In the Death Spiral

By Calvin Hill

The Republican leadership has embraced the year 2017 as its golden opportunity to erase from memory, any and all evidence that the United States of America ever elected a black president. The Affordable Care Act, the life extending legislation that both proudly and disparagingly bears Barack Obama’s name is being subjected to the insidious fallacy that it is in a death spiral. Not only does the Congressional Budget Office deny this about the legislation that has given health insurance to over 20 million previously uninsured Americans, and adds more to the rolls each year, the CBO predicts that the Republican plan that allegedly repeals and replaces Obamacare will gut 14 million people from the rolls of the insured inside of a year, and 24 million or more over 10 years – not to mention those that Obamacare may have added over those 10 years.

Having entrusted their political futures, the well being of the country, the safety of the world and their good old common sense to the ultra-mendacious Donald Trump, the Republicans have taken to his habit of lying to the press and the public. The only thing that we can be absolutely certain of being in a death spiral in America is the truth.

Just as they have seen no evidence that President Obama, by himself, through law enforcement, or through British agents, wiretapped the phones at Trump Tower, the GOP can produce no evidence that their Unaffordable American Health Care Act will insure more people at a lower cost and provide better service. In fact, Donald Trump’s “something terrific” health care plan that he said would cover everybody, cost less money, and offer better insurance coverage, does not cover everybody and threatens the lives and health of millions of Americans. It also allows insurance companies to return to offering the many junk policies that Obamacare ended, in addition to allowing CEO’s to personally pocket enormous profits. Were that not enough, House Speaker Paul Ryan, who crafted this disastrous AHCA, removes between $600 – $880 billion from health care for poor, needy, working poor, elderly and lower and middle class families and disgracefully funnels it to the extremely well off who have no issues financing their health care insurance. And neither Speaker Ryan nor President Trump has provided a cogent, acceptable or respectable explanation as to how excising such a massive amount of funds from the very health care system that needs it, presents it on a platter to the financially fit, provides better health care for all Americans.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz’s defense of Ryan’s plan was, perhaps, its most insulting show of support. To those currently receiving adequate subsidies, which they no longer will get under the AHCA, Chaffetz’s solution is for them to buy insurance instead of the latest IPhone. In the real world, which one would think Chaffetz also lives in, people buy insurance every month, not IPhones. And under the AHCA, poor and working class Americans will not be able to afford to pay for health insurance or their monthly carrier bill no matter what kind of phone they have.

However, Trump and Ryan continue to advance the lie that their plan is better than Obamacare because it gives Americans more health care choices. Having choices has never been the issue – its having money. Listening to Ryan and HHS Secretary Price repeatedly promote choice in a debate over health care, rather than life, is one of this debate’s absurd ironies. Now, we also see that Donald Trump’s budget proposal takes an axe to virtually every program that millions of Americans depend upon to sustain life. And those who are unable to sustain life after Trump, Ryan and their deliberate mountain of deceptions are inflicted will just be collateral damage.

Supporters of Obamacare readily admit that, although the legislation has worked well for the majority, it does need some adjusting. What it does not need is to be hacked to death and replaced with Paul Ryan’s version of an un-aborted Rosemary’s Baby. With an unrelenting campaign of lies, which has yet to end with his ascendance to the presidency, Donald Trump is laying waste to much of what is great about America. Unfortunately, the power and the pull of controlling the purse strings has led most Congressional Republicans and their indulgent mouthpieces in the conservative mainstream media to obfuscate and distort the facts about almost everything from health care to religious liberty.

As he refuses to abandon his campaign of lies, Pinocchio Trump threatens to lead the Republican Party off the edge of a moral and ethical cliff like a Pied Piper who has no intention of returning them home with or without receiving payment. For almost 2 years, the Trumpniks have spoken of a Trump “pivot” wherein the misleading, (lying), insulting, irascible and bombastic Donald Trump will begin to be “presidential.” However, his only pivot has been a circular one as he Tweets his way to more insulting and more dangerous fallacies that are spiraling out of control. The number of lives that will be irreparably damaged due to this pathology of lies will be devastating. And that’s the undisputed truth.

 

Somebody’s Watching You!

By Calvin Hill

Just before Sly and the Family Stone repeat their refrain, “Somebody’s Watching You,” Sly sings:

Ever stop to think about a downfall

Happens at the end of every line

Just when you think you’ve pulled a fast one

Happens to the foolish all the time.

Inquiring minds must be starting to wonder, and not just the ones Donald Trump reads in the National Enquirer, is the president freaking out? His support for the Unaffordable American Health Care Act has seen his approval rating drop another 5 points in the last couple of weeks. Thus, his ego driven narcissism has driven him to Nashville, Tennessee to up his attacks on American institutions in and out of government. Even some of his usual Republican enablers have begun to distance themselves from an accusatory Saturday morning Twitter storm that went a Tweet too far. Or, it is possible that the Prevaricator-in-Chief’s accusation that former president, Barack Obama, tapped his phones at Trump Tower was just another attempt to remove the glaring light that shines upon members of the Trump campaign, certain administration officials, WikiLeaks, Russian operatives, conflicts of interest and collusion.

Among several of the legal minds in the United States, who are enjoying their largest media exposure since the double murder trial of OJ Simpson, President Donald Trump is already in violation of the law and the emoluments clause of the Constitution of the United States due to his ownership of the Trump International Hotel on NW Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. A lawsuit by a competitor alleging that Trump’s continued ownership, which is possibly illegal, rises to unfair competition via his stature as President of the United States. Trump claims that he has ceded control of his organization to his sons, yet he travels to Trump properties at his whim. Still, Trump proceeds along his merry way with seemingly obvious ethical, constitutional and criminal violations under the Nixonian entreaty that, “If the president does it, it is not illegal!”

He is the poster boy for the hypocritical adage, ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’ He rants and raves like a spoiled little brat on how the media shouldn’t be able to use unnamed and anonymous sources when reporting and airing charges and allegations. However, virtually every unprovable utterance of his is peppered with, “I heard” or “I’m hearing” or “People are saying” and “People are telling me.” He is labeling ‘fake’ and ‘fake news,’ any challenge by the media to hide the fact that there is very little truth in anything coming out of his mouth. Previously respectable Republicans are now obfuscating their responsibility to the truth, the Constitution and the American people. It is often painful to watch them twisting and turning absurd explanations to defend words and actions that are indefensible. They are so afraid that Trump will subject them to a primary challenge or an early morning Twitter assault that logic and reason has escaped them as a necessary human trait. Even South Carolina Senator, Lindsay Graham, who spent the campaign pleading with American citizens that if they want to make America great again, “Tell Donald Trump to go to hell!” has taken to a fence sitting, wait and see position.

It is no small wonder that the brief excursion into Trump’s 2005 tax return is an attempt to ruin the credibility and stem the viewership of The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Unlike much of the media, that are caught in Trump’s game of follow the bouncing Tweet, Maddow is locked into, with Woodward and Bernstein laser like precision, the Trump/Putin/Russia story wherein the collaborative coincidences are getting harder and harder for the Trumpniks to explain. In addition to Rachel Maddow, California Rep. Maxine Waters is not buying any coincidences. In her, now famous, “scumbag” moment on ALL IN WITH CHRIS HAYES, also on MSNBC, Waters pours out the names, associations and financial interests of the Trump administration’s officials she now dubs THE KREMLIN CLAN. And, typical of most Fox News Channel hosts and their far right media personality brethren, the content of Waters’ comment was not at issue, only her name calling. Yet, the past 20 months of lies, damn lies and name calling by Donald Trump never seem to phase their conservative sensibilities.

While the threat of a nuclear North Korea is what keeps many Americans up at night, unfortunately, it is SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE that keeps Donald Trump up at night – and possibly the contents of a 35 page dossier. Late night jokes aside, it would be funny if the well being of so many lives and the health of the nation were not at stake. The mounting evidence that Vladimir Putin is pulling many of the strings at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is now anathema to the far right and ultra-conservative media talking heads who allege to be staunch constitutionalists and staunchly anti-Communist. The irony lost on them is that their malicious, overt attacks on Barack Obama, whose leadership inarguably brought the United States back from the brink of a depression, was labeled a Socialist. However, they are blind to the very real possibility that the administration that they now support may be run from the Moscow address where socialism birthed its bad name. Even my investigators, who I have dispatched to the afterlife, are telling me, “Ethel and Julius Rosenberg cannot believe what they are seeing!“

The Boy Who Chirps Wolf

By Calvin Hill

There is a narrative among the open-minded that if @realdonaldtrump would just stop Tweeting, the nation could get back to the business of governing. Why are they more concerned with the excessive Tweeting than they are about the incessant lying? It should be very clear to those open-minded and those who have been paying attention, that Donald Trump seems to have a serious psychological aversion to the truth. There appears to be nothing he will not lie about, from easy to recognize crowd sizes to independent employment numbers, plus anything and everything in between.

He was given information that a member of his campaign staff, General Michael Flynn was compromised by Russian influence weeks before he claimed that no one in his campaign was in touch with Russia. It also turns out that his choice for Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, and one of his top advisors, son-in-law Jared Kushner, met with the Russian ambassador to the US at Trump Tower.

He has asked his generals to come up with a plan to defeat ISIS after having campaigned that he had a plan to defeat ISIS – but would not reveal it for someone else to get credit. I imagine letting more innocent people and soldiers die was just the price we had to pay until he got elected. Without providing any evidence, he has accused the former President, Barack Obama, of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower, asserted that 3 to 5 million people all voted, illegally, for Hillary Clinton, and repeatedly claimed that positive monthly job reports, under the Obama administration, were phony.

Trump has lied about saving thousands of jobs that were already committed to staying in the US before the election. And he has even lied about being his own spokesperson to promote ‘Donald Trump’s’ successful business acumen and prowess with attracting the ladies. But perhaps his biggest lie(s) that sent lie detector needles into a frenzy from coast to coast was that Barack Obama was not born in the United States of America. He claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii and told Americans, “You can’t believe what they are finding!” However, unless his “investigators” operated under the cloak of invisibility, they must have found nothing to substantiate his charge. His failure to produce any investigators that he hired and sent to Hawaii appears to be just another lie.  After Obama produced his long form birth certificate, Trump bragged that only he was responsible for the president’s disclosure. Almost immediately following his fit of braggadocio, Trump then accused the birth certificate of being a fake – again without providing any evidence of, or from, any source. Having revealed his obsessive idiocy regarding Obama’s place of birth, the next target of his many prevarications was Obama’s tenure at Columbia University in New York. For Trump, it was not enough that Obama show his birth certificate, he now wanted the President of the United States to provide his college transcripts because, according to Trump, nobody at Columbia saw or knew “this guy.”

When confronted with losing the popular vote, Trump revealed one of his more contradictory absurdities. At first, he correctly states that the nationwide popular vote is/was not the goal – 270 electoral votes was the goal. He said he would have campaigned differently, and still won, if he had to win the popular vote. Finally, the ego obsessive loss of the popular vote led to the lie that 3 to 5 million people all voted, illegally, for Hillary Clinton, which lost him the popular vote. That led to another lie that his Electoral College victory was a landslide and one of the largest ever.

Trump’s lack of veracity should surprise no one. The pile of lawsuits alleging he has not paid for products delivered and labor provided is astounding. His defense is that maybe they didn’t get paid because they didn’t do a good job. Yet he never mentions that he requested they do it over or returned any defective merchandise. This is how he has done business. And to Trump, the presidency is just another business acquisition.

Today, one of Trump’s sons thanked Rachel Maddow for revealing that Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return showed that he paid approximately $38 million in taxes on just over $150 million of earnings. But, beware the Ides of March. Trump supporters should know that this president wants to eliminate a tax provision, the ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX, that would reduce that $38 million to just over $5 million on the same income – less than 4 percent in taxes. The Maddow reveal was also useful because it exposed the need to know how the money was made, not just the taxes paid. And in light of his son’s 2008 admission that lots of Russian investment was coming into the Trump Organization, The Donald’s repeated claim that he has “Nothing to do with Russia,” the multitude of undisclosed, clandestine meetings and possible collusion between Kremlin operatives and the Trump campaign, Trump’s extremely troubling refusal to say anything at all negative about Vladimir Putin, and in fact praises him, the vigorous inspection of the tax schedules of Donald J. Trump from 2008 to the present, is of paramount importance. Whatever you think of Rachel Maddow’s style or the result of her show regarding the limited 2005 tax return, she has assembled a clear and precise series of shows connecting enough dots to show that Rex Tillerson, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Wilbur Ross, very possibly Jared Kushner and Jeff Sessions, along with Trump himself, form a very formidable Russian Dream Team.

And if the US Congress and the Fourth Estate do not take this Russian hold on Donald Trump more seriously than debating whether his wolf chirping Tweets  should be taken literally or figuratively, the signature song of the choir at future White House celebrations will be ONWARD KREMLIN SOLDIERS.

“Isn’t That Special!”

By Calvin Hill

All of a sudden, in GOP and conservative circles, lying under oath no longer requires the comprehensive legal machinations that they have insisted upon, and demanded, in the past.  Nineteen years ago, the possibility of a stain on a blue dress led Republicans to agree that it was a matter of national security that a special prosecutor investigate, lest a foreign power subject the President of the United States to blackmail.

Fast forward to today, the American intelligence apparatus, has concluded that the Russian government hacked the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign officials and turned the information over to WikiLeaks.  We have witnessed multiple visuals of a practically schizophrenic sounding Donald Trump both denying and acknowledging associations with Vladimir Putin.  After lies by one National Security Adviser, and now, a lie by a senatorial campaign advocate turned Cabinet Secretary, the Republican foot dragging over the need to appoint a special prosecutor, or have a special independent commission is burrowing a hole in the infrastructure surrounding the Capitol.

Full disclosure – I agreed with the Republicans over the Lewinsky affair.  Pillow talk has, and will continue to expose all manner of corruption and criminality to the benefit of a civilized society, which is why people continue to lie about sex outside of committed relationships, and why prosecutors find it valuable in making a case. Sometimes there is more to hide about an affair than the embarrassment of being caught.

Thus verifying, or invalidating the “35 page dossier” becomes critical.  A 35 page dossier, in and of itself, requires serious thought. Trump maintains that they are all lies and has taken the website, BuzzFeed, to task for publishing the contents of said dossier.  Like many, I have not read the dossier, only heard of its existence. However, here’s the rub.  Why would an experienced British agent feel the need to come up with 35 pages of false information to discredit someone, anyone?  Any skilled and accomplished spy would know that fabricating 35 pages of information to tarnish one individual would be serious overkill.  No sane agent would produce 35 pages of false information to accomplish a goal knowing that anywhere from 2-5 pages would suffice and be taken more seriously.

With all of the revelations of a Trump/Putin connection during the campaign, and even more so since the inauguration, Donald Trump Jr.’s 2008 statement that Russian money was coming into the Trump Organization should leave no doubt that a serious, special investigation is warranted.  Now that a former US Senator has been caught up in the turmoil, it is time for both sides of the aisle to take seriously, the threat posed by the current administration and any incestuous business interests between the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, the Commerce Secretary, and the oligarchical Putin government.  Trump is not going to volunteer scrutiny of his tax returns.

After having invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, Putin is poised to wreak havoc on former Soviet satellites and hack his way through Western European elections favorable to him.  Here at home, the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy the credibility of the Fourth Estate is, apparently, not enough.  His cabinet is filled with people whose ideologies undermine the well being of the American people.  A failed charter school advocate threatens public education. The wages and salaries of hourly workers is suddenly at risk.  The rollback of regulations, under the guise of helping small businesses, virtually guarantees more Flint, Michigan water crises and East Chicago, Indiana soil contaminated developments.  And the top up tax policy and economic proposals of the president could very easily plunge the US into an economic wasteland leaving Putin, Trump and their associates to pick over the carcass of a destroyed American economy.

Yet, with very few exceptions, congressional Republicans and their statewide counterparts are content to sit back and watch the Republican president malign, insult and defame the institutions of government and society that serves and protects the American people and those who aspire to be American.  And Trump’s media surrogates continue to provide insufficient reasons for The Donald’s behavior or the clandestine audiences given to the Russian ambassador by his officers and advisers.

As the accumulation of smoke continues to pour out of the White House, Trump Tower, and Mar-a-Lago, the failure of Congress to act in a bi-partisan manner will not just result in a fire, but a conflagration.