I apologize in advance for being negative… this is just how I see it. Because I’m Old As Dirt.

Guy riding in on a white horse is going to save the American Justice system after it inexplicably has allowed a fakester, fraud, con-man who has lived his entire life criming and defrauding and molesting …
And now we are supposed to be excited that some “kind” of Justice might prevail after he has been allowed to hold top secret classified documents at his sleazy hotel property frequented by Russian mob and Chinese spies for 18 months…?

Even if this 76 year old man were to go to jail — which is NEVER going to be allowed to happen — it is NOT Justice because he has already SPENT his lifetime doing whatever the F**K he wanted to do, at the expense and pain of many more innocent and less sociopathic people, for decade after decade after decade after decade after decade.

Jack Smith may be a competent and upright part of an immune system used by Old Money or by US power geniuses to be a surgical cleanup expert. Contain the damage, excise what will be sacrificed, create the appearance of restoring order to the worst of a grotesque festering wound, stitch it up and close it out. He may be a pressure relief valve that ensures the whole damn pressure cooker of US polity doesn’t blow apart. Well good, at least we may get some minor correction, some change of conditions. A breath —one, just one — of fresh air.

But the underlying illness will not be disrupted, many important people who facilitated trumps crimes and traitorous actions will NOT be prosecuted, not because there isn’t evidence but because Jack’s purpose is probably surgical, a contained cleanup, that doesn’t upset the apple cart.

Perhaps there are some powerful thinkers who prefer the illusion of Justice, the way that Noam Chomsky described the maintenance of the illusion of democracy.

I’ll celebrate the restoration of the illusion of Justice as much as I’m willing to celebrate the illusion of democracy, because it’s much nicer not to be so weighed down by the nightmare seriousness of the threat to normalcy… but none of us are pulling the strings. Justice would be an expanded Supreme Court, or impeachment of Clarence Thomas and Kavanaugh etc., to start to restore the balance of power that we were cheated out of. What they are going to give us is a bandaid and a pat on the head. They’ll say “Run along now kids.” The top tier has already got most of the presents under the Christmas tree that they wanted. Their minions and accomplices have gotten their share. Jared is richer. The Saudis probably have some of our secrets. None of that will be undone, and a whole lot of truth will never be told to the American people.

Your life is precious. Every day that you remain with us, we are grateful.

I am lucky to have someone in my life who is 85. He has always tended toward a dark humor, and morbid talk from time to time. I used to brush it off, tell him not to talk that way, especially around the young.
Now I bluntly tell him, “you are CHERISHED.” There is nothing wrong with his hearing, but I speak up a little, to make sure he hears it. “You must stay with us. Please don’t abandon us in the middle of this journey.”

The life he has lived is so unique. The stories he can tell, and the wisdom contained in them, are a valuable source of experiences and insight. “Tell me more.” “Tell me again.”

I want him to live to be 99. Medical issues come and go. When he recovers from one, from near misses and health scares, it is such a happy feeling. “Ten more years,” I give silent prayers to the Great Being, to the Big Heart. Please give us ten more healthy years. Do not abandon us. Stay.

The bookends of life: precious little babies with their blank books of life and a soul’s pen in hand; and the old ones, with their books nearly complete, but full of precious stories, their life’s work.

Dear 80-somethings and 90-somethings, honor all the days of your life, all the way.. The singer sings it softly, “I’m 99 for a moment.” When you can sing those words in your heart, you’ll still be 15, 22, 33, 45, and 67…already possessing the lived life in your written book, a book not quite complete. Use those days to write the finishing touches — decide on the ending, write the acknowledgments, the dedication, the afterword; add details to an illustration, find the right shelf in the library, or give a copy to everyone in your life, before it is over.

This song “100 years” by Five for Fighting always fills my heart so much that tears coming pouring out. Lyrics by John Ondrasik, some of the most profound and poignant words ever sung.

Elizabeth Warren was BORN in Oklahoma and appears to be coming in FOURTH place there.

I wish I was surprised.

Oh he is SO good at spinning conversations rightward. That’s the solution he’s talking about. The “solution is going to look like more guns, armed guards and metal detectors”? Oh, he will say that isn’t HIS opinion, he was just expressing the views of republicans that might want to actually do something. Parents aren’t going to want armed camps, he admits. But he’s shifting the ground. Now he’s asking “what’s realistic when it comes to this issue?”

1. “Schools as armed camps” is a FAILURE.
2. It does NOTHING to stop guns at concerts, soccer games, movie theatres.

“If we had a magical way to search social media...” another f’ing straw man, Chuck. COMPANIES DO BACKGROUND CHECKS THAT INCLUDE SOCIAL MEDIA ALL THE TIME. You can’t get a JOB without one. That doesn’t require MAGIC, Chuck. It requires the will to do it.

But we had an assault weapons ban from 1994 to 2004, which the Democrats gave us, until the Republicans took it away. That’s not MAGIC either.

But hey, don’t let the facts interfere with your agenda, which is to chronically paint the democrats as weak or ineffective or idealistic, and to paint Washington as a bipartisan gridlock caused by both parties.

One edit: his “I’m obsessed segment” afterward was somewhat better but I am tired of his constant false equivalence and his lack of fairness in recognizing the strengths of Democrats.

In 15 and 20 years, I hope to have my brother visit me at a house on a lake, sit on my porch when we are old, play cribbage or cards, and remember our parents and growing up together in the 60s. I want my son to still have an uncle then, and my future grandkids to have a GREAT-uncle, one who can tell them about resourcefulness and self-sufficiency and working hard and being honest. He has many good traits.

If that happens, we will occasionally look back and remember last week, when his heart stopped twice in the same day, the second time while I sat beside him. That was the week that the nurses and doctors rescued him and tormented him and encouraged him and put an expensive little device in his chest, all paid for by Obamacare.

We don’t know why this crisis befell him. He eats healthy, exercises daily, and has never smoked. His heart got big and ineffective, or sparks flew where they shouldn’t, or he caught a virus, and in a span of just a few months he went from daily 5 mile walks and chopping down trees, to two horrible days on a ventilator.

This week, he is home — walking, talking, working on his computer— on his road to a full recovery. His focus is on getting better, not on paying a flood of unexpected and indecipherable medical bills. What might have cost $250;000 will instead total only $600. There was PLENTY of fear last week, but no extra layers of fear consisting of “how will this get paid for?” Or “how deep in debt will we go?”

Politics don’t enter into love for a family member facing a health crisis. We united in pulling for him, taking turns at his side. Our circumstances are different. One of us gladly pays a couple thousand dollars a year in extra Medicare taxes to support Obamacare; one of us pays none of that, but pays a lot for their own company-sponsored plan; and one of us benefits from Obamacare. We are children of the same parents, and it is a no-brainer that we look out for each other now. Among other reasons: the important and perhaps most meaningful last gift that I can give to my long-dead parents is to be there for their son or daughter when they cannot be. It is a privilege.

We will argue about politics on that porch in twenty years, and I will be grateful. A grand-nephew yet to be born might get taught the game of cribbage — and hear stories about my own father — by a great uncle, who will enrich that child’s life in subtle ways that will only be appreciated decades later. We never know where our later lives will lead.

We are all family. The doctors, the nurses, the researchers, the patients — not only now, but the ones that came before us — contributed to the evolution of life-saving technologies and to the bank of knowledge on which modern medicine depends, and in most cases they did it for the sake of humanity, not just for the sake of a paycheck. We share in that human legacy, regardless of who has since purchased the patents or cornered a market. We all need that human legacy.

Oh, to all of my brothers and sisters in the great extended human family, I hope your lives are treasured, long and healthy. I hope you all grasp that life and health are bigger than theoretical ideologies. We owe it to ourselves, to each other and to our long-dead ancestors to fight to defend the compassionate spaces in our public institutions, to not fail in preserving and nourishing our basic humanity.

Chuck Todd, Mr. false equivalence, threw a question at you related to the fact that Republicans wanted Bill Clinton to be impeached at one point during his presidency... you replied saying that “yeah, but Bill Clinton wasn’t a threat to the democracy”. That part was a good, quick, sharp and true answer.

BUT... you then launched into the Democrats need to do this, need to do that, and democrats need to be a check on the presidency...I do not think that is the correct approach.

Rather -
yeah, but Bill Clinton wasn’t a threat to the democracy...
and *not only democrats recognize the threat* — scores of leading right wing thinkers are saying it too — even very conservative thinkers like David Frum and Max Boot and Bill Kristol are warning the country that he is unfit and a threat to democracy...

It’s not only Trump though — the entire GOP Congress is looking the other way — here’s evidence of serious crimes including money laundering and possible treason...but the GOP is willing to enable trump, to be sycophants, tearing down the reputations of people like Mueller.

If there’s any patriotism left on the other side, then they will do the hard thing and the right thing. Republicans can’t leave it up to the other party to clean up this mess.

Several thoughts.
God damn WSJ... now we always have to second guess the reason for an article and the truth of it.

in a world where Trump admires Xi, what protection does the Uighur filmmaker have in Virginia?

Choice of words...where the Israeli government has created a system of checkpoints and biometric surveillance to keep tabs on Palestinians.”Keep tabs on” is a friendly thing you do with your young children. “Monitor” is what you do for the sake of security or danger. What a brilliant editor to use such diction.

Fascinating.

Those as such a useful explanation of types of pass-thru income. By the way, it mentions that Georgia Pacific — owned by the Koch Brothers —is a rare example of a very large business that operates as a pass-through entity.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/20/us/politics/small-business-tax-cut-pass-throughs.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=b-lede-package-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

This is fascinating. We all have heard about the estate tax exemption increasing to $11 Million per person. But according to Mother Jones, it also includes a step up in basis.

A WHOLE LOT OF INCOME FOR WEALTHY PEOPLE WILL NEVER BE TAXED.
So if you have SO much money that you can buy millions in Apple stock (or whatever) and keep it until the next generation inherits it, they are never going to have to pay tax on that gain either. Even when they sell it, never any tax on the gain that occurred before your death.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/12/six-things-you-might-not-know-about-the-republican-tax-bill/