The assurance of an extreme right winger

I am heading back in Monterey today after spending a wonderful two weeks with my grandchildren and their parents. Much of my time was spent just hanging out, going to playgrounds, playing games, and reading books with the children but I did take the opportunity to visit some friends and relatives in the area.

One day, I visited my cousin and his wife for lunch and it turned out that his brother and his wife were also visiting from Canada and it was great to see all of them after a space of about seven years. While we were chatting, a neighbor of my cousin’s dropped by the house, a man named John. He was about my age, and my ever-hospitable cousin invited him and he came in. He immediately started talking. What astonished me was that he began making the most extreme right-wing pronouncements. These included things like the US is no longer a country because under Biden, it has an open-door policy that lets anyone in (and he clearly meant the refugees at the southern border) and gives them handouts. He said that we should have walls like Israel does. He said that people in the US do not want to work anymore because they too get handouts from the government. He said that the current economic inflation was entirely due to Biden’s policies. He said that young people today are lazy and do not want to study or work hard because they expected the government to take care of them. And on and on.

What was astonishing was not that he had these views. These are quite common in the US. It was that he felt free to utter them as incontrovertible truths in the presence of strangers whom he had met for the first time. One is familiar with the dictum that one should avoid discussing politics and religion in social settings because those topics can generate great passion and animosity. But he sailed right past that taboo.
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Trump’s methods for avoiding accountability for his actions

Trump is not a clever person. But he does have a strong sense of cunning whenever anything involves his self-interest. This is evident in the way that he avoids leaving a paper trail that will enable authorities to pin crimes on him. One of the ways he does this is by avoiding putting things in writing. It is reported that does not use email and avoids as much as possible giving written instructions to his underlings, instead issuing verbal orders. This allows him to deny that he ever did so, leaving others to take the rap. He will likely eventually blame some poor sap for the recent revelations of top secret documents being sent to Mar-a-Lago.

In addition to all the investigations into presidential wrongdoings ,we should not forget the investigations into possible tax fraud involving his private businesses. One of the charges is that he inflates the values of his properties when using them as collateral to obtain loans but hugely reduces their value when filing his taxes. Forced to give a deposition recently during this investigation, Trump invoked the fifth amendment over 400 times in his efforts to avoid answering the questions posed to him by New York’s attorney general Letitia James.
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Trump needlessly alienates the allies he needs

Donald Trump is facing difficulties on many fronts, with many former allies and people who worked for him distancing themselves from him, though his hard core base seems to be intact, if possibly getting smaller. In such a situation, you would think that he would try to retain as many allies as possible.

But he is so thin-skinned that even the slightest perception of a criticism of him causes him to lash out. The latest target is Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the US Senate. It is McConnell who blocked many of the actions taken by Congress against Trump, such as the two impeachments. Trump should be grateful to him
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Parkland killer and the M’Naghten rule

In the penalty phase trial of the person who has pleaded guilty to carrying out the massacre of 17 people in the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in February 2018, the defense has argued that he should not be executed but instead serve life in prison without parole because “his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own,” by his childhood and even while in his mother’s womb because she was a drug and alcohol addict, and thus he should not be held responsible for his actions.

The prosecution meanwhile has argued that he deserves to die for the “goal-directed, planned, systematic murder – mass murder – of 14 students, an athletic director, a teacher and a coach”. Note the word ‘deserves’. This raises once again the strong retributive strain that runs through the US legal system, the backward looking view hat people should be punished harshly because of who they are and what they have done, not for any benefit the punishment might provide for society. The defense is arguing that the killer was not acting because of decisions made freely by a normally functioning brain but was following the compulsions of a brain that was ‘broken’. In other words, both prosecution and defense are using ideas of free will but the defense is arguing that in this special case, he did not have it.
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Who knew that Finns were like Americans?

Some of you may be familiar with the recent fuss in Finland about the behavior of their prime minister Sanna Marin. She became prime minister in 2019 at age 34, becoming the youngest ever chief executive of a country.. Recently a video was released on social media of her dancing at a private party and clearly having a good time.

Then questions were raised in parliament about the appropriateness of her behavior and some even suggested that she may have taken drugs other than alcohol.
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Why was the US presidential transition such a mess?

The US may possibly have the longest transition period between presidential administrations in the world between the election and the swearing in of the new president. Presidential elections are held on the Tuesday after the first Monday in November, which means that it falls between November 2nd and 8th, while the inauguration is held on January 20th of the following year, which gives a transition period of about two and a half months. That should be plenty to ensure a smooth transition and in general that is what happens.

The Trump-Biden transition was chaotic to say the least. This was mainly due to Trump spending much of that time denying that he had lost and fruitlessly plotting ways to stay in office, which meant that the normal pace of packing and storing had to be compressed into a frantic few days before the 20th. The revelations of the search warrant executed by the FBI on Mar-a-Lago shows how messy the transition was from the Trump to the Biden presidency.
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The great Paul Robeson

Paul Robeson (1898-1976) was a giant of a man, not just physically but by virtue of his many talents as a professional athlete, lawyer, singer, actor, and political activist. By rights, he should be much better known than he is in the US. One should find his name on public buildings and monuments but his political activism, his steadfast support of socialism and the working class, his anti-imperialism, and his relentless denunciations of American racism made him a pariah to the ruling elites in the US who tried their best to derail his career and ruin his life and they partially succeeded.

In Howard Bryant’s excellent book The Heritage that deals with black athletes and politics that I reviewed here, he described Robeson’s testimony in 1956 to the House Un-American Activities Committee that hauled him up before Congress and tried to berate him. But he was defiant in his testimony.
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It is so hard to get good legal help if you are a rotten client

It appears that Trump is finding it hard to get top-notch lawyers to work on his many legal fights, ending up with second-tier advocates.

Former President Donald Trump and his team have spent days since the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago trying to assemble a “team of respected lawyers” but keep getting rejected, according to The Washington Post.

“Everyone is saying no,” a prominent Republican lawyer told the outlet.
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Jon Sale, a former Watergate prosecutor who is now a prominent Florida defense attorney, told the Post he turned Trump down last week.
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While Corcoran and Trusty submitted filings in the case, Trump’s other attorneys have been tasked with making his case to the public in media appearances.
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Pence increases his distance from Trump

Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president, has condemned the attacks on the FBI for their execution of a search warrant on Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago, further signaling that at least some members of the Republican party want to distance themselves from Trump’s hysterical reaction that triggered anger among his supporters who threatened violence against the fbi and the department of justice.

“I … want to remind my fellow Republicans we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decision that he made without attacking the rank-and-file law enforcement personnel at the FBI,” Pence said on Wednesday at New Hampshire’s Saint Anselm College.

“The Republican party is the party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal, state and local level. And these attacks on the FBI must stop,” he said.

But what was even more interesting was that he seemed to be inviting the January 6th committee to ask him to testify before the panel.

“If there was an invitation to participate, I would consider it…I would have to reflect on the unique role that I was serving as vice-president… “It would be unprecedented in history for the vice-president to be summoned to testify on Capitol Hill. But, as I said, I don’t want to prejudge ever any formal invitation rendered to us.”

Trump has been lashing out furiously at the committee and all those who have testified, since those hearings have really damaged him. He must be apoplectic that even his once-loyal lapdog seems to offering to cooperate with it.

IRS starts process to provide free online tax filing software

The current tax filing system in the US is absurdly complex. Part of the reason is that the tax code is used to achieve various economic and social goals by making them have economic consequences. Another reason is that special interest groups lobby hard to get favorable items put into the code to benefit their own interests.

One of the less-publicized items in the big bill that was passed recently known as the Inflation Reduction Act is a provision to allow the IRS to study the creation software that people can use to file their taxes online.

The sweeping domestic policy bill passed by the House and Senate last week mandates that the IRS study options to provide a free tax filing option for Americans. That study represents a threat to the for-profit tax prep industry dominated by TurboTax, a product of the Silicon Valley company Intuit.
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Unlike many developed countries, the U.S. does not offer free tax filing services for taxpayers, who instead pay billions of dollars every year to highly profitable private tax prep companies.

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