Author Archives: Brick Wahl

Democrats and Donald Trump, or how social media is changing the way you think and act and fear

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I cannot figure out what the hell it is that makes Democrats want to obsess over Donald Trump, but I think now might be a good time to ask yourself just how much of your fears and fascinations are being driven by Facebook, Twitter and cable news. Because if you are a Democrat then Donald Trump doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. He is running for the REPUBLICAN PARTY NOMINATION. And unless you are Republican, then what the hell are you doing wasting time even thinking about him.

Stop being a victim of viral campaigns. What’s worse is that these are not even being directed by anyone. It is just social media changing the way you think and act and fear. I can never remember seeing people’s thought processes so controlled by the Internet before. If you take a step back and look and listen, this is some really creepy shit. People have lost control of the medium. It is taking over. It is feeding on your emotions, paranoia, and hatred. When all you Democrats were watching the Republican debate like it was the most important thing in the world I felt something crack.

You might want to step back and take a deep breath.

The real campaign

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“Obama still was able to convey a sense of progressiveness and realness that was nonetheless very exciting. You don’t think of the middle as being an exciting place…”

Depends on your point or view. Most candidates on the left of the Democratic party have been spinning essentially the same hackneyed ideas since Adlai Stevenson, just as those on the right of the GOP are still tossing the same raw meat that was tossed to their ancestors in the fifties. Almost invariably new ideas come from the center, where workable plans have to be developed out of compromise. On either end of the spectrum the candidates know there’s no real hope of attaining almost anything they promise so they promise the moon because the audience out there loves it and to be honest doesn’t care if any of it ever passes or not, they’re just there for the show. Only twice in the last hundred years has revolutionary reform been possible after an election: under FDR and then under Reagan. After that you have various candidates pretending it’s 1932 and 1980 again respectively. Just like now, with Bernie Sanders on our side making impossible to implement proposals and nearly all of the GOP cast of crazies on their side promising to do exactly what Sam Brownback is doing to Kansas now. It’s complete crap on both sides, but it’s good theater, and it sure gets Facebook worked up. But you ask any of these Bernie Sanders fans just how his proposals will be implemented in real life they will not be able to answer…nor will they care. And it goes without saying that the GOP is the same. This campaign is not about change, it’s about show biz. Once the press begins focusing on Bernie Sanders for viable explanations for how to pass, fund and implement his proposals, that’s when it gets hard. Right now he and all the GOP are playing to Facebook. This is still recess. The real campaign hasn’t even started.

Progressive scorecard

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1968. The Democratic party, bitterly divided between liberals and way liberals, blows up.

1972. George McGovern is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

1984. Water Mondale is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

1988. Michael Dukakis is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

2000. Voters, disgusted at Al Gore’s sell out conservatism, elect Ralph Nader in a landslide victory and American is changed forever.

2004. John Kerry is elected in a landslide victory and American is changed forever.

2008. Barack Obama, reaching out to black and moderate voters, is defeated in a landslide and America is unchanged forever.

2012. See 2008, but way worse even.

2016. Bernie Sanders is elected in a landslide victory and America is changed forever.

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Convergence

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Wow. Twelve declared Republican presidential candidates as of today, and another four expected. Sixteen total. That’s seems nuts.

But thinking back to my college days when I had dreams of being another Theodore White and read every campaign history I could lay my hands on, I remember doing a rather long paper on the 1976 presidential election campaign. It’s probably stuffed in a box around here somewhere. That was the first election after Watergate, and the Democrats had blown the GOP to smithereens in the previous midterms. Watergate, you’ll remember. If you were a Democrat and breathing you were elected that year. And as 1976 approached, the excitement was too much for many Democrats and fifteen of them declared themselves candidates for president, and another sixteen considered but decided against it, which means at one point over thirty Democrats were picturing themselves in the Oval Office, signing bills and giving orders. I’ve seen no list yet of the Republicans who were thinking about running this year but changed their minds. But if the last four Republicans expected to announce this year do join the herd, they will have officially beat by one candidate the Democrat’s total in 1976, which I believe was the most ever. That was a helluva campaign on the Democratic side, the 1976 nomination race. Fast paced, fluid, full of surprises. The histories–I remember reading two of them, though the titles escape me–read like fast paced novels. The underdog, a peanut farmer named Jimmy Carter, won in a happy ending that made Americans feel warm all over. It was the most exciting election since 1968, the histories of which (An American Melodrama was one) also read like a novel, though a tragic one, full of death and betrayal, the ending just sad. Continue reading →

The glass half full

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I cannot remember two days in a row like this before…this is profound stuff. Affordable health care is now the constitutional right of every American citizen, bar none, and that cannot be changed ever. This is as profound as some of the most glorious events in American history, like banning slavery forever, or giving women the right to vote, or establishing social security. This is that big a deal. Health care, in this country, is now as much your right as voting is. It is as much a right as is anything in the constitution. If you are an American citizen, the government is required to see that you receive health care. And that is profound. The Supreme Court laid that on us yesterday. It’s still sinking in. People haven’t quite grasped the absolute significance of that yet. That if you are sick, it is unconstitutional for you not to have access to affordable health care. Continue reading →

Breaking the ice in the Arctic

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The polar ice cap is melting and the Arctic Ocean is fast becoming navigable and every country with access to the Arctic Ocean is rushing to take advantage of all that navigable water except us. We are so unprepared, in fact, that the United States has only one ice breaker capable of navigating the Arctic in icy months. And it’s only a medium sized vessel, based out of Seattle. Not Alaska, Seattle. Our one heavy ice breaker, the forty year old USS Polar Star, is also in Seattle, but it’s mothballed, ready for scrap. On the other hand, Russia has four heavy icebreakers already in the water–and based in the Arctic–and another four on the way. No idea what the U.S. is supposed to do if our one operating icebreaker has to go into dry dock. Borrow one of Russia’s?

Yet any attempt by the Obama Administration to somehow ready us for the open water Arctic is met with stiff resistance by congressional Republicans. They’ll be no more icebreakers. That would mean an increased presence in the Arctic. Which would mean that the ice has melted. Which would mean temperatures have risen. And that’s where we get into trouble. The Republicans oppose anything that suggests global warming might be real. They pretend it all isn’t happening. Their opposition is so uncompromising that the US has done next to nothing to prepare for the new realities up there. Denmark–yes, Denmark–will have a bigger presence on the Arctic Ocean than we will. As will England, though they have no Arctic shore to call their own. Even tiny Iceland could be better prepared than us, and we have one thousand times as many people as they do.

Of course, we still have submarines up there, playing cat and mouse with their Russian counterparts. But that is underwater, and the Republican congressmen find solace in that, no doubt seeing visions of Ice Station Zebra, with submarine conning towers poking through a vast plain of ice. They can’t be looking at the same satellite photos we all see, with blue ocean stretching the length of the Siberian coast all the way to Canada. They just pretend its frozen solid and inaccessible, and if they wish hard enough maybe it will all go away. How did Republicans, once the cold-eyed realists in foreign policy, ever become so delusional?

Our national icebreaker, USS Polar Star, in better days.

Our national icebreaker, USS Polar Star, in better days.

Wrong place, wrong time

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(2012)

Kendrec McDade memorial, 2012

Kendrec McDade memorial, 2012

Kendric McDade never even got the dignity of a public hearing.

Think about it. The Pasadena police officer who first shot him fired at point blank range from a darkened patrol car without any verbal warning whatsoever. Didn’t even yell at him to stop. He just fired. His partner then shot McDade several more times. Then they cuffed him as he died. And though McDade was innocent, wasn’t the guy the cops were looking for, and was unarmed, he was a black guy reaching for a cell phone. “He left the sidewalk and he’s running at me,” the officer told investigators. “This — this scares the crap out of me. I don’t know why he is running at me. He’s still clutching his waistband. I think he’s got a gun. I’m stuck in the car. I got nowhere to go.” Fearing for his life, Griffin said he fired four times through the open driver’s side window. McDade was two or three feet away.

McDade never knew what hit him. The DA, reading Officer Griffin’s testimony, decided it was justifiable. Instead, blame was laid on McDade for being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a cell phone, and on the guy who called in a robbery report. The guy said the perpetrator–who was not McDade–brandished a gun. No gun had been brandished. So no action was taken against the officers whatsoever. Not a goddamn thing.

This case completely weirded me out at the time. A cop killing by surprise like that, just like a mafia hit. Made me wonder what they teach Pasadena police at the Academy now. Profiling, obviously, black man, white cop. Self preservation. Not a lot of guts, though, not if they’re so scared they pop off citizens like that without any warning whatsoever. Maybe they could teach guts at the Academy. Courage. Intestinal fortitude. McDade’s death was about as cowardly a police shooting as I’ve ever heard of. I don’t think police are cowards, not at all. Just the opposite.  But I’ll make an exception in this case.

Oh well, McDade wasn’t the first innocent victim to be killed this way. Certainly not the first young black man. But I thought it was the scariest. The ugliest and most cowardly. Just how low are the standards for the Pasadena Police Department?

But then no one remembers Kendrec McDade anymore. And the Pasadena Police Department hid the names of the officers who killed him, never did tell us. (We found them out later, much later, when all was safely swept under the rug.) Then that guy who made the 911 call had to pay $3,000 to the Pasadena Police Department. Imagine that. The police were the aggrieved party, not the family of the man they ambushed and killed because one of their own was too scared to protect and serve anyone but his own skin. Talk about hiding behind a badge.

I am not a cop hater. Things like this don’t get me screaming about Amerikkka or making absurd comparisons to Nazi Germany. I don’t think all cops are killers, nor do I think all cops, or even almost any other cop, would pull a cowardly stunt like the police officer who fired from that car did. There are plenty of good police officers in Pasadena. Excellent officers. But how could you tell when the department turns egregiously bad and very fatal police work into justifiable behavior? What a great message that sends. There has to be some sort of accountability when police error kills an innocent person. But in this case there was absolutely none. It’s a travesty. You or I would never, ever get off on a homicide like that, ambushing and killing someone. We’d be charged with murder in the first degree. Maybe we’d get it reduced because the guy scared the crap out of us, too. But there is no way we wouldn’t do a stretch in prison. And there’s no way we could hide our identities, either.

You can tell the DA and judge knew this was a crock, that this Oscar Carrillo was taking the fall for the Pasadena Police Department. You can tell because all the big talk of charging the guy with manslaughter–basically saying the he pulled the trigger and killed McDade–was suddenly and mysteriously dropped. Carrillo pleaded guilty to filing a false police report. He’s said he was robbed by a man with a gun. It was from that report that the police decided they had to kill Kendric McDade. Had you or I done that the very same D.A. would threaten us with a charge of cold blooded murder. Then let us settle for settle for a more appropriate conviction of manslaughter. That’s what they did here, threatened Carrillo with a long prison stretch but accepting a conviction for letting him off for filing a false report. He got ninety days, another ninety days community service and then had to pay the Pasadena Police that $3,000. Not a hand was laid on the cops who shot him. Not even a whisper.

I bet there are people in the District Attorney’s office that still get queasy when they think about how they handled this case. And I bet they don’t talk about it, ever. I bet they never tell their children what they did.

Justifiable homicide. Self defense. Officer Griffin suspected the man on the sidewalk wanted to kill him. So he blasted him first, several times. He couldn’t miss at that range. I don’t know if McDade’s cell phone remained on his belt or went skittering across the sidewalk, harmlessly. But I am absolutely flabbergasted they knelt down, rolled him over and cuffed him. He had eight holes in him. There must have been blood everywhere. I don’t know what those officers were thinking at that moment. But if they handcuffed a dying man they weren’t thinking the right thing. They knew he was a goner, and that they might be too. So they were trying to get their story right. How to explain away killing a completely innocent citizen guy by mistake. That’s what they were thinking.

I’m sorry this piece is so goddam angry. So goddam angry that the writing’s not the best, the structure a little messed up, repetitive. I’m sorry if I’ve pissed off any other police officers who might see this, which wasn’t my intention at all, and I’m sorry if some people in Pasadena might think I should shut about all this because I don’t live there. But sometimes you can’t help being angry. And some people can’t help being dead either. The living cover their asses and all is forgotten. Wrong place, wrong time.

Here’s the story:

Making fun of poor people on Black Friday

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It’s been pointed out that Black Friday is the only day of the year that lower income families can afford to buy household items otherwise beyond their means. I think there’s an element of class prejudice in our condemnation and satire of Black Friday shoppers. After all, it’s not the upper class and two per centers cramming into Walmart, and you don’t see all those professionals without kids lining up to be the first in at Target. We’re just keeping alive the fine old tradition of making fun of everything poor people do.

You can’t be a democratic socialist and think you’re better than the working class. But that is the problem when Progressives have the highest income level of any American political orientation. Nearly a quarter of those surveyed Occupying Wall Street a couple years ago had incomes that qualifed them as wealthy, one third had post-graduate degrees, and the vast majority were white. Rather than reflecting the working class, they were much were much reflective of the American upper class. Those condemning ‘Murica tend to be the very thing they hate. If they weren’t so overpaid, there wouldn’t be so many of the less fortunate acting crazy at Walmart on Black Friday. Shopping at Whole Foods is a far more destructive act than fighting over a microwave at Walmart.

If you make good money now, and live comfortably, you are probably in the top fifth of American Income earners. That makes you part of the problem. Just ask Bernie Sanders.

 

Cuba libre

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Alpha 66 is not happy.

Alpha 66 is not happy.

The U.S. embargo of Cuba is pretty inexplicable. We have close relations with Viet Nam. We may have more direct connections with North Korea than we do with Cuba. Why have we continued this ridiculous embargo and non-recognition so long? Fidel tossed Batista (and the Mob) out in 1959. That was 55 years ago.

Because of Florida, that’s why. Specifically because of Florida on two days every four years. One of those days is the Republican presidential primary. The other is the day we vote for president. By an accident of political geography, it’s been impossible for a presidential candidate to say that as president he would lift the embargo and exchange ambassadors with Cuba without committing political suicide. Continue reading →