When the people who fund the careers of politicians in the Pro-War Pro-Business party are threatened their party always steps up to save their masters like Black Adder’s Baldrick. And no one, ever, asks the question: But how will we pay for it? From now on, the only response to that question must be laughter. But this morning I’m more interested in Ted Rall.

Rall is best known as a cartoonist, but he also an idealist whose art is just one tool in his communication workshop. He’s also a damn good writer of columns and long-form essays and it is two of the former—both focused on COVID19—that I want to address this morning.

The first is Think, Don’t Hoard: How to Survive the End Times. Rall ledes:

It feels like the end times. A mysterious invisible killer stocks the land. Wild rumors abound. The government is useless. There’s no sense that anyone knows anything, much less is in charge. Could America become a failed state?

Yes, but not yet. Yes, but not because of coronavirus. Late-stage capitalism will ultimately destroy the current sociopolitical governmental system, not COVID-19. A vaccine will come online either later this year or early next year; that will be the beginning of the end of this scourge. Before then, many if not most Americans will have contracted the disease and recovered from it. Businesses will reopen. People will go back to work. The stock market will resume its climb.

In the meantime, many of us are wondering: how would/will we survive in an apocalyptic scenario without a somewhat benevolent government to run things?

I have good news for you: it is possible. Not easy. Not fun. But it can be done.

I know because I have seen it.

Where Rall says he has seen it surprised me: Afghanistan. These are the lessons that Rall learned from his time in that failed country:

I have met more than my fair share of survivalists in the United States. Typically their instinct is to hunker down on a remote plot of land, stockpile weapons and supplies, fortify a perimeter and arm up to fend off potential marauders. They are foolish. When the crap hits the fan, the best armed man will not be able to fight off a dozen invaders. It’s smarter to pack up and go if your area turns into a battle zone.

What you really need to stock up on are two items: personal relationships and IQ points. Both make the difference between life and death.

Good friends welcome one other into their homes. If one home is lost, they can squeeze together into a second one. A good friend might have a skill or a possession that you might need—they can stitch up a wound or drive you somewhere in their car.

You make yourself useful in a failed state by exactly the opposite means you would use in ours?. In the United States in 2020, it pays to have excellent skills in one or two areas, to be the best at what you do in your specialty. Not in Afghanistan in 2000. Dangerous places work best for people who are renaissance men and women, those with a wide variety of skills. Learn to do a lot of things fairly well. Shoot a gun, drive a car, cook, sew. Translate a foreign language, ride a motorcycle, fish, hunt. You can sell those skills to people who don’t have them.

Most of all, stay sharp and think nimbly. Hone your instincts. Watch for changes that might affect you and the people you care about. Prepare to drop everything you are doing at a second’s notice and take off if need be. We are all descended from people who lived this way. Those who didn’t died. Survival is in your DNA.

The second is We Should Attach Strings to Corporate Bailouts. The core message here is: Don’t get screwed again. Don’t doubt that we are about to be fucked because, as Rall writes:

It’s the end of the world as we know it and the banks and airlines feel fine because even in the midst of economic collapse CEOs can sleep soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that the American taxpayer will bail them out. Again.

All they have to do is wait a respectable 6 to 12 months after the wire transfer clears to start giving themselves raises, renovating executive suites and buying back their stock.

That’s exactly what happened during and after the 2008-09 global economic crisis that followed the subprime mortgage meltdown. In 2008 alone banks that received government bailouts spent $1.6 billion on executive salaries, bonuses and benefits including “cash bonuses, stock options, personal use of company jets and chauffeurs, home security, country club memberships and professional money management,” the AP reported.

This is socialism for the One Percent. We’re not bailing out the economy, we’re bailing out a lifestyle that would have made King Louis XVI, literally, lose his head. Rall continues:

Some people in the media are asking the right questions. Steve Inskeep of NPR’s Morning Edition asked an AFA spokesman about the $10 to $15 billion in profits the airlines have been raking in annually. Didn’t they save any of that? According to Bloomberg, the idiots spent 96 percent of their cash to buy back their stock even as they accumulated a mountain of debt.

As a society, however, Americans ought to be asking a bigger question: are we going to allow ourselves to be conned by these corporate douches the way we have been in the past?

Well? Are we? Rall thinks that the federal government should offer two options to the corporations wanting their welfare checks: nationalization or we—the American people—get to tell you how to run your company. In the first case, Rall writes:

If we save your automobile company or your oil company or your airline, we own it. All your stock gets transferred to the property of the U.S. Treasury. If the bailout is partial, we take a proportionate share based on a discounted rate of your devalued stock prices. If you are a competent CEO, you get to stay, but obviously at a greatly reduced salary. Once you start to do better, we deserve your profits.

In the second case, he writes:

I’m picking on banks and airlines because they are particularly mean to their customers but you can extrapolate these principles to other lines of business.

If the U.S. taxpayer saves your bank, the U.S. taxpayer has the right to be treated like a human being when he or she does business with you. That means closing the gap between interest rates. It’s insane that banks pay out 0.5% interest on savings accounts while taking in 25% from credit cards. It’s immoral to charge lower fees to rich people with high bank balances than to poor people with hardly any money. Before we dole out money to these institutions, they must promise in writing to do better.

At the Minister’s Leadership Training Conference in Miami on February 23, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King told those assembled that:

Whenever the government provides opportunities in privileges for white people and rich people they call it “subsidized” when they do it for Negro and poor people they call it “welfare.” The fact that is the everybody in this country lives on welfare. Suburbia was built with federally subsidized credit. And highways that take our white brothers out to the suburbs were built with federally subsidized money to the tune of 90 percent. Everybody is on welfare in this country. The problem is that we all to often have socialism for the rich and rugged free enterprise capitalism for the poor. That’s the problem. [Emphasis mine, JH]

We haven’t made any progress in more than 50 years, but we can if we do not allow this crisis/opportunity to pass. We saw this play out Sunday night in the debate between Senator Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden where Biden wanted to focus on bailing out the corporations the way he and his buddy President Barack Hussein Obama did in 2009 and Bernie wanted to stay focused on the root causes so that we don’t keep doing something stupid again and again.

I’m still hopeful for Bernie, but President Donald John Trump could come out looking better than either of them.

Bonus No. 1: It’s called the American Dream… you have to be asleep to believe it.

Bonus No. 2: I’ve hoarded enough cat food to last until 2065!

In the bad old days of President Ronald Reagan’s misery index, people with large savings accounts—mostly senior citizens enjoying their retirement—made out like they were Wall Street Bankers, enjoying double-digit returns on their savings. For those of us who were just starting out and businesses living on their line of credit, however, the situation really sucked.

Since Reagan’s first term in office all subsequent presidents from the Pro-War Pro-Business party (i.e., all of them) have worked diligently to drive the misery index lower and lower until we find our selves today with banks’ big-borrower clients lapping up free money. Great for them. Disastrous for everyone else.

When ever I go to the bank to make a deposit, the tellers will always try to sell me on their great rates on certificates of deposit. I ask them what the rate is, and, of course, the rate is always less than the current rate of inflation. The means, I say, that any money in one of their CDs is daily losing value. What little money I have I invest privately, not in a bank and not on the stock market. I’m not going to rich, but I’m not going to go broke either. Ralph Nader gets this and he’s doing a Paul Revere and warning us that the Fed is coming! The Fed is coming!

Nader, in The Federal Reserve Dictatorship Runs Amok Against Savers, writes:

If you are a saver in a money market account or in a bank, you’ve already noticed your dwindling interest income as interest rates have been at their lowest in modern American history. Well, brace yourself. Your saving account has just become little more than a lock box, thanks to the supreme dictatorship of the Federal Reserve.

On Sunday, March 15, The Federal Reserve announced that it would cut interest rates to “near zero.”

After ignoring the largely unproductive spiral in corporate debt, now a staggering $9.3 trillion, the risk of a domino effect from underwater “zombie companies” is pushing the Fed toward an orgy of printing money for an anticipatory bailout of profitable corporations—not depleted savers.

The Federal Reserve is our version of what other countries call a Central Bank. The Fed is not funded by Congress; its budget comes primarily from interest on government securities and fees from financial institutions. Bankers influence who gets appointed to its Board of Governors. Bankers can also elect three directors directly to the boards of the Fed’s regional Boards.

The Fed decides in secret the fate of the monetary policy, which includes the interest rates paid on your savings. There are no public hearings or open dockets for submission of views. No real explanations by the Fed; just dictates. It is a government of its own inside our government—the epitome of corporate socialism.

The President nominates members to the Board of Governors and they have to be confirmed by the Senate. This is almost an automatic process by a supine Senate. These nominated “governors” and Chairman Jerome H. Powell have allowed themselves to be publicly bullied by Trump who, as a failed lifelong debtor, wants zero interest rates.

The Fed has no regard for the hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments taken from one hundred million unorganized savers who have their savings in Treasury bonds, banks, and money market accounts. Now trillions of dollars’ worth of interest rates are getting “near zero.” What a blow by the Trumped Fed reducing interest rates from about 2.25 percent– 2.5 percent to near zero in five dictatorial steps over the past 14 months.

The big Fed fib is that this cut in interest rates will stimulate a shaken economy buffeted by the coronavirus pandemic. How? By reducing mortgage rates and other costs of borrowing. Well, the last interest rate cut by the Fed saw mortgage rates actually increase. Moreover, the Fed’s move doesn’t affect the sky-high credit card interest rates on unpaid balances, the horrifically gouging “pay-day loan” and “rent-to-own” rackets and the towering interest rates charged by lenders for student loans. There is no Fed regulation of usurious interest rates by profiteering lenders.

What harms the economy is reduced interest income for savers that in turn cuts down on consumer demand.

So what is the Fed up to? Juicing the stock market and big finance is the narcotic offered to the executive suite speculators. To enhance further its credentials as the aider and abettor of crony capitalism, the Fed is buying $700 billion in government securities and will be increasing “its holdings of Treasury securities by at least $500 billion and its holdings of agency mortgage-backed securities by at least $200 billion” (See: Federal Reserve issues Federal Open Market Committee statement, March 15, 2020). At the same time, the Fed is reducing bank reserve requirement ratios to zero percent and letting banks tap into the Fed’s discount window at ridiculously tiny interest rates. The average interest on millions of student loans is 5.8 percent.

On Sunday, when no one was looking, the Fed imperiously announced its decision to hold interest rates near zero “until it is confident that the economy has weathered recent events and is on track to achieve its maximum employment and price stability goals.” That is a very nebulous standard. Congress doesn’t establish any standards for the Fed except the vague mission of advancing employment and maintaining a stable monetary system.

The Fed has its own inscrutable language. “Quantitative easing,” is jargon for printing trillions of dollars in liquid money to lift stock markets and big banks. What the Fed doesn’t want to explain is how boosting the “paper economy” and tolerating trillions of dollars in unstable corporate debt—some incurred for unproductive stock buybacks—helps the common worker.

Pension funds, conservatively invested, can’t begin to earn the interest rates called for by the actuarial tables for payouts. So, backed up against the wall, pension funds dive into riskier stock investments and derivatives for higher returns which bring their own perils in case of stock market collapses.

The Fed has lots of explaining to do for the public in plain language. But why bother? As described by William Greider, in his classic book, Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country, the Fed can do pretty much what the financial industry wants it to do. For all the help the Fed gives to the unrepentant speculative financial industry, it does not ask for anything in return for the huge bailouts that would help the common folk. “Reciprocity” is outside of the Fed’s self-defined dictionary.

After all, the Fed does nothing about rampant speculation and staggering debt until it sees a “liquidity problem” (a.k.a. “the greedy big boys got themselves into a fix”) and then it rushes to inject massive sums of liquidity into the economy as relief. And the self-inflicted cycle of government guaranteed corporate greed and abuse of power starts all over again.

Remarkably, groups like Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America are not fighting for the one hundred million small and mid-size savers who are being taken to the cleaners and have no voice whatsoever in the Fed dictatorship.

If we expect others to fight for us, especially any elected official from the Pro-War Pro-Business party like Joseph Robinette Biden, we’re fucked. We have to fight for ourselves against the elites. We do, thankfully out number them 99:1.

Are you even close to being revolted enough yet?

Bonus No. 1: Thank gawd for Ronald Reagan and Jane Fonda.

Bonus No. 2: Aren’t you glad it’s spring?!!

Bonus No. 3: Coronavirus diaries: everyone is frightened and it’s getting weird now.

Bonus No. 4: Two from PJ in London on how the Brits are dealing with COVID19.

Bonus No. 5: What’s Missing From the Coronavirus Bill.

Our gym shut down on Monday—no word if we’ll be credited for the down time or not—and we miss the facility already. I’ve been doing my three miles there every morning and Mary Jo swims and works out on the strength machines. We’re fortunate enough that our backyard is adjacent to the Brecksville Reservation and all that that offers.

That allows us to take very long walks with Gillighan whenever the weather permits. While the days are warming—the high this week is predicted to be 67 degrees on Friday—lots of late winter rain is also predicted. Elle Hunter, in How to make a home gym from household items while self-isolating in The Guardian this morning, has some suggestions:

The gym is off-limits for now—but you can put together a functional gym with items you already own. “You don’t need to spend a lot of money on kit,” says Natalie Guyan, a personal trainer in Spain. In fact, if you have bags of flour and plastic bags to hand, you don’t need to spend anything at all.

1. Bags of flour in a plastic bag—as a kettlebell.

2. A jacket—as TRX bands or suspension rings.

3. A broom—to improve shoulder mobility.

4. Bottled water—as weights and and children—as heavier weights.

And, I would add: 5. a one-gallon milk jugs filled with water weighs can weight from one to eight pounds—a pints a pound the world around—and two jugs can be taped to a broom handle to make an easy barbell.

Fortunately for us, I have a set of free weights and a weight bench in the basement with pull-down and leg-developer attachments. The space is a bit cramped—I usually move everything to the garage, à la Lester Burnham in American Beauty—once the weather consistently moves above 60 degrees, but the basement works.

So now we have a new family activity to share.

Bonus No. 1: OHIO LIBRARIES ARE OUR BEST TAX INVESTMENT…

Bonus No. 2: Saagar Enjeti: The largest populist uprising in HISTORY is coming.

Bonus No. 3: The Big Story Tonight Is YOU—A Special “Social Distancing” Edition Of The Late Show and Uninformed Correspondent: Bootsie Visits An Expert For Straight Talk About Coronavirus and And On The Second Day Of Quarantine, Stephen Colbert Discovered Fire.

Bonus No. 4: Coronavirus Capitalism—and How to Beat It.

Bonus No. 5: Say Your Prayers and Take Your Chances. (via reader Ryan…)

The tragedy here is that it has taken a microscopic virus and the suffering of millions across the globe—including tens (hundred?) of thousands here in the United States—to finally reveal that there is no there there in the oval office. President Donald John Trump is poorly tap dancing as fast as he can to convince his supporters that he’s still the very stable genius he said he was.

Like the Wizard of Oz he’s frantically obfuscating and spinning wheels to convince his minions that everything is perfect and that there is nothing to fear from the Democrat-hoax chinese flu. As expect, Ralph Nader ain’t havin’ it. Nader, in Trump Minimizing and Sugarcoating Coronavirus Perils, writes:

Donald Trump can’t fake his way through the coronavirus. It’s spreading and doesn’t respond to his delusions. Donald is flailing, failing, fibbing, stumbling, and scapegoating. With the stock market collapsing and the economy shaking, Donald fears defeat in November. Trump is a daily clear and present danger and he is the worst person to handle the COVID-19 crisis.

Last weekend, Trump and Mike Pence met with Brazilian officials at Mar-a-Lago, after which Brazilian President Bolsonaro’s press secretary tested positive for COVID-19. Despite his potential exposure, Trump refuses to take the test for coronavirus. He should take paid sick leave and let competent, experienced people take the reins to combat the virus.

“Be calm,” he says, “it will go away.” “This is like the flu.” On February 26, he falsely said the number of U.S. COVID-19 cases “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” The dangerous falsehoods continue to pour from his fevered mind.

Trump knows that during his tenure, he took innumerable actions that have made the United States more defenseless against this pandemic and other threats. He and the evil John Bolton, aggressively moved to disable pandemic prevention forces in the U.S. government, boosted by supine, maniacal right wing talk radio show hosts (Rush Limbaugh said the virus is “just a cold”). In 2018, the head of the pandemic response team, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, left the National Security Council amid Bolton’s restructuring. Once Ziemer was gone, Bolton dismantled the entire pandemic response team. Trump also pushed to slash the budgets of the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. Congress stopped the cuts but couldn’t repeal the destructive policies of Trump and his henchmen.

Trump insanely decided to cut USAID’s Predict program, a critical federal program that tracked infectious diseases. At the same time, he poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the bloated military empire budget with congressional complicity. According to Public Citizen, Trump wanted to cut the CDC’s 2021 budget by $1.3 billion, down 19 percent from the previous year. The proposed CDC budget cuts included cutting $25 million in funding for the “preparedness and response programs.”

This is sheer madness: Trump has chosen death over life. Draft-dodger Trump is stockpiling mass destruction weapons that can blow up the world many times over. But the determined golfer, right in the midst of this COVID-19 surge, did not stockpile ventilators, face masks, testing kits and other critical equipment and materials. Hospital capacity is perilously low and the number of reserve medical and nursing personnel is too small. What about readiness here at home?

Failing to head off a pandemic is what can be expected from a regime that sugarcoats and covers up its criminal negligence by not protecting the American people. Trump blathered about China since day one, but he allowed the U.S. drug companies to continue to outsource production of most drugs to China and India. We’re utterly dependent on that fragile supply chain because Big Pharma wanted to make even bigger profits—despite the handouts they already get in the form of big tax credits and free research and development of drugs by the National Institutes of Health. The U.S. government doesn’t even have price ceilings on drugs, allowing pharmaceutical companies to gouge Americans. There’s a real possibility of drug shortages soon.

Trump is trying to buy himself out of trouble through red ink deficit spending in the tens of billions to cushion businesses. At the same time he balks at eliminating the huge tax cut he gave to big business and the wealthy to provide paid sick leave, paid medical care for the uninsured, and other assistance people will need. Poor people will especially need broader medical coverage, protections from evictions, and food assistance during the predicted crisis. Unemployment compensation funds need to be expanded during this coming recession.

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote that “We’re all socialists in a pandemic.” That brings us to the daily vindication of the Bernie Sanders campaign. Suddenly, everyone—the banks, Wall Street, the airlines, the hospitality and tourist business, beleaguered small business, and others are expecting government agencies to help in all kinds of ways. The same CEO fat cats who, in the past decade, dumped seven trillion dollars of profits into unproductive, stock buybacks for their compensation metrics are looking to the government to stabilize their debt-ridden companies.

When I was campaigning for president in 2008 during the stock market crash, we hoisted a large banner at an anti-Wall Street rally that read, “Socialism bails out Capitalism.” Bernie recognizes our mixed private/public economy. He wants a better balance so that the few/powerful, in their greed do not disproportionately benefit while the many powerless suffer. Bernie wants what western European democracies have long provided for all their people: Universal health care, tuition-free education (like we have for public high schools), living wages, stronger labor unions and cooperatives, and other social safety net benefits long overdue in the world’s biggest economy.

So long deprived of what they’ve earned, from frozen wages to looted pensions and consumer gouging, the people should shout out “what’s the big deal, we are long overdue.”

Bernie needs to continue his campaign to the Party’s convention. Just like Jesse Jackson did in 1984 and Ronald Reagan did in 1976. To drop out is to calamitously let down his supporters, including voters yet to vote. He would forfeit going after Trump, with media coverage, in ways faltering and gaffe-prone Joe Biden can’t or won’t. He would lose his leverage, backed by legions of small donors, to get concessions from Biden and his entrenched Democrats. Besides, Biden could stumble before the convention. [Emphasis mine, JH]

So it’s not just about voting margins in primaries; it’s about policies for the present and future of America. Politics is about timing; now Bernie’s proposals will receive more attention from everybody affected.

And everybody is affected by the looming coronavirus pandemic.

Most of us will be OK. Many, tragically, will be devastated and possibly loose their lives or the lives of those they love. Just as President George Walker Bush dug a hole so deep that it took President Barack Hussein Obama more than two years to even begin to see daylight, so too has President Trump set up whoever succeeds for years and years of damage control and healing before they can even begin to move forward.

Fuck Trump and the horse he rode in on.

Bonus No. 1: Robert Greenwald talks Voter Suppression on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour.

Here we have Roldo Bartimole, a journalist that Ralph Nader called arguably Cleveland’s greatest investigative reporter of the past half century; but in the larger world, all journalist know the work of Isidor Feinstein Stone whose I.F. Stone Weekly—from 17 January 1953 to 1 December 1971—changed the way journalism was performed.

Sam Allard, perhaps Cleveland’s best heir to both Roldo and Stone, posted a mention of Stone yesterday in Steaming in the Age of Social Distancing, Some Picks from Netflix, Prime and Kanopy. He wrote:

One of the joys of Kanopy is its extensive documentary portfolio. Newly added is the 2016 doc All Governments Lie, which tells the story of independent muckraker I.F. Stone (who covered the U.S. power structure in much the same way that Roldo Bartimole covered the local one), and shows how his spirit inspired a new class of independent journalists, including Glenn Greenwald, Michael Moore and Amy Goodman. With Trump in the White House, hearing these journalists speak so clearly and coherently about lying leaders is straight catharsis.

Here in Cuyahoga County our tax-supported library system makes the streaming service Kanopy—and many, many other services—available to patrons. This is yet another example of why Eric Klinenberg described libraries as one of the Palaces for the People. If you’re not so fortunate to have your tax dollars bring Kanopy into your home, you can also watch the 2016 documentary on YouTube.

I’m not sure exactly when I first told someone—I think it was around a year or so ago to Tim Russo—that I would vote for Donald John Trump in November 2020 before I would debase myself to vote for Clinton 3.0: Joseph Robinette Biden. (See the sidebar at the right where I have constantly repeated this message for months now.) ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱ ➱

I do remember when I made my stance public to a group. The date was 27 June and the place was the Southside Diner—which has since become a favorite eating spot for Mary Jo and me—and I was speaking to a couple who had come to the diner with many other Bernie voters to watch the first debate. When I told them that I was all in for Bernie, but that if he didn’t win, I would vote third party again (most likely Jill Stein and the Green Party)—unless, unless the candidate was Biden.

In that case, I said, I’ll vote for Trump because the Democratic Party was beyond redemption and we needed to burn the fucker down. Their jaws dropped. The husband had that deer-in-headlights look and the wife pleaded, couldn’t you at least vote for a third party? They avoided me for the rest of the evening.

If the Republicans can have their Never Trumpers, then the Democrats and can have their Never Bidenists. Count me in as a charter member.

Bonus No. 1: Krystal and Saagar call out Biden’s gender pander on VP pick.

Bonus No. 2: Nader on Biden.

Bonus No. 3: Krystal Ball debunks Biden’s parade of lies.

Bonus No. 4: Saagar Enjeti: Biden makes definitive case for why he’ll lose.

Bonus No. 5: Bernie Versus Biden: Who Won the Debate?

Bonus No. 6: Fact Check: Joe Biden Has Advocated Cutting Social Security for 40 Years.

I went through Gunner’s Mate A (basic) and C (Terrier missile) schools with Frank Gercke and we both went to nuclear-powered missile cruisers homeported on the west coast: Frank to the USS Long Beach, CGN 9 and I to the USS Bainbridge, CGN 25. There were a few times that we were both in port together and Frank would invite me over for a meal off base.

During one of those visits Frank told me about a regimen of three-day fasting that he had undertaken to successfully lose some weight. That was the first time anyone had ever mentioned the practice. (Yes, I was aware of what a fast was from my reading of fiction, particularly Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, but I hadn’t known anyone who actually fasted.)

Today—thanks to George and Dr. Jason Fung, I know a whole lot more. As I wrote yesterday, Fung’s book—The Obesity Code—concludes with:

There is one more piece of the puzzle—a solution found many centuries ago. A practice that has been enshrined in the nutritional lore of virtually every population on earth. A tradition rapidly becoming extinct.

This tradition is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 20: When To Eat, begins:

Long-term dieting is futile. After the initial weight loss, the dreaded plateau appears, followed by even more dreaded weight gain. The body reacts to weight loss by trying to return to its original body set weight. We hope our body set weight will decrease over time, but that hoped-for reduction does not materialize. Even if we eat all the right things, our insulin levels stay elevated.

But we’ve been addressing only half the problem. Long-term weight loss is really a two-step process. Two major factors maintain our insulin at a high level. The first is the food we eat—which are what we usually change when we go on a diet. But we fail to address the other factor: the long-term problem of insulin resistance. This problem is one of meal timing.

Insulin resistance keeps our insulin levels high. High insulin maintains our high body weight. Inexorably, our high body set weight erodes our weight-loss efforts. We start feeling hungrier. Our metabolism (that is our total energy expenditure) relentlessly decreases until it falls below the level of our energy intake. Our weight plateaus and ruthlessly climbs back up to our original body set weight, even as we keep dieting. Clearly, changing what we eat is not always enough.

To succeed, we must break the insulin-resistance cycle. But how?

The answer to that question, according to Fung, is intermittent fasting. Why isn’t every doctor and diet specialist shouting the solution from the mountain tops? Because fasting is ancient—recommended, writes Fung, by Hippocrates of Kos (4th century BCE), Paracelsus (16th century CE), Benjamin Franklin (18th century CE) and every spiritual tradition ever—and free.

After a brief history lesson, Fung goes to the science in The Body’s Response To Fasting in five steps: feeding, the post-absorptive phase, gluconeogenesis, ketosis and protean conservation phase; and How Your Hormones Adapt To Fasting covering four body chemicals: insulin, growth hormone, Adrenalin and electrolytes, before getting down to the nut of why fasting is different. He writes:

The one crucial aspect that differentiates fasting from other diets is its intermittent nature. Diets fail because of their consistency. The defining characteristic of life on Earth is homeostasis. Any constant stimulus will eventually be met with an adaptation that resists the change. Persistent exposure to decreased calories results in adaptation (resistance); the body eventually responds by reducing total energy expenditure, leading to the dreaded plateau in weight loss and eventually to weight regain.

And finally, Fung concludes:

What we have tried to develop here is a framework for understanding the complexity of human obesity. A deep and thorough understanding of the causes of obesity leads to rational and successful treatment. A new hope arises. We can begin to dream again—of a world where type 2 diabetes is eradicated, where metabolic syndrome is abolished. A dream of a thinner, healthier tomorrow.

That world. That vision. That dream. It starts today.

And it won’t put a penny in the pockets of any surgeons, pharmaceutical companies, special (highly processed) food manufacturers, diet gurus, Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. Technically—thanks to the American library system—you don’t even have to buy Fung’s book. I didn’t, but in tradition of helping a brother out, I am ordering a copy from Mac’s Backs.

Bonus No. 1: The impeccable wisdom of Huey Freeman.

Bonus No. 2: Gillighan HAS caught squirrels.

Dennis Kucinich is running for Cleveland Mayor in 2021.

WHAT ????

Forty years thereafter. That’s what they say. Could it be?

I always hated the term used for him. “Boy Mayor.” It was a putdown. Just as the Plain Dealer usually used Mike White when they knew he wanted to be known by his given name, Michael.

A 75-year old mayor could not be called “boy.”

I had a brief chat with Dennis at the Cleveland State University final salute to the late Norm Krumholz. A long-time friend to me, Norm died at the age of 92 last December 21.

It was ironic that Kucinich attended. He was the mayor under whom Krumholz lost his planner’s post.

Krumholz, a nationally-prominent city planner, lost the post as Cleveland City Planner during Kucinich’s reign as mayor.

It was rather fortuitous for Norm, however.

Because it led him to a new career. He became a Cleveland State University professor of some note.

The chance meeting gave me the opportunity to ask Dennis, since I had heard the rumors, whether he was planning on running for mayor again, some 40 years after the fact.

As the experienced politician he has been and remains, he evaded an answer.

Maybe it’s a second chance in this Look Back for him to make amends too.

Kucinich did say that he was involved in writing a book, a second book. His first book, “Courage to Survive.” Traced his early tough life and its tough times.

His brief description of a second book suggested it would be a review of how he saw his short, but historic, battle with the Cleveland establishment.

In attendance also at the tribute to Krumholz was the current mayor, Frank Jackson. Jackson often attended and spoke at Krumholz’s urban affairs class at CSU. He also had named Krumholz a member of the Cleveland Planning Commission.

Jackson is the longest serving mayor in Cleveland’s history.

I wouldn’t doubt that he might decide he wants to keep the job.

So Dennis would have competition if he does decide on a comeback. Both men would be 75 by the next election; both born in October, 1946.

In a town that has seemed in a rip van winkle state for some time, the contest might awaken some community spirit. So badly needed.

Do it Dennis. Show us that there can be a second time around.

This city needs an awakening.

Annddd, I’m back. Twelve days ago I first posted about Dr. Jason Fung and the idea of intermittent fasting. Since then I’ve watched more than 10 hours of videos (mostly lectures by Fung) and, on Friday, Fung’s 2016 book—The Obesity Code—came in for me at the library, and I’m now on my second reading. The nut is that what we think we know is killing us.

Fung’s core message is that most of what we think we know about what we eat and how long we live is wrong and our fabricated ignorance is killing us. I would make the comparison between how the fossil fuel industry has perpetuated the hoax that global warming is a hoax to the way industrial agriculture has sold us the lie that processed foods—primarily flour and sugar—are good for us.

I know, I know. Plenty of others have touted this threat before—my own references to Michael Pollan and his sage advice: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, is ample evidence of that—but Fung is boringly factual, methodical and wholly scientific in a way that cannot help but convince anyone paying attention.

When I was an undergraduate at Ohio University—The Orwellian Class of ’84—I was, for a time, a dual major in Magazine Journalism and History. I picked up the second major for the sole reason that I wanted to take Dr. Douglass Baxter’s History 301: “Historical Research & Writing” and you had to be a history major to get into the class. I later changed back to a single major when I completed the course (and remembered that I was no good at foreign languages, a graduation requirement for a Bachelor of Arts degree; Journalism was a Bachelor of Science or, more appropriately, a BS degree).

While the final project in that class was a 15-page paper, Dr. Baxter took us through a number of intermediate steps that focused on ever larger abstracts of the information that we would eventually include in our final paper. I wish more non-fiction authors had taken Dr. Baxter’s class. Reading Dr. Jason Fung’s The Obesity Code is a perfect example of that.

[Note: all underlined emphasis in my own, JH]

Fung’s book is some 250 pages of well-presented and written vital information, but the reader needs to start at the end of the penultimate chapter: The Last Piece of the Puzzle where Fung writes:

There are five basic steps in weight loss—
1. Reduce your consumption of added sugars.
2. Reduce your consumption of refined grains.
3. Moderate your protein intake.
4. Increase your consumption of natural fats.
5. Increase your consumption of fiber and vinegar.

The first 214 pages in five sections and 18 chapters provide all the detail you need to know why those five steps are indeed true, and after you know where Fung is going, you’ll read those chapters with far more understanding than if you were to follow the start-at-the-beginning-and-read-to-the-end traditional route. Perhaps what he writes next is the reason for why he (or his editor) organized the book in the way he did. Fung continues:

When it comes to the what to eat, you pretty much already knew the answer. Most diets very conspicuously resemble each other. There is far more agreement than discord. Eliminate sugars and refined grains. Eat more fiber. Eat vegetables. Eat Organic. East more home-cooked meals. Avoid fast food. Eat whole unprocessed foods. Avoid artificial colors and flavors. Avoid processed or microwavable foods. Whether you follow the low carb, low calorie, South Beach, Atkins or some other mainstream diet, the advice is very similar. Sure, there are particular nuances to each diet, particularly with respect to dietary fats, but they tend to agree more than they disagree. So why all the controversy?

Agreement does not sell books or magazines. We need to discover the latest and greatest superfood. Acai berries. Quinoa. Or need to discover the latest dietary villain. Sugar. Wheat. Fat. Carbohydrates. Calories. Vogue magazine does not carry headlines such as Dietary advice you all ready knew!

Then Fung leads into the final chapter of his book which is the real discovery.

All diets work in the short term. But we’ve been ignoring the long-term problem of insulin resistance. There is one more piece of the puzzle—a solution found many centuries ago. A practice that has been enshrined in the nutritional lore of virtually every population on earth. A tradition rapidly becoming extinct.

This tradition is the subject of the next chapter.

And tomorrow’s a future post…

Bonus No. 1: In the spirit of the last first: The Aetiology of Obesity Part 6 of 6: Dietary Villains—Fat Phobia.

Bonus No. 2: Senator Ian the Climate Denialist Potato on what to do during your super dull government imposed isolation.

Bonus No. 3: Therapeutic Fasting.

Bonus No. 4: Dealing with the squalor of everyday life: First Dog on the Moon readers tell us how to be happy.

BLOG NOTE: I’m taking one of my periodic news fasts so that I can go thinking and read a number of books that have been gathering dust on my desk. My plan is to spend at least six hours a day—0900-1500—in a quiet room at the library. As usual, I’ll check email once a day.

If you can’t make a rational argument for your case, then the fall back argument is to make the other sides case look horrible by attacking individuals and insinuating nefarious purposes and actors. In other words, scare the fuck out of everybody. Americans scare easily. We are afraid of everything and everyone that we don’t know or understand.

This has been the strategy of the Pro War Pro Business party since the death of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who famously told America in his 1933 inaugural address that: That the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That strategy of the PWPB party has in the past, and into the present, worked. Bernie Sanders can change that and Ralph Nader has the details.

Nader, in Trump vs. Sanders—Comparisons for Voters, writes:

It isn’t un-American for voters to do some homework before voting. Here’s a “concise guide” for the voter with limited time who might want more information.

The corporate Democratic Partiers keep questioning the electability of candidates they do not like, namely Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Really? These leading progressives are absurdly presumed to be “unelectable” compared to Trump?

Consider an election where Bernie is up against Trump. The differences are night and day. Start with the all-important issue of character. Trump lies every day, tweeting misinformation and falsifying what is and what is not going on in our country. Just as bad, Trump’s tactics rely entirely on lying about or misrepresenting what he is doing to handle large and small problems. Trump has made over 16,000 false or misleading claims since January 2017. Bernie bluntly tells the truth.

Trump is a bigot/racist who uses dog whistles to promote, implement, and enforce racist policies. Bernie is a civil rights fighter going back to the nineteen sixties.

Bernie respects women and champions their causes. Donald is a savage sexual predator, has boasted about his sexual conquests, and was a serial adulterer.

Bernie talks of peace and rule of law. Donald incites violence and believes in the rule of raw power by a president who is lawless and daily violates our Constitution. Recall his ominous declaration that “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.”

Compare what Trump and Sanders do in public office. When there is a conflict between big business and the public good, on labor rights, consumer rights, small taxpayer respect, and environmental protections, Bernie has stood with the people. Bernie has the best Congressional record of fighting corporate abuses. Meanwhile, Trump, really a corporation masquerading as a human being, works to line the pockets of corporate fat cats. Bernie fights for unions, living wages, and workplace safety; Donald hates unions, and has no problem freezing the $7.25 per hour minimum wage and dismantling serious worker health and safety protections.

Bernie is a consumer champion who wants to cancel crushing student loan debt and reverse the dangerous outsourcing of production of medicine to China, leaving us defenseless. Trump is close to shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and other consumer safety agencies such as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For three years he crazily pushed cuts for health and pandemic research. It took a spreading coronavirus for him to face reality and his response has been too little, too late.

Trump was a corporate welfare king with a failed gambling business who used, in his brazen words, “bankruptcy as a competitive advantage.” He’s busy shoveling all kinds of subsidies, giveaways, bailouts, and giant tax escapes to profitable big companies, at the expense of smaller taxpayers. Bernie is strongly against most of this corporate “socialism for the rich.”

On the environment, Bernie has a good, though not perfect, record. Trump has no problem with deadly corporate pollution—such as coal ash, mercury, methane, diesel particulates degrading your health. Trump is preventing federal efforts from combating climate disruptions, talks about “clean, beautiful coal,” and even forbids the use of the term “climate change” (which he believes is a hoax). Bernie campaigns all over the country talking about public investments in climate preparedness—paid for by restoration of corporate taxes that Trump would like to further cut. Only by using all available resources can the U.S. contain immensely costly runaway fires, floods, tornadoes, droughts, and already rising sea levels caused by climate disruption.

Bernie releases his tax returns while Trump hides them and gets a major tax cut for his family through Congress.

Donald says he’s never done anything wrong and never needs to apologize. Bernie recognizes his mistakes when he is wrong. Donald breaks promises—on lower drug prices, on cleaner air and water, on more manufacturing jobs, and on expanded health care insurance. Trump has, in fact, actively damaged the environment and hurt these workers and consumers.

Bernie and Trump have superficial similarities. Both rarely smile. Both can be gruff and have trouble taking advice. But Bernie reads, thinks, and empathizes with people who desperately need universal healthcare and endure daily poverty. Frantically tweeting Donald doesn’t read or think, and is devoid of empathy, preferring to use his office to enrich Trump family businesses. Instead of spending his time working to understand the problems of working people, thin-skinned Donald spends his time blaming others and viciously nick-naming political opponents.

Bernie is a “democratic socialist,” advocating for improvements that western European counties have had for decades as well as ones we had decades ago—like nearly tuition free higher education after World War II at state universities from California to New York and even an early sales tax on Wall Street trading.

Donald is a corporate socialist and a champion of the dictatorial, corporate state (Wall Street owning Washington) that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called “fascism” in a message to Congress in 1938.

Bernie is a good, crisp debater. Donald is a shouter, stage liar, and evader-in-chief. Bernie refuses corporate PAC money and has millions of people funding the campaign with small donations. Trump goes for the zillionaires. I could go on. For more usable information, read the new book, Fake President, by Mark Green and me.

According to the number one Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Trump is “a crook, a thief, a liar. He should be in prison.” Can anybody think honest Bernie is not electable against corrupt Donald?

Not me. Joseph Robinette Biden is not and never has been destined for election to our highest office. He’s merely the PWPB party’s placeholder for four more years of Trump.

Bonus No. 1: You should.

Bonus No. 2: Cleveland, Get Ready for a Dennis! Kucinich 2021 Mayoral Run.

Bonus No. 3: To Rebound and Win, Bernie Sanders Needs to Leave His Comfort Zone.

*I coined this phrase as a way of telling my students that they were not what they wanted to be but rather what they did. I believed in the idea so much I had pencils made up with the reminder and gave each student two to keep. More than one student has shown me one of the two pencils—sharpened only to the point where you could still read the message—years later.

The year was 2012 and I wrote that I was done with the Democratic Party. With the exception of a primary vote for John McCain in 2000—I really didn’t like George Walker Bush—I’d never voted for a Republican. But I had voted third party in 1996 (Green Party candidate Ralph Nader, because William Jefferson Clinton was, well, Clinton)

I went back in 2000 and voted for Albert Arnold Gore because I liked his book: Earth In The Balance and in 2004, because of his record of anti-war protest, I liked John Forbes Kerry, but after Kerry self-immolated I said that I was done with the Democratic Party. To use the words of Ronald Wilson Reagan, I didn’t feel I was leaving the party, I felt that the party had left me.

Then came Barack Hussein Obama and like Silvio quoting Michael Corleone in Godfather III I got pulled back in. Four years later I realized how wrong I had been and I first voted for the Green Party candidate Jill Ellen Stein.

In 2016 I back Bernard Sanders, hard. I’d followed Bernie’s career since about 1997 and was 100 percent behind his politics. (I still am.) I also made a prediction in August 2015: I wrote that Donald John Trump would be the Republican Party nominee in 2016 and that Bernie would be the only Democrat who could stop him from winning the White House. Tragically, I was right; the Democratic National Committee and the elites they served, screwed Bernie, gave us Clinton 2.0 and I voted for Jill Stein, again).

The result was as I predicted: Trump waddled into the oval office all but unopposed. This year looks to be a solid repeat of 2016. The time has come to burn down the Democratic Party and if Joseph Robinette Biden (Clinton 3.0) becomes the nominee, I’m voting for Trump. If any other Democrat but Bernie gets the nomination, I’ll vote Green Party again, because the DNC is dead to me. I am not alone.

Nathan Robinson, in What The Stakes Are: We just need Bernie. How is this not self-evident? for Current Affairs, [in my bulleted form, JH] ledes:

I feel like I’m going crazy. I have a pit of terror in my stomach that never goes away. I am stressed and afraid at every moment.

To me, a set of facts about the world is difficult to deny:

1. If Donald Trump is reelected in November, very bad things will happen to a large number of people…

2. To stop these things from happening, we have exactly one chance on exactly one day: Nov. 3, 2020…

3. Donald Trump will do whatever it possibly takes to prevent this from happening…

4. The Democratic party “establishment,” meaning the people who have been in leadership positions in the party, does not actually understand Trump…

5. Even in a concerningly out-of-touch and inept party, Joe Biden stands out as uniquely out of touch and inept…

6. The only other Democratic candidate than Joe Biden who has a viable chance at the Democratic nomination is Bernie Sanders…

7. Between the two of them, Bernie Sanders is the only one with even a chance of beating Trump…

8. Many wealthy and powerful Democrats will do whatever it takes to stop Bernie Sanders from being the nominee….

9. If these Democrats succeed in stopping Bernie, perhaps through a contested convention in which superdelegates override the plurality vote, and they put the feeble and uninspiring Biden at the top of the ticket, it will be an absolute calamity…

10. If Bernie is nominated, things will go differently, though we do not yet know quite how…

Robinson sums up his list this way:

I run all these facts through my head all day, every day. If Trump gets reelected, untold horrors will be released. Unless Sanders prevails, Trump will get reelected. Therefore Sanders must prevail. We must do everything possible to get Sanders the nomination. There is no alternative.

No. There isn’t and in the 4,400 words—please read them all—that follow, Robinson carefully makes his case and concludes:

The reason I’ve been writing incessantly since 2016 about the critical importance of electing Bernie is that I sense the extreme urgency of our political moment, and this cranky old man from Vermont has rather remarkably ended up in the position where his election is a necessary step in moving this country forward and saving it from barbarism and self-destruction. If I could, I would write 10 pro-Bernie articles a day, not because I am a “bro,” but because I am so afraid all the time about what happens if we don’t get this done, and all I want to say over and over is “Don’t you see? Please. PLEASE. We need this. It is so important. How do you not see the importance? Do you not realize what’s at stake?” It sounds so arrogant. So accusatory. So insane. I don’t want to be like that. I’ve become an angrier person this election season. I’ve lost friends. I’ve flunked my schoolwork. I’ve alienated colleagues. I’ve made people think I’m nuts.

But since we founded Current Affairs in 2016, I’ve been trying to say the same thing over and over in however many ways I can, because it feels so obvious to me that it occupies me constantly and if it isn’t understood and acted upon it will cause such catastrophic harm: we need Bernie. We have got to make this happen. We have an opportunity here. It won’t come again. We are lucky we got a “do-over” in 2020, but this is it. We can have something incredibly good, or we can have something incredibly bad, and there is no in between and we’ve got to choose and choose now.

The only thing that keeps me from going insane is the fact that I am not, in fact, at all alone. The millions of people who fight for Bernie: they all get it too. That’s why they’re out there spending every moment of their day working for him, giving him all the money they can. Forklift operators, truck driver, fast food workers: they sense that at last, there is someone in politics who might really make a difference to their lives. The activists in the youth climate movement know that there is finally someone for whom climate change carries the right amount of urgency, who doesn’t just see it as a phrase to toss out and indicate Deep Concern about, but who sees it as something that if we do not fix now will have terrible consequences. Bernie gets it in a way nobody else does.

When Bernie had his heart attack, I and so many of these others panicked. And people made fun of us and couldn’t believe how dependent we were on “one guy” being our “savior.” But Bernie isn’t a savior. Bernie is a vehicle for carrying out our aspirations. He’s a means to the end of a better future. I wish we had other vehicles. But he’s the one we’ve got right here and now, and we have to do everything possible to make sure we don’t miss this chance.

I hope today goes well. It needs to. So much is on the line.

Yes he is and we must. Or we’ll be burnin’ down the DNC.

Bonus No. 1: Bernie Sanders plots new strategy to foil Biden and take charge of 2020 race.

Bonus No. 2: Low-carb diet may reverse age-related brain deterioration, study finds.

Bonus No. 3: Ta-Nehisi Coates Talks Political Writing With Former WSN EIC.

Bonus No. 4: The Craving Mind.

Bonus No. 1: It cuts across time: a peek into the world of antiquarian books.

Bonus No. 2: Mac’s Backs.

Herbert George Wells wrote the original novel in 1897. Claude Rains would play the title character in 1933 and now, in 2020, Leigh Whannell puts a different spin on the classic tale of horror. But between 1933 and 2020 two authors—Ralph Ellison and Walter Mosley told very different scary stories that were fiction, but not fantasy. And now we get the real story.

Tom Lamont, in The invisible city: how a homeless man built a life underground for The Guardian, ledes:

Most nights, before bed, before it all went wrong, Dominic Van Allen whiled away the last of the evening hours in a pub called The Garden Gate. It was easy to fit in and feel smart there, chatting and drinking with a crowd who passed through in varied states of dishevelment. Dog-walkers brought in sodden dogs. Exhausted junior doctors shambled in after shifts with their sleeves pushed up. There were scarved and suited older men, frail as antique hatstands, and casually dressed professionals with jobs in finance or entertainment who owned expensive homes nearby. “And it’s you rich buggers,” Van Allen marvelled, genially enough, as he eyed the state of their trainers, “who can afford to look the scruffiest.” He wore durable boots, khaki trousers and a leather motorcycle jacket, and could have been mistaken for a bike courier, a builder, maybe a maintenance guy at the hospital next door, where he was known in the staff canteen as someone who would wander in at dawn to buy a discount coffee.

That winter of 2017, Van Allen was 44 years old—tall, with close-cropped blond hair, blue eyes and a faint Yorkshire accent. At the pub, his was an ale. As soon as he judged it was late enough, Van Allen drank up and said his goodnights, bearing north from the pub and walking up a tree-lined road that hugged one side of Hampstead Heath. A vast open space that sits as a sort of green beehive haircut on top of metropolitan central London, the heath is untamed in parts and otherwise mown and managed like any public park. Every day, people visit by the thousand: runners, outdoor swimmers, tourists, bird-lovers on the trail of whitethroats and blackcaps in the bushes or goldfinches and kestrels in the trees. Sometimes a travelling circus unfolds itself on the hard-packed sand of the heath’s carpark. Summer brings sunbathers, picnickers and sixth-formers sat in circles, while in winter, on those rare occasions it snows, people drag in toboggans. On this night, in December 2017, forecasters had predicted flurries overnight. Van Allen moved briskly, eager to get in.

He walked up the heath’s western edge, beside a fringe of scrub where hogweed grew in tangles and brambles rose taller than him. It was known that homeless people sometimes slept rough in this scrub, pitching tents here after dark. Van Allen had done this, too, once upon a time. As a rule, he kept the fact of his homelessness to himself, “because, wouldn’t you?” He knew there were a lot of people just like him, irregularly employed, regulars in pubs, the owners of passports and phones and all the right charger leads, only with nowhere stable to live. He would never plausibly make London rent. Social housing was just out of reach. A mortgage purest fantasy. Van Allen had taught himself, instead, how to borrow a piece of this expensive city, night by night, on unarranged loan. When he reached a row of mansion houses that overlooked the heath, he turned off the road and on to a footpath that cut through the scrub.

Van Allen could be just as fictional as Griffin or Charles Blakey or the homage-named Adrian Griffin or Ellison’s unnamed black man, but he’s not. Van Allen is, perhaps, most akin to Ellison’s character, living in the shadows, unseen, unknown, unnoticed. I won’t attempt to excerpt further from Lamont’s piece; he’s too good a writer to pick him apart and pretend I’m good enough to pull the right highlights.

I will say that reading his piece reminded me of reading two books by Eric Blair, aka George Orwell: Down And Out In Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. Those two books were my entry into Blair.

I’ll leave you with this; another take on the invisible people of the world.

Bonus No. 1: It just keeps going and going: the weird, mean things the Morrison government has got into. My favorite comment.

Bonus No. 2: All Coronavirus 24/7—From this morning’s Most Viewed in the Guardian… Such as: The Trump administration ‘brain drain’ is impeding the coronavirus response.

Bonus No. 3: The Late Show’s Alter Egos: Michael Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren.

Bonus No. 4: Don’t Panic! The S.M.F.T.S.O.B.G.M.C.F.T.P.O.H.H.S. is on the case.

Bonus No. 5: If You Praise Anything about the United States.

If you think any of these plans—Altrua HealthShare, Samaritan Ministries, Christian Healthcare Ministries, Liberty HealthShare, Medi-Share Affordable Biblical Healthcare or
Aliera Companies—are health insurance that will take care of you or your family in a medical crisis, you have another think coming. Maybe Vice President Michael Richard Pence can get his team to pray away your tumor.

I start my day with Stephen Colbert, but I seldom repeat here what he, or his guests, say because, well, comedy and while I love Colbert, his comedy is only meh. For what I think may be the first time, an interview led me actually look for more of what a guest was saying. In this case the guest was Susan Glasser who writes the Letter from Trump’s Washington.

Yesterday morning I watched Colbert interview Glasser and learned the word: Trumpregierungsschlamasselschmerz. (Take note editors of dictionaries.) You’ll have to watch the interview to learn precisely what the world means. In her most recent letter, A President So Unhinged That Even Bill Barr Says He’s Out of Control—Welcome to the post-acquittal Trump Presidency, Glasser ledes:

President Trump is not moving on. He is not getting over it. In the eight days since his acquittal by the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump has shown all too clearly what he took from the experience of being the third President in American history to be impeached and tried. On Wednesday, marking the one-week anniversary of the Senate’s preordained verdict almost to the minute, reporters asked Trump what lesson he had learned from impeachment. His response was “that the Democrats are crooked . . . that they are vicious, that they shouldn’t have brought impeachment.” On Thursday, the President attacked Mike Bloomberg, John Kelly, a juror who voted to convict Roger Stone, Robert Mueller, and his own “Justice” Department. (Trump’s quotes, not mine.) And that was just before noon. Through it all, he has been carrying out a purge of those who figured, in ways large and small, in the impeachment and threatening to root out additional dissenters in his midst. “We want bad people out of our government!” the President tweeted on Thursday morning.

The level of alarm about Trump’s post-acquittal rampage has been predictably high—five-alarm-fire, red-siren-for-our-democracy high.

Glasser thought that Trump crossed a bridge too far for Attorney General William Pelham Barr:

In a striking interview with ABC News, released on Thursday afternoon, Attorney General William Barr broke with Trump over the President’s public demand that the Justice Department change its recommended prison sentence for Stone, Trump’s friend and adviser, who was convicted of lying to Congress and of other offenses that came out in the Mueller investigation. Barr denied overruling his own prosecutors in response to the President and agreed that Stone’s sentence should be reduced, but then he let loose on Trump, anyway. Trump’s tweets, Barr said, “make it impossible for me to do my job.” What’s more, he added, in a swipe at the President, “I’m not going to be bullied or influenced by anybody.”

We know now, three weeks later, that Pelham was quickly brought to heel. (Side note: I think that you can learn a lot about the roots of individuals with middle names like Pelham and Beauregard.) Glasser quotes our own senior senator, Sherrod Campbell Brown on the senates decision to let slip our man-child president. She writes:

On Capitol Hill, Democrats were already furious with their Republican colleagues about the acquittal, to a degree that I can’t recall having witnessed in my decades of observing congressional politics. They accuse G.O.P. senators of having enabled and facilitated Trump’s “Personal Retribution Tour,” as Sherrod Brown, of Ohio, termed it. “He’s unleashed,” Brown said. “The lesson is he can do whatever he wants, abuse his office, and he’ll never, ever be held accountable.” When the President, on Thursday, publicly demanded that the governor of New York drop lawsuits and other “harassment” against him—even as the Trump Administration has banned New Yorkers from joining the federal government’s “trusted traveler” program—it was an almost uncanny parallel to one of the post-acquittal scenarios that the House impeachment managers had warned about. If Trump was allowed by the Senate to withhold nearly four hundred million dollars in congressionally appropriated military aid to Ukraine, their trial brief warned, what was to stop him in the future from demanding that individual states “perform personal political favors” or else face federal wrath?

Glasser is a keen observer and excellent journalist whose craft has been honed well by her years of national and international experience. For me, the key experience was as a co-bureau chief in Moscow for the Washington Post and her coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that is where Glasser goes next:

I found myself thinking a lot this week about my experience of covering the former Soviet Union and watching aspiring authoritarians in action. Before Vladimir Putin refused to give up power, despite the Russian Constitution’s two-term limit, two senior Bush Administration officials told me that he would not do so, simply because Putin had personally assured them that he wouldn’t. These same officials believed that Putin would never arrest Russia’s richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, until he did. They also believed that Putin would never renationalize Khodorkovsky’s oil company. But he did that, too.

And we have no idea where our president might go next. He has no boundaries, no guard rails, no one holding the leash. Glasser concludes:

Still, this isn’t Russia, and, for Trump-watchers, there was a notable familiarity to the week of mayhem that followed the President’s acquittal. Although it is often difficult to look back when so much is happening each day, Trump has been nutty and angry before, ranting and vindictive, blasting norms and lying with abandon. Trump has been insulting his enemies and wreaking vengeance and claiming the “absolute right” to do things that he does not have the absolute right to do—for years. The Washington Post counted more than sixteen thousand lies, misstatements, and untruths from the President—before a single senator voted to acquit him. Months before he hijacked U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine, in service of his personal political interests, he ordered the U.S. military to the Southern border to combat a nonexistent “invasion,” only days in advance of the 2018 midterm elections. Is this time really different?

The answer, I’m afraid, is yes. In his post-impeachment rage, Trump wanted vengeance, and he wanted us to know it. There was no one inside his Administration to stop him. A month ago, Congress had at least the theoretical power to do something about his overreaching. Today, thanks to the Senate’s very clear vote, it does not. So, although the President himself is unchanged, the context around him is very much altered. In the history of the Trump Presidency, there will be a before impeachment and an after. It’s too late for lessons learned, and it’s most definitely too late for Bill Barr to complain about the President’s tweets. The constraints are gone. The leverage is lost. One ABC News interview with a single Cabinet official is not going to restore it. Trump, unhinged and unleashed, may actually turn out to be everything we feared.

Meanwhile, the economy’s grip on the precipice is loosening and our president thinks he can have his people—those who believe in that sort of thing—pray away the problems. They can’t, the adults have all left the building and we have little chance of preventing four more years of the same.

Bonus No. 1: I’ve written a letter to my local paper every day for 40 years.

Bonus No. 2: Political change with pen and paper.

Bonus No. 3: Have Yourself A Merry Super Tuesday! (Note cheer at timemark 1:15.)

Bonus No. 4: If this is your retirement plan, you’re fucked.

Bonus No. 1: The neo-Confederate rise of Joe Biden.

Bonus No. 2: Krystal Ball: Bernie can still win, here’s how.