Bernie vs. Bloomberg

Trump has indicated that he would rather face Bloomberg in November ... other than Bernie.  This flies in the face of conventional wisdom ... that Bloomberg in many respects is the more difficult opponent ... with his many billions and more moderate positions.

Then why might Trump prefer Bloomberg as an opponent?

Very simple ... it’s a choice between positive and negative political messages. Bloomberg would be running with a “I’m not Trump” message. Whereas Bernie has a transformative message, however poisonous to many ... “We need to become more like Socialist Sweden ...  with free healthcare, free college, free housing, open borders, voting from prison, Green New Deal, etc.”

Bloomberg would be Diet Trump ... many of his same policies except for climate change, gun control and open borders ...  but without the tweets ... too easy a switchover. Whereas Sanders is leading a “movement” ... a movement backed by change ... however distasteful to many of us.

Trump recognizes that a passionate positive message is a tougher challenge than a squishy negative one.

Headlines

How a private meeting with Kennedy helped Trump Ger to 'yes' on Kavanaugh

Texas is CNBC's top state for Business in America this year

Clooney injured in scooter crash in Italy ... thrown 20 feet ...

Liberal law prof in NY Times: Kavanaugh great pick ...

Trump's neglect of Europe goes beyond angry tweets

Tesla has signed an agreement to build a factory in Shanghai

Trade deficit with China hits new record [high] ...

Libya: 700,000 migrants waiting to board boats to Europe ...

Trump's solution for reunifying migrant families: 'Don't come to this country illegally'

More than a third of small businesses can't [find workers to] fill open jobs, matching a record

Trump: Seeing Putin will be easier than meeting with May ...

Booker: Trump nominated Kavanaugh for Get out of Jail Free card

My Nominee for Nobel Prize

In literature? -- Peter Fonda! 

See: His Uplifting Tweets.

I think his sister, Jane, might take the booby prize.

Who's Nuts?

Ward Cleaver and the Beaver

To me there was, and to a lesser extent, still is a mass hysteria surrounding global warming. When I say "mass" I am referring to a large enough portion of the world's population that, once bought into this concept, refuse to let logic or physical evidence sway them from this meme. All they need to see is smoke coming from a factory stack to reinforce the notion that carbon (soot) is carbon dioxide and it is killing us all. (Obama's EPA labeled carbon dioxide, the basis of all life on Earth, a "pollutant.")  Their ears and minds are shut to any dissonance. But fortunately this "mass" is atrophying with every sub-zero day and every polar bear who survives our "planer's fever."

I see a similar mass psychosis surrounding the notion that President Trump is crazy. This meme is driven by much of the media and appeals to a large swath of those who didn't vote for Trump. They dislike this man so much that they want some way to take him down -- Russian collusion, obstruction of justice, the 25th Amendment, anything to cause this man to be gone out of their lives. The poster child of this mass psychosis is Maxine Waters who has been calling for Trump's impeachment since even before his inauguration. And this chorus of irrationality ebbs then grows again with any act by this president that cuts across their political grain.

And Trump reinforces this psychosis diagnosis with his unorthodox behavior ... his early morning tweets, his eccentric tastes (well-done steak with ketchup, ugh!), his taunts of those with whom he disagrees, his tendency toward OCD behavior. But is this nuts? I'm not a psychiatrist (most of whom I have found to be unbalanced anyway), but I don't see Trump to be much further out than one sigma from the Ward Cleaver (the Beaver's dad) notion of "normalcy."

So, boys and girls, is Trump nuts? I would rather point to that parade headed by Maxine Waters ... full of many media types and rabid Democrats as being unstable in their Captain-Queeg-like attempt to take down our president. There is but one small problem .... it's going to take a very large couch and lots of therapeutic introspection for this mass of unbalanced Trump haters to find their sea legs.

Perhaps in Trump's second term?

Headlines

Impeachment debate divides Democrats as 2018 wave builds

Good news for FedEx and UPS: People just opened $90 billion in unwanted gifts

MasterCard: It was the biggest Xmas in history!

CBO: At least 4.5 million anchor babies in U.S.

Guatemala follows Trump's lead on Jerusalem

North Korea caught in hard spot as China suspends country's only source of energy

Oil prices hit 2-1/2 year peak ...

Donald Trump: Phony dossier is a 'crooked Hillary pile of garbage'

Playbook: Brits worry Obama invite to royal wedding will offend Trump

The Library of Congress will stop archiving every Tweet

Northeast states sue EPA over air pollution from Midwest ...

[Sen.] Cotton: If DREAM act were so popular Dems would've shut down gov't ...

Headlines

All from Internet news sites. Guess which from Drudge?

Aides give up on trying to control Trump's tweets

Doctors are turning to marijuana to treat opioid addiction

Argentine sub missing with 44 sailors ...

Mika latest Clinton ally to suggest Bill should have resigned

Trump reverses hunting trophy decision, says he will review

Tesla is 'going out of business' says former GM exec Bob Lutz

I trump to pay staff legal bills ...

Hungary PM: 'Silent majority' will prevail over 'Soros empire' ...

Jesse Jackson diagnosed with Parkinson's

WalMart says it has pre-ordered 16 of Tesla's new tractor-trailers

10,744 more JFK records released ...

LOL: After covering for Weinstein, Clinton, NYTimes says Franken should go

Headlines

The following headlines have all been found on Internet news sites. Guess which ones came from Politico?

Trump questions why states refusing to give data to election panel

Lawandoeski on Trump: He is the Ernest Hemmingway of tweets

[Trump] Has signed 39 laws since president ...

Exclusive  -- Lieberman: [U.S.] Embassy move to Jerusalem will happen

Despite recusal, Sessions offers advice on Trump-Russia probe

New Study: Generation Z votes Republican

Update: Central America hit by massive power  outages ...

Blue state jitters over voter fraud crackdown

Trump's voter-fraud panel's data request a gold mine for hackers, experts say

Solar panels generate 300 times more toxic waste than nuclear reactors

[Carl] Bernstein call for 'different kind of reporting' to counteract 'malignant presidency' ...

AP clarifies: 17 U.S. intel agencies did not assess Russian [election] 'interference'

  

Proportionality

I absolutely had to watch Morning Joe this AM after President Trump's tweetings yesterday hitting back at Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough for their daily doses of vicious vitriol directed towards him ... see: NY Times Article.Without trying to defend Trump's puerile behavior that is not befitting a president, I was expecting and did watch a conga line of outrage by the invited guests on this show. If there is a stronger word for outrage then I would use it, but I can't think of one now.

However, I was also struck by the contrast between these highly emotional reactions and the almost matter-of-fact reactions by these same players to the baseball field shooting of a Republican Congressman, Steve Scalise, last month. Not that there wasn't condemnation, but I don't recall the foaming mouths and the shallow breathing like I saw this morning on MSNBC. What we are basically comparing here is an infantile insult of two rabid Trump haters versus the attempted mass murder of Republican Congressmen.

I guess, very simply, what I am looking for (and not finding) is a sense of proportionality in our media. And it is this lack of proportionality that permits Trump to keep up this compulsive behavior (which most of us would prefer him not doing.)

Afterward: What Morning Joe and the NYT focused on was that Trump's tweets were a sexist attack on Mika. Not quite true ... he also called Joe "Psycho". Now to see why this might be apt, Google "Why Joe Scarborough left Congress" ...

After Afterward: I find it curious that the media never seems to label attacks on conservative women (Ann Coulter, Kelluanne Conway, Sarah Palin) as "sexist" ...

Silly Season

President Trump has said and tweeted some things that rub many people the wrong way. In fact I strongly suspect that Trump secretly relishes tweaking his detractors. And this tactic very often works. Liberals, progressives, much of the media, even many squishes in the establishment ,,, and their fellow travelers ... are tying themselves in granny knots to show their contempt for our newly elected president. It does seem that one is not allowed to go half-way in exhibiting one's "resistance" to Trump.

So we have a D-list comedian, Kathy Griffen, pretending to cut off Trump's bloody head, late-night TV and SNL sapping the imaginations of their writers trying to smear with innuendo and even slander Trump. We are even taken aback by Stephen Colbert saying that Trump is Putin's cock holster (implying fellatio). The list goes on and on exhaustively. Now we see the New York City Public Theater putting on Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" in which Caesar is dressed as Trump and is stabbed to the cheers of the partisan crowd (described in the above paragraph) ... see: Daily Wire Story

This Trump "resistance" has become so commonplace, sophomoric, banal and even sinister that we are clearly entering a silly season. Liberals are straining at the yoke to find new ways of insulting Trump ... made even more frustratingly inane by the fact that these intended insults seem to roll right off of our president's back. As a result of this overdoing of this Trump Derangement Syndrome, those on the left are in danger of becoming parodies of themselves ... kinda like a skit out of Monty Python ... if they haven't crossed this threshold already.

Megaphones

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." -- Barack Obummer in 2008

Today, while traveling by car to and from the grocery store, I was listening to National Public Radio (which I help to fund with my taxes ... so I was interested in what I was buying) and the subject going and coming was Trump's comments yesterday about the Second Amendment being overturned under Hellary Clinton. His comments ("If she picks her judges, Nothing you can do folks ... Although the Second Amendment people, I don't know, maybe there is")  obviously can be interpreted two  different ways: (See: Fox News Story.)

1) The Second Amendment people, having guns, could shoot her.

2) If all the Second Amendment advocates vote as a block, they might defeat her.

Now obviously, having the megaphone and a liberal crush on Hellary, these NPRers were advocating the number one choice ... with little acknowledgement of number two.  (Actually this is what I first thought too.) And this also has been the stentorian approach of all the major networks and newspapers. However, to be fair, there really are two options and Trump says he meant the second.

Now Donald Trump is a pretty proficient Twitter user ... but can one tweet capture more attention than a chorus of megaphones?

Bomb Throwers

Twitter has turned the United States (and I expect much of the rest of the world) into a bunch of illiterate bomb throwers and insipid twits (remember #bringbackourgirls?) Anxious to get their tiniest thoughts out to their adoring public, users of this instant messaging service post comments on many news events without stopping to consider how their 140 characters of top-of-the-head diatribe or dribble will be viewed. In business we used to refer to this as "ready, fire, aim." As a consequence, clarifications or retractions are often required ... which do nothing but muddy the waters further.

I suspect that Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton (or her Twitter surrogates) and many other presidential aspirants think that they are being hip to tweet out their bon mots at the drop of a news cycle ... to their adoring throngs of millennials and X-ers ... but, to me, using this technology too often appears non-presidential and demeaning. Reading tweets second-hand (I refuse to subscribe) is all too often a cringe-worthy experience. I would personally prefer that the eventual leader of the free world be a little more circumspect in his/her pronouncements.

Idiot glitterati can make asses out of themselves using this medium, but, please ... let's keep our important political leaders free from such pop-star pap.

Social Media

For whatever reason I have been somewhat averse to most social media ... in particular Facebook and Twitter. Now it is becoming very apparent that these new media are being used to recruit terrorists around the world, coordinate terrorist attacks and synchronize terrorism planning. In fact it has just been revealed that over 10,000 Twitter tweets are sent out to the world each day by ISIS. And I am quite sure that many of the other social media outlets are being likewise abused by terrorists.

Yes, this is the dark side of these Internet bugaboos ... to be balanced against all the societal good that they perform ... posting 142 pictures of your newborn grandchild, writing a review of your latest family visit to McDonald's, discussing the pros and cons of touring Greece during its financial crisis, lamenting the family pet that you just put down, sexting, rounding up your friends to attend a Bernie Sanders campaign rally, and complaining about how you were treated on your latest airline flight. All very interesting stuff ... and well worth the terrorism downsides that these social-media sites also engender.

So, may I suggest that you invest your last dollar in these social media software companies ... they are bound to make you a fortune ... if you can live to enjoy it.