Sweet memories

"If you took all the girls I knew when I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match my sweet imagination."

       Paul Simon, Kodachrome, 1973

"Thanks for the memory
Of faults that you forgave,
Of rainbows on a wave,
And stockings in the basin
When a fellow needs a shave,
Thank you so much."
        Lyrics by Leo Robin, Thanks for the Memory. Sung by Bob Hope and Shirley Ross, 1938

We experience the present in the bright light of day. We experience the past in moonlight.

We remember the Trump years better than they were. That is a huge advantage for Trump in the 2024 election.

For decades Gallup has been asking Americans whether they approve of past presidents. There is a pattern. We remember them better than we experienced them.

This result is not surprising. It reflects our common experience. 

My high school and college years were full of hassles and insecurities as I lived them, but I remember them now as "happy days."

Covid. What a mess. What lost opportunities. What worry. Yet, now, alive, mostly free of the uncertainty and dread of a mysterious disease, I feel relief. Relief is a happier emotion to associate with Covid than is fear.

The points of crisis in past years which should define an era -- the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, the 9/11 attack, the Great Financial Crisis, the January 6 attack -- fade a little in emotional intensity. Our minds reflect on the aftermaths and how we coped. Again, we feel relief.

We saw January 6 revisionism in real time. When the memory was fresh, Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and Kevin McCarthy were furious with Trump, and they publicly blamed him with clarity and certainty. Lindsay Graham said he was done with Trump. McConnell and McCarthy said he was responsible. Then they recanted and began defending Trump. They forgave. They forgot.

Trump says things were wonderful when he was president and that they are terrible now. His narrative benefits from our selective forgetting. Trump is a high pressure salesman with a story. At his inauguration, he defined the immediate past as "carnage," then in three months he said we are in a golden era of prosperity. He talked up the country throughout his presidency. As soon as Biden was inaugurated, Trump said things are terrible, a disaster, the worst ever, and he has said that relentlessly. Trump gave us a roadmap.

Biden is not a strong communicator by presidential standards, and no one is as omnipresent and relentless as Trump. Trump is the voice-over narrator for this era, telling us what we are seeing. Even people who dislike Trump and disagree vehemently cannot help but hear him. 

All this is an electoral headwind for Joe Biden, but it is not hopeless for him. Trump is not just the moonlit past because he never became the past. The all-too-present Trump is a manic, increasingly dangerous-sounding and desperate politician in deep legal and political trouble. The present-daylight-Biden does not compete with moon-glow Trump. Trump is on center stage today for having falsified business records to mischaracterize as a legitimate business expense his payments to quiet a porn star in order to suppress yet another revelation of sexual misconduct just prior to the 2016 election.

That sounds bad for Trump, but he may survive it and be stronger because of it. The problem for Biden with the Stormy Daniels trial is that everyone knows that this is the sort of thing Trump has done for decades. Some people admire his rascally audacity. Most other people don't care. The only people who care a lot already dislike him anyway.

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The Trump team roster

Trump learned.

Next time Trump will be more careful picking his team.

Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, followed rules on recusing himself. Trump wanted someone who would follow orders on recusals. Trump's secretary of state called Trump "a moron." Trump's chiefs of staff rebelled. His intelligence aides disagreed. His defense secretaries resisted his orders. Many of his cabinet members resigned after January 6. His top Justice Department lawyers threatened to resign in mass.

Trump is already planning how to staff up, this time with true loyalists in key positions. That got Jack Mullen thinking about the Trump team lineup. I got to know Jack back in our youth when we picked and thinned pears together as summer jobs in Southern Oregon orchards. Jack was an outstanding scholar athlete, a three-sport star playing football, basketball, and baseball for Medford High School. He follows politics with the knowledge and orientation of a sports fan. Real sports fans think about rosters.

Guest post by Jack Mullen 

Undecided voters don't make their choice based on potential nominations to the Supreme Court. It's too "inside baseball" for most voters. Nor are undecided voters thinking about potential cabinet members. That is unfortunate, in both cases. The success of a sports team or the overall impact of a presidential administration depends on the whole roster, not just the stars. And there is plenty to worry about in a future Trump team.

How about Texas Governor Greg Abbott heading Homeland Security? What about Kari Lake, if she loses her Arizona senatorial race? Would she be put in charge of Health and Human Services? Might Trump place "Mr. DeSanctimonious" in charge of the Department of Education? Trump would love giving a sharp "up yours" to defenders of wokeness, and DeSantis would draw liberal tears.

Let's consider Richard Grenell, whom I have followed because of my interest in Guatemala, where I served in the Peace Corps. 

Grenell is the perfect utility infielder on Trump's team, able to play a number of positions. Loyal Fox News viewers know Richard Grenell, Trump’s “favorite envoy.” Grenell served four years in the Trump administration. As the U.S. Ambassador to Germany, our top diplomat in Europe pushed hard on Trump’s anti-NATO stance. He warned Germans that Germany’s miserly dues payments to NATO could result in the U.S. pulling out our troops stationed there.

Grenell represents Trump's tilt toward Russia. While posted in Berlin, Grenell became Trump’s envoy to the Balkans as a mediator in a Serbia-Kosovo economic dispute. The eventual result of the brokered agreement was the ouster of Kosovo’s prime minister and a win for Serbia, a country long aligned with Russia. Serbia’s ambassador to Washington, Marko Duric, expressed his country’s appreciation for Grenell when he stated “Grenell is undoubtedly Serbia’s friend.” Today Grenell is greeted as a “quasi-official” whenever he visits Serbia, which he visits quite often. 

Richard Grenell is working on a billion dollar deal with Jared Kushner’s investment fund to build apartments and a luxury hotel in downtown Belgrade, and a resort on an island off the Albanian coast. Grenell told an Albanian television interviewer that he expects these projects to attract a flood of investments. This sits well with the various Mid-East Sovereign Investment Funds.

Grenell garnered his “election fraud” chops when he claimed illegal votes tainted Biden’s 2020 win in Nevada. 

Earlier this year, as Trump’s “special envoy," Grenell traveled to Guatemala claiming “election fraud” in Bernardo Arévalo's upset win over the Guatemalan ruling class candidate, Sandra Torres. For four days Grenell met with over 40 members of the Guatemalan hierarchy in an unsuccessful attempt to postpone Arévalo’s inauguration. Fortunately, he did not succeed. Guatemala now has its first anti-corruption candidate to win a presidential election in 70 years. 

One more interesting tidbit about Grenell. He became the acting director of national intelligence for the Trump administration’s last nine months. During that time, he purged career professionals in what he called a “bloated counterterrorism bureaucracy” and turned over a slew of declassified documents about Russia to Congress. Trump’s scorn of spy agencies clears Grenell’s path to play a role in national security, be it in the CIA, National Intelligence, or as secretary of state.

Will undecided voters, when casting a November vote, take into account the possible effect a Grenell, an Abbot, a DeSantis, or a Kari Lake can have on the nation’s future? A Trump presidency won't just be Trump. It will be Trump people all the way down. 

 

 

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Easy Sunday. Baby goats.

Take 51 seconds. Chill out. Easy Sunday.
 

Bottle feeding 20 baby goats.

Click: Youtube

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"Chicken." "Total cop out."

David Hume Kennerly resigned in protest from the Gerald R. Ford Foundation.

Kennerly

It did not dare give its award for political courage to Liz Cheney.

“I can’t in good conscience stay on the board of an organization representing Gerald R. Ford that doesn’t manifest his kind of guts. It’s now a place whose leadership is cowed by a demagogue creating and promulgating the greatest crisis our country has faced since the Civil War.

David Kennerly, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his photographs of the Vietnam War, and close friend of Gerald and Betty Ford, resigned from the Gerald R. Ford Foundation board. He said the foundation made implausible excuses not to give its annual award to Liz Cheney. The award is given to a person who shows strength of character, sound judgment, and decisiveness "particularly during periods of crisis," and determination "in the face of adversity." 

Kennerly said that Liz Cheney "checked all the boxes" and was the obvious choice. 

He said the foundation grew "chicken" in the face of Trump's domination of the GOP, and that the foundation feared retribution from Donald Trump if he returns to the White House. Liz Cheney is persona non grata within the GOP for calling out Trump's effort to overthrow the 2020 election. 

David Kennerly became internationally famous as a photographer for UPI, Life Magazine, Time Magazine, and as the in-house photographer of Gerald Ford during his presidency. Kennerly was born in Roseburg, Oregon, and his first published photograph was at age 15 in the Roseburg high school newspaper.

I met Kennerly In 2015. He and I attended a small outdoor event for Chris Christie in New Hampshire while Christie competed for the Republican nomination for president. Kennerly took this photo. Somehow both Christie and I, plus Christie's wife Mary Pat, who is standing well behind us, are all in focus.

President Gerald Ford's pardon of Nixon in 1974 was controversial at the time and remains so. Ford knew it would hurt his chances of election in 1976. Ford took the political hit in order to put the "long national nightmare" behind us. The foundation's annual award for courage honors similar acts of sacrificial courage. 

The foundation's executive director responded by saying that he was afraid that giving an award to a person who could possibly run for president as a "No Labels" candidate might cause problems for the foundation with the IRS.

Kennerly called that a "fig leaf." Kennerly said the real reason is that the foundation was afraid of Trump. In a letter to the foundation, he said:

A key reason Liz’s nomination was turned down was your agita about what might happen if the former president is reelected. Some of you raised the specter of being attacked by the Internal Revenue Service and losing the foundation’s tax-exempt status as retribution for selecting Liz for the award. 

The historical irony was completely lost on you. Gerald Ford became president, in part, because Richard Nixon had ordered the development of an enemies list and demanded his underlings use the IRS against those listed. That’s exactly what the executive committee fears will happen if there’s a second coming of Donald Trump.

Trump has said he would end the independent Civil Service and replace "career" people in the departments, including the IRS, with Trump loyalists. Kennerly said the foundation was ducking for cover, but, in doing so, was enabling and empowering Trump.

Those of you who rejected Liz join many "good Republicans" now aiding and abetting our 45th president by ignoring the genuine menace he presents to our country.

During the Watergate hearings and investigations of President Nixon, there was a body of "good Republicans" who wanted to examine and act upon the facts. "What did the president know, and when did he know it?" was a question both Democrats and Republicans asked. The American constitutional system of checks and balances depends upon people willing to hold their own party members up to the bright light of facts and the law.

Trump brought the GOP to heel, and that accountability is missing now within the GOP. The country is worse because of it.

 

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Downsizing someone else's stuff

"To everything turn, turn, turn

There is a season turn, turn, turn

And a time to every purpose under Heaven

A time to gain, a time to lose"

      Pete Seeger, 1955. A Byrds hit in 1965

The New Yorker

Many Americans had deferred baby-making during the Depression and World War II. They made up for it in the decade after 1945. Thereby, the Baby Boom, and I am in it. Our generation is in our 70s now. We have been slow to give up political power. We have been slow, too, to give up material wealth. Stuff. 

Look at that refrigerator in the garage. It was probably too good to throw away, but not good enough to use. It is in that no man's land where you store things you cannot use. Maybe someday the owner could take it apart and find out why the compressor motor squeaks. Maybe it could be made into a smoker for BBQ ribs. Maybe some young family could use a gift of an unreliable refrigerator. In the meantime, store it. 

Tony Farrell is a college classmate who has written several guest posts about branding and politics. He had a long, successful career in marketing for The Sharper Image, The Nature Company, and The Gap. Tony Farrell had a rich downsizing experience. 

Guest Post by Tony Farrell

My sister-in-law died recently. Not from Covid, but in this time of Covid, I’ve discovered a way to manage my grief, and I’ll share it.

What you do is, you spend three days a week driving 150 miles, round-trip, for five months, to claw through the dust-covered detritus of a shopaholic hoarder with three hairy dogs crammed into an impassably small house whose only clean space was inside the oven -- because it had never been used. 

Grief is replaced with simmering resentment that such mind-numbing tasks were implicitly assigned to you by the dearly departed because (quite rationally) they didn’t want to do it themselves. 

In this way, grief absolutely evaporates. You’re welcome. 

When my sister-in-law passed, I was obligated to sort through an obscene quantity of shoes, boots and slippers; buckets of earrings; 70 never-used designer purses; dozens of memento totes and soft briefcases from obscure conventions and trade shows; ancient America Online printouts of emailed jokes; so many keyboards, mice and backup discs for long-forgotten software; yellowing issues of People magazine memorializing Lady Di and JFK Jr., and even Patrick Swayze.

Everywhere, I confronted more lame-brained mottos, aphorisms, proverbs, adages, axioms, maxims, dictums and platitudes than you can imagine. Perhaps ironically, an uncomfortable number involved St. Peter at the Pearly Gates: “A Cowboy’s Prayer,” “The Rainbow Bridge,” “The Dog’s Prayer.”

On four different objects were inscribed, “It’s not the number of breaths you take, but the number of moments that take your breath away”—which, I gotta say, took my breath away. 

From a woman who never exercised, we inherited four huge fitness machines—two still banded in shipping cartons. And what to do with the worst pop CD collection ever? (How much Manilow can one own?) Last month, at Black Bear Diner, I sat too close to their gift shop with shelves full of souvenir mugs; ball caps; sweatshirts; key fobs; tee shirts; earrings and phone cases. I’ll exaggerate and say I started to shake and sweat—a kind of PTSD (or Post Traumatic Stuff Disorder) brought on by my many months of drowning in piles of useless crap. 

I’ve become afflicted with a near-pathological revulsion to stuff. Thank God this didn’t happen earlier in my life: For 35 years, my career was devoted to creating and selling stuff. Now, I have only a bleak vision of where all stuff ends—like gazing at a face and seeing only a skull. 

I don’t want any more stuff in my life. It’s over. My wife Kathy and I recently celebrated her birthday and our anniversary with zero gifts. It’s fine. We’re fine.

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The "field-sign" message

If you like Donald Trump, you will love Randy Sparacino.

Randy Sparacino is a Republican candidate for Jackson County commissioner. Currently the office is partisan. 

It should be nonpartisan.

The placement of "field signs," those four-by-eight sheets of plywood on arterial streets, tell an unmistakable story of political affiliation. The signs in the photos below are placed on Biddle Road opposite the Rogue Valley International Airport, a county-owned facility. 

Opponents of the ballot measure that would make the county commissioner job nonpartisan have only a single sentence explaining their reasoning at their website:

"Nonpartisan status decreases transparency, allowing candidates to hide their political beliefs and intent during campaigns."

I agree with that statement. Party labels do give voters a snapshot of the political associations of a candidate. Voters see a party label and make deductions. 

My own sense is that this is a net-negative, a reason not to have partisanship. I prefer local candidates for offices that have negligible relationship to state and national issues be nonpartisan. I prefer that campaigns reveal the individual brand of the candidate established around discussion of local issues. I would prefer that local campaigns not involve us in the fights that consume Washington, D.C. 

Partisanship has advantages, though. It gives a candidate instant friends and an institution for raising money and getting one's name in front of the public. That comes with a price, the "transparency" of being attached to a nationally-known brand, with all its warts and wrinkles. Trump's brand eclipses everything. It bleeds out onto the people sharing his party label. Sparacino is being transparent. He stands with Trump. 

The local GOP circled the wagons in opposition to the three ballot issues updating the county charter. These signs below are along Crater Lake Highway near Vilas Road. Bentz is the Republican U.S. representative. He endorsed Trump over Nikki Haley. 

In the back is a sign for Alyssa Bartholomew, a woman running for the nonpartisan district attorney office. She is running a "whisper-Republican" campaign, with signs clustered among GOP candidates. I believe that this will hurt her election chances. People do not want a district attorney to be wearing a partisan jersey. We want crime prosecution to reflect fairness and even-handedness. She should not be a Republican DA. She should be the DA representing the whole of the people. The more she continues her whisper campaign in association with a party, the worse for her. But Bartholomew and Sparacino have made their choices and will need to live with the consequences.

This one is off Foothills Road, inside Medford. 

I think Sparacino would be a more electable candidate, and a better commissioner if elected, if he didn't associate himself with Trump. Sparacino had a long career in law enforcement. That implies to voters that he respects district attorneys and judges, that he cares about law and order, and that he would not appreciate tirades of the kind Trump is now publishing daily. Trump organized fake electors and his campaign lawyers urged them to swear falsely that they were "duly elected." He summoned Proud Boys to the Capitol to intimidate the Congress and vice president. He praises Capitol rioters. I realize that that was Trump, not Sparacino, but Sparacino's signs share the field with Trump's, publicly linking them. It is transparent who he is comfortable with.

"If you like Donald Trump, you will love Randy Sparacino," is the downside of partisan transparency. If Sparacino were smart, he would never allow his signs to be placed adjacent to a Trump sign. I have given Sparacino campaign advice in the past when he ran for state Senate, and he ignored it. He spent $1.1 million of Republican donors’ money persuading people he was the wrong person for the job. It was crazy. I suggested he reverse course. He ignored me and lost an easily-winnable race. Once again he is letting his political party manage his reputation. So here we are: Sparacino linked to Trump. Trump linked to Sparacino. I don't expect him to take my advice today, either. Call me Cassandra.

What is Sparacino's actual, deep-down "intent and belief?" Who knows? But he has signs next to Trump's, so we draw our conclusions.

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RFK Jr.'s target is Biden.

     "The Kennedy voter and the Trump voter -- the mutual enemy is Biden. . . . Why wouldn't we put our vote to Bobby and at least get rid of Biden. . . . 

If you don't get to 270,. . . Congress picks the president. They'll pick Trump. So we're rid of Biden either way. Does everybody follow that?"
          New York State Director of RFK Jr.'s campaign.

Click Here

There is a reason Republican billionaires are donating to the Robert F. Kennedy Jr. campaign. He takes votes from Biden.  

RFK Jr. is hard to define politically. He isn't a centrist. He is eccentric. He is "some kind of weirdo fringe," in the words of Matthew Bennett, a leader in the left-center Third Way think tank. The problem for Democrats is that some of the "weirdo fringe" things he says sound about right to a lot of people on both the left and the right.

In this political era shaped by Trump, Democrats and Joe Biden represent the party of normal. Democrats are the party that can govern. A Democratic House caucus could pass legislation. The Democratic president supports longstanding bipartisan positions on NATO, on Israel, on trade, on public health.  

The GOP under Trump is the party of tear-it-down. At its best it could be considered the "creative destruction" of progress and renewal, but its primary focus now is negation. Shut down the government. Stop majorities. Stop border legislation. Stop abortion. Its presidential candidate is a proud hooligan, vandalizing old norms. He flagrantly connived to overthrow an election and justifies it. He is proud of it. He tweets crazy things in the middle of the night. Trump is the chaos candidate -- the foil and opposite of Biden. 

There are people who prefer where Trump is on that axis of normal and chaos. There is yet another salient axis today: It is conspiracy-friendly/conspiracy-resistant. 

Trump -- like RFK Jr. -- appeals to those Amerivan with conspiratorial instincts. Trump says that elections are not what they appear to be. Don't believe the so-called "evidence" or audits or re-counts. The news is fake. The health care system is lying. Vaccines are dangerous. The deep-state-controlled government is fake. Government investigators are fake; prosecutors are fake; judges are fake.

The left has its own conspiracies. Some of the largest hotbeds of vaccination resistance are in leftist schools and communities. There is widespread leftist conspiracy thinking regarding adulterated and artificial ingredients in food, and in corruption in big business, in the CIA, FBI, and local police. It is the left that worries most about the military-industrial complex and secret money in politics. 

RFK Jr. is best known for his vaccination skepticism, but he also says that Sirhan Sirhan did not assassinate his father and that the CIA assassinated his uncle, JFK. He says he doubts that the January 6 attack on the Capitol was part of a Trump-led effort to stop the vote count. He has said that Wi-Fi causes cancer, that anti-depressants cause school shootings, that chemicals in water cause kids to become transgender, that AIDS isn't caused by HIV, that Republicans stole the 2004 election, and that 5G networks are used for mass surveillance. 

RFK Jr. currently polls around 15% in three-way contests. When RFK Jr. is included in current polls, Biden's support drops more than does Trump's. RFK Jr.'s brand is Democratic and environmentalist. With Democratic voters crowded into their blue corner, and people restless for new Democratic faces, Biden's "status quo normal" vibe seems blind and tone-deaf to people who believe that dark forces are ruining America. I can imagine people on the left thinking: RFK Jr. is a little bit crazy, but at least he isn't a Republican and he's right about _________. And here is where they can fill in the blank. The JFK assassination? The FBI sabotaging Martin Luther King? Cell phones tracking us?  Distrusting big pharma? There is always reason to question authority. 

Urban and out-of-area readers may under-estimate the strength and in-your-face belligerence of some of Trump's voters in rural America. Trump has locked down his base. The conspiracy-minded among them won't be tempted by RFK Jr. They have their man. The lawn signs are up on rural roads. "Trump won." Yesterday I parked behind a pickup truck with this home-made modification. 

I have never seen anything equivalent from a Biden supporter. I don't see people driving Priuses bedecked with flags and Biden signs. If there is partisan erosion to a conspiratorial third party candidate, I expect more of it to come from Biden. 

The Democratic national campaign will attempt to disqualify RFK Jr. by citing his kookiest ideas. But some of those will have an air of truth about them to Democrats. This is an era of widespread distrust of institutions. I expect Democrats to deal with the RFK Jr. threat with a simple message that re-affirms partisanship -- in this case negative partisanship. The message will be "A vote for RFK Jr. is a vote for Trump." Full stop. Democrats know what they don't like.

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