January 23, 2020--The Worser the Better.

I'm hearing from people who are so frustrated that they are stepping back from paying attention to the 2020 election. They can't take any more either from or about Trump.

They are trying to do other things with their lives. Things such as listening to music, reading again, talking to their spouses, and watching diverting programs on TV. Rona and I, for example, via Netflix, have been working our way through the 153 episodes of Gilmore Girls--seven years worth!--and immersing ourselves in Miles Davis CDs. 

I can't say that I blame my exhausted friends. They need to get their rest. And a grip.

The current predicament is the struggle to disengage from the day-to-day while still obsessed with the impeachment trial underway in the Senate. Not exactly a sitcom, but still it's an historic event and hard to click away from. And how much Shark Tank can one take?

Those who I'm hearing from haven't yet managed to kick the Trump habit and can't stop themselves from watching the trial. It will take awhile for them (and me) to detox. 

Is there a 12-step program we can join?

Knowing that there is no way for Trump to be removed from office by the Senate--Mitch has the votes to prevent that--we are zeroed in, therefore, on whether or not my Maine senator Susan Collins, to save her political skin, can find three others to vote with her to force McConnell to subpoena witnesses. Actually, not witnesses but John Bolton, who claims he has a story to tell. It must be a really good one because he has a $5.0 million book deal.

I've been saying to friends who see having Bolton testify as the meaning of life that they are failing to keep their eyes on the prize. That prize is making sure Trump is defeated in November. If we agree about that, the best way to help that along would be for the Republican-controlled trial to turn into a fiasco, including screaming, yelling, and ignoring the Chief Justice who is presiding and will plead for civility.

McConnell does not agree to witnesses and will ram a vote to acquit down the throats of his people. And once Bolton's book is published (I suspect right after Labor Day) everything he has to say will enter he public record just weeks before the election. That will be the October Surprise.

All the major news outlets will clamor to interview him. He will appear on the five Sunday talk shows and be on Sixty Minutes for the full hour. Reviews will be published above the fold on the front pages of the Times, Washington Post, and WSJ.

What Bolton will have to say will be a disaster for Trump.

The only down side? Trump will try to get us into a distracting hot war.

But one way or the other, Trump may be cooked.

In sum--the worse things get the better they are.

February 11, 2105--Built On Lies

The problem at NBC is not that Brian Williams is a lier.

He admits now that he sexed up a 2003 report about a foreign-correspondant-trip of his to war-ravaged Iraq--that his helicopter was hit by incoming enemy fire. And there may be evidence that he did a version of the same thing while reporting about Hurricane Katrina from New Orleans (he claimed then that he saw bodies floating by his hotel though there was apparently no significant flooding where his hotel was located); and, who knows, he may have stretched things in a similar self-aggrandizing way during the other assignment that put him on the map, reporting knee-deep in water from South Asia about the tsunami of 2004.

The problem is that the real lie is that he and his anchor colleagues are no longer reporters and that the shows they star in are not about the news. They are exhorbitantly-paid news readers. Reading the script like the actors they are and blow-dried to attract viewers, especially those from coveted demographic groups, all to keep sponsors happy and buying commercials.

All the anchors, with rather thin journalistic backgrounds, but telegenic, Brian Williams, extra-youthful David Muir at ABC, Scott Pelley at CBS, Anderson Cooper at CNN, Megyn Kelly of Fox, and who knows who at MSNBC, all are more in the entertainment business than the news business. Thus their favorite things are to report on events that will garner the highest ratings--natural disasters (hurricanes, blizzards, and tsunamis), terrorist activities (if there is video of beheadings to accompany their reports), and plane crashes. How many hours and days and weeks did CNN devote to the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight 307?

Now in paroxysms of schadenfreude, TV colleagues, print journalists, and people calling in to talk shows are asking for William's head. (Not literally of course. But who know.) And as of last night they at least had a taste of blood--NBC suspended him without pay for six months.

Some rue the "fact" that he isn't Tom Brokaw or, even more distressing by comparison, "the most trusted man in America," Walter Cronkite, both of whom presided over TV news when it was still news, not profit centers. Neither Tom nor old Walter, I have been reading in the blogs, ever would have participated in such unprofessional behavior. What is not noted is that Cronkite and Brokaw did not live and work in a world so pervaded by social networks and Internet sites where hyper-scrutiny of anyone famous' missteps go viral and thus magnified beyond proportion.

I cannot claim for certain that Tom and Walter were on the full up-and-up. Can anyone?

When Roone Arledge, who headed ABC's remarkably successful sports operation was asked to also take on responsibility for the network's news division, it was with the assumption that he would turn what had been the Tiffany Network's unprofitable news division into a profit center. He managed to do so by softening up the reporting, getting the hard news out of the way in the first few minutes and then turning to the up-close-and-personal stuff that had been his signature in ABC's Olympics coverage.

The rest is history. Now even NBC's fading Today Show and widely-watched CBS's 60 Minutes make hundreds of millions and are those networks' most profitable shows. And Brian Williams spends more time on the Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live than he does in Syria.

But this TV news environment also contributes to the success of so-called "fake-news," with entertainment and fun unabashedly at the heart of Jon Stewart's Daily Show and the Colbert Report. More young people who even bother to watch TV get their "news" there than on the three networks and cable news outlets. And often that news is real news.

Meanwhile, desperate, isn't it the Today Show that is now raising a puppy on the set?

October 1, 2014--60 Minutes With Professor Barack Obama

So he went on TV and told Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes that the situation in Syria is fraught with contradictions--"I recognize the contradiction in a contradictory land and a contradictory circumstance."

Yes, he actually said that. Much appreciated Professor Obama.

Among the contradictions, he acknowledged, is the fact that we (really, he and his administration) did not know in advance that ISIS (or ISIL as he obstinately insists on referring to them) was going to turn out to be such a threat to the Middle East and ultimately us.

After 9/11 and the failure to connect the dots that should have warned us about an imminent, cataclysmic threat to the U. S. homeland, one would have thought, with that dark lesson in mind, that something as elaborate as ISIS's emergence and, yes, remarkable barbaric capabilities, would have shown up on someone's Oval Office radar.

Al Qaeda was a relatively small band of terrorists incubating in an under-scrutinized part of the world (the forbidding mountains on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border) compared to the thousands of ISIS jihadist warriors arming and preparing themselves to operate even captured American tanks in plain sight right in the middle of the civil war in Syria.

All one needed to do was go to the Internet to learn directly from ISIS itself what they were about and were intending to do. Undoubtedly and appropriately humiliated, Obama told Kroft that we (he) blew it and so now we're involved in another war in the Middle East that we can't win that will soon cost billions and the lives of more of America's finest young people.

Meanwhile, at about the same time, literally closer to home, there was that embarrassing and dangerous event at the White House. An armed intruder jumped the inadequate and unguarded fence, ran across the lawn, entered the ground floor through the unlocked North Portico, raced left to the East Room, and then, still alluding the Secret Service, entered the Green Room where he was finally tackled.

It would not be my favorite thing to have seen him shot well short of the mansion, but allowing him to make it into the building, where, if he knew the layout better, he could have raced up the stairs to the living quarters, I'd opt for the security forces taking him down.

The Secret Service is far from what it used to be--which might serve as a metaphor for much of our federal government and, alas, much of America--but this latest incident is so pathetic as to render one almost speechless.

We learned in the process that, with Obama family members in residence, in 2011 a sniper hit seven windows in the living quarters, firing armor-piecrcing bullets from hundreds of yards away and that that information was withheld from the public and the Obamas, including the distressing fact that it took White House security forces four days after the attack to even know it occurred!

Under questioning by members of Congress yesterday, Julia Pierson, director of the Secret Service, took responsibility and promised that it won't happen again.

Well it already did happen again, and on her watch. There was the shooting incident in 2011 and then the intrusion 12 days ago. I call that happening again.

And another thing that will happen again is that she will not be fired just as no one was fired for the Veterans Administration or IRS scandals or for that matter the Obamacare website rollout fiasco.

As our professor president said, ours is a contradictory land and what we are seeing are contradictory circumstances.

December 2, 2013--Cyber Monday

It was 5:30 yesterday evening when we pulled up to the house to unload groceries.

"Today's Sunday, isn't it?" Rona asked, actually knowing the answer. "So what's that mail truck doing delivering packages on Sunday?"

"It's because Amazon made a deal with them to deliver orders on Sundays."

"You mean the American people, the president, and Congress couldn't get them to do it but Amazon could?"

"What can I tell you."

"Let's get upstairs as soon as we can," Rona said, "I think 60 Minutes is doing a story today about Amazon. About Jeff Bezos. Your favorite."

"You know I can't stand 60 Minutes any more. They have descended basically to doing puff pieces. I stopped watching after Mike Wallace retired."

And, as predicted, the story about Bezos was mainly fluff. The interviewer was Charlie Rose who is a personal friend of the Besoses, Jeff and MacKenzie, his novelist wife. The whole thing was like an unpaid advertisement for Amazon.

But there were a few things of interest. Great interest.

One of Amazon's senior executives, I think the person responsible for Amazon's fulfillment operations--the people who round up, pack, and ship orders--when asked said that Amazon's long-range plan is to sell "everything to everyone."

He added, "I think." But I believed him since they seem well on their way to achieving their goal. Currently they have nearly 225 million customers worldwide.

A lot of the piece was shot in one of Amazon's one-million-square-foot fulfillment warehouses--one of, I think, 19 in the United States--with more under construction so that packages can get to customers quicker than the typical two days at present. Thus the Sunday delivery deal they struck with the USPS.

And Bezos, told Rose, they are working to get orders to customers even faster than that--they hope to be able to deliver 80 percent of orders the same day. Which is an enormous challenge since they get 300 per second.

When Charlie put on his faux-incredulent face, Jeff winked at him and indicated he was willing to let his friend in on a top secret project--he agreed to show him the drones--yes drones--Amazon is developing to deliver packages right to people's doorsteps within hours of their placing orders.

And sure enough 60 Minutes had video footage of these little drones with yellow plastic buckets attached to their underbellies hovering over a suburban home, using GPS coordinates--just like in Pakistan--before descending to the lawn, uncoupling itself from the yellow tub before lifting off to swoop back to the fulfillment center.

The still incredulous Rose, with his mouth still hanging open, could barely deliver a follow-up question, so Bezos, unasked, said that 85 percent of their orders could fit into one of those plastic boxes and so . . . He didn't need to finish his sentence.

Charlie, now recovered, asked how soon packages would be delivered that way.

Bezos laughed--he's worth about $25 billion and that makes it easy to chuckle at such things--that it wouldn't be for a few more years. They had to make sure the drones won't cause collateral damage, landing on people's heads on streets such as ours in Manhattan.

"So," Rona said, as we watched with our mouths also agape but for other reasons (everything to everybody?), "I guess that means the post office will be doing Sunday deliveries for quite some time."

"Good for them," I said, "I mean I suppose. Good for them."

"And it all started in his garage in Bellevue, Washington less than 20 years ago. Good for him . . . I suppose."

I said, "Too bad we don't have a garage."

"Maybe we don't, but tomorrow, I'm buying some Amazon stock." She wrote a note to herself.

Shrugging, I said, "Get me some too."