Month: July 2016

Donald Trump must have so much contempt for Republican voters, and even more for the Republican Establishment who couldn’t stop him. Seeing that Birther stuff launch him to the top, listening to Roger Stone egg him on, you can tell that he thinks people are infinitely gullible. And he has absolutely no conscience about exploiting this. It’s been his business model for at least fifteen years, and his image has always been built on the most brazen lies.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the Nyack, New York painting.  I am using the photo seen directly below.  The scene is Main street in Nyack, New York, a historic town on the Hudson River.  I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 6×6 inch canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

 
This week’s changes are concentrated at street level.  To the left side, I’ve now completed the shadowed jeep.  The street itself has received another layer of paint on the lane going away from the viewer.  Across the street, the SUV has now been completed, also in blue.  Finally, the trees have recieved shadows and highlights.  The painting is now completed.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

 

I’ve never really been sure why there was enough consensus in this country after World War Two to pass the 22nd Amendment, barring any president from being elected more than twice. I can certainly see why a lot of people felt that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had served too long, but then it seemed fortuitous that he’d been available to lead us through most of the war. In any case, passing amendments to the Constitution is notoriously difficult, so why was this reform possible?

If anything, Roosevelt’s war leadership and immense popularity were arguments against forcing a well-liked and much-needed leader out of office just because of the passage of some arbitrary amount of time.

I guess the country felt that it was still dangerous to allow anyone to stay in power too long and they didn’t want Roosevelt setting a precedent contrary to the one George Washington set when he voluntarily stepped down after two terms in office.

I see the rationale for the amendment, but I don’t like it and I wish it didn’t exist. So, count me among the people who wish Obama could stand for election again. Two-thirds of Democrats still want him, so why should they be denied the opportunity to nominate him?

I have never supported term-limits, which I consider to be one of the stupidest “reform” ideas I’ve ever heard, but it makes a little more sense to me when discussing a president than it does a congressperson. After all, a president has executive authority which they can theoretically consolidate and abuse.

So, I don’t think this is a slam-dunk case either way, but it doesn’t sit well with me that the people can want a president and not be able to vote for them. Absent the amendment, I’m sure some people would vote against Obama for no other reason than that they think he should honor the two-term code of honor. But that’s their right. That’s representative government. If he lost for that reason, there would be nothing wrong with that.

It’s just that I look at poll results like this, and I doubt the American people are getting the choice they want or deserve:

A Quinnipiac University National poll out Wednesday found that majorities of Americans believe neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump will be a good president.

Fifty-eight percent of voters say that Trump would not be a good president, according to the poll, while only 35% say he would be. That compares to 53% who believe Clinton will not be a good president and 43% who say she will.

Maybe the Canadians were on to something when they chanted “Four More Years” at Obama after he addressed their parliament.

Happy Birthday as Katrina floods New Orleans:

Story at ThinkProgress

A Skank Scolds

Story at CNN

Fancy Seeing You Here

Story at AZ Central

A still shot captured from a video of AG Loretta Lynch deplaning at PHX:

No photo of Lynch and Clinton meeting on the tarmac or Clinton boarding Lynch’s plane.  Christopher Sign’s report

(O’Reilly is running with other information that he claims he got from Sign (which is heating up the rightwing blogosphere as they all repeat the claims), but until there is confirmation from Signs or other observers to the events, repeating it would be  irresponsible.)

Sure wish credible reporters would check into this story (plenty of easy questions that need answering). The explanation that Lynch offered was so stinky that today:  Loretta Lynch Says She Won’t Intervene to Save Hillary Clinton as reported by The Atlantic:

If the FBI and federal prosecutors in the Justice Department decide to bring charges against Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server as secretary of state, Attorney General Loretta Lynch won’t stop them.

Lynch plans to announce later Friday at the Aspen Ideas Festival that she will accept the recommendations of career prosecutors leading the Clinton investigation, according to several reports. The news comes after the disclosure that Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton aboard her government plane at the Phoenix airport–a chat that drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike for giving off the appearance of impropriety at a time when the Justice Department is investigating his wife. Lynch has said her meeting with Bill Clinton was unplanned and purely social.
…

Your guess as to how and why Lynch met up with Bill Clinton on her private jet.

UPDATE — I find this curious. Christopher Sign is the ABC15 Arizona reporter that broke the Lynch-Clinton “tarmac” meeting story. Filed both on air and in writing (same link as above). What ABC15 went with was the basic story (WJC met with Lynch at PHX on her airplane) that he had verified with Lynch at her news conference at some point during her Phoenix visit.

Subsequent to Sign’s ABC report, he appeared on the O’Reilly Factor. In this appearance he related far more information about what had been visible to an observer in the private airplane section of PHX. However, Sign secured this from a source “that he trusts.” Understandable that ABC15 didn’t want to go with an unverified second-hand report, but it’s interesting that an a news anchor with eleven years at the station would take the story to a rival network. Here’s what he got from his source:

It’s a big scoop. If true and verified. (Or perhaps good enough for Fox (or the NYTimes) if it’s not verified and may not be true.) Seems to me that FBI has some explaining to do if they issued a no photos, etc. order.

Looking at the internals of the Loras College Statewide Iowa Survey, it seems like it’s a pretty well put together poll. Comparing their sample to the latest Iowa registration numbers, it appears that Loras may have undersampled the NO Party/Independents, but they have about the right mix of Democrats and Republicans. And, in any case, an undersampling of independents probably skews the results towards Donald Trump and Chuck Grassley.

For example, Grassley has a net favorable/unfavorable rating of 48%/42% with independents, and is losing with them to Patty Judge by a 41.9%-48.0% margin. So, if you add more independents to the sample, he probably loses his overall 46% to 45% lead.

Likewise, Donald Trump is getting crushed 48%-34% (-14) in the poll, but among independents he’s losing by a mammoth 44.7%-23.5% (-21) margin.

The survey is made up of 35.0% Republicans, 33.0% Democrats, and 29.8% Independents, but according to the Secretary of State, there are now more independents (670,068) than Republicans (639,476) or Democrats (610,608) who are registered to vote in the Hawkeye State. Maybe the independents don’t turn out at the same rate as party members, so it’s possible that the sample is dead-on. What’s doubtful is that it is skewed toward the Democrats.

Either way, it shows that Donald Trump is not competitive and Chuck Grassley is in a dead-heat. It’d be tempting to blame Grassley’s woes on Trump’s unpopularity (54.7% of Iowans have a very unfavorable view of Trump, and 68.9% have an overall unfavorable view of him), but we know that Grassley has been in the news as the lead architect of the Senate’s refusal to hold a hearing for Merrick Garland, the president’s nominee to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. It’s costing him because he’s historically been very popular but he now has a 41.4% unfavorable rating. That’s not terrible, but it’s far below where he’s been in the past. If he’s going to hold on, he’s going to need a lot of crossover votes, but less than a quarter of Democrats (24.8%) have a favorable view of him right now.

Now, Grassley has been in Congress since 1975 and a senator since 1981. He’ll be 83 years old on Election Day. I don’t know if this is really how he wants to go out. I am not even sure why he wants to continue in the job. He’s got to be frustrated. Just this week he had to announce that he almost definitely won’t be able to get his criminal justice reform bill through the Senate this year.

“I don’t see how it gets done before” July 15, Grassley said, referencing the day the senators depart from Washington and won’t return until after Labor Day. “It’s a real big disappointment to me because we’ve worked so hard to do what the leadership wanted to get out more Republican sponsors.”

The criminal justice reform bill was probably the best chance this Congress had to pass a meaningful bill and they can’t get it done. Unless Grassley just likes the prestige and lifestyle of being a senator, I see no reason for him to want to continue. He used to be a legislator, but no Republican can be a legislator in this day and age, and certainly not under a prospective President Hillary Clinton.

If I were him, I’d drop out before Patty Judge cleans his clock in November.