Category: Uncategorized

2018 has been a helluva year.

I’ve been depressed and unproductive for the past couple of years, but these days I’m starting to feel better. My Christmas song this year, I hope, reflects this.
Of course, it’s a song that is beyond my ability, which has become an unwritten rule for The revision99 Holiday Recording Pageant. This year the song I’m trying to do that I can’t really do justice to is “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

Continue reading “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”

I’m a political junkie.

So when big political events take place I can’t resist going in that direction here on revision99.  But by the time of Donald Trump’s election to the office of President of the United States, Facebook had lured me away from this blog, and I posted my comments about this profoundly incompetent man there, instead of here, where they belong. Later I tried to “catch up” by copying my Facebook posts and pasting them here (the “previous 13 posts” of the title), but Trump and his circle of miscreants generated so much daily outrage fodder at such a high rate that I just couldn’t keep up with them, so I abandoned that effort.

In any case, no one needs me to tell them what damage Donald Trump is doing to the country. I won’t try to document everything, and I’m not going back to finish my copy and paste project.

Is this just going to become “normalized?” (Story here.)

Click the image to read the Washington Post article by Zephyr Teachout. The President of the United States is on the take. He could have set up a blind trust. He could have begun selling off his companies. He could have NOT RUN FOR PRESIDENT if he didn’t want to comply with the Constitution.

Holy shit, what a crazy dream I was having.
There was a TV game show host running for president against 16 nincompoops. The game show host was like, the head nincompoop: loud, obnoxious, insulting, racist, misogynistic, vindictive, and ignorant. Of course, in my dream, he gets the nomination, and ends up running against a really accomplished candidate from the other party.

Nobody, including the game show host, thinks he’s going to win, but he’s so needy for attention that he plows ahead, improvising his campaign and preening before his supporters. Somewhere along the way it comes out that Russian computer hackers are helping him get elected by humiliating his more qualified rival for the job. Totally not believable, right? And then — you know how the weirdest things happen in dreams? — the game show guy — get this — wins the election! Nuts, huh?

Of course he has no idea how the government works, but he’s shot off his mouth for months about all the outrageous and hurtful things he’ll do when he’s the prez, so he has to go through the motions of “transitioning.” He spends the first month letting everybody know that he’s planning to renege on every single one of his campaign pledges except one: he’s going to take away everybody’s medical coverage! And his fans, for some reason, love it! Then he blows off daily presidential briefings because, he says, they’re too boring. “Oh oh,” I think in my dream, “he’s going to improvise his presidency, too!” I mean, I told you it was a crazy dream, right?

After a while he starts picking who he wants in his cabinet. He likes this part, because on TV he played a “boss,” who was powerful and smart and fired people on every episode. Here’s his chance to do it for realz! But remember, this is just a nutty dream — for each department he chooses somebody who’s made a career of destroying the very department they are now in charge of! If I were not sleeping, I could never make this stuff up!

Anyway, my dream starts to feel more like a nightmare as the game show host goes on Twitter day after day — and sometimes in the middle of the night — to attack people he hates for one reason or another, or to take credit for things that are happening around him that he had nothing to do with. It’s beginning to look like I’m about to descend into some kind of bizarre political hell for at least four years. I mean, a revenge-minded, petty, narcissistic sociopath is about to be handed the nuclear codes! Seriously, I must need psychiatric counseling or something, to be dreaming shit like this, right? This nightmare seems to last all freakin’ night, and finally, just as the obnoxious game show host is about to be inaugurated, I cry out and wake up in a cold sweat.

Thank God it’s only a dream.

It’s now clear that Donald Trump intends to enter the White House…

…without resolving the many conflicts of interest between his business holdings and his new job as defender of the Constitution. In his charade Wednesday morning he told the nation he could easily run his company and the country at the same time if he wanted to, and that he’d be really good at it. Then he brought out his lawyer to announce that it would be a satisfactory solution for him to turn over control of the company to two of his sons, who would run it without any input from Trump himself. There are no ethics experts who agree with him on this. Furthermore, his lawyer said, it would be really hard for Trump to divest or to set up a legitimate blind trust. To that I say, Mr. Trump, if you didn’t want to comply with the United States Constitution, you should not have sought the presidency. I mean, some things are hard.

What this means is that from the moment he takes the oath of office he will be in violation of the constitution. If this is not a “high crime and misdemeanor,” nothing is. I’ve heard that I should “wait and see” what he does as president, before I criticize him. I don’t think this is a “wait and see” situation: He has already announced his intention to break the law: No need to wait.

The standard resolution of a situation like this is impeachment. But guess what? Articles of impeachment must begin in the House of Representatives, and the House majority is Republican. Do you think they will allow their boy to be impeached? Not until they get him to sign a bunch of their bills, including the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, tax cuts for the rich, removal of many corporate regulations, defunding of Planned Parenthood, and more. You say someone could file a lawsuit to have him removed? Someone probably will, but it will be thrown out of court, because no one can claim to have sustained “direct injury or harm” as a result Trump’s crime — no one has “standing” to sue. Hey, it’s a legal thing. We don’t have to understand it.

There is no likely avenue to correct this.

Maybe the new president will commit more crimes while in office. Maybe he will be so blatant in his arrogance and lawlessness that even the Republican held House will feel they must act. Certainly if your district is represented by a Republican you should write and encourage her to do the right thing. But while you’re holding your breath for that to happen, don’t forget there’s a congressional election in two years, and a 3-million strong majority did vote against Donald Trump. If everyone who thinks we’ve made a terrible mistake gets out and votes in 2018, we can begin to rescue our government from this unqualified man and start on the road to recovering some of our national integrity.

Donald Trump is as unqualified for his new job as anyone who’s ever won an election,

and yet his first four years as President of the United States may indeed turn out to be “successful.” Even though his complete lack of experience and inability to focus will lead him to turn over most governing to Congress and underlings in his administration, his habit of using Twitter and pep rallies to talk directly to his supporters could allow him to create an aura of “getting things done.” He takes credit for things he hasn’t done, pretends he didn’t say things that he was recorded saying and endlessly promotes his superior intelligence and knowledge of subjects (foreign policy, cyber security, military strategy) that he clearly knows nothing about.

And many of his supporters believe him, or at least they act as if they do. This phenomenon has been explained by Trump spokespeople as “…taking him seriously, but not literally.” Thus, for example, he’s able to promise over and over for a year that he will definitely build a 2,000-mile wall across our southern border, but nobody gets upset when he reneges on that pledge a week after the election.

If he can get away with this kind of thing for four years, a large segment of American voters is going to think he is The Greatest President Ever. Thanks to the gullibility and/or ignorance of a lot of us, and Trump’s instinct for finding the shortest route to a cheap pat on the back, together with his willingness to say anything without regard to the truth, he may be able to sustain the charade long enough to be a viable candidate for reelection in 2020.

The Trump Administration is going to go down in history as the era when “truth” finally became completely uncoupled from actual facts. We saw this coming 16 years ago when an aide to George W.Bush told Ron Suskind of The New York Times that the reason he (Suskind) couldn’t understand the new administration was that he was living in the “reality-based community,” a place that Bush & Company did not reside. But during the past election campaign Trump abandoned even the pretense of caring about truth. He just made stuff up whenever he felt like it, so fast that there was not enough time to refute all his BS.

But if we are going to get the country back on track we are going to have to refute the BS. I’m a political junkie, and I spend a lot of time reading and studying what’s going on in government and public policy, so I usually can tell when a politician is dissembling or shading the truth. Whenever I see a falsehood on social media I try to correct it. I don’t expect Trump’s most ardent supporters will be swayed — they don’t take him literally, after all — but it’s important that blatant lies or completely inaccurate statements are challenged, so that uninformed readers won’t be confused when they come across something that makes no logical sense.

Trump’s preferred method of spreading these falsehoods and pumping up his own image is just talk on social media. When his talk is untrue, let’s call him out on it, on Facebook or right back at him on his own Twitter account.

Merry Christmas! (And when I say “Christmas,” I mean ALL the holidays that happen at this time of year.)

[Copied from the YouTube page]
2016. It’s been a rough year for me and, I suspect, for some of you as well. But we go on, don’t we? My Christmas song this year is a Beach Boys tune, from back in their early days when they were under pressure to put out as many albums as possible, before their flash-in-the-pan popularity disappeared. They cranked this one out in 1964. The writing is credited to Brian Wilson, and while it’s true that on his own Brian did not always come up with the most sophisticated lyrics, this one is so lame I have to suspect the influence of Mike Love, who wrote even dumber lyrics than Brian, and who sang lead on this one.

An Oklahoma oil man and climate change denier as head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

What could go wrong? Scott Pruitt has said he wants to dismantle the EPA. And now he’s in charge of it.
The new president doesn’t know how much damage he’s doing, but up in the penthouse, he doesn’t much care. Note to Trump voters: It’s your children and grandchildren who will pay the price for your stupidity.