Friday, December 30, 2016

BloggeRhythms

Today’s combination of items taken from major news story’s illustrate a dedicated effort by Obama to paint Trump as one unworthy of ascension to the Oval Office. Yet, as that process continues, the results trend more toward painting himself and his party into a corner instead.    

The unilateral presidential actions include Thursday’s decision to sanction Russian entities for election-related hacking. 

That followed the administration’s allowing the U.N. Security Council to condemn Israeli settlement activity, potentially having an indelible impact on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There was also the permanent ban on oil and gas drilling across large swaths of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans, the closing off of 1.6 million acres of Western land to development and scrapping the last vestiges of a registration system used largely on Muslim immigrants.

Simultaneously in the background, as reported by Paul Bedard @washingtonexaminer.com, the “lame duck” administration imposed new regulations a rate of 18 for every new law passed, “according to a Friday analysis of his team's expansion of federal authority.”

While Congress passed just 211 laws, “Obama's team issued an accompanying 3,852 new federal regulations, some costing billions of dollars,” adding up to a record 97,110 pages of red tape. 

At the same time as Obama continues building the bureaucracy in his last gasps of power, in her column @wsj.com today Peggy Noonan delivers some insights into the public’s disdain for the overbearing weight of unnecessary regulation on them.  

Ms. Noonan writes about photojournalist Chris Arnade, holder of a Ph.D. in physics from Johns Hopkins in 1993 who worked 20 years as a bond trader at Salomon Brothers, through its end as Citigroup. Leaving Wall Street in 2012, he ”started taking long treks through New York City, 10 miles and 20. “I was a numbers guy,” he said, a professional who lived on data. Now he wanted to see things. “Eventually I started taking pictures and talking to people about their lives.”

A political “progressive,” he spent the past year traveling through much of the country taking pictures of regular people in challenging circumstances and writing of their lives. 

A week before the election he “angered his side, and some media folk, by foretelling the victory of Donald Trump." Because: “The people he met were voting for him. Many saw the America they’d grown up in slipping away. They wanted a country that was great again. They experienced elite disdain for Trump as evidence he might be the one to turn it around.”

Most interesting, was his rationale for touring the nation: “Looking back, for me it was an evolution of trying to . . . stop being that arrogant Ph.D. kid who knew it all.” What he saw was “injustice.” He wanted to see “if what I found in the Bronx was true in other parts of the U.S.” 

In Ms Noonan's words: “In his work you see an America that is battered but standing, a society that is atomized—there are lonely people in his pictures—but holding on. Two great and underappreciated institutions play a deep role in holding it together. 

“The first is small churches, often Pentecostal and Evangelical. They’re in a dead strip mall or on a spur off a highway and they give everyone an embrace. “Any church that has a sign that says We Welcome Everybody, that’s where I go.” He looks for the ones “that are often literally on the edge of town.” One in Alabama was a former Kentucky Fried Chicken. 

“The other institution that helps hold people together is McDonald’s. Mr. Arnade didn’t intend to discover virtue in a mighty corporation, but McDonald’s “has great value to community.” He sees an ethos of patience and respect. “McDonald’s is nonjudgmental.” If you have nowhere to go all day they’ll let you stay, nurse your coffee, read your paper. “The bulk of the franchises leave people alone. There’s a friendship that develops between the people who work there and the people who go.” “In Natchitoches, La., there’s a twice-weekly Bible study group,” that meets at McDonald’s. “They also have bingo games.” There’s the Old Man table, or the Romeo Club, for Retired Old Men Eating Out.”

Summarizing what’s been told to her by Mr. Arnade, Ms Noonan construes his analysis as seeing a divide as between the front-row kids at school waving their hands to be called on, and the back-row kids, quiet and less advantaged. The front row, he says, needs to learn two things. “One is how much the rest of the country is hurting. It’s not just economic pain, it’s a deep feeling of meaninglessness, of humiliation, of not being wanted.” Their fears and anxieties are justified. “They have been excluded from participating in the great wealth of this country economically, socially and culturally.” Second, “The front-row kids need humility. They need to look in the mirror, ‘We messed this up, we’ve been in charge 30 years and haven’t delivered much.’ ” “They need to take stock of what has happened.” 

However, many of those reading the column perceive that Ms Noonan too, sounds like an elitist. One who's reaching out, attempting to explain the feelings and rationales of a Middle-America she does not and cannot understand as an insider herself.

In a very appropriate comment, reader Trudy Ahearn, wrote: “How many weeks after the election, seven?  Peggy is still trying to "explain" the Trump victory!  The majority of the American people understand why he won.  The East coast, West coast elitist will never understand or accept his mandate.  Peggy needs to stop trying to explain his victory to her people and she and they need to GET OVER IT!   Happy New Year to all my people, the middle of the road, love your God and your Country, make America great again majority!”

And that brings us right back to Obama, who doesn’t understand it ether. Because the more he cries about a lost election, lost for a myriad of valid reasons, the more he revolts the huge numbers of everyday Americans who voted for Trump.

What's’ more, the issues he’s picked for his last stick in the eye of Trump and American voters are harmful to significant numbers of his own party, many of whom are now starting to back away from him themselves. But, it may be too late for that.

Because, the way things are going for Trump and his job-building success before even taking office, indicate that the corner into which Obama is painting himself will soon be crammed full of party constituents colored by the same brush.

That's it for today folks.

Adios 

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