Author: Alan Wallach

How’s that title for pedantic??
This is my last rant on the subject.
Looking back on the year, I have been incredibly disappointed in the media for its complicity in creating the monster called candidate Donald Trump. You cannot give a person hours and hours of free public air time and print space because of disgusting outrageous pronouncements and then point excitedly to polls which you have skewed in his favor. You created a self generating evolution of a joke into a serious candidate and continue to compound it by giving him even more attention. I admit that the print media has not been as bad as radio and TV, but bad enough.
Campaign by poll numbers is something that has never happened before. Issues, what are they? Many of the people populating our media who have the chutzpah to call themselves journalists say he is entertaining. This is the presidency of the US, we are talking about. What sick minds consider what Trump says and does entertaining? You have a mandate to report the news and, yes, provide commentary and analysis, left, right and center, but not to give free public exposure to a lunatic.
Now, I cannot fault the media completely. They are only complicit. I have lived elsewhere in the world and I can truly say that the American electorate is by far, to say it nicely, the least informed in the western world. The people Mr. Trump caters to, are at the low end, and mistakenly direct their anger at the Washington establishment which ironically consists of the very representatives they have, by voting against their own self-interest sent there. But what the Trumpees (and many others) are really angry at is the realization, frightening for them, that there is a black man in the white house who is extremely intelligent, focused on sound objectives, free from scandal, personal or otherwise and despite overwhelming opposition has been eminently successful. To call what Trump caters to xenophobia, minimizes it. It is racism pure and simple.
The other major contributor to this madness has been the Citizen’s United decision which allowed big contributors to set up superpacs, each to fund its own favorite candidate. This created the nineteen candidate clown car which is still, despite some dropouts, in double digits. The sane possible republican candidates have been buried by a resounding lack of attention, with media claiming that their poll numbers are low and that Trump has sucked the air out of the room. Don’t connect your media vacuum cleaner to the room and then claim the air is sucked out. You did it yourselves. And to make matters even worse, enter that profound intellectual Sarah Palin in support of him to suck out any air that you might have left.
Bernie Sanders, in contrast, whether you agree with him or not, has managed to wage a serious issue campaign, attract myriad supporters and donors, despite virtually perfunctory coverage by the media until only a few weeks ago. And to compare Sanders’ leftist campaign to Trump’s rightist “I don’t know what to call it” campaign in the interest of being fair and balanced, is offensive. No matter what his poll numbers, Trump is still a frightening joke.
I say to the media as attorney Joseph Welch said in 1953 to Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no shame?”

We democrats want to win, keep the White House and retake congress. So the suggestion posed is vote for Hillary to do this. She is a better candidate. Some have even said that Bernie should back out of the race for the good of the country. I answer with the following comments to those who use this argument.
1. If Hillary were more progressive and sounded like a true progressive, Bernie would be gone by now. But she’s too packaged and too stilted. People see that everything she says is contrived. That’s one of the reasons the trust factor is a problem. The republican attacks on her have not helped. She is definitely well qualified to be president but that’s not good enough in the primaries. Now she is attacking Bernie with bullshit and has Chelsea repeating it and that takes her down even more. She hasn’t learned her New Hampshire 2008 lesson. Let your hair down. Be yourself. It seems she can’t do it.
2. Is there some question whether Bernie is electable? In my opinion, he is definitely electable. The media is finally showing polls of Bernie vs the republicans which they have blatantly refused to show until now and even then, rarely. They do not want Bernie. But polls show that he does better than Hillary against the republicans. The question is whether there is enough animosity toward the Clintons to make her a weaker candidate than one would hope.
3. In my mind, almost all democratic voters could and would support either in the general election. It seems to me that there is not one republican that can attract a sane democratic or truly independent voter.
4. Bernie represents a movement, a progressive movement. There is the same anti status quo on the liberal end as there is in the conservative, I mean reactionary, wing. But with one difference. Everything Bernie says shows that he is sane. I cannot say the same for the republicans.

In 1914, Gelett Burgess, of purple cow fame, wrote a book. An unabridged dictionary of “words you have always needed.” One of the words that struck me was “Yowf.” The definition was as a noun, One whose importance exceeds his merit. A rich or influential fool. As an adjective, Stupidness, combined with authority. He also wrote the following verses to describe a Yowf.

The Yowf was traveling on a pass –
And he was grand and fat.
A Fourth Vice Presidential ass
Or something big like that.

I could not bear him; so one noon
I pricked him with a pin.
He shrivelled, a collapsed balloon –
Naught but empty skin!

I will give you one, and only one guess who I think is a Yowf.

Back in 1998, I wrote a book which was published and was called The Year 2000 Hoax. This was in answer to the fear mongering by people who had no idea what they were talking about. The economy of the world was going to collapse, planes will crash, you won’t be able to get your money out of the bank, and so on. It was a circle-jerk of a bunch of know-nothings reinforcing each other’s nutty claims. The media picked up on it and made it a cause celebre. Congress jumped on it for the same reason. The techies knew better but didn’t complain because it was good business. The media loved it because it was news in a ratings sort of way. Instead of researching it, they went along with the fear mongering which persisted until the millennium when people woke up and found the world was still there. ATMs worked and they could still get their money, planes were flying. In short, the whole thing was monumental bullshit. I debated the fear mongers before and was interviewed afterward and asked how come I knew. I was a computer techie and knew what I was talking about. So did most every other techie. But the media didn’t want to hear from us. We were bad business.

A similar thing has happened with the Trump mongering. The media created him and he cleverly used their greed to get himself to the top of the republican polls. It didn’t help that the republican competition was so lackluster that this asshole stood out. But, instead of taking him to task, he was good business, high ratings etc. No matter what shit came out of his mouth, the media publicized it, for hours and hours. And they are still doing it. You can’t give hours and hours of free coverage to someone and wonder why no one else is really challenging him. I have stopped following the presidential race because the coverage is so biased, not in favor of any party or person but biased in favor of ratings and money.

I am not interested in what the talking heads are saying. They are saying only what is self-serving. One only had to see the debates to realize that each “journalist” was only interested in his or her own personal ambition, not to do the service they were given a microphone for.

News is important to a free society. So when will we get some?

I have recently begun to read print media again on a regular basis to inform me instead of depending on TV, even the so-called decent journalistic stations. I am amazed at what is going on besides the the presidential election and especially besides the unmentionable person whose name I don’t ever want to hear again and whose picture I would like never to see again.
I am planning where to live, in the remote chance that he becomes president. I thought Nixon was bad and left the US when he became president. But this pig is in a sty by himself.

It looks like the El Niño forecasts are proving to be true on steroids. To call this a mild winter is a monumental understatement.As a meteorologist who has been following weather patterns for a lot of years, I have never seen anything like this. The longer it lasts the better, for me anyway.

It seems to me that the unlimited funding for PACS because of the Citizen’s United decision, instead of giving the rich republicans an edge, is instead leading the republican party off a cliff. Trump maintains his 30% give or take, with the balance spread out among the rest of the clown car. If there were one or two alternatives to Trump, it would be over. But none of the manifold undistinguished rivals wants to drop out and because of Citizen’s United they don’t have to. In the past, few could really afford to stay in the race for the nomination. Now, they all have their pet financiers and can stay in forever. So unless they find a way to gang up on Trump, he will win. If they succeed in ganging up on him, he will run independently and assure a democrat the presidency. The law of unintended consequences rides again, second only to Murphy’s law and the Peter principle.

The corruption of the Chicago city administration from the Mayor on down is blatantly obvious. These questions have to be answered.
1. Why did it take 13 months to indict the officer? Investigation? 13 Months? The video was clear. If it were an ordinary citizen, he/she would have been indicted within a week and held without bail until trial. The officer was on the payroll and working during this period. He should have been locked up. Didn’t he have a history of significant complaints?
2. Is it true that the victim’s family was paid $5 million by they city without seeing the video and without even being sued?
3. Is it true that some policemen removed the video from a local store? Where is it, who were they and why weren’t they charged with a felony cover-up?
4. Why did it take a court order to release the video to force the prosecutor to take action. She claimed she wanted to wait until the investigation was over. How long? 13 months wasn’t enough? They must have had serious difficulty finding some witness, any witness, that would exculpate the cop. I can’t help but assume that if the court did not act, the video would not have ever been released and the officer would never have even been charged. This charge is first degree murder, not some minor misbehaving.
5 The Mayor, Police chief and State’s attorney should resign and all be charged with corruption. They are an embarrassment.

Climatologists say that El Niño this year is the most powerful on record, exceeding the record breaker in 1997. It’s strength is measured by the water temperature in a region of the Pacific ocean west of Peru. This year it is already 5.4 degrees above normal and still increasing. In 1997, the record year, it was 5 degrees above normal. The ramifications of a strong El Niño are manifold – heavy precipitation in the west (the hope is that it will be snow in the mountains, not rain), mild temperatures in the northeast and a host of other weather phenomenon. Is this caused by carbon emissions? We don’t really know. It does seem to be cyclical but the record increase of this year’s temperature is suspect. We are not waiting for something to hit. It is already creating anomalies. Stay tuned.

I know, latest poll shows that 81% of Americans are not satisfied with handling of ISIS. But, what do they know? Do they have intelligence (both kinds) we don’t have? By whipping them into a frenzy and then using the resulting polls to perpetuate their whipping, the media is just creating a self-fulfilling prophesy. Does the public really think that Obama is ignoring what is happening? Does the public want Marshall Dillon to go get’em like W did in 2002. Fortunately, the Obama administration does not govern by poll and shouldn’t be encouraged to do so especially by using the low-information voting poll as justification. And Herr Drumpf is benefiting from this. Trump’s outrageous demagoguery is again getting more press coverage than it deserves because the media is in love with his bullshit. Is he running for president or chancellor? He well knows that it takes a 24 month screening before any refugee arriving in the US can be released into the population, but chooses to ignore it. And the media gives him a forum. I can understand Fox, but MSNBC ought to be ashamed especially supporting that numbskull Joe Scarborough. MSNBC should send him packing.