One of the topics of discussion at one of the high schools where I teach was the implications of Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s decision to prevent 17-year-olds who will be 18 on or before the November election from voting on Tuesday.

In a case brought by a group of politically active and savvy 17-year-olds here judge Richard Frye of Franklin County has ruled that: Plaintiffs are entitled to a judgment that the secretary abused his discretion.

Why did Husted decide how he did? Here’s what I think.

In all the head-to-head matchups between Republican presidential candidates and the Democratic Party candidates Bernie consistently out performs Hillary. Simply put, Bernie is the harder candidate to beat and in all the caucuses/primary elections to date, Bernie has trounced Hillary by wide margins in the under-30 category. Young and first-time voters are psyched to vote for a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils.

Like most netizens I occasionally surf the google to see if anyone is paying attention.

This morning I came across a rather obscure mention in the 2008 book Blog Wars, written by David Perlmutter.

My very brief mention (Perlmutter thankfully got my name right) comes at the top of page 135.

The reference is to a 27 July 2005 post I wrote on the (then collaborative) The Writing On The Wal blog.

I requested a copy from the library this morning to see what else I may be missing.

Ah, the glory days of blogging in Cleveland. I do miss the crew.

[Update at 0300 on 10 March: Larry Wilmore piled on.]

When the first students brought this story to me today I didn’t believe the claim. By the end of the day they wanted to talk about nothing but the claim that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac Killer. These are the kids who mostly give me a meh when I talk politics. Go figure.

For the record, Ted Cruz was born on 22 December 1970. The Zodiac killer was active from 20 December 1968 through 11 October 1969 and is suspected in murders occurring on 22 March 1970, when Cruz was not yet conceived.

Writing in Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer: the anatomy of a meme gone rogue for The Guardian, Michelle Dean has the fascinating details:

Last week, for extra fun and mouseclicks, the respected polling outfit Public Policy Polling found that 38% of voters in Florida believed that Ted Cruz might be the Zodiac killer. (In fact, 10% said that yes, they thought he was; 28% were “not sure”.)

And, inevitably, there is a Facebook page.

These things might lead you to believe that there really is a constituency in America who have been fooled by this meme into thinking that the Zodiac is several hundred delegates away from the presidency. Perhaps there is. More likely, however, is that these people are kidding. In fact, the first rule of the “Ted Cruz is the Zodiac” meme club is this: you don’t actually believe Ted Cruz is the Zodiac.

“To those Cruz trolls who insist that we ‘look at the facts’ that Ted was not even born when the Zodiac was committing these horrid crimes… yes we know,” @redpillamerica volunteered to me over a Twitter direct message. (The first confirmed Zodiac killing took place in 1968; Cruz was born in 1970.) “Lighten up!”

But the meme works on a higher level. It satirizes the fact that political discourse in America has sunk so low that this kind of spurious accusation can actually get traction. Ted-Cruz-is-the-Zodiac types often say they’re only doing what birther Republicans did to Obama in 2008. They repeatedly insisted that Obama’s birth certificate was faked, and that he was born in Kenya. Gradually, certain members of the public began to believe it. So claiming that Ted Cruz is the Zodiac simply mimics the mass-panic technique Republican have already perfected, several meme proponents argued.

This couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Well maybe Trump.

Here is a last warning to Cuyahoga County voters who might be torn between voting for the present Prosecutor Tim McGinty or his opponent Mike O’Malley in the Democratic primary.

Victory in the Democratic primary March 15 assures that the victor will be elected.

I know that Michael O’Malley is not the same as Pat O’Malley. Michael is his brother and should not be blamed for Pat’s transgressions. However, it’s baggage he has to carry.

His campaign has the smell of a revival of that old gang.

Mike told Cleveland Magazine’s Erick Trickey recently that he hadn’t spoken with Pat in months.

However, there is a record. I have been repeating problems of the former County Recorder’s record.

What concerns me is that by electing Mike O’Malley you bring back to county politics the poisonous tactics and practices of Pat and his buddy former Prosecutor Bill Mason, who as the previous keeper of order seemed to miss all the corruption in almost every office in the county building.

There’s no doubt in my mind that the old clique of theirs could be back with an O’Malley victory.

Prosecutor McGinty has a rule: Run for office or even party precinct committee if you’re a prosecutor you must resign. Formerly, prosecutors were encouraged Continue Reading »

We knew the FBI’s claims that unlocking an iPhone could only be done by Apple was bogus, but now someone who really knows, Internet Freedom Hero Edward Snowden nails the feebs to the web. Jenna McLaughlin, writing for The Intercept in Snowden: FBI Claim That Only Apple Can Unlock Phone Is “Bullshit” lays out the case.

NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says the FBI’s ostensibly last-ditch attempt to unlock San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone is a sham.

The FBI last month persuaded a federal judge that the only way to get into the phone was to make Apple write code to undermine its own security protocols. Apple is refusing to comply.

“The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’” to unlock the phone, Snowden said during a discussion at Common Cause’s Blueprint for Democracy conference.

“Respectfully, that’s bullshit,” he said, over a video link from Moscow.

Following the conference, Snowden went on, writes McLaughlin, to explain via twitter and other platforms.

Snowden further explained on Twitter: “The global technological consensus is against the FBI,” he wrote — linking to a blog post on the American Civil Liberties Union website explaining exactly how the FBI could have bypassed the iPhone’s auto-erase function on its own. That’s “one example,” he wrote.

Other technologists have explained how the FBI could have easily accessed the phone’s latest iCloud backup if agents working with San Bernardino County had not reset the iCloud password.

Even so, security researchers say there are other options, like “de-capping” the phone’s memory chip to access it outside the phone (which Snowden has also mentioned), or resetting the phone’s internal counter so that you can guess the passwords as many times as you want. Those techniques are hard and expensive and could destroy the phone, experts say—but have worked in the past.

Given the FBI’s history of spying on civil rights groups, could an associated article by McLaughlin be the real reason why the Feds are so hot to get Apples subservient compliance? She writes, in The FBI vs. Apple Debate Just Got Less White:

The court fight between Apple and the FBI prompted a slew of letters and legal briefs last week from outside parties, including many tech companies and privacy groups. But a particularly powerful letter came from a collection of racial justice activists, including Black Lives Matter.

The letter focused on potential civil rights abuses, should the FBI gain the power to conscript a technology company into undermining its own users’ security.

“One need only look to the days of J. Edgar Hoover and wiretapping of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to recognize the FBI has not always respected the right to privacy for groups it did not agree with,” wrote the signatories, including arts and music nonprofit Beats, Rhymes & Relief, the Center for Media Justice, the Gathering for Justice, Justice League NYC, activist and writer Shaun King, and Black Lives Matter co-founder and Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi.

Those tactics haven’t ended, they argue. “Many of us, as civil rights advocates, have become targets of government surveillance for no reason beyond our advocacy or provision of social services for the underrepresented.”

In Washington and Silicon Valley, the debate over unbreakable encryption has an aura of elite, educated, mostly male whiteness — from the government representatives who condemn it to the experts who explain why it’s necessary.

But the main targets of law enforcement surveillance have historically been African-American and Muslim communities.

Malkia Cyril, co-founder of the Center for Media Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, gave a speech at one of several nationwide protests outside Apple stores two weeks ago, supporting the tech giant and pointing out the FBI’s history of surveilling black activists. “In the context of white supremacy and police violence, Black people need encryption,” she wrote in a tweet.

Hmmm. I wonder why I haven’t heard of Cyril and related protests before?

Since I learned how to play Go a number of years ago I have told those interested that, unlike Chess, Go is a game that cannot be played at the highest levels by even a supercomputer. Google believes their computer program, Deep Mind, can.

On Wednesday afternoon in the South Korean capital, Seoul, Lee Se-dol, the 33-year-old master of the ancient Asian board game Go, will sit down to defend humanity.

On the other side of the table will be his opponent: Alphago, a programme built by Google subsidiary DeepMind which became, in October, the first machine to beat a professional human Go player, the European champion Fan Hui. That match proved that Alphago could hold its own against the best; this one will demonstrate whether “the best” have to relinquish that title entirely.

Lee, who is regularly ranked among the top three players alive, has been a Go professional for 21 years; Alphago won its first such match less than 21 weeks ago. Despite that, the computer has already played more games of Go than Lee could hope to fit in his life if he lived to a hundred, and it’s good. Very good.

At the press conference confirming the details of the match, Lee exuded confidence. “I don’t think it will be a very close match,” he told the assembled crowd with a sheepish grin. “I believe it will be 5–0, or maybe 4–1. So the critical point for me will be to not lose one match.”

DeepMind thinks otherwise. The company was founded by Demis Hassabis, a 39-year-old Brit who started the artificial intelligence (AI) research firm after a varied career taking in a neuroscience PhD, blockbuster video game development, and master-level chess – and he puts its chances of winning the match at around 50–50.

Skynet takes a step closer…

The Plain Dealer’s editorial board wrote:

Democratic Ohio House District 12 includes struggling cities and wealthy ones on Cleveland’s eastern and southern rims. Communities and neighborhoods within this district include Bedford, Bedford Heights, Cleveland Ward 1, Highland Hills, Maple Heights, Mayfield Heights, North Randall, Orange, Pepper Pike and Warrensville Heights.

Democrat John E. Barnes Jr., the current state representative for the district, again faces in a Democratic primary Jill Miller Zimon, a former Pepper Pike City councilwoman.

Two years ago, our editorial board supported Barnes, who was re-elected. This time we are backing Zimon because of her strong advocacy for women’s health issues, charter school reform and preschool education.

Barnes is concerned with similar issues, particularly with bringing jobs to distressed cities in his district, but Zimon strikes us as the better, more articulate candidate.

While I can’t cast a vote for Jill, I live outside her district, I continue to support her with campaign contributions as I have in the past. I have no doubt that she will be a “forthright, articulate and engaged” representative in Columbus.

[Hint for Pinto in the PD comments: watch this video.]

Yet, and to some inexplicably, millions and millions love, and are voting for, Donald Trump.

Thomas Frank, in the Op-Ed Millions of ordinary Americans support Donald Trump. Here’s why for The Guardian, writes:

Let us now address the greatest American mystery at the moment: what motivates the supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump?

I call it a “mystery” because the working-class white people who make up the bulk of Trump’s fan base show up in amazing numbers for the candidate, filling stadiums and airport hangars, but their views, by and large, do not appear in our prestige newspapers. On their opinion pages, these publications take care to represent demographic categories of nearly every kind, but “blue-collar” is one they persistently overlook. The views of working-class people are so foreign to that universe that when New York Times columnist Nick Kristof wanted to “engage” a Trump supporter last week, he made one up, along with this imaginary person’s responses to his questions.

When members of the professional class wish to understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement, they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry.

I confess that I too have succumb to this easy trope: Frank digs deeper.

Last week, I decided to watch several hours of Trump speeches for myself. I saw the man ramble and boast and threaten and even seem to gloat when protesters were ejected from the arenas in which he spoke. I was disgusted by these things, as I have been disgusted by Trump for 20 years. But I also noticed something surprising. In each of the speeches I watched, Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue, one that could even be called leftwing.

Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his single biggest concern—not white supremacy. Not even his plan to build a wall along the Mexican border, the issue that first won him political fame. He did it again during the debate on 3 March: asked about his political excommunication by Mitt Romney, he chose to pivot and talk about … trade.

It seems to obsess him: the destructive free-trade deals our leaders have made, the many companies that have moved their production facilities to other lands, the phone calls he will make to those companies’ CEOs in order to threaten them with steep tariffs unless they move back to the US.

Trump embellished this vision with another favorite leftwing idea: under his leadership, the government would “start competitive bidding in the drug industry”. (“We don’t competitively bid!” he marveled—another true fact, a legendary boondoggle brought to you by the George W Bush administration.) Trump extended the critique to the military-industrial complex, describing how the government is forced to buy lousy but expensive airplanes thanks to the power of industry lobbyists.

Frank may very well be right. In the past I have chided my fellow liberals for denigrating and dismissing people living in the southern part of Ohio (where I grew up) as ignorant bigots. That’s too easy, and wrong. My father once described a friend as a redneck who would stop in a snowstorm to help a black man change the tire on his truck.

We’re complicated that way.

I’m thinking past the stereotype now. I still think Trump would be a bad idea for the United States, but I’m not dismissing those who disagree with me.

Bernie writes:

The results are in and we were just declared the winner in a very important state for our campaign: Michigan. That’s a major, game-changing victory for our campaign.

The corporate media counted us out. The pollsters said we were way behind. The Clinton super PACs spent millions against us across the country. We were hit with a dishonest attack in the debate. But we won, again… and if we continue to stand together, we can win this nomination.

Writing in Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton in stunning Michigan primary upset for The Guardian, Dan Roberts,Ben Jacobs and Lauren Gambino report:

Bernie Sanders pulled off his biggest win of the Democratic presidential race on Tuesday, defeating Hillary Clinton in the Michigan primary on a night which also confirmed strong anti-establishment support for Donald Trump in the battle for the Republican nomination.

In an industrial state hit hard by the decline of manufacturing, the Vermont senator’s consistent opposition to free trade deals appears to have been a decisive factor, but he also showed signs of weakening Clinton’s dominance among African American voters.

The shock victory – by a margin of around 3 percentage points when his win was first projected by Associated Press – comes despite Sanders trailing the former secretary of state by an average of 21 points in recent opinion polling.

“What tonight means it that the Bernie Sanders campaign, the people’s revolution that we are talking about, is strong in every part of the country and frankly we believe that our strongest areas are yet to happen,” said the senator at a hastily arranged press conference in Miami.

“I want to thank the people of Michigan who repudiated the polls which had us down 20-25 points and repudiated the pundits who said Bernie Sanders wasn’t going anywhere,” he added.

Next Tuesday, 15 March, Ohioans get to have their votes counted. I predict that the result will be Yuugggeeee!!!!

Full transcript of the debate.

The Guardian summerized in Democratic debate recap: Clinton and Sanders battle over key progressive issues:

What we learned from the sixth Democratic debate, held in Flint, Michigan, just days before the state votes in a key primary for Bernie Sanders’s hopes to compete with Hillary Clinton for their party’s presidential nomination:

In the most aggressive of any Democratic debate, Clinton and Sanders fought most over bailouts, Wall Street and controversial trade agreements, which the former secretary of state said were necessary and the leftwing Vermont senator described as deals with the devil. Perhaps feeling the pressure of Clinton’s enormous lead in the race, Sanders sharply interrupted her several times, and occasionally joked bitterly about their differences. “I’m very glad,” he said at about Clinton’s dithering over one trade deal, “that Secretary Clinton discovered religion on this issue.”

But on bailouts for banks and the auto industry during the 2008 financial crisis, Clinton and Sanders could not agree. The senator said the government should never have rescued the banks who helped destroy the economy, while the former secretary of state argued that it was a “hard choice” but necessary to save the collapsing auto industry.

The candidates battled over whether the 1990s really were as dreamy as many people think. Clinton conceded that parts of a tough-on-crime law signed by her husband were “a mistake” that left a legacy of injustice for African Americans, and Sanders walked back some of his old stances on gun control. “So when we talk about the 90s, you’re right, a lot of good things happened,” he said, “but a lot of bad things happened.”

Sanders also urged Clinton to release copies of the speeches she gave to Wall Street, for which Wall Street gave her millions of dollars. Clinton said she would release transcripts when everyone did, to which Sanders threw his arms in the air: “Here it is! There ain’t nothing! I don’t give speeches on Wall Street.”

In a sign of the wonkish quality of the debate, one of the angriest moments came during an argument over the Import-Export Bank, which Sanders denounced as “corporate welfare” to major corporations such as Boeing and Caterpillar. Clinton pitched herself the pragmatist; she argued that the bank also helps small businesses, and gives American companies a necessary edge abroad.

The rivals waxed thoughtful on race and religion, with Clinton saying she “can’t pretend to have the experience” of black Americans, but that conversations in the last year had helped her “think about what it is to have to talk with your kids, scared that your sons or daughters even could get in trouble for no reason”.

Asked about his faith, Sanders said a moral compulsion drove him to public office. “Being Jewish is so much of who I am,” he said. “Look, my father’s family was wiped out by Hitler in the Holocaust. I know about what crazy and radical, and extremist politics mean.”

Clinton for the first time called for Michigan governor Rick Snyder to resign, and said anyone implicated by a full investigation into Flint’s lead-tainted water crisis should similarly lose their job. She also said federal and state money should go not just to emergency water supplies but to repair infrastructure and train residents about safe water.

Climate change appeared only briefly – Sanders opposes all fracking, Clinton wants stringent regulation – and immigration went unmentioned. But Donald Trump got airtime, and was promptly repudiated by both candidates. Clinton said she would not “get into the gutter” with Trump’s “bigotry” or that of anyone else, and Sanders joked that Republicans needed treatment for their mental health.

Previously…

The poisons used to make Teflon are.

I have a personal connection with this story. My youngest brother and his family lived downriver from the DuPont’s Washington Bottom plant on the Ohio River south of Parkersburg, West Virginia. (They’ve since moved up river to our hometown of Marietta, Ohio.) Teflon appears in our lives in many guises spanning plumbing tape to frying pans. The chemical may be more ubiquitous than the company—the name escapes me in this moment—that mounted the annoying advertising campaign in the ’80s that told Americans that a corporation they had never heard about before was touching nearly every aspect of their lives. Since Teflon doesn’t present a direct risk to end users we can too easily dismiss the threat to those who live and work near the production site.

Doing so is wrong.

Sharon Lerner, writing in A Chemical Shell Game: How DuPont Concealed the Dangers of the New Teflon Toxin for The Intercept tells us:

Fayetteville Works, as the sprawling site is called, previously manufactured C8, a chemical that DuPont used for more than 50 years to make Teflon and other products. After a massive class-action lawsuit revealed evidence of C8’s links to cancer and other diseases, DuPont agreed in a deal with the EPA to phase out its use of the chemical. But [Environmental Protection Agency scientists Andrew] Strynar and [Mark] Lindstrom were among many scientists who feared that DuPont and the other companies that used C8 might have swapped it out for similar compounds with similar problems. To see if they were right—and whether any of these replacements might have ended up in the river—they took water samples from the Cape Fear, some upstream the plant, others from points below its outflow.

Perfluorooctanoic acid, commonly known as PFOA or C8, is a “perfluorinated” chemical, which means that its base includes carbon chains attached to fluorine atoms. Because the fluorine-carbon bond is one of the strongest in chemistry, these compounds are incredibly stable, which makes them useful in industry. But that stability also makes them endure in the environment. Indeed, C8, which has recently been detected in upstate New York, in Vermont, and in Michigan’s Flint River, among other places, is expected to remain on the earth long after humans are extinct. And evidence suggests that many of its replacements are just as persistent.

The potential permanence of the problem was only one reason the EPA team was mucking around on the banks of the Cape Fear River. There were short-term dangers, too. Strynar and Lindstrom knew well that the Cape Fear is a source of drinking water and that if perfluorinated chemicals—known as PFCs — had contaminated the river, they would soon make their way into human bodies. Strynar had spent eight years documenting the presence of these molecules in fish, food, air, house dust, and humans. Lindstrom, an expert on measuring PFCs in the environment who has worked for the EPA for more than two decades, had also been documenting the steady proliferation of the chemicals. Both knew that the potential for contamination around the plant was great, because C8 had spread into the water around many of the facilities that made and used it, including plants in West Virginia, Minnesota, New Jersey, Alabama, Germany, and Japan. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control, 99.7 percent of Americans already had C8 in their blood.

This is a longish read (I’m still taking the whole story in) but vital, in the strictest sense of the word, to us all.

Last Saturday Roldo wrote about the Economic Innovation Group’s THE 2016 DISTRESSED COMMUNITIES INDEX: An Analysis of Community Well-Being Across the United States in CLEVELAND CITED MOST DISTRESSED AMERICAN CITY

Yesterday I caught Part II of a three-part Sound of Ideas discussion on WCPN of the Distressed Cities Report Part I, Part II and Part III can be found on the WCPN website.

From 6 to 10 p.m. tomorrow the Ohio City Bicycle Co-op at 1840 Columbus Road will again host a bicycle fixathon to help repair 150 bikes for the Cleveland Schools bicycle safety pilot program.

Jim Sheehan, executive director, writes:

The Ohio City Bicycle Co-op has enlisted the help of bike mechanics from many of ts supporting local bike shops to help refurbish the final portion of 150 children’s bikes for a pilot program, to begin in March in six Cleveland Metropolitan Continue Reading »

Is the Plain Dealer trying to confuse readers, simply trying to have it both ways, or just flopping around? I think maybe the latter, unfortunately.

Chris Quinn, vice president of content, Cleveland.com (Whatever happened to editors?), writes that the Plain Dealer will endorse candidates but that’s not the end, as I think it used to be.

The paper made a choice. The paper advised readers of its choice and asked them to follow it. For good or bad.

Now a new recipe: Here’s our choice! But you may not like it. So here’s another choice, too. We aim to please.

Here’s how I guess it will work:

On Sunday we were greeted on the Forum front page with an editorial endorsement: Re-elect Prosecutor McGinty with a cartoon figure that I presume was of Timothy McGinty.

Good advice anyway.

I thought the choice was made.

But just below was a hedge: Editorial: Alternative view. What?

They didn’t endorse? They can’t make up their minds?

The second editorial had a cartoon figure that was supposed to be Michael O’Malley. He’s also running for County Prosecutor. The headline was “O’Malley’s Continue Reading »

I’m still optimistic that Bernie will be the Democratic Party’s nominee in November, partially because of the results in Colorado, Minnesota and Massachusetts, but also because I think the big states to come like Ohio, California and New York, to name three, are going to go for Bernie.

I was struck last week by a discussion about how the number of mail-in-ballots for Democrats was lower this year than in 2008. The talking radio heads seemed puzzled, but I thought the at least one reason was plain: Ohioans are just not all that secure in voting for the DNC anointed candidate. We’re still thinking.

On the other side of the aisle, however, Matt Taibbi once clears the deck in Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump for Rolling Stone. The whole piece is masterful, of course, but nearly at the end Taibbi gives us the nut:

…Washington is freaking out about Trump in a way they never did about Bush. Why? Because Bush was their moron, while Trump is his own moron [Emphasis mine, JH]. That’s really what it comes down to.

And all of the Beltway’s hooting and hollering about how “embarrassing” and “dangerous” Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they’re smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.

We’re about to enter a dark period in the history of the American experiment. The Founding Fathers never imagined an electorate raised on Toddlers and Tiaras and Temptation Island. Remember, just a few decades ago, shows like Married With Children and Roseanne were satirical parodies. Now the audience can’t even handle that much irony. A lot of American culture is just dumb slobs cheering on other dumb slobs. It was inevitable, once we broke the seal with Bush, that our politics would become the same thing.

As Taibbi concludes: There’s no map in the Constitution to tell us how to get out of where we’re going. All we can do now is hold on.

(Matt Bors isn’t so calm either.)

Matt Taibbi’s lede is long, brilliant, but nearly 750 words long, and he sets the reader’s table perfectly for the Trump shot:

What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower.

In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:

President Donald Trump.

Today may make the fear all better, convince us that the past ten months have all been a bad dream. Maybe.

I don’t think so.

How the fuck did this happen? Taibbi explains:

[I]n an insane twist of fate, this bloated billionaire scion has hobbies that have given him insight into the presidential electoral process. He likes women, which got him into beauty pageants. And he likes being famous, which got him into reality TV. He knows show business.

That put him in position to understand that the presidential election campaign is really just a badly acted, billion-dollar TV show whose production costs ludicrously include the political disenfranchisement of its audience. Trump is making a mockery of the show, and the Wolf Blitzers and Anderson Coopers of the world seem appalled. How dare he demean the presidency with his antics?

But they’ve all got it backward. The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line. And every time some pundit or party spokesman tries to deny it, Trump picks up another vote.

Trump say out loud what lesser beings only reveal to their drunken fraternal brothers leaning in to mutter their dark feelings about those people ruining their country and making their lives suck. Taibbi nails the idea.

[T]here’s evidence that human polling undercounts Trump’s votes, as people support him in larger numbers when they don’t have to admit their leanings to a live human being. Like autoerotic asphyxiation, supporting Donald Trump is an activity many people prefer to enjoy in a private setting, like in a shower or a voting booth.

Those people who aren’t afraid to proudly proclaim their love all things Trump do so because they like the man first, because he’s not a tool.

Trump, though, she likes. And so do a lot of people. No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.

Surprisingly, for me, Taibbi shifts gear and brings (with a Trump twist) Bernie and Hillary into the story.

The unexpectedly thrilling Democratic Party race between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, too, is breaking just right for Trump. It’s exposing deep fissures in the Democratic strategy that Trump is already exploiting.

Every four years, some Democrat who’s been a lifelong friend of labor runs for president. And every four years, that Democrat gets thrown over by national labor bosses in favor of some party lifer with his signature on a half-dozen job-exporting free-trade agreements.

It’s called “transactional politics,” and the operating idea is that workers should back the winner, rather than the most union-friendly candidate.

This year, national leaders of several prominent unions went with Hillary Clinton – who, among other things, supported her husband’s efforts to pass NAFTA – over Bernie Sanders. Pissed, the rank and file in many locals revolted. In New Hampshire, for instance, a Service Employees International Union local backed Sanders despite the national union’s endorsement of Clinton, as did an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers chapter.

Trump is already positioning himself to take advantage of the political opportunity afforded him by “transactional politics.” He regularly hammers the NAFTA deal in his speeches, applying to it his favorite word, “disaster.” And he just as regularly drags Hillary Clinton into his hypothetical tales of job-saving, talking about how she could never convince Detroit carmakers out of moving a factory to Mexico.

Unions have been abused so much by both parties in the past decades that even mentioning themes union members care about instantly grabs the attention of workers. That’s true even when it comes from Donald Trump, a man who kicked off the fourth GOP debate saying “wages [are] too high” and who had the guts to tell the Detroit News that Michigan autoworkers make too much money.

You will find union members scattered at almost all of Trump’s speeches. And there have been rumors of unions nationally considering endorsing Trump. SEIU president Mary Kay Henry even admitted in January that Trump appeals to members because of the “terrible anxiety” they feel about jobs.

“I know guys, union guys, who talk about Trump,” says Rand Wilson, an activist from the Labor for Bernie organization. “I try to tell them about Sanders, and they don’t know who he is. Or they’ve just heard he’s a socialist. Trump they’ve heard of.”

More specifically, why the race in November may be Bernie vs. Donald:

This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way – Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat – but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics.

Both propose “revolutions” to solve the problem, the difference being that Trump’s is an authoritarian revolt, while Sanders proposes a democratic one. If it comes down to a Sanders-Trump general election, the matter will probably be decided by which candidate the national press turns on first: the flatulent narcissist with cattle-car fantasies or the Democrat who gently admires Scandinavia. Would you bet your children on that process playing out sensibly?

We are, of course, betting our children, and their children and their children.

In this revolution, perhaps Bernie is Danton to Donald’s Robespierre.

The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It’s now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won’t keep pulling the lever for “conservative principles,” or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won’t just keep voting Democratic on cue.

I first became disenchanted with the Democratic Party in 1996, the year I first voted third party. I stuck around for 16 more years after I vowed that if President Obama proved to be as disappointing as President Clinton, well, I was done. He did and I was.

At an organizing meeting for Bernie Sanders last year, I told the organizer that if Bernie lost the bid for the nomination, I would not, under any circumstances, vote for whoever was nominated. He was initially shocked by my attitude, but quickly recovered and began making conciliatory noises.

I was not impressed. I’ve now put more of my money into Bernie’s campaign ($550 as of this morning) than I have ever done for any other candidate. That’s $550 I don’t really have, but I feel that strongly about Bernie. I haven’t felt this way since my first presidential vote in 1976.

The Tea Party (nothing more than a front for our Oligarchy) has blown up the Republican Party. Maybe Bernie can blow up the decrepit, degenerate organization that is nothing more than the Republican Party’s less-reactionary wing.

I hope so.

Taibbi concludes: King Trump. Brace yourselves, America. It’s really happening.

PHOTO BY MARY JO HANLON

I’m only one-quarter Welsh from my father’s mother whose grandfather Thomas Evans came to America from Newtown, Wales in 1872, but I’ve come to identify more with that part of my heritage than any other to the extent that I have a Welsh flag hung over the fireplace in my office.

St. David is the patron saint of Wales just as St. Patrick is the patron saint of Ireland.

According to Wikipedia:

Saint David (Welsh: Dewi Sant) was born towards the end of the 5th century. He was a scion of the royal house of Ceredigion, and founded a Celtic monastic community at Glyn Rhosyn (The Vale of Roses) on the western headland of Pembrokeshire (Welsh: Sir Benfro) at the spot where St David’s Cathedral stands today.

David’s fame as a teacher and his asceticism spread among Celtic Christians. His foundation at Glyn Rhosin became an important Christian shrine, and the most important centre in Wales. The date of Saint David’s death is recorded as 1 March, but the year is uncertain—possibly 601. As his tearful monks prepared for his death Saint David uttered these words: “Brothers be ye constant. The yoke which with single mind ye have taken, bear ye to the end; and whatsoever ye have seen with me and heard, keep and fulfil.”

For centuries, 1 March has been a national festival. Saint David was recognised as a national patron saint at the height of Welsh resistance to the Normans. Saint David’s Day was celebrated by Welsh diaspora from the late Middle Ages. Indeed, the 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys noted how Welsh celebrations in London for Saint David’s Day would spark wider countercelebrations amongst their English neighbours: life-sized effigies of Welshmen were symbolically lynched, and by the 18th century the custom had arisen of confectioners producing “taffies”—gingerbread figures baked in the shape of a Welshman riding a goat—on Saint David’s Day.[

I’ve posted this before, but I’m always uplifted by listening to the singing of Men Of Harlech in the movie Zulu.