The Revenge of John McCain.

December 1st, 2018

John McCain Was elected to Congress in 1982 and elected to the Senate in 1986 taking the seat previously held by Barry Goldwater. In 1989, he was involved in the “Keating Five Scandal.

The five senators—Alan Cranston (Democrat of California), Dennis DeConcini (Democrat of Arizona), John Glenn (Democrat of Ohio), John McCain (Republican of Arizona), and Donald W. Riegle, Jr. (Democrat of Michigan)—were accused of improperly intervening in 1987 on behalf of Charles H. Keating, Jr., Chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of a regulatory investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB). The FHLBB subsequently backed off taking action against Lincoln.

The late 1980s were the era of the Savings and Loan scandals.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Act of 1932 created the S&L system to promote homeownership for the working class. The S&Ls paid lower-than-average interest rates on deposits. In return, they offered lower-than-average mortgage rates. S&Ls couldn’t lend money for commercial real estate, business expansion, or education. They didn’t even provide checking accounts.

In 1934, Congress created the FSLIC to insure the S&L deposits. It provided the same protection that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation does for commercial banks. By 1980, the FSLIC insured 4,000 S&Ls with total assets of $604 billion. State-sponsored insurance programs insured 590 S&Ls with assets of $12.2 billion.

Inflation in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to pressure on Savings and Loan institutions that had been lending money at 6% to home buyers but savers were demanding higher interest rates to compensate for inflation. The S&Ls were caught in the “Borrow high and Lend low” vise that led to their demise.

My review of Nicole Gelinas’ book on the 2008 economic crisis includes some discussion of the 1986 problems.

The story of the 2008 collapse begins in 1984 with the rescue of the Continental Illinois Bank. Here began the “too big to fail” story. Two things happened here that led to the crisis. One was the decision to bail out all depositors, including those whose deposits exceeded the FDIC maximum. Secondly, the FDIC guaranteed the bond holders, as well. Thus began the problem of moral hazard. Another feature of this story was the role of Penn Square Bank, which had gone under two years earlier in the wake of the oil price collapse, which devastated many of its poorly collateralized loans in the oil industry. Both banks had been caught seeking higher returns through risky investments. Penn Square, however, had been allowed to collapse. Continental was rescued and that began a trend that the author lays out in detail through most of the rest of the book.

The 1986 crisis and the 1989 scandal affected McCain deeply. He was a freshman Senator and was probably included in the group for two reasons. First he was the only Republican and Second, Keating, a Phoenix developer, was a constituent. McCain was humiliated and his ego was as big as all outdoors.

His reaction to his humiliation was once of the worst pieces of legislation in the 20th century, The McCain-Feingold Act.

In 1995, Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Russ Feingold (D-WI) jointly published an op-ed calling for campaign finance reform, and began working on their own bill. In 1998, the Senate voted on the bill, but the bill failed to meet the 60 vote threshold to defeat a filibuster. All 45 Senate Democrats and 6 Senate Republicans voted to invoke cloture, but the remaining 49 Republicans voted against invoking cloture. This effectively killed the bill for the remainder of the 105th Congress.

McCain, still in his “Maverick mode and still running on ego, persisted.

McCain’s 2000 campaign for president and a series of scandals (including the Enron scandal) brought the issue of campaign finance to the fore of public consciousness in 2001. McCain and Feingold pushed the bill in the Senate, while Chris Shays (R-CT) and Marty Meehan (D-MA) led the effort to pass the bill in the House. In just the second successful use of the discharge petition since the 1980s, a mixture of Democrats and Republicans defied Speaker Dennis Hastert and passed a campaign finance reform bill. The House approved the bill with a 240–189 vote, sending the bill to the Senate. The bill passed the Senate in a 60–40 vote, the bare minimum required to overcome the filibuster. Throughout the Congressional battle on the bill, President Bush declined to take a strong position, but Bush signed the law in March 2002 after it cleared both houses of Congress.

The results have been disastrous. Congressmen have spent most of their time “dialing for dollars,” as fundraising is referred to and staff members write legislation. The result is monster bills, like Obamacare and Dodd-Frank, that have devastated the economy and destroyed healthcare in this country. Now another consequence is developing. Congress members are quitting.

Only once since 1930 has the number of voluntary departures been higher than it was this cycle. Members choosing to walk away from the legislative branch include eight Republican committee chairs, as well as House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who became the second speaker in a row to voluntarily give up the gavel of the most powerful position in the House.

Interviews with more than half a dozen departing members and some recently retired members revealed three major drivers behind the surge of retirements: a legislative process dominated by party leaders, the constant pressure to raise money, and political dysfunction plaguing Congress from top to bottom. The picture painted by these departing Republicans and Democrats lays bare a disturbing reality: Congress is fast becoming a place that repels, rather than attracts, public servants who want to get things done.

Committee chairs are expected to raise more money even than regular members.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who was first elected to Congress in 2012, has said that party leaders’ efforts to get him to pay his dues went so far as reminders being “stuffed in my pocket during votes” on the House floor.

Asked what happens when member don’t pay their party dues, retiring Rep. Jimmy Duncan (R-TN) bluntly said “You don’t get these chairmanships.”

Outgoing Rep. Lynn Jenkins (R-KS), likewise, acknowledged fundraising frustrations and even joked, “My mom had taught me not to talk a lot about myself and never ask strangers for money, and then, that’s all I’ve done for the last ten years.”

Many soon-to-be retirees also look forward to walking away from the hostile culture that pervades Capitol Hill.

The recent decision by the Supreme Court on “Citizens United vs FEC has brought the issue into focus.

The United States Supreme Court held (5–4) on January 21, 2010, that the free speech clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for communications by nonprofit corporations, for-profit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.

In the case, the conservative non-profit organization Citizens United sought to air a film critical of Hillary Clinton and to advertise the film during television broadcasts shortly before the 2008 Democratic primary election in which Clinton was running for U.S. President.

Outrage by Democrats followed and Obama even berated the Supreme Court majority during his State of the Union speech.

On January 27, 2010, Obama further condemned the decision during the 2010 State of the Union Address, stating that, “Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests – including foreign corporations – to spend without limit in our elections.

The statement about “foreign corporations” is a lie. He should know better since his campaign in 2008 disabled credit card verification to allow foreign donations, which are illegal.

Ultimately, John McCain did what he could in person to get revenge on the voters when he killed Obamacare repeal with his vote in the Senate in spite of his promise in the 2016 campaign to vote for repeal.

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Posted in corruption, elections, health reform, politics | Comments Closed

More Biology

November 30th, 2018

I have posted a few times on Biology and should really do more. Here is one.

In a previous post, I stated that mitochondria are not present in sperm.

The “African Eve” theory is derived from the fact that all mitochondria are inherited from the mother. There are no mitochondria in the sperm.

That was a mistake as, someone pointed out, sperm have motile flagellae and that requires Mitochondria. However, my second comment was also, perhaps, incorrect.

An astute reader pointed out that my statement above is incorrect. Actually, it is a sign of how old I am as this was the previous understanding. However, sperm do have mitochondria but they are tagged for destruction and do not survive in the egg. Why this is, is not explained although the paternal mitochondria may be harmful in some fashion.

Now, I might still have been wrong.

But new research suggests that in some cases, mitochondrial DNA can be inherited from fathers, too. A group of researchers found three unrelated families where individuals had mitochondrial DNA from both parents. A total of 17 people across these three families were affected, suggesting that mitochondria aren’t as exclusively maternal as scientists believed.

In nearly all mammals, this mitochondrial genome is inherited exclusively from the mother, and transmission of paternal mitochondria or mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has not been convincingly demonstrated in humans. In this paper, we have uncovered multiple instances of biparental inheritance of mtDNA spanning three unrelated multiple generation families, a result confirmed by independent sequencing across multiple unrelated laboratories with different methodologies. Surprisingly, this pattern of inheritance appears to be determined in an autosomal dominantlike manner. This paper profoundly alters a widespread belief about mitochondrial inheritance and potentially opens a novel field in mitochondrial medicine.

There are lots of new developments in biology, such as studies of dental specimens in archeology.

An example is the use of plants in the diet of Neanderthals.

The most popular idea is that the disappearance of the Neanderthals was caused by the greater competition of the ancestors of modern humans, Homo Sapiens, who appeared more or less at the same time as the Neanderthals disappeared from Europe, and one of the explanations as to how that happened could be their diet. The Neanderthals are thought to have had more limited diets, while our ancestors had more flexible, adaptive diets that included seafood and a variety of plants.

Yet even though archaeological science has advanced considerably over the last few decades and has come up with new theories about the diets of the Neanderthals, today we still only have a patchy image of their dietary ecology given that we lack full, environmentally representative information about how they used plants and other foods.

This new piece of research into the fragments of dental calculus or tartar shows that the use of plants was a widespread, deeply-rooted subsistence strategy of the Neanderthals.

More detail is coming as dental tartar is beginning to be analyzed.

Archaeological tooth tartar has previously been shown to preserve milk proteins, but the international study, led by researchers at the University of York and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has proved for the first time that it can also reveal more precise information about a wider range of food proteins, including those from plants.

And

Analysing 100 archaeological samples from across Britain, as well as 14 samples from living dental patients and recently deceased individuals, the research team found that potential dietary proteins could be found in about one third of the analysed samples.

Dr Speller added: “In the teeth we look at from individuals who lived around the Victorian era we identified proteins related to plant foods, including oats, peas and vegetables in the cabbage family. Occasionally, we find evidence of milk and oats in the same mouth — I like to think it’s from eating porridge!”

We know quite a bit about the diet of “Otzi,” the Iceman found in the glacier in 1991. His remains are a unique treasure for anthropology.

More recent analysis of Ötzi’s stomach and intestines has resolved this contradiction: the contents of his intestines have revealed fragments of bones from an ibex, alongside various remains of plant origin. A detailed genetic analysis of his intestinal contents also showed that he had consumed venison. The latest study conducted on his stomach contents revealed that his last meal consisted largely of ibex and venison with a high percentage of fat. Studies have also shown that the Iceman – and, indeed, the entire population of present-day South Tyrol – had a very balanced diet. Early types of grain – such as einkorn and emmer – were probably consumed in the form of porridge or bread. The diet also included a large number of other plant products, including various vegetables, fruits and wild berries, as well as dried wild fruits.

We knew this by 1998 when I wrote my medical history book. Here is a 1998 article on his diet, which was known at the time./


But at the top of the colon, Zur Nedden made out a slight bulge, which the radiologist suspected was a clump of half-processed food. The progress of the food indicated that the Iceman had last eaten about eight hours before he died, possibly of hypothermia, on the Hauslabjoch pass, which cuts over the main Alpine ridge dividing Austria from Italy at 10,500 feet above sea level.

Not until several years after the discovery did the Innsbruck scientists finally cut a hole into the mummy, insert an endoscope, and snip out about .004 ounces from the colon. Dr. Werner Platzer, the University of Innsbruck anatomist then in charge of research on the corpse, gave .0016 ounces milligrams of the material to Oeggl, who had already been studying the rich botanical finds from the site.

Pollen provided a snapshot of the environment the Iceman was exposed to in the hours before his death
Oeggl’s sample was barely the size of his little fingernail. Under the microscope, he quickly identified the flake-like, semi-digested material that made up the bulk of the sample as einkorn, the most important wheat of the Neolithic, the period of prehistory in which people lived in semi-permanent settlements and survived by agriculture and keeping animals. The discovery of einkorn, which does not occur naturally in Europe, in the Iceman’s intestinal tract suggested that he had contact with an agricultural community. The dominance of bran in the sample led Oeggl to believe that the wheat had been finely ground into meal and made into bread, rather than eaten as a porridge, where the grains would have been eaten whole and found in larger pieces in the colon. But the bread would have been little like modern breads. In order to get bread to rise when yeast is added, the wheat grains must contain a high level of gluten, which lends the dough a durable elasticity and therefore holds the pockets of air. Einkorn has low levels of gluten, so the bread made with it was probably hard, somewhat like a cracker, and rather tough on the teeth.

That is interesting.

There are even suggestions of medical therapy in dental calculus from Neanderthals.

The international team analysed and compared dental plaque samples from four Neandertals found at the cave sites of Spy in Belgium and El Sidrón in Spain. These four samples range from 42,000 to around 50,000 years old and are the oldest dental plaque ever to be genetically analysed.

“We found that the Neandertals from Spy Cave consumed woolly rhinoceros and European wild sheep, supplemented with wild mushrooms,” says Professor Alan Cooper, Director of ACAD. “Those from El Sidrón Cave on the other hand showed no evidence for meat consumption, but appeared instead to have a largely vegetarian diet, comprising pine nuts, moss, mushrooms and tree bark — showing quite different lifestyles between the two groups.”

“One of the most surprising finds, however, was in a Neandertal from El Sidrón, who suffered from a dental abscess visible on the jawbone. The plaque showed that he also had an intestinal parasite that causes acute diarrhoea, so clearly he was quite sick. He was eating poplar, which contains the pain killer salicylic acid (the active ingredient of aspirin), and we could also detect a natural antibiotic mould (Penicillium) not seen in the other specimens.”

“Apparently, Neandertals possessed a good knowledge of medicinal plants and their various anti-inflammatory and pain-relieving properties, and seem to be self-medicating. The use of antibiotics would be very surprising, as this is more than 40,000 years before we developed penicillin. Certainly our findings contrast markedly with the rather simplistic view of our ancient relatives in popular imagination.”

The “Iceman” also had some evidence of medical treatment, although probably ineffective.

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The story of the Trump spying scandal.

November 25th, 2018

Dan Bongino is a former Secret Service agent who is prominent commentator on Fox News.

His presentation at the David Horowitz meeting is worth watching.

He has a book out and I have ordered it on Kindle.

He also says that he thinks Bill Priestep is working with the people investigating this scandal.

The link at Conservative Tree House has some additional suggestions.

One of the key points Bongino highlights is how none of the paper-trail; nothing about the substance of the conspiracy; can possibly surface until *after* Robert Mueller is no longer in the picture. Until Robert Mueller is removed, none of this information can/will surface.

That’s why every political and media entity are desperate to protect Mueller; and also why Mueller’s investigation will never end.

This may well be true and it is depressing.

The source of the famous Fusion GPS “Dossier” on Trump is probably a 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal where Simpson worked at the time.

Simpson and Jacoby co-wrote a Journal article in April 2007, “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington.” In it, Smith notes, they identified Paul Manafort as a key player in introducing Russians to Beltway circles. They kept reporting on him over the years. When Manafort was hired to manage the Trump campaign, Simpson — by now running Fusion GPS — made him a focus of his research, and knew enough background information to build a plausible case.

The reporter who dug up this story, which you will never see in the New York Times, is named Lee Smith and writes for Tablet Magazine.

A Tablet investigation using public sources to trace the evolution of the now-famous dossier suggests that central elements of the Russiagate scandal emerged not from the British ex-spy Christopher Steele’s top-secret “sources” in the Russian government—which are unlikely to exist separate from Russian government control—but from a series of stories that Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson and his wife Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal well before Fusion GPS existed, and Donald Trump was simply another loud-mouthed Manhattan real estate millionaire. Understanding the origins of the “Steele dossier” is especially important because of what it tells us about the nature and the workings of what its supporters would hopefully describe as an ongoing campaign to remove the elected president of the United States. Yet the involvement of sitting intelligence officials—and a sitting president—in such a campaign should be a frightening thought even to people who despise Trump and oppose every single one of his policies, especially in an age where the possibilities for such abuses have been multiplied by the power of secret courts, wide-spectrum surveillance, and the centralized creation and control of story-lines that live on social media while being fed from inside protected nodes of the federal bureaucracy.

Anyway, the story is there and I am beginning to read Bongino’s book.

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Posted in corruption, elections, politics | 2 Comments »

What about 2020?

November 23rd, 2018

First, everyone should view this Steve Bannon Oxford Union debate.

It’s an hour long and, while I rarely watch hour long YouTube videos, this one is worth while.

He gives a talk about his European sessions with new “right wing” leaders like Viktor Orban, the Hungarian Prime Minister.

Viktor Mihály Orbán is a Hungarian politician serving as Prime Minister of Hungary since 2010. He also served as prime minister from 1998 to 2002. He is the present leader of the national conservative Fidesz party, a post he has held since 2003 and, previously, from 1993 to 2000.

Orban is hated by the globalists in Germany because he has built walls to keep put “migrants,” which he says his county cannot support.

Orbán’s social conservatism, national conservatism, soft Euroscepticism and advocacy of what he describes as an “illiberal state” have attracted significant international attention. Some observers have described his government as authoritarian or autocratic.

In August 2018, Orbán became the 2nd longest-serving prime minister after Kálmán Tisza. If his current government lasts a full term, upon its completion, he will become the longest-serving Hungarian prime minister in history.

He also talks about the Italian election and the leaders Salvini, the conservative and Di Maio, the leftist party “Five Stars” leader were able to come together as a coalition. Both are populists. That is his point.

Bannon also has an excellent interview with Euroweek news.

Again it is mostly about Trump. Also he tries to define “Populism” and talks about the “Davos Elite.”

Several topics in the Oxford Union discussion came up, especially what will happen in 2020. He makes several good points about the midterm election. He says that Democrats out worked Republicans and that the turnout was what would be expected in a presidential election. He expresses interest in Beto O’Rourke, who lost the election in Texas to Ted Cruz. He points out that Lincoln lost the 1858 Senate election to Douglas, then was elected president two years later. He suggests that the 2020 election will be affected by a plan for Mike Bloomberg to spend $100 million on opposition to Trump. He thinks that it may well be a three way race. Bill Clinton was elected in a three way race in which he got 42% of the vote.

In the Euronews interview, the “moderator” keeps debating him. Bannon corrects him constantly.

In both discussions, the populism equals Fascism kept coming up.

Finally, this Tucker Carlson speech explains a lot of where Trump came from.

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Posted in elections, Europe, immigration, politics | 2 Comments »

Was there vote fraud in the election?

November 18th, 2018

UPDATE: The results as of November 18.

I’m not really writing about Broward County in Florida as that seems to be old fashioned Democrat fraud. In 2016, there was almost certainly vote fraud.

“There is no authentic surge,” a source at the Broward County Supervisor of Elections told People’s Pundit Daily. “They’ve been at this [filling out absentee ballots] for days, working 4 to 5 employees some 16 hours a day each. There’s no telling how many ballots we are talking about. As many as they can each write in 16 hours a piece.”

A review of the early and absentee voting statistics in the state–which People’s Pundit Daily does on a daily basis–does reveal a suspicous increase in Democratic returns juxtaposed to the rest of the state, which has not experienced the same turnout increase. If enthusiasm and turnout for Mrs. Clinton was organic and legitimate, then we would expect to see those gains in similiar percentages in regions of the state expected to back the Democrat.

But that’s not the case.

Sources confirm Snipes was breaking the law and opened more than 153,000 ballots cast by mail in private, claiming employees were tearing up and disposing of those that were votes in support of Donald J. Trump. The law prohibits the opening of ballots without the supervision of a canvassing board appointed to oversee and certify elections precisely because of this possibility.

That seems to be correct but why was that person still running the election in Broward County in 2018?

Within hours of receiving Ingoglia’s letter, a judge on Broward’s canvassing board offered a two-step compromise that ended the charge by Republicans. But Snipes admitted no wrongdoing and, until now, was able to maintain the story that the employees didn’t open the ballots.

“The canvassing board has never opened the ballots,” Snipes said. “We have procedures we follow that are approved in our security manual sent to state. We don’t feel like we are doing anything illegal — this is the process we have always used.”

But it was only because David Shestokas, a Florida Bar-certified attorney, was sent by the Republican National Lawyers Association from Chicago to watch the election in Broward that these activities were made known.

What about the 2018 election ?

There seems to be a repeat in at least one race.

The campaign of the Republican candidate for agricultural commissioner sent a news release Friday afternoon announcing that his attorneys filed a lawsuit in the 17th judicial circuit “asking the court to protect the integrity of all ballots and all public records relating to the election for Commissioner of Agriculture.”

Caldwell thought he had edged out a victory in the agricultural commissioner race Tuesday night when he had about a 40,000 vote lead over Democratic candidate Nikki Fried.

But the latest vote count shows Caldwell losing by 3,120 votes to Fried. The difference between the candidates is .04 percent, signaling an automatic recount, and a likely manual recount.

“Over the course of the last two and half days, the Broward supervisor has continued to magically find boxes of ballots that have potentially altered the course of the race,” Caldwell said in an interview Friday. “And after all that time, we still cannot get a straight answer as to where they came from, when they were cast. We just heard there is another magical box of 2,100 ballots they supposedly found here (Friday).”

Something is going on with absentee ballots.

We had the same thing in Arizona, including “Emergency ballot stations for absentee ballots in Maricopa County.

The chairman of the Arizona Republican Party is threatening legal action against counties that opened emergency voting centers over the weekend or that plan to allow voters to confirm that they signed the early ballots that they dropped off on Election Day before those ballots are rejected for mismatched signatures, issues that could come into play if Republicans find themselves on the losing end of any close votes.

In a letter to all 15 county recorders, dated two days before the election, Jonathan Lines argued that the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office violated state law by opening five “emergency voting centers” on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. State allows voters to cast early ballots at specified centers through the Friday before Election Day, but states that in-person early voting after 5 p.m. on Friday is only permissible in the event of an emergency, which is defined as “any unforeseen circumstance that would prevent the elector from voting at the polls.” Pima County also opened five emergency voting centers on Saturday and three on Monday.

It was also used in Pima County where I live. What is going on ? I have some suspicions.

Arizona has gone to “early voting” by mail ballot. In all 37 states allow “early” or absentee voting by mail. I voted by absentee ballot in California for years because, as a surgeon on call for emergencies, I could never be certain I would be available on election day. Now, most states allow absentee voting without any reason other than choice and three states have only mail voting.

In my opinion, this is an invitation to vote fraud, and I suspect, that Democrats are perfecting this system to allow voting to be done by their agents. In Arizona, the media reported “99% of ballots” counted by the morning after election day. Then came the deluge of “absentee ballots” that reversed the results of many races, including the Senate in Arizona. Republicans in Orange County, where I used to live, were inundated by a similar late wave of absentee ballots.

Crude forms of vote fraud were previously committed in Washington State in 2004,

The 2004 Washington gubernatorial election on November 2, 2004 gained national attention for its legal twists and extremely close finish. In what was notable for being among the closest political races in United States election history, Republican Dino Rossi was declared the winner in the initial automated count and again in the subsequent automated recount. It wasn’t until after the third count, a second recount done by hand, that Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, took the lead by a margin of 129 votes.

A box of 400 votes were “found” in the trunk of a car owned by a King County official.

King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday December 12, reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Phillips said he was certain he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, and asked the county election officials to investigate the discrepancy. They discovered that Phillips’ signature had somehow failed to be scanned into the election computer system after he submitted his request for an absentee ballot. Election workers claimed that they had received Phillips’ absentee ballot in the mail, but they could not find his signature in the computer system to compare to the one on the ballot envelope, so they mistakenly rejected the ballot instead of following the standard procedure of checking it against the signature of Phillips’ physical voter registration card that was on file. The discovery prompted King County Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been incorrectly rejected.

Logan announced on December 13 that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to an administrative error

Sorry. 561 Votes were “discovered.”

I think Democrats have developed a way to ensure that “enough” absentee ballots are completed by somebody to ensure that Democrats “win” elections. I am unaware of any of these close elections that have involved Republicans being elected this way.

Posted in corruption, elections | 2 Comments »

Press passes and civility.

November 16th, 2018

The CNN correspondent who has made a career of harassing Trump, won his lawsuit to regain his “hard pass” to the White House press room.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Friday to immediately return the White House press credentials of CNN reporter Jim Acosta, though a lawsuit over the credentials’ revocation is continuing.

U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Kelly, an appointee of President Donald Trump, announced his decision at a hearing Friday morning. The judge said Acosta’s credentials must be reactivated to allow him access to the White House complex for press briefings and other events.

Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, was back in the afternoon. The White House said it would be developing new rules for orderly press conferences.

It may not be the last word as this is a preliminary injunction.

While the judge didn’t rule on the underlying case, he ordered Acosta’s pass returned for now in part because he said CNN was likely to prevail on its Fifth Amendment claim — that Acosta hadn’t received sufficient notice or explanation before his credentials were revoked or been given sufficient opportunity to respond before they were.

The judge said the government could not say who initially decided to revoke Acosta’s hard pass and how that decision was reached.

“In response to the court, we will temporarily reinstate the reporter’s hard pass,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement. “We will also further develop rules and processes to ensure fair and orderly press conferences in the future.”

Acosta has made himself obnoxious. I watched the video of his encounter that resulted in the “ban.” The media lied about it being “doctored” but in fact the “doctoring” was only conversion to a gif for use on Twitter.

What to do now? Acosta is preening in his confidence that he was won the exchange. I expect he will be just as obnoxious next time.

There have been suggestions of what to do about him.

Does Acosta have “a right to keep talking ?”

Maybe the press conferences will have to be restructured since the press hostility has become a problem. I remember Sam Donaldson shouting questions at Reagan, but I do not recall this sort of behavior from him.

An interesting sidelight to this is the absence of any outrage over Acosta’s treatment of the female intern who tried to take the microphone.

We live in an era in which interactions between men and women in the workplace have been under heightened scrutiny. Business leaders like Sheryl Sandberg have focused attention on the many ways men undermine the authority or equality of women at work. A prominent male media figure forcibly asserting himself because he wanted to keep talking would appear to fit perfectly into this narrative.

Indeed, in announcing its revocation of Acosta’s pass, the White House specifically cited gender power dynamics, noting that it would “never tolerate a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.”

In contrast, the news media almost unilaterally dismissed that aspect of the incident. The New York Times called it “brief, benign contact,” the Wall Street Journal termed it “incidental contact with the intern briefly” and Salon offered that “Acosta didn’t do anything wrong.” Late-night comedians even joked about the incident.

The Times lied about the contact but, because this involved Trump, no interest in the treatment of the young female intern.

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The Election Results.

November 13th, 2018

Since I now live in Arizona, the result that most affected me was the Arizona Senate race which was won by far left loony tune, Krysten Sinema.

Sinema is a far leftist who has used the typical Democrat strategy of sounding moderate until elected.

Sinema began her political career as a Green Party activist before joining the Democratic Party and becoming a state legislator.[2]

After her election to Congress, she shifted toward the political center, joining the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus and amassing a center-left to centrist voting record.[3] Sinema worked for the adoption of the DREAM Act and campaigned against Propositions 107 and 102, two voter referendums to ban the recognition of same-sex marriage and civil unions in Arizona.

Since she is “bisexual” her support of gay marriage is understandable. I have no problem with that although Civil Unions would have accomplished all the requests of gays.

According to Elle, “her first public comment as an elected official came in 2005, after a Republican colleague’s speech insulted LGBT people. ‘We’re simply people like everyone else who want and deserve respect’, she passionately declared. Later, when reporters asked about her use of the first person, Sinema replied, ‘Duh, I’m bisexual.'”

Of course. Why did McSally lose ?

Martha got 1,059,124 votes.

Governor Ducey, running for re-election, got 1,241,028 votes.

Why the difference? Did almost 200,000 more people vote for Ducey and not for McSally ? Why ?

Here is a site that purports to be Republican that asserts Trump’s support hurt her.

It’s fine, Martha. You didn’t lose. Donald J. Trump beat you. He beat Lea Marquez Peterson’s bid to replace you. He looks like he’s electing Democrats Katie Hobbs, Sandra Kennedy and Kathy Hoffman to statewide office. A Democrat took your seat in Congress because Trump made the election all about him.

Republicans have a choice to make. Are they the party of Doug Ducey, who this Red State’s voters still embrace, or the party of MAGA, turning off everyone without a red hat? One has a bright future in the Sonoran Desert. The other does not.

That sounds like a NeverTrumper and how many are there in Arizona?

Trump exists in another dimension and he has demanded Republicans join him there. It’s a place where refugees are diseased and shithole invaders, the truth is whatever instant lie he just fell out of his mouth, and no one has ever been a better president than him. McSally had to follow him there or face the GOP wrath that kneecapped Flake. He even boasted that he, personally, “retired him” and he was “very proud.”

That sure sounds like a Democrat and Tucson has plenty of them.

Nationally, National Review is pessimistic

What a difference a week makes, huh? With Arizona’s Senate seat lost, Florida and Georgia down to the wire, and GOP House losses approaching 40 seats, it’s time to adjust Wednesday morning’s “It wasn’t that bad” assessment.”

What’s more, President Trump and his team should be nervous about 2020. There’s still a lot of road between now and the next presidential election. We don’t know what the state of the country will be in autumn of that year. What will the unemployment number be? Will Americans feel prosperous and that American has been made “great again”? Will there be a terrorist attack? Another war?

I think most people who have supported Trump as president have done so on the basis of results, not affection.

I also doubt that many will consider Hillary, or Booker, or Harris, an improvement, almost no matter the state of the country,

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Remembrance Day, or Armistice Day.

November 11th, 2018

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November 11 is the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. When I was a child, it was Armistice Day. In Britain, it is still Remembrance Day when people who respect history buy and wear paper poppies.

The story of the poppies is told here.

In the spring of 1915, shortly after losing a friend in Ypres, Canadian doctor Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was inspired by the sight of poppies growing in battle-scarred fields to write the now famous poem In Flanders Fields.

His poem moved American teacher Moina Michael who began making and selling silk poppies to friends to raise money for the ex-service community.

Before long, poppies made their way to the UK and became the symbol of the Royal British Legion when it was formed in 1921.

The first ever ‘Poppy Appeal’ in the UK that year raised over £106,000 for war veterans. The following year, a poppy factory was set up by Major George Howson MC, giving jobs to disabled former servicemen.

The bright red poppy is regarded as a resilient flower which managed to flourish despite fields being destroyed by war.

Some people say you should wear the poppy on your left side, so it is worn over the heart. The left is also where military medals are worn. Others say only the Queen and Royal Family are allowed to wear a poppy on the right, which is an urban myth.

About ten years ago, my daughter Claire and I were visiting London and a friend, a retired Royal Army Medical Corps doctor, invited us to sit in Westminster Abbey with the RAMC on Remembrance Day. The group sits in front of the RAMC window that commemorates the medical branch of the British Army. The medical corps is “Royal” but the Army is of Parliament, so not “royal.”

In the north aisle of the nave of Westminster Abbey is a memorial tablet and stained glass window for those who died serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps in the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars. The larger white marble tablet was unveiled on 13th July 1922 by the Duke of Connaught, Colonel in Chief of the Corps. It was designed by F.J. Wilcoxson. The inscription reads, below the regimental badge:ROYAL ARMY MEDICAL CORPS
In memory of 743 Officers and 6130 Warrant Officers, Non-Commissioned Officers and Men who fell in the Great War, and whose names are enrolled in a Golden Book placed in the Chapter House. “They loved not their lives unto the death”

World War I changed Europe and we live with its consequences today. Unfortunately, the study of history has lapsed largely, and is distorted by academics and politics.

In years since that visit, I have spent some time in the scenes of World War I, such as Ypres, a scene of a prolonged and expensive battle of the war. There were several battles of Ypres.

The first ended the German assault through Belgium and ended with the beginning of trench warfare that continued to the end of the war. On our visit in 2015, we saw some of the original trenches, which were preserved by a family that returned after the war to find their farm a battlefield. They elected to preserve the scene as a museum since farming would be difficult with all the residue of battle and the bodies of the dead. There children have continued the museum and it is quite an interesting visit.

There are a number of museums in the area. This is the one we visited.

After the First World War a farmer returned to reclaim his land in and around what was left of the wood he had left in 1914. A section of the original wood and the trenches in it were cleared of debris and casualties but generally the farmer left a section of a British trench system as he found it.

This site is now one of the few places on the Ypres Salient battlefields where an original trench layout can be seen in some semblance of what it might have looked like. Elsewhere the trenches were filled in and ploughed over by returning farmers leaving only the occasional chalky outline of what had once been there.

In the last decade there has been a large increase in visitors to the Ypres Salient, and many have, of course, included a visit to the trenches at Sanctuary Wood. In the 1990s the trenches were covered in grass and the whole site was overgrown with undergrowth. Interestingly, nowadays the ground around the trench line has been visited by so many pairs of feet that it is mostly bald with no grass or undergrowth. The photograph on the far right shows how the trenches looked just a few years ago.

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The changes with increased foot traffic are seen in the two photos. The left photo is the way we saw it.

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The “Third Place”

November 8th, 2018

Saloon

I am reading, by listening to the audio, a book called “The Revolt of the Elites,” which was written in 1996 but I just discovered it.

The theme, which is quite timely, is that there are two worlds in this country; that of the elites and that of everyone else. From a review on Amazon:

Lasch was most active in the late twentieth century yet it would seem he was seeing into the future with this book and his equally (or more) famous book, The Culture of Narcissism. In Revolt of the Elites he posits that the degeneration of Western Democracy has been caused by the abandonment by the wealthy and educated elites of their responsibilities to support culture, education, the building of public facilities, etc. in these societies. The rich and educated in Western Liberal, Capitalist, Democracies have, since the 1970s, increasingly abandoned society, keeping all of their earnings to themselves and have adopted a listless transient existence forgoing any significant commitments to community.

He makes the point that we are no longer one nation with even the well off participating in the community. We lead separate lives.

One example of this he calls the “Third Place,” a place where the community gets together. One place is work and another is home. The Third Place used to be a gathering place where all classes could mingle and get to know each other. In my own life it was the neighborhood tavern. My father was in the Juke Box business when I was a child and he spent quite a bit of time in taverns as that was where his business was. Two taverns that I remember quite well were owned by good friends of my father’s. One served as an answering service for service calls from other taverns. Both were neighborhood places which had many customers from nearly all classes. The very rich tended not to be there but I remember quite successful businessmen and their wives who attended parties and barbecues. The tavern would have softball teams for younger customers. One of them had a private ball field across the street that was owned by the tavern owner.

The other tavern was not far away and among its regular customers were a wealthy heiress and her husband who had been a professional golfer. Every Sunday after Mass, there was a group that would always congregate there for an hour or two before going home. Most of the regulars did not visit each other at home, but did their socializing at the tavern.

When I was a medical student, we visited New York City in August 1965 and the friends whose apartment where we stayed, were regular customers of the local tavern. One our one visit to the tavern, the friend pointed out all the men there without women. The wives and children were all at the “shore” for the hot month of August.

The VFW and the Elks Club and Fraternal Order of Moose served the same purpose for many. My father was an Elk. There is a scene in the Clint Eastwood movie, “Gran Torino” that shows him socializing with the friends at the VFW. (Has it been the years since that movie ?)

Those third places are pretty much gone. The country club and even the yacht club, where I spent a lot of time socializing, are not the same. There is an economic issue although yacht clubs are full of crew members who are not members of the club but are welcome.

The divisiveness and tribalism we see in the elections and in the national politics are probably consequences of the lack such mixing bowls of democracy.

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What happens now ?

November 8th, 2018

The election is over except for Arizona which seems to be bogged down in some mishap with absentee ballots.

The Democrats have taken a majority of the House of Representatives so the Speaker and committee chairs will shift. Nancy Pelosi wants to be Speaker again at the age of 78. She has shown some signs of mild dementia and is definitely not the first choice of many Democrats. However, she has been a big fundraiser with her San Francisco connections.

Committee chairs who will be prominent include Jerry Nadler, energized after his obesity surgery and now promising impeachment of Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh and President Trump.

The Federalist reported that Nadler was riding an Amtrak Acela train to Washington, DC, Wednesday to meet with his congressional staff and House Judiciary Committee staff when he revealed in a phone call with a friend the details of House Democrats’ plans for the next two years.

“We’ve got to figure out what we’re doing,” he explained on the call before he began discussing House Democrats’ plans to investigate and later impeach Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh for alleged perjury.

The first option, he explained, was to investigate the FBI for how they handled the uncorroborated claims from several women claiming Kavanaugh sexually assaulted them.

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