The Scarapranos

Like Avis, the Democrats need to try harder

Remember the old car rental commercials?

Hertz was No. 1 because they “put you in the driver’s seat.” Avis was only No. 2 but they “tried harder.” And then there was Rent-a-Wreck, which just rented you a cheap car…or a good car cheaply. Something like that.

In today’s political arena, the Republicans are Hertz. They control the White House and both houses of Congress and have a 5-4 conservative majority in the Supreme Court. However, all is not well in the current administration, so Avis – I mean the Democrats – are hoping to score some major gains in the 2018 mid-term election. They think they can retake the Senate and maybe even the House if faux-president Donald J. Trump and the GOP keep shooting themselves in the foot.

But here’s a caution for the Democrats: Tighten up your lug bolts now so your wheels don’t fall off and turn you into Rent-a-Wreck.

A good example is what happened yesterday. In what seemed like another exercise in stupidity, Trump decided unilaterally to ban transgender Americans from serving in the military and tweeted that command in 140 characters or less. He just forgot to tell his staff, Congress or the military about his directive and, oh, by the way, doesn’t have a plan for implementing such a rule.

It seemed like just another gaffe from the Gaffer-in-Chief until I read an article that seemed to put the issue into context. By taking this position on transgender rights, Trump is forcing Democrats to defend the opposite position when they run for Congress in 2018. He thinks that campaigning for transgender citizens is a losing proposition, especially in rust belt states like Ohio and Michigan where he surprisingly beat Hillary Clinton last fall.

And that’s where Rent-a-Wreck comes in.

Let’s face it, in 2016 the Democrats nominated a somewhat unexciting, slightly aloof, centrist former First Lady who supported the Iraq war and some other conservative principles but who tried to slide w-a-a-a-y to the left during the campaign to accommodate Bernie Sanders’s social liberal tribe – and failed badly. It was too much of a stretch for her to make and she seemed uncomfortable trying to tell America what the Democrats stood for and why. Her message of “we’re good and Trump is bad” wasn’t enough for those rust belt voters who wanted a change from the status quo.

Now comes 2018 and the next chance for Democrats to unfurl their true colors. If that means defending their position on transgender soldiers, then get out and defend it with gusto. Don’t just tell us (sheepishly) that you support it, but give us good reasons why. Tell Joe Cornfield how it benefits him and his family to allow any American who’s willing to wear a uniform and serve his or her country, and how anything less than that is un-American.

Moving on, if single-payer health insurance is what you really want, develop a plan for implementing Medicare for All and a way to pay for it, then come out strong to sell it to the country. How hard can it be to promote single payer as a better alternative than the obscene and ridiculous bills the Republicans keep putting forward after seven years of bitching about Obamacare?

If you want more money to combat climate change, say so. Show us the plan. If you want free college tuition, show us the math. Higher minimum wage? Infrastructure repair? The right side of social issues? Measured and appropriate foreign policy? Write it all down, pass it around and start selling it to the voting public. Some of them won’t support your platform, but they for sure won’t get behind you if you’re not sure you support it yourself.     

A lot of us believe the Democrats are the good guys in today’s world and the Republicans are the Evil Empire, but that “good guy” message by itself isn’t going to work any longer. Thanks to Trump and his Deplorables, one-third of the country will never believe a word that comes out of a Democrat’s mouth, or the “fake news” that reports on it. They still believe that they are the good guys, all evidence to the contrary.

I left the Democratic Party after 2008 because it couldn’t decide what it wanted to be when it came into power. They have a little over a year to figure that out or forget the whole “coming into power” thing. Bold action is required and now would be a good time to start. It’s not enough to tell people what you’re for or against. What’s important is showing them why they should care. 

Some things, once broken, can never be fixed

I’ve thought for a long time that the O.J. Simpson case ruined the American criminal justice system forever. Despite weeks of trial and a mountain of evidence – albeit highly technical evidence – jurors could not overcome the spectre of reasonable doubt and find in favor of the prosecution. Interviewed today, many of them will tell you they thought O.J. was guilty, but Marcia Clark and her lineup of shady cops, Cato Kaelin and monotonous DNA experts didn’t prove their case.

After all, the glove didn’t fit.

Since then, time after time, we’ve watched as seemingly guilty defendants get acquitted because juries can’t determine the difference between “reasonable doubt” and “any tiny smidgen of doubt the defense attorney might have conjured up and planted in our brains, regardless how unreasonable it might be.” Frankly, I’m surprised when anybody gets convicted any more.

That brings me to the faux presidency of Donald J. Trump.

There are at least two things that Trump has given us that I don’t think can ever be repaired. One is the possibility that anything the President of the United States says is a lie. We know that’s true of Trump, who has averaged 4.6 lies and/or distortions every day since he took office. Trump lies with such impunity that I no longer believe anything he says. Lies roll off his tongue like butter off hot corn or rain off a sloping roof.

When he isn’t lying to us in person, Trump sends out people like Sean Spicer to lie to the media on our behalf, starting with his crowd estimate on Inauguration Day. That was Day 1, Episode 1, Chapter 1 of Trump’s presidency. Not a great start.

When we quit buying Spicer’s lies, Trump rolled out Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who kept the ball in the air with a barrage of lies so thick it choked the air – and the cameras – out of the White House press room. After Spicer resigned, Sanders took over his job and promised us she’d always tell the truth. Then she was asked another question and she lied in her reply. Didn’t take long to violate that truce.    

Now we have some shady looking guy named Scaramucci who picked right up where Spicer left off. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. After work, I suspect he sits out front of the Washington version of Satriale’s meat market sipping espresso out of tiny cups and talking about “this thing of ours.” His old tweets make Trump sound like a Sunday School teacher.

And on and on it goes.

Someday we’ll have another president. Maybe in four years, maybe fewer. It might be a Republican or a Democrat, a man or a woman, black, white or brown, who knows? The problem is, after Trump, there will still be a segment of the population that doesn’t believe a single word that comes out of the new POTUS’s mouth. It’ll be more lies, damned lies and whoppers, with apologies to Mark Twain. The lies might just be left-handed the next time around.

Thing Two is this: The news media will never again be respected because it sold its values for the fool’s gold of Donald Trump and the ratings that came with it. Oh, sure, there are still good, solid journalists digging for news instead of digging their own graves, but Trump installed the term “fake news” so deeply into our vocabulary that no one knows what real news looks like any more. You see a story on Facebook. Is it real? The New York Times quotes an unnamed source. Is that true?

Liberals believe what they want to believe. Everything else is a lie. Conservatives just flip the coin.

I have used this analogy before – more than once – but it’s mine and I like it so I’m using it again. The media was Dr. Frankenstein and Trump was the monster they created. They loved him when he brought in the revenue but seemed shocked when he escaped and started roaming the countryside killing sheep.

Presidents who lie and the fake news media…these are the gifts from Trump that can never be returned. They’re the gifts that keep on giving. You might as well throw away your receipt.

We’re gonna need some new laws around here

This edition of shieldWALL is going to do something completely different. We’re going to make this one an “audience participation” essay.

What I’m proposing is a list of new laws that will help us clear away the stain from the Donald Trump presidency and make sure nothing like that can ever happen again. I’ll start it off with my ideas and then everyone out there who reads it can add their own thoughts. In short order, we should have a complete legislative agenda that we can hand over to the new Congress after the 2018 mid-term election.

So here goes…

(1) First off, the obvious. We need to abolish the Electoral College. I live in a deep red state that was going to vote for Trump regardless of what my wife and I checked on our ballot. In other words, we contributed to Hillary Clinton’s margin in the popular vote but did nothing to actually elect the president. Our votes for president didn’t really count.

The same can be said for Republicans in California and New York and Democrats in Mississippi and Alabama. If we’re going to live by the one-man, one-vote doctrine, then all ballots must contribute to the winner of the election. The Electoral College has got to go. If that takes a Constitutional amendment, then let’s get the ball rolling now.

(2) Next, every candidate for president must submit to a comprehensive psychological evaluation by a panel of qualified doctors. This would disqualify, say, any candidate found to be a shallow, childish, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness.

Poor Thomas Eagleton was ruled out as George McGovern’s running mate simply because he was once treated for depression. How far we’ve come that now fully half of the country is suffering from depression because of the man who was elected president.

(3) Third, all candidates must release any and all tax returns. No excuses. Period.

(4) Candidates must truly divest themselves from any business interests that pose a conflict with their duties. Failure to do so by Inauguration Day is not subject to debate and will result in automatic removal from office. Said person will not be inaugurated with a wink and a promise.

(5) Presidents will not have absolute pardon power. Any president who wants to pardon himself or any member of his family or staff for crimes against the government must put the issue to a vote of the people. And good luck with that.

(6) We must overturn the law that says a president can’t be charged with a crime. Are you kidding me? Who came up with this idea? This means that Trump actually could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not be arrested. An amendment to this law would do away with diplomatic immunity that allows really bad people from other countries to get away with all kinds of criminal activity.

(7) And finally, we need term limits for Congress and the Supreme Court and finance reform so that no one can contribute anonymously and corporations are no longer considered “people.”    

That’s what I got straight off the top of my head. Please leave a comment here or on Facebook and tell me what laws you want to see passed. I’ll make sure the complete list gets to Washington. 

Trump’s accomplishments are big news in American Samoa

(Click the links for source material.)

Last month, during his first White House cabinet meeting, faux-President Donald J. Trump claimed to have accomplished more than any other president – aside from Franklin D. Roosevelt – during his first six months in office.

  

“Never has there been a president, with few exceptions…who has passed more legislation and who has done more things than what we’ve done,” Trump proclaimed. Raise your hand if you think that was true.

In fact, through the end of June, Trump has signed 42 bills, according to the White House web site. I admit I don’t know how that number compares with all other presidents, but in terms of what he has signed as opposed to just how many, there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot there. I couldn’t find a single piece of significant legislation that Trump has signed into law. Not. One. Single. Bill.

So let’s take a look:

* First off, of the 42 bills Trump has signed so far, 14 of them (a full one-third) simply overturn rules that were implemented during the Obama administration. To me, the most damaging are the ones that allow the dumping of mine waste into streams and the killing of hibernating bears and wolves in Alaska, and the ones that no longer protect the privacy of broadband customers or require financial advisers to put consumers' best interests ahead of their own.

Those bills are significant in their own right, but don’t rise to the level of health care, tax reform, infrastructure repair or border security – Trump’s main campaign promises.

* Three of the other bills he signed appointed members to the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents.

* Two of them approved new names for Veterans Administration clinics in Butler County, Pa., and Pago Pago, American Samoa. For the record, the Samoan facility will now be known as the Faleomavaega Eni Fa'aua'a Hunkin VA Clinic. I knew you’d want to know.

* One bill recognizes Vietnam War veterans as, well, veterans of the Vietnam War, and tells us to wave the flag in their honor. I didn’t need the president to point this out to me.

* Another bill authorizes the Department Homeland Security to defend our food supply from terrorists. That’s OK by me, I guess, although I didn’t see any details on how they intend to do that.

* One names a courthouse in Tennessee after “Law and Order” actor and former Congressman Fred Thompson, and two others were passed to encourage women to become entrepreneurs and seek jobs with NASA.

That’s 24 of the 42 so far. See any blockbusters anywhere?

* Speaking of NASA, another bill reaffirms support for our space program, including the International Space Station, and mentions something about a mission to Mars. Just what we need right now. 

* And then there’s H.R. 534, the “U.S. Wants to Compete for a World Expo Act.” This bill signed by Trump would require the Secretary of State “to take such actions as may be necessary for the United States to rejoin the Bureau of International Expositions...to promote domestic job creation, global branding and tourism to the United States.” It sounds like Trump wants to bring back the New York World’s Fair.

How much do you want to bet that any “expo” coming to America right now would be branded with the Trump family logo and somehow involve Trump hotels and a golf course or two? The bill also enables the Secretary of State to accept private contributions for this purpose. What could possibly go wrong?

* There’s also a bill that protects whistle-blowers in the Department of Veterans Affairs, one relating to veterans’ health care and one approving the location for a memorial to honor veterans of the Gulf wars Desert Storm and Desert Shield.

* There are bills praising cops as heroes and one pertaining to their benefits, a couple extending appropriations for 2017 and one that claims to improve our weather forecasting. Can’t wait to see how that one works out since forecasts are wrong at least half the time.

* The first bill Trump signed on Inauguration Day was a waiver to allow Mad Dog Mattis to serve as Secretary of Defense, even though it’s been less than seven years since he retired from active duty in the Armed Forces.

* But my favorite bill – by far – is the “Follow the Rules Act,” signed by Trump on June 14. This is word-for-word the way the bill is explained on the White House web site: “This bill extends the prohibition against a person taking, failing to take, or threatening to take or fail to take a personnel action against any employee or applicant for employment for refusing to obey an order that would require the individual to violate a law to personnel actions against such an individual for refusing to obey an order that would violate a rule or regulation.”

Say what? It might as well have read “argle bargle, argle bargle, argle bargle....” If you can understand what that bill said, you should run for Congress.

To me, this is Donald J. Trump’s crowning achievement thus far. He has managed to sign a bill into law that abuses the English language even worse than one of his speeches. There is no way in hell he knows what he signed with this one, and, probably, neither does anybody else.

So in conclusion, I congratulate you, Mr. Trump, for your monumental accomplishments. In your first six months as president, while failing to push through any of your legislative agenda, you have managed to sign 42 bills, most of which really don’t do a damned thing, and one of which can’t even be read out loud with a straight face.

Franklin D. Roosevelt would certainly be proud.

*   *   *

Here are three sources if you want to read more about signed legislation to date.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pggbpz/all-the-laws-and-executive-orders-trump-has-signed-so-far

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/signed-legislation?field_legislation_status_value=0

http://www.npr.org/2017/04/27/525753448/white-house-touts-historic-28-laws-signed-by-trump-but-what-are-they

How do you want your nothing burger cooked?

Why do people lie? Mostly, they lie to hide the truth.

It can be a simple, almost innocent lie. “I didn’t break the glass, mommy. It fell off the table all by itself.” Or, “It wasn’t my fault. Tommy made me do it.”

There’s the incidental, relatively harmless lie to spare hurting someone else’s feelings. “I can’t come to your party, Michelle. I’m going to be out of town that night.” (You’re really not going anywhere, you just don’t like Michelle.)

It can be a manufactured lie with way too many details to be believable. “I had my report all written but I forgot to put it in a plastic cover and then today I had to run out of the house to catch my ride and it was raining really hard and I dropped my backpack in a puddle and the report fell out and got all wet and it got ruined and, no, I didn’t make a copy.”

It can be a cruel lie. “No, honey, I’m not seeing someone else. I just have to work late…a lot.”

And, of course, there are political lies that come in all forms imaginable. “If you like your health plan you can keep it.” “Read my lips: No new taxes.” And my favorite, from our pathological liar president Donald J. Trump, “I will never lie to you.”

What do all lies have in common? Simply that the liar considers them to be better than the truth, hopes everyone will believe them and thinks that no one will find out they’re lies. That, and they are always concealing something that, when exposed, turns out to be far worse than the lie.

“The glass didn’t fall by itself. I saw you knock it off the table.”

“I know you’re cheating on me, Jim. I followed you to her house last night.”

“We know that you met with Russians to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton. We have your own email to prove it.”    

Donald Trump’s administration has been a deplorable basket full of lies since the day he announced he was running for president. You don’t need me to list them for you. Just google “Donald Trump’s lies” for a comprehensive list.   

Listing Trump’s lies is not the point of this essay, however. The point is this: It’s time for Trump himself, his sons, his lawyers, his spokespeople and his other surrogates to stop repeating lies that have already been debunked, rebunked and bunked all over again.

Please stop saying that Russia “may not have hacked our election.” Everybody already knows that they did. Please stop saying there was “no collusion” and “no obstruction.” Everybody can see that there was. Even your supporters can see it; they just refuse to believe it. The questions are not whether there was collusion but who colluded with whom and when and how much. And please stop saying that Donald Jr. met with Russians to talk about the adoption of Russian children. That was just a throw-in at the meeting so they’d have some cover in case news of the meeting leaked out – which it did.

Trump Jr.’s own email clearly shows he was invited to a meeting to discuss Hillary Clinton, knew that in advance and endorsed the idea with his three-word response: “I love it.” Sending Sean Spicer out yesterday to bring up the adoption thing again just makes the lie that much worse. It’s a waste of good oxygen.

Please stop saying that the “Russia thing” is “fake news” or “bogus” or “a witch hunt” or “a nothing burger” or Barack Obama’s fault. It’s not. What it is is the greatest political scandal since Watergate and possibly even greater than that when all of the facts come out. And that really is the point I’m trying to make. If there's nothing there, why is everybody lying about it? What are they trying to hide?

If Russia really is a nothing burger, why does Trump keep pouring on the ketchup?

A special counsel, four Congressional committees and the FBI are all investigating Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election. When they’re finished, we’ll find out definitively whether there’s any there there, what was fake news and what was true and just what kind of burger they were cooking up in the White House. Until then, everything else is speculation and fodder for the 24-hour news cycle.

Trump and his trolls should do the country a favor and STFU about Russia. They’re not convincing anybody about anything. One-third of the voters still support him regardless of anything he says and the rest of us still want him to be impeached. They just keep kicking the dead horse instead of dragging it to the side of the road and driving on.

Here’s an idea, Mr. Trump: Instead of recalculating your election victory or reimagining the crowd at your inauguration or reinventing the whole Russia story, why not try your hand at governing the country for a change? Come up with a legitimate approach to health care or an actual infrastructure bill or tax reform that benefits everybody or even a plan to have your shirts made in America during “Made in America Week.”

I probably wouldn’t agree with you on many of those subjects, but at least they’re real issues that need to be resolved. There’s not one nothing burger in the whole bunch.

Collusion is not illegal except when it is

I keep hearing Sean Hannity, Geraldo Rivera and the other Fox News propaganda ministers arguing that collision is not illegal, and is just a routine part of our everyday lives. So I googled the term and here below are the first seven definitions that came up from several different sources.

Please note that all seven use the word “illegal” or “fraudulent” to describe collusive activity.

(1) Secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially in order to cheat or deceive others. [Synonyms: conspiracy, connivance, complicity, intrigue, plotting, secret understanding, collaboration, scheming]

(2) Illegal cooperation or conspiracy, especially between ostensible opponents in a lawsuit.

(3) Secret agreement or cooperation especially for an illegal or deceitful purpose acting in collusion with the enemy.

(4) Improper secret agreement between two or more entities, to defraud or deprive others of their property or rightful share, or to otherwise indulge in a forbidden, illegal, or illegitimate activity.

(5) A secret agreement, especially for fraudulent or treacherous purposes; conspiracy.

(6) A secret understanding between two or more persons to gain something illegally, to defraud another of his or her rights, or to appear as adversaries though an agreement.

(7) Secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to deceive others.

I didn’t see any definition that said “routine activity” or “part of everyday life” or “no big deal” or “a perfectly normal thing for our president to do to rig an election with help from agents of a hostile foreign government.”

I also didn’t find a single reference that said it was Obama’s fault.

I forgot...100 times

So here's the thing:

Let's say you've had more than 100 meetings with foreign agents but you only listed, say, 97 of them on your security clearance form. I could see how you maybe forgot 5 or 10 at first and had to go back and amend your form after you remembered a few more. After all...100-plus is a lot to remember.

But nobody has more than 100 meetings with foreign agents and forgets all 100 of them, lists "0" on his security clearance form and then has to amend his form three times after he suddenly remembers the other 100 or so.

At least, no honest person would do that.

I've never had any meetings with foreign agents -- not one -- but if I had taken at least one, I'd remember it. More than 100? Impossible to forget, yet Jared Kushner did that and still retains a security clearance in the Trump White House. 

You have to wonder, what does it take to have that security clearance revoked? Is this not enough? How about if he joined the Russian army? Or got caught delivering microfilm to Boris and Natasha? Would that do the trick?

Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale

A kick in the head, Part 2

In the aftermath of Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer, Republicans all over Washington are being asked this question: “If you were running for public office, would you take a meeting with someone you were told was spearheading a Russian government plan to boost your campaign, and had dirt on your opponent he wanted to share?”

Their answers have been mixed, ranging from Senator Orrin Hatch, who said “no,” to our faux-president Donald J. Trump, who said, “I think many people would have held that meeting.” Of course you do, Donald. Of course you do. Senator Lindsay Graham said he’d call the FBI, but Paul Ryan, our esteemed Speaker of the House, refused to comment on a question he called “hypothetical.”

Seriously, Paul? Is that question so hard for you to answer? Are you into the slime that deep?

Apparently Mr. Ryan didn’t read an essay I wrote a few weeks ago in which I talked about knowing right from wrong. It started out like this:

Walking down the street you see a homeless person sitting on the sidewalk, leaning against a wall. You have basically three choices:

* You can give him some money for food.

* You can ignore him and walk on by.

* You can stop, mock him for being a loser and then kick him in the head.

That essay was mainly about health care legislation, but the premise still applies. In the battle of good versus evil, no one is required to give the homeless man money to be considered “good.” You could do nothing but walk on by and still be considered a good person, but you lose that label as soon as you kick the poor man in the head.

Meeting with a foreign agent from an unfriendly nation to collect dirt on a political rival during a campaign seems pretty cut and dried. It’s illegal, immoral and un-American. Doing so puts you on the wrong end of the right/wrong continuum, and anybody with half a brain and anything resembling a moral compass would know that right off the top.

And therein lies the problem.

As I wrote in an earlier essay, it’s not wrong to want other people to be the best they can be and to always do the right thing. It’s only wrong if we’re naïve enough to expect it. I don’t think it’s naïve to want our political leaders to know right from wrong and, faced with the choice, to act accordingly, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that many of them don’t … and won’t.

There's nothing hypothetical about that. It’s a fact. Just one more kick in the head.

When will I become obsolete?

Sitting here in my office, I’m surrounded by obsolescence.

Over on the desk to my right is an electric pencil sharpener. I haven’t used a pencil in at least 20 years, and the one I used then probably doesn’t need sharpening.

On my left under the TV is a combo DVD/VHS cassette player. We have at least five video cassette recorders in the house, dating back to the 1990s when my wife and I both worked and we recorded a lot of TV shows. I mean a lot of TV shows. We had VCRs running all day and night all over the house with tapes labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, etc., so we didn’t miss any must-see TV.

How many people do you know who still have a VCR? Did you even remember that it was called a video cassette recorder? Can you believe I once had both Beta and VHS?  

Behind me on a bookcase is an iPod. My wife has one, too. I loaded mine up with playlists and listened to it every day when I took my three-mile walks. Hasn’t been turned on for, I dunno, five years, since I got my iPhone and realized I could put the songs right on there and carry one device instead of two. I assume the iPod battery has gone dead by now – just like my battery has. I no longer walk three miles a day. Or week. Or month...

In the closet is a camera bag filled with equipment, including a Nikkormat 35-mm camera with wide-angle and telephoto lenses, a flash attachment and film; a Sony video camera that we got for Christmas in 1996 with extra batteries and tapes; an instant camera that’s older than my children; and other stuff as well. I got it out yesterday looking for something and choked on the inch-deep layer of dust that covered the bag.

Also in the closet is a very nice Sony 6.0 megapixel digital camera I bought my wife several years ago because she’s very good at photography. She still takes a lot of photos, but now she mostly uses her phone.

Elsewhere in my office there’s a boom box. We have at least two of those, plus a number of portable cassette and CD players. I use the boom box once in a while to listen to sporting events, even though you can now “listen live” on radio stations’ web sites. It also plays CDs, but hasn’t sniffed one since about the year 2000.

Above that on a stand I have a printer that includes a fax machine. I’ll just leave that here.

I have two “picture tube” type TV sets that weigh about a thousand pounds apiece and are at least a foot and a half deep, made obsolete by bigger, lighter, sharper flat screens that we have in almost every room of the house. I could throw the old ones away, but they both still work fine. They’re hiding somewhere in my basement.

I have a box full of really nice corded telephones that became obsolete when I bought a set of six cordless ones. Even those would be considered dinosaurs by people who now use a cell phone exclusively.

I have books. Actual books. Shelves lined with them, boxes full of them and stacks of them on the floor. I keep them (and still buy them) even though I have another 300 or more in my three Kindles. There’s something about an actual book full of pages that I like having around me. I like the look, the feel and the smell of real books. My Kindles don’t smell like anything.   

I have a battery-powered portable DVD player that my wife bought me for Christmas. I used to take it outside in the summer. It was a great thing to have until we started watching Netflix movies on our Kindles, our iPad and our phones. Then it was good-bye portable DVD player… back into the closet with the cameras.

And then there is the music.     

I have always loved music, dating back before I started school when my mother used to play Elvis records and my dad walked around singing “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” To feed my passion for song, I started buying 45-rpm vinyl records as soon as I had some money in the 1960s. They grew into long-playing records called “albums” when I could scrounge up $5 to buy one.

Over the years, I collected somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 vinyl records, some of which were played so many times the black grooves turned white and the scratches became louder than the lyrics. For records, one needed a turntable. Mine all wore out, but I was lucky to find one on sale at Sound Investments several years ago. It’s a Sony and I think I bought it for, like, $50.

Now, even Sound Investments is obsolete.

In college, like everyone else, I had to hang a wobbly 8-track tape player under the dashboard of my car. Why wait for that one song on the radio when you could plug in your own music and take it on the road? Of course, the tape in an 8-track tape was designed to play over and over itself until two or more songs started bleeding together. That’s when you jammed a matchbook under the tape to raise it up slightly and override the second song.

Eventually, the tape just wore out altogether. If there ever was a failed technology worse than the 8-track tape, I don’t know what it was. The typical 8-track tape cost around $8-10 as I recall, and lasted a month if you were lucky. Eventually, they were replaced by cassette tapes which at least ran for 30 to 60 minutes before flipping over and reversing direction. I have a few hundred of those, too, and most of them are still in good condition. That required the addition of a cassette player or two – and one in each car.

Cassette tapes made it possible to buy new, replacement versions of those scratchy, overplayed vinyl albums, play them one time only while simultaneously recording them onto cassette tape and then put them away, never to be played again unless the tape got damaged or lost. I did a fair amount of that, until, alas, the compact disc came along.

Compact discs. CDs for short. Shiny metal discs that required yet another playback device. The great thing about CDs is that nothing actually touches the playing surface except a laser light so they never wear out or become unplayable – unless you step on them, break them, get enough fingerprints on them to solve crimes, leave them in the sun too long or let small children handle them after making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  

Across the hall from me right now are bookcases full of a few hundred CDs and DVD movies, even though I can’t remember the last time I bought either one. You don’t buy music or movies any more, you download them, which leaves you with a whole lot of records, tapes, discs and electronic equipment that is virtually obsolete.

There’s other stuff, too, that has passed its time. I could mention watches (I have three but don’t wear any), alarm clocks, boxes full of clothing, old computer games, backup discs from days when I worked and the floor-mounted Dell PC tower that still uses Windows XP.

And did I mention my cars? One of them is 15 years old and the other will turn 20 next fall.

So as I said, I’m surrounded by obsolescence, and a lot of it is right here in this office where I sit typing this essay. The only question now is, when will I become obsolete? It could be any day now, I suppose. If I stop writing the shieldWALL, I guess you’ll know.

I say it here...

Yesterday on Facebook I posted a joke about the Trump family and Dr. Zhivago. Until that time, to my knowledge, no one else had ever mentioned the 1965 movie in relation to Donald Trump. This morning, I heard a pundit say it on MSNBC. He got a laugh.

Also yesterday, I said I could hire a hit man to kill someone, and be guilty of a crime even if his intended target wasn’t home. Some time after that, Trump spokesliar Kellyanne Conway used the similar analogy of a burglar who breaks into a house but doesn’t steal anything.

I’m usually not one to brag, but once again (make that twice), I say it here and it comes out there. Maybe instead of following Louise Mensch and some of the other Twitter all-stars, the media should start following me.

Just sayin’.

Lie-la-lie, lie-la-lie-lie-lie-la-lie…

That chorus from Paul Simon’s 1969 hit song “The Boxer” goes through my head every time I hear Donald Trump speak. Lies roll off him and his family like butter off hot corn. But they’re not standard run-of-the-mill lies. They’re a special kind of lies like I’ve never seen before.

Let me explain.

I’ve known some pretty prodigious liars in my life, and most of them weren’t very good at it. You know who I mean. There are two basic types. You ask Type 1 a question and they answer with w-a-y more information than you needed, droning on and on endlessly while spilling out every last detail as if their story had been rehearsed – which, of course, it had.

I mean, nobody remembers that many details about routine stuff unless they made it all up. I probably had lunch two days ago, but I can’t tell you if I did and what I ate, let alone that it was a little overcooked, much too salty and served on a light blue plate with purple flowers, lavender cloth napkins and a frosted crystal glass served by a waitress with brown eyes, curly brown hair and small square glasses whose name was Jen.

I may have eaten a hot dog on a bun with mustard, but I forget.

Type 2 liars go in the opposite direction. They are so bad at it and so unprepared they can’t provide the simplest answer that anybody should know, such as the name of the main character in the movie they claim to have seen. They’ll try to talk their way around it, but that never works.

As for me, I’m not very good at lying, which is why I don’t do it. Oh, I suppose I must have tried it a time two in my life, but I would have failed miserably, spit out the truth eventually and given it up entirely. And that brings me to the Trumps.

It has been well documented that Trump lies almost daily. One news outlet demonstrated how he told at least one lie in each of his first 40 days in office. He didn’t stop after 40 days, but they probably wore themselves out counting and dropped the story after that. Trump, however, is a different type of liar. His lies are not over-stuffed with detail (like Type 1) and he barfs them up shamelessly, often with no remorse (like Type 2). He can tell most of them in 140 characters or less.

Here’s an example from just this week:

   

Trump on Sunday, 4:50 a.m. – “Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded…”

Trump on Sunday, 5:45 p.m. (after being mocked unmercifully on Twitter) – “The fact that President Putin and I discussed a Cyber Security unit doesn't mean I think it can happen. It can't…”

His sons have picked up the habit as well. When it was reported that Donald Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner and others met with a Russian lawyer during the campaign, they said they were discussing the adoption of Russian children. Only after the press kept following the story did they admit the truth – if it is the truth – that they actually were trying to gather dirt on Hillary Clinton.

That’s just two examples from the past few days. I could write this essay all afternoon and still not cover half of them. Besides, everybody knows by now that Trump is a serial liar. While I’m still shocked by the ease with which these whoppers fall out of his mouth, I am no longer surprised.

I’m also not surprised but extremely saddened by a recent poll showing that more than one-third of Americans still approve of Trump. According to news reports, many of those same people got upset with National Public Radio for broadcasting the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July. It was bad enough that they didn’t recognize the words to one of our most important documents, but many of them labeled it “subversive” toward the Trump regime.

It was subversive, all right, but in a whole different context. Without those words, we’d still be drinking tea with our crumpets every afternoon and singing “God Save the Queen” at baseball games, which would be called cricket matches and would look really silly out on the pitch.

Speaking of songs, here are some more lyrics from “The Boxer.” Raise your hand if they mean anything to you.  

I have squandered my resistance

For a pocketful of mumbles

Such are promises

All lies and jest

Still, a man hears what he wants to hear

And disregards the rest…

From 1969. Insightful, to say the least.

It’s July 5…do you know where your country is?

I’m not a big fireworks guy. This may be owing to the fact that they scared the bejeezers out of my last dog, who lived 16 years but shook uncontrollably for two or three hours on 16 consecutive Independence Days. I’m not opposed to them, but basically, if you’ve seen one rocket’s red glare you’ve seen them all. I won’t go far or expend much effort to watch a fireworks display.

I’m also not fond of picnics. I used to be, but they have lost their attraction over the years. I blame flies, old age and humidity for that. [Disclaimer: My younger daughter did invite me to one at her house yesterday and I had a very nice time with most of my family. I make an exception for that event.]

So what I did do to commemorate the Fourth of July was listen to patriotic songs, including three separate versions of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and post sections of the Declaration of Independence on my Facebook page. I also listened as commentators from NPR read the entire document out loud. It took less than 10 minutes and I followed along with the printed text.

If you don’t do anything else on July 4, you should at least spend 7-8 minutes reading the document that separated us from Great Britain and launched the creation of the United States of America. I have read it several times and – while far from having it memorized – have a pretty good feel for what it says.

I’m willing to bet a pile of green American money that faux-president Donald J. Trump has never read it even once. I know his loyal supporters haven’t read it, especially the one who tweeted yesterday that NPR was wasting its time communicating such “trash” over its Twitter account.

Trash. He called the Declaration of Independence “trash.”

Here are some other things that happened over the Independence Day weekend:

(1) On Saturday, July 1, Trump was the guest speaker at a “Celebrate Freedom Rally” at the Kennedy Center, during which a white Southern Baptist church choir made up and sang a song called, “Make America Great Again.” The choir from the First Baptist Church in Dallas could have performed “God Bless America” or “America the Beautiful” or any of a number of patriotic songs, but opted instead for a Trump propaganda piece that probably had the Kennedy Center’s namesake rolling over in his grave – especially since the “Celebrate Freedom” theme is really a disguised excuse for legalizing discrimination against people of color and the LGBT community.

The rally might as well have been called “Happy Fourth of July to White People Everywhere.”

(2) Trump tweeted out his Fourth of July message, in which presidents usually say patriotic things and pay tribute to our founding fathers and the brave men and women who have fought and died over the years to keep Americans free. He could have quoted John Hancock or Thomas Jefferson or John Adams, but instead he bragged about the size of the crowd:

“Getting ready to celebrate the 4th of July with a big crowd at the White House. Happy 4th to everyone. Our country will grow and prosper!”

(3) During his speech before the White Baptist Christian Rally, Trump interrupted his comments about military veterans to complain about fake news. “The fake media tried to stop us from going to the White House,” Trump told the crowd, “but I'm president and they're not.” Shades of Chevy Chase. He also took time to assure us that, “We're going to start saying Merry Christmas again.” For some reason, he decided to tell us this on July 1.

(4) And finally, everyone has probably seen the video of Trump getting off his airplane, walking up to his limousine, turning right and wandering off down the tarmac like he was window shopping or looking for a lost dog. Unfortunately, he didn’t wander far enough to fall over a cliff before his Secret Service detail turned him around and pointed him back toward the car.

You know, there are 326 million people in the United States, including 235 million who are eligible to vote. Trump received 62.9 million votes in the last election, meaning that he was sent to the White House by roughly 26% of the voting public. It’s time for the remaining 74% to get up off the couch and demand that our leaders do something about this travesty.

It’s bad enough that Trump has uttered a long list of vile and disgusting statements in the last two years or that he lies on an almost daily basis, but now he’s angling to turn the Fourth of July into his own personal holiday, complete with orchestral and choral support and his very own theme song. You know who does this? People like Idi Amin, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Kim Jong-un.

So on this day -- the day after Independence Day -- I hold this truth to be self-evident: It’s time for somebody to step up and fix this problem before it gets any worse. The Declaration of Independence was signed so this kind of thing would stop happening. Click this link and read it. You'll see.