There’s nothing the least bit radical about one of the “radical” ideas of Sanders and Warren. If anything, it’s a bit old-fashioned.

Probable Trump voters. (Just sayin'.) Photo swiped from

PeopleOfWalmart.com. This has nothing to do with the

comments below. I just needed a picture of something.

Below, a three-paragraphs-long list of some high-achieving Americans, both living and deceased. Glance at all the names and then — quickly — figure out what they all had in common: 

General and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. Inventor of the polio vaccine Jonas Salk. Actor Tony Curtis. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Composer Yip Harburg. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Composer Ira Gershwin. Author Henry Miller. Photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Keep reading, because there’s more: 

Composer Frank Loesser. Theoretical physicist Julian Schwinger. Author Upton Sinclair, Jr. Millionaire investor Bernard Baruch. Actor Jud Hirsch. Congress of Racial Equality Chairman Roy Innis. Internet Protocol inventor Robert E. Kahn. Trade unionist A. Philip Randolph. Author Lewis Mumford. Keep going, because there’s still more.

 Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Artist Ben Shahn. United States Senator Robert F. Wagner. Psychiatrist Albert Ellis. Newscaster and reporter Daniel Schorr. Author of The Godfather Mario Puzo. Semiconductor entrepreneur Andrew Gove. Actor Zero Mostel. Nobel Prize-winning physicist and astronomer Arno Allan Penzias.

Figured it out yet?

Before I give you the answer, let me mention that this is just a partial list of famous high achievers who had this thing in common. But okay, I’ve probably kept at least a few of my readers in suspense long enough.

They were all graduates of the City College of New York — CCNY as it’s called locally — when it was free. You can find a fuller list here.

And remember, CCNY was only one of the free city colleges. There was also Brooklyn College (Frank McCourt, David Geffen, Dominic Chianese, Barbara Boxer, Alan Dershowitz, Bernie Sanders, and many others.) 

And Queens College (Jerry Seinfeld, Paul Simon, Joy Behar, Gary Ackerman, Carole King, Marvin Hamlisch, Robert Moog. And many others.)

Free education is 

cost-effective education

Before the squeeze-‘em’-till-they-bleed Conservatives began to choke off the funding, CCNY alone was known as “the poor man’s Harvard.” And judging from all their distinguished alumni, they produced contributors to America’s prosperity, leadership, and scientific advancement far more cost-effectively than Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Each time the city’s colleges turned out another alumnus, they helped to improve the economy, and scientific advancement of the United States.

These days, their funding strangled directly and indirectly by ever-increasing tax cuts for the obscenely rich, these institutions are forced to charge tuition. It’s still modest tuition by the standard of most private colleges, but the cost nevertheless prevents an unknown number of future potential contributors to America's greatness from getting a college education .

Nor was the concept of free or cheap college limited to New York City. The great land grant colleges and universities — places like Texas A&M, Cornell, Ohio State, Purdue, and Iowa State, among many others — were founded on pretty much the same idea. When Americans yearn for the time when America was “great” they are yearning, in fact, for a time when a college education for most could be free, or at least so dirt cheap that nobody had to go into debt for it.

But will rich people

get a "free ride?"

Some, I suppose. However, I don’t hear either Warren or Sanders promising to send your kid on a free four year excursion through the Ivy League. They’re talking about the public and land grant colleges and universities. So if, say, some future Trump kid can’t make it into Harvard or even Haverford, I suppose they can make a stab at Podunk State, and sail through tuition free if any Trump has the brains to survive. But so what?

We’ve had free elementary and secondary education in America for two or more centuries now. So far I haven’t heard anybody complain that Chauncey (“Chip”) Chizzlewit the Third went to public school free, from kindergarten through high school, and didn’t pay a nickel of tuition. It’ll be largely the taxes the rich will pay that will finance free public education anyway, so if they want to take advantage of it, fine. 

Come to think of it, maybe mixing with the likes of thee and me will teach the spoiled rich a thing or two about tolerance. And perhaps they’ll all figure out that they’re not all Very Special Stable Geniuses after all.

The point is, free college education isn’t a radical idea. Preventing free college education is what’s really radical. Harmfully radical, reducing America's competitiveness in the world.

And the so-called middle-of-the-road Democrats who oppose free higher education are so far off to the right, they’re helping the Republicans run this country into a ditch.

“But Hitler wasn’t all bad. He built the autobahns.” Plus: How to know if you too are a very stable genius.

Back in the day, Ogilvy turned out

classy ads like these for classy 

clients. Today, alas, not so much.

Keep reading for the Hitler part.

If you follow the advertising trade press — or pass your time reading Buzzfeed — you may already be aware of the brouhaha that’s been kicked up at the advertising agency, Ogilvy.

The agency was founded in 1947 by the late, utterly charming, and brilliant advertising great, David Ogilvy. One of its founding principles was flat out integrity. “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife,” Ogilvy thundered. 

Another of the agency’s principles had to do with quality and class. Perhaps the only thing David Ogilvy ever stole was his agency’s motto. And Ogilvy, with disarming honesty, admitted outright that he stole it. He lifted it from, of all people, the banker J.P. Morgan. “Only first class business, and that in a first class way.”

Alas, the definitions of what is first class, what is business, and even what advertising is all about, have changed since then. There are many forces at work, from the merciless advance of technology, to the greedy consolidation of ad agencies back in the 1990s that switched the focus at most ad agencies from doing great work for great clients, to making damn sure management hits its financial targets, no matter what else you have to do to get there.

The commotion

about Ogilvy

Which brings us to the sort of semi-scandal brewing around Ogilvy today. Long gone are Rolls Royce, Hathaway Shirts, Schweppes, and some of the other accounts that made the agency famous. In its place are clients like — God! I hate even to write the name — U.S. Customs and Border Protection. You know. Immigrants fleeing persecution getting busted and handcuffed  Kids ripped from their parents' arms and stuffed into cages. Adults in lockups squeezed so closely together they can’t sit down or lie down. Cool stuff like that.

Some of the folks who actually do the work, in Ogilvy’s Eleventh Avenue boiler room in a repurposed Manhattan chocolate factory, and around the world, balked. Buzzfeed got hold of the story and initially did some fairly egregious misreporting, ranging from the age of the agency (It was founded in 1947, not 1850), to the notion that Ogilvy was handling the PR for the border guards. They’re not. Ogilvy’s assignment is to do ads recruiting more people to the border patrol's ranks. For some reason — I can’t imagine what it might be — Trump’s government seems to be having a problem doing this.

Nevertheless, the report kicked up such a hullaballoo that on July 9th, Ogilvy’s CEO, John Seifert, decided to calm the roiling waters by holding a company meeting in New York, with people in remote offices plugged into the conversation.

Early on in the meeting, Seifert pleaded for “confidentiality” and asked that no one record the conference. So of course, somebody made sure to do just that , and then turned the recording over to Buzzfeed, which printed a transcript of it. If you have some time to read it all, it’s worth a perusal. But for me, two points stand out.

First, well into the lengthy meeting, Seifert in effect said that if you don’t like the way things are, leave.

Seifert: Let me give you a separate view. If your line is no company, whether it's product defect, whether it's breakdown of operational safety, whether it's a formulation that didn't serve a particular constituency, if your line is we should not work for clients at that risk level, then you shouldn't be here. Because the fact is we cannot hold that line of expectation and assume that we'll work for anybody.

Which isn’t all that different, when you think about it, from Donald Trump telling the Congressional squad of women of color to leave and fix the countries “they came from” if they don't like it here. Never mind that three of the four come from the United States.

Second, there was a vague echo from a line in the old movie Judgment at Nuremberg, about the post WWII Nazi war crimes trials. An old German woman tells an American judge, played by Spencer Tracy  “I won’t say that Hitler was all bad. He built the autobahns.”

Here’s Seifert:

Seifert: What I'm saying is that as an employee of the company, you can look at this all on a spectrum. Right now, we as a company have made the choice to work with a variety of government agencies, that we believe, in the main, they have the intention, a mission, a commitment to do the right thing. You have one aspect of this particular agency that is absolutely overwhelmed and failing to deliver on what most of us would agree, they should be, a standard they should be trying to live up to.

See, they’re not all bad. I mean, sure, they have this little thing about busting up families and turning little kids into virtual orphans, and imprisoning people in crowded, filthy spaces, and chattering about it approvingly on social media. But I won't say they're all bad. They have a commitment to do the right thing.

Listen, without going into details, I’ve met Seifert. He comes across as a nice guy. In most respects not pertaining to this matter, he is a nice guy. And given that his own survival and that of many of his employees, in part depends on his turning over to his parent conglomerate, WPP, the income that Ogilvy makes from the border cops, he’s got a real problem. Whether inadvertently or not, he got his dick stuck in a wringer. And now he can’t seem to get it out.

David Ogilvy's not-so-secret

secret confession

 David Ogilvy must be turning in his grave. Late in his life, in 1994, he gave an "off the-record talk" to his company's board of directors at Touffou, the medieval castle in France that he bought with some of the proceeds from taking his company public. Like just about every secret off-the-record talk, the record has leaked out. I happen to have a copy of it. 

Ogilvy was nearing the end of his life, almost certainly knew it, and felt the need to do some confessing. Here's one of his confessions: 

"I made a terrible mistake in going public." (Underlining his own.)

It was from that mistake that all other tragedies at the ad agency sprung — from the hostile takeover of his company by WPP, to the necessity of bedding down with clients controlled by the Trumpistas.

Were he still living, Ogilvy might abandon his First Class Business motto for another:

Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

But I won’t leave you

on that grim note.

So instead, Donald Trump.

No doubt many people who’ve listened to and watched Donald Trump have wondered how they, too, could become very stable geniuses.

Like everything else Donald Trump does, it’s easy. Take real estate transactions, for example.

As the shopworn maxim about real estate goes, they’re not making any more of it. So most of the time, if you buy a piece of real estate, and just hold on to it, you’re almost certain to make money when you sell. Ask nearly any American who’s bought and some years later sold a house or a condo.

What's more, if the real estate in question is an iconic landmark that also happens to be a hotel where people will pay top dollar to stay, who knows how many millions of dollars you could make?

Unless you’re Donald Trump.

The Great New York City Blackout of 2019. Was there more to it that didn’t meet the eye?

Con Edison already sticks its cost of doing business to its customers. 

What else have they stuck to you?

This is about bills, and corporate greed, and the July 13th blackout that demonstrated just how dependent New Yorkers are on a company that, like nearly all corporate enterprises these days, puts profits first. And it may be about possible ulterior motives. But let’s start with the bills.

My June bill from New York City’s utility company, Con Edison, charged me $8.94 for the electricity I had used.  

No, that wasn’t the amount of  my monthly bill. That was just for the electricity I actually consumed. The bill itself came to $41.48 because it included charges I would have had to pay even if I hadn’t consumed a single watt of power.

Amont the items Con Edison tacked on to my bill, there was a “merchant function charge.” 

A  what? 

According to the bill that’s a “Charge associated with procuring electricity, credit and collection related activities and uncollectible accounts.” In other words, unlike your neighborhood cheese merchant, if Con Ed gets stiffed, they simply stick the loss caused by the deadbeat to their other customers.

It's all very weird —

and vaguely crooked

Suppose your next door neighbor stiffs the plumber. Can the plumber demand the unpaid $300 from you?

My bill also included a $12.33 charges for “maintaining the system through which Con Edison delivers electricity to you.” Right, and why shouldn’t the beer company charge me not only for the case of beer, but also for the broken axel it had to repair on the beer truck after hitting that pothole on Main Street, which is part of the system through which they bring me my beer? Not to mention the price of washing the truck.

There was also a “Basic service charge.” That, says the utility, was for “basic system infrastructure and customer-related services, including customer accounting and metering services."

Sure I’ll tell you what you owe me.

But there’s a charge for that.

So they charge me to read the meter so they can tell me how much money they want from me! I’m not sure what a “customer accounting” service is because they also charge me for depositing the check I send them every month.  Specifically, “A billing and payment charge of $1.20 which may be avoided by switching to an energy services company (ESCO), is also included.” 

How nice of them not to charge me for paying bills I’ve incurred with another company!

The list goes on with several other items. Not least infuriating is the charge for taxes that Con Ed gets charged on their gross receipts. So — if you can follow this — if they charge their customers more, they'll also charge us for charging  more, since their gross receipts will increase.

Now I know that similar charges are hidden in everything from the price of my corn flakes to what the doctor charges me for thumping my chest, before he goes off to pay his malpractice insurance. But at least just about every other business in the world has the decency to charge proportionately to what I consume. Keeping beer trucks up to snuff may be included in the cost of my beer, but if I drink less beer, I pay less for maintaining the trucks. If I visit the doctor only once, I pay less of his malpractice insurance. than if I visit him twice Not so with Con Ed.

Guess what, blackout victims:

You're screwed again.

During the blackout, the thousands and thousands of Con Ed customers who sweltered without air conditioning, stumbled around in the dangerous dark, and found the milk in their unrefrigerated refrigerators going bad, consumed less electricity. 

So yes, they’ll be charged for a piffling few less kilowatt hours. But remember, that’s often a very small part of their bills. They’ll still pay Con Ed’s charge for other people being deadbeats in full. As well as the billing and accounting charges. As well as all the other outrageous charges that most companies consider to be the cost of doing business.

The infrastructure charge is particularly galling, since it was the inadequate or badly maintained infrastructure that caused the blackout in the first place. Imagine if I didn’t deliver the case of beer you ordered because my truck broke down, and then billed you the price of a new truck.

Meanwhile, Con Edison is seeking a rate increase that would put an additional $1.6 billion a year into its own coffers. According to AARP, which is attempting to marshal opposition to the increase, “Next year alone, that would mean a 9% increase in the average customer electric delivery bill, and a 15% increase for gas delivery.”

Was the blackout an accident?

All this makes me wonder if that blackout on July 13th was nothing more than a little accidental-on-purpose demonstration of what’s going to happen to you if Con Edison doesn’t get the $1.6 billion it’s demanding.

The AARP recommends that New Yorkers protest Con Ed reaching deeper into your pockets by calling 1-844-354-6881 toll free. That’ll give you an opportunity to leave a message for the Public Service Commission.The AARP proposes you follow this script:

“Hello, my name is [name]. I’m calling to urge you to reject Con Edison electric and gas utility hikes, cases 19-E-0065 and 19-G-0066. Con Edison’s plan would send rates sky high, as well as increase my already excessive customer service charge. Please give ratepayers a break.”

Come to think of it, pick up the phone and do that right now. It’ll only take you a few minutes. It might save you hundreds of dollars over the long run, if the Public Service Commission actually listens. And better you get get a break than those greedy goons at Con Ed, right?

This blog is away on a short vacation. See you mid-to-late July.

A bicycle parking lot in downtown Amsterdam roughly this time last year. But
I'm not going there this year. It's simply that I thought this would be a good
opportunity to wonder aloud how the hell you find your bike again after you
park it there. Or how you dislodge it. (Photo by The New York Crank.)

I'm outta here for a few days. I'm heading for a place where the grass is green, the air is fresh, the sky is visible from the ground, and I misspent part of my youth.

More about that place — maybe — when I get back. Look for another post here about the 16th or the 17th of the month. 

Meanwhile, I won't be moderating any comments during my vacation. Which means that if you try to post your thoughts here, they'll remain in unposted limbo until I get home and unpack.

Hey, it's not the end of the world. If the urge to comment on something is really buzzing furiously in your bonnet, you'll find a list of other fine blogs on the right side of your screen. Most of them permit posting. 

Actually, there are very fine blogs on both sides. Not of the page. I'm talking about the political spectrum. And if it seems to you that I'm babbling, that's why I need a vacation.

'Bye for a little while.

Justice in America, July 4th edition

A woman who was seen (and photographed) removing the tops of ice cream containers in a Texas Walmart and then licking the ice cream and replacing the tops faces up to 20 years in prison for her crime.

Police were working overtime through the July 4th holiday to track her down.

Elsewhere in Texas, Border Patrol agents had scores of women locked in an overcrowded cell with no sink. The women were forced to drink from the toilet bowl. While this went on, the officers sat back and laughed. 

Those women who managed to sleep were also awakened at odd hours for no particular reason. And they were called whores by the officers, who now face praise from the Trump Administration and a generous pension after putting in their 20 years of giggles.

Is this a great country, or what?

The founding fathers must be rolling over in their graves.

Supreme partisanship and how to give it a bloody nose

Thanks to the Republican majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, you now can

kiss Democracy an eternal goodbye. Unless...

No sooner was I feeling pleased by the first round of Democratic Presidential Musical Chairs on Wednesday night than the U.S. Supreme Court slammed the brakes on my euphoria. 

In a 5-4 decision, the usual Republican suspects on the court decided that hey, even if a Congressional district is so bizarrely twisted and contorted that it could hide behind a corkscrew, judges are not allowed to second guess the judgements of the law makers. At least, not when the winners are Republicans.

No legal standards discernible?

Not if you keep your eyes shut.

“There are no legal standards discernible in the Constitution for making such judgments,” writes Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts, who seems to have forgotten the legal principle that "all men [and thus, by inference, their votes] are created equal." And presumably, ditto women and their votes these days.

Fortunately there are clearly discernible legal standards saying Supreme Court justices may be impeached and removed. Perhaps it’s high time the Democrats considered how to go about dumping these bums. (Only one Justice, Samuel Chase, was ever impeached, but it’s a precedent.)

I would start with the weakest target, Justice Thomas. His infamously scurrilous behavior relating to pubic hair on a Coke can, during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, calls for some review in light of current standards. 

It’s my understanding that the Senate never heard from other witnesses who were waiting to testify about sexual harassment by Thomas. Further, there seems to be a good case for impeaching and removing Thomas for both sexual harassment and perjury. Go for it, House Judiciary Committee!

Next there’s Samuel Alito who, during his senate confirmation, uttered a pious paean to stare decicis. Watch this one with your hands clasped in the prayerful position, and try to imagine a little gold halo shining over Alito's head as he lies through his teeth.

Then, as soon as he was seated on the court, he ignored or overrode enough prior decisions to make it clear that he perjured himself licentiously during the Senate confirmation hearings. Put him on trial in the House and Senate for perjury. And then, when he is removed, put him on trial for the same crime in the criminal courts.

Neil Gorsuch? It's time to make the case  that because President Obama’s nomination for that Supreme Court chair was improperly withheld by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Gorsuch's subsequent nomination and confirmation was the fruit of a poisoned tree, and hence illegitimate. That one’s a long shot, but it’s time to start stirring the pot and seeing how the Long Shot Soup turns out.

Democrats, you too can

start your gerrymander engines

Meanwhile, in every majority Democratic city, county, and state around the country, Democrats need to start gerrymandering the living crap out of election districts, to make sure Republican votes in their jurisdictions count for as little as Republicans have been making sure that Democratic votes will count.

One person, one vote rule is essentially dead in this nation thanks to the Supreme Court majority in action. These days, it’s every bully, crook and pit viper for him or herself. So New York, California, Massachusetts and other Democratic states, gerrymander those Republicans until they bleat.

And if the Republicans don’t like it, let them run to the Supreme Court and try to find some justice.

If there is any justice any more.

Nine Horrifying Political Nightmares for the Trump Age

I no longer have a shrink, so you’ll have to analyze my political dreams instead.

(Sketch from real life by the late and wonderful Wes Emmart.)

You want a decent shrink? How old are you? Unless you’re stark raving bonkers enough to get admitted to a mental hospital, you can’t find a decent psychiatrist who takes Medicare. Not in New York, so far as I can determine. So poof! Now you're my head shrinker, and here are nine cranky political dreams for you to analyze. They have me waking up screaming. You’d scream, too.

1. Donald Trump, trying to prove that he didn’t lie when he said he could get away with shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose voters, rides the escalator down to the ground floor of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, with an AR-15 strapped to his shoulder. 

   He steps out onto Fifth Avenue and shoots the first passer-by he sees. The passer-by turns out to be Joe Biden, who is strolling down Fifth Avenue on his way to Grand Central Station for an Acela to Washington, after a luncheon with supporters at the Plaza Hotel, a few blocks away. The last thought that goes through Biden’s head is, “How could that nincompoop have bankrupted such a gorgeous hotel?” 

   Trump immediately gets arrested by the NYPD, but released after Attorney General Barr declares that the President cannot be arrested or indicted for a crime during his time in office. Then Barr tells me to wake up and get a Diet Coke for Trump while he cleans his rifle. I wake up screaming, of course.

2. I’m not sure how this got arranged, but I’m home, wearing a bathrobe, waiting for a well-endowed porno actress to show up at my place. Suddenly, the doorbell rings. I open the door and let in a beautiful woman. She is carrying a handbag and a doggie bag from a restaurant called "Hamberder Heaven." She yanks a magnifying glass out of her handbag and barks an order. “Open your bathrobe and let me make sure you're Donald.” 

    I do so. She becomes enraged and flings her magnifying glass out the window. “You’re not Donald!” she says furiously. Then there’s a loud explosive sound and a puff of smoke. When the air clears, I notice that she has turned into a check for $130,000. And no, it is not signed by Donald Trump or by any lawyer named Cohen. Instead, it bears Donald Rumsfeld’s signature and the printed motto: “You gotta go to blog with the nightmares you got.”

3. I am four years old and running a foot race in Central Park. I come in second. At the finish line, Melania Trump grabs me by the collar and smacks me across the face saying, “I told you to be best, not second best.” Then she puts me in a cage where, fortunately, I meet Alexandria Occasio-Cortez, who tells me she can help me escape if I help her play with her Barbie dolls. 

   AOC has a doll called Congresswoman Barbie, and a Ken Doll. She hands me the Ken doll and it immediately turns into a Donald Trump doll with a string in the back of his neck. I pull the string and the doll says, “Who knew health care is complicated? ” I pull it again and Trump says, “I am a very stable genius.” I pull it a third time and Trump says, “My daughter is a real piece of ass.” 

   I tell the doll, “That’s not a nice thing to say.” With that, Barbie turns into a Melania doll and smacks my face again. I’m angry enough to hit her back, but suddenly Gloria Allred is standing behind Melania. Gloria says, “I wouldn’t even think about that if I were you, Crank.”

4. Donald Trump is speaking at a rally when suddenly his hair falls off. Or maybe it gets blown off by a sudden gust of wind. To tell you the truth, my memory is a little bit fuzzy on this. I mean hey, it's a dream. 

   At any rate, Trump now has a billiard ball head, which is orange, except for the line where the part in his hair used to be, which is white. 

   Suddenly, I have a revelation. For some reason, Trump’s skin turns white when exposed to the sun, but the part of his head that is under his hair, and thus always in darkness, is orange. Which means he must sleep in the sun wearing a full face mask, with only his eyes exposed. This explains the white lines around his eyes. It also explains why he's always awake and tweeting in the middle of the night.            

   I start to write this down because it seems very complicated and I want to make sure that I won’t forget it. But the Secret Service smashes open my door and arrests me for a violation of the Official Secrets Act. I complain that the Official Secrets Act is English law, not American law. “Not any more,” says President Trump, who is suddenly standing over me wearing a baseball cap bearing the slogan, “Brexit Now.” I look at him in amazement, which causes him  to morph into Boris Johnson. I start to wonder if Trump and Johnson were twins separated at birth when, annoyingly, I wake up.

5. HUD Secretary Ben Carson goes on TV, and in a tense hour, separates conjoined housing projects. When asked why there are no people in them he replies, "They've been used to store grain."

6. I have just been thrown into prison for wearing a purple baseball cap that bears the slogan, “Make America Grape Again.” “But why is this a crime?” I ask the judge, who turns out to be Judge Judy. 

   “Ssh! Did I ask you to talk?” she says. 

   This isn’t a question, and if you know Judge Judy you know what I mean. So I stand in silence, waiting for Judge Judy to pronounce a verdict. Unfortunately, we have to cut away for a bunch of television commercials. Halfway through the third commercial, I wake up singing, “Entresto, Entresto, Entresto!”

7. President Trump has been defeated in the election. The new President, Kim Kardashian, has seen to it that Trump is tried for numerous crimes and sentenced to death. Much to my horror, I have been chosen to be the hangman. 

   I protest that I know nothing about hanging people, but nobody will listen to me. Trump gets marched out to the gallows. He stands on top of a trap door. I put a hood over his head and then a rope around his neck. I check my instruction sheet and it says to ask the prisoner if he has any last words. So I ask him, and he responds.   

   “Yeah,” says Trump, “just out of curiosity, how did Kim Kardashian get to be President?” 

   “Beats me,” I tell him. "Things have been weird ever since the second George Bush. Or maybe the first." Then I yank on the lever that’s supposed to open the trap door under Trump’s feet, but it won’t open. 

   I keep yanking, and yanking, and yanking. I wake up, only to discover that I am trying to rip the brass headboard off my bed. Then I realize that waking up is part of the dream, too, because my bed doesn’t have a brass headboard.

8. I’m back on the scaffold with Trump, but now the rope that I need to hang him with is sticking out of the back of his neck. I pull it and Trump yells, “Enemy of the people! Enemy of the people!” I pull it again and he yells, “Fake news! Fake news!” I pull it a third time and he yells, “Crooked Hillary! Failing New York Times! Sleepy Joe! L’il Marco! Pocahontas!” 

   That’s it, I’ve had it! I pull the trap door lever. This time it opens. We both fall into a swimming pool, strategically placed beneath the gallows. Trump yells, “I can’t swim!” and promptly drowns. I am pulled to the safety of the pool steps on the shallow end by a very large Labradoodle that jumps into the water to save me. 

   Later, the dog and I are both seated at a bar by the edge of the pool, drinking whiskey sours. “Tell me, why did you save my life?” I ask the dog. “Because Trump was the only president in modern history who wouldn’t have a dog,” the dog says, bitterly. 

   I am taken aback. “Where did you learn to talk?” I ask the dog. “Where did you learn to drink whiskey sours with dogs?” the dog responds without missing a beat. He seems smugly pleased by his own retort.

9. In the final Presidential debate between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren,  Trump is doing exactly what he did in a debate with Hillary Clinton. He has left his podium and crept up behind Warren, practically breathing down her neck. Warren wheels around and says, "Back off, creep!" 

   Trump sneers. "Try and make me," he says. So she kicks him hard between the legs. He doubles over, falls to the floor, and begins to weep. "This is so unfair!" he cries. "No president has ever been treated worse than me!"

    Two days later, Elizabeth Warren has been elected President. Unfortunately, this is also a dream.

Donald Trump, a badly manufactured causus belli, John Bolton’s mustache, and other inflammatory bull-oney

An abandoned protest picket sign in the New York
subway, some years ago. Hey, if we can picket for
any crazy thing, we can have a world war for any
crazy thing, too. Right? (Photo by The New York
Crank.)

So we’re heading for a war with Iran! At the risk of finally wearing out a cliché that’s been incurring considerable wear and tear since Donald Trump became president, what could possibly go wrong?

In case you missed it, there’s this video, taken from somewhere or other, purporting to show Iranian military removing an ocean-going mine from the hull of an oil tanker. Bit of a problem there, folks.

The mysterious case of

the airborne sea mine

See, the thing about sea mines is, they float in the sea. But if you look at this footage, you can see that the mine — if it is a mine — appears to be roughly ten feet above the waterline. In order to lodge in the ship’s hull where it is, the mine would have to leap out of the water, open its mouth wide, and bite into the hull as hard as it possibly can, afterwards holding on for dear life.

I’m kidding, of course. But also, I’m not kidding. That mine is ridiculously high above the waterline. And sailors on the ship — a Japanese, not an American vessel — said they saw “flying objects” heading toward them at the beginning of the incident that forced them to abandon ship for safety. Sea mines don’t fly. Moreover…

• The president of the Japanese company that owns the ship is reported to have said that claims of a mine attack are “false.

• Japan’s minister of defense said his government has no intention of responding to this incident with Japanese troops. He claims nothing here is an imminent threat to Japan.

Not to worry, Mr. Defense Minister, we here in America will respond for you, whether you want a response or not. 

This is just what President Trump has been looking for — an excuse to start a war with Iran. You know — send over more young Americans to fight, die, or get maimed for what years from now will turn out to be a tempest in a powder puff. Kill a few thousand, or hundred thousand, or millions of Iranians. Get to a stalemate after ten or twenty years of fighting. Expend treasure. Cut Social Security and Medicare to pay for it.

Also the excuse Iranian

hard liners needed

It has been pretty clear The Trumpster has been spoiling for a fight since the day he abrogated the nuclear deal that kept Iran from developing nuclear weapons. This got the United States nothing, while it got Iran an excuse to go back to manufacturing A-bombs again if they decide to.

All the same, the Iranians remained, as Elmer Fudd might say, vewwy, vewwy cautious about restarting their nuclear program — annoyingly cautious for Trump. Heck, even though Trump reportedly hates and despises John Bolton’s snowy white mustache, the President fired H.R. McMaster and hired Bolton in his place as national security adviser, perhaps because Bolton never met a war he didn’t like. Mustache and all.

Of course, it helped that Bolton also was appearing regularly on the Fox network, which also happens to be where Trump more than occasionally goes to recruit top governmental officers. I mean, I can see the logic of it. If you can regularly shoot off your mouth on Fox, you can probably start a shooting war, too. Maybe Trump thinks this is his big moment to have his very own war.

But even Bolton needs what they call a causus belli, some kind of excuse that lets the United States whine, “Whaa whaa, they provoked us. We had no choice.”

Causus Klutzi

Unfortunately, some klutz somewhere, instead of attacking an American ship with an American crew aboard, got a Japanese ship with a Philippine crew, and then aimed the rocket, or whatever it really was, too high.

Not to worry. Worst case scenario, somebody or other out there in the Persian Gulf will make it happen to another ship, presumably the right way this time. And then we can have anything from an invasion of Iran to a nuclear war. Or maybe WWIII.

Y'know what? Life ends quickly when the crazies are having fun.

Update, 3:40 PM, June 17th: Evidently, in an attempt to reinforce dubious information, the war-makers in Washington are adding more dubious information. According to an article just published by the right wing Washington Times, the surveillance drone that was surveilling the alleged Iranian attack on the Japanese vessel whose owner denies it struck or was struck by a mine...that drone was itself "attacked" by Iranian missiles. The Washington Times reports:

During the drone operations, “a modified Iranian SA-7 surface-to-air missile attempted to shoot down” the U.S. aircraft but missed its target, Central Command spokesman Lt. Col. Earl Brown said in the statement.

“The SA-7 was ineffective and its closest point of approach to the MQ-9 was approximately one kilometer,” Lt. Col. Brown said.

Wait, wait, just wait a second! The SA-7 rocket never got closer than a kilometer to the drone it was supposedly attacking. So how do we know that this kilometer-away rocket, if it existed at all, was even going after the drone? And how, from that distance, do we know it was a SA-7? And how come the Pentagon didn't think to release this information until now, more than a day after it released its story about the busy drones photographing alleged Iranians allegedly removing the flying sea mine? Inquiring minds want to know.