Patricia and Girls Girls Girls - Whiskey A-Go-Go

Mind Games: The Checker Shadow Illusion

Click here for an article entitled "Do we perceive reality? The checker shadow illusion."

Two squares on a checkerboard -- a dark-colored square in full light and a light-colored square in shadow -- appear to be vastly different, but are in fact the same shade of gray.

Steve King Fantasizes About Civil War

Click here for an article at WaPo by Reis Thebault, entitled "Steve King posts meme warning that red states have '8 trillion bullets' in event of civil war."

The Iowa Republican broached the subject in a Saturday evening Facebook post — a meme of two fighting Frankenstein figures, one red and one blue, each an amalgamation of states based on their political leanings. The art was ripped and uncredited, as meme art usually is, from a New York Times book review in 2013, and was originally designed by Yarek Waszul.

“Folks keep talking about another civil war,” the meme read. “One side has about 8 trillion bullets, while the other side doesn’t know which bathroom to use.”

Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, tweeted “This is treason. Steve King should be expelled from the House immediately.”

In reply, Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe commented that King “isn’t actually COMMITTING treason, but he is fomenting and inciting it. Ample reason to expel him.”

Just another congressman joking about civil war and how his side would win. Move along, folks -- nothing to see here.

Cool Mathematical Trick

x% of y = y% of x

An easy example: Let x=10, y=60.
Then x% of y -- 10% of 60 -- is 6.
But y% of x -- 60% of 10 -- is also 6.

Those calculations are rapidly performed in your head. But what if the calculation is just a little more difficult: What is 4% of 75?

You can divide 75 by 100 to get .75, and multiply by 4: .75x4=3

Or you can flip the equation; instead of doing 4% of 75, do 75% of 4.

"Fox News has become an American plague."

That's the closing line of an article by Margaret Sullivan at The Washington Post entitled "It’s time — high time — to take Fox News’s destructive role in America seriously." Click here.

Kavanaugh Hearing Revisited

When Michael Cohen was testifying in open session, at one point Trump lieutenant Mark Meadows was trying to rebut the idea that Trump is racist. During this bit, he had a black woman named Patton, apparently one of the few black people who work for Trump, come and stand beside him. She just stood there awkwardly for 30 seconds or so, not saying anything and not mentioned; and when a junior Democrat accused Meadows of using her as a prop in a racist way, Meadows hit the roof. Paul Waldman at the Plum Line compared the incident to the Kavanaugh hearing:

You’ll recall that when Christine Blasey Ford testified, she was calm, controlled, deferential and polite, because she knew that if she displayed any anger she’d be called a lunatic and her allegations dismissed out of hand. Kavanaugh, on the other hand, was utterly unhinged — crying, shouting, sneering, interrupting senators — and his anger was taken not as evidence that he was unreliable but just the opposite. It was considered proof that he was the true aggrieved party and the victim of a terrible injustice that had to be remedied.

Seth Myers, Green Book Criticism

More Coal-Fired Plants Close In Trump's First Two Years Than In Obama's Eight

Click here for a Reuters article by Scott DiSavino entitled "President Trump can't stop U.S. coal plants from retiring."

First sentence: "More U.S. coal-fired power plants were shut in President Donald Trump’s first two years than were retired in the whole of Barack Obama’s first term..."

More:
"The number of U.S. coal plants has continued to decline every year since coal capacity peaked ... "in 2011, and is expected to keep falling as consumers demand power from cleaner and less expensive sources of energy."

"Cheap natural gas and the rising use of renewable power like solar and wind have kept electric prices relatively low for years, making it uneconomic for generators to keep investing in older coal and nuclear plants."

Increase Top Marginal Tax Rates

Click here for an article in The New York Times by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman entitled "Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Tax Hike Idea Is Not About Soaking the Rich." Here are a few points from the article:

From 1930 to 1980, the top marginal income tax rate in the U.S. averaged 78%; it exceeded 90% from 1951 to 1963. These rates applied to extraordinarily high incomes only. In 1960, the top marginal tax rate of 91% started at what today would be $6.7 million a year. For incomes in the hundreds of thousands (in today’s dollars) marginal rates were 25% to 50%.

The income per adult of the lowest 50% was $16,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation), and it still is around $16,000 today. At the same time, for the highest 0.1 percent of earners, incomes have grown more than 300 percent; for the top 0.01 percent, incomes have grown by as much as 450 percent. And for the tippy-top 0.001 percent — the 2,300 richest Americans — incomes have grown by more than 600 percent.

A common objection to elevated top marginal income tax rates is that they hurt economic growth. Consider the examples of Japan and Russia.

The United States grew more strongly — and much more equitably — from 1946 to 1980 than it has ever since. But maybe in those years the United States, as the hegemon of the post-World War II decades, could afford “bad” tax policy? The United States occupied Japan after the war, imposed democracy and a top marginal tax rate of 85% on it (in the U.S., the rate was 86% in 1947). The goal was to prevent the formation of a new oligarchy. In 1982, the top rate in Japan was still 75%. Yet between 1950 and 1982, Japan grew at one of the fastest rates ever recorded, one of the most striking economic success stories of all time.

When Communism fell, Russia was also a poor country, with income and life expectancy well below that of Western economies. Russians got fast privatization and a top tax rate of 30 percent — again modeled on what was prevailing in the United States at the time (31 percent in 1991). That rate was replaced in 2001 by an even lower flat rate of 13 percent. That shock therapy created a new oligarchy, led to negative income growth for the bottom half of the population, fostered a general discontent with democracy and produced a drift toward authoritarianism.

Democracy or plutocracy?

Bits and Pieces

- Under the Trump administration, EPA civil penalties have fallen 85 percent compared with the previous two decades. The inflation-adjusted figures from Trump’s first two years in office were the lowest since the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance was established. Former agency officials expressed alarm that the decrease in fines could affect the EPA’s ability to deter wrongdoing. (Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis)

Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (2016)

Sand Dunes Base Jump

Good Riddance, Paul Ryan

That's the title of an article by Paul Waldman in the Washington Post.

https://s2.washingtonpost.com/camp-rw/?e=cnNwcm94dG9uQG91dGxvb2suY29t&s=5c1bfbd0fe1ff6164aca695d

And here's another one, from Charlie Pierce, entitled "Paul Ryan's Career Ends as It Was: As Full of Sh*t as a Christmas Goose:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a25634032/paul-ryan-farewell-speech-full-of-shit/

John Kelly, White House Chief of Staff: Goodbye and Good Riddance

Here's an article on the subject at Intercept: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/09/john-kelly-was-a-bully-bigot-and-liar-for-trump-goodbye-and-good-riddance/?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_todayworld

New Browser: Vivaldi

Here's a link to a Bob Rankin article on a new browser, Vivaldi, seen as a rival to Chrome. Privacy is an important aspect of Vivaldi, but it apparently has lots of great features. I'm a Firefox guy, but Vivaldi looks like something to keep an eye on, and maybe I'll give it a try. https://askbobrankin.com/browser_wars_vivaldi_20_takes_on_chrome.html?awt_l=OKbfN&awt_m=JPgzYLwp8OP6SL

EPA Penalties Plummet Under Trump

In Trump's first year, EPA penalties which had been $20.1 billion in Obama's year 7 and $23.9 billion in Obama's final year to -- $1.46 billion.

The Real Story On The Steele Dossier

Click here for an article in The New Yorker by Jane Mayer, entitled "Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump Dossier."

This is the complete story of Christopher Steele, whose dossier provoked a firestorm of controversy when he presented it to the FBI out of concern over Russian interference on Trump's behalf in the 2016 election.

Important Article By Paul Waldman, The Plum Line, In The Washington Post

I don't like to do this -- it's lazy blogging -- but I've reproduced in full an article by Paul Waldman at his Plum Line blog at The Washington Post, entitled "The entire Republican Party is becoming a Russian asset":

In the past few days, President Trump has given at least some Republicans reason to express displeasure over his relationship with Russia. First he performed a pathetic ritual of subservience before Vladimir Putin, standing beside the Russian leader — after a private meeting between the two, which no aides were permitted to attend — and dismissing the copious evidence of a Russian attack on the 2016 election in deference to Putin’s word.

Then we learned that Putin had suggested that we make Americans available to the Kremlin for questioning, including Michael McFaul, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, in exchange for allowing us to question some of the agents who carried out the cyberattack. Trump had called it “an incredible offer,” and the White House said he was considering it, before finally backing down after the Senate unanimously passed a resolution condemning the idea.

But look past the modest number of Republicans saying that Trump has gone a bit too far here or there, and you see a very different picture. The truth is that the entire GOP is well on its way to becoming a Russian asset.

Are there a few Republican dissenters? Sure. But perhaps we’re having difficulty viewing that whole picture because what’s happening is so utterly bonkers that we can’t quite bring ourselves to see it clearly. So let’s review just some of the things we know:

- In 2016, the campaign of the Republican nominee for president was approached multiple times by representatives of the Russian government offering to help them win the election. These offers were welcomed with enthusiasm. The campaign was also led for a time by a political consultant with deep financial and personal ties to a Russian oligarch and a Kremlin puppet in Ukraine.

- Multiple members of the Trump team had contacts with the Russian government that they later lied to conceal.

- As part of its attack on the American electoral system, Russian intelligence hacked into Democratic Party systems. Some of the information it found there was released publicly and promoted gleefully by Republicans at all levels in order to help the Trump campaign; information relating to down-ballot campaigns was passed to Republicans, who used it in order to maintain their hold on the House of Representatives.

- Amid the insistence from the intelligence community that in 2018 Russia will likely attempt to once again penetrate the computer systems of state election agencies, Republicans this week killed an effort to provide funding to states to bolster the security of their election systems.

- As part of a lengthy effort to infiltrate the National Rifle Association, an important Republican interest group, an alleged Russian spy began a romance with a Republican activist, met multiple Republican leaders and fostered a relationship between American gun advocates and Russians. On the night of Trump’s victory, she messaged “I am ready for further orders” to her handler, a Russian banker named Alexander Torshin who is close to Putin.

- The NRA dramatically increased its spending on the 2016 presidential campaign from past years, pouring $30 million into their effort to elect Trump. The FBI is investigating whether that money may have illegally come from Russia, funneled to the organization by Torshin.

- The Trump administration has announced a change to IRS rules so that groups like the NRA will no longer have to identify their donors on their tax forms, making such money almost impossible to trace in the future.

- Over the last few years, the Christian right, another key part of the GOP coalition, has grown increasingly close to Putin, whom they see as an ally in a global clash of civilizations between Christianity and Islam.

- In Congress, Republicans have undertaken an aggressive campaign to discredit and, many of them plainly hope, shut down the probe into the Russian attack on America. Though they mounted seven separate investigations of Benghazi, they are nearly united in their position that no further investigation into a hostile foreign power’s attempt to manipulate the American electoral system is necessary.

- Fox News, which functions as the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, has aired relentless attacks on the Russia investigation and calls for it to be shut down.

- Despite the mountain of unambiguous evidence of the Russian attack in 2016, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters continue to say no such attack occurred.

- Hard-core Trump supporters are beginning to argue that even if Russia did attack the American electoral system, it was actually a good thing because it helped Donald Trump get elected.

That last argument has not yet filtered up to more mainstream Republican figures, but give it some time. When Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III closes his investigation and presents all his evidence (and more indictments, surely), no one will really be surprised to hear Republican members of Congress and prominent conservative media figures saying that it all worked out for the best because Hillary Clinton isn’t president, and we should just move on.

The president himself has laid the groundwork for that argument to spread. Not only has he repeatedly cast doubt on whether the attack occurred, he insists that he himself didn’t “collude” with Russia, and no matter what, there’s no proof that the attack changed votes, as though that would somehow make the whole thing okay. And you may recall that when news broke that his son, son-in-law and campaign chairman met with a group of Russians in hopes of getting dirt on Clinton, an outreach that had been presented to them as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” the president claimed that “I think from a practical standpoint most people would have taken that meeting,” as though working with Russia to defeat his opponent was the most natural thing in the world.

We can speculate on exactly why Trump has been so eager to become Putin’s flunky; it’s obviously a complicated story with roots that go back decades. But what about the rest of the GOP? Some of them have embraced the annexation of their party with gusto, while others are clearly more reluctant. But let’s not forget that they were reluctant to make peace with Trump’s takeover of the GOP, too. Eventually, they realized that since Trump had captured the hearts of the Republican base, they had no choice but to get on board if they wanted to survive.

The same has happened, and will likely continue to happen, with Russia. Had you told them 10 years ago that Russian intelligence was going to mount a comprehensive assault on an American election, they’d say that they would respond to such an attack with a furious rage and leave no stone unturned in learning every detail about it so that any collaborators could be mercilessly punished and no such attack could ever occur again. Today though, they’re mostly eager to get everyone to think about something else.

It may be because they’ve convinced themselves that no tactic is too repugnant, no alliance is too distasteful, and no moral compromise is too loathsome when you’re serving the lofty goal of keeping Democrats from power. Or it may be that they’re terrified that their rabid base will decide that they are insufficiently devoted to the cult of Trump. Whatever the reasons, they’ve traveled a long way down this road already, and it doesn’t look like they’re turning back.

Arnie v. Trump

Click here for a three-minute video of Arnie (The Terminator) challenging Trump's support for coal -- bring back Blockbuster! (It's interrupted by a couple of annoying advertisements.)

Reverence For The Dear Leader

Click here for an article at Crooks & Liars by Frances Langum (Blue Gal), entitled "Open Thread: Fox News, Or NoKo State TV? YOU Decide!"

Accompanied by swelling, inspirational martial music, and video clips of Kim and Trump before their adoring fans, Fox News and Korean state TV praise their leaders -- notice any similarity?

President Trump has now accomplished what no other American president has ever had the vision or the courage to even attempt.

With our venerable Supreme Leader's acute intelligence and courageous leadership, the world is able to witness this zenith of world peace and a vital moment for our humanity.

*****

Only days ago, President Trump ushered in a new era of diplomacy.

Our venerable Supreme Leader comrade opened a new, triumphant era of diplomacy.

*****

This is something that many analysts and pundits thought was totally impossible.

Who could have imagined that this moment was possible?

*****

The president's continued success in his every undertaking, whether in domestic politics, international trade or foreign policy, President Trump standing taller than ever on the world stage ...

The venerable statesman, whose leadership has been verified by the world, our Supreme Leader comrade is a hero revered by all people.

*****

Donald Trump has instincts that are different than ours, but most often, 99% of the time, they tendd to be better than ours.

We have this world-respected outstanding statesman, a once-in-a-lifetime great man as our leader.

*****

And it's topped off with this expression of praise by Jeanine Pirro:

You simply can't comprehend the genius of Donald Trump. Our president has no fear!