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The Moving Center

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Riffing slightly on a few recent posts.

I can’t help but comment on the rapidity with which the “center”, as defined by our media, moves ineluctably to the right. This post at Hullabaloo, in which it is noted that the Times characterized the George Bush administration as from the “comparatively moderate” wing of the Republican Party got me thinking about the subject once again. The wording is not completely indefensible, for it’s quite true that the current crop of Republican candidates is largely a competition among a group of men (is Carly still in it?), each of whom is striving, in his own way, to prove that George Bush is not the worst we can do. Still, the use of the word “moderate” is peculiarly inapt. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say that Cruz is simply even more extreme than Bush? Using the term “moderate”, even limited by the adjective “comparative” is yet another brick in the wall, so to speak. As the Republican Party moves ever rightward, the media obediently redefines the center, even though there is no evidence that the actual center in this country has moved much at all. On the issues, the American people are pretty much where they have been, and that would show up in the various state legislatures and in Congress, had not the majority’s will been gerrymandered into irrelevance. A corollary of this type of thinking is the following: the media will not acknowledge that it is defining the center to the right. It is also an axiom that both sides do it. Therefore, If the extreme on one end is ever more extreme, it follows as the night the day that the extreme on the other end is also ever more extreme, and to the same degree, massive evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Therefore, we can expect, if Sanders takes off, that he will be endlessly described as the left-wing version of Trump or Cruz, even though, despite his self description as a socialist, the policies he’s advocating are no different than were commonly supported by mainstream liberals in the 60s. As one small example, when JFK (and then LBJ) proposed Medicare, they went right for a single payer system. I may be wrong, but I don’t think there was ever any discussion of handing the system over to rent seeking insurance companies, as happened with Obamacare. That only happened later, when the Democrats caved to Republican demands for the money wasting “Medicare Advantage”.

On another framing issue, it appears that Elizabeth Warren has shut the door to a Clinton endorsement, at least while Sanders is still in the race. She gave a speech in the Senate and concluded with these words:

A new presidential election is upon us. The first votes will be cast in Iowa in just eleven days. Anyone who shrugs and claims that change is just too hard has crawled into bed with the billionaires who want to run this country like some private club.“

I think that aligns with the point I tried to make recently, that you can’t achieve progressive goals by pushing for incremental changes that inevitably bring you no closer to what you actually want. You might accept incremental change if that’s all you can get (and you won’t get much of that, if tiny change is your opening demand, see Obama, B, first 6 years in office), but you should never stop demanding the real thing. In the current context, Clinton is defining success as achieving minor adjustments to the status quo; Bernie is defining it far more broadly. I can understand the argument some make that we have to go with Clinton, because Bernie is a sure loser. I don’t agree, particularly if his opponent is Cruz, but I understand how someone can come to that conclusion. The unfortunate fact, in my opinion, is that we have no choice but to roll the dice. Give the billionaires four more years of country club living, and we may have lost the last opportunity to turn that club into a public course.

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In politics, you can’t get what you won’t demand

Tuesday, January 26, 2016

If you read a range of left wing blogs you know that one of the knocks against Bernie Sanders is that, given the present makeup of Congress, there’s no way that he could get his proposals through even if he wins. It follows, therefore, as the night the day, that he shouldn’t be advocating for stuff like single payer.

This has been a Democratic mantra since time out of mind: don’t demand what you can’t deliver right now. It ignores the fact that if you don’t demand what you actually want, you will, almost as a matter of definition, never get it. Not now, and not some far off day in the future.

That’s not the way Republicans do things. They play the long game. They make demands that start off derided as loony and impossible to achieve. They repeat themselves over and over until whatever lie they are telling becomes conventional wisdom. After a number of years, lo and behold, they get what they want, be it the destruction of unions, a constitutional right to carry guns, or, most importantly, a transfer of wealth from the bottom 99.99% to the top .01%.

It’s probably true that we can’t get single payer, or free college tuition, from the Republican Congress we presently have. It is equally true that we will never get single payer, or free college tuition, if we never demand them. Hillary’s incremental changes are just another way of preserving the status quo.

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The limits of our discourse

Monday, January 25, 2016

One of the better news sources out there is Consortium News, which gives an informed but dissenting view on current affairs, primarily focusing on foreign policy. The reporters know their stuff. When I read their pieces, I call to mind the few voices that dissented from the Iraq invasion that were allowed on traditional media; mostly to have their sanity questioned. Nowadays, the voices of dissent are just ignored.

The first amendment is alive and well in the United States, though the present Supreme Court has twisted it to accommodate the political preferences of the right wing judges (I can’t bring myself to call them “justices”, as that gives them too much credit), but the First Amendment does not confer any right to command an audience, nor should it. So it’s fairly easy for the corporate media to squelch dissenting views, or at least to prevent them from invading the DC bubble and contaminating the prevailing received wisdom, which, oddly enough to, is inevitably proven wrong.

Two recent cases in point from Consortium News, both of which involve topics that should be open to debate generally, but which will never be debated in the corporate media.

First, in an article written by Paul Pillar, a former CIA analyst, we learn that ISIS, at the mere mention of which we are all supposed to shake with fear, may very well be in decline. He points out that there are phases to successful insurgencies, the first being organization; the second involving terrorism and guerrilla warfare, and the third conventional warfare. He points out that ISIS attempted to compress the process; has already attempted conventional warfare; and after some initial successes is already being driven back. It is now reverting to the terrorist phase, a sign of desperation and decline:

As ISIS declines, it is likely to resort increasingly to international terrorism. It will do so for the same general reasons that other movements that have been pushed backward along the Maoist timeline have focused on terrorism. If one is not succeeding in large conventional operations, one relies more on smaller asymmetric ones.

In the case of ISIS, increased reliance on international terrorism should be all the more apparent in that it represents a departure from the group’s earlier focus — much different from the strategy of Al Qaeda — of concentrating on building and expanding its so-called caliphate. The terrorism will serve the purpose of demonstrating continued vitality of the group and keeping it on the mental maps of potential recruits.

We will need to recognize such a change in emphasis for what it is, as well as recognizing the reasons for it. There will be a tendency to equate more ISIS international terrorism with greater overall ISIS strength. Bowing to that tendency will be an error in analysis, and it will play into the hands of the group.

The decline of ISIS will be violent. The violence should be taken seriously and must be dealt with, but when a decline is occurring we nonetheless should understand that it is in fact a decline.

via Consortium News

In yet another article, reporter Robert Parry, who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories, notes that Hillary Clinton appears to believe that she can score points with the American electorate by claiming that Bernie Sanders “isn’t adequately committed to the positions of Israel’s right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his American neocon acolytes.” He questions whether Clinton has made the right call. Inside the Beltway it is a given that the Israeli tail must wag the American dog, but he argues that it is not at all clear that the American people share that point of view.

You can take issue with the conclusions of either reporter, but the fact is that there are good reasons to believe that both Pillar and Parry are essentially right. The sad fact is that while you can find this stuff if you search long enough on the Internet, the arguments they are making will never penetrate into the corporate media, and thus will never penetrate into the corridors of power, or even into our political debate at election time (for, after all, who gets to ask questions at those debates). Besides the Iraq debacle, it reminds me of the debacle in a country that starts with “V”. The idea that the Vietnamese were mainly fighting against colonialism and that a country historically fearful of China would never voluntarily submit to Chinese domination (a prerequisite to becoming a member of the monolithic Communist menace) was given no credence during that long and fruitless war. In retrospect, of course, we know the dissenters were right.

The sad fact is that on too many issues, only one side is allowed to express itself in the corporate media or the corridors of power. Sometimes dissenting views break through. The Occupy Movement is often deemed a failure, but inequality remains an issue that the corporate media can’t avoid, even though they would prefer to do so. Of course, they certainly don’t want anything done to reverse the wholesale appropriation of the people’s wealth by the plutocrats; hence the certainty that attacks on Bernie Sanders will multiply beyond measure if he beats Clinton in Iowa. A man who is almost indistinguishable from the typical Democratic politician of the 60s will be branded a rabid radical, and were it to come down to a Sanders vs. Trump contest, we will be amazed to see how quickly our overlords get comfortable with the idea of a President Trump.

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What the Fates allowed

Saturday, January 23, 2016

Regular readers know that I’m not much for religion, but if I had to choose a faith, I’d probably go with the Greek gods, or some similar pantheon. They made no pretensions to being anything but arbitrary and capricious, unlike a certain Hairy Thunderer, who shall remain otherwise nameless.

All this is by way of introduction to a recounting of the events of the past few days, in which the Fates, the most arbitrary and capricious of the gods, took a hand in the lives of my wife and me.

As I said in my last post, we were vacationing in Mexico, where we had a good time, but alas, sooner or later we had to get home. That fateful day was yesterday. Our tickets told us that we were to go from Puerto Vallarta to Bradley airport via Minneapolis; leaving Puerto Vallarta at about 1:00 PM Mexico time, and arriving at Bradley at 11:00 PM our time. The Fates, alas, decided to amuse themselves at our expense.

The first hint of trouble was insignificant enough. We went to the concierge at the resort where we were staying, and asked him to print up our boarding passes. “No can do”, he said, since he could only do it within 24 hours of departure. That, of course, was an insignificant problem, but it was rather concerning that he couldn’t find our flight number, and when he put in our confirmation number, he rather insisted that we were going to Hartford via Atlanta. I checked my email shortly thereafter, and while I did get an email from Delta Airlines asking me about my reaction to a rather insignificant delay on our way over, no email had come, or ever did come, appraising us of the change of route. But, after all- Atlanta, Minneapolis- what difference could it make, though we would arrive at Bradley a half hour past midnight, a slight inconvenience, though there was all that bothersome news about a storm on the East Coast while the weather was all clear in Minneapolis. But, on the other hand, the forecast put off the snow here in Connecticut until after our projected arrival.

But the fates were just warming up, getting in shape for the big game, so to speak.

Friday dawned bright and sunny in Puerto Vallarta, as do all days there, in our experience. The nice taxi driver took us to the airport without incident.

The flight from Mexico was delayed by half an hour. No big deal, for after all, we would have plenty of time between arrival and departure in Atlanta. And so it proved. It took a mere hour to clear customs; we had a hearty meal, and proceeded to our boarding gate. No one was there. We looked at the monitor. Our gate has been changed. We made the roughly half mile trek to the new gate. Not satisfied, the Fates twisted the knife again. After a short time we were sent to yet another gate, roughly a mile away (airports are big) where the sign informed us that takeoff was slightly delayed. Our original 10:00 PM takeoff had been changed to 10:28. No big deal, we thought. What’s half an hour? The Fates chuckled to themselves. We noticed something curious. It was already 10:00 PM, and even we, amateur travelers that we are, were aware that the herd is usually loaded on the plane starting a half hour or so before takeoff. The minutes ticked by. The ticket agents were mute. A seasoned traveler with whom we struck up a conversation speculated that the crew had not arrived, a speculation confirmed by the hitherto silent agents about 5 minutes before the scheduled takeoff, and a like number of minutes before the crew actually arrived. Still, what’s half an hour? We were crammed into the plane at 10:30, primed for takeoff.

But we don’t take off. We sit. What else can we do? It is physically impossible to move in an airplane. It is theoretically possible to sleep on an airplane, but this is a skill reserved mostly to infants and alcoholics. Finally, we are told that the plane needs de-icing, and we are presently third in line. We should take off in an hour. An hour passes. So does another. We are now told by the pilot that we are 12th in line for de-icing (he never tells us how those 9 planes cut the line), and at 20 minutes a plane, we should leave in 2 hours. For those of us still mentally capable of doing math in our head, the news is even worse. Our seatmate (for some reason a woman was assigned to sit between my wife and I ) expresses the hope that the pilot is better at piloting than mathematics, a sentiment with which we heartily concur. The Fates smile, for we are not fated to wait out 12 de-icings, for after an infinite amount of time, the crew makes inquiry: are there any passengers with medical qualifications aboard. Indeed there is, and he hastens to check out the case of a passenger who has become ill. The plane must return to the hangar, discharge the sick individual, and then, believe it or not, re-fuel. This announcement, according to my wife’s contemporarily penned notes, is made at 2:40 AM. We have been on the plane for 4 hours and 10 minutes, give or take a few minutes, all of which have passed by with leaden feet. No one, of course, ever tells us why the plane would need re-fueling. The minutes proceed apace, and at 3:15 we get the happy news that refueling is complete, and that we are now awaiting the “fuel slip”, which the fuel man delivers with breathless haste by around 3:30.

The plane’s engines turn; we taxi around and around. Then stop. Remember de-icing? Apparently most of the 11 planes before us have been sent on their way, for after a mere half hour, we are de-iced! Nothing can stop us now! And nothing does, even the Fates, who have apparently had their fill, and are even now looking for new victims. We are in the air at 4:00 AM, having sat immobile in our seats for a mere 5 and a half hours. By 6:00 AM we are at Bradley. By a quarter to eight, we pull into our driveway. We are home.

And after all, as my wife pointed out, the Fates really were quite kind to us. The first snowflakes don’t begin to fall until moments after we arrive home, where we, after the previous day’s fitful fever, sleep well, at least for a few hours.

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Blogus interruptus 

Sunday, January 17, 2016

If I do any blogging for the next week, it will be to put up pictures, as we are presently in Mexico on vacation. I hear with immense satisfaction that it snowed in Groton today. We are at a resort near Puerto Vallarta. Herewith a few pictures of the environs. Later in the week we hope to get into actual Puerto Vallarta and see a little of real Mexico. We feel pretty good about being here, since I understand from Donald Trump that all the Mexicans with criminal intentions have been sent to the United States. That must be true, since the people we’ve met here all seem quite nice.

   
This little guy has been hanging around our room. I’d really like to know how Darwin explains the length of his tail.

 
Egret? Heron? I don’t know.

   
I said it was a resort.

  

 
A few views of the beach. Did I say it gives me great joy to hear it snowed in Groton today?

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Another lesson in linguistics

Monday, January 11, 2016

We live in a world in which the word “literally” now literally means the opposite of what it means, so it is not surprising that words are constantly misused. However, the ways in which they are misused can be instructive. The New York Times published a story this morning about the Western land issue that has supposedly led the nutcases to occupy federal land in Oregon. I’ll remark only in passing that if the group were composed of left leaning types, we wouldn’t be reading such stories at all. The article itself is not totally awful, though it nonetheless is a reward of sorts to a group that has taken up arms against the government and is just one of many that has earnestly and often sympathetically explored the grievances of these criminals.

The article was reprinted in the Boston Globe. You can read it here. What you won’t see at the link is the headline that appeared in the print edition: Pitch to reclaim land appeals to some in West.

Words do have meanings, and I mean that literally. At least in a newspaper, some effort should be made to use them with precision. In this context, the word “reclaim”, according to my unabridged dictionary, means: to claim back; demand the return of as of right, and so forth. It was probably (hopefully) unintentional, but the person who wrote that headline was implicitly conceding a point to these assholes that lacks any historical basis. The land in question was never theirs in the first place, nor did it belong to the several states in which it is located. Those states were federal territories before they were states. The federal government could grant statehood on any condition it wished. The land in question was reserved to the federal government, as the government had every right to do, and let us give thanks to the non-existent God that it did, or it would be wasteland right now. It cannot, therefore, be “reclaimed”. The headline implies that the land was somehow taken from someone who now wants it back. If the folks holed up in Oregon were Native Americans, the word might be properly employed, but so far as I’m aware, they are not advocating the return of the West to its original occupants. There have probably been instances in which words have been misused in a way favorable to some person or group on the left; I just can’t think of any offhand.

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Rainy day pessimism 

Sunday, January 10, 2016

The Real News Network recently ran an interview with some British Economists who think that the new Labour Party Leader, Jeremy Corbyn, is steering the party’s policies where they ought to go. John Weeks, a Professor Emeritus at SOAS, at the University of London, had this to say, and it struck me that there are some obvious parallels with the situation here in America:

WEEKS: First I must stress that our group is not affiliated with the Labour Party. Our report does not endorse the Labour Party. It looks at the British economy. But nonetheless, [inaud.] should be interpreted as showing [inaud.] considerably more credible on economic policy than the current government. I’ll briefly explain why. To understand the context, the American watchers should realize that the election of Jeremy Corbyn as head of the Labour Party would be rather like the Democratic party nominating Bernie Sanders to run for president. There would be that much of a dramatic break. There has been that much of a dramatic break.

The Labour Party before the election in May took a position that most people would call, most people would call, austerity-lite. That is, there was a hesitancy, some people would say a fear, of breaking with the Tory policy of budget cuts because, for fear that the Labour Party would be attacked as not understanding the economy and not being worried about deficits. Jeremy Corbyn has come in and he has picked a chancellor, that’s a person who is in charge of economic policy, with an absolutely clear policy: the Labour Party is now against budget cuts. Cuts are necessary, on the contrary, the government needs to spend, the government needs to spend more to expand the economy and generate productive employment. And John McDonnell has developed a fairly clear and detailed plan that emphasizes public investment in infrastructure, and basic things such as high-speed internet access, and such as that.

So I think that the Labour Party is now credible and impressive on economic policies. I mean, nobody’s perfect. But there’s such an improvement upon the past that they look awfully, awfully good. As a result, of course, of a dramatic change, a basic change that was brought about from the grassroots, I should add. Jeremy Corbyn won over 60 percent of–someone, one of my colleagues may correct me, it may have been more than that–of the Labour Party membership. Maybe up towards 70 percent. And the Labour Party is of course filled also with supporters of Tony Blair, and out of that ideological period. And so there is a very deep split within the party.

And the new leadership faces a very difficult time imposing its policies as the united front of the opposition. And I think some progress has been made in that regard, but we can’t kid ourselves. The right-wing elements within the Labour Party are attacking Jeremy Corbyn, and attacking him precisely for the policies I just described.

via Naked Capitalism

Weeks draws an explicit comparison to Bernie Sanders, but there are other parallels.

The Democratic Party too, even when it was in power, was austerity-lite. Despite the large Congressional majorities he had in 2009, Obama proposed a largely inadequate stimulus package that he further diluted in order to make it “bi-partisan” by getting Susan Collins’s vote. Had Obama, and a fair number of Congressional Democrats not been captive to “austerity-lite” thinking, they could have rammed through an effective stimulus package that would have done more than simply put the brakes on decline. Had there been a real recovery, we might have avoided the 2010 electoral disaster, and the gerrymandered nation it produced. The most charitable explanation for their blindness is that they were victims of the same fears Weeks ascribes to the Labour Party. Less charitably, one might argue that they never really cared to initiate a broad based recovery, because it was not something for which their major donors were particularly pining. After all, the rest of us might have gone nowhere since 2008, but the bankers have been doing great. In any event, there is only one candidate for President who is not, at best, “austerity-lite”, and that candidate is not Hillary Clinton.

Here at home, broadly speaking, I’ve run into two kinds of Democrats, since I am not privileged to consort with the Wall Street types. The first group supports Bernie. The second group supports Hillary, almost universally because they think Bernie can’t win and that they are therefore left with Hillary. I’m sure there are some Hillary enthusiasts out there, but I have yet to meet one. On issue after issue, these folks agree with Bernie, but they’re holding their noses and sticking with Hillary.

Maybe they’re right, but you have to wonder. If you step back and look at the trend line, it seems unlikely that any semblance of real representative democracy can survive four more years of government by and for the plutocrats. It’s all very well that Hillary would likely appoint Supreme Court justices that would protect the social advances of the past few years, but those are issues about which the plutocrats care nothing. On the economic front, it is simply unclear that we can recapture the ground that will surely be lost in the next four years, when Hillary, safely elected, reverses course on issues such as the TPP and the Keystone Pipeline, and reminds us that on other issues she never said she was with us, she simply said she would listen. It just so happens that she listens a lot harder to the plutocrats. Everything put together sooner or later falls apart, and as some have pointed out recently, the period between 1932 and 1980 was an aberration in the first place, a period of retrenchment for the plutocrats. Maybe Corbyn won’t win in Britain, and maybe Bernie won’t win here, but if they don’t, the course of history may be irreversibly fixed, and we will be back, perhaps permanently, to the days of government of, by, and for the capitalists.

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Thank you, Canada 

Thursday, January 7, 2016

Or, more accurately, thank you TransCanada:

TransCanada has filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration and plans to file a claim under the North American Free Trade Agreement over the U.S. government’s rejection of the company’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline.

The company said Wednesday it has filed a notice of intent to initiate the NAFTA claim on the basis that the denial was not justified.

“TransCanada has been unjustly deprived of the value of its multibillion-dollar investment by the U.S. administration’s action,” said the company in a release.

The firm says it will be looking to recover $15 billion US in costs and damages as a result of what it says is a breach of obligations under Chapter 11 of NAFTA.

“TransCanada asserts the U.S. administration’s decision to deny a presidential permit for the Keystone XL pipeline was arbitrary and unjustified,” the company said.

via CBC News

In the old days, when a company risked it’s money on an investment that would require government approvals to move forward, the risk was on the company, not on the government. But that was before they rigged the system; imperfectly in NAFTA (TransCanada may lose), but far more perfectly in the not yet passed TPP. If we manage to stave off the TPP we may have TransCanada to thank, for demonstrating that the warnings of TPP opponents have a basis in fact. It may push some wavering lawmakers in the right direction.

It should be noted that TransCanada’s legal position comes down to this: If a country wants to make a political decision that adversely affects a corporation’s interests, it may do so only if it pays off the corporation. So, if we want to avoid global warming, we can do so only by paying big bucks to the energy companies that have caused the problem in the first place.

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A Blogger’s Lament

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Regular readers have no doubt been pleased to see a decrease in blogging activity from this quarter. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind impels me to explain the latest stretch of inactivity.

I’ve been doing this, if memory serves, for 11 years. When I started, there were meaty issues being debated, some of which actually had two sides, or, if that was not the case, one side that had to be explained somewhat. For instance, when I started Bush was busily trying to destroy Social Security, and there were real issues to be explored about his privatization scheme.

Partly I have posted less because I don’t want to repeat myself, but primarily I have written much less because the discourse out there has become so dumbed down that it hardly seems necessary to comment, and, when it is, lightning fast reflexes are required, because if you don’t get it out there within minutes of the event, a thousand internet actors have already pointed out the obvious, so why bother to add one’s mite?

Several years ago I put up a post in which I disparaged Twitter, my point being that the 128 character limit was clearly insufficient to deal with any issue intelligently. Nowadays, 64 characters is often sufficient.

Case in point, the ongoing situation in Oregon. You know the one: White guys with guns holed up in government building demanding their constitutional right to own government land. It’s in there somewhere, I’m sure, though I can’t recall where. Anyway, the point is that the tweets write themselves, and unless you’re first off the block, what’s the point of writing an entire blog post about the obvious. Here’s just a few of the things that come to mind right away, all of which have been explored elsewhere:

If they were black, they’d be dead by now.

If they were Muslim, they’d be even deader.

Why does the press label these guys “protestors” or let them label themselves as a “militia”. And why is the press not pointing out that they are being led by a guy who is looking for the ultimate government handout. Not satisfied with no cost to low cost grazing rights on government land, he somehow feels he has a constitutional right to fee simple ownership of that land. Why him? Why not? The important thing to keep in mind is that he is not at all like all those takers that Mitt was going on about on account of he’s the wrong color, don’t you know.

In the no one could have predicted department: Fox News says they’re just good guys protesting a nasty government, nothing like the thugs in Ferguson who, if memory serves, were unarmed and threatened exactly no one. And of course, no one could have predicted that we’d be hearing pretty much the same thing on CNN. No one, that is, except everyone.

The thing is, it’s not just this one story. In the good old days, for example, when a Republican told a lie, he (usually he, after all) at least made an effort to make it sound plausible. It took at least a little work to expose the soft underbelly of his mendacity. Nowadays, they take no pride in their craft. Does anyone with the minimal amount of brains it takes to read this blog need to be told that nothing that escapes the mouth of the Donald, or his competitors (including especially, but not limited to, Ted, Ben, and Carly) has even a nodding acquaintance with objective truth? They make no attempt to hide their dishonesty. It’s no longer a regrettably necessary bug; it’s a feature. The lies are so obvious there is no need to comment in anything longer than half a tweet, and you have to get that tweet out in real time, or retweet the first guy out of the starting gate, and I just can’t stoop to that (very often). That being the case, what need for the struggling blogger, who in olden times took some delight in exposing their falsehoods. We wait instead for those stopped-clock moments when a stray bit of truth exits their gustatory orifices, at which point we can note the event with the appropriate amount of astonishment.

By this time you are probably eagerly anticipating a vow from me that I will blog no more. Unlike your run of the mill Republican politician, I cannot tell a lie. Well, I can, but I’m not going to tell one at the moment. Despite all, I will soldier on. All I need to do is find a way to make the obvious sound profound. Does Thomas Friedman give lessons?

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The road ahead 

Thursday, December 31, 2015

Listen my reader(s), you’ll eventually hear
All my predictions for the coming New Year
Open a bottle of your strongest of stuff
You better get plenty, though it won’t be enough

The future I’ll serve you like holiday dishes
Sorry, I doubt I can fill all your wishes
There’s reason to hope, but far more to fear
But we don’t have a choice, so on to next year

Lets start with the stuff that’s on everyone’s mind
This year, Obama leaves his old job behind
We pick a successor, are we all having fun?
Well there’s lots more coming ‘fore the election is won

The Republican Party, in a century long slump
Will finally hit bottom-Can you say Donald Trump?
And if it’s not him, I’ve even worse news
If it’s not him, it will be Teddy Cruz

As for the Dems, if you’re feeling the Bern
I’ve news that is sad, your affections must turn
For the Titans of Wall Street will allow no such frillery
The fix it is in, we must make do with Hillary

After that, as you know, it is still early innings
Clinton must work before collecting her winnings
From the press there’ll be questions on issues deemed critical
Like emails, Benghazi and motives political

But as they campaign neath the hot August sun
Some things we won’t hear, and I’ll tell you just one
Though the Earth it is warming in ways quite absurd
About climate change we’ll hear nary a word

Still in the end, when the votes are all cast
She’ll win when the race is over at last
If that’s not the case then I’ll sally forth
After packing my bags I’ll head straight to the North

All through the year the gun folks will rage
It will take thirty kills just to make the front page!
Unless you’re a Muslim, it goes without saying
One bullet from them will set the Fox baying

Here’s a prediction that’s sure to come true
If you disagree then you haven’t a clue
The Congress, controlled by the party in red
Will do not a thing but tell the country: drop dead

Are you growing weary; am I starting to bore?
You may have a point, but don’t head for the door
Here’s an end to political prognostication
(I can practically feel your sincere approbation )

Now I can turn to subjects less pressing
Like what will be in, or how we’ll be dressing
But on those two subjects I can’t ply my wit
Because…honestly… I don’t give a (can’t think of a rhyme, please give me time)

There must be a subject that I can explore
Something every American loves to the core
Some port that is safe to which I’ll resort
Isn’t it obvious? Time to talk sport

In the first days of spring they will start to play ball
And this year the Sox will not fail in the fall
At least when compared to the year that has passed
They won’t come in first, but they won’t be dead last

As for the sports that aren’t played with a bat
I give less for them than the ass of a rat
So you won’t hear from me ’bout the Celts or the Pats
I meant what I said ’bout that part of the rat

If you took my advice in stanza the first
And drank your way through this quite wretched verse
Your head it is swimming; you just cannot cope
For an end to your labors you’ve no doubt lost hope

But take heart, I’ve good news: this is certain
Two more lines and then down comes the curtain
For a repeat of this you have little to fear
It won’t happen again for at least one more year

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