Friedman of the Plains

Here we go again. On Senator Mitch McConnell's decision to invoke the “nuclear option” to abolish the filibuster on presidential Supreme Court nominations so that Neil Gorsuch may be placed on SCOTUS, I give you John McCain, maverick, on the ramifications. “Idiot, whoever says that is a stupid idiot, who has not been here and seen what I’ve been through and how we were able to avoid that on several occasions,” McCain said Wednesday, recalling past efforts to defuse these judicial confirmation wars. “And they are stupid and they’ve deceived their voters because they are so stupid.” Even though there's some discussion over whether this really is the end of the Republic, good on ya, John! You believe this--country over party, institutional integrity over short-term gain, process over politics, sanity over stupidity-- Wait, what's this? Even so, McCain will support McConnell’s move to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for reaching a final vote on approving Supreme C...

Yesterday afternoon, an hour or so before closing, a man at Old School Bagel Cafe, here in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sat in a booth by himself. Late 20s, thin, stubble, great complexion, short black, shiny, thinning hair, he was calm, scribbling in a tiny notebook, the kind New York Review of Books gives out free with paid subscriptions, only instead of red, his was black. On the table, as well, one larger notebook, two Qur'ans, a plastic cup of water and a leather briefcase. His writing was smooth, almost robotic--purposeful, yet not rushed. One of the holy books was open. He didn't drink the water, but he must have at some point, for it was only a third full. Was I the only one who noticed? Was there anything to notice? I saw the owner of the shop, laughing with three others, at another booth near the window. We're friends. He looked in my direction. He smiled at me; I smiled back. We were all smiling. The man finished writing and stood up, walked to the briefcase--his ...

"Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world. These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing. We stand with our allies across the globe to condemn this intolerable attack."--Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world. These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a “red line” against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing. We stand with our allies across the globe to condemn this...

He spends his mornings, alone in a big house, watching television, playing with his phone. He surrounds himself with sycophants and crooks and disgraced incompetents and white supremacists.  When he bankrupts companies, he does so with equal parts aplomb and denial. He is to grammar what Jim Nantz is to Vin Scully. Tone deaf, he can be found playing golf and bringing back to life deceased American icons. To his followers he is a paragon of virtue, a voracious reader, and a top-notch negotiator. He looks at his detractors and says NYET.  He has the best ties, the best words, the best children. Once, at a military school, he dreamt of conquest, but settled instead for refurbishing the Commodore Hotel with a loan his father co-signed. He knows heroes when he sees one, and he hasn't seen one.  He has slept with more women than you, many more. He has cheated on all of them, but they deserved it. His hair is glorious and manly and as real as the America on his hats. He is clodd...

"In the case, a truck driver named Alphonse Maddin discovered on the highway that the brakes on his trailer had frozen. He pulled off the side of the road and called for help, which never came. The heater in his cab failed, and Maddin soon began exhibiting the symptoms of hypothermia. His bosses told him to wait with his crippled trailer which, even if Maddin were capable of driving safely, which he wasn't, would have been a hazard to his fellow motorists because the frozen b rakes on the trailer would have held his speed down to 15 miles per hour. The company fired Maddin. He sued, and won, but Gorsuch  dissented ." Surrounded  by business executives in the White House before he signed the order, Trump claimed "excessive regulation is killing jobs" and "driving companies out of our country like never before." He said the measure is "one of the many ways that we're going to get real results" in scaling back regulations. P...

Yevgeny A. Yevtushenko After the killings in Blacksburg, Virginia in 2007, I ran into Fran Ringold , Oklahoma's poet laureate (yeah, we have them), in a parking lot at the University of Tulsa. At the time, she was editing Nimrod International Journal, the university's literary magazine. Would I, she wanted to know, come to a campus-wide memorial later that night and read one of my public radio essays? There were poets, Indian drummers on blankets, musicians, interpretative dancers performing that night. I not only felt out of place, I was. A microphone was set up and I read a piece about walking around the TU campus and seeing promise and opportunity, entitlement, innocence, arguments, people breaking up, tears, and how we were all connected to all of that, to every conversation, every word, every action, every building, every moment, every tragedy, including Blacksburg (and, for that matter, Bergen-Belsen) and concluded with something David Letterman, of all people, ...

This article cites a 2002 interview with Vice President Pence — who has called himself an “evangelical Catholic” — saying that he “never eats alone with a woman other than his wife,” and that he doesn’t attend events serving alcohol unless she is with him as well.  Sheik Hilali was quoted as saying: "If you take out uncovered meat and place it outside ... without cover, and the cats come to eat it ... whose fault is it, the cats' or the uncovered meat's? The uncovered meat is the problem. If she was in her room, in her home, in her hijab [the headdress worn by some Muslim women], no problem would have occurred."

"I'm a huge baseball fan, huge. I knew George Steinbrenner, so I'm very much appreciated in all sports worlds. I owned the New Jersey Generals, a great franchise, ahead of its time, and I knew Ali very well, so, believe me when I say, I am Mr. Sports, love the players, the athletes, the front office people, the people in the cheap seats, the games, including baseball, where I used to watch The Mets, even when they played in that horrendous stadium, near LaGuardia, a disgusting airport, which I told them to destroy and eventually they did and they're hugely successful now after listening to me. A great city like New York deserves a great ballpark--look at Alabama U. and the Astrodome--and I'm going to encourage more cities to build them.  I loved the Mets, too, even though I knew Madoff was a crook, knew it before anyone and warned against letting him buy into the team. They would have been smarter if they listened to me. So, #FakeMedia is wrong, as usual, ab...

Scott Pruitt, EPA Administrator  Back in 2015, Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma's former attorney general and chief dictation officer for the energy industry, sued Colorado because ... "The fact remains — Colorado marijuana continues to flow into Oklahoma, in direct violation of federal and state law. Colorado should do the right thing and stop refusing to take reasonable steps to prevent the flow of marijuana outside of its border. And the Obama administration should do its job under the Constitution and enforce the Controlled Substances Act. Until they do, Oklahoma will continue to utilize every law enforcement tool available to it to ensure that the flow of illegal drugs into our state is stopped.” Yes, because three Alpha Phi Deltas at the University of Colorado cutting their Freshman Writing Seminar to get high back at the frat house presents a clear and present danger to the good people of Oklahoma City. Pruitt, though, is a states' rights kind of guy, but apparentl...

Now that 36-year-old Jared Kushner has been asked by his father-in-law to be his closest presidential advisor, to  broker a Mideast Peace, to cure the opioid crisis, reform care to veterans, and  overhaul the very workings of government (none of those jobs, incidentally, for which he is even remotely qualified), you have to wonder about poor Fredo, uh Eric. JARED I've always taken care of you Eric ERIC Taken care of me. You're my brother-in-law and you take care of me. Did you ever think about that -- did you ever once think about that? Send Eric off to play golf during the inauguration . Send Eric off to pick up some award for drinking wine ! Let Eric to take care of some Mickey Mouse property in Uruguay !  Send Eric out to take a picture of his ballot . I'm his real son, Jared, and I was stepped over. I should be advising him and meeting with Russian bankers and Netanyahu and hanging with Bannon and lying in bed all day on Saturday (or whatever it is y...

Right after the election, this annoying meme started showing up about how wanting Trump to fail was like wanting the pilot of your plane to fail. It was nothing like that, of course, for if your pilot had a momentary lapse in judgement, your plane would be equipped with the latest technology and (you hope anyway) an equally experienced and trained co-pilot who would say, as Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger said about US Airways Flight 1549 moments before landing it smoothly on top of the Hudson River, "My aircraft." If Trump fails, we have Steve Bannon and a twitter feed.  More to the point, Trump failing is the best thing that could happen to and for us. For ... If he fails to place Jeanine Ferris Pirro or Andrew Peter Napolitano on SCOTUS, America wins. If he fails to gut the NIH and PBS and handcuff NASA in its study of climate change, America wins. If he fails to gum up the Affordable Care Act, America wins. If he fails to pass a tax cut w...

In December 1950, Woody Guthrie and his family rented an apartment in the Beach Haven apartment complex in Brooklyn, New York, a property developed and managed by Fred C. Trump, father of Donald J. Trump. They moved out of “Bitch Heaven,” as Guthrie called it, in 1954, due to his illness, around the time he wrote “Old Man Trump.”  What follows is mostly fictional. Mr. Guthry, I have to tell you, I don’t send a lot of letters, but they’re great when I do. The best words, punctuation, typed on the most expensive typewriter—it’s an IBM Selectric. You probably can’t afford the one I have. It’s a special model—and you probably still use a manual, like an Underwood—but I can assure you they’re superstar letters. Great thoughts, sentences, they look fantastic. People notice. And I care about people, very much, but I’m taking the gloves off—no more Mr. Nice Guy—though I’m always nice, extremely nice, ask anyone, but you don’t deserve nice because you’re not nice. I know you’re in...

Oklahoma First District Representative Jim Bridenstine, who once stood by like a blob of Play-Doh while a constituent talked of executing President Obama, had a really bad week. A proud member of the Freedom Caucus, but one who also wants the NASA gig, Bridenstine came out for AHCA earlier this week, thinking, no doubt, he'd curry favor with Trump and because someone somewhere might still get a free condom from a large fishbowl at Planned Parenthood under the Affordable Care Act. Most important to me, this bill prohibits funds from going to the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, and redirects federal funding to Community Health Centers. Most important? Really? There was more. In my judgment though, this is the opening legislative salvo of the Trump Presidency, and we cannot let it fail when we do not have a shot at a better option.  Oops. So AHCA lost spectacularly and the president to whom Bridenstine was transparently sucking up for a better ...

The worst part of today was AHCA failed not because Republicans in the House thought the bill too draconian, but because they thought it wasn't draconian enough. The Freedom Caucus --and for the love of Christ, we should demand back that name--thinks insurance guidelines that require health coverage for people with pre-existing conditions (and those, you know, with vaginas) and provide minimum standards for all Americans must be derailed; otherwise, it would be the banana peel on which the country slips and summersaults into socialism and decay. Donald Trump, the president, and the GOP, the majority party in America, were humiliated today and revealed, once again (if such a notice were necessary), to have no balls, no heart and no conscience; so, yeah, it was a good day, but considering he and it are not going anywhere (Trump, in facts, wants ACA to fail, to blow up, for Americans to suffer), it was also a lousy one. America won and they're not happy about it.

Legislative Insanity,  Part the Infinity It keeps getting worse I have argued on these pages for years the GOP in Oklahoma throws cash to the luxury boxes and sanctimony to the cheap seats, and as someone who usually sits on the third base side, in general admission, I have found this to be a maddening, deplorable, cynical, and sycophantic spectacle.  To watch how easily these two groups are played and duped, to see the legislative sops—alternately hilarious and heartless—being thrown to each of them is to know that much of the GOP in Oklahoma is unmoored and, just as troubling (if not more so), the party’s base is largely unconcerned about the unmooring.  Let’s begin with Governor Mary Fallin’s  State of the State address  last month and the lowering of the bar of effective governance to subterranean levels. A thriving, prosperous economy must have a skilled, educated workforce. That starts with good teachers in the classrooms pr...

The GOP will now slink back to Mordor, tear off the heads of innocent cockatoos, and craft a health bill even more pernicious than before.