Won't Concede The Obvious

Some of us were amazed that after the Access Hollywood tape was aired, Donald Trump's standing in the polls against Hillary Clinton dropped but rebounded quite nicely.

Our naivete is understandable because Americans claim to value integrity in their elected officials. In a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll conducted after the Stormy Daniels interview on 60 Minutes

91 percent said honesty is “very important“ for elected officials to embody in their personal life in order to carry out their official duties. Seventy-five percent said the same about morality. On the question of extramarital affairs, 80 percent said they were morally wrong. You probably know what comes next:

Despite all that, when asked directly about the Daniels scandal, nearly half of voters say it doesn't change how they view Trump.

"The Stormy Daniels scandal has had little discernible impact on voter opinions of President Trump this month, "said Morning Consult Co-Founder and Chief Research Officer Kyle Dropp. "In this week's poll, 46 percent of voters said the Stormy Daniels matter made no difference in their view of President Trump, compared to 39 percent who said the same in early March."

When Ms. Stephanie Clifford was interviewed on Sunday night, she appeared dressed relatively conservatively, seemed older and more mature than in the photos we've seen of her, and stuck to her version of  events. Yet voters find the probability that Donald Trump had an (limited) affair with a pornographic movie actress- whose voice his team is trying to suppress- less relevant than they initially did.

There is an obvious truth or two here, which Politico and virtually every organ in the traditional, "liberal" media ignore.  When overwhelming majorities of people say they want their politicians to be faithful to their spouses and to be honest and moral, many are themselves not being honest.

The "Time's Up" and "Me Too" movements have won over many people, presumably mostly men. Most individuals directly or indirectly acquainted with sexual harassment or assault, presumably mostly women, did not have to be won over.

However, there are many other voters who remain unmoved. And it's very likely that there is a backlash brewing- fortunately not one which will nullify the movement- that will unfortunately take its toll.  It may not be this week, this month, or even this year, but it will happen.

Most of them believe Stormy Daniels. Even among those who don't, a substantial number believes that when so many individuals (women, in this case) say similar things (video below from 10/16), they're not all lying.



Sure, when Democrats are in power, people will care about the personal behavior of politicians- but only because their outrage will be stoked by Republicans. For now, though, the mainstream media will dutifully report that the American people realize that Donald Trump is not the ethical, sexually responsible public official people say they want.

Nonetheless, that "liberal," supposedly anti-Trump media will not acknowledge of sizeable chunks of its constituency- the American people- their view of sexual misbehavior generally: 1) they are lying; and 2) seventeen months after the Access Hollywood tape and five months after birth of "Me Too," they simply don't care.



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Not That He Isn't An S.O.B.

"Anti-rape advocate" Wagatwe Wanjuki of Daily Kos cautions us not  to consider her criticism of Joe Biden in any "way a personal attack on Biden or a suggestion to completely ban him from the court of public opinion."  She notes the former vice-president, rightfully condemning Donald Trump, recently stated

A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, 'I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.’ 

They asked me if I’d like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, 'If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'

I've been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life. I'm a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy who talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.

While condemning Trump, Wanjuki explains

There are a lot of cultural norms behind why society is still overwhelmingly complacent about rape culture. One of them is at the core of Biden’s own “locker room talk”: toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity says the only way to be a man is to be violent, emotionless, and dominate women. The idea that boys would handle hearing a teammate brag about sexual assault by physically assaulting him is a manifestation of that....

Giving us a short, helpful history lesson, Wanjuki adds

If this was an attempt to talk about how things were back in the day, don’t believe the idea that sexual assault was less prevalent during Biden and Trump’s adolescence. Rates of rape have been declining for decades. We’re hearing more victim stories—not because of sexual violence, but because we’re increasingly creating a world where survivors’ words, the most powerful tool against rape culture, can be heard. 

However, there is an additional reason to question Biden's response to the Molester-In-Chief.

It is simply not true.   Joe Biden, a proud Catholic, has been doing penance for several years for having enabled the GOP minority on the Senate Judiciary Committee to trash Anita Hill and get Clarence Thomas on the United States Supreme Court. It is unlikely that a young Mr. Biden, less sympathetic to women's issues than he is currently, would have challenged anyone to a fight for making a misogynistic, violent remark. 

Very few- if any- guys would have, given the era and the chance the confrontation would have escalated out of control. A young man might have gone upside the head of another man who said something as bad or similar about his girlfriend. But it's a safe bet that he would have done little if anything about a fellow who spoke as generally as did Trump.

Echoing most feminists and experts in the field of sexual violence in recent years, "rape is about power, not sex. His (Trump's) choice to publicly humiliate his victims emphasizes that." However, rape is defined as "unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person's will..." Hence, rape is about both power and sex, with the claim that it is about only power an overreaction to the long-held, dangerously faulty, assumption that it is merely a sexual crime.

Still, Wanjuki gets it mostly right, criticizing Joe Biden's "locker room trash talk" and reminding us that our heightened concern about sexual violence reflects not an increase of the behavior, but creation of a culture in which we understand that a victim must no longer be silenced..

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Still In The Dark

The married president of the world's greatest superpower, the United States of America, allegedly picked up pornographic movie actress Stormy Daniels at a golf tournament, took her to his hotel room, was spanked, and had unprotected sexual intercourse with Daniels.

Once the leader of the free world, he previously had lamented that he could not date his own daughter and allegedly told Stephanie Clifford "Wow, you-- you are special. You remind me of my daughter."

Reportedly, President Trump wanted to continue seeing Ms. Daniels/Clifford, and not to discuss real estate deals in New York City. After the affair ended and she sold her story to a magazine, Stormy/Stephanie , in a parking garage with her daughter, allegedly was threatened by a man remarking "That's a beautiful little girl. It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom. "

In the fall of 2016, Daniels/Clifford was pursued to sell her story. Instead, she took $130,000 in return for signing a non-disclosure agreement with Michael Cohen, the President's fixer, who once stated 

If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit. If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let go until I'm finished. 

Incomprehensibly, Politico's Michael Calderone labeled this a  "lengthy  segment." It was not a lengthy supplement, but a sketchy one, with CBS unwilling even to devote all of 60 Minutes to the interview.  (A segment about a young NBA superstar  from Greece followed.) Calderone wrote

Cooper said on “60 Minutes Overtime” — an online CBS piece that accompanied the television interview — that “there are many, many tawdry details which we did not include in the story because it's just, you know, that's not our interest.”

“For us, it wasn't so much ‘there was an affair,’” Cooper added. “That's not as much the headline. For us, it's everything that has happened since and how we've gotten to this point.”

Alert Bill Clinton, who was impeached because he lied about a sexual encounter.  The current President of the USA allegedly had an affair, and CBS should have left  to the viewers' discretion to evaluate Clifford's story.

A talented interviewer unencumbered by qualms about sex would have asked the interviewee- who said she was physically uninterested in Trump- why she had followed Trump to his hotel room.. He would have asked whether she knew the reason he engaged in unprotected sex. Those aren't questions of prurient interest nor "slut-shaming." It's the President of the USA and Anderson Cooper is regarded as a legitimate journalist who should not be embarrassed to ask follow-up questions.

Of course, there were other leads to pursue. Clifford claimed not to know who threatened her but would recognize him instantly if she saw him. She might have been asked about the individual's race, height, body frame, even what he was wearing.

But she was not, for whatever reason, which leaves the possibility that the Russian government may be blackmailing the President of the United States with information denied the American public.

We don't know, however, whether Cooper failed, the network allocated insufficient time, or there was an agreement between lawyer Michael Avenatti and CBS. Nor do we know whether the Kremlin has more information about the President than Americans do. We deserve to know far more than we do, and the 60 Minutes telecast did nothing to change that.









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Low-Hanging Fruit

Two years ago, Irin Carmon was understandably alarmed because women had been prosecuted for alleged violation of anti-abortion statues. In Indiana, Purvis Patell was charged by prosecutors with feticide after ordering abortion pills online."  In Tennessee, Anna Yocca had "used a coat hanger to try to induce an abortion and later gave birth to a living chiled." And in Pennsylvania, Jennifer Whalenn was prosecuted "for ordering pills online so her sixteen year old daughter could end her pregnancy."

As the use of online telemedicine service to obtain an abortion grows- as it has in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland- the issue of punishing women who undergo the procedure will take on added importance.

For now, however, a much more common assault on women is the continuing effort to undermine Roe vs. Wade. Rewire explains that, in the large and politically pivotal state of Ohio (video below from 9/17 at abortion clinic)

Republicans are once again proposing an unconstitutional ban on abortion care, as lawmakers have introduced a bill that would lead to the “abolition of abortion in the state of Ohio.”

The bill is part of a trend among GOP state lawmakers to pass legislation that would challenge the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, with the goal of creating a case allowing the Supreme Court to revisit legal protections for abortion care.

Kellie Copeland, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice Ohio, said in a statement that the legislation is part of an effort by “anti-choice extremists” to target Roe....

HB 565, sponsored by state Reps. Ron Hood (R-Ashville) and A. Nino Vitale (R-Urbana), would prohibit the termination of a pregnancy by “any method, including, but not limited to, chemical methods, medical methods, and surgical methods.”

A further problem persists, one in which Republicans who insist that abortion is killing insist on holding one group of individuals responsible while the other is held blameless:

The GOP bill would allow physicians and those who undergo the common medical procedure to be charged with murder, which is punishable by life imprisonment or the death penalty. The lawmakers circulated a co-sponsor request for the bill in September, in which they criticized the legislation for passing abortion restrictions as “regulating evil” and that it was time to “abolish abortion in its entirety.”

Deadset against abortion rights and intent on ending the alleged "evil" of reproductive freedom forever, these legislators are terrified to hold women accountable while they are anxious to prosecute the doctor. If abortion is abolished, they believe, only pro-choice individuals will weep because they have substituted their judgement for the the professional judgement of an individual physician. However, even in one instance blaming  a woman for pursuing, paying for, and welcoming a "murder" would shock the public conscience.

Opposition to abortion would dwindle and their bad intentions would backfire.  There would be a significant upsurge in support for the right of a woman to terminate her pregnancy.

That leaves the pro-forced birth crowd in the philosophically untenable position of wishing to enshrine in statute a procedure as constituting murder, and simultaneously giving a pass to the murderer.  It isn't logically coherent, it isn't honest, but it is cowardly.









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Their Opposition A Good Sign

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee doesn't like the Omnibus Spending Bill passed by Congress and on Friday signed by President Trump. He tweeted "I join with others in disappointment and disgust with the Omni-BS bill" and posted

If  Mike Huckabee and most "evangelical leaders" oppose the deal, Democrats must have preserved some programs critical tothe  bottom 90% of society. Rewire.News notes

The omnibus omits the Conscience Protection Act, which would have allowed a broadened swath of health-care providers to sue if they’re supposedly coerced into providing abortion care, or if they face discrimination for refusing to provide such care.... A top Senate aide expected the Conscience Protection Act to be in the omnibus, according to Christian Broadcasting Network’s Abigail Robertson. But it wasn’t. Neither was a repeal of the Johnson Amendment, which could politicize churches.

But the news is not entirely positive, as Rewire explains that Congress decided

to hand over the $286.5 million designated in the omnibus for the program to Trump’s abstinence-only Title X chief, Valerie Huber. For the first time in three decades, Huber’s position will have sole decision-making power to award federal family planning grants, based on Trump-era HHS grant criteria that omitted any mention of “contraception” or “contraceptives.”

In approving the statement above, the father of presidential press secretary Sarah Sanders lauds the increase in military spending, which according to CNBC's Phil LeBeau (below) is 10.3%, or $654 billion.   That may not be good for the poor, the sick, the elderly, or workers, but it's heartening to learn that defense contractors are uppermost in the mind of Mike Huckabee and many other evangelicals.

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The Massacres We've Avoided

On February 14, Nikolas Cruz massacred 17 persons by shooting them to death at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.  But have you heard about the more recent murders at the same school?

Because no such thing occurred, you have not imagined them unless you have a vivid, macabre imagination- or are Ryan Cleckner, described by The Federalist (where he is a contributor) as "a former special operations sniper and a current firearms attorney, university lecturer, entrepeneur, and best selling author..."

Below (video from Crooks and Liars) Cleckner is seen telling fellow righty Tucker Carlson

Abandoning an inanimate object will not solve the problem. The tool is not the problem. I mean, you want to talk about the tools, look at the Austin bombing, which we just solved today.  Bombs are already illegal.  It didn't stop the bombs from happening.

Bringing a dangerous knife to school also is illegal. Before a boy on Tuesday was arrested at Douglas High School for having posted a threat on social media, the

school day began with the arrest of Jordan Salter, 18, after a conflict in the cafeteria. She poured cereal on another student’s head after he asked Salter’s friend a sexually offensive question. When the boy leaned in close to Salter’s face, she pulled a 2-inch black knife from her bra, opened it and displayed it, according to a report from the Broward Sheriff’s Office.

The next arrest came in the afternoon when school authorities learned that Gavin Stricker, 16, had brandished a knife on a bus Monday. He was called into the school’s office and a 9-inch knife was found in his backpack, according to a juvenile arrest report.

It was a bad day at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. But it was not a catastrophic day- because these individuals did not possess a firearm.  If Nikolas Cruz had gone on a rampage with a two-inch or nine-inch knife, lives probably would have been lost, and families would be grieving. But there would not have been 17 lives lost and 17 families grieving.

It's that way everywhere. On January 4, 2017 a man

stabbed at least 11 children after "sneaking into" a kindergarten in southern China, according to the Chinese media. The police arrested the 41-year-old alleged attacker, but his motives remained unclear.

Five of the children suffered serious injuries but none of them was in life-threatening condition, officials in the city of Pingxiang said on Wednesday.

And this concept, which a firearms instructor should be able to understand, applies also to bombs. Noting bombs are illegal, Cleckner cited the bombing attacks- plural- in Austin, Texas. He did not mention that aside from the bomb which killed himself, Mark Anthony Conditt evidently set off five bombs in four separate incidents, killing two individuals and wounding five people, one of them seriously. That is a great tragedy for two families and a somewhat lesser tragedy for the other families. But it's not 17.

Reminding us that "Chicago" is still a profanity for many conservatives, Cleckner claimed "it is the worst place  we have going on in this country for shootings, the worst place we have going on right now in our country for shootings. We have not only shootings but violent crime..." Inconveniently, Chicago has nowhere near the highest murder, or death by shooting, rate in the country- but Chicago. (Republicans- so in love with the "heartland," they'll lie about it.)

Other arguments made by Cleckner, with Carlson's encouragement, were invalid. However, this notion that all weapons are the same appears to be one gun apologists are particularly enthralled by. Hopefully, this and other shibboleths will take a serious blow when millions of gun safety advocates hit the streets of Washington, D.C. and elsewhere on March 24.

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Not A "Flake," Only Irrelevant

Donald Trump is terrified. He is hiding behind his desk and even considering resigning.

He is tortured with fear now that Republican senator Jeff Flake of Arizona has tweeted

We are begging the president not to fire the special counsel. Don't create a constittuional crisis. Congress cannot preeempt such a firing.  Our only constitutional remedy is after the fact, through impeachment. No one wants that outcome. Mr. President, please don't go there. 

"Very strong words," CNN's Wolf Blitzer told the Arizonan when he interviewed him Wednesday (video below from the day after). They probably didn't seem that way, however, to the president who

reportedly told then-acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe that he should ask his wife, who had lost a bid for political office in Virginia, how it felt to be a loser, NBC News reported Monday.

Trump made the remarks in a phone call to McCabe the day he fired FBI Director James Comey that was placed to demand why Comey was allowed to fly on a FBI plane from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., after being fired.

McCabe told Trump that he hadn’t been asked about the flight but that he would have authorized it if he had.

Trump fell silent before lashing out at McCabe and telling him to ask his wife what it felt like to be a loser, according to NBC.

Intentionally or otherwise, Senator Flake has suggested to the President that nothing will happen to him. "Congress cannot preempt such a firing," he told Trump, so don't expect us to stop you.  Then, you could be impeached- but "no one wants that outcome," so we in Congress will avoid it at almost any cost.

Flake appeared honest in his tweet, as well as in confirming the comment in his chat with Blitzer. "We are begging you," he pathetically remarked, "please don't go there."  However, his words were almost- almost- as misleading as they were pathetic. In late January, TIME reported

Two bills have been introduced in the Senate, both bipartisan. Sponsored by Republican Sen. Thom Tillis and Democratic Sen. Chris Coons, the Special Counsel Integrity Act would only permit the firing of a special counsel in the event of “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, or conflict of interest.” Sponsored by Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Democratic Sen. Cory Booker, the Special Counsel Independence Protection Act that would require an extensive judicial process to do so.

Both have been in a holding pattern in the Senate Judiciary Committee for several months and have only a couple co-sponsors, indicators that they are not moving ahead any time soon.

Congress could act constructively and patriotically but its GOP leadership in both chambers is loathe do so. Team Russia, captained by Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan, has made its choice. It will do as the team's owner, Donald J. Trump,wants it to do, save a letter signed by President Trump reading "I appreciate your help in winning the election. Quid pro quo forthcoming."  (And "appreciate" would have to be in all caps.)

As a member of Congress not running for re-election, Senator Flake could have a little- maybe a lot- more background. Flake is not responsible for the GOP's choice of party over country because no one cares what he believes as long as he votes for tax cuts for corporations and other important initiatives the President he finds distasteful needs to maintain his credibility.  A larger problem than Jeff Flake, other than the likes of Ryan and McConnell, is that the media has set the bar so low for conservatives and Republicans that "begging the president" is welcomed as "strong words."

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