Monday, December 31, 2018

A few random thoughts (probably useless) about Donald Trump’s wall

There used to be a time, back when America was great, when to be American was to hate a wall. It was a hatred powerful enough to shake our chief rival superpower. Remember this ten seconds? 


The United States knew then something then that we seem to have forgotten today. Walls don’t just keep people out. They also shut people in.

Little wonder that the great American poet, Robert Frost, unenthusiastically put up with, and even worked along side of an impossible neighbor, who insists on repairing a wall that serves no purpose while repeating a hollow catchphrase about walls and neighbors. Frost came to the right conclusion.


Nancy Pelosi has suggested, tongue-in-cheek, of course, that Donald Trump will settle for a beaded curtain instead of a wall. But let us not guffaw too quickly.

With Trump continuously backing off his proposal for a solid concrete wall, sometimes describing it as a slatted see-through wall, or a spiked wall, or a fence, Lindsay Graham  now insists “the wall” is really a mere metaphor for some kind of "physical barrier." I take that to mean it could be a row of saw horses, or Nancy Pelosi's beaded curtain. 

I can imagine the signs as people approach the border

"WARNING! TURN BACK! 
DANGEROUS METAPHOR AHEAD!"

No, Lindsay! No metaphors, please. I want to go with that beaded curtain.

Well, I guess the beads are a metaphor, too. But at least they'd be a physical metaphor, if I may coin a concept here. Anyway....

The beads should be brightly colored and very shiny. Perhaps we could even engrave Trump’s name on each bead. That would not only provide satisfaction to our president, who seems to like bright shiny objects with his name on them, but also would distract immigrants until ICE can come after them, rip their children out of their arms, throw the poor kids into cages, and kill some of the little ones by neglecting mysterious, esoteric, and hard-to-detect infections — such as the flu evidently is, in the opinion of Homeland Security experts on pediatrics.

I further propose that the beaded curtain should be rigged to periodically squirt jets of perfume into the adjacent air. It should be something exotic, deeply aromatic and wildly sexy. Personally, I go for Bijan. According to something I read on the web, Bijan perfume “opens in notes of ylang-ylang, narcissus, orange blossom, bergamot, neroli and pimeto.” I think they meant pimento, but you get the idea.

Bonus: A quarter ounce of the real Bijan perfume (not the toilet water or a cheap knockoff) costs so much that 1,954 miles of automated atomizers squirting perfume on the beaded curtain would help get the total budget for a barrier up to Donald Trump’s $5 billion goal. Of course, I make no promises. This could be one of those government projects that has an automatic  perfumed cost overrun.

The wall also should be equipped with loud speakers from which a looped version of Mozart’s Escape from the Seraglio will play 24/7. I mean, it makes sense just because it goes with the beaded curtain and the perfume.


But make no mistake. Thanks to the work of Robert Muller, eventually even many Democrats will demand a wall, too.                                           

They will want it to be at least ten feet high, topped with concertina wire, and watched by armed guards in towers. Here’s an example.


One more thing. We will demand that Donald Trump get incarcerated behind it.




Monday, December 24, 2018

The 12 days of Christmas — an updated carol for the Trump era

On the first day of Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
A tape of him taking a pee.

On the second day of Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Two Mnuchins munching
And a tape of him taking a pee.

On the third day of  Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Three stock markets crashing
Two Mnuchins munching
And a tape of him taking a pee.

On the fourth day of  Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Four Flynns pleading guilty
Three stock markets crashing
Two Mnuchins munching
And a tape of him taking a pee.

On the fifth day of Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Fox and Friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed 
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the sixth day of  Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the seventh day of Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the eighth day of Trump-mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Eight Bannons barking
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the ninth day of Trump-Mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Nine Reinces retching
Eight Bannons barking
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the tenth day of Trump-Mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Ten Sessions snarling
Nine Reinces Retching
Eight Bannons barking
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the eleventh day of Trump-Mas
The Trumpster gave to me
Eleven Kellys quitting
Ten Sessions snarling
Nine Reinces Retching
Eight Bannons barking
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee

On the twelfth day of Trump-Mas
The Trumpster gave to me
12 Mad Dogs resigning
Eleven Kellys quitting
Ten Sessions snarling
Nine Reinces Retching
Eight Bannons barking
Seven Cohens a-ratting
Six Sarahs lying 
Fox and friends
Four guilty Flynns 
Three markets crashed
Two Mnuchins
And a tape of him taking a pee.


Moral: There aren’t enough days of Christmas — or of the year for that matter — to list all of the disasters that Donald Trump has created. So Merry Christmas. With Trump’s finger on the button — and the vastly increased lack of adult supervision — it could quite possibly be your last.


Thursday, December 20, 2018

Betsy DeVos, outrageous fraud, Trump (of course!) — and the mysterious case of the magenta Jockey shorts

The package depicted white Jockey undershorts. As you
can see, the undershorts that came out of it were anything but.


Let’s deal with the magenta shorts first.

Their story is part of what comes down to an ancient observation: 

There’s a sucker born every minute.

An impulse purchase goes bad

Last August, I was walking past Macy’s here in New York and a thought occurred to me. Rather than wait until my underwear wears out and then have to hustle to replace it, why not stash away a package, for use when I would eventually need it?

So I ambled into Macy’s, found the men’s department, and asked where I could get a package of plain white jockey shorts. A clerk disinterestedly pointed me “that way.” Wandering “that way” I found a display of Jockey brand briefs. I found a package that portrayed white ones, the only kind I wear. I grabbed a pack and took it to a checkout counter.

A few days ago, five months after I made my purchase, it was time to replace some old briefs with some of the new ones. I pulled out the package, ripped it opened and found….the shorts were magenta!

It was a bloody outrage! Or a magenta outrage, if you will. Macy’s and Jockey had showed me white shorts, but surreptitiously sold me magenta shorts. It’s enough to make my head explode.

Does anybody for a moment think I’m going to get undressed in the locker room of my local health club and reveal I’m wearing magenta undershorts? Or go to my doctor wearing magenta undershorts? Or even meet a nice woman at a bar and….well, enough of that. You get the idea.

Evidently, you can’t be
too paranoid these days

How could this have possibly happened? Why had Jockey, or Macy’s, or Jockey and Macy’s decided to betray me? What profit is there in baiting-and-switching an old crank into buying a color he’d rather die than wear when you can just as easily sell him the white shorts he wants?

To be scrupulously, meticulously, rigorously, relentlessly fair to a fair-thee-well, had I examined every single side of the six-sided box of shorts, one side at a time, paying rigidly concentrated attention, turning it over and around, and over and around again with a fixed stare, I might have noticed…that one panel of the box did indeed reveal, through a cellophane window, that something inside was magenta. 

But I trusted the picture on the box. I was more interested in the printed information around the photograph of white Jockey shorts, to make sure I had the right size, the right design, the right brand — all of which was stated or illustrated on one broad  front panel. Who but a paranoid lunatic would start turning the box over and around and from side to side, looking for contradictory evidence? (Clearly, I wasn’t nearly paranoid enough to survive in the deceptive jungle that is modern America.)

Stuck and miserable in
a magenta nightmare

So now I’m stuck with bought-and-paid-for magentas. And no, I can’t take them back to Macy’s. Who but that paranoid lunatic I was talking about would horde receipts from a box of underpants in case he were to discover, five months later, that the wrong color had been foisted off on him? 

Moreover, I’ve ripped open the box. What am I going to do — stride into Macy’s waving magenta shorts and a torn box, with no receipt, and demand a refund for a five-months-old and now-undocumented purchase? 

They might think this is some kind of elaborate shop lifting scam. They might call security and the cops. I might end up in a cell phone video on the evening news, handcuffed and getting clubbed and tased by overzealous cops. I keep thinking about that poor woman who got beaten and her baby ripped from her arms for sitting on the floor while waiting her turn in a welfare office where there weren't enough chairs.

So I’m stuck forever with magenta. I’ve shoved the shorts into the back of my underwear drawer. No doubt when I die, somebody will go through my stuff, find the magenta shorts and say to him or herself, “I didn’t know that about him!”

Well, come to think of it, that’s not the way I want to be remembered. So after I finish writing this, I’m going to wad up all the shorts into a ball, (there were three pairs in different magenta hues) cram them into a paper bag, and then surreptitiously dump the bag into a city trash basket.

More than 30 bucks worth of underwear in the trash! All because of bait-and-switch. Or casual deception. Or a screw-the-public attitude. Which brings me around, at last, to Betsy DeVos and Donald Trump. 

When the nation’s educational system
is treated like mislabeled underpants

One of the few cabinet appointments Donald Trump made that hasn't self-destructed yet was of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. He appointed her at a time of high outrage at for-profit colleges — a great many of which proved to be nothing more than theft mills targeting the vulnerable poor.

Many for-profit colleges deceived the most vulnerable people they could find, promising them a degree and a bright future, when in fact all that the poor suckers got was a worthless piece of paper, if anything, and a lifetime of debt. One for-profit college listed their ideal recruitment targets. And guess who they were:

•Welfare moms w/Kids
•Pregnant Ladies
•Recent Divorce
•Low Self-Esteem
•Vocational Rehabilitation
•Experienced a Recent Death
•Physically/Mentally Abused
•Drug Rehabilitation
ªFired/Lay Off

DeVos had skin in the game of
financially skinning suckers alive

When Betsy DeVos’s name was first bantered about for the job of education secretary, American Progress magazine reported that 
Overall, DeVos’ paperwork showcases an extensive web of investments, several of which raise eyebrows. She has investments in companies that hound students to pay their federal loan debts, as well as in psychiatric hospitals under federal investigation for Medicare fraud. She also has more than $1 million in an undisclosed venture related to education. And although her filings do not show any direct ownership stake in a private for-profit college, she has chosen to put some of her money into firms that are invested in that industry.
Among the article’s conclusions:
•”DeVos profited from student loan misery” 
•"DeVos has a connection to a major for-profit college” 
•"DeVos has investments at firms that also own for-profit colleges”
So naturally, Donald Trump thought she’d be perfect as Secretary of Education.

Phony forgiveness of
student loans

This month, the DeVos’s U.S. Department of Education announced that it will cancel $150 million worth of student loans. But before you jump up and down with joy, and declare that Betsy has seen the light, understand what a piddling drop in the bucket this gesture is.
• In order to qualify, you can only have attended a college that a) closed and that b) went out of business between November 1, 2013 and December 4, 2015. All other victims are disqualified. 
• Not only that, but you had to be enrolled at the time the school closed, or have withdrawn no more than 120 days before the school closed.
• And furthermore, you can only qualify if you did not enroll at another of these Title IV-eligible schools within three years of the date the prior school closed.
Got all that? Then there’s more than a piddling chance that even if you were ripped off by a for-profit college, you get nothing, nothing, nothing. That includes the ripped off former students of so-called Trump “University,” which closed in 2010.

And here’s the bottom line

What really happens is, DeVos and her pals, including Donald Trump, are inoculated against serious clawbacks by some future administration from the cost of those loans. The taxpayers eat the unreimbursed costs. The victims of for-profit education remain victims. And life goes on, except for those ripped off students who are so screwed that they commit suicide.

Hey, this is America, where, when you get right down to it, everything is magenta undershorts.

Friday, December 14, 2018

Hey, what are you so mad about? We only gave you a little bit of cancer.

Human lungs destroyed by mesothelioma. Photo from the Pathology Education
Informational Resources Digital Library public access image database.
If you want or need yet another example of why the Trump administration’s urge to deregulate consumer protections are so horrifying, take a look at Johnson & Johnson. Or should they be called Murder & Murder?

A shocking piece of investigative reporting by Lisa Girion at Reuters indicates that, “Facing thousands of lawsuits alleging that its talc caused cancer, J&J insists on the safety and purity of its iconic product. But internal documents examined by Reuters show that the company’s powder was sometimes tainted with carcinogenic asbestos and that J&J kept that information from regulators and the public.”

Well, this is going to cost Johnson&Johnson some money in court. Probably. It has already cost its stockholders plenty. Last time I looked today, J&J stock was down more than nine and a half percent. 

In the end, my guess is J&J will settle some lawsuits and cheerfully continue doing business. My other guess is that government regulatory agencies will do nothing, or at least nothing significant, to make an example of J&J.

I’m not talking about damages and fines, even costly punitive fines. Big business has come to regard those as simply the cost of doing business. I’m talking about charges of negligent homicide, and stiff prison terms for J&J executives, from the very top down, who knew their product was carcinogenic and hushed up the news to protect sales and profits.

Since the discovery and subsequent lying about asbestos in their talc goes back to at least 1972, it’s possible that some of the guilty parties are already dead and others are retired. Fine, haul the still-living criminal old farts out of their retirement homes, perp walk ‘em into court, and put their evil butts on trial, same as we used to do for war criminals.

Justice demands it. The corpses of God-knows-how many people who died of mesothelioma and ovarian cancer caused by J&J products demand it. The deaths, still to come, of others, coughing and gasping for breath, demand it.

I know, I know. It ain’t gonna happen. Yet. 

Unless enough people make enough noise, long enough.

Consider this a shout. I hope it’s an early one that will eventually join others and become a roar so loud, it will be impossible for politicians and prosecutors to cover their ears any longer.

Monday, December 10, 2018

A completely private note to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: Jewish smooish, bubbeleh. As long as you’re a progressive Democrat, you’ll mostly give me naches.

That's funny, you don't look Jewish.
So listen, bubbeleh, because I’m trying to help here. 

These days there seems to be a surprise a minute in the New York Times. Most of those surprises aren’t all that surprising in this era of Trump, because with Trump in the White House, a day that goes by that he doesn’t say something that’s outrageously surprising is the only surprise that actually surprises people any more. [Yes, that does so make sense. Read it again, slowly.]

But what’s really surprising is when somebody you didn’t expect to be surprising surprises you. 

Am I talking to you, Congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez? Does a fried latke have living relatives in a potato field?

This past weekend, you addressed the crowd in a Queens, NY synagogue, letting on that you’re Jewish. Well okay, a Catholic who’s got Jewish ancestors. As The New York Times explained:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the self-described Puerto Rican “girl from the Bronx” who is set to become the youngest congresswoman in American history next month, added another layer to a complex personal story: She has Jewish heritage. 
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, made the reveal on Sunday evening at a Jackson Heights synagogue in Queens, telling the crowd that “a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.” 
She dated her ancestry to those who had to flee Europe during the Spanish Inquisition more than 500 years ago, and sought refuge in the New World. “Some of those people landed in Puerto Rico,” she explained.
You went on to say that “As is the story of Puerto Rico, we are a people that are an amalgamation. We are no one thing. We are black, we are indigenous, we are Spanish, we are European.” And in the spirit, I suspect, of kinehora — a ritual for warding off the evil eye, pupupu — you threw in the disclaimer, “Before everyone jumps on me — yes, culture isn’t DNA.”

So okay, I get what you’re saying — and I should drop dead before I’d argue with a word of it. And I also know that Sephardic isn’t Ashkenazic, and that — before the nitpickers and Jewish history wonks hak mir a chainik on this —the language of your Jewish ancestors was Ladino, not Yiddish. 

All the same, if you’ll permit this ufgeregt his ufgeregtig thoughts, I have a thing or few to say.

Shoyte! What, you didn’t see what Trump did to Elizabeth Warren when she said she had a little bit of native American ancestry? If he called her Pocahontas, what’s he going to call you the first time you oppose one of his pet projects, like shtupping cages full of crying and terrified children and shipping their parents off to another country?

He’s probably sitting on the edge of his bed right now, scratching his pupik and trying to make up sarcastic names to call you when he launches a Twitter attack against you. Fortunately, he doesn’t speak Yiddish. Unfortunately, he can call in his Jewish daughter and….oh wait, I forgot. 

Well anyway, he can call in his really Jewish son-in-law, who happens to be a shonda to the rest of us if you ask me — and maybe they’ll cook something up.

But my guess is they’ll settle for calling you Yentl! Donald Trump may have heard that name before.



I.B. Singer, my favorite Yiddish author, who wrote the book on which they based the Yentl movie is another story. I suspect the last time Donald Trump opened a book, the title was “This Is Dick And Jane,” and that he lost interest after it became clear there weren’t going to be any pictures of Jane taking her clothes off. 

But I digress. Anyway, whatever you do, don't get a DNA test.

Another thing I need to bring up — can we talk, Alexandria? — is this whole Israel-Palestine thing. Now I know the old saying that, on any matter at all, if you have two Jews you’ll get three opinions. That is, if you’re lucky and don’t get 37 opinions and 52 commentaries from kibitzers. But this business of blasting Israel over territorial disputes and who’s occupying what has to be seriously reconsidered. And then rephrased.

I mean, I can see you’re beginning to get a sense of things when the Times of Israel runs a headline that says: 

Ocasio-Cortez criticizes ‘occupation of Palestine,’ but admits she’s no expert

Oi, Alexandria! That’s like me saying, "Donald Trump is a shediker, nudnik and a ganse goniff — but what do I know?"

How about clearly and firmly taking a position that would enable Israel to survive as the one place in the world where it’s safe to be Jewish, while still providing Palestinians with separate autonomy? I’m talking about a two-state solution, borders and other details to be negotiated — okay then, negotiated yet another time — across a conference table.

This would prevent the likes of Netanyahu — his teeth should rot in his head — from creating an apartheid state, which would not only justifiably raise the world's hackles but also rapidly become a Jewish-minority state, given the relative birthrates of Israelis and Palestinians. 

The two-state solution would give Israel a future, while getting some of the Israel-haters off everybody’s back.

But as my grandmother said, what do I know?