Yesterday I wrote about the dangers of calling people stupid because (a) their IQ is lower than ours, but since there can only be one top IQ, we all have IQ’s lower than a portion of the world’s population; (b) they’re actually just ignorant, as are we all on more subjects than we can list; or (c) and this is the really dangerous instance, we disagree with what they say and think we can just dismiss them by labeling them as stupid.

When we dismiss people as stupid because their world view is out of whack with our world view, this is what happens.]

I’ve concluded that Mayor Frank Jackson WILL NOT run for re-election.

I don’t believe he has the fight left in him for a fourth term.

And he has to know that he will not have an open field with only fake opposition as Ken Lanci, who had money but nothing else to offer. In other words, he won’t have a cleared field. Indeed, it may be crowded.

It has been the rule that opposition to Jackson—Jeff Johnson, Zach Reed and even the battering ram Nina Turner—would observe the unwritten Cleveland rule that they wait in line. Wait in line until Jackson decides to call it a day. Then they are permitted by the community to run. I believe that day is over.

There is no doubt that more than one of Jackson’s line-waiters has decided time is not on their side. They can’t wait another four years until 2021. They’re getting literally older, too, they realize. When one jumps, the others must.

So you will see a campaign come 2017—next year.

It would be my bet that Jackson has over-stayed his welcome, just as Ralph Perk did in 1979. Mayor Perk finished third—behind Dennis Kucinich and Ed Feighan—and out of the final race. He had too much baggage. So does Jackson.

The same fate awaits Jackson if he wants to test the voters again.

Too much has gone wrong—police, streets, political hangers on as Marty Flask, Michael McGrath, and his reputation as a people’s mayor faded into the downtown mayor. The headline that 90 had been shot in July and 12 killed suggests there is little concern on the part of the city leadership and the Plain Dealer or Cleveland.com, that bewildering mishmash of what was once a newspaper, one that some (mistakenly in my estimation) considered among the nation’s leading daily publications. Sad. Now it seems to be Continue Reading »

[Update @ 0937 on 13 August: When we assume that someone we disagree with, or dismiss, is stupid, this is what happens.]

Recreationally this summer I’ve been watching Glee on Netflix and I’ve heard the comment that so many of the students are really stupid. I’ve take exception saying the kids are ignorant, an easily fixable condition.

Stupid, however, has become a minor theme in the show manifesting in one break-up and culminating in Born This Way where two of the students wear t-shirts that read: I’m With Stoopid, with the arrow pointing up; and I’m With Stupid, with the arrow pointing down for the episode’s big number.

I tell my students that I wake up every morning thankful for my vast ignorance because that means I get to learn that day. That’s how we fix ignorance, we learn. Stupid on the other hand is a pejorative hurled at people we don’t agree with—think of all the stupid jokes made about President George W. Bush or Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. Neither man, by any stretch of the term, is stupid.

David Freedman, writing for The Atlantic takes the discussion to an even higher level in The War On Stupid People:

The 2010s…, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. Even in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s?bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement.

This is a pejorative I hear in school and in adult conversations. Intelligence, as Freedman continues, has very real consequences in our world.

From 1979 to 2012, the median-income gap between a family headed by two earners with college degrees and two earners with high-school degrees grew by $30,000, in constant dollars. Studies have furthermore found that, compared with the intelligent, less intelligent people are more likely to suffer from some types of mental illness, become obese, develop heart disease, experience permanent brain damage from a traumatic injury, and end up in prison, where they are more likely than other inmates to be drawn to violence. They’re also likely to die sooner.

I honestly don’t recall what my SAT/ACT scores were, but I doubt they were very good. I took both tests the same day—one in the morning and then, after a quick lunch break, the other in the afternoon—with absolutely no preparation. My body and mind were toast by the end of the day but my scores must have been OK because I got into the one college I applied to, Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Personally I think both tests are bogus as hell, but that’s another post.

Students today taking the SAT work their way through three sections: reading, writing and math. The maximum score is 2,400 with 800 points possible in each of the three sections. Today, those scores not only influence, if not make or break, your college career, but also what jobs you may get hired for.

In addition, many employers now ask applicants for SAT scores (whose correlation with IQ is well established)

I was surprised by the parenthetical. A quick online check however, indicates that this actually true. So, what might my IQ be if I say, had a 1,499 SAT score? Pumpkin Person says 108, or slightly above average. (More on this below.)

Freedman continues:

“Every society through history has picked some trait that magnifies success for some,” says Robert Sternberg, a professor of human development at Cornell University and an expert on assessing students’ traits. “We’ve picked academic skills.”

Which lead Freedman to zero in on the problem.

…it might make more sense to acknowledge that most people don’t possess enough [intelligence] that’s required to thrive in today’s world.

The College Board has suggested a “college readiness benchmark” that works out to roughly 500 on each portion of the SAT [that 1,499 I mentioned above, JH] as a score below which students are not likely to achieve at least a B-minus average at “a four-year college”—presumably an average one.

…it seems safe to say that no more than one in three American high-school students is capable of hitting the College Board’s benchmark. Quibble with the details all you want, but there’s no escaping the conclusion that most Americans aren’t smart enough to do something we are told is an essential step toward succeeding in our new, brain-centric economy—namely, get through four years of college with moderately good grades.

For Baby Boomers that wasn’t fatal, but beginning in the ’70s, as the America economy began to shift and factory jobs were outsourced, the jobs not in Freedman’s brain-centric economy became scarcer and scarcer to the point that the destructive power of globalization has become a central theme of the 2016 presidential election.

What can we do?

A lot, says Freedman, but he isn’t hopeful that we will do what needs to be done.

He picks, however, the easiest target: get serious about early childhood education where children, beginning at age three or even earlier, receive early education done right by well trained teachers whose education has focused on the need of these young minds. The results can be epic.

…measures of virtually every desirable outcome typically correlated with high IQ remain elevated for years and even decades—including better school grades, higher achievement-test scores, higher income, crime avoidance, and better health.

Right now, we are not even coming close.

Unfortunately, Head Start and other public early-education programs rarely come close to this level of quality, and are nowhere near universal.

According to Freedman primary and secondary schools are getting some $607 billion a year from federal, state and local revenue sources, but he says:

…these efforts are too little, too late: If the cognitive and emotional deficits associated with poor school performance aren’t addressed in the earliest years of life, future efforts aren’t likely to succeed.

Confronted with evidence that our approach is failing—high-school seniors reading at the fifth-grade level, abysmal international rankings—we comfort ourselves with the idea that we’re taking steps to locate those underprivileged kids who are, against the odds, extremely intelligent. Finding this tiny minority of gifted poor children and providing them with exceptional educational opportunities allows us to conjure the evening-news-friendly fiction of an equal-opportunity system, as if the problematically ungifted majority were not as deserving of attention as the “overlooked gems.”

In his closing, Freedman turns to vocational programs that were once a staple in education. (We have a number of very good vocational programs here in Cuyahoga County and a number of my students spend half-days in them.) A national problem exists, however, that even these programs focus too greatly on science, technology, engineering and math, according to Freeman, catering to students:

…who want to burnish their already excellent college and career prospects. It would be far better to maintain a focus on food management, office administration, health technology, and, sure, the classic trades—all updated to incorporate computerized tools. We must stop glorifying intelligence and treating our society as a playground for the smart minority. We should instead begin shaping our economy, our schools, even our culture with an eye to the abilities and needs of the majority, and to the full range of human capacity.

There are some advantages of being average that our present system which values academic skills over all others misses.

…the less brainy are, according to studies and some business experts, less likely to be oblivious of their own biases and flaws, to mistakenly assume that recent trends will continue into the future, to be anxiety-ridden, and to be arrogant.

Freedman concludes:

Smart people should feel entitled to make the most of their gift. But they should not be permitted to reshape society so as to instate giftedness as a universal yardstick of human worth.

Indeed.

As I expected, the fight against the plutocracy is moving down ticket while working to push Jill Stein’s numbers high enough to get her in the debates.

Victor Tiffany co-founder of Revolt Against Plutocracy emails:

Fellow revolutionaries,

There is a push to replace members of Congress with Berniecrats and other progressive revolutionaries. Revolt Against Plutocracy fully supports this effort.

In my Philly speech at the Bernie or bust rally on July 26th, I argued for “busting” responsibly. In the Senate, vote Blue no matter who to counter the possible consequences of the superdelegates choosing to lose behind Hillary. (Here in Ohio I will be holding my nose and voting for Ted Strickland just for this reason, JH.) I forget to add, “with one exception: Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate, Margaret Flowers.” She is probably the most qualified Green Party candidate for U.S. Senate in American history.

Please support Flowers against her Democratic Party rival, corporate darling Chris VanHollen. Open Secrets reports his funding is coming from K Street lobbyists including people who primarily give to Republicans.

For the House, I argued we need to clean house of the dirt bags who endorsed Hillary Clinton. I interviewed Nancy Pelosi’s challenger Preston Picus, a Bernie-Independent. He’s smart, revolutionary and unabashedly progressive. You can listen to my interview with him here:

However much you have available to donate to candidates this week, please divide it between Flowers and Picus.

Near the end of my speech in Thomas Paine Plaza, I quoted Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” If we do not displace the neoliberals and their corporatist agenda, the world as we know it will end all too soon. Hydrofrackers Clinton, Trump and Johnson will support policies that will see coastal cities under water in the next century.

Donating to candidates won’t take much time. We must also work hard to convince ALL of the Berniecrats you know of Jill Stein is the only candidate worth supporting. Nay-sayers like Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky are locked inside the two-party prison, but the letter many of you printed out, signed, stuffed into envelopes and sent to the superdelegates was our get-out-of-the-two-party-prison free card. The superdelegates, not revolutionaries, will be responsible for Clinton losing in November. Friends don’t let friends support #CorporateClinton, a dangerous and revolting plutocrat. Let’s work to get Stein up to 15 percent in the polls, so she can participate in the debates.

Thank you for supporting these two revolutionary candidates. We can start the world over again; indeed, we must.

In solidarity,

Victor Tiffany

Clevelanders, and the rest of America to a lesser degree, breathed a great sigh of relief when the last delegates to the Republican National Convention fled our city for whatever safer and saner gated community they live in because there was no riot.

Seriously, that has become the standard of success. We hosted a national party convention with some 50,000 participants and media and we didn’t have to use teargas. Yea us!

The convention brought a lot of journalists and talking heads to Cleveland and a few actually left the Green Convention Zone to see what was what. A few, like Alice Speri, have stayed to see what happens after the crews strike the set.

Speri, reporting in The Post-Convention Crash: Cleveland Gets Back to Work on Policing and Race Relations for The Intercept, writes:

Three weeks after the Republican National Convention, Cleveland officials and residents are back to work on a task more daunting than hosting that event: reforming the city’s troubled police department.

When delegates and visitors left Cleveland last month, city officials sighed in relief. The massive street protests many had predicted failed to materialize, and the military equipment the city had acquired was left untouched. In total, 24 people were arrested—too many, according to both Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams and legal observers—but significantly fewer than everyone expected.

Visitors left Cleveland with the image of friendly, helpful police officers patrolling the city on bikes and horses, and with an approach to protest that seemed exemplary, if untested by larger numbers of protesters. “All-in-all, it was a great week that was successful on every level,” city officials wrote in a self-congratulatory statement the day after the convention officially wrapped. “We got a chance to show everyone what Cleveland is all about and why we are a great city.”

Cue puppies, kitties and unicorns. How many Cleveland residents would agree that that is what their city is all about? Speri continues.

But the bigger test for city officials will be convincing their own residents—many of whom stayed away from downtown during the convention and have a long list of grievances about policing in their communities—that Cleveland can be great for them too.

Last week, Cleveland’s City Council drafted a proposal to amend the composition of the civilian review board tasked with reviewing use-of-force complaints made against officers. The proposal is part of a series of reforms the city is beginning to discuss in the aftermath of a scathing Department of Justice investigation that found it engaged in a pattern of excessive force and lacked accountability, training, and adequate engagement with the community.

The American Civil Liberties Union thinks those proposals are weak. From the Associate Press:

Civil rights officials say proposed changes to Cleveland’s Civilian Police Review Board don’t give members enough power or autonomy to ensure the accountability required in a police-reform agreement.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio said Monday it’s a conflict of interest to allow the police chief to remove board members and for the chief and safety director to decide officer discipline. A city attorney said Tuesday it’s the safety director, not the chief, who can remove panel members.

The citizens of Cleveland were debating issues around police oversight when I moved here in 1984 when the Hough Uprising was only 18 years in the past. Thirty-two years later the debate continues because we won’t go to the rotten core.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, writing in The Near Certainty of Anti-Police Violence for The Atlantic, explains:

To understand the lack of police legitimacy in black communities, consider the contempt in which most white Americans hold O.J. Simpson. Consider their feelings toward the judge and jury in the case. And then consider that this is approximately how black people have felt every few months for generations. It’s not just that the belief that Officer Timothy Loehmann got away with murdering a 12-year-old Tamir Rice, it is the reality that police officers have been getting away with murdering black people since the advent of American policing. The injustice compounds, congeals until there is an almost tangible sense of dread and grievance that compels a community to understand the police as objects of fear, not respect.

What does it mean, for instance, that black children are ritually told that any stray movement in the face of the police might result in their own legal killing? When Eric Holder spoke about getting “The Talk” from his father, and then giving it to his own son, many of us nodded our heads. But many more of us were terrified. When the nation’s top cop must warn his children to be skeptical of his own troops, how legitimate can the police actually be?

Yeah, what he said.

I listen to WCPN’s Sound of Ideas when I can and every few weeks I call in to make a comment. I had not planned on making the call yesterday to the show but then that all changed.

You can watch (or listen) to the part of the program that grabbed me beginning at timemark 28:00. My comment airs at 43:49.

If you want to hear more from Iyad Burnat (and you should) he’ll be speaking at Church of the Covenant on Sunday, 14 August.

I tried to find a copy of his book—Bil’in and the Nonviolent Resistance—locally without success. Copies will be available at the event.

Previous Skidmark Moments…

As I’ve listened to the news of late, as I’ve read opinions and reports from the political front, the gist of the message in this moment has boiled down to a single message: ignore all that you know about me or my political opponent and focus on this one inescapable truth—I will appoint justices to the U.S. Supreme Court that will protect all that you hold dear and and my opponent will not.

That is one very, very serious load of pure bullshit. No. sorry, make that: this is one very, very serious load of emotional bullshit, and this November will be all about emotions. Facts and reason have no place in American politics this year. Maybe they never did.

Scott Adams writes:

If you have been following this blog since last year, you know I have been saying Trump was playing 3D chess against 2D opponents. And by that I meant Trump was using powerful persuasion techniques while the rest of the field was flailing away with facts, reason, policy details, and other things that don’t change anyone’s mind.

Then, in late spring, at about the time that Bernie Sanders’ flamed out, Clinton ascended to the 3D playing field and stayed there, thanks to help—I assume—from one or more weapons-grade behavioral psychologists who joined the cause. For the past few months both candidates have operated in the third dimension, where emotion and persuasion rule, and facts are irrelevant.

Recently, Clinton has been winning in the third dimension. She abandoned her 2D rational arguments about experience and policies and started hypnotizing voters into believing they have the power to predict the future if they try hard enough. And in that imaginary future, Donald Trump is incinerating the world with nuclear fire because he can’t take advice, or he’s a narcissist, or he’s unstable, or he’s Hitler Version 2.0. This approach is excellent persuasion, and it is working for Clinton.

Don’t expect to hear anything honest or true come from the mouths of either candidate for the rest of the campaign. Both candidates are skillfully building imaginary castles and make-believe demons out of your cognitive dissonance and your confirmation bias. You’re seeing the best-of-the-best persuaders (and helpers) operating at the highest level. Facts and policies are sitting this one out.

We can forget about the dozens and dozens of Supreme Court decisions that will be handed down in the next eight years. For the voters the candidates are focused on only two issues matter: protecting a woman’s right to choose and protecting a citizens right to bear arms. Can anyone think of two issues more driven by raw, primal emotions? I can’t. We don’t like to admit that we are single-issue voters or that we vote based on our guts (the code word for emotions) but that is the truth.

In a the multi-dimensional world, Americans are living in Flatland.

Now, that really sucks.

[Update on 10 August @ 1503: Adams has appeared on a lot of shows and given more than a few interviews on this topic in the past year (one might think he’s prepping his next career). Yesterday he spoke with Rob Harvilla.]

[Update at 0600 on 14 August: Garry Trudeau also gives a (probably unintentional) nod to the topic in the Sunday strip.]

[Update at 1800 on 12 August: The story, and video, is blowing up with both The Guardian, John Oliver’s right—journalism is in danger, and here’s why that matters; and Mother Jones, John Oliver Takes On the Bleak Future of Journalism, weighing in.]

While I was a Journalism undergraduate at Ohio University in the early ’80s I was fortunate enough to take part in an experimental class called VideoText.

There was this company, CompuServe, in Cowtown, 90 minutes up Route 33 from Athens, that was in the business of backing up business computers via telephone lines. The business was good, but the massive mainframes spent an insane amount of time idle outside of regular business hours. Somebody, I never knew who, came up with the idea of letting average consumers do cool stuff like send emails and communicate in real time on two chat channels all at the blazing speed of 300 baud, but that person started a revolution.

Because I also owned an Apple II Plus with an AppleCat modem I hopped on what would become the information superhighway and began, with my classmates, to explore what we thought would become Journalism hottest toy and our future.

Some people wonder why I’m not all that interested in travel, or accumulating new experiences. My standard answer is: been there, done that, but that’s a bit too flippant.

As I’ve entered my third score and ten I can look back at 60 years filled with more experiences that I can ever hope to process if I live to a full biblical age. My life is already cluttered with more objects, both physical and mental, than I know what to do with. Why in the world would I want to add to the pile?

Oliver Burkeman, exploring in Interestingness v truth for The Guardian, writes:

Ultimately, interestingness is a form of excitement, and we all know how excitement can lure us off course: consider the thrill of an extramarital affair, or of driving at 120mph. But it’s intellectually respectable excitement, so it doesn’t ring alarm bells.

Perhaps it should. When he gives talks, the spiritual author Eckhart Tolle likes to warn the audience that they may not find the experience interesting. He’s not simply lowering expectations. He means that constantly to chase after what’s interesting is to miss something crucial about life. Interestingness gives the mind something to chew on—but the best experiences come when you stop chewing. When you’re watching a stunning sunset, Tolle asks, “could you say, ‘This sunset is interesting’? Only if you were trying to write a PhD about sunsets… Truly look, and then what you’re looking at goes beyond interesting… There’s nothing interesting about it, and yet it’s awe-inspiring.”

I am constantly reminded about an anecdote shared by Tom Bodett about listening to his son wake up one morning.

My reason for going into all this, like I said, is I had occasion to hear [my son] come to life one recent morning. I’d been awake for over an hour, but nobody else was up. I lay there silently straining to hear any encouraging sign that there might be people and coffee about. I thought about my day, a Sunday, and took inventory of the chores at hand. We would have to get organized and make the drive home. Once there I’d have wood to put up, a door to fix, a few letters to write, and some bills to pay. My wife would clean the house, as she does every Sunday. The boy would refuse to take a nap, as he does every Sunday. Luck willing, we would have a little time to spend together before Monday once again descended on our lives. All this was less than the stuff of dreams.

As I was lying there brooding, I heard my child stir. He rolled over—I assumed he opened his eyes—and said “wow”. Suddenly I felt like a heel.

With all my training to “think good thoughts”, “look on the bright side”, and “take it one day at a time”, I woke up to a near-miserable world. This little boy who knows nothing of optimism, saw he had a new day, and gave it his grandest praise. I learned something.

I hope you did too.

Howard Jacobson, in I’m like a painter, adding a dab of colour before popping out for absinthe for The Guardian, writes:

This was a mode of work so uncomplicated it didn’t deserve to be called a routine. No neurotic rearranging of stationery, no minimum number of words, no plan, no mental deadline, no drafts – I just plonked myself down and didn’t move. The chief advantage of such immersive immobility is that you lose the intrusive self that is the enemy of all art. Longhand, shorthand, notebook, typewriter, computer screen – once you disappear into the words you don’t notice the medium in which you’re working; there is nothing before or behind you but the narrative: a volcanic source of ideas you are embarrassed to call your own, so foreign to you do they seem, like the characters who also appear as though from an eruption miles away, unknown to you or one another in the morning, married at noon, and bitterly divorced by tea time.

If only the process could really be that simple, but in so many ways the process is that simple. All else is simply excuses.

Forty years ago I devoted four years of my life to working and living literally living within spitting distance of nuclear reactors and weapons. I survived. I have total faith in the United States Navy’s nuclear power program because of the corageous impatience of Admiral Hyman Rickover and his absolute demands for safety, safety and safety. If every nuclear reactor in the world operated under Rickover’s rules, I’d have no problems with generating our electricity that way.

However, turn that operation over to corporations whose sole interest in increasing shareholder value and nuclear power becomes an existential threat to humanity. The private sector nuclear power industry should never have been permitted to be built and certainly is not worthy of the further expenditures of billions of dollars in the interest of turning around global warming/climate change, or any other cause.

Ralph Nader, writing in Wake Up: These Unneeded Instruments Can Wreak Mass Destruction, explains:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has recently advanced a clean energy plan which mandates that New York transition half of its energy needs to renewables by 2030. By regressive contrast, New York’s Public Service Commission has approved enormous subsidies for three aging nuclear power plants—Ginna, Nine Mile Point and FitzPatrick—located in Upstate New York. Estimates of the costs of these subsidies range from $59 million to $658 million by 2023, with specialists such as Blair Horner of the New York Public Interest Research Group predicting that costs could grow to $8 billion. New York consumers will be covering the tab via their utility bills.

Ginna and Nine Mile Point are owned by the Exelon Corporation, and Exelon has plans to purchase the FitzPatrick plant. You can be sure that Exelon is frothing at the mouth for this huge bailout that was approved without adequate public scrutiny. Approval of this plan gives New York State the not-so-honorable distinction of being Continue Reading »

Tom Dart, reporting in ‘The only other option’: Bernie Sanders backers turn to Green party’s Jill Stein for The Guardian writes:

[T]hen [Bernie Sanders] lost the Democratic presidential primary to Hillary Clinton, and backed her for the White House last month at the national convention. That was where [Vanessa] Tijerina and Sanders diverged.

“A lot of us waited with bated breath, wondering: what’s he going to do?” she said. “Because depending on what he did, that’s where the movement was either going to go or not go. He decided to stay there, and the movement can’t stay there. It cannot stay in a centrist environment. The movement is antagonising that environment so we can’t stay there.”

Tijerina and others were calling for a new phase of a Sanders-style political revolution on Thursday, as the Green party kicked off its presidential nominating convention in the improbable location of Houston, Texas—Big Oil’s back yard.

“To me the Green party was the only other option,” Tijerina said in a conference room at the University of Houston. “There’s just no way that anything centre or right of centre was going to get America where it needed to be.”

I think that Gary Johnson, who is ahead of Stein in the polls, is a threat, but I’m hoping that a combination of awareness of his positions on fracking and global warming/climate change along with enough stoners forgetting when election day is, might turn those numbers around.

What is clear to me is that there is a ground swell of opposition to government as usual and we do not yet know where the high water mark will be.

I would say that “Where do you get your ideas from?” is the most frequent question asked of writers, but I’ll give Hilary Mantel her due.

The most frequent question writers are asked is some variant on, “Do you write every day, or do you just wait for inspiration to strike?” I want to snarl, “Of course I write every day, what do you think I am, some kind of hobbyist?” But I understand the question is really about the central mystery—what is inspiration? Eternal vigilance, in my opinion. Being on the watch for your material, day or night, asleep or awake.

Remember, your muse is always whispering in a corner of the next room.

There are some existential perils so great and so imminent that only government is capable of addressing and shutting down that threat. Global warming/Climate change is just such a danger and while I get the whole libertarian concept of keeping hands off the liberty of others, when the monster is in my bedroom splashing gasoline over all I hold dear and waving a match, I’m not all that interested in the fiend’s liberties.

Could attacking the family of fallen veteran, Army Captain Humayun Saqib Muazzam Khan, who gave his life in the defense of his country on 8 June 2005, be the bridge too far for Donald Trump?

Maybe. What other story about the garbage spewing from Trump’s mouth has had this kind of traction. (Well, maybe this.)

Trump has become so frustrated by the incessant drum beat of questions on the topic that he sent his newest liar-in-chief, Tea Party darling Katrina Pierson on the road to disastrous results

Robert Mackey, writing in Donald Trump’s Spokeswoman Katrina Pierson Says a Lot of Things That Are Not True for The Intercept, explains:

Let this news, and the fact that it is news, sink in: Katrina Pierson, the former Tea Party activist who is now Donald Trump’s national spokeswoman, admitted on Wednesday that Barack Obama was not the president of the United States in 2004.

The reason it was considered necessary to extract this concession to reality from Pierson is that she had insisted, during an interview with CNN the night before, that President Obama was responsible for the death of Capt. Humayun Khan, an American soldier who was killed in Iraq five years before he became commander in chief.

Yes, Pierson actually tried to blame President Obama and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for the death of a soldier who died in the line of duty five years before they took their oaths of office.

While Pierson retracted her statement three days ago, the lie won’t die.

Igor Bobic, reporting in Trump Campaign Can’t Stop Blaming Obama For Humayun Khan’s Death for The Huffington Post, writes:

Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on Thursday blamed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton for the death of Army Capt. Humayun S.M. Khan, a Muslim American war hero whose parents mounted a vocal opposition to the GOP nominee and his anti-Muslim bigotry last week.

Asked in an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” why Trump refused to apologize to Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Manafort said the GOP nominee had already “paid the respect” and “expressed his sympathy” to the family.

“We quibble over the words and the sentiments about what he feels towards the family and what they’ve went through … I mean, just because he doesn’t say the words everybody wants ? he’s said he’s sorry for what they’ve gone through,” he claimed, even though Trump has not publicly apologized to the Gold Star parents.

Manafort then attempted to recast the debate, claiming the “main issue” wasn’t Trump’s campaign, but rather the “suffering” of the Khans due to the “war in the Middle East, the destabilization and the policies of Obama and Clinton that caused them.”

Then there are the lies regarding Khizr Khan’s position on sharia law. Mackey continues:

Pierson also introduced a new false claim: that her boss only objected to “reports” that Khizr Khan, a Harvard-trained lawyer, “is a strong proponent of Sharia law, and actually writing about it, and how the Constitution should be subordinate to Sharia law.”

To CNN’s credit, the hosts quickly cut Pierson off—telling her “that’s not true, Katrina”—and played video of Khan explaining that he was in no way a proponent of using Muslim religious law in the United States, noting that it would conflict with the Constitution, which he reveres.

Donald Trump lives in a fantasy world of his own making that rivals any of the tales Charles Dodgson told Alice Liddell and her sisters.

The whole incident is a useful reminder of just how firmly rooted the entire Trump campaign is in fictional beliefs — many of them revolving around the paranoid delusion that American Muslims are a fifth column secretly plotting to undermine the United States.

After all, Trump’s popularity among Republicans first surged when he pushed the baseless claim that President Obama was not born in the United States, and so was ineligible for office. Although he has refused to discuss the issue in recent months, last year, Trump told Sean Hannity, “I don’t know where he was born,” and suggested that the president’s college transcripts might indicate that he was listed as a foreign student. That fact-free speculation—revived on Tuesday night by Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski—is closely connected to the myth that the president is a secret Muslim, a belief that is still held by almost a third of all Americans and 54 percent of Republican primary voters.

Earlier in the campaign, of course, Trump insisted, despite a total lack of evidence, that he had seen television footage of “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims cheering in New Jersey as the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001. Then this week, in an interview about his dispute with the Khans, Trump claimed that America’s borders have to be closed because “you have radical Islamic terrorists probably all over the place—we’re allowing them to come in by the thousands and thousands—and I think that’s what bothered Mr. Khan more than anything else.”

As the blogger Charles Johnson explains, the “reports” that Khizr Khan is a secret Islamist radical started in the imagination of Walid Shoebat, a far-right blogger who is part of a network of anti-Muslim conspiracy theorists.

This has Trump on the ropes. We can’t let him play rope-a-dope.

All systems are rigged to favor those who write the rules or, as Johnny Hart reminded us: Always remember the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. The only way to win when faced with a non-win situation is, like cadet James Tiberius Kirk, to break the rules.

Victor Tiffany, Co-Founder, Revolt Against Plutocracy, explains:

We are not political revolutionaries because of Bernie Sanders.
We were Bernie or bust because we are political revolutionaries.

We warned the superdelegates our movement was not Bernie or bluff in snail mail letters and again during our press conference on July 25th, but they chose a candidate we can and will not support for a wide range of reasons. Not least among those reasons is the election fraud along with a long list of sleazy but legal Clintoncratic operations to undermine Sanders state by state. Voting for Hillary Clinton is like asking a known burglar to home-sit for you when you’re on vacation!

Bernie or bust did not work, but we’re still working on the revolution we need. #JillOrBust is general election leverage. Even though it’s possible the outcome is predetermined by rigged voting machines and possible Clinton-Trump collaboration, we aim to scare the hell out of liberals and 1 percent feminists by demanding Dr. Stein or else…President Trump! At the Bernie or bust rally in Philly, I argued Secretary Clinton is more dangerous than Donald Trump. There is no tactical, no “less-than,” reason and certainly no moral obligation to support Hillary.

If you want to write in Sanders, our original idea, please listen to my Philly speech. I also described how to “or bust” responsibly. I explain why writing Continue Reading »

I’ve been on the mailing lists of former Rep. Ron Paul and his son Sen. Rand Paul for a number of years and I get begging letters from the father/son duo on a regular basis. With the ascendancy of Donald Trump as both the Republican party nominee for President and the presumption leader of the far-far right wing of the party, Ron Paul seems to have fallen on hard times and has taken to the Internet to beg like 3rd-rate furniture store owner stringing going-out-of-business banners.

Paul emails:

Dear Patriot,

I never wanted to have to sit down and write this letter to you.

For weeks now I’ve pushed it off because it hurts too much.

But this is too important, and you’ve been a good friend and supporter through the years so you deserve to know.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on the phone non-stop with Campaign for Liberty President Norm Singleton making tough decisions about the future of Campaign for Liberty.

Norm and I have done everything we can.

In a last ditch effort to save everything you and I have worked for over the last eight years, we’ve immediately restructured the organization, made Continue Reading »