Dispatches from Vilnius

It's taken a couple of days to digest the carnage from Tuesday.  Only someone completely out of touch with reality could call it a "tremendous success" just because the Republicans managed to knock some Democratic senators out of deeply red states.  The one senate race I was waiting on was Montana because we were told this one was personal.  Trump went to the state repeatedly to campaign against Democrat Jon Tester , who had exposed the WH physician Ronny Jackson for the quack he is.  Trump was determined to ride Tester out of the Senate.  In the end, Tester held onto his seat.  So, a big Fuck You to Donald J. Trump! That's pretty much how the midterms played out.  Trumplicans were able to hold onto the rural areas but suffered big losses in suburbs across the nation as women left the party in droves to vote for an unprecedented number of Democratic women candidates.  The Democrats now have 83 women in the House, while the Republicans have...

Once again Trump has turned the elections into a reality show -- this time Fear Factor.  He and the screaming banshees of Fox and right-wing radio and web channels have been pumping up the volume when it comes to the size, make-up and pending doom of the "caravan" creeping toward the American border at about 10 to 15 miles per day.  Trump doesn't miss an opportunity to scare his base into believing this imminent threat will bring unspeakable misery to America.  He's greatly inflated the numbers as well, turning thousands into millions in his latest barrage of tweets. Beto O'Rourke made a mockery of this looming "invasion" by going to the border himself and holding a rally to show what an absurd notion it is that we are under attack.  Nevertheless, Trump has sent a contingent of troops to the border as a line of defense.  At one point, he loudly proclaimed that the military would take any provocation as a threat, including stone throwing, but has s...

The Trump Red Army has found a new weapon in accusing persons of "virtual signalling" whenever they post a comment that openly expresses a virtuous position, especially in regard to human rights and the environment.  This criticism has been around for awhile.  White conservatives were accusing white liberals of voting for Obama only because he is Black to satisfy their guilty conscience, as Mitt Romney was apparently the true virtuous man.  But, it wasn't called "virtual signaling."  The term gets thrown around a lot now.  I was accused twice recently, which to be honest was the first time I heard of the phrase. James Bartholomew claims to have coined the term in an article he wrote for The Spectator in 2015 ostensibly on the subject of moral superiority, but appears to be largely a defense of Nigel Farage and UKIP when they were still riding high in UK politics.  The term took a little time crossing the Atlantic, or I'm being called out by cr...

One of the great things about America is that you can reinvent yourself.  This has long been the case with immigrants ever since the Mayflower.  Even today people come to this country hoping to start their lives anew.  That was probably the case with Cesar Sayoc's parents.  He was born to a Filipino father and Italian mother in Brooklyn, New York.  It seems things didn't turn out well with Cesar.  He got off to a good enough start, was attending college in North Carolina, but never seemed to find his footing.  Fifty-six years later he was found living out of the back of his white Dodge van, plastered with stickers regaling Donald Trump and lambasting all the things he hated.  A far cry from his humble origins. What makes Sayoc even more curious is that he is a White Supremacist.  Maybe it was all the steroids he had been using to pump up his body, or just a series of bad breaks that ultimately led to him being homeless.  What...

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the Republicans are intent on keeping their Congressional and state legislature majorities by any means necessary.  Probably the most egregious example is Georgia, where the Republican candidate for governor is the current Secretary of State and he is doing what ever it takes to purge the number of registered voters ahead of the November election.  Reports vary widely but the number being floated around now is 340,000 persons dropped from the voter rolls.   These efforts date back to a 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the pre-clearance provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  Republican administrations have been busy clearing the voting rolls ever since under the guise of eliminating potential voter fraud, where persons are registered in more than one state.  Of course, determining who these persons are seems to be rather selective, as minorities tend to be hit the hardest by these purges.  Th...

Politics is a strange beast.  You have scientists who study it in detail, examining poll numbers, sorting through the underlying trends, and to one degree or another predicting outcomes, much the way Nate Silver does on 538.  He's come up with a complicated set of algorithms to determine good polls, weed out bad polls and with a relatively high degree of certainty predict the outcome of an election.  Of course, he was famously wrong with Trump, having given Clinton a 71.4% probability of winning, but his forecast was decidedly less optimistic than other polls that gave her as much as a 99.9% chance of winning, and to his credit he had the crucial states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin light blue. For every scientist there are a hundred or more pundits that go on gut feeling, so you can never expect anything more from them than an opinion.  When they are right, they shout it to the world.  When they are wrong, they crawl back into their ...

It's not a word that normally conjures up fear and loathing, but Trump and his political apprentices have been doing their best to agitate their conservative base into believing this migrant caravan slowly making its way up the Central American isthmus from Honduras and Guatemala to the United States has all the worst criminal elements and we shouldn't be fooled by the many images of children we see in the news.  CNN and other international media networks have been tracking it like they would a swarm of killer bees. Polls show the Republicans doing very poorly in the midterms.  As many as 70 GOP seats in the House are considered vulnerable, and 5 of 9 GOP seats in the Senate.  This should have been a midterm where the Republicans solidified their hold of Congress.  Democrats had far more contested seats in the Senate (25) and had to fight against many GOP gerrymandered districts around the country for House seats, but the Dems are expected to retake...

Julian Castro opted for a more traditional means of proposing his candidacy than did Liz Warren -- a memoir .  If you remember this was how many of us first heard about Barack Obama.  It pays to get your name out early and a heartwarming story about yourself generates a lot of positive buzz. Castro, and for that matter Warren, probably would have run in 2016 had not Hillary taken so long to announce her candidacy.  She essentially froze out her potential competition, as no Democrat wanted to invest in a race they felt was hers for the taking, which she finally did but with the disastrous result we are still trying to come to terms with. Bernie, a septuagenarian social liberal was the only serious candidate willing to challenge her and might have won had not the superdelegates been stacked against him from the start.  These were delegates who weren't supposed to commit themselves until the end of the primaries, but had already done so, which meant Hillary ess...

Conservatives are outraged, and I mean outraged, by this video from T.I. speculating why Melania skipped out on a weekend with Donald at Mar-a-Lago.  Maybe it is just the audacity of the rapper taking a seat in the Oval Office because I can't imagine they would be so upset about the Melania look-a-like.  She's bared it all before.  But, I guess we should afford her more respect now that she is FLOTUS. Melania would have us believe she is one of the most bullied persons in the world, which apparently was the reason for wearing that notorious jacket a few months back on her trip to the borderland to commiserate with the caged children. For the most part, the media has been quite gentle on her, considering her relationship with Donald.  Most on-line periodicals focus on her fashion sense and have given her some credit for her philanthropy efforts, even if her "Be Best" campaign has seemed to have little affect on her husband.  For all the talk of bullyi...

Maybe Liz Warren thought she was clearing things up by taking a DNA test, a very popular thing to do these days, but it seems she has only made the politics of Native American identity even more murky. The Cherokee Nation has chimed in on the test with a rather ludicrous statement that this does not determine tribal citizenship.  Well, duh, since there wouldn't be a little red flag that says "Cherokee" in her double helix.  Native Americans come from a handful of pre-historic groups so the best a saliva test could do is determine if she has some of this pre-historic DNA in her.  It's not going to pinpoint her heritage to one tribe or another, anymore than it would determine a Cherokee is Cherokee.  Sadly in politics, all it takes is for the Cherokee Nation to issue a statement like this for the conservative blogosphere to run with it, disproving her claim once again. What's "useless" is these kinds of debates.  Just about every American likes t...

Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, Trump proudly displays this painting of himself sitting around the table with past Republican presidents, regaling in what appears to be a joke told by Lincoln.  It's by an artist friend of Darrell Issa, who dabbles in presidential portraits.  I don't think it was so much the smile, as it is Andy Thomas made Trump significantly trimmer, and gave him the most prominent light.  While Lincoln is clearly the storyteller, he is obviously saying something about Trump. It reminds me of the paintings Stalin had commissioned of himself, although a little less pointed than this one .  You almost wonder if Thomas studied Soviet Realism art, or maybe he just stole the idea from Cassius Marcellus Coolidge of old dogs sitting around a poker table. For many Trumpkins, November 9, 2016, or 119 as it is called in alt-right circles, represents year one of a new America, similar to what occurred in Russia after its horrible civ...

and the Flight of the Swifties This is certainly turning out to be one of the most entertaining midterm elections in a long time.  Not only did we have Kanye regal the President with images of a hydrogen-powered plane, which he called the iplane, but we have the full-on assault of the Swifties in Tennessee as Taylor Swift came out in support of a Democrat.  This seemed to grab Donald Trump's attention more than Kanye's ten-minute rant in the Oval Office. Donald Trump would have us believe Blacks love him, especially after that stunning embrace by Kanye in the WH that seemed to catch everyone off guard.  If that wasn't cringeworthy enough, how about that picture of Donald with Ivanka and Jared and his new adopted son, Kanye, all wearing MAGA caps.  That's right, Kanye said Trump is the father figure he had been longing for 41 years.  Good thing his mother is not around anymore to hear that incredible pronouncement. It all begs to ask th...

A tumultuous week draws to an end with Wall Street in as much disarray as is the Gulf Coast of Northwest Florida.  Trump deals with it by entertaining Kanye West, or should I say entertained by Kanye , and signing a ceremonial Music Modernization Act into law that would allow guys like Kanye and Kid Rock to reap even more profits off their music.  Can't let all that good music be so easily listened to on Spotify and other on-line streaming services. How is Kanye going to justify his Yeezy brand without record sales? Trump found time to assure us that what is going on with the markets is just a "correction."  Nothing to worry about.  The Dow lost 5 percent of its value over the last two days.  This after seeing Apple and Amazon become the first trillion dollar companies just last week.  Of course, this historic Bull run has to come to an end sometime.  We had a forewarning in Spring, and now it tumbles once again after regaining its losses ove...