The Carpentariat

Many of you were right about the changed photo, to FDR. For reasons I won't or rather can't explain, it screwed up photo-less posts on Facebook. So it's back to the fedora-covered, Merlot-sipping wine guy. 

Opinion, please

Do you like this new layout?

(I still need to increase the font size and narrow the main body, which I'll do as soon as I understand how. Update: Please bear with me. I have had to ask Typepad about these procedures — and they're on the case, as I write — because 90 minutes of trying on my own has produced nothing but giant goose eggs. But that's ok. I need them. 

Fresh posts below.)

Trump's desperation is rising

Sorry, I don’t buy Rep. Tlaib’s tears. I have watched her violence, craziness and, most importantly, WORDS, for far too long. Now tears? She hates Israel and all Jewish people. She is an anti-Semite. She and her 3 friends are the new face of the Democrat Party. Live with it!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 20, 2019

Anti-Semitism is "the new face of the Democrat Party" — so you must vote for a lunatic?

It won't work, Donnie.

From the Trump-despising, conservative website, The Bulwark:

"The most recent Pew data … track[ed] Trump’s disapproval ratings (48 percent among whites, 55 percent among men, 79 percent among Hispanics, 58 percent among Catholics, 55 percent of those with some college but not a four year degree as well as 55 percent of those with a high school degree or less, 55 percent among seniors and 17 percent disapproval among Republicans and Republican leaning Independents)."

What more, Fox News' August poll found that Trump's disapproval rating was "up 5 percentage points to 56 percent … but it’s up above 50 percent for almost every demographic: 64 percent among independents, 53 percent among men, 46 percent among white men, 53 percent of those older than 45, 61 percent among suburban women (59 percent of women overall), and 55 percent among whites with a college degree. Trump’s disapproval ratings even inched up to 11 percent among Republicans … and a full 26 percent among self- described conservatives.... He has a whopping 71 percent of moderate voters disapproving as well."

That makes my day. How 'bout you?

The Democratic frontrunner, 7-Up

CNN headline: Joe Biden regains double-digit lead over 2020 Democratic field

"[He's] up 7 points compared with a late June CNN survey," to me, a most pleasing upside. "No other candidate has made meaningful gains over that time." (Survey conducted by SSRS, rated "A-" by 538.)

On the gratifyingly negative side is "a 12-point decline in support for California Sen. Kamala Harris, who stood at 17% support in the June poll but now has the backing of 5% of potential Democratic voters." Karma, baby. 

And on the rather predictable but still fascinating side?

"Among those under age 45, 56% say it's more important to nominate a candidate who shares your positions on issues, while 66% of those age 45 and older say it's more important to nominate someone who can defeat Trump. Among whites without college degrees, 49% say it's more important to nominate someone who shares their view on issues while … among whites with a college degree, 65% say it's more important to beat Trump."

The young are idealistic, always have been; but as they age — and policy disappointment follows policy disappointment, since pluralism is by definition multisided — virtually all but Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren replace their idealism with pragmatism.

That's a shame, really, for Warren. I like her, I like most of her policy positions, and I like her youthful enthusiasm. But older voters actually vote, while younger voters tend to drift from the voting booth on Election Day. And then — as part of the pragmatism thing — there's the electability factor, wherein Warren's is 10, and Biden's is 90 (my estimate).

One needn't like Biden to vote for him. One merely needs to feel an intense dislike of Trump — which just about everyone but Wayne LaPierre and white nativists already do.

"Can't Anybody Here Play This Game [Honestly]?"

The Times:

"Officials inside the administration have drafted a white paper exploring a payroll tax reduction, which would seek to boost [Trump's roaring, fret-free] economy by immediately injecting more
money into workers’ paychecks….

"A White House official said more tax cuts were on the table, 'but cutting payroll taxes is not something that is under consideration at this time.'"

Then what in hell is it doing on the table?

This is, I must assume, yet another example of the Trump administration's pathetic speciousness — and so soon. Recall that only Sunday did Trump tell reporters that journalistic rumors of the Chinese tech firm Huawei — which the administration considers a national security threat — receiving a U.S. trade extension were way off the mark; "actually," he said, "it’s the opposite" of fake-news reporting.

Next day, the Commerce Department, under the debatable leadership of Wilbur Ross, approved the extension to Huawei Technologies.

Is anyone in this administration capable of telling the truth? Just once?

Gun insanity, Trump- and NRA-style

The president has returned, unsurprisingly, to the lazy refuge of mental illness and guns, after having suggested that more stringent, universal background checks are needed. That, we all knew was coming. Resoluteness and issue-consistency are to Trump what honesty and integrity were to Bernie Madoff.

What I didn't know — perhaps you did — was that "a week after taking office, Trump rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at making it more difficult for mentally ill people to buy firearms" (Washington Post). The insanity of it all begs emphasized repetition: A week after taking office, Trump rolled back Obama-era regulations aimed at making it more difficult for mentally ill people to buy firearms.

No doubt Trump reversed Obama's perfectly sensible regulation only because some aide let him know that Obama had instated the regulation. Trump's vindictiveness knows no boundaries. At any rate, he's now advocating what he himself spitefully unraveled.

Another commonly known Trumpian priority on military-style weapons indulgence is what a Democratic aide told the Post: that Trump intends to run for reelection by tub-thumping to only his fanatical, gun-happy right-wing base, hence advocating universal background checks is, for him, verboten.

"Trump’s campaign commissioned a poll on guns after this month’s shootings," reports the Post, "and his political advisers warned him that there is little support for significant action among Republican voters, and even some Democrats." I just may quit this hardscrabble writing business and seek a high-paying position as one of Trump's political advisers. Poll or no poll, all I'd need do is tell the president the bloody obvious, and cash my checks (assuming, you know, Trump didn't stiff me).

As for any centrists out there who might be sane enough to vote for Trump's general-election opponent, based on Trump's insanity on guns, the (less well-paid) Democratic aide added that the president, in league with Mitch McConnell, is cynically playing the disingenuous "game of hot potato" — wherein both pols contend that the other guy must initiate stronger gun regulations. Said the aide: "Trump says it’s on Congress to lead [and McConnell has insisted it's up to the president]…. That’s an easy way for nothing to ever get done."

Moreover, any day with the NRA is a sunshiny day of blinding, Platonic enlightenment. "NRA officials have repeatedly told the president and senior White House officials that universal background checks won’t do much to prevent mass shootings," the Post alerts us. It has instead "argued that Trump should focus on prosecuting gun crimes."

Upon reading this, I was shocked. I've been living in a cave, seeing nothing but shadows. Yet my ignorance of most things in this world never, I thought, included the apparent fact that the federal government had, at some vague point, ceased prosecuting gun crimes. In addition, I suddenly found the NRA's thinking on this issue — "that universal background checks won’t do much to prevent mass shootings" — to be irresistible. After all, what's the difference between 255 mass shootings and, say, 245? A piffle, my friends, a mere piffle.

On a non-sarcastic note, let us accede to the Democratic aide's conviction that "nothing [will] ever get done" — not, that is, as long as we've a gutless Republican president and an equally gutless Republican Senate leader in possession of more than 38 fellow members. For the next two years, if not longer, just sit back in your easy chair, flip on cable news, and watch the daylong coverage of the latest mass slaughter.

Self-Delusion as a palliative for madness?

Not being a psychiatrist, I've no informed idea if Trump's chronic mendaciousness and self-delusions alleviate or aggravate his poor mental health. As a layman I would think that both of his worrisome disabilities at least temporarily prevent him from going altogether bughouse insane. But, also as a layman, as far as I know he is already there.

Great cohesion inside the Republican Party, the best I have ever seen. Despite all of the Fake News, my Poll Numbers are great. New internal polls show them to be the strongest we’ve had so far! Think what they’d be if I got fair media coverage!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2019

In partial support of my initial, amateur diagnosis — that his undeniable chronic mendaciousness and self-delusions just might be good things — if Trump were to confess that "my Poll Numbers are dreadful," do you not agree that this prehensile presidential primate would be dangling from a White House chandelier, obscenely screaming even dumber policy commands and dropping bombs on innocents somewhere?

So for the innocents' sake, please, White House aides, don't show him these, from RealClearPolitics (sorry about the sizing; couldn't be helped):

And from a week before, from Survey USA (which 538 rates "A," as it does Fox News' polling), there's this.

Yes, political polling is volatile. But a trend is developing that very much appears to be irreversible. For everyone's sake, however, don't tell Mad Ludwig. He's trying his self-deluded best to be content, and for the next 14 months, that's the best we can hope for.

The jaw-dropping fakery of Trump's "fake news"

The NY Times (this morning's story/link deleted): Yesterday, Trump "indicated that the Chinese tech giant Huawei, which his administration sees as a national security threat, might not receive an extension of a reprieve that allows American companies to supply it with certain goods despite a ban on such trade….

"Reuters reported late last week that … the Commerce Department is expected to again delay the implementation of its penalty on Huawei on Monday. But Trump on Sunday disputed that notion, telling reporters that 'actually, it’s the opposite' of what has been reported."

The Washington Post: "Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said Monday that his department will grant another  temporary reprieve to Huawei Technologies, delaying the implementation of a penalty on the Chinese tech giant for another 90 days."

Just more besotted disarray by the Trump maladministration. 

The Three Stooges ain't got nothin' on these Two, the Big Guy and stooge Ross.

The ever-turning hamster wheel of the Trump administration

The Trump administration is like rodent in a hamster's wheel, in which every little step it takes is but a repeat of the step it took at precisely that point on the wheel during its previous revolution. This morning, the president re-stepped on the horizontal rod marked "I'll hire only the best people" — most of whom have been the worst, while the few best, or at least competent, have fled or been fired.

For example, today it seems that Trump's former communications director, Anthony "the Mooch" Scaramucci, was one of the best for merely 11 days, until it dawned on Trump that Scaramucci was in fact "a highly unstable 'nut job,'" a man of "gross incompetence," a "mental wreck" who was "bad on TV." Which is to say, Trump hired a communications director who self-evidently would be a communications disaster. Trump's customary excuse: "I barely knew him until his 11 days of [service]." Hence did he blindly fill a critical administration position.

....got fired. Wrote a very nice book about me just recently. Now the book is a lie? Said his wife was driving him crazy, “something big” was happening with her. Getting divorced. He was a mental wreck. We didn’t want him around. Now Fake News puts him on like he was my buddy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 19, 2019

(Scaramucci's hitherto, tweeted reply: "My wife @DeidreScaramuc2 response: 'I don’t really like being tweeted at by @potus on a Monday morning but at least I had my coffee!' More to follow . . .")

And yesterday — as well as a week of similarities? On the economy, Trump again tread on the self-exonerating rod labeled "conspiracy." (As the Times' Maggie Haberman notes: First there was his 2016 claim that if he lost the election, it was "rigged"; then came three million "illegals" to steal the popular vote from him; then emerged the imaginary, mischief-making "deep state"; and of course for more than two years he has repeatedly trampled the Stalinist rod of honest reporters as enemies of the people — all without so much as a smidgeon of evidence, logic, or human decency.)

"The Fake News Media is doing everything they can to crash the economy because they think that will be bad for me and my re-election," tweeted Trump last week. He's also accusing (like Scaramucci) his chosen Fed chair, Jerome Powell, of being a conspiratorial part of an economy-wrecking crew. And if the economy indeed goes south, "it would [also] be because I have to take on China and some other countries," said Trump yesterday, pointing at our erstwhile European allies, who are bigly behaving "very badly."

Thus is Trump attempting to shield himself with a troika of conspiratorial humbug.

Meanwhile, two of his team of economic nitwittery appeared on the morning talk shows. Larry Kudlow echoed the president's allegation of Fed skulduggery — Trump's economy "is kind of a miracle, because we face severe monetary restraint from the Fed," said Kudlow on "Fox News Sunday" — while, appearing on CNN's "State of the Union," trade-sorcerer Peter Navarro went on another of the Trump administration's jihads against academic and institutional expertise.

As Haberman reports, Navarro "dismissed a study from researchers at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the International Monetary Fund and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston that showed that the cost of Mr. Trump’s tariffs had 'fallen largely on the U.S.,' not on China and other countries, as the administration has asserted." Said Navarro: “There’s no evidence whatsoever that American consumers are bearing any of this" cost. And that, naturally, echoes the president: "The tariffs have cost [consumers and businesses] nothing … or certainly very little," he again said yesterday. On CBS' "Face the Nation," Navarro "was asked … to explain a presidential contradiction: If tariffs don’t really hurt U.S. consumers, as Trump likes to claim, then why did he delay tariffs until Dec. 15 out of concern for hurting consumers?" Navarro's answer was characteristically confounding.

Conspiracies, excuses, finger-pointing and clownishness, just a few of the rods of Trump's hamster wheel. Which other rod will he tread today?

What, pray tell, is the future of blogging? (Especially mine.)

The opening lines of the 1648 poem, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time," by the English poet Robert Herrick, are a seemingly self-evident exhortation to all the young to make the most of their youthfulness:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
 Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
 Tomorrow will be dying.

Those lines can apply to all youth, male and female, yet Herrick's primal message — on the Christian sacrament of marriage, for women ("this flower") — was grounded in the fourth and final stanza:

[B]e not coy, but use your time,
 And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
 You may forever tarry.

I add this note merely to prevent any reader's eternal misreading of the first stanza only, which, merrily, is humanly universal. And I quote that first stanza because of Ross Douthat's latest piece, "What Happens in a Recession? Trump loses, Uber evaporates, the social crisis gets worse." Inspired by a tweet from The Atlantic's Derek Thompson — "If you work at WeWork, drive home with Uber, and then order food by DoorDash, you’re engaging with three companies that are projected to lose about $13 billion this year." A recession will unquestionably dynamite quite a few acres of Silicon Valley. Hence in Douthat's latest column, his riff on Herrick: "Gather your Uber rides while ye may …"

All of which leads, selfishly, on my part, to Douthat's sixth prediction on recessionary fallout:

"To end close to home, my profession will be shellacked. As with [other] social trends..., the economic foundation for professional journalism has continued to erode amid relative economic plenty; midsize daily newspapers keep shrinking and closing, web start-ups struggle to find ad [and reader] revenue, and the business of online subscriptions rewards giants like [the NY Times] but so far almost nobody else. For many newspapers and webzines struggling to make the economics of the business work, a slump now could be simply fatal."

Tell me about it, Ross, though no telling is needed. Who fails to grasp this financial fundamental? It's already bad out there — that is, where I reside, in opinion journalism blogging — and it's getting worse. It seems to me that Twitter has been the most causative. Although online, politically motivated readers once read blogs, they have fled by the millions to Tweetland, which requires the intellectual focus of an aardvark.

Twitter is simple and time-saving and enthrallingly bloodletting, while a mere 300- or 400-word blog post — let alone a column-length post, such as this one — no matter how well written, is now an intolerably time-consuming drag. It also might ask the "reader" to think. Heaven forfend. Speaking statistically and more objectively, for greater clarity, I can tell you that since the entrenchment of Twitter's cyber-supremacy, my readership has dropped by nearly half; correspondingly, this site's revenue.

Perhaps it's presumptuous of me to include myself in Douthat's shellacked-coming profession. But I think not. We're both opinion writers, albeit Douthat's public spotlight dims mine to an ember. We both ponder the political pickle we're all in, and we both occasionally digress: Douthat to religion, I to literature or music. Our only authorial disparity lies in the inescapable reality that while my and Douthat's profession will be shellacked, Douthat himself will go forth unbruised. He works for the online subscription giant, the NYT. This writer labors on an undemanding, dwarfish island. Twitter can bombard blogs, but it will never conquer the Times and the Post, both of which also retain the power of tradition.

Don't mistake; I'm not sniveling or sobbing. I do mourn the evident decline of opinion journalism's readership of blogs, but change is as ineluctable as Trump's coming doom. "All is flux, nothing stays still," observed the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who added, ironically, that "change is the only constant in life." Still, permit me my mourning — another unpleasant constant in everyone's life.

Well, if you've made it this far — making you one of the idiosyncratic few — hasn't this been a happy discussion? Sorry to be so dreary on a Sunday. On the lighter and closing side, I have but clues as to where this blog will financially go, but I know when it will go: just before my ashes. The sagacious Samuel Johnson noted that "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money." I agree, though the equally sagacious Emily Dickinson would have added unbreakable habit, which I also possess. Thus as long as a few clams, euros and pounds come in — maybe I should discount that last one, seeing how Britain will soon be poorer than I am — I'll be here. I hope you will be, too.

Trump: Not just underwater damn near everywhere; he's drowning, ocean-depth

A regular reader and dear friend in California sends this: 

And from Mr. Conway, duplicitous neologist Kellyanne's conscientious husband, there's this:

With the economy heading south and manifestly ignorant foreign policies that have cut our allies to one — Israel — would anyone care to explain how Trump can reverse these magnificent trends in only 14 months? Some say gerrymandering could do the trick. But that's a congressional fraud, which, at any rate, failed to help Republicans in 2018. Voter suppression? When you're receiving double-digit "F" grades in, for example, Virginia and Nevada, there's another f-word that fittingly assesses your standing, no matter how undemocratic the GOP chooses to be.   

The Mooch: Trump is "un-American"

"The Mooch has soured bigly on Trump," writes Vanity Fair's William Cohan. Trump is "The Wicked Witch of the West Wing" — "We gotta get some water thrown on him; he’ll start melting," says the president's former, 11-day communications director, Anthony Scaramucci.

In a delightful interview with Cohan, Scaramucci unloads on Trump just as every nervous Republican should be doing. "[The] entire Congress hates his guts" because of his bizarre and erratic behavior, failed policies and potential political fallout, says the Mooch. "The guy’s nuts. We’ve gotta defeat him. Everybody in the Republican Party knows it…. This guy is gonna take us off the rails." Thus does Scaramucci believe that the GOP should find a credible candidate to primary Trump. "And I think we will."

The need for a primary challenger is Scaramucci's singular non sequitur in the interview. Perhaps it was merely an extemporaneous digression, for Scaramucci also predicts that Trump is "gonna drop out of the race…. It’ll be March of 2020. He’ll likely drop out by March of 2020. It’s gonna become very clear that it’s impossible for him to win. And is this the kind of guy that’s gonna want to be that humiliated and lose as a sitting president?… You think this guy’s gonna look at those poll numbers" and risk gargantuan debasement in November?

Ah, but remember, Anthony, "the guy's nuts."

And therein lies Scaramucci's infallible thinking on Trump. "I think the guy is losing it, mentally. He has declining mental faculties; he’s becoming more petulant; he’s becoming more impetuous." Asks VF's Cohan, "But what was the moment the scales actually fell from your eyes?" Here, Scaramucci's infallibility turns even more psychological — perfectly psychological. "The red line was the racism, full-blown racism" — but with a confounding twist. "He can say that he’s not a racist, and I agree with him, okay? And let me explain to you why he’s not a racist, ’cause this is very important. He’s actually worse than a racist. He is so narcissistic, he doesn’t see people as people. He sees them as objects in his field of vision. And so therefore, that’s why he has no empathy…. If you and I were in his field of vision and he had a cold and the two of us had to die for him to get a Kleenex, you’re fucking dead."

Scaramucci, however, goes well beyond psychoanalyzing "this jackass." He looks at Trump's policies and declares them — I'll resort to a cliché — unmitigated disasters. "Number one, we hollowed out our manufacturing, and we allowed these asymmetric trade deals which helped the global system to hurt a large percentage of people in our own country…. Second thing … is that we have to have a propitious balance [which Trump has been whacking away at] between regulation and releasing the animal spirits of the system. The third piece … is you had to reform the tax code. You had the highest corporate taxes in the industrial world. You had to reform the code."

Trump & Co. did, but in the worst possible way. "You could’ve put more middle-class incentives in there, and, you know, you didn’t"; nor did they "need to be doing this level of deficit spending." Scaramucci mentions it not, but with Trump's nearly $2 trillion tax cut and consequent massive deficits, what can the [next] government do fiscally when the [next] almost inevitable recession hits?

Of which Trump is vastly increasing the odds. "Go look at the tweeting and the craziness and the fracturing of the alliances and the irrational Trump trade-tariff roulette," says Scaramucci. "Okay, we’re putting the tariffs on; we’re taking the tariffs off; we’re putting them on; we may take them off. Hey, you can’t run a business like that if you’re a business leader. 'Hey, I gotta stop my capital investing. I don’t know what this guy is doing, because if he — if I start to invest in Mexico and he slaps a 20% tariff down there for some reason that I don’t understand, that’s gonna kill my business in Mexico. Let me wait this guy out.'"

I shall finish by giving Scaramucci the final say — as though I've not given him enough already? — which matches mine in toto.

"I love my country. You may not agree with my political views, you may not like my demeanor or personality, but you can’t say I don’t love my country…. I don’t have Trump derangement syndrome, but what I do have is Trump fatigue syndrome…. Trump is crazy, everything about him is terrible, [so] we gotta do everything we can to defeat him…. He needs to be dismantled because he’s un-American."

I. Hate. The FDA.

Today, Friday, I need to limit my posts to the one below, which, if you're smart, you will skip to immediately, because this shall be nothing but a toxically unmasculine, whining post.

Much of yesterday as well as today has been spent, and may continue to be, on trying to resolve a medication nightmare. For two years I have taken (liquid) opium 6 times a day to limit fluid loss because of severe, chronic diarrhea, which can be an aftereffect of multiple operations to cure ulcerative colitis. In my case, it wasn't cured; I still possess just enough (1 inch) of what I'll call a diseased lower colon (others call it a rectum, but I'm far too rhetorically discreet for that). So the diarrhea is free to march on. Thus the opium, which was quite effective in slowing bowel activity — something physicians have known since Galen.

The FDA, however, has now instructed my insurance carrier that it shall no longer cover the opium — $350-$450 a month, if paid out of pocket, which I could afford as easily as I could afford a new BMW — because this particular agency denies that opium is an effective treatment for chronic diarrhea.

I have therefore determined — and this, not my wimpy medical issues and unmanly bitching, is the point I wish to make here — is that the FDA is full of fucking sociopaths and ignoramuses who give not a fuck about patients who must spend almost every laughable fucking day crapping like a duck. An "alternative" med has been approved by that ungodly bureaucracy, which my hospital administered roughly two years ago(?), without any luck. After 10 days of trying every possible other drug, the doctors finally resorted to the drug of last resort: opium. I was sprung from the hospital on the 11th day, because of opium's effectiveness.

No longer. No more.

I. Hate. The FDA. Bad, bad people. A goddamn drug dealer would have more understanding, compassion, and pharmacological knowledge.

All Trump needs now is Nero's fiddle

Throughout my involuntary yet ultimately refreshing intermission — that is, it included virtually no Trumpian news — I had convinced myself that little to nothing of political importance had been in play. For more than two years we have been subjected to relentlessly aggressive cheerlessness, and I suspected I would reenter the icy, deepest circle of hellish Trumpism once I was well again, which promptly would make me sick again.

I was mistaken. Trump's hell is as demonic as ever, of course, but after my short absence and subsequent reboot of news consumption, I began to believe more fervently that our better angels have finally had enough. This belief, curiously enough, was initiated not by hard news but by none other than the Times' splendid satirist, Gail Collins:

"Forget our endless supply of critical problems and just try to think of a good way to torture Donald Trump. Psychologically. Reasoned criticism never works. We have to go down to his level if we want to get his attention…. If we want to really make him crazy, we ought to start a rumor that he can’t draw a crowd." That, gentle reader, may not require a mere rumor.

After the president's adolescent braggadocio over whose was bigger — to be more precise, his or Beto O'Rourke's El Paso crowd — "he refrained from saying a whole lot about attendance when he spoke in Pennsylvania on Tuesday," continued Collins. "He did peer toward the media section and note that there were 'a lot of people' for an 11 a.m. event. It was a point only slightly dulled by the fact that it was 2:42 in the afternoon."

Trump's attendance was only 5,000 at the Pennsylvania event — thus his relative silence — so "What if the headlines read 'Disappointing Crowd for a Presidential Visit'…? Not responsible journalism," noted Collins, since straight news reporters and editors perform backflips to be "fair," even to unbearable jerks like Trump. "But maybe it’d … leave him curled up in bed, sucking his thumb while somebody else ran the government."

Fact is, however, no one is running the government. I-alone-can-fix-it Trump is at one of his personal resorts on yet another vacation — absent any advisers, who, at any rate, have no idea of what in hell they're doing. Trump has already sacked or fatally alienated those who were competent — e.g., Cohn, McMaster, Mattis — and replaced them with feckless hacks such as Larry Kudlow, John Bolton, and anonymous defense department phantoms.

Enter those note-taking better angels. The latest Fox News poll  (rated "A" by 538) has Joe Biden over Trump by 12 points, Elizabeth Warren by 7, Kamala Harris by 6, and even (please) semi-retired Bernie Sanders by 9. Yes, the point spread will narrow during the general election season. But by then the economy will have tanked even deeper because of the earlier, ominous signal of an "inverse yield curve," which has an eerily accurate record of foretelling economic doom.

Meanwhile, reports the Washington Post, "Mounting signs of global economic distress this week have alarmed President Trump, who is worried that a downturn could imperil his reelection, even as administration officials acknowledge that they have not planned for a possible recession." Good thinking, boys.

Glenn Thrush — who appears to have been released by the Gray Lady from time out because of "sexually inappropriate behavior" — muses that "the choice of Mr. Biden as [President Obama's] hedge against [radical] change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided." Democrats at large aren't profoundly divided — they all just want Trump gone — although their presidential contenders are. "Many candidates, including Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, are urging the party to move far beyond [the Obama] administration’s positions on immigration, criminal justice, health care, the regulation of banks, the environment, income inequality and race, which they now view as timid, conservative or dated," writes Thrush.

Fine. But for God's sake, attempt "far beyond" reforms only after you've been elected. Biden, much like FDR did, knows this. They don't. He has wisely chosen to reject immoderate policy positions during the primary season, only to forcibly backtrack during the general, should he be nominated. What's more, reports Fox News, "By a wide 60-36 percent margin, Democratic primary voters prefer a nominee who will 'restore the country and get American politics back to normalcy' over one who will 'fundamentally change' how Washington works." That's Biden's slot, right down the middle. 

All in all, my absence appears to have caused its rather customary cosmic positivity. To explain, whenever I would watch my hometown's football team — the Kansas City Chiefs — on TV, they'd invariably blow it. When I refused to watch, they'd win. This weird, facially unconnected cause-and-effect effect now seems to have transferred to politics. So perhaps I should go to the hospital more often, ignore the news, and thereby further improve the nation's odds of kicking Trump's butt in 2020.

Satin Doll

You ask. I respond. (Plus, my day's recovery is going to involve a lot of great jazz, classical, and, unfortunately, rediscovering the world of politics via the Times, Post et al.)

From a rather poor video but always fantastic audio, here's the Duke:

If you like your Satin Dolls even jazzier (with a touch of comedy thrown in), here's the Clark Terry Quartet version. It's longer (9 min.), but man, is it ever worth every second.