Trump Knows That WE've Always Loved The Circus

Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey!
Eat your heart out.

In the annals of American presidents and rich American billionaires, Donald J. Trump will probably go down in history as one of the best marketers that the nation has ever known.  While he masquerades as a business savant, we must remember that he's mostly a media mogul who gained power and prestige from simply being that man behind the desk that fired people every week. If his corporate empire was 'all that' and free from taint, he'd be flaunting it for sure.


Now that the Ringling Brothers have done away with the circus, Trump has promised an ongoing show that can currently be described as Smoke, mirrors, and other tricks of the trade.

During his years behind the "Apprentice" desk, we never really knew he was being sued for the failures of Trump University, nor did we quite understand that those Trump Towers are not at all owned by Trump, he simply negotiated the deal to keep his name on them. We never even suspected he ran a charitable organization in name only, with nearly none of its money coming from Trump himself. Now that we do know, we can't even decide if his Alternative facts impress us from their clever convention, or disgust us from the constant scamming they display.

Whether we like it or not, he is the man at the oval office desk now, and it is vital that we come to grips with exactly who this man is in order to recognize who and what he is not.

First and foremost, he is not really a democrat, but he damn sure isn't a republican either.  He chose to pursue the presidency following the most plausible path towards success, but he alienated most of the people who populate the path he chose, and only gained their commitment when it was clear that he could really win it all. He insists that he'll never allow for an America that continues to disregard it's poor and beleaguered, all while scaring every last one of them with his ability to say really stupid stuff directed at the most disadvantaged among US.

Stupid stuff! Like his answer to the question about those 11 million undocumented workers. He's still adamant about building a wall, however, will it trap the 11 million inside, or is Trump's round up Gestapo plan still in the works? When asked in his very first one-on-one interview as president, "should the 11 million be afraid", Trump says, "not very afraid", as if being a little afraid is still an absolute necessity. Is this just Trump the promoter realizing how he used immigration to get elected or is there really a significant reason to be afraid some? Shouldn't his billionaire buddies also be afraid about the massive loss of cheap labor?

As we listen to what he does say (The wall, No TPP, nobody loses insurance), it's just as vital to recognize what he no longer talks about as well (E-verify, term limits, or deportation forces).

Trump has waged an all-out war against all three legs of American politics- republicans, democrats and the media- and part of that war includes bogging them all down with deciphering silly stuff and trying to target what he'll do by virtue of what he says. The media is right and fully responsible for keeping the heat on Trump and both of his hired mouthpieces (Sean Spicer and Kelley Anne Conway) who get to handle Trump's silly stuff and twitter tirades on a daily basis. What he does and what he says are of vital concern to America. But let me remind you all of a few commonly known facts.

WE DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA EITHER.

Well, we might tolerate the media outlets that lean our political way, but we hate the rest of them and commonly criticize them all for displaying a nature that seems much more focused on the bottom line than the God's honest truth or fair and balanced reporting.

WE DON'T LIKE THE TWO PARTY SYSTEM EITHER.

After the shock of the 2016 election, we might understand it and relate better to the necessity of it's being, but we all complain about the Two-Party hustle and the Electoral College game they use to trade power back and forth between themselves to our demise. If in fact, we are to be a nation that finally confronts the folly of our political design, what exactly will that confrontation look like, and are we fully certain that Trump isn't it?

When the war against two-party domination does begin, wouldn't we expect to see the leaders from both sides coming together to confront the only foe whose ever been able to call them both out on the carpet together?  Shouldn't we expect to see some dissolving lines between the two parties as they come together to fight off that foe? Is John McCain (R) and Chuck Schumer (D) sounding like members of the same party because Trump is threatening America or because he's threatening them?

When it comes to scrapping the TPP, Trump has pleased the unionized left immensely even though he's only promising to win our trade deals, not to end them or even curtail them. As for this claim of 3-5 million fake votes? I can guarantee you that the voter suppression South (or (Alt-right if you will) is not at all disagreeable to his claim, even as mainstream republicans and democrats alike find his comments laughable. It's not very clear if he will truly launch an investigation into his concerns over losing the popular vote, but it is very clear that he wants each of US to think he will and to remain skeptical of the motives of those who never wanted him to win in the first place, which was essentially everybody currently considered a Washington insider.

We can go into a really deep analysis of Donald Trump and we might even agree on the psychological conclusions we make, but it will all come back to one basic analytical question of what's wrong with Trump? In the quest to discover what is wrong with him, there is simply no clear delineation of what might be right, or what about his approach could be helpful to America for a time like this.

No human or president is perfect, though we, and they, work mightily to hide the areas of our weakness from anyone except those who we are most intimate with. If you voted for Obama for the benefit of what he brought to the table, you might not be willing to admit to the areas in which he lacked as a person. 8 years of a democrat as president, followed by Trump, has somehow turned the much maligned George W. Bush into the kind of republican that some of us actually long for these days. None before Trump were without character flaws and no president after him will be either.

Trump is childish to a fault, and WE have to accept that WE just elected- or stayed home and allowed for the election of- a petulant child as our new president.

He's that big bully kid that finds the facial flaw in the new kid and needles him with name calling until the other kids join in for fear that they might be next up.  He is that same bully that never hesitates to retaliate when you give him a dose of his own medicine by pointing to a flaw or two of his.

With all of the childishness problems being noted by many, and generally agreed upon by all, how long does our current media think they should continue to shine a light on the childish tweets versus the signatures he continues to place on paper to enact new laws and regulations?

We have always known that our politics are disjointed in America, and we readily expect the media to be a necessary player in the political arena even as we also see them as a major reason for the dislocation of America's political joints. What we've never really known is what the hell to do about it.  We hold this truth to be self-evident, that freedom of speech is the cornerstone of every other freedom we have. Yet, we also have little to no way of reconciling the new wave of fake news or the old and enduring wave of partisan reporting that isn't much better.

Suddenly, I find myself in the midst of a major quandary.

Even an opinion editorialist like myself has the journalistic duty of understanding the facts and reporting my opinions based on firm and confirmable facts.

I'm not sure if that's what I will achieve today because the anti-Trump protest is being reinforced by the media that Trump remains adversarial towards- of which I must include myself. Even when I try to add a link to a statistic that I've researched, or do anything to try to remain the "good media", those who oppose my opinions will oppose my link sources as well.

I'm mostly in favor of all of the worldwide protesting against Trump just as I am in favor of holding our new president to the standard of expectation befitting the office.  What I am not really in favor of anymore is hour upon hour upon hour of news media reporting that essentially boils down to the same damn question.

Can Trump maintain the honor and dignity befitting the office of the president while behaving like a kid banished to the office of the principal?

Probably not!

For those of US already embarrassed, it's too late anyway, but WE really don't know what the future holds.  If WE're perfectly honest, most of US already lost respect for the office of president even if we don't have any memory of presidential behavior quite so silly. Although we really don't know what behavior is necessary to break the back of tainted media reporting or partisan politics, we do know that no one has done it yet. We may not like Trump's approach, and we should surely point out how embarrassing it continues to be at moments we are overwhelmed by embarrassment. But how many times in a row can you call a baby a baby and expect that your name calling will uncover the man inside of him?

Media polling failures were not the beginning of the mass media failure in this election cycle. Our media had no clue of how to handle our new lying leader when he was campaigning, so they are even more clueless of how to deal with him now that he's won.  If, by the end of this race, it felt like the ridiculous repetition of the campaign season rhetoric was becoming enough to shut off the television, what are we gaining from a media that has no new headlines other than "OMG, Trump Said It Again".

When we finally get to see those taxes- or the taxes of some of his unvetted cabinet selections- that will be news-worthy.  The daily whining over our brand new presidential baby is not really very effective anymore. In fact, our collective attention is probably just the thing he wants and needs to keep up with all the pettiness. When properly ignored, eventually that crying baby tries a new approach or falls asleep and grows quiet from fatigue.

It bodes well for Trump that WE aren't really pressing the issue of the taxes or the touchy relationship with Putin as we continue to marvel at what appears to be our brand new, 70-year-old presidential baby. As any good marketer knows, you have to shine a strong light on the features and benefits of what you are selling in order to take attention away from the damage or flaws.

There is something severely ballsy about using the three sides of American politics (the left, the right, and the media) against each other for the purpose of destroying them all internally. Is that what he's trying to do?  Who knows? But if I were on a mission to do whatever Trump is on a mission to do.....making people discuss election fraud theories in between a twitter beef with John Lewis might be a great way to work your plan.  

As our covertly neutered media continues to collectively whine about our petulant president, I can't help but wonder who the baby really is.

Before You Write Off 2016, What About Tomorrow?

I am trying to be sympathetic to all of you who are completely done with 2016 and all of the bad things you seem to recall, but I've got two days left in this blessed year before 2017 comes in fresh and new and pretends to be better just because it's new.

Don't get me wrong. I'm sad about Prince Roger Nelson , Muhammad Ali and so many others leaving us during the same calendar year, yet I'm hard pressed to beg for a better 2017 when death keeps reminding me to be thankful for today, because tomorrow isn't promised to any of us.

I'm not attempting to make light of a tumultuous year. I clearly realize that the spirits that seemed to make 2016 feel like 20666 came to visit me and you too, not just Hillary Clinton and celebrities. Many of us lost loved ones and/or had relationships tested to the core. Either we experienced true death and dying, or we lived the death and dying of love and friendships that we thought would last forever.

In hindsight, getting Donald Trump mostly felt like piling on. Trump's victory seems like a death of something noble; of an image that WE believed of ourselves right up to the moment of Hillary's defeat. Not only was it difficult accepting the notion of a president Trump, but Hillary's bitter inability to lose with dignity made the entire scene that much worse. In one embarrassing night, WE were announcing to the world that we are lazy voters, semi-crazy voters and also poor losers all at the same time. We did that towards Obama too, but I just assumed that was because of his skin color, not because we don't know how to politically lose anymore.

WE did experience more nasty episodes with gun violence in 2016, which is something I'm admittedly forcing myself to include because I know WE've learned- as a coping mechanism- how to fully forget about domestic terror incidents as quickly as our minds will allow.  Since we forget our own terroristic ways, police across the nation are currently learning the end of year data of officers killed on duty as well as a sharp rise (6 to 21) of those directly targeted for violence. I have to assume that this information is either a message begging those who assassinate cops to stop, or it's an effort to make cops more aware of the level of angst against them.


Either way, is it totally bad that cops have been exposed to the extremity of our collective societal concern about imbalanced policing or policing for profit efforts that disproportionately impact minorities across the land? Is it even horrible that cops are being filmed and confronted for the bad behaviors of the relative few of their brethren? I don't condone the assassination of cops, but I hear the voice of anger that it saying "enough", and so do cops. Isn't it better that we begin the movement towards nationwide mandated chest camera usage and community policing as a standard, not an exception? Personally, I will mark 2016 as the turning point in that crucial conversation?

If that's too heavy a point to consider, what about Pokemon-Go (bad choice?)?  Or how about those Cubs? In 2016 the Chicago Cubs broke a long-standing curse by beating the Cleveland Indians, another team that expelled a curse themselves by simply making it to the World Series.  We could feel sad for the city of Cleveland and the Indians, if not for the exploits of those Cleveland Cavaliers?  Was that an incredible series and an improbable outcome or what?

I'm trying to be a bit humble, but we can't forget about Peyton Manning and my Denver Broncos. While Broncos haters are quick to remind me of our present putrid performance on the field, they seem to forget that this is still 2016, and there will never be another Superbowl Champion crowned in this calendar year. Well, actually, we never allow anyone to forget about the Broncos being a huge part of the 2016 story, even if that's part of the stuff they'd like to forget.

If you aren't a Broncos fan and don't like successful swan song stories of HOF quarterbacks, what about the Rio Olympics? They turned out to be amazing despite the concerns going in and despite the Ryan Lochte nonsense on the way out.

Even if you want to use the seriously draining impact of the presidential election process as a reason for our sucky '16, I would counter you with the fact that Americans are more aware of their personal impact on an election than they ever were before.  We all understand the electoral college, and some of us- including Donald Trump himself- now believe there is a redeeming value for it. Thanks to 2016, we are now capable of debating the finer points of the electoral system against the legions of Americans who are suddenly engaged in politics and believe that a popular vote is a better way to go.  When Al Gore lost the electoral college thanks to a few hanging chads, nobody really understood what the hell that all meant.

We are so sophisticated now that we even understand the difference between a primary and a caucus and how each party protects their own process from the impact of outside intrusion by forcing participants to register for a caucus or primary months in advance instead of allowing an opposing party to taint a primary by participating only to sway the vote one way or another. We don't really like a lot of the realities of all that exclusionary behavior that comes along with caucuses and primaries, but we actually understand it now.

......and what is so bad about that?

If 2016 has been one thing positive for us, it has been muscle building that we sorely needed. We've never needed muscle building that involves paying too much for gas (Thanks, Obama) so hopefully Trump and Putin aren't working on a plan to raise prices for major oil producers like Russia and Exxon who have suffered under the new market reality relative to the price of oil. WE will also never need housing prices that our wages can not afford, yet, we did need some muscle building relative to our family budgets and our ability to make more out of our money by eating more rice and beans and DIY living that we often reject during times of prosperity.

Unemployment is down even if it's partly because of people quitting the workforce altogether. Our unwillingness to accept low-paying work in the months leading up to 2016 has forced the hands of every low-wage employer. Now, whether states increase the minimum wage or not, companies are currently desperate for employees, forcing many employers to offer wages above the liberal pursuit of $15.

Thanks, 2016!!

Maybe, 2016 doesn't deserve credit for people quitting the workforce, but 2016 was the year when the employers gave in and started trying to lure them back with better wages. If we are simply asking for 2016 to go away because we think that 2017 couldn't be worse, how exactly do we know that?

High expectation is the mother of disappointment, and I am not willing to waste all of the muscles that I gained in 2016 begging for easier workouts in 2017. In fact, I don't really want an easy 2017 if it means a return to the flimsy muscles that produced the fake relationships that I let go of already. Sure, fake felt easier, but easy isn't always a sign of substance. In 2016, I discovered much more clearly who is for me and who is not, just as many of you did too. I refuse to go back and nurture fake relationships anymore.

I'd prefer 2016's realness and rawness for the rest of my life. Not the pain necessarily, but certainly the pain if it comes with a deeper well of emotion and a stronger capacity for feeling. In a deeper well, there is a lot more things to hurt you, however, that is the well in which love and hope reside too.

Yeah, we lost Prince. But thanks to 2016, I'll never have to
be too macho to blast "Do Me Baby" while driving down the street again. WE grew in 2016 and have evolved into something new and different. Quite frankly, 2017 had better be ready for the change in US.

Putin Plans Bigger Than Hillary Or Donald Trump

Apparently, Mitt Romney is either not loyal enough or just too swampy to avoid the drain plug that Donald Trump promised to pull within the first 100 days of his administration. Not only that, Trump also promised to implement term limits on the very people he'll need to pass the bill that will limit their terms in office. I've lost track of the other million broken campaign promise' that Trump has either already renigged on or intends to real soon. Should we wait until he get's sworn in to be so critical?  We would wait if those cabinet appointments could wait too.  As it stands, they are the clearest signal of how he intends to Make America Great Again.

As for Romney? He's among the too sane or too unloyal that Trump is being challenged to steer clear of as he forms his cabinet. Indirectly, Trump is deciding that many of the most important jobs in American politics will either be filled by inexperienced novices who will need a fair amount of time to ramp up to their job description, or it will smell a little swampy in a few rooms while looking eerily familiar to the all white male America that used to rule our political landscape.

What America never seems to accept- especially as our future president crosses the dividing line between cronyism and full-fledged corruption in our government- is that WE are our government. Those of us who work in politics (media and lobbyist) or directly for the government become the learned body of knowledge that guides the way through the jungle WE've created for ourselves. The social necessity of finding cabinet workers sufficiently learned in a particular area of government can not be intertwined with some hand slapping agenda of punishing people who campaigned to ensure that you'd lose.

To Trump's credit, Rex Tillerson, the Exxon CEO tabbed to become the Secretary of State, was not chosen because he is a Washington insider, but he is also someone with a dubious history relative to Putin.  Once honored for his innovative efforts while doing oil related business in Russia, Tillerson is now going to be asked to hold Putin to task for war crimes and the like. Is he looking to nurture an existing relationship or test one with the understanding that you too could become a target of Putin if you cross him.

Rick Perry might actually get a job too, because the plethora of people on the list of Trump enemies is much too vast for Trump to function like someone looking to hand down repercussions as well.  Other than Omarosa and a couple of political talking heads, Trump never really had sufficiently learned supporters anyway, so his selection pool of people to put in key positions was depleted from the moment he won. As it stands, he would much rather use his children- the only people he really trusts much at all- and not have to do any business with people who could be hustling him the way he's hustled so many others in his lifetime. If only it weren't the biggest conflict of interest in political history; one so huge, it could threaten his office before it ever get's underway.

Has anyone stopped to think if Putin understands Trump's potential conflicts of interest too?

The Art Of The Deal

Trump is soon to learn that you really can't drain the swamp unless you restock the damn thing with some fresh fish when you are done.  Keep in mind that the new fish will need a little time to grow, so you must implement a catch and release policy for the newbies, or they may never survive to fix our public school problem, much less Putin. Nothing Trump's new swamp creatures do for 2-4 year's can really be counted against them anyway as they learn to replace those knowledgeable swamp critters he promised to get rid of.

What he is really going to learn the most is that Putin is not his friend and certainly not a man to be played with in a friendly manner.  He may not be the devil for his retaliation against Hillary Clinton- someone he loathed- but he is hell bent on restoring the former Soviet Union to Cold War era size and strength, and he needs a weak America to assist with that agenda. His restoration of the Soviet Union started in Crimea, but it surely won't end there.

So whenever Trump repeats the refrain about "is it so bad if Russia and America got along", he must be reminded that it is okay, so long as he's prepared to deal with a dictatorial president inspired by everything damaging to America and helpful to the restoration of Soviet dominance.

Dave Chappelle Says "Give Trump A Try". But Why?

Nobody is happy that president-elect Trump used every raw wound in America to run a campaign of toxicity that incited his own while suppressing the rest.  Although his supporters seem to be, they are only happy they won. They denounced all the toxic parts of our new president weeks ago before voting for him anyway. Why be so mad at his supporters when they told you they would "Make America Great Again" with their crotch grabber just like We promised to be "Stronger Together" behind fear mongering Clinton?

Chappelle and I not only look alike. We think alike too.

When I started chronicling this campaign, I said some time ago that one person didn't want the job and the other didn't even get in it to win. Today, I slightly modify that view.

While I won't fully abandon my theory of Hillary sending Trump to dismantle and mangle the GOP field for her, I am more inclined towards my belief that Trump, Hillary, Obama and I (plus many of you) are all really no different politically. You might have come from a christian evangelical church root like Hillary, Obama and I, or you might be simply respectful of religion while terribly skeptic of its motives like Trump and I are now, but most of US have found a way to love our churchy family and friends just like we love our LGBTQ friends and family too.

By percentage, very few of us really want to jail women who get abortions, nor do we want to arrest our undocumented neighbors. Even the people who say they want all of that don't want the regulatory state or the cost of making it happen. What they want is enough personal income opportunity to not care about the undocumented people and what they might be taking away from them, like they used to be able to do.

WE- those who aren't doing the deplorable dance all in the face of the skeptics- are enraged by the extremity of how far Trump went to win the White House while ignoring his sanguin relations with Russia (is it so bad that they get along?) and how their relationship contradicts the extremity of those God-awful nuclear war commercials Hillary kept running to scare us into giving her the job.

My Modified View of Things 

My signals say neither of these long time friends really wanted the job quite as much as they didn't want to lose and endure the embarrasment of losing. They both ran afraid to lose and reacted to one another like scaredy dogs, not cats since cats have 9 lives and fight with confidence. Trump seems to be the man of many lives, but he's really just the bombastic old guy who finally listened to the regular folks and answered back with hope and change.

How do I confirm my view of things?

No prospective winner would ever delegitimize his own post like Trump did realizing that he would (and still will) need the electors that he crucified to elect him president. Hillary, on the other hand, could not have believed herself a truly worthy winner while relying on NOTHING but fear of Donald to do it.

Donald peddled fear too but we've already established that he was afraid to lose. He was poised to become the poster child for "afraid to lose" politics if our fear of women and status quo politics did not far exceed our fear of him. We could try to complain about low voter turnout, but that's more status quo politics too, so deal with it or fix it.

With those truths rising to revelation, I'm less and less sorry that the grandma- who's taken lots of bullets on the battlefield of politics- lost to the grabby grandpa who was virtually bullet free going in to all of this.

One of these days we simply need to accept that the rich are just too rich not to look out for the rich. If we think tax breaks for them won't remain the only truly republican idea, then we enter the negotiation confused.

Can WE meet ALL goals with tax breaks for everybody? Only if we have the kind of sustained GDP growth that accomplishes stuff like that. Whether we can raise boats without the rich raising theirs or the poor getting drown should no longer be a body of water we tackle in such a fashion.

The travesty of the republican blockade of Obama is that he's always been one of them and their block of him was only one of princple. Our economy would have already reached president-elect Trump's promised goals if not for this over abiding republican principle.

The Principle?

Losing Sucks!

Now, the former republican party has won. They lost everything else including their identity and control over their own agenda and electorate, but they didn't wake up on the day after the election getting autopsy report questions from the media, questions only reserved for the losers.

Republicans still need an autopsy now that the GOP (Grand Ole' Party) seems to be the Generally Old Policies party. They'll need a whole new list of policies to identify themselves by, but they get 2-4 years to realize it fully if they choose not to accept it now.

In that time, how much so-called republican stuff can you accomplish when your number one task is fixing universal healthcare?  For goodness sake, could there be anything more non-republican than universal healthcare no matter what name you replace it with? And for goodness sake, if you have something better than universal healthcare, can you give it more details than just the word REPLACE?

The campaign stuff, except for rich people tax breaks and repatriation of rich people's off-shore money, will be challenged by more than an ideological congress, it will be challenged by means of rallies and riots. Those rallies and riots are so certain, that they've already begun as a way of pre-warning president-elect Trump about the risk of trying to govern like he campaigned. These rallies and riots are likely to go on for several more days if Trump can't reassure people that his Gestapo for rounding up immirgrants was kind of a joke.

Under his republican anti-regulations rhetoric, president-elect Trump has threatened to free up the banks so they could go back to the stuff they did before Wells Fargo got busted. Wells Fargo, however, got busted and fully revealed what happens when bankers are automatically assumed righteous, so even that bill won't be regulation free. If there is something else uniquely GOP, anything else, let me know?

Aside from their new mantra for an old plan, 'a rising tide raises all boats', which offers a wetter scenario for common folks to relate to- the same common folks who don't own a boat or never got wet while waiting on the trickle down rains of old- the republicans have nothing. Not even an explanation for how to replace a socialist healthcare system with anything other than a better name and a firmer hand on the insurance industry, code for regulatory measures that nobody seems discouraged by except the health insurers themselves.

I'm thinking on some of these things and becoming more resolved with seeing the potential good from president-elect Trump because I also recall the last days of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. I recall the fact that MLK moved away from his version of Black Lives Matter by realizing that ALL poor people bear a similar plight.

Are You Helping Too?

With that in mind, there really is very little that Donald J. Trump, our president-elect, can do for the poor people in the rust belt that won't help me and you too.  If a president can fix poor peoples problems anywhere, sit back and watch how much those changes positively impact blacks and browns.

Assuming the poor whites, alt-rights, regular right and center left whites are asking for the exact same realized relief that progressive democrats have been wanting. The only difference now will be 
"What Makes It Happen"? 

An America that is fed up and crazy enough to elect Trump, that's what could make it happen. His selection alone is a 'cut the bullshit' mandate, because he's the only person that ever really claimed he could fix so much of it, whatever it might be.

Even if he can't fix it, at least it could be worth watching him try. If he can fix it, it would be even better to give him a hand.

I'm looking for ways to help.

Can Trump Change America's Fear Into Hope?

What started out as a wall building joke is no longer funny.

First of all, I would like to apologize to all women for our significant fear of you. Many of you are significantly afraid of yourselves, but that's a conversation for another post.

Hillary Clinton- for all the good she's done and all the cracks she keeps putting into that dreaded glass ceiling- earned that ass kicking Donald Trump gave her last night. You can blame misogyny or Comey or whatever Russian Wikileak you'd like. The bottom line is that Hillary Clinton hoped like hell that WE were way too afraid of that pussy grabbing outsider to ever take a chance on someone never elected to public office before.

The same populist movement that elected Donald Trump
will now be anxiously waiting for certain dividends that
will pit him against his own kind, the rich and powerful.

In the end, she ran a race on fear with commercials feeding into the fear we should have of Donald's decision making, or lack thereof. In the end, she was dead wrong.

Not that she was wrong about Donald.....sorry, president-elect Trump's dastardly ways. She was wrong to use them as a way of stoking the fears of human beings. Fear might be a motivator of sorts, but it is most commonly known to invoke hesitation and doubt, not clear-eyed certainty.

To Trump's.....sorry, president-elect Trump's credit, his campaign of fear was not one that he needed a television ad or any real effort to sell. After all, WE have long since doubted the intentions of the Washington elite, and he waged a campaign of retweeted anger that did nothing more than tell US what WE already felt enough to tweet.

Nothing is sweeter than the sound of your own name or being retweeted, and president-elect Trump used the oldest sales tool in the book to display the art form of negotiation and close another deal.

He listened.

Hillary Clinton spent way too many days wondering how in the hell she was so close in a race that she should have been winning in a landslide while ignoring the fact that she barely beat Bernie for the nomination and never really convinced the Berners that she was really interested in what mattered to them even while desperately needing them to show up at the polls.

In reality, she was terribly interested but listened to the wrong voices (insiders) and took an early victory lap when she decided to drive the down ballot bus instead of focusing on her own. All the pollster deserve the same ridicule I'm leveling at Hillary, but none of them were running for the highest office in the land, and the successor to a president MANY did not consider their own and said so, over and over and over for 8 years straight.

Forget about President Obama's approval ratings right now. Those were one part Michelle Obama and two parts disgust with the two candidates campaigning to succeed him.  Pollsters might have been dead wrong about president-elect Trump's level of voter enthusiasm, but they were totally right about the lack of it for Clinton. She tried to ride the enthusiasm of everybody in the world including Jay-Z and Beyonce in the final days, but no surrogate could transplant their charm into her.

I'm not thrilled about getting someone other than who I circled on my ballot, but I was never going to get the person I preferred anyway.  He (Jeb Bush) got rubbed out early on in the same name smearing fashion that finished off Hillary too.

Will Paul Ryan live to regret opposing
Trump?  Will Hillary Clinton?

The more I reflect on my journey in this election, I recall the question I had a year ago. Why would someone who is able to do so much good around the entire world while making shitloads of money from speeches- in between spending lots of precious time with her grandkids in the waning years of her life- be willing to give all that up for a job she knows is not really that cool anyway?

Hillary Ran For US.

I'm not happy for you sad or afraid voters, but I'm thrilled by all of those quiet people who either didn't vote or didn't take it seriously with that silly write-in name you chose.  Their lack of comical posts right now speaks volumes to the impact this election shall have on all of those who quietly hoped the rest of US could elect Hillary while they maintained the role of sideline ridiculers. Some of you really petty people are more than happy to pretend to relish in your Illuminati theory of the whole system being rigged, but even you thought the system was rigged for the insiders, not pussy grabbers.

I will be more thrilled when WE all get to see what happens when you try to push forward Wall Building Acts or Infrastructure Bills given the reluctance of congress to invest in anything worthwhile. Maybe they were just blocking Obama for 8 years and now understand that they will get Trump'd too if they aren't listening to the voice of America. And maybe president-elect Trump always realized that he was proposing non-republican populist stuff that America is looking for him to achieve, and must now truly roll up his sleeves to get it done. Either way, we are now wide awake and fighting for a front seat at the table of this divine civics lesson we are receiving.

No Trump TV?

President-elect Trump has a 100-day plan promise that involved implementing term limits on the same people he will ask to pass the bill. It involved finally fixing our failing roads and bridges (I guess you can pork-barrel a wall into that bill, but then Mexico doesn't pay for it), and dealing with the income disparity in whatever way first-time presidents who used to run businesses do it.

If he can do it, he and WE are all the big winners. Until he does, even the winners are losers with a difficult mandate ahead. Both insider parties are losers too as Trump systematically proved WE are tired of them all. Both republicans and democrats needed total reconstruction and will be putting out new autopsy reports soon enough.

As for today's true winners?

Saturday Night Live, CGI and Chelsea's children.

God Bless America, and president-elect Trump.

Did Donald Trump Just Tell America To Stay Tuned For His Concession To Hillary Clinton..........Or Not?

We know that George W. Bush will not be a guest on Trump TV. Will Putin?

It would be so great if we could do what we did in the last two debates this time around, but we can't. We can't spin the results of this debate into some kind of convincing reason for the candidate we prefer because Donald Trump did the unthinkable.

On the stage, in his final televised presidential debate, Trump said we would have to wait to decide if he would concede the election or not. He didn't spin the statement to mean, so long as it's not close and a disputed count like Al Gore had. Trump ran with the torch he lit days ago, to start these games he 's playing with our nation, and he intends to carry this torch to the finish line even if it means he'll burn down the entire party and portions of our nation along the way.

Trump's inability to lose is so well documented in his own writing about himself that any person who is voting for Trump but unwilling to read and recognize that he is a self-proclaimed whiner, might be a whiner themselves.

Trump is not tough like he keeps pretending, and neither is Vladimir Putin for hacking personal emails to try to influence an American election. He's especially not tough for his inability to call an email stealing punk like Putin exactly what he is. People who promise you they are tough are notoriously the least tough of them all. We've known this since elementary school even if it took until middle school for you to finally do something about that fake tough guy.

Why is Trump scared to take Putin on as he should? Probably because Trump has business dealings in a nation that could freeze your funds or simply take them and make you do something about it. There is no way that Trump will move from his company line on Putin, in fear that Putin might be listening. So, no matter what you ask Trump on the question, he won't get all Mike Pence on stage and mess around with his own foreign bank accounts or whatever it is that he's hiding in those taxes. He's going to say the same thing over and over again.

"I don't know Putin. But would it be so bad if the U.S. and Russia got along?"

Yes, Donald! If Putin is messing with our free and fair elections, getting along now without retaliation would be bad. It will get even harder if they shoot down one of our planes in that smokescreen of a 'no fly zone' that Russia created as a shield to keep the Syrian president safe from an American drone gone astray.

It's true. President Obama is the king of drone killings and deportation. Trump actually admitted that Obama is the king of deportation, but he also seems to be auditioning for the chance to outdo him in deportations while forgetting that immigration and wall building won't be the only job. He'll also have to deal with America's mortal enemy and Donald's pretty good friend Putin. Russia needs to prop up Syrian president Bashir Al-Assad and save him from an untimely death, but what are the chances that Turkey or an American manned flight doesn't "accidentally" take on Russian air defense fire?

Republicans are interestingly concerned that America and its president should not be talking too tough to Russia when it's already too late for what they've done within our election. Weakness is to ignore Russian Wikileaks without retribution. Weakness is to disregard your own counter-intelligence so you're not cornered into disrupting your own family income.

Donald Trump has done so much to avoid conceding the inevitable that he is conceding the inevitable indirectly. He's conceding that he is nothing more than a television hustler with a bigger agenda towards television than leading this country. He's conceding that the cliffhanger concession he's making of our election is juicier than the admission (or not) of a president's birth, and a perfect teaser to launch a new television network. He's also conceding that he doesn't understand the process of putting his mistakes to bed. As our leader, every misstep he'd make would become a presidential dark cloud that would never leave and never stop raining.

Trump could do a whole lot more not to leave us in suspense on the concession of this election, but that would not be good marketing. It would be presidential, but that's not his problem. At one point he accidentally interrupted Hillary with a "good luck with that" sarcastically referring to something she said she would do as president.

Even in his own twisted mind, he doesn't do a great job at lying. It could be the cause of his sniffy nose and not some other nefarious reason that requires urine or blood to uncover. Trump not only subconsciously congratulated his opponent on winning this election, weeks in advance, he's consciously telling his supporters to prepare for a tainted loss, which is a twisted version of a victory in the mind of Trump.

What Trump may not get, is that his angry alt-right supporters probably won't waste their time standing in line for a rigged election instead of drinking a lot of beers after work and waiting for the results to come out on their living rooms tv's.  One- maybe two- will let anger and those beers push them to behave badly in response to the rigged election that they didn't bother voting in. They'll find liquor induced inspiration for their revolution even though they hadn't the gumption to vote.

Trump's rigged election claim was set ablaze by his unwillingness to say he'd concede the election. For the next three weeks, he'll fan this flame and watch it grow and glow from all of his handy work.  At best, nearly half of America will buy into the tainted election theory and work to delegitimize the first woman president, much like they did the first black one.

At worst, someone will die from this idiot.

Millions "Taking A Knee" On Presidential Vote. Aren't They Making US Choose For Them?

How will that "don't vote for any
of them" plan work out actually?

I had a rather heated response to this question that I posed when I posed it in a FB post, but I think it deserves to be asked again, and in a more thoughtful way.

In order to frame this question, it's important that I ignore the defense of Hillary because I'm doing my darndest to be more sensitive to those of you who've decided that nobody is worth your vote this time around.

I'm going to disregard that Bush (the son) had 13 embassy attacks resulting in 66 deaths including 3 American diplomats and 22 embassy workers. I'll do the same ignoring of the 10 attacks under Ronald Reagan resulting in 318 deaths including 1 US Ambassador, 18 CIA officers and 254 Marines. I can even forget the fact that Bush never had an investigation as a result of the deaths, and Reagan only had one.

None of that matters when the people telling you that Hillary is a murderer are convinced that she is the reason they are dead. The 13 investigations have taken these Hillary haters off of her email trail for the purpose of finding blame over Benghazi, but they still need a Wikileaks to prove some form of pay to play with their very charitable organization, CGI (Clinton Global Initiative).

Keep in mind that the email Hillary's opponents are seeking for pay to play proof is a connection only made possible because THE CLINTON'S HAVE RELEASED THEIR TAXES AND THE BOOKS TO THE CHARITY.

Let me say this again in another way.

In order for me to believe what you are saying about that evil Hillary and her horny husband Bill, I have to connect some yet to be found email, or yet to be authenticated Wikileaks, to the open books that they've provided for everyone to see, just like most presidential candidates do.

I am suspending belief in all that I've just mentioned about Hillary's open documents, and I will equate this yet to be found open book crime with whatever Donald has told us about his closed books. For the sake of argument, I am trusting what a Russian dictator has shared from people's private files (will it be okay if they release any nude photo's since some of you are okay with the rest of this stuff?) and I am scouring through all of it like the gospel truth, trying to connect it all back to THE OPEN DOCUMENTS THAT THE CLINTON'S PROVIDED TO EVERYONE.

For the purpose of this article, and this question, I am ignoring the obvious differences between these two candidates and taking them to be the exact same Bozo's that some dear friends and family have called them.

Now that I've separated myself from my own distorted reality in exchange for your more realistic one, I am now truly, really and sincerely ready to consider the idea of doing the exact same thing as some of you and not vote for anyone as well.

My question is- before I make protest posters or write up blogs to sell the rest of America on the value and virtue of this approach- what is the value and virtue of this approach?

What would be gained if only me and about 600 more people that I can convince join in the "No Vote" ideology? What happens if every American finally see's the light and bows out of the presidential vote too? Other than the Congress being forced to choose for US, doesn't the process of bowing out allow the remaining voters- whoever they may be- to decide which president the rest of US lives with?

That's not really a question because the answer is obvious. Of course, the people that vote are the people that choose for all of us.  That is not really a debatable topic even though it sounds like extortion if you are as firm about the right to "Not Vote" as Colin Kaepernick is about taking a knee.

I am not debating the right to take a knee on an anthem or an election. I am asking the value of it so that I can decide if I will join in myself.  As it stands, I am willing and ready to sell the benefits of not voting just as I've sold the value of taking a knee and every other protest that came before it.

I'm not personally interested in taking a knee against the flag as my way to improve it, but I appreciate the knee people for the conversations and the situational awareness that must happen every time someone gets into another heated debate over the virtue of saluting the flag versus protesting the ways in which the flag has failed.

Protest is important, and comes in many forms and fashions.
I just don't understand this "Not Voting" protest, very much.

I can advocate for this not voting thing in the same vein of free expression if I could just put into words what this decision expresses. With barely 50% of Americans voting these days, how does reducing those numbers to less than 50% and allowing less than a majority decide for all of the rest make sense? What is the magical percent of lack of involvement that will finally make bureaucrats listen and respond to our frustration?

Like it or not, we are all stuck with the president that the majority (or plurality) selects. voters who sit out might hope for more obstructionist government, but even that doesn't change the impact and direction of the Executive Orders that will ensue or the Supreme Court selections that are still the privilege of whoever wins the presidency.

Should Bashir Al-Assad be removed and what happens with Russia if we do it.
Our next president must soon decide if America will honor the Syrian no-fly
zone that Russia claimed to establish against ISIS.......who has no aircraft. 

No, you do not have to exercise your privilege to vote because freedom provides you that privilege. You will, however, have to accept Roe v Wade if the wrong side wins but you want abortion to become a crime. Conversely, your gay friends who recently got married may have their nuptials annulled by the results of this election, depending on who wins.

You don't have to choose from the best of the bunch or write in your own choice if that seems like too much of a long shot. You don't even need to show up if none of this seems like it's worth your time, but you will live with whoever WE choose for you, so please don't curse and whine at friends and family that choose your next president for you. WE invited you to come to the store with US and pick out the best watermelon available. Sorry if we choose the sour one over the seedy one.

We'll be heading back to the store in four years, just so you know.