driven by the identity politics of victimization than as a religious or ideological movement. " His position which is backed by incomprehensible fact-free analysis.
Mr Ryan capitulates to ugliness -- Editorial Board. Ryan let down his party and his nation because he supported his democratically selected Presidential Candidate. Go figure!

Daily Musings 05/26/2016 Donalt Trump and WAPO

WAPO: The primary is over but Donald Trump keeps attacking fellow republicans-- Jose DelReal & Jenna Johnson

Republicans which do not back the Republican Candidates should either keep quiet and melt into the background, or go to hell.
To continue to disparage the candidate is to work for the Democrats, and therefore not to be a Republican.
This is a simple syllogism, WAPO's biased Democratic pundits should be able to understand this.
It is not only Trump's responsibility to unite the party. It is everyone's responsibility in the party. If you don't give it, you are out!

EnemyOfTheState:

I'm beginning to think Trump is as surprised as the rest of us that he's gotten this close to the White House. No detailed policies, his speeches are rambling stream of consciousness rants and he's been on every side of every issue, it seems. What was supposed to be a lark, and fodder for a reality show has turned into the real deal....more

You want the same "detailed policies" promised by Republican House and Senate leaders over the past 6 years? After all, we have stopped adding to the debt, we are stronger world wide, and we have eliminated Obama care! Right?
Detailed plans allow people to nitpick details instead of evaluating the individuals providing them. Trump shows us a new way. Compare a gruff, direct and honest person against "crooked" Hilary.

Daily Musings - 5/13/2016 - WAPO Petraus

WAPO: Anti Muslim-bigotry-aids-Islamist-terrorists- David Petraeus

I hate to criticize General Petraeus, but he left the internal political situation of the US out of his review.
If you attack me, kill my children, kill my wife and family, and do it in the name of Allah, I will hate you, and this focused hate is spread out to the religion who carries the name of the prophet.  I will also try to prevent your from being able to attack me, and stopping you at the borders may not be the best policy, but it certainly looks that way.
The political argument became, as usual, about the tone, not the content of Trump's speech. He said, very clearly, we must stop any Muslims from entering the country until we figure out how to separate out the terrorists. (Until we figure out what is going on.) This was converted into a racist comment, and you get the result our General speaks about.
Even immediately after his comment, when asked about whether he intended to allow Muslim members of the armed forces to return home, he said: Of course, they don't represent a danger.
So please, don't throw around racism, and then accuse Trump of causing a furor that helps the Terrorists. The media, and the "outraged" are responsible for that reaction.

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WAPO: Judge Strikes Down Obama Health Law Insurance Subsidy in victory for House GOP -- By Spenser S. Hsu, Greg Jaffe and Lena H. Sun

Roberts: Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter

This person was considered a "conservative"? It's the job of SCOTUS to divine Congressional will and fix their errors of law creation through interpretation? I though Congress could simple change the laws they screwed up in order to fix them!

I am be naïve. I thought SCOTUS would review laws against what is stated in the Constitution and find them OK or flawed.

After Rowe v Wade, and after LGBT, I should have known better.

What is funny is that in this case, the administration says, if the laws can't be interpreted as I interpret them, change them, overcome my veto, and then they will be changed. So the president has a 2/3 voice in how to interpret the law, even though he is supposed to apply them as Congress intended them.  POTUS has a veto over law interpretation! Great separation of powers.

Daily Musings - 5/11/2015

WAPO: After Trump the GOP may need a better voting system--Kathleen Parker

As usual KP is after Trump, and this piece is about how to prevent another "Trump" from happening.
She converts Trump followers from thinking beings into herd animals following the candidate with "momentum".

Using ranking methods is not a bad idea per-se, but it would still have led to his wining since his supporters (including myself) would only put him in, while other peoples supporters would spread their numbers across 15, or they could only put a single candidate and we would have the system we had.

Finally, when it came "Mano a Mano," Trump beat Cruz handily, and even Cruz was not exactly loved by the establishment.

Much better to make the results secret, or not hold primaries at all, and let the elders, with their superior intelligence, choose our leaders for us, like the do in Iran. 

Daily Musings 4/1/2016

WAPO Headlines:
1. WAPO: The worst stereotype of the GOP is coming to life in the form of Donald Trump - Michael Gerson Yet another tirade against the GOP front runner to pave the way to a Hilary victory. Attacks abortion. It turns out that Trump wants to punish women, not as he said, under current Federal Law, if Roe b Wade is eliminated, there would be such punishments. Trump definitely screwed up the answer, because he is not a politician, because he accepts what if questions, because he is transparent. So if transparency and answering all questions is not preferable to the opacity and the careful crafting of answers before hand shown by Hilary, Obama, and indeed all "politicians" then you want a politician, and his $$$ backers as president. Not what I want at least.

 Gerson then lies on Trumps other plans. Not worth getting into. The idea is: WHEN DEALING WITH A NON POLITICIAN WHO ANSWERS QUESTIONS, DESTROY HIM FOR LACK OF GRAMMAR, TAKE HIS POINTS TO ALL POSSIBLE EXTREMES, AND NEVER UNDERSTAND HIM, OR TRY TO.

This is great for all pundits, but it is beneath those who believe human beings should be transparent, tell us what they think, and let us evaluate them as humans, not caricatures.

2. Why is America ignoring 23 million ex cons  by Eberstadt. Point? We are ignoring our oppressed minorities, 12M ilegal aliens and 23M ex cons who cycle through our prisons. As usual, Nicholas phrases it as: "a higher share of its populace in jail or prison than virtually any other country" instead of "why aren't other countries applying their laws with the efficacy of the US?" or "Why do so many people in the US commit crimes" or even "Do we criminalize too much behavior?"  Somehow numbers are more important than reasons.  Funny, peculiar, and totally PC.

In my tweeting I came across this item about Iran's interest and interference with Africa: 

Daily Roundup - 3/29/2016

WAPO: No, the media didn't create Trump - by Eugene Robinson

So who created Trump? Robinson gives the clear implication that it was the stupid retarded Republican voters.  Is there another explanation?

 Let's go over the facts presented by Robinson:

The news media, it seems to me, are guilty only of reporting the news — which is that a candidate who has never held elective office, and who displays neither the base of knowledge nor the temperament necessary to serve as president, is leading all comers for the Republican nomination.

Where does Robinson get the Chutzpah of deciding who should or should not be president of the US.
President Carter fits the description much better than Trump, even if his weakness, inexperience, and lack of leadership were not clear before he was president.

 Deport the 11 million undocumented migrants already in the country, and build a “big, beautiful wall” along the Mexico border. Ridiculous, yes, but he got people’s attention.

This is a specific solution, promised us by President Reagan when the first wave of "comprehensive immigration reform" was passed. Trump just wants to enforce it. It is legal, it is a plan, and you may like it or not, but calling it ridiculous means you are ridiculous, not the plan.

He followed up, after the San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist attack, with a call to ban all foreign Muslims from entering the country. It is another crazy idea — impossible to implement and counterproductive if attempted

Again, what is crazy about this. The political parties, especially the republicans, have now come to accept it, except in name. Cruz simply names the countries he won't accept people from, and between him and Trump we have 3/4th of the Republican voters. What is crazy about improving our intelligence and engineering techniques which will allow us to predict whether people will integrate into the country before we nili-wili accept them in. After all, each person is an expenditure of over 20K per year of government funds if they fail to integrate, and this does not count the harm they can do if they become Jihadists.

Trump rails against free trade agreements whose effect, in his view, has been to eliminate millions of manufacturing jobs. He pledges to reduce the cost and scope of U.S. involvement overseas. He denounces other politicians as lackeys who dance to the tune of rich and powerful campaign donors. And he plays on the anxieties and prejudices of white voters unnerved by demographic change in a nation that will soon have no racial majority.

Why are these anxieties not correct? Isn't it well established that Nafta performed precisely as Perot predicted, "It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor,...have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south." He said that in 1992, and it now would apply to most of the "agreements" made since then.

So who created Trump? Robinson gives the clear implication that it was the stupid retarded Republican voters.  Is there another explanation?

Yes, there is. Trump is neither crazy, nor just a salesman effective in getting the marks to vote for him.  Rather, he is a serious candidate, effectively using the justified anger of a constituency long lied to by their supposed leaders and pundits.

Daily Roundup - 3/18/2016 -- Washington Post

These are the headlines of WAPO for Today:

Fareed Zakaria         Republicans are surrendering to Donald Trump David Ignatius         Trump’s and Sanders’s dangerous revolt against free trade Eugene Robinson     The GOP’s stop-Trump ‘movement’ is a pathetic joke Mary Jordan             Anxious about Trump? Try being a foreign ambassador. --------------------- SO MUCH PARTISANSHIP -- SO LITTLE CIRCULATION

Daily Roundup - 3/18/2016 -- Zakaria

WAPO: Republicans are surrendering to Donald Trump, by Fareed Zakaria

"The Republican surrender has begun. Having described Donald Trump as an unacceptable, unconservative, dangerous demagogue, the party establishment appears to be making its peace with the man who keeps winning primaries."

Great title and criticism. The party elite is giving in to The Will of the Voters. How undemocratic can you get. He isn't right yet, the Elitists who have failed their voters consistently are bent of schemes to change the outcome, and these schemes may make this a democratic year instead of a triumphant republican one.

"Trump marks, in many ways, an even larger break from the past than Goldwater. The modern Republican Party has been devoted to free markets and free trade, social conservatism, an expansionist foreign policy and fiscal discipline, especially on entitlements. Remember that the speech that launched Ronald Reagan’s career was an attack on Medicare. On every one of these issues, Trump either openly disagrees or — as with abortion — has a past track record of disagreement." 

All of the above is bunk. Trump is for free markets and trade, just FAIR free markets and trade where we and our workers are not thrown overboard to line the pockets of the elite money backers who, like Trump when he was a businessman, butter both sides of the bread (Reps and Dems) giving more the the side they think will win. He is not for a meek foreign policy where we support our enemies and fail our friends, but he is not into "nation building." He believes that wars incur costs (how strange is this?) and that those cost need to be defrayed by the defeated, and by the protected. America shouldn't shoulder all of the costs of fighting, while others enjoy the fruit of our winning.


"Trump’s nomination would transform the party into a blue-collar, populist, nationalist movement with a racial element" 

Where is this "traditional" ad-hominem attack coming from? What racial element? When has Trump ever talked about Race? Is it because he is against illegal immigration? But he is for legal immigration, and the people involved are the same.  Is it because he believes Muslims hate us? But they do as shown by a the Pew study:

This indicates that a 19% of American Muslims and 28% of World Wide Muslems (over 300,000,000) believe that violence and suicide bombing is acceptable in defense of Islam. So shall Trump say all of these are the "extremists" or simply leave it unspecified and say Muslims represent a threat. They represent a threat either way, but the PC word parsing would have us spend our time arguing about the use of adjectives (good, bad, extreme, progressive) rather than the problem.

So is Trump a Racist? Not in my book, and not by any action he has taken.

Daily Roundup - Jan 26, 2016

WAPO:Donald Trumps troubling politics of pride - Michael Gerson

Gerson paints Trump as the devil incarnate in "his ability to persuade people to support him by suspending their deepest, lifelong beliefs." Like the Devil, he has an enchanted tongue able to persuade the innocent away from the righteous path.  But of course Gerson never tells us what that path is so we could compare it to Trumps.

In fact the only factual policy comment on Trump is: ".. he is an immigration restrictionist" He also claims that he is supporting Abortion not believing his ".. rationale for his pro-life conversion". He also claims (albeit indirectly) that he bragged about affairs with married women, but he only quotes hearsay.

Lastly, and most poignantly he quotes C.S. Lewis: “The essential vice, the utmost evil is Pride,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison; it was through Pride that the devil became the devil. Pride leads to every other vice; it is the complete anti-God state of mind.”

It must be admitted that Trump does have pride, but whether that pride is "arrogance" we have really to see since he admits to mistakes (Abortion) and has always been a deal maker which is impossible at the arrogance level ascribed to him.  To quote CS Lewis on Pride and the Serpent: "he arrogantly contradicted what God had said to Eve about eating the forbidden fruit and charged God with lying. ,,,. In the next breath, the devil drew her into deeper deception by contending that God’s reason for lying was to keep her from enjoying all the possibilities inherent in being Godlike. " See C S Lewis Institute

It is clear that Trump has warned us about following the losers in the White House or the Republican Leadership, but I hope they are not in Gerson's mind the equivalent of God.

He also gives us this precis about Trump's future:

"What does this mean for politics? A leader with an overweening, compulsive pride finds it difficult to learn or change: What of worth can others possibly teach? A narcissistic leader is always at enmity with other people and groups, and cannot be a unifying figure. As Abraham Lincoln displayed, the capacity to heal requires humility and empathy. A narcissistic leader is vindictive, keeps lists of his grievances and enemies and is vulnerable to the abuse of power. A narcissistic leader finds it difficult to feel sympathy for those regarded as failures and losers, for the wounded and disabled, for strangers, refugees and the vulnerable."

I believe this reflects badly more on Obama than Trump, after all:

1. Obama can't seem to learn from his foreign affairs disasters, 

2. He cannot meet Congress half way, he takes what he can from them legally, and then even brakes the law to achieve his purposes through royal edicts.

3. Obama has no sympathy for people, stating that the deaths of civilians and our fear of being attacked by terrorists are but pinpricks that cannot hurt our nation! Who but an insensitive, narcissistic person could so inhumanly ignore human suffering.

4. Obama has certainly kept a list of enemies and used the power of the state to go after them. Right wing organizations denied 501(c)(3) status for years or forever while friends were benefited with the status. Congress has been dealt with utter contempt including illegal denial of oversight in Benghazi, Mrs. Clinton's private insecure email preserve, and Fast and Furious. 

I have to thank Mr. Gerson for his precis on Trump. While it doesn't fit a deal maker at all, it fits a dogmatic, unbending ruler like Obama to a T.

Daily Roundup - Jan 20, 2016

WAPO: The gospel according to Trump -- by Dana Milbank

Once again a Newspaper I love to hate.

"Monday on the thrice- married head of a gambling empire who talks about the need to kill members of terrorists’ families."

If Dana is writing as a Religious person, he just struck out on being Christian, having kind sentiments for a fellow human being, or even treating others as you would be treated.

I went to discover the context of the statement which I remember being that while we cannot influence those that want to suicide with threats on themselves, threats and actions against their families might influence them. "They care about their families"

The rule Trump is proposing is biblical, from Exodus 21:22-24

22 And should men quarrel and hit a pregnant woman, and she miscarries but there is no fatality, he shall surely be punished, when the woman's husband makes demands of him, and he shall give [restitution] according to the judges' [orders].

23 But if there is a fatality, you shall give a life for a life,

24 an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot,

While Rabbis tended to convert life to its value in money and were totally against capital punishment, and Rashi restricts it to when both mother and child are lost, it is clear that at some time some crimes were thought so grave that lex talionis (The law of the Jungle), a life for a life is required. 

Terrorism clearly falls under this category, if any crime does.  We are talking about the targeting of our innocent so as to inflict as grave a social pain as possible, and doing it in the name of total obliteration of our civilization. 

This is done in the context of the aggressor being a tribal civilization where the group, not the individual, is paramount. Clearly a situation in which "it took a village" to create the suicide bomber.

In this situation, inflicting maximum damage on "the village" makes sense, since communal ethics, not individual responsibility rule as an influence in that society.

The question is not, "is it nice, is it humane, is i permissible under international law?" The question is "Is it effective?".

To accuse Trump of making a statement against the common wisdom or our civilization does not answer any of those questions.  We are not willing to commit the trillions and thousands of casualties that it would take to teach Muslims to respect individual rights. But we are willing to blame Trump from making a suggestion which might resolve the conflict without such huge expenditures of capital and personnel, without considering its sociological basis. In the meantime our Western policies allow millions of civilians to die in the ME, and hundreds of millions to be placed at risk by suicide bombers, and rogue nations with nuclear capabilities. As Trump would say: "We got a real problem here!!!  We got a real problem..."

We need to solve that problem. Dana Milbank, other than insulting our intelligence with out of place quotations from both the New Testament and Trump, provides none.

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JJournal: Is Ted Cruz an anti-Semitic hypocrite? - Rob Eshman

"We know Ted Cruz is a hypocrite. The urgent question before us is whether he is an anti-Semitic hypocrite."
End of reading.  I don't know TC is a hypocrite, and no data is presented to convince me.

The fun continues:
1. Cruz comment on Trump's NY values was hypocritical-- Not really, we do thing of NY as a place of left politics (gay marriage, pro abortion..) and money (Wall Street).  It is Hypocritical of Rob to state otherwise.
Trump certainly trumped him properly when he made the comment, but that was one expert debater to another, nothing to do with the facts. You can be valiant, place community interest first, and still be left on politics and have money corruption.

2. Cruz has a successful wife working at G. Sachs.  Great for him.  He mortgaged his home to be elected Senator! Fantastic, he puts his money where his mouth is.

3. He didn't declare his loans. Fact Check has him declaring his borrowings in his financial disclosure papers, but not in his FEC submissions. Since he did declare them in one, not declaring it in the other would only cause trouble so I believe it was unintentional. Not a big deal in either case since he was self funding and that loan was less than 1/3 his total worth.

4. The following shows Eshman is not for any of the front runners:
"But let’s forgive Cruz his hypocrisy. He’s a politician. Trump spent last week pretending to evangelicals at Liberty University he knows the difference between Corinthians and corned beef. Marco Rubio twisted the English language in knots explaining how isolating Cuba is good for average Cubans. Bernie Sanders was against gun control before he was for it. And Hillary Clinton is so anti-Wall Street firms, she is taking away all their money — $300,000 at a time, in speakers fees. "

So what is his point?

5. He is anti-semitic.  YEAH! finally we have what Rob means. It may be idiotic, but here it is.

Cruz criticised NY values -> lots of Jews live in NY. There fore he criticized Jews!!!!

"he knows that by saying “liberal New York values,” he is dog-whistling the anti-Semites. "

It is just incredible that this dribble is placed in JJ! Once more: SHAME ON YOU JEWISH JOURNAL.