February 2016 Archives

Dear America,

A couple of months ago, Donald Trump boldly stated that he could walk down 5th Avenue in New York and shoot someone and not lose a single vote.  Perhaps that is true, because if the last of his contretemps isn't enough to disqualify him in the minds of his supporters, nothing he can do in America will.  Trump is the beneficiary of the political largess of David Duke, a long time southern politician who started out as the grand wizard of his local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan.  He never ascended to office as far as I can recall, but I believe he ran for one or another more than once.  He is a confirmed racist, and he is unabashed about it.  So, when Trump was asked whether he disavowed the endorsement of David Duke, he said that he didn't know who Duke was and that he didn't disavow people without knowing something about them.  At that point, Duke's Klan credentials were pointed out to Trump and he was asked again if he would reject Duke's support, to which he again said he didn't know enough about him.  Unfortunately for Trump and his malleable concept of the truth, he had disavowed Duke's support just the day before, demonstrating that either he was lying when he told Jake Tapper of CNN on the air that he didn't know who Duke was, or he disavowed the support of someone he knew nothing about just the day before.  But even with his bare, orange face hanging out, he tried to excuse himself, which is his wont.  He claimed that he had been given a faulty earpiece for the Tapper interview, and he could barely hear what Tapper was asking.  Of course, if you watch the interview, which you can do online, it is clear that Trump is hearing every word in light of the coherence of his responses to Tapper's direct questions...three of the...about the Duke endorsement.  One of his answers was that he didn't even know who Duke was, though as it turns out, he had declined to partake of a third party run for office fifteen years ago by citing the membership of Duke in the party that wanted to nominate him.

If you go to New York City and look at the Trump Tower, you see a pretty accurate representation of Trump's values.  The Ozymandian edifice is nothing but Trump's self-aggrandizement, like the statue of Ramses II for which the poem was named, what with the Trump name emblazoned on the front in gold letters taller than the man himself.  And if you can find footage of the premises inside, you will see ostentation that Trump wants to believe to be opulence, but that is so blatant and tasteless that it makes clear how hollow Trump's character really is.  And that lack of substance is further demonstrated by his willingness to rely on lame excuses for every misstep he takes, such as the earpiece in the Duke matter, rather than apologizing and admitting his mistake.  When he didn't like the questions he was asked by Megan Kelly, for whom I frankly have little use myself, he made only thinly veiled reference to her menses as the explanation for what seemed unreason to him, and then he attempted to defuse the flap the remark caused by claiming that his remark about bleeding didn't refer to any particular part of Kelly's body.  When he told the world that he thought that Carly Fiorina's face disqualified her for anyone's vote, he attempted to mask his contempt for Fiorina's appearance by claiming that he actually thought she was beautiful and that his remark about her face had been misunderstood--a preposterous effort at self-redemption given how explicit his remark had been.  And now this Duke thing.

If Trump were a racist--and he may be for all I know--that might limit his potential, but because we have freedom of speech and thought here, it wouldn't disqualify him for the presidency.  Racism is not a high crime or misdemeanor.  If he weren't a racist, but just wanted the support of every racist he could get to vote for him by pandering to them, that wouldn't disqualify him either.  Pandering to a particular group isn't impeachable either.  If it were, every president would have stood trial in The Senate at some point in his presidency.  But lying...that's another matter.  Lying to the American people may not be impeachable per se, but lying under oath is.  It wasn't the lying that got Bill Clinton impeached, it was partisanship and the oath he took before he lied one time...at his deposition.  The moral turpitude that was at the heart of it all wasn't enough by itself, and Trump's turpitude isn't either.  But he is a crass opportunist, and he'll say anything to get what he wants, and think he is being clever by doing so.  Trump isn't immoral.  He's amoral, and that is what disqualifies him for the presidency.  I concede that amorality isn't a high crime or misdemeanor, but it would certainly lead to one, just like the Nixon Watergate tapes did.  Trump is what used to be called a sharper, and though that by itself wouldn't get him caught, he is proud of what he is, and he's a braggart in the bargain.  He couldn't help touting his successful gulling of someone, some time, and that would be his undoing, just as his attempts to excuse himself for his odious opportunism should.

I don't think Trump could get elected president, but I didn't think he could get the nomination for the presidency of the Republican Party either, and that certainly looks like what is going to happen now.  If all but one of his opponents dropped out immediately, the ineluctability of his ascendance might be mitigated.  But Cruz, Rubio, Kasick and Carson are all running out of personal ambition rather than a desire to serve, so none of them is going to go away any time soon, and soon might even be too late, so it looks like Trump in November.  Our only hope is that the American people see what Trump is underneath it all, but frankly, Trump's supporters just don't seem inclined to look, and that makes me worry.

Your friend,

Mike

  

Dear America,

The federal government's efforts to conscript Apple into its digital decryption force are disturbing in two ways.  First is the attempt to compel a publicly held corporation to act as a branch of the government and do the government's bidding, and it makes no difference what that bidding is.  It constitutes nationalization of a private enterprise, and that is anti-democratic.  The ultimate consequence of success on the part of the government in this Apple case would be to authorize future conscription of not just corporations, but of you and me as well, and not just for military service in a time of national peril, but for any reason.  Remember the immortal words of Mitt Romney: corporations are people too, which they are under American common law.  A military draft is one thing, but a draft for the furtherance of virtually any governmental purpose is another.

But the second discomfiting aspect of the Apple case is the rationale being used by the government.  The premise of the federal case is that only Apple can program entry into the phone in question without tripping the security protocol built into the phone's software, that is, erasure of all data if someone tries ten times to enter a password that is incorrect before entering the correct one.  That argument implies a much broader proposition: that anything that is inscrutable to the government is improper, or worse, illegal.  The fourth amendment to our constitution gives us the right to security in our "persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures."  But if Apple can be compelled to assist the government in violating that right, albeit in the case at hand there may be probable cause to search the iPhone in question, they can be compelled to assist in any search the government deems necessary.  And more broadly, any person could be drafted into government service for penetration of the privacy of any other person, which requires by implication that no matter is sufficiently private to justify invocation of the fourth amendment.  And one more thing; if Apple can be made to intrude into private matters, is the next step the effective proscription of privacy that precludes government access.  Remember that there is no warrant in this case as the owner of the phone in question is dead, and there's no one to serve with a warrant, so the existence of probable cause is assumed, and no judge is making a determination that a warrant is justified.  Should the government be able to search and seize without a judicial determination of probable cause?  If so, the fourth amendment becomes a nullity, and no intrusion into private lives will be precluded.

Of course, the public is being seduced by the presumed need to ferret out the associations of the San Bernardino murders, and I concede that to the extent that the records stored on that phone may disclose the identities of cohorts and coconspirators of the criminals, they would be useful, if not essential in prevention of future crimes of the same ilk as well as in prosecution of guilty parties.  But what about the records of innocent contacts.  How can they be protected from intrusion into their private affairs even though they are without guilt or fault in the crimes that are the subject of the federal government's inquiry?  How can they be sheltered from guilt by association?  If you dialed that phone by accident--a wrong number--how could you convince government agents that you had no connection to the crimes or the criminals, and I don't mean someone else, I mean you.  There is no way to prove your claim that nothing inculpatory happened.  Your only defense would be that no one can prove the contrary, and lack of provable guilt is not the same as innocence in the eyes of most of us, and certainly not in the eyes of government agents.

I know that all of this sounds like paranoia, and I would like to know what is on that phone myself.  But there may be larger issues to consider with regard to the future implications of a court order that Apple unlock that phone.  Bear in mind that the government already forces telecommunications companies to give up their records of private calls and internet use, and that under the Patriot Act, they can require that those companies keep silent about the requests.  Those records are stored indefinitely revealing all of your personal cell phone contacts and uses of the internet in virtual perpetuity, and while the government is required to use them only for specific purposes and after certain conditions are met, is that mandate something we can all rely on?  To round out your impression of my paranoia, I have to confess my skepticism on that point.

 In the final analysis, there is more to consider than the obvious.  We all want to thwart terrorism, and we all want to punish those who perpetrate it.  But at what cost.  A police state would probably be much more secure.  If everything from encrypted phones and computers to whispering were prohibited by such a state, it would be much harder to pursue conspiratorial enterprises, but do we want a police state.  In other words, where do we draw the line?

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The main topic discussed on every newscast these days is the death of Antonin Scalia, the arch conservative Supreme Court justice who unexpectedly died a couple of days ago.  He was seventy nine, but his intellectual alacrity was undiminished, and his physical vigor never seemed to be in issue.  His nearly beatific visage was the face of conservatism--especially in the realm of constitutional law--but that angelic countenance belied what I often thought was a tendentious philosophy designed to reify the conservative ethos that seems to have swept over this nation like a brush fire from time to time...today especially.  Through thirty of the past fifty odd years, Scalia sat on the Supreme Court fanning the flames.  I found his thinking teleological in that his goal was to enforce certain conservative principles even when they were paradoxical.  For example, his general subtext was that government should have just as much power as the constitution specifically articulates, but no more.  Yet in cases like Anderson v. Creighton he bent over backwards to support government intrusion, apparently presuming himself that such intrusions were all in a good and righteous cause: the old, if you have nothing to hide, government intrusion shouldn't be a problem routine.  Thus, in Anderson, which involved warrantless entry into an innocent family's home, Scalia accepted on its face the assertion of Anderson, an FBI officer, that his entry was justified by probable cause to believe that a fugitive was within the Creighton home, which is a permissible reason to violate the fourth amendment right to be free of such warrantless searches.  But though the factual basis for Anderson's claim of probable cause was in dispute.  The trial court had not allowed Creighton--the plaintiff who claimed that his right to be free from warrantless search and seizure except when there was probable cause to believe that exigent circumstances prevailed--to conduct the otherwise permitted discovery process needed to either confirm or refute the claim of probable cause.  In other words, Scalia voted to allow law enforcement officers to claim probable cause to violate rights and then to prohibit the victim of such intrusions into their lives from demanding proof that probable cause existed.  The related law is quite complex with regard to the extraordinary power to ignore the fourth amendment rights of Americans, but Scalia used that law to camouflage the Supreme Court decision, which Scalia himself wrote, to give such officials complete impunity.  Like Richard Nixon, he asserted that if a law official says he acted lawfully, then he acted lawfully.  Thus, I am compelled to believe that Scalia believed in the constitution except when it interfered with the illusions he harbored as what Eric Hoffer called a "true believer," that is, a person who believes in government uncritically thinking that such blind loyalty is the equivalent of patriotism.  That's the Scalia paradox.  That's what the Nazi's relied on...true belief.  It's innocent, but it's deadly.

So now, Republicans are doing everything they can to avoid appointment of anything but another true believer to the Supreme Court, and they have seized on the fact that President Obama, who will have the right to appoint the replacement justice with the "advice and consent" of The Senate for another eleven months, is a lame duck president right now to prevent him from making the nomination that it is not just his prerogative, but his right and his duty.  The argument--a very "Scalian" argument I might add--is that the American people should decide who is qualified to make that nomination in the coming presidential election, and that tradition has made it so...like the filibuster's use to obstruct everything that the minority party doesn't like.  But that argument conveniently ignores the fact that the American people have already spoken on that issue...in 2008, and they repeated themselves in 2012.  In fact, polls show that if President Obama were running for office again, which he can't, he would beat either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton by nearly thirty points.  Thus, given that no Republican other than Donald Trump can get even twenty percent of that party's votes--and no one wants Donald Trump to appoint the next Supreme Court justice--Obama's judgment on the subject is what the American people endorse.  This "voice of the people" pretext that conservatives are arguing is actually the petard by which they are hoisting themselves, to paraphrase the immortal bard of Avon.  And that's why the Republicans won't win the presidency in 2016.  They keep doing the same thing, and in the end they wind up apologizing for it.  Casuistry is not a political strategy.  It is just hypocrisy, and even Republicans...for the most part...don't like it.  You can't trust a casuist, which is essentially like saying you can't trust a liar.

I predict that the Republicans in The Senate--led by the chief casuist, Mitch McConnell--will see the error of their ways just as they did on the issue of shutting down the government over the budget.  But they won't do it until they have fired their foot-shooting pistol one more time, and they we'll all be safe from a would-be Republican president.  Go to it Mitch.  Do your worst.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

We are living in an era in which starting a life is not easy for the young.  It has always been a challenge for the many of us who have no particular direction in mind, but it is a singular challenge today, and as technology continues to winnow away areas of employment, we socio-economic wanderers become an ever increasing demographic.  I believe that the 2016 presidential election will turn on that point as the New Hampshire primary and the Iowa caucuses did.  The young are becoming the possessors of our society as the baby-boom generation fades into retirement and eternity, and they are disaffected.  So when Hillary Clinton says that she is a pragmatist who doesn't want to make promises she can't keep, she is not evincing a trait that people under thirty will admire.  What they want their political leader to be is someone who, as Bobby Kennedy said, dreams things that never were and says why not.  What Kennedy characterized as the obverse--seeing things as they are and saying why, but by implication failing to aspire to confronting and fixing them at all costs--is the defeatist attitude that Hillary Clinton projects, and a generation that cannot afford to fail will not accept it.  Further, they will not elect someone who does.

Donald Trump has perfected the polemic art of projecting the ability to confront all odds and obstacles with a sanguinary political rhetoric to match his sanguineous countenance while never saying how.  And a large contingent of our polity has endorsed his hollow cry for change, which he bases solely on his assurance that we should trust him because he can make the deal.  Bernie Sanders--and in the interest of full disclosure, I intend to vote for him every chance I get--has mastered pointing out that there are general phenomena that are inimical to the prosperity of not just generation X, but all of us down here in the bottom 80%, and like Trump, he has garnered the support of a substantial constituency.  But Hillary Clinton seems to be content to tread the middle ground between Trump's bullying bloviation and Sanders' righteous indignation, which is nothing better than taking a pass on the issue of change.  It is not that the young want a fist shaker and a saber rattler.  What they want is someone who is committed to trying to institute change, and to persist in the face of reactionary obduracy from those who now are in control.  The irony in that fact is that Barrack Obama beat her the same way in 2008, but all she took from that defeat was the need for a campaign organization, which means nothing now, and wouldn't have meant anything to Obama in 2008, without a message, like "Yes, we can."  No, we can't is no substitute, even if it is the adult thing to say.  The brashness of youth, which Bernie Sanders has--perhaps in surfeit, but to his loyalists it is only too much of a good thing--will not be overshadowed by Hillary Clinton's plea to wait a minute.  No one wants to hear why an aspiration is impractical; everyone wants to hear a commitment to at least try to overcome the obstacles, but Clinton seems so risk averse that such a stirring promise would now ring hollow as it fell from her lips.  Hillary Clinton is yesterday.  Paradoxically, seventy-four year old Bernie Sanders, or God forbid, Donald Trump is today, and my guess is that one of them will be our next president.

If I were running Clinton's campaign, I would have her read Ted Kennedy's eulogy of his brother Bobby, paying special attention to the quotation of a stump speech that Bobby probably gave a hundred times or more.  That is where why versus why not dichotomy comes from.  When Kennedy uttered those words on the stump, they may have been just a rhetorical flourish, but they were inspiring in a way that is virtually universal, the way the Obama's "yes, we can" mantra was.  People never tire of hearing someone try to inspire them to participate in great change, but they soon tire of people who do nothing but defend the past, and if Clinton doesn't learn that fast, and learn how to project the image of an agent for change who will not be denied, she is doomed to repeat the history with which she seems to be unfamiliar.  And it must be noted that the fact that the words in question may not be anything of substance, they are forerunners of deeds that in many cases are profound rather than being just an empty plea for the fulfillment of personal ambition.  Even if she had palpable laurels on which to rest, resting on them would not be enough.

Satchel Page said that we should never look back because something might be gaining on us.  But Hillary Clinton had better, because her past is gaining on her.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

New Hampshire primary day is here and it looks like Trump and Sanders will be the winners.  Though this primary doesn't determine who will be nominated by a long shot, the trends that are being manifested in the presumable result are long standing, and in that the New Hampshire primary will most likely just reify what the polls have been saying all along in the Republican Party, and for some time of late in the Democratic, we may be looking at a preview of the November election.  While I am happy about the Democratic prospect, the Republican give me a sense of foreboding.  Bernie Sanders has to convince a lot of people that his philosophy is sound, but Trump? Maybe not so many.

While Bernie Sanders appeals to an obviously substantial sector of the discontented populace, Trump does too, though perhaps not the same ones.  But Trump rides on a rail that has become quite popular among the non-thinking, "patriotic" body politic.  He is the very embodiment of what has come to be known as "American Exceptionalism."  It is an odious idea in my opinion, not because I don't want to live in the United States, but because it is a conceit that brands us throughout the rest of the world.  And while the rest of the world wants what we have and wants us to defend it, it does so with a certain kind of subtle, almost sub rosa loathing.  That phenomenon is what makes ISIL so successful in its recruiting efforts, and it is what makes American tourists the laughing stock of the old world.  We are seen as spoiled rich people who take everything for granted and display a sort of entitlement that no one else in the world can afford.  We are a well endowed country in a world in which the vast majority of the people are not only not well endowed, if they are endowed at all, they are disenfranchised as well.  That is something that Sanders supporters understand, but Trump supporters think it is their right, and what worries me is the count.  How many of them are there, and how many of us?  If it turns out that there are more of them, we might wind up with a Trump-Sanders presidential race and a Trump presidency.  We might wind up where we were during the Nixon years when the purported silent majority took it upon themselves to plague those of us who did not agree with them that "my country right or wrong" is emblematic of patriotism.  We might wind up again with a groundswell of support for American imperialism and dominion over the rest of the world because those who believe in American exceptionalism also believe that God is on their side.  They are as committed as the ISIL lunatics who think that God is on theirs, and the fact that they call their God Allah is a distinction almost without a difference in some respects.  There is not argument to be made against blind faith, whether it is faith in a Muslim caliphate or an American empire.  Those on the outside reap the same whirlwind.

So, though I am optimistic about the coming political year, there is room for fear.  Trump is supposed to have toppled into the political abyss by now according to all those of us who laughed when he demonstrated what seemed the embarrassing conceit that he would be running for president, but here he is...still ahead.  And Sanders has had a similar history.  What started out seemingly solely as an effort to bring certain issues to the fore...a symbolic campaign if not a shambolic one...gradually became a juggernaut, and its first casualty might be the then two times unfortunate Hillary Clinton.  The political establishment will have two plates of crow to eat, and on election day, we Americans will get just what we deserve.  What I fear is that we deserve Donald Trump, and I would venture to guess that I'm not alone.  A Trump presidency would be a " 'uge" disaster, and it would unresponsive to any criticism, as the imperious Donald is.  And worst of all, that man would carry "the button" with him wherever he went, presumably quite often to one or another of his golf courses.  At least his focus, fortunately, won't be on running the country.

In the end, Rooseveldt's exhortation that all we have to fear is fear itself won't do this time.  If Trump does become president, we will be lucky if we can avoid war somewhere: again in Iraq, in Syria, Crimea and Ukraine, or even in Russia or China.  Trump is a bully, and someone is bound to resist his self-proclaimed strong-arm practices.  I don't think Vlad the Putin is going to be as impressed by some billionaire piker who could have left daddy's legacy in the bank and been as rich as he is now, and avoided the three bankruptcies and the fraternal loans that it took him to get here.  As to the President of Mexico, we have as much to lose from a rent in the fabric of our international relations with that country as they do.  Don't forget that Mexico is an oil exporting country, and we are an oil importer...still...even though our petroleum giants are now going to be able to export petroleum for the first time in several decades.  Then add in the relationships that so many of our manufacturing corporations have with Mexico and its labor supple, and the idea of Trump bullying President Nieto into building some preposterous wall to keep Mexicans out of the United States looks that much more absurd.

Even with all that, Trump isn't the idle threat we all though he was in the beginning of his run.  Reason seems to have nothing to do with it.  So I would suggest that those of us who see Trump as the threat that he is start wringing out hands now.  It will be good practice if it turns out that our fears are justified.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

The Iowa caucuses are done, and it's good news for Democrats all around.  Ted Cruz beat Donald Trump in a fashion adequate to take Trump's nomination out of the realm of certainty and to siphon off some of the winners only luster with which he has burnished his ruddy cheeks.  I don't think Trump could be elected president, but then I don't understand why he got even one vote, never mind millions, so I'm not sure my opinion on the subject has persuasive value.  Cruz however has less of a chance than Barry Goldwater, and Goldwater  had virtually no chance even when he was alive, and I feel very comfortable opining that someone whom no one likes outside of those in distant right field can't become president regardless of lunatic fervor.  (Goldwater wanted to drop atomic weapons in Vietnam to defoliate the trees so that we could see the Viet Cong, just as Cruz wants to "carpet bomb" ISIL controlled areas to kill them all, not to mention every civilian around, whom we are trying to protect from ISIL by carpet bombing them.)  On the Democratic side, Sanders and Clinton finished up in a virtual tie with Clinton winning what I would call a TKO in the case of the Iowa caucuses.  That's only slightly more than nothing considering that the state of Iowa is not reflective of American sentiments generally, and the caucus system is so susceptible to manipulation based on personal presence, that is, showing up for coffee more than anyone else, Iowa's vote of confidence is meaningless, and I believe that electoral history demonstrates that proposition.  So now, the last real poll has been taken, meaningless as it is, and we get down to brass tacks.  There will be more polls, taken over the phone by everyone from Quinnipiac University to the Pew Trust, but as to a poll in which people actually have to do what they think they should, Iowa was  the last there will be in 2016.  So, where are we now.

I think we are getting closer to the probability of a Democratic president as of 2017, though there is still a long way to go; we've got a good start on it with the Republican outcome in Iowa.  It showed that Trump can be beaten, and it reiterates the point made by the aforementioned Goldwater in 1964...inadvertently: it's hard to get elected if you represent the lunatic fringe.  But, let's assume that a Democrat will win only if the party picks the right Democrat.  Hillary Clinton could probably beat any Republican, emails, Wall Street connections and Benghazi not withstanding.  For all her failings, she is middle left in her thinking except when it comes to money, of which she has plenty.  So, she would probably be as good for most of us as her husband was, though while Bill likes to make himself out to be the people's man, he did plenty for the monied few as well.  What passed for "welfare reform" was really the gutting of the program itself for the people who need it most and longest as well as for some other programs, like unemployment insurance.  That's what he gave to get tax reform, such as it was.  Before Clinton, a person who was chronically unemployed could try to get work, but he wouldn't have to worry about starving after trying for a given period of time.  Now, once hard times create unemployment that persists for more than a year, the continuingly unemployed have to rely on the warm heartedness of congress, which is an oxymoron when the Republicans are in control, for renewals of unemployment compensation eligibility.  As to tax reform, it is true that he presided over the return of marginal tax rates on earnings to pre-Reagan levels, but he left those who live on capital gains--that is the now-infamous 1%--untouched as to their taxation rate of approximately half the rate of the average American and a quarter of the rate of the upper-middle class, which creates most of the jobs in this country.  As to Hillary, when Martin O'Malley got into the race and said in his announcement that he advocated the reenactment of the Glass-Steagall Act I thought that his point would become a battle cry and Hillary, assuming she emerged as the number one of the party, would have to pick up the standard, but I have heard almost nothing about reenactment since then, and if no one mentions it, I doubt that Hillary will, which brings us to Bernie Sanders and the possibility--seemingly real now--that he could be the Democratic nominee.

At almost seventy years old, I don't see seventy four as old enough to be an issue in presidential politics, but most of America is younger than me, so I see age as being a problem for him.  Of course, if he chooses a vice presidential nominee whom everybody loves, that probably won't be a problem.  But then there's the whole "democratic socialist" thing.  That phrase will hang on him like an albatross, which means that dyed-in-the-wool Democrats will still vote for him, and of course Republicans won't, but neither will a substantial portion of the independents, and they will decide who our next president will be.  How a committed socialist, democratic or not, will appeal to them is anybody's guess.  Of course, most of them are like us down here in the bottom 80%, and Bernie says all the right things from our perspective, so if he could get 80% of the independents, well, it's President Bernie for us, America.  But the Republicans managed to turn the country--we've favored a single payer system of health care for decades with the exception of the four years just after the passage of the Affordable Care Act--against "Obamacare," which was the closest thing to single payer that they couldn't prevent a Democratic president from accomplishing.  So they could possibly turn a majority against some form of equality in taxation, and that is the key to income inequality because only government programs can have the desired effect.  The top 10% aren't going to cut us in on prosperity if they don't have to, and they're the only alternative government action.

I'm still going to vote for Bernie in our state primary, and I will still talk him up whenever I get the chance, but I have to admit, we Democrats have a choice to make.  Do we want certainty or do we want what we believe in.  What a world.  What a country.

Your friend,

Mike