Category Archives: Politics
Trump’s Animal Spirits
James Fallows, in the October Atlantic, says Jane Goodall told him that Donald Trump reminds her of a chimp:
In many ways the performances of Donald Trump remind me of male chimpanzees and their dominance rituals,” Jane Goodall, the anthropologist, told me shortly before Trump won the GOP nomination. “In order to impress rivals, males seeking to rise in the dominance hierarchy perform spectacular displays: stamping, slapping the ground, dragging branches, throwing rocks. The more vigorous and imaginative the display, the faster the individual is likely to rise in the hierarchy, and the longer he is likely to maintain that position.”
Animal Spirits
The elite made a monkey of Trump before the election. But since then he’s released the stock market’s animal spirits. Oil and the dollar dig The Donald too.
Many 401-k investors are bullish because stocks have hit record highs. But Clinton Foundation investors – not so much.
Well, at least one Clinton supporter has done ok. Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is up 8% since the election.
Flag Burning
Trump tweet of the week: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag — if they do, there must be consequences, perhaps loss of citizenship or a year in jail!”
The Huffington Post reported that most people think President-elect The Donald goes too far. They think flag burners should keep their citizenship. However, they’re cool with the jail part.
Flag Burning
Justice Scalia, for his part, wasn’t cool with either jail or loss of citizenship for burning a flag. Here are a few lines from a Pittsburgh Post Gazette editorial on Scalia’s opinion of flag burning:
“If I were king,” the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once said in an interview, “I would not allow people to go about burning the American flag. However, we have a First Amendment, which says that the right of free speech shall not be abridged. … Burning the flag is a form of expression. Speech doesn’t just mean written words or oral words. … Burning a flag is a symbol that expresses an idea.”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1989 that flag burning is a protected form of free speech. And Salon said Trump was cool with that when he appeared on The David Letterman Show in 2015.
Of course, the court also ruled that campaign issue advocacy spending by corporations and unions is a protected form of free speech. We know Hillary’s not cool with that. The Citizens United case involved a movie critical of her. Here’s the trailer.
My favorite example of the exercise of free speech by flag burning occurred at the RNC convention in Cleveland last summer. The burner became the burnee. He caught himself on fire.
Bitter Clingers, Deplorables, and Fox News
On the campaign trail President Obama attempted to transfer his base of support to Hillary Clinton. He pleaded,”I’m not on the ballot but my policies are.” And he warned that he’d take it as a “personal insult” if African Americans failed to turn out for her. Well, Obama Nation didn’t show and Hillary lost. Trump was elected president with majorities in the House and Senate.
Another shellacking.
In a Rolling Stone interview the president analyzed the shellacking. And he concluded his lost legacy was due to a failure to communicate with middle America. That would be the Coal miners he and Hillary promised to put out of work. The Bitter Clingers. The Deplorables.
Fox News
That and Fox News. “Part of it Obama said, “is Fox News in every bar and restaurant in big chunks of the country.” Personally, I hardly noticed Fox in bars and restaurants in my midwest chunk of the country. But maybe that’s just me.
Progressives are also blaming Fake news for Hillary’s upset.
A month ago a federal court ruled that Rolling Stone defamed a University of Virginia administrator with malice. The administrator was awarded $3 million.
The magazine had published a fake news story about rape.
Nancy Pelosi House
Nancy Pelosi won 134 votes to Tim Ryan’s 68 to hang on as House Minority Leader. Ryan is taking credit for giving her a scare. But winning 68% of the vote sounds like a landslide to me.
Maybe they should demand that Jill Stein do a recount.
Nancy Pelosi
And maybe Nancy Pelosi should give the Democratic party a scare. Under her leadership they lost 63 House seats in 2010 and 13 more in the 2014 midterms.
Republicans now own “the White House, and the Senate, and the House, and 33 governorships and 68 (of 98) state legislative chambers.”
Court of Public Opinion
FBI Director Comey recommended that Hillary not be prosecuted by the Justice Department. But he presented her case on national TV anyway. A verdict was rendered on election day. Hillary was convicted in the court of public opinion. Her sentence was loss of the White House.
She’s Suffered Enough Already
Now President-elect Trump has issued a get out of jail free card. He doesn’t want to see her prosecuted in a court of law either.
Court of Public Opinion
Meanwhile, some Democrats don’t believe there were enough Deplorables in the court of public opinion. They want a recount.
Green candidate Jill Stein is leading the charge. She wants a recount in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. She’s raised more money so far than she did for her presidential campign.
Oops. She can’t guarantee the money will go to a recount.
