Nope

It's caucus night in Minnesota. I'm not going this year. I've been trying to keep a greater distance from party politics in the last few years and this is the year to make a clean break. I'm not particularly happy with any of the presidential candidates on offer, and on the local level it really doesn't matter much because the DFL so utterly controls my district that we could offer up Jesus Christ as the candidate in District 41B and He'd still lose 60-40 to whatever Education Minnesota acolyte the local machine chooses to run this time. Maybe I'll feel differently in the fall, but I doubt it.

Someone to Watch Over Me, Part Four

So is the Trump phenomenon a movement, or is it a variation on William F. Buckley's mission statement:

It stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.

Stop. Stop the immigrants. Stop. Stop the high-handedness. Stop. Stop the impulse to remake the world through egalitarianism with handling charges. Stop. Stop ignoring the concerns of the people who have provided support. Back to Aaron Barlow:

Many Trump supporters . . .  base their attitudes on a Calvinist (and pre-Enlightenment) vision of individualism that starts within each of them, with faith in the person and in their God. It next moves, in a spreading circle, to family, to friends, and only then to others in the broad realm of human interaction and politics. If each person acted responsibly, by these lights, there would be little need for government—each individual having a tempering effect on those they interact with. The secular-liberal vision starts in a different place, with a structured base created and maintained by the group. Once responsibilities to it are met, the individual is free to—is encouraged to—act on his or her own to whatever ends seem appropriate, as long as those ends do not threaten or compromise the group structure.

It's been incremental, but we're now at a point where accumulated power in Washington overwhelms everything else. And we are at a point where the group structure that Barlow describes doesn't include many Americans in any real sense. Leadership pursues its own agenda and doesn't really give a damn what the less enlightened folks hold dear. Once more, to Barlow:

 The manipulated among the conservative Americans have finally found their voice. Unfortunately for the rest of us, its articulation comes through a circus entertainer of little substance. This is driving the Republican establishment crazy—and may well do the same to the Democrats in the general election this fall. Neither group knows how to deal with the Trump phenomenon. Both are seeing the man, not the movement.

And it's not surprising -- we all see what we want to see. And we're like a snowmobiler in the woods at night, off the trail, overrunning our headlights.

Someone to Watch Over Me, Part Three

Still talking about Trump, yes. In the past few posts, we've discussed the penchant for many observers, particularly on the left, to treat Trump's supporters in the manner that a cultural anthropologist treats exotic societies. Step up to the mic, Aaron Barlow:

Trump’s supporters, however, are something else again. Finally feeling a spotlight on themselves, they are people who have felt forgotten for generations. They are not descended from the American identity as was it imagined and written in New England and imagined and crafted separately by the Southern white elite. That identity was only endured by them. The great debates of the 19th century only saw them as grounds for extension of the North/South conflict as they moved west, or those debates ignored them. Ignored them, that is, until they were useful to the new myths concerning the West, ones crafted by the intellectual elite of New England and by East Coast writers generally. But those myths had nothing to do with the real lives on the prairies or in the mountains—and the people there knew it.

Is that it? He says more:

While New England and New York were developing the first real American intellectual and artistic culture and the South was building its antebellum “paradise” on the backs of slaves, the poor Americans of the Appalachians and then of the West were busily engaged in a genocide of Native Americans that no one wanted to praise or even admit was happening. At the same time, they were eking out a living on land that often, as soon as they tried to lay claim to it, turned out to be “owned” by someone from the East. They had no time for what Leo Marx calls the “fully articulated pastoral idea of America” that had emerged on the back of the Enlightenment and that was popular as an ideal in the East. Whatever garden these poorer Americans could find or create or conquer or defend was not often even theirs for very long. More frequently than we imagine, they were forced once again to move farther west and to start from scratch—again. Poverty breathed down their necks; little of their lives would ever qualify as “pastoral.”

Emphasis mine. We'll get back to that. More:

Numerous theories have been put forward to explain the differences between the uncouth of the frontier (and then settled) “interior” of America and the civilized East (and then, West) Coast. Some writers blame the land that had seemed so promising, others blame class distinctions, and still others see the lack of civilizing government as the problem. Unfortunately, all the writers were from the East (or from Europe) until well into the 19th century; those actually from the frontier culture had little voice in the discussion, no ability to ground the debate in the actual facts of the matter as seen by the people there. As they would remain for generations more, these people had been made mute. Few outsiders understood either their perspective or their background, allowing erroneous conceptions to be put forward unchallenged and then to become received wisdom. The anger of the Bundy family and its supporters, for example, is real, even if we on the coasts see it as misplaced.

Getting closer. Now, the nut:

Trump’s campaign is giving such people voice in a way that their “champions,” those already stalwart in the Republican Party, never have. Trump is not telling them what they believe or even what they should believe but is reflecting frustrations that have been bubbling up within them for generations. The leaders of the party, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, John Kasich and the others, are acting on old assumption about the mass of white America, that it has no real culture of its own—believing it their duty to impose one.

There it is. It's easy for any of us to imagine that the way we choose to live our lives is the normal way, the default. It's especially easy if we live among others who largely agree with our own worldview. I suspect Barlow is wrong about the amalgamation of politicians he lists -- I don't see that Rubio or Cruz are leaders yet, but Bush and Kasich share many of the same notions that have held sway in Republican politics for many years.

I think the impulses involved are contradictory, but make sense on their own terms. Limited government, the goal of most movement conservatives, is quite apart from what I'm hearing. Immigration is a hot button issue precisely because it's a sign that the government is acting on behalf of only certain sectors of the population. Gino summed up the impact yesterday:

[o]ne of the most insulting things i've ever heard from a politician was from George Bush, trying to push his amnesty with no intent of securing the border... claiming: they do jobs americans wont do. which is bullshit on its face to anybody who's seen a construction crew building tract homes today... or who the janitor was in my grade school 40 yrs ago.

I suspect that most Trump supporters don't dislike government per se. What I think causes the animosity is the very real sense that those who control the levers are operating on assumptions that are either romanticized or ignorant. It's a worthy enough impulse to offer noblesse oblige, which is the hallmark of every Bush who has walked the national stage, but the recipients aren't really looking for a helping hand delivered as a pat on the head. Instead, what I suspect many Trump supporters are really looking for is something else -- a government that removes obstacles, instead of imposing them. Immigrants are competition, an obstacle. Trump is promising to remove obstacles, so that people can get jobs and get on with their lives, without the overweening cultural assumptions that flow with the aid.

We're not done with this topic.

Someone to Watch Over Me, Part Two

Another mainstream pundit starts to figure it. This time, it's Peggy Noonan (unfortunately, link behind a paywall). Here's the nut of it (via Instapundit):

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful — those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them — in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union — literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

They also control the culture:

In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement — charter schools, choice, etc.— because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.

This is a terrible feature of our age—that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.

And the lessons have been pretty clear:

If you are an unprotected American — one with limited resources and negligible access to power — you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.

Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration — its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine — more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.

It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.

Personally, I'm not 100% protected from the depredations of the age. But I do have advantages. I have a college education and a skill set that gives me options, should I need to exercise them, in an economy that's based more on exchanges of ideas and information than on physical labor. We aren't going to get the immediate post-World War II era back; it was an unprecedented time in history. But it won't do to ignore the concerns of so many of our fellow citizens.

Since the time of FDR, the Democrats have used the song "Happy Days Are Here Again" as part of their symbolism. The Democrats have held the White House for 15 of the last 23 years. Things haven't been happier for a lot of those years. The Democrats have also made the claim that they are the party of the working man, even before the days of FDR. A significant group of working men and women left the party, at least temporarily, when Ronald Reagan came to power. These voters, and more often their children and grandchildren, are now looking at a corrupt technocrat as the likely standard-bearer for the Democratic Party. What enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton there is comes from the protected and their enablers. Donald Trump is seeking a different audience, speaking to a different group of voters. The question becomes, at this point, which group is larger? I'm beginning to believe we're going to get an answer to that question in November.

Someone to Watch Over Me

I think there's a tendency among those of us who have college educations of a certain type to look at people we don't understand as an anthropologist might, as a case study. It's a condescending way to look at the world and every time I find myself doing it, I start to cringe a little bit.

Some of our loftier observers are starting to say things that mesh with what our friend Gino has been trying to tell us. I quoted the piece from Bill James earlier in the week. Now here's another smart take from the invaluable John Hayward:

Identification has been Trump’s secret weapon all along. Sure, he’s entertaining, and he did an absolutely amazing job of demolishing the other candidates, back when there were 16 of them. He turned Jeb “Shock and Awe” Bush into a $150 million firecracker that sputtered for a while without ever going off. He made A-list pundits look like fools for confidently declaring that some other candidate had “destroyed” or “castrated” him during previous debates.

He threw down the iron gates of political correctness, shrugging off gaffes that should have terminated any other campaign. The mainstream media – Hillary Clinton’s little helpers – were like the surveillance tank crew in Independence Day, reporting with awe and dismay the results of a nuclear strike on the alien warship over Houston: “The target remains.”

Trump’s confidence sells very well after years of Barack Obama’s abject failure and corruption, his endless lowering of the standards America sets for both its leadership and itself. After years of being told to accept the incompetent execution of billion-dollar projects, zero accountability for abuses of power, foreign policy that made America a joke to its enemies and a menace to its friends, and a New Normal of economic mediocrity, Trump’s “Make America Great Again” really is a hell of a rallying cry. It’s exactly what people want to hear, especially Republicans dejected over party leadership even worse than Obama’s national leadership.

That's part of it, but there's more, especially the condescension. Back to Hayward:

Granted, the likely Democrat candidate this time around is a charisma-free robot with no discernible skill at lying despite a lifetime of practice, but identification will be forcibly manufactured for Hillary Clinton by her friends, donors, and former employees in the media. Literally half the country will be instructed to vote for her because she has the same genitalia they do, while any man who dreams of voting with the same criteria will be made to feel ashamed of himself. The Democrats’ dependency army cares about nothing except keeping their benefits coming, and would vote for a bowling ball with a wig on it.

It’s not easy to create a natural sense of identification that can overwhelm those advantages, but Trump seems able to do it… perhaps even with a decent number of Sen. Bernie Sanders supporters who seriously loathe Clinton, and feel betrayed by the outcome of the Democrats’ rigged primary. It’s hard to imagine Cruz building a rapport with those folks, and Rubio will probably fare only a little better, once the Democrat media finishes smearing him as the Hispanic Uncle Tom. (That’s what Telemundo Lady’s job was last night, in case you nodded off during her diatribes.)

Trump critics comfort themselves by dismissing his supporters as fools and vicious fringe types, which doesn’t seem like a very good strategy for winning them over… and it’s factually incorrect, as clearly demonstrated by Trump’s victory margins. If you think he’s winning by appealing to some lunatic fringe, you are simply wrong, and your error can be empirically demonstrated with both Super Tuesday polling and the cold, hard results of primaries gone by.  

Emphasis in the original. I still don't think it ends well, but I understand the sentiments. This is not unfeeling rage, or racism, or any of the other things that I am obliged to decry. Go back to what Gino said earlier in the week on the long comment post:

Trump is hope for a lot of people in my class.
they love their country, and the middle-class life they used to have. they don't want to burn it down, they want to make it great again... but most of all, they want to feel safe again. they don't feel safe, and haven't for a long time. lose a factory job in your 40's, where will you find another with the skills you've developed?

It's a plutocrat thing. Trump operates in that world, which is why I'm suspicious of him, but he has a lot of outer borough in him. He's New York, but he's not Manhattan. He's Queens. He's not Edina, or Lake of the Isles, or Mac Groveland. He's Robbinsdale. He's Oakdale. He speaks directly to a constituency that national Republicans are loath to acknowledge. And more people than we know are hearing the message. And taking an anthropological view of things doesn't help.

George and Ira Gershwin were on this ninety years ago:

Won't you tell him please to put on some speed
Follow my lead, oh, how I need
Someone to watch over me

They don't feel safe and haven't for a long time. We'd better keep listening.

Poetry reading

I didn't watch the debate last night because I was attending a poetry reading in the artsy part of Nordeast and then had to give one of my poet pals a ride back downtown, then pick up Fearless Maria from drumline practice. In between all that, I heard some of the debate on the radio, which is a far different experience than watching it. If you can't see the faces and the gestures, you are left with the words and not the images. So as I worked my way from 6th and Hennepin back to the high school, my impression of what I heard was as follows:

• It was clear that Marco Rubio was trying to get a few blows in on The Donald, and if you are amenable to his campaign, you might believe he succeeded. Listening on the radio, he sounded a little like Fozzie Bear, trying to milk the punchlines every time he uncorked one. It's useful to take the attack to the Donald, but I wonder whether it worked.
• Ted Cruz is Ted Cruz. He's the smartest guy on the stage, but he's not going to win. You don't pick up the smarm when you hear him on the radio, but that doesn't help him when most people are watching on television.
• Ben Carson isn't going to win, either, and as usual he was complaining about not getting a chance to speak. The most interesting thing he said was that he was on the business end of an IRS audit, but only after he spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast and was critical of the current occupant. If that's true, it's a huge story.
• In re John Kasich, here's the definitive verdict:



Mmmm... ramen

As for The Donald, well:

Yuuuge

Again, when you listen on the radio you don't get the whole picture, but it was striking how utterly vacuous he sounds when all you are experiencing is the voice. A lot of the bully boy crap he engages in is particularly gratuitous; really, what does slagging Hugh Hewitt about his ratings accomplish? Everyone else is a choke artist and a liar. You'd think he'd just dispense with the pretense, go full Rickles and call Cruz a hockey puck, which would be as effective an insult and ring the Canada bell at the same time.

Does any of it move the needle? Probably not. Trump is probably going to be the nominee and there's a decent chance he'll be the next POTUS. We wanted Ronald Reagan and we're gonna get Leo Gorcey instead.

Failed sonnet

Maybe twice I planned to purchase asters
At the farmer’s market, but they had narcissus
Instead and I grabbed a handful carelessly
And threw them sideways in a messenger bag. I’ve
Never had presentation skills; my shirt tail
Was at liberty and when I stopped by you said
The wind tunnel effect was less than
Adorable. I remember how your red pillow

Mocked me from the corner of your bed
And your Kraft Mac and hot pot were always
Arrayed with care behind the sliding bamboo
Closet door. My friends suggested you were
Going places, with your favorite scissors, with
The perforations raw in a messenger bag

il miglior fabbro

I'm a big fan of Bill James, who is best known for his writing and statistical work concerning baseball. He has interesting things to say about The Donald:

I have despised Trump for 35 or 40 years, however long he has been a national figure, and I don’t intend to give this up now, or after he becomes president. Of all of the people who are running for president or have now dropped out of the race, Trump is absolutely the last one I would vote for.

I could summarize the reasons for this in five bullet points:

(1) I believe Trump is more interested in what is good for Donald Trump than in what is good for America. Not that the same could not be said about many of the other candidates, but it seems to me that this has to be more of a concern in the case of a man who has spent 30 years plastering his name to everything he could put his name on.

(2) I don’t think Trump’s background in business prepares him for the challenges of the presidency.

(3) I think Trump’s hard-ass approach to problems would be very dangerous for our nation in the presidency, and might have terrible consequences for all of us.

(4) I intensely dislike self-promotion. Trump is the nation’s most notorious self-promoter—and was before he decided to run for president.

(5) I don’t believe Trump is sincere in 99 percent of what he says. I think almost everything he says is either an outright lie, or something he is merely saying because it is convenient for him at the moment.

We haven’t had a president since Harry Truman who mocked people, a president who was openly rude and vulgar, and I am not anxious to bring that back to the Oval Office. 

I would say the current occupant is pretty good at mocking people as well, but we'll leave that aside. James does notice something else, however:

I believe in courage. I am all for politicians displaying courage, and I think Trump has done a better job of displaying real courage than anyone else running this year. Trump has had the courage to say and do things that people tell him he can’t do. We need that in a president. We need somebody who is willing to stand up and say “You don’t make the rules for me. I make the rules for me.” I applaud Trump for being that person.

Also, Trump is advocating real democracy in a way that the other candidates are not, and in a way that is too subtle for most of the talking heads to understand. We have in this great nation a class of professional do-gooders who have made a lot of rules for the rest of us, and who have, with the knowing co-operation of the media, forced the rest of us to comply with their rules. Most of us never voted upon or agreed to these rules. Some of these rules are good and proper, and some are useless and counter-productive.

Trump is saying “screw you” to the professionally self-righteous and to those people who are trying to force him to obey these rules that the nation has been forced to accept by leaders who lacked the courage to stand up to it all.

There is more, a whole lot more, at the link. Check it out.

A little late, but better than never

Rick Perry (remember him?) is vindicated:

The top criminal appeals court in Texas just dismissed the nearly two-year-old felony indictment against former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. The first of two charges against Perry was dismissed last July.

You might not remember why he was indicted, so a little refresher was in order:

Perry was indicted in August of 2014 by a Travis County jury for the twin crimes of threatening to veto a bill and then vetoing a bill. The ordeal began when Travis County district attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested for driving drunk in 2013. Blood tests taken after her arrest showed that Lehmberg had a blood alcohol level of .239. Daschcam and police station videos, which went viral shortly after her arrest, showed Lehmberg lashing out at police and threatening to use her power as district attorney to punish them for arresting her.

Here is a look at the witty and charming Lehmberg:

By the way, Rosemary Lehmberg is still in office.

Ding

Ann Althouse on Trump:

His theme is pride — self esteem. I think the message is: Even if you're poorly educated — especially if you are poorly educated — you are smart, and you are American, and you should feel great. All those other politicians look down on you, and they look down on the country. They insult it. They use the worst insults, like "racist." They'd have you believe that it's racist to say "Make America great again" and to want to preserve the benefits of America for Americans and to increase those selfishly guarded benefits. But it's not something to be ashamed of, it's being smart. And he's very smart, and we — you, with me leading the way — "are going to be the smart people."

A blog commenter elsewhere:

I think Obama and the Democrats just stepped on too many nerves for too long and the national GOP was looking like the frightened woman on the chair holding the hem of her dress because there's a mouse on the floor. The Republican Party became not only the "Stupid" party, but the "Coward" party. 

Gino, here:

yes, innovation happens. i'm not saying my plant should go back to doing 1/2 the production with twice as many people as when i started.

BUT... when a sector is declining naturally, the positions lost are lost a lot more often to attrition. nothing wrong with that.

having your livelihood of these same workers cut in 1/2 within 20 yrs due to open border importation of people here to do exactly that type of work is another thing entirely.

Trump, himself:

So I’m very proud of you, this is an amazing night. I love the country, I love the country. We’re going in the wrong direction. We’re going to keep—as you know Gitmo, we’re keeping that open, and we’re going to load it up with bad dudes. We’re going to load it up w a lot of bad dudes out there. We’re going to have our borders nice and strong. We’re going to build the wall, you know that. We’re going to build the wall. And I have a lot of respect from Mexico and you just heard we won Hispanics. But let me tell you Mexico is going to pay for the wall, right? It’s going to happen. It’s going to happen. They know it. I know it. We all know it.

We have a tremendous deficit. We have a trade deficit with Mexico. They’ll pay for the wall. They’ll be very happy about it. Believe me. I’ll talk to them. They’re going to be very, very thrilled. They’re going to be thrilled to be paying for the wall.

and

We’re going to be the smart people. We’re not going to be the people that get pushed around all over the place. We’re going to be the smart people. You’re going to be proud of your president, and you’re going to be even prouder of your country, OK?

OK?

I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied

Why don't you tell me 'bout the mystery dance.
I wanna know about the mystery dance
Why don't you show me,
'cause I've tried and I've tried,
and I'm still mystified.
I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied.

That's the chorus from Elvis Costello's early song "Mystery Dance," which is ostensibly about Topic A but has application for where I'm at right now. It's caucus time in exactly one week from today and the candidates on offer all suck, in one way or another. The choices are:

• Professor Harold Hill with a Queens accent
• A principled conservative running an unprincipled campaign, with the mien of Mr. Haney on Green Acres
• A robotic cipher who got played the minute he hit the Senate and still doesn't seem to understand it, primarily because he doesn't appear to be especially bright
• A straight-up socialist who is every bit as much of a carnival barker, in his own way, as Lord God King Combover
• The most comprehensively corrupt candidate in the history of the Republic

So in a certain way, the caucus is about Topic A as well. I can't caucus for any of these people. They are all frauds in their own way. So I won't.

Has this ever happened to you?

Have you ever written a 350 word blog post and then decided that your premise is bullshit? That's what happened to me this morning.

I'm trying to wrap my brain around the continued success of Donald Trump and I find myself having contradictory thoughts about it. I put up a quick squib yesterday that led to an extended conversation with Gino and then a long and thoughtful, yet dispiriting, comment from Picklesworth. In the process of sorting it all out, I have come to the conclusion that I can't sort it out, at least not yet.

I'm not much for Ayn Rand, but I've always thought she was right about one thing -- we need to check our premises. And I'm checking mine this morning. The process feels like this, however:

Hope is the thing with a combover

Comment of the day, from some guy in a thread at Powerline:

Frankie and Donny

Finally, the event we've all been waiting for:

Thrusting himself into the heated American presidential campaign, Pope Francis declared Thursday that Donald Trump is "not Christian" if he wants to address illegal immigration only by building a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Trump fired back ferociously, saying it was "disgraceful" for a religious leader to question a person's faith.

Ahem. Let's think about this one:

I am no fan of Donald Trump, but the statement as reported shows the problem quite clearly. Trump is hardly basing his whole immigration policy on building a wall on the border. He has plenty of other proposals, some more realistic than others. So we'll grant that much to Trump.

Then again, is it really "disgraceful" for a religious leader to question a person's faith? Seems to me it's part of the job description, at least if questioning means challenging. We are all called to recognize our sin and to be better disciples. See if you can spot the flaw in Trump's response:

"For a religious leader to question a person's faith is disgraceful," he said at a campaign stop in South Carolina, which holds a key primary on Saturday. "I am proud to be a Christian, and as president I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened."

The secret word here is "proud." Proverbs 21:24 could have been written with someone in mind:

The proud and arrogant person--"Mocker" is his name-- behaves with insolent fury.

I'd also add that an admonition directed at a political candidate does not equate to an attack on Christianity itself. And if you listen to Francis consistently, he's made humility a recurring theme in his papacy, as he should. And if you want a New Testament reference, try Romans 12:3 --

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you.

Anyone who takes the idea of humility to heart is unlikely to run for president, and there's usually a thin line between bravado and salesmanship. We can stipulate that and still suggest that pride is usually problematic. Inasmuch as a politician is supposed to be a public servant, excessive pride is a fundamental trait for many people who currently populate our governmental agencies, especially at the federal level. I'm not sure if any of the people running for president understand the problem, but I especially worry about Donald Trump in that regard.

Not exactly Bobby Goldsboro

Popular culture:

Kanye West blasted Taylor Swift as a “fake ass” and called NBC staffers “white m———–s” during his epic meltdown backstage at “Saturday Night Live.”

In an audio clip exclusively obtained by Page Six, Kanye can be heard repeatedly yelling at “SNL” production staff, “Don’t f–k with me,” before branding Swift — who he claims on his new album he made famous — a “fake ass”.

Then the hotheaded rapper went on to proclaim that he is “50 percent more influential” than legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Picasso, Paul the Apostle — who was handpicked by Christ to deliver the gospel — and even the notorious drug runner Pablo Escobar.

Kanye can be heard ranting, “Are they f—–g crazy? Whoa by 50 percent [I am more influential than] Stanley Kubrick, Picasso, Apostle Paul, f—–g Picasso and Escobar. By 50 percent more influential than any other human being. Don’t f–k with me. Don’t f–k with me. Don’t f–k with me. By 50 percent dead or alive, by 50 percent for the next 1,000 years. Stanley Kubrick, ‘Ye.

Other people he's 50% more influential than include:

Pauly Shore
Frank Gorshin
My accountant
Any and all remaining Gabor sisters
Your accountant

And most of all, Slim Pickens:

Feel free to add your suggestions in the comments.

Song of the day

State of play

If current trends continue, this is shaping up to be the most depressing presidential election cycle of my lifetime. The three people who are most likely to be the next president are, as follows:

• A carnival barker
• The most comprehensively corrupt public figure in the last fifty years
• A straight-up socialist

Criminy. Mencken is right -- one of these shaved apes is going to give the people what they want, good and hard.

A decade on, B of A returns

Okay, I find this amusing:

Bank of America is making a run at building a business in the heart of Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank country.

The nation’s second-largest bank just opened a new branch in the IDS Center in downtown Minneapolis, is beefing up its Minnesota business lending presence and will add a dozen ATMs and three new branches in the metro area.

“In some ways, we’re growing before it’s happened because we think it’s that important of a market,” said Larry Kloth, the bank’s market president for Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Most people don't know it, but B of A was here before. I worked for B of A as a business program analyst for about three years. I lost my job when they closed their facility in Bloomington in 2006. The stated reason for leaving Minnesota was that the loan center was "out of footprint," meaning that the company didn't have any regular banking presence in the state, so it wanted to consolidate its operations in markets where the bank had a presence. As many long-time readers of this feature know, I had a chance to keep my job if I were willing to move to Portland, Oregon with B of A, but ultimately decided against it, because my kids were young and I didn't want to disrupt their lives with a cross-country move. Chuckwagon Boy, who comments here from time to time, was a colleague of mine in Bloomington who ended up making the move. This blog began during my lunch hour when I worked for B of A.

It was an odd business decision for B of A to close their facility here, since it was the most successful mortgage loan processing facility in the company. Although my current gig is a better use of my talents, I had more fun working for B of A than anywhere else I've been in my career. It was a go-go time in the banking industry and we were doing great business in our channel, corporate relocation, We had a great team and the work was fast-paced and challenging. The larger problems in the financial industry were coming, but in 2005 things were great. And I can say this -- we weren't cheating, like some of our competitors. We weren't doing stated income loans and we weren't doing subprime work. We looked at it more than once, but it wasn't our thing.

B of A took a lot of shots to its reputation in the financial crisis that came about later on, but I've always thought many of the criticisms were unfair. They made one very bad decision, which was acquiring Countrywide, whose portfolio was riddled with bad loans of the sort we avoided in Bloomington, but the shotgun wedding fiasco with Merrill Lynch was something that B of A was essentially forced to do.

I can't say that Bank of America is a perfect business, by any means. They've made plenty of mistakes and their management has been short sighted on many occasions. Large corporations are generally mercenary in their instincts and I'm certain that the guy in Charlotte who made the decision to close our facility ten years ago didn't give the human impact of his decision much thought. I also don't know whether B of A will do well in this market, considering the dominating presence that both Wells Fargo and US Bank have. Still, I have fond memories of my tenure with Bank of America. I'm glad they've finally returned.

For the dog that chases its tail will be dizzy

 Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

-- Saul Alinsky

Okay, dignity is always a transitory thing, and sometimes you walk right into it:

Time for that ridicule:

Of course, I prefer a different Clinton, who barks far more effectively:

Bow-wow-wow-yippie-yo-yippie-yeah.

Or if you'd prefer:

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel
Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack

Nasty

RIP, Vanity:

Takes me right back to those nasty college days. Also a cautionary tale -- her crack cocaine use led to health problems that plagued her for the last twenty years of her life.