Chappie Thanks the Khan Family for Saving America

Perhaps I should say "for saving us from ourselves." Who could have imagined just a week ago that the salvation of our deranged political impasse would originate in the steely bespectacled gaze of a deeply outraged Pakistani-American immigrant lawyer and his attentive wife? Gold Star parents. The final night of the Democratic National Convention was deep in remarkable affirmations of responsibility and decency.  The wonderful speeches, barn-burners all, from (among many others) Jennifer Granholm, the Rev. Barber from North Carolina and retired Lieutenant-General John Allen were sufficient to the task, but one could never imagined what came next and what it would lead to. Who it would lead to.

                   "Liberty...and equal protection of law!"

The word "ironic" is horribly over-used in our jaded culture. It seems ironic to Chappie that just as Capt. Humayun Khan died while drawing fire (putting himself in a position where the enemy had no choice but to engage prematurely--in his case detonate the car bomb--thus saving others) his parents have been drawing fire for the Democratic Party and, truth-be-told, the entire nation in causing Donald Trump to reveal in glaring and daily detail what a nasty, compulsive and frankly stupid charlatan he truly is. Anyone who thinks that Trump's continuing attacks on the Khans (who are drawing his fire) have not and do not continue to diminish him and cost him the votes of those not too damaged to perceive his awfulness...anyone who doubts that hasn't been noting the prominent Republicans announcing their temporary defections. These people are profiles in courage at the moment, but one mustn't forget that the party they have supported for many years IS responsible for ginning up the tempest of obscene nonsense we have come to think of as national politics.

Thanks to Mr. Khan's brandishing of a deadly weapon in the face of live TV, his vest-pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution, sales of that document (in it's concealed-carry form) have soared. Americans have found something substantial to care about. Or maybe they're just looking to accessorize? In any case it can't but be a good thing. The fact that the 1787 Constitution is actually a counter-revolutionary document that reversed many of the goals and gains of the 1776 revolution and the raucous democracy that ensued is beside the point. For better or for worse, the Constitution is our second founding document, and until we improve it, it is to all intents and purposes,,,sacred. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Khan, for your example.

Those who take exception with the degree to which I praise the Khan's intervention in our national nightmare-in-the-making need only recall the last words of cinema icon James Dean as he approached the intersection of CA 466 with CA 41in his Porsche Spyder about 6:45PM on the last day of September, 1955.  He saw an oncoming car ahead signaling to make a left turn across Dean's path: “That guy’s gotta stop… He’ll see us,” Dean said to his friend, Rolf Wütherich... But Don Turnupseed, the other driver, turned left into his path and Dean died at 23. Just because it seems unreal that something terrible, something uncharacteristic and unimaginable could happen, doesn't mean that it won't. Too often it does. The Khan's know this too, too well.

Finally, it seems clear to the Chapster that the Trump phenomenon raises a practical question for political parties to consider: should political parties have codes of ethics/behavior that enjoin people of certain extreme behaviors and demonstrated base values from representing them in elections? This would normally not be much of an issue, but during the brief period between receiving a nomination until election day, any candidate may be caught in a cycle of vile lies or assertions (or even a criminal act of which he is presumed innocent) but which call into question the nominee's suitability and electability. The time between nomination and election can be as little as 10 weeks, which is insufficient to allow the law to weed out the grotesque. If such a candidate, dishonored and exposed, lacks the ability to resign for the good of the party, the party's governing committee should have the option of withdrawing the nomination and offering it to the runner-up or to whomever they want.  

Captain Kahn could never have been President, given his foreign birth, but the conjunction of his sacrifice, his family's tragedy and the purest love of country may have led this Muslim family to help us pause in mid air...

Chappie's Idea for Protecting Seniors from Property Taxes

Chappie is a senior and will soon be paying property taxes for the first time. Yes, I know: something is not quite right about the Chapster...arrested development for sure. For the time being, he can afford his taxes, but down the road? Who knows?

In California in 1978, the anti-tax people (Republicans) put over on the future of California something called Proposition 13. Chappie remembers it well. The Golden State has been sliding ever since.

 

When Chappie arrived in CA in 1974, Patty Hurst had been kidnapped and everything in the state seemed to work wonderfully well. California had the #1 rated public education system in the USA. Rents were affordable in SF and elsewhere, the economy made CA the world's #5 economic power. Even the arrest/rescue of Patty Hearst didn't cast a pall over that scene of possibility.

In 2015 CA public education ranked 9th worst in the country. Our other metrics are equally dismal. to dismal to list. But this post is about the original, underlying interest/issue that motivated the passage of Proposition 13: grandma and grampus cast out for unpayable property taxes.



Chappie believes that the original premise for Prop 13 was a phony from the beginning. He has reached this belief over 40 years of watching the Golden State become not so much. But the economic benefit to a large class of people (mostly Democrats now) has made them so corrupt in their acceptance that they should pay much less than their neighbors pay for properties of approximately equal market value, that there is no hope for the state. Prop 13 is said to be the third rail of CA politics, so CA is done for. But CA is just one state and this problem supposedly exists in all 48 states. 48 states? Chappie thinks that there is an obvious answer to the problem of seniors being unable to pay increasing property taxes on their fixed retirement incomes and being forced to sell their homes in any of the 50 states: a simple solution that benefits everyone.

What if retired people (or anyone) with incomes that make it prohibitive for them to pay their property tax were allowed to pay the tax later, when they sell and move out or after they die and their estates are settled? The taxing authority would have a lien on the property that would guarantee payment. In the meantime, the property owner would pay only the interest on what would in fact be a loan, a kind of reverse mortgage. The interest would be pegged to the prime rate or the cost of living or some metric that everyone could agree on. It couldn't be high. This would be interest on the unpaid tax, an amount that would climb by the tax number each year.



If the tax on a given property is $1,000 and the owner opts for the program with an interest rate of 5%, after 1 year, the tax interest bill would be $50 and the tax owed at estate settlement would be $1K. After 10 years, if the tax rate had not gone up, the tax owed would be $10K and the annual interest owed would be $500. If the homeowner remained in the home for 20 years with no change in the tax rate, the total tax bill payable on settlement of the estate would be $20K and the annual bill for interest would finally have reached $1,000, having increased by a steady $50 for 20 years.  Thus the taxing authority would have a kind of investment paying interest annually. 

Over 20 years, the value of this interest payment would total $10,500. The homeowner would have paid slightly more than half of the value of the outstanding tax bill in interest. Payment of the balance (the actual tax) would come from the estate. A homeowner who couldn't mange this should probably not be living in such an expensive property. Where do people get the idea that they have a right to live in the same house all of their lives regardless of ability to pay? Downsizing has many benefits and one of them is living within one's means. Republicans otherwise seem to think this a valid goal to enforce on people who don't look like their parents and grandparents. If folks don't want to pay that extra $10,500, they can downsize and move into a place they can afford and let a young family move into their big house with all the empty bedrooms. It's a choice, and meaningful choice is the essence of real freedom.




Oops--not so fast! It is unlikely that the tax number (rate compared to assessed value) would not have increased over the 20 years. In many locations the property would have doubled in value. In San Francisco it would have quadrupled in 20 years. In order to protect the elderly, the taxing authority could allow them to pay interest on only the original annual tax number during their lives, regardless of how the actual tax number had risen with increased valuation. At the time of settlement of the estate, the full value of unpaid tax increase plus compounded interest on that increase would be due from the proceeds of the sale at market rate of the vastly more valuable property. The taxing authority would always have first claim on assets. 

If the greedy heirs don't like this prospect, they could have persuaded Grandma and Grampus to move to an apartment 20 years before, selling their house and investing the excess proceeds...in any rate those are individual decisions for individuals. The governing/taxing authority can offer a real and workable choice which doesn't cut into tax receipts at all.

Chappie believes, based on his years of observing stupid, short-sighted public policies allowed to run roughshod over the uncomprehending, that turning back the clock is rarely a good option, but recognizing that cycles tend forward and changing conditions will eventually lead to the undoing of myopic, recidivist policies. The way to deal with, for example, the absurd gun violence situation is not to try to pass further legislation limiting ownership, it is to allow the insurance industry and the civil law to task gun makers and owners for the full damages produced by their manufacture/ ownership of these dangerous things. People will always vote with their wallets if possible. Solutions that involve restrictions are always a limit on personal freedom. Solutions that offer meaningful options--choices--enhance freedom and its twin: responsibility.
 

Chappie Says It's Time to Confront the (Maybe) Biggest Republican Lie of All

Chappie was reading a piece by Ben Stein in The Guardian and came across the following assertion:

"In terms of tax policy, all of them [2016 presidential candidates] say they are going to cut taxes on the poor, but that’s a fake because the American poor already pay no taxes. Approximately 50% of American wage earners don’t pay any tax already, so that’s a fake."

A fake?  Ben Stein says that it's "a fake" to claim that that 100% of Americans pay taxes.  FAKE TAXES?    T    A    X    E    S ?

Mr. Stein's glib, fatuous and utterly false remark is beneath him. To be frank, it marks him as either a) a dumb shit or b) a mean prick. Sorry for the apparent gutter language--it is actually a clinical description of the identity Mr. Stein's duplicity earns him. Ben Stein is a very bright and well-educated witty man who knows full well that the income tax (which he declines to name even as he references it) is not the ONLY tax people pay. And yet he never mentions The Income Tax. Mitt Romney, to his eternal credit, DID refer to income tax when he otherwise disparaged and demeaned the 47%. But he ignored tax realities when he made his outrageous, and he thought secret, statement. Ben Stein gives the 50% or 47% or whatever credit for paying no taxes of any kind--that is what he says. Twice. He knows what an utter lie this is because he's an economist like his father before him. 

I'm sure I could think up some really clever and apt analogies to encompass the bizarre duplicity of Stein's language, but why should I? I've got Stein's language and the facts of life to rebut them with.

The income tax is (almost) the ONLY tax that some people don't pay. They don't pay income tax (if they get their payroll tax refunded) because in our wonderful economic system where wages have been flat for 43 years, they can't earn enough income to pay income tax--paying income tax is a sign of success, it's a symbol of the power of and honor to be an American citizen...unless one is a Republican. So why does a bright man make such an asinine and utterly false statement? A statement that defies reality? Because Ben Stein lives in a different reality. 

 

In his alternate reality, the income tax is the only tax that causes the well-off, with their huge incomes, enough pain to lie and complain about, because the other taxes don't affect their quality of life AT ALL. Well, the inheritance tax does, but that's a separate story... Poor people pay all of the taxes rich people pay at the same rates--except the income tax. For the income tax, however, the poor pay payroll taxes which range between 7.3 and 10%, money they receive back when and if they file income tax returns. The undocumented, lacking SS numbers, can't get their federal or state income tax refunds and thus pay ALL taxes the rich pay. They also pay Social Security, Medicare and unemployment insurance taxes which they can never claim the benefit of. These payments they make benefit only us citizens. THINK ABOUT THAT. The undocumented, unless they work completely off the books (in which case they still pay all the other taxes other poor Americans do) pay the highest taxes relative to personal wealth of anyone in the country. 

What could those other taxes amount to? Sales tax. Here in CA it is pushing 10%. Property tax is huge for people on a fixed income or just poor. 1% of the value of a tear-down in the SF Bay Area is many thousands. Due to the grossly inequitable property tax structure resulting from Proposition 13, the new purchasers of property pay tax at many times the actual value of long-term owners whose 1% rate may be based on an assessed rate as old as 1975. Liberals who own some of this old property are not calling for a fairer system. This measure was sold to the voter to benefit elderly people being pinched by the tax. How about the elderly super rich? Every year millions of poor people lose their homes either to foreclosure or unpaid property taxes. Car tax, gas tax, alcohol and tobacco tax. Highway tolls. Court costs and fines which push the poorest into debtor's prison or destitution. Building and other types of permit and fee costs, the list is much longer than this. Am I boring you, yet?

As a matter of fact, I left out payroll taxes. All those 47% pay payroll taxes at a much higher rate that their richer, better fellow citizens. A look at the table below will show that taxpayers in the top 10% pay at a rate half that of the majority. Taxpayers in the top .01% pay at only 10% of the rate of those in the middle. Incomes over $118,000 pay nothing additional at all. Between the time the payroll taxes of the lower income people are taken out of their paychecks and the same money is returned to them (if it is), a wealthy person's money which is not taken out is used to make more money. Does that make sense? The bottom 50% could be using their money for up to a year before they get it back in a refund--if they actually file properly and do so. It is difficult to explain something so unequal and unfair. Ben Stein, in the words of Al Franken, is a lying liar. He is just a Republican on message.

 

 

Republicans on this issue are simply LIARS. I can't stop myself from saying this. The truth feels so good, so right. I'm not calling names--I'm describing the truth value of their endlessly repeated libel on the 47/50%. This is not a pejorative opinion but a fact. The real question is, Why be liars? Why not give the less affluent their due for the combination of kinds of taxes and vastly higher percentage of individual wealth that they pay? Well, obviously because it's the truth! If the American people ever understand how they are actually being raped by the top 1%, bad things could happen, and nobody wants that, right? As for lying, it is dishonorable to knowingly attempt to deceive people, unless you do it for a living--like a CIA agent or a salesman.

  The most savage of truths on taxes, is that poor people (in the US, millions of poor people are offended at being called "poor") provide with the ultimate tax: the "donation" of their children to serve as the cannon fodder for our military adventures since we decided after Vietnam to spare the better sort of people the need to sacrifice their precious sons to our idiotic wars by having a 100% volunteer force. These patriotic families have just spent 15 years with their father, mothers, sons and daughters fighting the wars for the other 98% of us at the cost of their death, dismemberment and mental destruction. Since US states have cut our higher education budgets to the bone, the only way most children of the poor can go to college is through tuition payments earned via military service--call that a "voluntary tax" Mr. Stein, if you are so heartless. 

 


My point is just that it is shameful for Republicans like Stein and Romney and all the rest to continually deny the tax contribution and impactful tax burden of absurdly regressive taxes that people living near or below the poverty line make to our government operations year in and year out. There is a mental defect among Republicans and it is a form of ingratitude. Why deny that the poor make a tax contribution which is proportionately far in excess of your own when it is manifestly true?  Everyone who lives here pays taxes.  Illegal aliens pay taxes. Repeat after me: Everyone who lives in the USA pays taxes because we have taxes for everyone. Stop the LIE, Ben Stein.

And yet to think that the white portion of that ill-educated, brain-washed group will vote for Trump, who despises them, as Stein recommends!  You gotta love this fucked-up country!

There is another metric that no one, to the best of my tiny knowledge, calculates, but it is this: what percentage of a taxpayer's net worth is paid in taxes? For the very poor it can easily go to 10% or more. That is 10% of your total wealth given in taxes every year! When all the money that comes in must be spent to live, sales and other taxes BITE. However much it is, they can't really afford it--10% of little is less--that's why such taxes are called regressive. 

For the very wealthy, most of whose wealth is superficially inert (generating value increase in investments or property not taken as income) and barely if at all taxable, the percentage might be 1-2% of one's total wealth. That's not nothing, as they say, but these are people who have so much wealth they can live on a 2% annual return (not that they would ever be happy about it--they are never happy with things...)  Those folks certainly never have to stint on anything for themselves or their families, except maybe holding off a year before purchasing the salmon stream in Scotland--and that more for appearances. Well-off, successful people generally despise the unsuccessful almost as a reflex action. This is their right. You EARNED it, no?  Liar or not?

 

But such an unchristian attitude (Ben Stein famously loves all manner of Christian stuff) should not be made easier by this bare-faced lie that you tell each other and repeat so foolishly as Ben Stein (Thanks, Ben!) did. Ignoring not only the fact that poor people are much more impacted by taxes than the well-to-do, but pretending, as most Republicans do (as a matter of doctrine) that the poor "don't even pay taxes" is a blood insult--like saying that those people don't love their children or feel pain. It's insulting beyond imagining to those who suffer it, and you who dish it out (all the while pretending you are just stating facts) should be in no doubt as to why you are loathed and despised by those less well-off, as you sulk in your gated communities between rounds of golf, wiping the gun oil off your fingers while clipping those coupons and filing your Social Security checks away in a back drawer.

Chappie says Five Months is a Long Time to Maintain a Tantrum...

Since the possibility that Donald Trump's creepy, fool-evil politics could find enough soulless adherents to gain traction and the Republican presidential nomination has become reality, it has been on Chappie's mind that Trump might do a belated Sherman when he realizes what he's facing if elected. Chappie doesn't think Trump will make it to November.

He's barely going through the motions now, though the endless and ever-burgeoning flood of racist, nationalist bluster makes him seem alive. He's campaigning in California where's he's guaranteed to win the primary and where he doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning in November, but he's doing it because he likes it out here--or he liked it before he had stimulated 70% of the population to loathe him. Trump ain't going to make it to election day.

If elected, Trump would likely perish in office, overwhelmed by the many forms of resistance to his asinine antics. Anyone who remembers how lost George Bush & CO were before 09/11/2001 gave them something to do that they could (mis)understand, Bush 43 was a dead man walking. A one-term president in the making. With Trump, the possibly first 100 days is difficult to imagine, but the SCOTUS might suddenly have a 6-2 adult majority with Thomas and remaining the Italian guy in the asinine minority. So, what if the asinine antics ceased? What if a new DT appeared, sober, thoughtful and deliberate? Sober? Trump doesn't drink! Maybe that's his problem? He's suffering some sort of negative alcoholism? But no, the antics can't cease until Death settles on The Donald, like the vast hand of vice-principal Petrovsky settling on young Donald's disruptive shoulder? The boy's asinine antics can't be replaced--there's nothing behind them, Folks. Two dimensions.

The desire to be POTUS betokens a level of insanity in a "normal" human being. Insane as in "insane love"--love of country, a willingness to sacrifice one's privacy and one's family's privacy for the greater good: public service. There's no indication that Donald Trump can conceive of any good greater than his own or any service other than the "self" kind. This is not a partisan statement from someone who has loathed Donald Trump for 35 years--this is a true statement and will be borne out.

Trump is not normal, but he's also not above normal. He's different--he's incomplete as a human being. All the plastic wives and all the kids prove exactly nothing. Sperm is as common as motor oil. There are rickshaw drivers in Rawalpindi with as many wives and more children who are far better men than DT. These are men you could drink with if they weren't Muslims--hell, some of them probably will drink with you. Trump is a man who never became anyone other than the caricature he developed for public consumption as a teenager--he's still a teenager between the ears.

Trump's adherents will be surprised when they find out what's behind the man's surface. The revelation will be "not much." Americans, with our over-emphasis on and respect for juvenile values (what other country could take high school and college team sports as seriously as we do--or even HAVE such sports?) have a tradition of creating boy-men. I often feel like one myself.

So wait and see--the Great Trump Meltdown: Chappie predicts that sometime about the middle of October, The Donald will announce that he is taking all his marbles and going home, that America won't have Donald Nutjob to kick around anymore....

Just four months to go.

Chappie Wants to Know Why Didn't He Get Sprinkles on HIS?

I have mercifully left off posting during the main months of the run-up election cycle. Among the trillions of words sputtered out in inchoate rage and blithering, ignorant stupidity since the beginning of the year are none if any of mine. Not that I wasn't tempted...the apparent general permission to babble like an idiot or bark like a dog that so many seem to have availed themselves of this year was hard to pass up. I'm only human! Yes, you're very welcome. But every good thing must end....  That being said, I will keep this short...

Chappie has grasped the fact that the essence of the Republican Spirit is not actually a desire for more of their favorite expressed drug--Liberty, but the fear that someone will get (without apparent labor or effort) something that "Joe Bimbo" has or wants or has worked for for a long time, for example a white, tricked out Lexus LS just like the one in the Bimbo's driveway. What's George Jefferson doing with MY car? It's like jonesing for the Joneses, the agonizing anguish that someone will get something that he doesn't "deserve." Think of it as reverse covetousness. The Bimbos, Joe and Jill, worry about this constantly and apply this concern to almost everyone they see whom they don't know and who has anything that the Bimbos themselves regard as desirable. If the possessors of said stuff are alien to the Bimbos' keen eyes (they speak a foreign language or possess a deliciously tawny complexion), the Bimbos' suffering goes into overdrive and they start picking at each other. Sometimes this leads to make-up sex, but not often. And this agonizing fear drives them mad over time. Of course, whenever Joe and Jill receive something that they didn't obviously deserve, they tend to be quiet about it OR if a not very bright version of the Bimbos, to celebrate it in obliviousness to the irony of the situation. And so it goes.

For the record and in the interests of discussing the relative merits and demerits of Right and Left, Chappie will hereafter refer to symbolic Republicans as Joe and Jill Bimbo and Democrats as Don and Diane Key (DonKey? Get it?). I hope this seems like an equitable distribution of silly names.

 Equus africanus asinus                                 © Isidor Stankov/Shutterstock.com

Anyway, as I was about to say when I rudely interrupted myself, this outraged Republican angst is understandable. Furthermore, the something that Diane Key gets that she doesn't deserve is likely to be something the outraged Jill Bimbo doesn't have but has always secretly wanted and been working towards. The deeper mystery of the Bimbo personality/weltanschauung is its intensely zero-sum nature, the sense that someone else's having or getting or winning entails the Bimbos not having or giving up or losing. In a free and productive economic system like ours (the very thing that attracts most immigrants) this is a failure of imagination and a sad thing.

When the Republican type (claiming allegiance to notions of personal responsibility and moral superiority) perceives some other achieving something that the Republican adjudges this other undeserving or unworthy of, emotions run high and the other's business becomes the Republican's concern. We can see the same dynamic operating in Republican opposition to other people having the right to marry whom they like, to other people having the right to control access and outcomes involving their bodies, in other people having the opportunity to vote, in other people having a right to valid, free public education, with other people having the right to temporary public assistance to feed their children. Seemingly the only  liberty issues Republicans have that are actually about imagined restrictions on their own possessions, are the obsession with guns and taxes.  The link just above is to a poignant scene on YouTube I came upon the other day. I freely point out that I possess no inside knowledge about the political affiliation of "Kimmy," the woman staring in the video linked above whose arguments and behavior I will be describing and commenting on, but I claim the Right of Stereotype here, anyway. Conversely, I admit that these Republican virtues I am apparently castigating are shared to some degree by all humans. It's just that the cup runneth over with most of those who self-identify as Republicans.  Everyone on both sides of the political divide seems to regard herself as superior to the other in any number of ways, so I guess everybody can't be either right or wrong, can he?

The cellphone recorded video linked above is of a woman (Kimmy!) verbally assaulting a man in a checkout line with his child, ostensibly because the man was using food stamps (her hard-earned money.) This video came to my attention when it was fully described at a respected liberal website, Raw Story without much editorializing. For the record there have not been any food stamps involved for many years, nor any of the corruption associated with that form of transaction. Participants have a debit card. Perhaps prejudice requires a false description of reality as it's first principle, Kimmy?

 

Upon being verbally encroached upon (in the presence of his small child) for carrying out a completely legal and valid financial transaction, the man (who looks like a "Skeeter" to me) explains to his attacker that he is a working father working "50-60 hours a week" to support his family. He is under no conceivable requirement to explain himself to this obnoxious woman (whom I'm calling "Kimmy" in honor of the heroic Kentucky office holder, thrice-divorced champion of vanilla marriage, Kim Davis, whom Kimmy painfully resembles in all her blousey authoritarianess) and the store should have taken steps to remove and ban her immediately, but Skeeter, bless his heart,  makes an attempt to explain himself--a fact no doubt driven in part by his own embarrassment at using the SNAP program. Poor people are actually not smug about their poverty! Ignoring his trapped response (he has a small child in his care) and perverting it's sense, Kimmy snarls that SHE supports his family. 

Now, we know nothing about these two real people besides what the poor quality video reveals. For the sake of argument, Chappie chooses to believe the best of both parties: Kimmy is a hard-working taxpayer who is not, according to her, a "bleeding heart liberal" and Skeeter is a struggling parent finding it impossible to make ends meet without availing himself and his family of "food stamps." Perhaps the most impressive thing about Skeeter is what he does not do: he doesn't make any cruel, sexist references to Kimmy's doughy appearance or invite her to worship certain regions of his anatomy, as Chappie almost certainly would have done. Go Skeeter!

 

 

Food stamps, so-called, are actually "plastic"--the chief function of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP which cost the US taxpayer "$74.1 billion in fiscal year 2014 and supplied roughly 46.5 million Americans with an average of $125.35 for each person per month in food assistance." This wasn't all the money they spent on food, just a supplement. 76% of SNAP benefits go towards households with children. It's fair to suppose that this assistance kept these people from going hungry in The Greatest Country in the World. If Kimmy knew the facts, she might have just a hint of a smile on her face. Her Republican House of Representatives cut the SNAP program by $8.7 billion in the 2014 Farm bill (they had tried for $39 billion but were blocked by Obama's veto threat) at the same time that they increased subsidies for corporate farming by a $6 billion increase in subsidized crop insurance.

To the extent that Kimmy pays any Federal income tax, she may be supporting the man's food stamps with her taxes (not her money--by definition, your taxes due are NEVER your money but what is due the government for providing you with the environment in which to live safely from the moment you "earn" anything.)  Chappie thinks it is healthy, realistic to realize that your taxes are never your money. Imagine how you think about your mortgage and the earnings that go to support it--your earnings are "spent" the moment you earn them, no?

Anyway, $74 billion is a lot of money. If we accept the widely documented fact that SNAP is a very effective program in alleviating hunger in America, then we should ask ourselves what $74 billion dollars represents to us? Well, we spent $60 billion on our pets last year. Every penny worth it, I'm sure. It's not clear to Chappie whether this figure includes funds spent to euthanize nearly 3 million dogs and cats whom nobody wanted? According to Market-watch (as Chappie did a quick check for facts) five years ago, "Americans spent a whopping $33.3 billion on cosmetics and other beauty products in 2010, up 6% from 2009, according to the Commerce Department." We also spent nearly $13 billion in 2014 on aesthetic plastic surgery (92% by women) and that overwhelmingly for breast augmentation.  Don't get mad...I'm just sayin'...

Lest you think these amounts constitute discretionary spending that no one really needs to spend, check out the price of our prisons, places where the inmates get, in additional to mental and other forms of torture, room, board and medical care 24/7/365: $80 billion. Or then there's the cost of automobile accidents: $871 billion. These numbers make me dizzy. Then there's the cost of the Pink Tax, the many percents that women in America and elsewhere spend extra for the same products that men buy. A California study estimates that it costs women an extra $1400 per year. If we consider that a third of our population are "women" (the other two thirds being "men" and "children") we come out with a figure around 150 BILLION extra that women pay every year for being women. That means you, too, Kimmy. So get off Skeeter's case, OK? Compliment him on his kid.

Chappie supposes that "Kimmy" is not a hypocrite since she is clearly too factually challenged to know that what she is claiming to know about Skeeter is basically not true and certainly would give the lie to her claim of being a Christian (as I'm sure she does and is...whatever that means.) Skeeter and I are similarly on a fishing expedition to assume that someone with a dreadfully perverted and ironic sense of entitlement and a rabid a social persona is a Republican when she is probably just an anguished meme escaped from cyberspace into our reality.

Attention Shoppers!  

Special on Hello Kitty TUTUS in Aisle 21-A!!!!

  

Chappie is Poopin' His Pants at the Thought of What's Comin'

 

  Chappie (no, that's not Chappie!) may look to you like a cute robot who has seen better days, but he's really just an aging white male American. Read this and weep, but only if sitting or lying down. Finally someone (Thomas Edsall in the NY Times) has written a 2016 electoral analysis that scares the hell out of me.  I feel like Dr. Bruce Banner staring at his image in a future-revealing mirror. Yikes! Green? Edsall's implied conclusion says that this election is (now that Trump is actually in the final and only a trip to the voting booth away) about white people and our secret (even to ourselves in many cases) feelings and attitudes about non-white people and the fact that WE can vote however WE FEEL in SECRET.  Hunh?

Because we block the admission of it from our own consciousnesses, people seldom if ever admit that they harbor racist convictions or feelings. Only 10% of whites consider themselves to be racist, but 38% of whites consider blacks to be racist. Apparently the fact that blacks would seem to have some cause to feel so doesn't penetrate this irony-free group's logic center. Nor does the obvious operation of psychological projection at work in the white mind. This dichotomy gives some idea of the mountain of distortion we all have to surmount. We monsters never see ourselves as such. 

Typhoid Mary was similarly clueless.

Edsall's argument, supported by evidence you must read, suggests that Trump is much closer to being elected than most of us imagine because he really is a one issue candidate whose issue is disguised by all the insults, bad taste and babble: Trump is the candidate of white resentment and white resentment of non-whites and the atavistic warp and weave of the contemporary world is much greater than (white) people with college degrees and liberal credentials realize. Since I write as a college educated white man, I leave it to other-defined people to figure out to what extent you may be kidding yourselves about what is coming. We will all face the same shit storm if it arrives.

So, racists almost never accept that they are racists. Perhaps Dylan Roof does? But racists are also generally sexists as well, since both are based on a conviction of human and gender inequality. I have given up on the apparently educated women who can't decide if they are "feminists" or not? Don't worry, 95% of the world's men know what you are and are just waiting to put you back in your place--and you thought it was only the women and girls of Kabul who needed to worry? 

I argue that there are two kinds of racists. I distinguish between racists who are "happy" with what they are and wouldn't change a thing (David Duke) and racists who sense that there is something "off" about their positions and are amenable to change given time and persuasion. Their hearts are still racist but their heads are further evolved and encourage them to get on the right side of history--or just the right side. George Wallace, the Alabama segregationist governor, was one such. He changed even his heart. So was Abraham Lincoln. Many of this sort actually voted for Barrack Obama once or even twice (given that he is an exceptional individual whose gifts and personal qualities were obvious to all when he first ran for office.) Even the other kind of racists like "their" colored friends.

The Democratic voters who may vote for Trump are many of the same ones who are now voting for Bernie. WHAT?  You don't see it?  If you are a working class male Democrat with job and other insecurity, Bernie with his talk of jobs and corrupt elites will appeal to you far more than the elite- connected Hillary. If Bernie became the Democratic candidate, you might actually have voted for Bernie--A SOCIALIST.

Of course, all of this silliness derives from the fact that perhaps a plurality of voters think of their campaign choice as a shopping expedition, a product choice (Let's give android a chance for a change, eh?)--actually believe the promises the candidates make or that the candidates (however sincere) have a snowball's chance of delivering on ANY of their pie-in-the-sky promises. Build a wall to the sky, Donald? Deport 11 million people, you pompadoured asshole? A "political revolution" Bernie? Free college education? This endlessly repeated "revolution" phrase alone should disqualify you from serious consideration. Want to know what a revolution (call it a civil war and look at who owns most of the guns, you NRA bashers!) gets you? Look around and find one that you'd like to emulate. Such talk is jejune nonsense, well-meaning and irresponsible as well-meaning people's passions so often are. The Road to Hell, Burnie.  Don't forget old Voltaire who knew everything about oligarchs and bullshit dreamers:  Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien.

The better is the enemy of the good. 

Seriously. 

But without Bernie and his charming, elderly male warmth, you, Shopper, are faced with someone you can't abide--how then can you vote for HER? Don't forget, if you ever knew it, that the rise of the National Front in France corresponded with the virtual disappearance of the Communist Party as a factor in French politics. The former Communists in a significant degree went to the racist, nationalistic, anti-Semitic National Front after 1970. Is that too much information?

The situation is a bit different with sexism since sexist ideology is hardly as stigmatized as the racist variety and is actually fostered in many cultures and cultural groups and religions, etc. Wow, it's a sexist world! The list of cultures that are not sexist and homophobic is by far a short list. Even inter-cultural groups share this: look at the music scene.

In short, Trump's chances are bolstered even further by the implicit, rock-solid sexist vote in this election. All the young women who reject the doughty Hillary for the adorable über sprite Bernie and react snippily that they are free to vote for the candidate of their choice regardless of gender--are, in my humble feminist male opinion, daft cunts who won't have any choice when it comes to their bodies (after Trump and his advisers reorganize the SCOTUS along racist, atavist male dominant lines) and won't have to worry about ever having another vaguely progressive serious woman candidate to vote for in their lifetimes. 

Of course, Trump may choose Sarah Palin as his VP and support her to succeed him after he's finished with us. Think that's ridiculous? Really? Who are you to measure the ridiculous? Insults and contumely are and will be your lot in life, GIRLS, until you get a clue and TAKE power and stop voting for Daddy or Gramps (Note that I didn't use the N-word, just the C-word and nothing will happen to me unless an asteroid swings off course--a risk I'll run.) Hillary, for all her negatives (whatever that means) is your one and only choice. Sadly, you may live long enough (six months?) to see that I am SADLY correct. 

Make me a liar, Bitches.

The feeling of equanimity I experience having a man like Barack Obama living and working in the White House will be gone in less than a year. I will probably never experience such a feeling again. I am surrounded by many nice people who seem to imagine that because a number of important battles have been narrowly won, that the tide of history has turned and a just world for all people is assured. (We're on the right side of history!) Well, let Trump be elected and WHITE atavism hold sway for a time, and you won't even be able to remember this Age of Barry.

This potential election of a white atavist man over a modern white woman offers the chance for a double whammy in reasserting the last hurrah of White Male Supremacy over bird, beast and bush. It could prove to be a perfect storm of racist, atavistic stupidity putting "the lesser breeds without the law" and the goddamned feminazis BOTH back in their proper places! I'm really scaring myself here. One thing I am absolutely certain of: should Trump be elected, America will wake up on November 9th feeling immediate buyer's remorse. Too late, Motherfuckers! Many who would be embarrassed to admit voting for Trump, will have thought they were registering a protest vote--that Trump could never win--THIS is how clueless we voters can be.

 

Edsall makes one point abundantly clear: the next and final test Trump faces will happen in the privacy of the voting booth where every voter can do whatever he or she wishes and NEVER have to answer for it, much less admit it to anyone, even in time to herself.* The country's fate could depend on millions of disappointed, confused and foolishly bitter white people NOT voting with their emotions...   Does anyone want to take that bet?

This moment feels like the 1980 and 2000 elections would have to me, if I had had sense enough to realize that white resentment could elect boobs like our 40th and 43rd presidents. I didn't. We did. How about our 45th?

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* My late parents, staunch Democrats and anti-racists, were also Eisenhower Democrats who supported Nixon in 1960. I was "politically active" as an 11 year old Protestant in a Catholic school tasked with being Chairman of the Republican Party in the mock election. Nixon got 4 votes, Kennedy 83, and I scored points with the nuns for being their patsy (this was partial revenge for my having been the #1 student in Catechism class for two years running despite being one of only two Protestants in the school. Sandra, the other Protestant, was usually #2. I developed a disdain for roman Catholic intellectuals that lasted until I met the work of Gary Wills and others years on. I still regard Jesuit training as duplicitous and deficient.) No matter, I supported Nixon all the way. Anyone remember his running mate? Henry Cabot Lodge. His campaign slogan? "Give 'em and inch and they'll take a mile!" (spoken of Red China's failed efforts to capture two doughty little coastal islands, Quemoy/Kinmen and Matsu, controlled by Taiwan.) My mother was critical of JFK and felt competitive with Jackie--this is my clear, uninterrupted memory. I don't remember Mom speaking well of JFK until he was dead, yet for at least the last 30 years of her life, my scrupulously honest mother insisted sincerely that she had voted for Kennedy. The idea that she had voted for Nixon (whom she had come to detest by '68) was utterly alien to her idea of herself. Looked at another way, how could I have been the only reactionary little swine in the family? Our neighbors, the liberal Crispells were great fans of JFK and since I adored the Crispell girls (to the extent an 11 year old boy could adore girls), the question arises how I could have been an adherent of Tricky Dick, someone they thought little of? Children obviously adopt the politics of their parents until they reach the age of rebellion, which was not eleven in those days.

 

Chappie Says What Happens on Television Should STAY on Television...

Could it be true? True that an American is more likely to be fatally struck by lightning than killed by a terrorist in any given year? Arguably this is so. I haven't fact checked yet, but I just know this is one of the more nearly true statements you'll have heard this week in reference to the tragedy in San Bernardino....  OK, now we have checked and find that the number of Americans killed by specifically Islamic terrorists this year has been about half of the number likely to be killed by lightning (14 vs. 27.)  The US suffers about one shark attack fatality every two years. Or something Blah, blah, Blah.

The first conclusion Chappie draws from the days long onscreen dance of concern and obsession with the religion obsessive "motives" of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the San Berdoo Butchers (How's that for a headline moniker, Daily News?) is that we secretly enjoy this stuff WAY TOO MUCH. Many of us want to be angry, and to be angry first requires that you be afraid, very afraid. How else to juice up the fear factor regarding things that happen on TV and which have absolutely no relevance or connection to our individual lives than to hype endlessly the possibility (however infinitesimally remote) that something will happen: that Kim Kardassian's ass will finally fall off in the middle of some runway or other, that A&E will cancel Storage Wars in favor of a show about Donnie Wahlberg and Jennie McCarthy dating in real life (and leaving "Bates Motel" as the only scripted show on the network!) or that no one will revive the Pontiac brand EVER? You know what I'm talking about, don't you?

Coulrophobia: fear of clowns (painting by Michael Olivier, Grenoble France)

The second conclusion I draw is that the sum total of our mental parts is significantly less than the observations and evaluations of a single person. That would be ME.