No, Mr. Trump, you can’t just revoke an act of Congress without Congressional approval. That’s a coup d’état.

Donald Trump treats the United States Constitution as if it's a piece of this.
(Photo: Wikimedia commons)

Just when you think he can’t get any worse, Donald Trump proves that after worse, there's more worse. And after that there's even worser. Ad infinitum.

The New York Times reports that Trump plans to roll  back California’s authority to set stricter auto emissions rules.

That draft Trump rule also included a plan to revoke a legal waiver, granted to the state of California under the 1970 Clean Air Act, allowing it to set tougher state-level standards than those put forth by the federal government.

Uh, small problem. If the president can revoke acts of Congress, then law, and Congress, and democracy have no meaning any more. We have been plunged into an absolute dictatorship, or perhaps an absolute monarchy, where the president makes and revokes laws according to his own whims.

Never mind that so much as even suggesting California’s pollution rules should be rolled back could be headlined around the world with something like: Trump To Planet Earth: F.U!

Never mind that there’s no sane reason to move in the direction of more pollution and more CO2 omission and more fossil fuel consumption when the very existence of life on earth is at stake.

But at least pay attention to this:

Donald J. Trump has just wiped his bottom with the Constitution of the United States and is now attempting to flush it down the toilet.

And the question is, will the obsequious lickspittles whom Trump and other Republicans have appointed to the court go along with this abomination? Or will they somehow assemble enough collective spine to put a stop to it, and smack down this flagrant abuse of the Constitution pronto?

Investigate the S.O.B.

Is he beginning to act like a cornered rat?

Only in Donald Trump’s world of double-speak and garble-think could a decisive loss of a majority in the House of Representatives be considered a victory. But up is down and out is in when you visit the world of Trump. Right after the election results revealed he had lost the House of Representatives he tweeted:

“Received so many Congratulations from so many on our Big Victory last night, including from foreign nations (friends) that were waiting me out, and hoping, on Trade Deals. Now we can all get back to work and get things done!3:21 AM - 7 Nov 2018”

However, Trump may not be feeling as victorious as he lets on. Something about the Democratic House majority scares the living crap out of Trump. What do you suppose it could be?

The New York Times reports: 

But even as he claimed victory, he quickly went on offense against the newly elected Democratic House, threatening to retaliate if the opposition uses its new subpoena power to investigate him for corruption and obstruction of justice in an early foreshadowing of the bitter partisan warfare that could dominate the next two years. 

“If the Democrats think they are going to waste Taxpayer Money investigating us at the House level, then we will likewise be forced to consider investigating them for all of the leaks of Classified Information, and much else, at the Senate level,” he wrote. “Two can play that game!”

If Trump has nothing to hide — if he is covering up nothing rank and criminal  — he could blithely let the Dems waste their precious time investigating to their heart’s content. The fact that, before the new Congress even finds its seats in the House, he’s threatening a counter-investigation if anyone dares investigate him reeks with the rank aroma of fear. 

His behavior merely adds to the growing stink of criminality in the White House. Foreign emoluments are already way out in the open, from foreign diplomats making certain to stay at Trump hotels, to China’s licensing of Ivanka’s trademarks.  The question is, what lies hidden under the rocks — and inside Trump’s thus-far secret tax returns?

There’s only one way to find out. It’s time for a House investigation.

And then he fired Jeff Sessions. A few hours after I posted the first part of this piece, Trump fired Jeff Sessions, his attorney general. It's clear what Trump is after — an end to special counsel Muller's investigation of collusion with the Russians — and other matters that for all we know range from bribery, to multiple forms of corruption, to espionage, to possibly even treason.

Desperate men do desperate things. Tump must be intensely desperate to commit a contemporary version of the Saturday Night Massacre that led to the unraveling of the Nixon Administration and Nixon's resignation in anticipation of impeachment.

When the rock under which Trump's grave crimes and misdemeanors are hidden is turned over, what crawls out from under it may be enough to turn your stomach.

The Donald Trump, Cuomo-Nixon, Dead Tree Parks Department Blues

Two years ago, the New York City Department of Parks cut down a
tall, leafy mature tree that stood here. Recently, they replaced it
with this obviously dead sapling. More complaints below.

If it seems I’ve been posting to this allegedly political blog at an unconscionably slow pace recently, you’re absolutely right.

I have a theory about why I feel about as incentivized to post most days as I feel a yearning to hike up to Central Park and take a long drink of water out of its algae-choked lake. Yes, you guessed the reason.

Donald Trump.

Trump not only sucks the oxygen out of the room, he also sucks it out of human brains. How long can anybody go on even thinking about that zombie, much less writing about him regularly? 

I wake up each morning wondering, “Now what the hell has he done?” I rarely have to wait until nightfall before I find out. It’s usually another dispiriting commission of horror-by-tweeting, if not by firing of somebody who sneaked into his administration despite demonstrable competency, if not yet another new diplomatic or racial contretemps.  

Whatever the news, our phony president will label it as “fake news” the minute it boomerangs back on him and whacks him in the teeth.

So I need distractions. That’s why last night, here in New York, I sat down to watch a one-time-only debate between the Democratic Party’s primary candidates for governor of New York, the incumbent Mario Cuomo and his challenger, the actor Cynthia Nixon.

The Cuomo vs. Nixon prizefight

Prior to watching, I felt that although I vastly prefer Cynthia Nixon’s political outlook to what I regard as Andrew Cuomo’s crass opportunism, she simply lacks the political and managerial chops to be a successful governor. I mean, one rank amateur in a position of considerable political power these days is more than enough.

Her inexperience was already showing before the debate. She is pitifully under-financed, inept at raising funds from small contributors the way Bernie Sanders can, and uninspiring despite her mostly spot-on political positions, her name recognition, and the fact that I’d really like to see a woman take charge in Albany. 

So it was my intention to vote for Nixon in the primary, not in hope that she’d win it (she can’t possibly) but as a way of demonstrating to Cuomo that some of us loyal Democratic voters think he’s a bit too much of a hack apparatchik and a phony. We need a better Democratic governor overseeing a vast infrastructure, most of it in a condition of decline, decay and decrepitude. And no, decline, decay and decrepitude is not a three-headed redundancy. Each word has a slightly different meaning.

Zinger for zinger

both turned out to suck

Unfortunately, the “debate” was one of those shouting matches that turn far too many TV discussions into a chaotic approximation of  a callithumpian. Instead of intelligent debating points, we got an exchange of insults, put-downs, and zingers. This all confirmed  my deepest fears, that Nixon is an unworthy featherweight, and Cuomo is a mindless weathervane whose direction can be divined by checking on which way the political wind is blowing. A plague on both of them.

Which leaves me….what? Nada, that’s what. I can simply withhold my vote in this primary. Come the actual gubernatorial election, I will not, in good conscience, vote for any Republican at this moment in American history. Perhaps I can find some weird rump party to throw my vote away to. Is there still an American Vegetarian Party? (Not that I’m at all a vegetarian.) Is the Rent Is Too Damn High Party still active in New York State? Or do I have to write in Weird Al Yankovich’s name to express my rage and frustration?

I think that I shall never see

my Parks Department plant a tree

Go to the New York City Department of Parks website and you can find a one-paragraph prose poem in honor of of trees that ought to be entered in a Most Promising Nine-Year-Old poetry contest — assuming we ever get around to having a contest in celebration of immature authors who praise the obvious. I quote:

Our street trees are living breathing parts of our communities (though they often go unnoticed). They bring us shade in the warm months, shield us from the cold in the winter, and provide fresh air for us to breath all year long. To better grow and protect our urban forest it is important to get acquainted with your NYC trees.

This is why I was surprised, in fact startled — no, in fact shocked!— when more  than two years ago, the very same Department of Parks came down our street with a truck and a chain saw and sawed down two gorgeous, leafy old trees that had provided not only shade, but also some respite from the clouds of carbon monoxide  and other noxious gasses that passing cars vomit into the faces of passing pedestrians.

No doubt the tree-killing parks department would claim that the trees were “diseased,” whatever that means. They were big, sturdy, leafy, and in no visible danger of falling that I could see. Moreover, subsequent events convinced me that this city’s Department of Parks wouldn’t know a thriving mature tree from a chewed up pencil.

More than two years after they cut down the leafy trees, after constant badgering and pleading by individuals, and at least one building’s co-op board, and my City Councilman, the city came by last spring and planted two frail-looking saplings. One may yet make it, and twenty years from now — far beyond the time I am even vaguely likely to be alive according to  the actuarial tables — we may yet have a full-fledged adolescent tree growing in that spot. 

The other? That little toothpick of a disheveled sapling looked dead when they planted it. I didn’t say anything because, hey, what do I know about trees? But despite all kinds of rainfall, and sunshine, and summer warmth, its pathetic leaves have not un-shriveled. They just limply hang there, brown, brittle and lifeless. I am finally coming to terms with the fact that the parks people spent God-knows-how-many dollars to cut down a living tree and replace it, more than two years later, with a dead tree.

I suppose I could get my City Councilman back on the case. Maybe  if I did, a year or two from now somebody would come by again and cut down the dead sapling. And then, with continued badgering, they’d come by two years after that, and plant another sapling.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if that one turns out to be dead, too.

The Donald, The Hillary and the Dada of American politics

This is either a work of art or

 an American presidential election

And so, it has finally come down to this: 

A century after Dadism gave up on real painting and sculpture (because what was the point now that nearly everyone in the western world had a camera?) Americans have given up on real hope that politics can improve their lives, or right the nation’s wrongs instead of perpetuating and extending them. 

Because what's the point of hoping any more?

The great Dadaist Marcel Duchamp in 1917 signed a urinal with a fake name and declares that it was art because he said it was art. It was, of course, a parody of art.

Ninety-nine years later we have a looming parody of a presidential election.

On one side, there's Donald Trump, who says we’ll make America great again because he says we’ll make America great again, just as Duchamp said it was art because he said it was art. 

And you can bet your bottom dollar (if you still have a dollar by then) that America will be great again primarily, or perhaps only, because the Donald will not only declare its greatness but also have you beaten by goons with rubber hoses if you disagree.

By then we might also be in a nuclear war with oh, say, North Korea. Or China. Or Iran. Or why not Pakistan? The war will be  conducted to demonstrate The Donald’s pride in his own unpredictability. 

Or Trump may have crashed the economy by then. Or he’ll have replaced Obamacare (and perhaps Medicare, too) with nothing, nothing, nothing.

The only thing that's nearly for sure is that we won't have a wall on the Mexican border — unless Trump makes you and me pay for it.

But that will be great, because the Donald will tell you it’s great.

On the other hand we have Hillary, she of the secret speeches to the enemy, whom she now appears to be assiduously courting in the wake of her own perceived inevitability. 

Nevermind that without Bernie’s backers it’s even money whether she'll win the election. It’s more important to her to make nice to a handful of neocons — only a handful of them since the vast majority of the so-called Conservative right would sooner pluck out their own eyeballs and eat them than vote for her.

One must assume that Hillary assumes…that the  young and vital left wing of the Democratic party will get swept up in her wake, like so many putrifrying half eaten hotdogs, and cigarette butts, and chewing gum wrappers sucked into the wake of a departing ferry. 

One must assume she believes that the left fears of a right wing Supreme Court nomination or three will cause a disaffected 45 percent or so of the Democratic party to vote for her regardless of anything else.

Pray that, horrid as Hillary is, she is right. We are already on the verge of a court fiat that will completely legitimize corruption. If we don’t get a Democratic appointee to replace Justice Scalia, and other aging justices as they depart, the next thing we’ll have is a restoration of the divine right of kings, with kingship and other titles and entitlements of medieval nobility bestowed on those who can bid the highest.

Get ready for King Charles and King David (Koch). 

This nation has already demonstrated that deliberate nonsense — nonsense more nonsensical than the Dadist art of the early 20th Century — works as brilliantly in politics as it works on museum walls.

Life in these United States is now a nonsense poem. Sanity and progress are dead. Long live insanity and wet rot! Or to quote a Dartmouth College freshman (not me) named Lawrence L. Kramer more than half a century ago:

Tara and sis boom bah, boys

Go play your fife and drum

The Captain isn’t here, boys

He never said he’d come

He won’t be here tomorrow

He wasn’t here today

So play your fife and drum, boys

And waste your lives away

Guns, Trump, Cruz, open carry petitions, and a surefire (no pun intended)…a surefire way to insure peace among Republicans.

Imagine the Republican presidential convention if every

attendee carries one of these

I note, admittedly not without a slight frisson of sangfroid coursing through my veins, that there’s a move afoot to allow open carry weapons at the forthcoming Republican convention, and that people are petitioning for it.

Now it happens that there are also some rascally folks who have openly and unscrupulously theorized that the petitioners are trolls. Imagine that! They say the petition is there to embarrass the Republicans into opposing one of the sacred principles of their own platform — specifically, support of an unfettered, unregulated, unpoliced, unlicensed Second Amendment right to, uh, blast bad guys off the face of the earth for, uh, self-defense.

According to that theory of trolling, the Republicans will be such silly sissies that they will be terrified of all those guns in their midst and oppose open carry even as Republican legislators and judges try to force it on schools and other places where the hoi polloi and their young children mingle. 

Nonsense! Republicans are red-blooded Americans who were given their right to open carry firearms by God Himself. I know they will get behind this petition — which will fill their convention hall with good guys with guns, thus rendering themselves safe from terrorist, communist, gay activist, socialist and possibly even dadaist, surrealist, and impressionist attacks. With so many Republicans openly carrying, the convention can’t be anything but completely peaceable. 

Little wonder that as of this posting, over 41,000 red blooded Americans have already signed the petition.

And little wonder Donald Trump says he is seriously studying the proposal. In fact, before you read the next paragraph, you should sign the Republican Convention open carry petition, here.

You’ve done that? Good for you. But before you go away, let me make a modest proposal concerning history, Alexander Hamilton, and Aaron Burr. That’s Burr on the left. You can find Hamilton on any of the $10 bills in your wallet. Or at right.

Aaron Burr. He knew how

solve a dispute between

high-ranking politicians

Alexander Hamilton.

During his duel with Burr

he missed. Burr didn't.

Both men had a dislike for each other that rivaled, or came close to

rivaling, anything festering between Trump and Cruz today.

In the end, Hamilton and Burr settled their differences the conservatively manly way — and remember, you Federalist Originalists, both dudes were founding fathers. In 1807, Hamilton and Burr fought a pistol duel. Burr won. Hamilton lost. And if two consenting founding fathers did it, it had to be constitutionally protected.

Given the dispute between Trump and Cruz over whose wife is uglier and who did or did not have a little tart — or a few little tarts — baking on the side, not to mention something about spilled beans, I think there’s only one way to settle their dispute so that the rest of us can get some sleep. Yes, I’m talking about the old-fashioned way. With a firearms duel.

Hamilton and Burr used front-loading pistols. But technology has advanced, and as the NRA will tell you, there’s no reason the average joe shouldn’t be walking, or driving around, or lazing on the couch with an automatic or semi-automatic assault weapon equipped with a 30 bullet magazine.

So that’s what I propose for the Trump vs. Cruz duel to the death. And both guys are so brave and macho, I’m sure neither of them will wimp out of the contest. 

Afterwards, the winner can go to the Republican nominating convention, openly carrying a firearm. Because with so many good guys armed to the teeth, just as the Republican party has been advocating, nothing can possibly go wrong.

Five rumors invented by this blog to concern, alarm, excite, and inflame the paranoia of panicky Republicans

I haven’t posted for the past few weeks because I’ve been left almost dumbstruck by the extent of small-mindedness, unreasonable “reasoning,” fake science, complete disregard for facts, insane rants, and other thinking , either of the stupid or the neo-Nazi kind, that seems to be prevalent in the Republican party.

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? That Cruz, and Carson, and Christy, and Carly, and Trump, and (ad infinitum) are full of crap? That it’s alarming how we are tumbling pell mell down the slippery slope toward totalitarianism? That the denial of science is not only stupid but suicidal for the planet? That allowing only “Christians” to immigrate to this country is a de facto establishment of religion in violation of the United States Constitution?

Nah! It’s all being said. Over and over again. And meanwhile, rumors, misinformation, outright lies, and filthy slanders abound to reinforce either the sclerotic Congressional status quo, or the candidacy of whacko Republican candidates. 

One of Trump's towers. Why so big? The

grainy secret is revealed in this blog post.

So if you can’t lick ‘em, join ‘em. Here are some rumors I’ve deliberately invented, just to see if the stuff that springs from my head is as good as the stuff that springs from Republican heads. 

1. What the Trump towers are really for.  There are several Trump towers in New York City. One is at Columbus Circle. Another on Fifth Avenue. Still another on First Avenue near the UN building. Other tall buildings bear his name on the Upper East Side. Why so many? Well, currently they contain  hotels and the apartments of millionaires and billionaires. But that is only temporary. Long term, comes the world wide famine caused by global warming, they will be used to store grain.

2. Global warming is real, but not for the reasons you think. Yes, there is an international conspiracy of scientists who are trying to keep the truth from you. They have been paid off by the oil industry and Big Government “libtards” to avoid the total panic that might occur if everyone knew the truth.

The truth is that the earth is heating up because the planet has been knocked off its axis and out of its orbit by too much and too-powerful fracking. Earth is now racing toward the sun on an erratically spiraling path that makes us feel too hot one day, too cold the next. But in the long run, we will all be fried, baked and barbecued alive by solar heat. 

Jeff Bezos in his space duds, practicing

to flee Earth with his fellow billionaires

before we're swallowed up by the sun.

In fact, the reason some billionaires like Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic) and Jeff Bezos  (Amazon) are pioneering “commercial” space travel is, they’ve been tipped off that we’re heading on a wobbly course to the solar crematorium. 

Their plan is to sell one-way tickets to another planet for $800,000,000 per seat, economy class, more for Business and First Class. Better upgrade if you can. Seventeen months in a narrow Coach Class seat could be mighty painful on your read end. And yes, baggage, meals and even use of the toilet will be extra. You don’t have that kind of money? Even for Economy? Then you’re toast, pal. Literally.

3. The blonde boy from Brazil.  The late author and playwright Ira Levin, an agreeable guy who at one time was my neighbor, wrote a book called "The Boys From Brazil." It's about a bunch of little Adolph Hitlers, cloned from the original, placed strategically by old Nazis to take over the world. The book later became a movie.

Well, Ira was partly right. There is one “boy from Brazil.” And don't be surprised if you learn that he's Donald Trump. But The Donald was not cloned from Hitler. He was a frozen embryo, fathered not by Fred Trump or by Cranky Adolph, but by Reinhard Heydrich, the “blond beast of the S.S,” who gained Hitler’s favor by making statements such as, “We will Germanize the Czech vermin,” and later became known as “The Butcher of Prague.” 

Reinhard Heydrich (right) with

Henrich Himmler. Note that 

Heydrich was photographed

with his hat on. Want to guess

what's under there?

Heydrich was every bit as good at spreading hatred as Trump is, but other parallels are equally eerie. Both Hydrich and Trump had several wives.  Both were military school cadets, Trump at the now-defunct New York Military Academy. (And by the way, what happened to Donald Trump’s school records, once kept at the military school? Hmm?) Both Heydrich and Trump were efficient organizers and builders. 

Ominously, one of Heydrich’s biographers wrote of him: “Among a crowd of lackeys, imbeciles and unredeemable thugs, Heydrich stands out as the one man who not only seethed with utter hatred mixed with emotional indifference for the welfare of others, but also knew exactly how to do something about it. He was, at that iron heart, a psychopath.”

Need proof that The Donald is The Blond Beast’s frozen embryo son? Notice that Donald Trump has never shown you his birth certificate. Not a legitimate one, at any rate. How can he, when he was born in a test tube? 

4. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are part of a sleeper cell. No no, not Muslim. Cuban. Their so-called “conservative” leanings are only a ruse. They were sent here by Fidel Castro to take over the government by becoming President, and then turn the United States into a Cuban communist satellite. There are two of them so in case something happens to one of them, there will still be another. Mark my words, in 30 years, if the Earth hasn’t been swallowed up by the sun yet, you’ll be speaking Spanish with a Cuban accent, and  driving a 30-year-old Chevrolet .

5. Carly Fiorina is the illegitimate daughter of Leona Helmsley, the Queen of Mean. Or maybe of Cruella de Vil. I mean, what proof do you Little People need?