The Robert Mueller Hearing

It just didn’t turn out as the Democrats had hoped. Robert Mueller gave a halting testimony that made me feel he was not prepared to sit before two congressional committees.

Yes, Mueller told the morning committee that his investigation did not exonerate the president and he told the afternoon committee they did not reach a determination as to whether the President committed a crime.

However, there was little emphasis on the fact that there had been Russian interference in the 2016 election and that it is likely to occur in 2020.

Congress needs to create laws that will discipline Americans who bring or use information from other countries into our election system. That should be called treason punishable by long prison terms.

Donald Trump openly invited Wikileaks and Russia to provide information against his opponents. That should be called treason. If those kinds of laws are not put into place we will see this happen again in 2020 and beyond. Robert Mueller warned of Russian interference in the 2020 election.

Trump’s Electoral College Edge

New York Times’ Nate Cohn analysis of the 2020 election outcome will be disheartening to Democratic Party nomination aspirants.  While Mr. Cohn doesn’t write that Trump is a shoe-in, he clearly points out that the Democratic Party candidate will have to overcome a country that for the most part is divided between rural and urban.

Of course the downside is that most polls indicated that Hillary Clinton would win the election in 2016.  

The tarp renaming Curry Village Half Dome Village came down on Monday

I have visited Yosemite National Park dozens of times.  It is a six hour drive from Los Angeles when you take time to stop for lunch.  The beauty and serenity of the park is something you will never forget.

In 2005 the facilities operator, Delaware North Companies Inc.  lost its renewal bid to Aramark. Delaware North claimed it owned the names Ahwahnee and Curry and would not permit Aramark to use those names because they are intellectual property.

Delaware North sued claiming they had paid the previous concessionaire’s for the right to use the names Ahwahnee and Curry.  They demanded $50 Million.

The consequence was the Ahwahnee Hotel was renamed Majestic Yosemite and Curry Village was renamed Half Dome Village.  I am quite certain that most recurring visitors continued to use the names Ahwahnee and Curry.

Basically the National Park Service and Aramark paid out $12 Million ransom to recover the use of those names. Ownership of the names will now revert to the federal government.

Incidentally I never thought it important to photograph the Curry Village sign or a picture of the Ahwahnee Hotel.  These photos appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

“Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

When Donald Trump implied in a series of tweets that some Democratic Party congresswomen weren’t born in America and sarcastically suggested, “they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi responded saying “Our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power.”

While all of the women Trump attacked do hold left wing views, Ocasio-Cortez, Tlaib and Pressley are natural-born US citizens, while Omar was born in Somalia and immigrated to the US when she was young. Omar became a citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old, according to the New York Times.

New Mexico Rep. Ben Ray Luján, the assistant speaker of the House, echoed Pelosi’s sentiments on Twitter Sunday: “A racist tweet from a racist president.”

Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign is really about making White Christian America the only group that matters and if you are not part of that group you are not welcome in the United States.

To reinforce his position for re-election Trump is using the most horrifying aspects of politics – Fear!  He rallies his base by telling them that he alone can protect them from the killers, rapists, gangs, and drug dealers that are primarily in minority communities.

Unfortunately many people who do not follow day-to-day politics will also respond to Trump’s rhetoric and vote for his re-election.  The Democrats are not united in their views on America’s future and that too will be a plus for a second term for Donald Trump.

Stock Market has reached new highs – Should we care?

Why is this man laughing?

What percentage of Americans own stocks?

Politifact California Stats:

6.7% are owned by bottom 80 %

9.3% are owned by the next 10%

84% are owned by the top 10%

Reported on NPR: As of 2013, the top 1 percent of households by wealth owned nearly 38 percent of all stock shares, according to research by New York University economist Edward Wolff.

Market Watch confirmed the same data.

According to U.S. News: In the U.S., there are 607 billionaires, up from 586 last year and 404 in 2010, and 14 of the world’s 20 richest are from the U.S. More than 40 percent of U.S. billionaires live in two states – California and New York. Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates don’t.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour.  States that have not set a higher wage must pay that amount to their employees.  In California the minimum is $12 for employers with 26 or more employees, otherwise $11.

The super wealthy keep telling us how lucky we are by pointing out how the working classes in other countries are poorer than the American working class.

The USA is run by rich old people.  Sadly that is not likely to change despite the campaigns of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

The picture at the top of this posting is Warren Buffet. His net worth this year is over $84 Billion.

Home of the Week

In Brentwood, a curvaceous hillside compound. Sweeping across an acre in Brentwood, this ultra-modern compound catches the eye and doesn’t let go. From an Italian marble driveway, a glass elevator ascends to a rooftop garden that doubles as an auto gallery with panoramic views of the city and ocean. Wavy walls mingle with clean lines throughout the three-story interior, which seamlessly expands to a 10,000-square-foot backyard with a lounge-lined infinity pool.  You are looking at the pool on the left with the city lights below.

Living area: 16,700 square feet, seven bedrooms, 9.5 bathrooms

Asking price: $42 million

Location: 12255 Sky Lane, Los Angeles, 90049

Code Red

Donald Trump dreams of being America’s first dictator.  He dreams of leading a military dictatorship.  This article by Thomas Friedman wisely identified Trump as a man who dreams of ruling the United States for the rest of his life.  Although the article is a year and a half old consider Trump’s recent actions as proof of where he wants to take the United States.

Whatever Trump Is Hiding Is Hurting All of Us Now

Thomas L. Friedman FEB. 18, 2018

 

Our democracy is in serious danger.

President Trump is either totally compromised by the Russians or is a towering fool, or both, but either way he has shown himself unwilling or unable to defend America against a Russian campaign to divide and undermine our democracy.

That is, either Trump’s real estate empire has taken large amounts of money from shady oligarchs linked to the Kremlin — so much that they literally own him; or rumors are true that he engaged in sexual misbehavior while he was in Moscow running the Miss Universe contest, which Russian intelligence has on tape and he doesn’t want released; or Trump actually believes Russian President Vladimir Putin when he says he is innocent of intervening in our elections — over the explicit findings of Trump’s own C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I. chiefs.

In sum, Trump is either hiding something so threatening to himself, or he’s criminally incompetent to be commander in chief. It is impossible yet to say which explanation for his behavior is true, but it seems highly likely that one of these scenarios explains Trump’s refusal to respond to Russia’s direct attack on our system — a quiescence that is simply unprecedented for any U.S. president in history. Russia is not our friend. It has acted in a hostile manner. And Trump keeps ignoring it all.

Up to now, Trump has been flouting the norms of the presidency. Now Trump’s behavior amounts to a refusal to carry out his oath of office — to protect and defend the Constitution. Here’s an imperfect but close analogy: It’s as if George W. Bush had said after 9/11: “No big deal. I am going golfing over the weekend in Florida and blogging about how it’s all the Democrats’ fault — no need to hold a National Security Council meeting.”

At a time when the special prosecutor Robert Mueller — leveraging several years of intelligence gathering by the F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A. — has brought indictments against 13 Russian nationals and three Russian groups — all linked in some way to the Kremlin — for interfering with the 2016 U.S. elections, America needs a president who will lead our nation’s defense against this attack on the integrity of our electoral democracy.

What would that look like? He would educate the public on the scale of the problem; he would bring together all the stakeholders — state and local election authorities, the federal government, both parties and all the owners of social networks that the Russians used to carry out their interference — to mount an effective defense; and he would bring together our intelligence and military experts to mount an effective offense against Putin — the best defense of all.

What we have instead is a president vulgarly tweeting that the Russians are “laughing their asses off in Moscow” for how we’ve been investigating their interventions — and exploiting the terrible school shooting in Florida — and the failure of the F.B.I. to properly forward to its Miami field office a tip on the killer — to throw the entire F.B.I. under the bus and create a new excuse to shut down the Mueller investigation.

Think for a moment how demented was Trump’s Saturday night tweet: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not acceptable. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian collusion with the Trump campaign — there is no collusion. Get back to the basics and make us all proud!”

To the contrary. Our F.B.I., C.I.A. and N.S.A., working with the special counsel, have done us amazingly proud. They’ve uncovered a Russian program to divide Americans and tilt our last election toward Trump — i.e., to undermine the very core of our democracy — and Trump is telling them to get back to important things like tracking would-be school shooters. Yes, the F.B.I. made a mistake in Florida. But it acted heroically on Russia. What is more basic than protecting American democracy?

It is so obvious what Trump is up to: Again, he is either a total sucker for Putin or, more likely, he is hiding something that he knows the Russians have on him, and he knows that the longer Mueller’s investigation goes on, the more likely he will be to find and expose it.

Donald, if you are so innocent, why do you go to such extraordinary lengths to try to shut Mueller down? And if you are really the president — not still head of the Trump Organization, who moonlights as president, which is how you so often behave — why don’t you actually lead — lead not only a proper cyber defense of our elections, but also an offense against Putin.

Putin used cyberwarfare to poison American politics, to spread fake news, to help elect a chaos candidate, all in order to weaken our democracy. We should be using our cyber-capabilities to spread the truth about Putin — just how much money he has stolen, just how many lies he has spread, just how many rivals he has jailed or made disappear — all to weaken his autocracy. That is what a real president would be doing right now.

My guess is what Trump is hiding has to do with money. It’s something about his financial ties to business elites tied to the Kremlin. They may own a big stake in him. Who can forget that quote from his son Donald Trump Jr. from back in 2008: “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets.” They may own our president.

But whatever it is, Trump is either trying so hard to hide it or is so naïve about Russia that he is ready to not only resist mounting a proper defense of our democracy, he’s actually ready to undermine some of our most important institutions, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, to keep his compromised status hidden.

That must not be tolerated. This is code red. The biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.