Category: Uncategorized

In the midst of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, EPA Director, Scott Pruitt, said we shouldn’t talk about climate change.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone.

Since becoming EPA Director, Pruitt has been busy rooting out climate change scientists at the EPA for dismissal, scrubbing its website of any studies supporting climate change and rolling back Obama Administration measures designed to address those issues.

While Trump’s FEMA Director appears to be doing a credible job in supplying relief to Houston, Florida and other parts of the nation hit by the storm, Trump, Pruitt and even some of the state officials in the hardest hit areas seem to be putting their residents at risk of future weather catastrophes by taking measures that would reduce the effects of unchecked climate change.

Scientists were nearly unanimous in their conclusion that while global warming did not cause Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, it worsened them.

The rise in water temperatures in the Gulf by as little as four degrees created pressure cooker conditions for the ingredients of the storms, i.e. extreme winds, rainfall and storm surge.

The increase in the water temperatures are unquestionably the result of greenhouse gases, the largest of which is carbon dioxide.

The gases are caused by many everyday activities but the two largest producers are industry and transportation.

The result is global warming which results in rising sea levels causing the polar ice caps to thaw, longer and more damaging wildfires, more frequent and intense heat waves, increased air pollution, greater flooding and more severe droughts.

Earlier this year, Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Climate accords in which most of the world joined and agreed to take steps to combat climate change and reduce global warming.

He was encouraged to do this by Pruitt and other Administration officials in his administration including alt=right advisers, Steve Bannon Stephen Miller and Energy Secretary Rick Perry.

Perry’s inclusion in the climate change denial faction seems almost incomprehensible.

One would think that as a former Texas Governor, whose state has been ravaged by storms and hurricanes as recently as Hurricane Harvey, he would be conversant with the science of climate change and global warming if only to learn what Texas should be vigilant about .

Yet, southern governors with large swaths of coastal land and beaches seen particularly resistant to learning those facts that might avert repeated catastrophes.

Florida Governor, Rick Scott, dismantled the Florida Energy and Climate Commission, walked away from his predecessor’s initiatives to protect the coastlines and forbade state scientists and employees from using the phrase “climate change.”

Texas Governor, Greg Abbott, like Rick Perry is a climate change denier.

Indeed, he has plenty of company in Texas.

Both Texas Senators, Ted Cruz and John Cornyn along with almost the entire Republican congressional delegation from that state voted against supplying aid to New Jersey, Connecticut and other northeastern states to repair and rebuild following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, contending that the assistance was “pork.”

In the wake of Hurricanes Harvey and Irma they have shown no compunction about bellying up to the trough with their hands out for disaster aid.

Fortunately, members of the congressional delegations from the northeast are a forgiving lot and have voted for the aid package proposed by the Trump Administration.

At this writing, the Trump Administration is steadfast in its withdrawal from the Paris Climate agreement.

Apparently, neither he nor anyone around him has stopped to consider that if global warming continues unchecked, large parts of the world, especially near the equator, could be rendered uninhabitable leading to a large migration of (gasp!) refugees.

Scott Pruitt continues to shill for the oil and gas industry as he guts every program and regulation designed to ameliorate global warming.

Governors Abbott, Scott and their congressional delegations will continue to beg for their disaster relief while putting their heads back into the ground at the same time Trump continues to rant and tweet that the “concept of global warming was made by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing Non-competitive.”

We will be expected to foot the bill for all of these “fake” storms and hurricanes until something occurs to alter Trump& Co.’s views on the matter.

It might require Mar-A-Lago being swept out to sea.

We can only hope and pray.

I’ve arrived at a point in my life where I wonder what kind of country we have become.

Americans, in times of crisis, always united and pulled together.

In the midst of the Great Depression, we united behind President Roosevelt as he passed legislation establishing public works projects that put people back to work.

Sixteen years ago, in the days and months following the attack on September 11th, we united behind the leadership of President Bush and supported appropriations to rebuild lower Manhattan and provide compensation for the families of the victims and the rescue workers who developed illnesses from the clean-up.

Somewhere or sometime after that, we lost our concern for the health and well- being of one another.

When the “Great Recession” occurred in 2008, some advocated allowing the banks and the auto industry to fail.

They didn’t care that millions of people would be left destitute or that the jobs in one of our major industries would be wiped out.

Legislation entitled the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, it was initially voted down when it was introduced by President Bush’s Treasury Secretary in September, 2008.

Following that vote, the stock market dropped by over 700 points, the largest in its history.

Both houses of Congress passed it a short time later.

The following year, as the economy and job markets continued to struggle, President Obama proposed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to save existing jobs and create new ones.

It was enacted with almost no Republican support.

This was a prelude to Mitch McConnell’s stated goal, which was to make president Obama a one-term president.

I won’t go into the passage of the Affordable care Act i.e. Obamacare.

Suffice it to say that there has been a seven year effort to gut health care for over twenty-million people without any viable plan to replace it.

What I have found truly amazing is the way that partisan indifference to human suffering has become so embroidered into our national fabric.

In 2012, when Hurricane Sandy struck twenty-four states on the eastern seaboard causing 71.4 billion dollars in damage, partisan and regional resistance to relief efforts abounded.

When President Obama traveled to the Jersey Shore and was praised by Republican Governor, Chris Christie, Christie was pilloried by others in the Republican Party.

The entire Texas Republican congressional delegation, with one exception, voted against federal aid to the areas damaged by Sandy.

Even earlier, in 2005, Pence proposed offsetting the cost of Hurricane Katrina relief against other programs, including highway projects and the new Medicare prescription drug program, opining “We simply can’t allow a catastrophe of nature to become a catastrophe of debt for our children and grandchildren.”

This past week, Hurricane Harvey struck Houston, Texas and its surrounding area causing over 100 billion dollars in damage to flooded homes and businesses.

This year, perhaps because Hurricane Harvey fell on Trump’s watch, Pence unconditionally called upon Congress to appropriate disaster relief.

Even before the storm struck, Senators Cruz and Cornyn, both of whom opposed the Sandy relief, were calling on the federal government to supply disaster relief.

The phrase “what goes around, comes around,” sticks in my mind.

Fortunately, congressional representatives from New York, New Jersey and other areas damaged by Sandy aren’t going to punish the residents of Texas for the actions of Cruz, Cornyn and their other representatives.

New York Congressman, Peter King, has tweeted, “NY won’t abandon Texas. 1 bad turn doesn’t deserve another” and “Above all true Americans must stand together.”

I wish the ability to put aside grievances and appreciate how much we need each other was more infectious.

In the week that Harvey ravaged Houston, the Muslim community opened their mosques and offered food and shelter to anyone who needed it for as long as they needed it.

Those who embrace a travel ban on Muslims might want to reconsider the justice and wisdom in that.

In the middle of that hurricane, thirty-one year old Alonso Guillen, was killed during a rescue effort for people trapped in an apartment complex in a Houston suburb.

He was a Mexican immigrant and a “Dreamer” under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

That is the program that Trump ended on September 5, one week after Guillen’s death.

We forget that both Muslims and “Dreamers” serve in our military and fight and die for our country.

In 1858, three years before the Civil War and two years before being elected President, Abraham Lincoln said “That a house divided against itself cannot stand.”

We are moving further and further apart from one another, demonizing each other based upon caricatures and prejudices while ignoring the good in each other.

We need to ponder Lincoln’s words if we are going to survive.

It should come as no surprise that Trump pardoned former Arizona sheriff, Joe Arpaio, before he was sentenced for his Criminal Contempt conviction.

They are, after all, two of a kind.

They bonded during the joint campaign to spread the racist “birther” lie that President Obama wasn’t born in the United States and therefore not eligible to be President.

Both claimed to have sent investigators to Hawaii who turned up evidence to support that claim, although neither ever disclosed the evidence they claimed to have found.

In Trump’s case the claim he sent investigators to Hawaii was probably a lie.

In Arpaio’s case it was true.

You have to wonder how Arpaio could justify using a public employee and public money for such a fool’s errand.

Maybe Maricopa County had a crime free week.

Arpaio’s contempt for the court processes and his abuse of Latinos spans a greater time frame than Trump’s but that is because he was in office longer.

The Phoenix New Times chronicled his abuses throughout his years in office.

He proudly called his jail a “concentration camp” and if you were a Latino inmate, it probably was.

As a publicity stunt, he marched Latino inmates into a segregated pen surrounded by an electric fence.

He erected a tent enclosure and marched inmates through the streets of Phoenix to the tent jail forcing them to wear pink nightgowns and pink underwear.

Once they were housed there, they were forced to live and sleep outside in below freezing temperatures in the winter months and temperatures that soared to over 120 degrees in the Arizona summer.

Over 160 inmates died in Arpaio’s jails during his tenure.

34 of those deaths were the result of inmates hanging themselves.

39 more died in the county hospital without the cause ever being classified.

Twice, the Federal Courts ruled that medical treatment is so deficient that it violates the Constitution.

A paraplegic inmate had his neck broken while being forced into a “restraint chair” because he asked for a catheter.

Another inmate died while deputies were trying to stuff him into the chair.

Pregnant inmates suffered miscarriages and still births because of the lack of medical attention and care.

Arpaio had the reporters from the Phoenix New Times that were covering him arrested, costing the taxpayers of Maricopa County 3.75 million dollars.

The federal Judge hearing the racial profiling case, G. Murray Snow and his wife, were subjected to an investigation by Arpaio’s agency.

The case was ultimately resolved against Arpaio.

It cost Maricopa County 44 million dollars.
Throughout his time in office Maricopa County has paid over one hundred million dollars in claims against his Sheriffs’ Office.

While Arpaio was devoting these resources to his crusade against Latinos, hundreds of sexual assault cases involving child victims were allowed to languish and die.

Despite Judge Snow’s ruling that Arpaio must cease the racial profiling, he continued to engage in it.

That led to the finding of Criminal Contempt by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton.

Perhaps it was the thought of Arpaio being forced to wear a pink nightgown, pink underwear and having to live in one of his tent jails for six months that motivated Trump to pardon him.

Perhaps he viewed him as a “patriot” and one of those “many fine people” that marched through Charlottesville, Virginia chanting “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil.”

I don’t know what motivated him to do this.

What I do suspect is that Trump is testing the pardon waters to see what the Congressional, media and public reaction to his use of the pardon power is.

I think it’s a prelude to more pardons being granted to people named Flynn, Manafort, Kushner and Trump Jr.

I can’t help but believe that if Arpaio had been born in Germany at the turn of the last century, he would have been prosecuted with the others for crimes against humanity at Nuremberg.

I also wonder if Trump had been born at that time and ascended to the office he now holds, whether he would have pardoned all of them.

The New York State Fair began this week, which means we are at the end of summer and the snow should be falling soon.

I thought that would get everyone enthused.

It put me in the mood to ruminate about some random end of summer thoughts.

Weather-wise it wasn’t much of a summer.

It seemed to rain every day although it was probably every other day.

Instead of playing golf, my weekends were spent cutting the lawn although I do have to confess that even if I’d played more golf, it wouldn’t have improved my game.

I still have the highest handicap at the Pompey Club.

If it was any higher, they would probably put a handicap sticker on the golf cart. I could probably blame my lack of improvement on working full time this summer but that would be “Fake News.”

We own nineteen acres, which we share with two mules, a horse, two dogs, two cats and five chickens.

After the pastures are subtracted, I mow about seven acres. The lower acreage, which surrounds a two acre pond was so wet that weeks went by before I could mow it.

It remained too soggy for us to even get any use out of the pond.

The summer seemed longer than usual.

That may have been due to the fact that I have 8:00 A.M. meetings twice per week.

There was a time when the only way I could have attended an 8:00 A.M. meeting was if I was coming home after a night out.

Those days, or should I say nights, are long gone as I celebrate my 68th year.

Now, when I get out of the meeting I walk a mile through downtown and repeat it again at noon as part of my ongoing campaign to stay above ground.

The State Fair is another changed experience.

Many years ago I’d go with a group, late in the day, catch a concert and stay until the fair closed.

Now, I go early on a weekday with my five-year-old granddaughter and stay until the mid-afternoon.

I do have the good sense to avoid opening day when Governor Cuomo comes and announces his latest round of harebrained ideas to be funded with our tax dollars.

It won’t be long before gondolas are crisscrossing the state.

This year, he didn’t disappoint.

He announced that a fifty million dollar expo center ”the largest north of New York City” would be built at the State Fair.

He promised that it would change the Fair from “a 13 day venue to year round economic engine.”

Earlier this year he proposed that a gondola at the fair which would travel over route 690 would be year round attraction.

He has apparently lost his faith in the tourist magnet of being able to view Weitzman’s Scrap Metal yard from the air.

At the end of September my 50hj high school reunion is scheduled.

I can’t help but go back forty years to my 10th reunion.

I was sitting in my office at Hiscock Legal Aid, when I received a telephone call from one of my classmates seeking some help.

“What are you up to these days?” I asked.

“I just stared a six month sentence at Jamesville,” (the local correctional facility), He replied.

“You moron,” I said,” Do you know what day it is?”

“No,” he answered.

“Our tenth reunion is tonight,” I told him.

“Can you get me out?” he asked plaintively.

“Of course not,” I answered.

“Then will you say Hi to everyone for me?” he asked.

“Sure,” I told him.

That night I was asked to say a few words and told everyone, “I’m bringing greetings from some folks who couldn’t be here,” I said, “and some are a lot closer than you think.”

I’ll be curious to see if he can make it this year.

I went to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, between 1969 and graduation in 1971.

East Tennessee was a very conservative and reliably Republican bastion that supported the War in Vietnam.

During those years much happened.

Numerous marches and protests against the war were held in downtown Knoxville as well as in Washington, D.C.

In May 1970, following the shooting that took place at Kent State University, U-T, like many other colleges and universities, went on strike.

Picket lines protesting the shooting and the war were everywhere on campus.

Large meetings and assemblies were held on campus at which speakers railed against the war and the persons responsible for sending the National Guard onto the Kent state campus.

During this period police in Mississippi shot into a dormitory at the African-American college Jackson State University in Jackson, killing two students and wounding twelve more.

While this raised the temperature on and off campuses across the nation, events, for the most part, continued peacefully.

In the Nation’s Capital, a protest march drew 100,000.

I was one of them.

No violence occurred.

Shortly after the shooting at Kent State, President Richard Nixon appeared on our campus to address a Billy Graham gathering.

While several hundred protesters turned out, the protest was peaceful and respectable.

The following year I traveled from Knoxville to Washington, again. This march drew 200,000.

In San Francisco another 156,000 protested.

Both protests were peaceful.

I offer all of this background as a way of explaining my confusion and understanding about how we have arrived where we find ourselves in the wake of Charlottesville.

The events in Charlottesville and Trump’s reaction to them are nothing short of spine chilling.

On Friday night, a large group of racists drawn from the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other white “nationalist” groups marched through the University of Virginia Campus in Charlottesville, Virginia.

In true KKK fashion, they carried burning torches.

In true Nazi fashion, they chanted “blood and soil,” a phrase chanted in Nazi Germany to signify ethnic purity and the virtue of German agrarian life.

On Saturday, as the world watched, they engaged in violent confrontations with counter demonstrators that ultimately led to the death of three people and left scores of others injured.

In the immediate aftermath, one would have expected that the President of the United States would have condemned the KKK members, Neo-Nazi’s and other racist extremists who precipitated the violence.

Instead, he condemned “many sides” lumping the counter demonstrators in with racists and Nazis, one of whom drove his car into a crowd of people, killing a young woman.

Former KKK Grand Dragon, David Duke applauded Trump’s stance, observing that it was white people, like himself, that were responsible for Trump being in the White House.

This moral equivalence by Trump, led to an outcry across the political spectrum causing him to backtrack and condemn racism and anti-Semitism.

By Tuesday, Trump had doubled down on his earlier comments during a raucous press conference in which he said there were “many fine people” among the racists, neo-Nazis and other extremists who participated in the “Unite the Right’ rally.

Once again, David Duke took to the air to thank Trump for “your honesty and courage to tell the truth about Charlottesville…..”

It is, to say the least, puzzling that Trump would characterize the alt-right followers that chanted “Jews will not replace us” and castigated Trump for allowing his daughter to marry a Jew as “many fine people.”

By the end of the week, Trump’s “chief strategist” Steve Bannon resigned and returned to Breitbart News, which he characterized as the “platform for the alt-right.”

Commentators have mused about whether Bannon’s departure will result in more moderation coming to the White House.

It’s time to face the sad truth.

Bannon is not responsible for Trump’s racism and bigotry.

Trump is responsible for that.

It is who he is.

He demonstrated it long before he began his racist “birther” campaign to challenge the legitimacy of the first African-American President’s right to hold that office.

It is manifest in his continued claim that the “Central Park Five,” young African-American men that were wrongfully accused, convicted and imprisoned for a the rape of a jogger remain guilty of that crime, despite being exonerated by DNA testing and the confession of the real perpetrator.

Only the most naïve or myopic can expect for a change in the man’s character.

It’s also time to stop sanitizing the characterization of Ku Klux Klan members, Neo- Nazis and other bigoted defectives by referring to them as “White Nationalists” and the “alt-Right” as though there was some moral or philosophical legitimacy for the hate they spew.

After watching the news reporting of the events in Charlottesville, I can’t see the “many fine people” that Trump saw among them.

Maybe, he saw them in the light from the torches that they carried.

Now that Congress is on recess, it is probably safe to get sick.

For the past seven years, the annual refrain of the Republican Party has been “repeal and replace.”

Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, once famously proclaimed that he “would pull out Obamacare root and branch.”

That was three years ago.

Republicans took control of the Senate that year.

They had taken control of the House of Representatives four years earlier, in 2010.

They have voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act i.e. Obamacare over sixty times before taking control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

Then, they got their wish, complete control of both houses of Congress and the White House.

You would have thought they would have had a plan ready.

The first bill which they called the American Health Care Act would have eliminated health insurance for twenty-three million Americans according to the Congressional Budget Office.

It would have reduced the budget deficit by about one-percent over ten years.

It passed by the narrowest of margins and advanced to the Senate.
Following the House vote, Trump invited the Republican members of the House that voted for it to the Rose Garden to celebrate its passage.

Shortly after that, he described the bill as “mean” and urged the Senate to soften it.

Who would vote for a “mean” health care bill?

We’ll get to that shortly.

The Senate revised and renamed the bill, calling it the “Budget reconciliation Act of 2017.”

The senators heeded Trump’s call to soften the bill by eliminating coverage for only twenty-two million people.

The Congressional Budget Office estimated that forty-nine million people would be without coverage by 2026.

When it became apparent that there were not enough votes to pass the bill, the Senate took up a “skinny repeal” bill which would have eliminated the individual and employer mandates. It contained no provisions for pre-existing conditions or essential health care benefits.

This bill also failed when Republican Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain voted against it.

McCain’s unexpected “no” vote made him the hero of the hour to opponents of the repeal and replace bills, which seemed unfair to me since both Collins and Murkowski had been steadfast in their opposition in the face of McConnell’s pressure tactics and Trump’s threats and at a time when the legislation appeared that it might pass.

Indeed, McConnell had crafted the legislation in secret without including any female members of his caucus, notwithstanding the fact that Planned Parenthood funding was an important component of the legislation.

It seems fitting that this chauvinism on his part may have further doomed his signature legislative project.

Although I refrain from blogging about local issues, we should return to the question of who would vote for a “mean” health care bill?

The answer is that five upstate Republican congressional representatives voted for it, ignoring the devastation it would wreak on the people living in their districts.

They are john Faso, Elise Stefanik, Claudia Tenney, Thomas Reed and Chris Collins.

In Faso’s 19thDistrict, 101,385 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Stefanik’s 21st District, 83,463 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Tenney’s 21st District, 67,539 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Reed’s 23rd District, 79,904 people would lose their health care coverage.

In Collins 27th District, 124,954 people would lose their health care coverage.

If any of the bills passed, 3,114,079 New Yorkers would have lost their health care coverage.

Faced with a choice between representing the health and well-being of their constituents, and siding with the powers that be in Washington, they chose the latter.

At this writing, Trump is castigating McConnell for his failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and demanding that Congress return try again.

What “mean” measure he has in mind remains a mystery.

If you’re one of those people who is covered under the Affordable Care Act, there are two things you should probably do.

The first is to get medical treatment for any condition you are suffering from.

The second is to pray that Congress doesn’t return to Washington any time soon

They come and go like Halley’s Comet, bursting across the scenery in a bright flash before fading out in a blaze of glory leaving a streaking tail across the heavens.

So swiftly did the rise and fall of Anthony Scaramucci as White House Communications Director begin and end.

“The Mooch” an investment banker with a law degree and no journalistic training was appointed White house Communications Director on July 21st and was gone ten days later.

He was Trump’s third Communications Director since last November’s election.

But what a ride he gave us during that brief tenure.

There were two things that leapt out at you during his first press conference.

He had mastered an impression of all of Donald Trump’s mannerisms, gestures and delivery.

He also sounded just like “Jimmy” in the Zyppah commercials.

It quickly became apparent that when dealing with Trump’s critics, he would be Trump’s id, maybe on steroids.

His arrival led to the resignation of Pres Secretary, Sean Spicer, who had no appetite for performing the duties of his position and Scaramucci’s and predicted it would simply add more chaos to the West Wing.

“The Mooch,” we learned, had been trying to secure a White House position since the inauguration.

He was so driven and focused in this quest that his wife filed for divorce a few days after the appointment, reportedly disgusted at his lust for power and position in the White House.

White House Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus and Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon had been united in their opposition to Scaramuccci’s hiring in any position in the White House.

Less than a week after his appointment, Scaramucci went before the press and characterized his relationship with Priebus as brotherly in the nature of Cain and Abel.

That Cain killed Abel, should have portended what was to come.

That night Scaramucci called a reporter and in a profane rant about Bannon and Priebus, predicted that Priebus would be gone soon.

By the following Monday, Priebus was gone.

Trump tweeted his resignation as they were returning from a speech on gang violence on Long Island. Priebus could be seen reading it on his phone.

Four days ago CNN obtained a copy of a seven page memo that Scramucci had prepared outlining his vision for the White House Communications staff.

The memo is interesting reading given Scaramuccci’s performance.

It opens with the observation that “Make it clear that horn tooting and denigrating colleagues is unacceptable.”

It proposes that “We need to improve the quality and quantity of interactions between [Communications Department employees] and its various constituents” and urges “treating colleagues professionally.”

Needless to say, those sentiments must have come as a surprise to Priebus and Bannon considering the observations Scaramucci made about them to Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker during his famous telephone rant.

Perhaps the most telling reveal about Scaramuccci’s unfitness for the job was that he thought that his remarks to Lizza were “off the record” despite never having told the reporter that they were.

The “Mooch” memo offers a couple of other observations designed to cause some head scratching to the reader.

The memo also urges that they “…should use Kellyanne Conway more. She has consistently been the President’s most effective spokesperson.”

Anyone who has listened to her various defenses of the Administration’s mishaps recognizes that she should be permanently attached to a polygraph machine.

It proposes humanizing Trump “the best golfer to serve as President…we embrace it with a national lottery to play a round of golf with him…” and urges the staff to ” …help POTUS convey a Reaganesque “happy warrior” image…”

Trump brings to mind a lot of images but the “happy warrior” is not one of them.

Now that the “Mooch” is free to do more Zyppah commercials, a new Communications Director must be found.

As we got closer to the end of the week, there was chatter that Bannon’s assistant, Steven Miller, might become the new Communications Director.

It was reported that Trump was impressed with Miller’s denigration of the inscription on the Statute of Liberty taken from the poem by Emma Lazarus “The New Colossus” which reads “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free…”

Miller has a long history in the alt-right world, shilling for various right wing dingbats like Michelle Bachmann, John Shadegg and former senator and current Attorney-General. Jeff Sessions.

He and his mentor Steve Bannon have found a kindred spirit in Vladimir Putin, whom they view as a “fellow nationalist and crusader against cosmopolitanism.”

In accusing a CNN reporter of being “cosmopolitan,” Miller embraced a term coined by Josef Stalin to justify his purges of cultural dissidents who did not share his nationalism.

If the Trump Communications job goes from Scaramucci to Miller, it will be the next chapter in an unfolding disaster.

The only one who will be able to straighten out that mess will be Mandrake the Magician.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that loyalty in the Trump Administration is a one-way street.

Indeed, it appears that unless your name is Trump or you’re married to someone named Trump, you’re expendable.
That lesson is being played out in prime time this week, as we watch Trump engage in daily criticism of his Attorney-General, Jeff Sessions.

I have never been a fan of Sessions who has a history of being a racist dingbat and is anxious to move forward the worst of the Trump Administration’s goals and objectives.

But, say what you might about him, he was the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump and gave his candidacy legitimacy in the Republican Party.

He served as a campaign surrogate for Trump and was the magnet that attracted Breitbart News, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and all of the other alt-right nut cases to the Trump campaign. His mission thus far has been to reverse every advancement that has been made in the judicial process.

If Trump fires him or succeeds in provoking his resignation, I will not shed a tear at his departure.

In fact, I’m more likely to shed a tear at his replacement because anyone who takes the position will likely lack any brains at all.

Nevertheless there are lessons to this little morality play.

Trump’s major criticism of Sessions springs from Sessions recusing himself from overseeing the probe of Russian meddling in the Presidential election and collusion with his campaign.

Trump contends that Sessions should have told him that he would recuse himself before he was selected as Attorney-General and, if he had, someone else would have been appointed.

This, of course, overlooks the fact that Sessions recusal didn’t come until March 2017, almost two months after his confirmation, after Sessions was revealed to have concealed meetings during the campaign with Russian officials and after the ethics officials at the Justice Department informed Sessions that it would constitute a conflict of interest for him to oversee the probe.

Trump has already demonstrated over and over that he doesn’t recognize a conflict of interest when he has one, so why should anyone be surprised that he doesn’t recognize Session’s.

The timing of this campaign to drive Sessions from his job is important in understanding it.

In the four months since Sessions recused himself Trump has expressed mild and sporadic disapproval of that decision.

That changed after the revelation of the June 2016 meeting attended by Donald Jr., Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and the Russian Government attorney offering dirt on Hillary Clinton and support for Trump’s candidacy was disclosed.

That seemed to pique the interest of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller and the need for criminal lawyers to be hired.

Now, Trump’s son and son-in-law have had to hire criminal defense attorneys because they may find themselves under indictment, depending on what more is learned.

Given the closeness of Trump to his son and son-in-law, it strains credulity to believe that Trump didn’t know about the meeting until this past month as he claims.
Indeed, his public call for “Russia, if you’re listening, find Hillary Clinton’s e-mails,” appears to be less and less serendipitous.

As Congress gets closer and closer to an August recess, Trump’s attacks on Sessions have become more vicious, strident and frequent.

There is little doubt that Trump has been trying to shame him into resigning.

Thus far, Sessions has declared that he will not quit.

No less than Rudy Giuliani and Kenneth Starr, among other Trump supporters, have opined that Sessions decision to recuse himself was the only proper one to make.

Starr went so far as to rebuke Trump’s new Communications flack, Anthony Scaramuccci, for his claim that Sessions should be Trump’s “hockey goalie.”

This kind of bizarre thinking leads one to wonder whether Scaramucci really did graduate from Harvard Law School and, if he did, what Harvard Law is teaching their students.

That, however, has not placated Trump.

Clearly his strategy is to get Sessions to quit during Congress’s August recess so that he can appoint an attorney-General who could serve, without requiring confirmation hearings, until the end of his first term.

Or it might be possible that Mitch McConnell could use the confirmation hearings that he didn’t give Merrick Garland when he was nominated for the Supreme Court by President Obama, to scrutinize Session’s replacement.

Whoever he might select would be free to fire Mueller and end the probe sparing Trump, Trump Jr. Kushner, Manafort and anyone else from being held accountable for whatever collusion may have occurred with the Russians during the campaign.

Even more important to Trump, it would curtail the kind of scrutiny that his tax returns, business dealings and other matters might come under that could lead to prosecution once exposed.

If that scenario unfolds, it will be interesting to see what the Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and the Senate will do.

We will learn, once and for all, whether the price of their loyalty will be greater to Trump or the rule of law and the American people.

In 1928, United states Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote In Olmstead v. United States, which authorized the government to engage in wiretapping telephone calls, that;

“…the makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness. They recognized the significance of man’s spiritual nature, of his feelings and his intellect. They knew that only a part of the pain, pleasure and satisfactions of life are to be found in material things. They sought to protect Americans in their beliefs, their thoughts, their emotions and their sensations. They conferred as against the Government, the right to be let alone-the most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men…”

Almost a century has passed since Brandeis offered that observation and very little of it is taken to heart today.

During his campaign for the presidency, John F. Kennedy was required to defend the right of a Roman Catholic to seek that office. It was generally viewed as the most eloquent defense against religious intolerance up to that time.

Since Kennedy’s appearance before the Houston Ministerial Alliance, religious intolerance has not only grown but has crept into the body politic to an alarming degree.

So-called “evangelical Christians” have all but taken over the Republican Party and have tried to legislate their own “moral “code into law.

Last year, Planned Parenthood was the subject of a heavily doctored video in which it was alleged to be selling dead fetuses.

Despite the fact that investigations demonstrated that the video was bogus and its creators were prosecuted, defunding Planned Parenthood became a campaign issue in the 2016 elections.

Provisions to defund it were written into the legislation designed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

While the legislation wasn’t enacted, its failure had nothing to do with this provision. Indeed, it was in the bill which passed in the House of Representatives but died in the Senate.

Defunding Planned Parenthood isn’t about opposition to abortion. The Hyde Amendment passed in 1977 prohibited Medicaid funding for abortions even if the life of the mother is at risk.

Defunding Planned Parenthood curtails funds which underwrite family planning, contraception and even services such as mammograms and other cancer screening tests.

Perhaps one of the most unconsidered factors in all of this, is that Planned Parenthood provides services for men too.

This fact never comes up in Congress or on the campaign trail when the issue of defunding the organization comes up.

Congress evidently believes that the right to privacy is reserved for only one gender.

During the last two winters, we spent a month in Asheville, North Carolina.

North Carolina, it will be remembered, had passed legislation that forbade transgendered people from using public bathrooms that didn’t correspond with their gender at birth.

It also forbade cities and towns from enacting local anti-discrimination ordinances.

The state was subject to numerous boycotts. Concerts, conventions and sporting events were cancelled. Those inflicted widespread damage to the tourist and convention industry amounting to 3.7 billion dollars.

Ultimately the Governor, Pat McCrory, who sponsored the legislation was defeated and the law was repealed.

Vice-President Pence was similarly burned on this issue when, as Governor of Indiana, he signed into law a measure that would allow service providers to refuse service to the LGBT community on “religious grounds.”

He too repealed the law when the NCAA threatened to leave Indianapolis and not schedule any sporting events in the State and other boycotts loomed.

One would think that any state government contemplating wading into this morass would learn from these experiences.

Texas has not.

Texas is led by Governor Greg Abbott and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick.

The only two people I can think of that are as intolerant as these two, are Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, and ISIS leader Abu Bakar Al Baghdadi.

Patrick, who controls the legislative process, has proposed defunding Planned Parenthood, imposing requirements on hospitals and health clinics that would force those offering comparable health care services to Planned Parenthood to close and a law that would forbid transgendered people to use restrooms that correspond to their gender identity at birth.

Proponents of these laws always justify them as measures which protect women and girls from being sexually assaulted by rapists masquerading as transgendered people despite the fact there has never been a reported incident of such a crime.

When the National Football League reacted to the “bathroom bill,” cautioning Texas that it could cost the state a future Super Bowl and other problems if enacted, Governor Abbott retorted that the League should “concentrate on football and stay the hell out of politics.”

He might better consider “staying the hell” out of matters as private as someone’s birth gender and the restroom they need to use.

If he and Patrick persist in this discriminatory enactment, they will almost certainly cost Texas billions in lost tourism.

That would be a very costly way to learn that you have to honor the right of people to be left alone.

Stay tuned.

As a self-confessed political junkie who follows politics and campaigns year round, I’ve learned that every time you think you’ve seen it all, the best is yet to come.

That is particularly true when a new administration comes to Washington.

At the outset, there is jockeying for positions of power and sharp elbows thrown by everyone involved.

It happens in every administration and this one is no different. Those who occupy the coveted offices in the west wing of the White House are fueled by varying combinations of megalomania and narcissism.

This administration however seems to be afflicted by a rare disease.

It manifested itself early on.

First, Attorney-General, Jeff Sessions, repeatedly forgot that he had met with the Russian ambassador, Sergei kislyak, and other Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance upon being nominated for his cabinet position.

The penalties for this can range from being denied the security clearance, a denial of future security clearances, and a prohibition on being employed by the agency or department that it is sought for, up to a felony prosecution in the most serious cases.

In Sessions case, it appears the only sanction is his voluntary recusal from the Russian election meddling probe.

Kislyak must be an eminently forgettable person, because Trump’s National Security Adviser, Michael Flynn met with him in December 2015, after President Obama had imposed sanctions on the Russians for meddling in the election.

When the meeting was disclosed, Flynn apparently told Vice-President Pence that lifting the sanctions had not been discussed, only to discover that Kislyak had been heard on an eavesdropping device confirming to the Russians that they had discussed them.

Later it was discovered that Flynn had forgotten to register as a lobbyist for the Turkish Government despite having been paid over half a million dollars for services after the election.

Trump’s son-in-law and West Wing senior Adviser, Jared Kushner, is perhaps the most forgetful.

When he was applying for his security clearance, he forgot that he too met with Ambassador Kislyak.

He also forgot that he mat with Sergey Gorkov, the head of the Russian state owned bank.

This past week, we learned that Kushner, his brother-in-law, Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort met with Natalia Veselinitskaya, a Russian lawyer, during the campaign after Trump had clinched the nomination.

The purpose of the meeting was set out in an e-mail that read, “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with [his father] this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

It went on to explicitly state “This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government support for Mr. Trump….”

The disclosure of this meeting was apparently the result of Jared Kushner having to, again, amend his disclosure forms for his security clearance because he forgot to include this particular meeting.

Once the meeting had been reported in the New York Times. Donald Trump Jr. posted the e-mail thread leading up to the meeting in the interest of “transparency.”

The fact that the Times had told him it was about to publish the e-mails apparently had nothing to do with his zeal to be “transparent.”

He then went on Fox News and told Sean Hannity that he had now disclosed everything about the meeting.

On Friday the Times reported that there was a Russian counter-intelligence operative in the meeting that had ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

Trump Jr. apparently “forgot” this detail.

Each time one of these forgotten meetings comes to light, I can’t help but recall Steve Martin’s famous line from a Saturday Night Live skit from 1978, “I forgot armed robbery is illegal.”

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could “forget” a meeting with a Russian government official, let alone, one that was about providing dirt about Hilllary Clinton and took place in Trump Tower.

Last September 19, I posted a blog piece entitled “The Manchurian Candidate 2016https://joefahey.com/2016/09/19/the-manchurian-candidate-2016

The post dealt with the Russian e-mail hacking and other meddling in the campaign that seemed to commence with the arrival of Paul Manafort as Trump’s campaign chief.

To no one’s surprise, Manafort was a participant in this latest meeting that Jared Kushner allegedly forgot.
I felt back then, as I do now, that a blind man could see what is going on here.

All of these “forgotten” meetings with the Russians has made me wonder whether we are witnessing an outbreak of contagious dementia among the Trump officials and team members.

We are now told that Trump Sr. never knew about the meeting that took place one floor below him involving his namesake, his campaign chief, his son-in-law and a Russian government official offering to provide campaign dirt on his opponent courtesy of the Russian government.
He claims he only learned about it a few days ago.

Yeah, sure he did.

Or maybe he just forgot about it.