In The Land Of The Free, We're Scared Of Them. But In Canada, They're Welcomed

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON WINTER/THE NEW YORK TIMES

How The Supreme Court Has Changed Without Scalia. (Hint: It's For The Better.)

I have written that if I could take only one Supreme Court reporter with me to a desert island, it would be Dahlia Lithwick, who year in and year out writes the most penetrating analyses of the top court.  This observation from a Slate magazine piece following a draconian Texas abortion law being overturned nails it:     

It seems clear the court is experiencing the same searing anxiety the rest of the political system is seeing -- anxiety about race, and sex, and religion, and guns, and immigration, and money, and making America great again -- and the justices are playing out the same big themes we are dealing with in the presidential race, only using their big-kid voices (in the main) and more footnotes.

"The real betrayal of the court's right wing may lie in the mere fact that Justice Kennedy seems to have become more aware that racism is a real thing and that you can't lie about women's health.  It doesn't make him liberal.  It makes him open. . . . Justice Kennedy doens't seem angry about all of this, by the way.  If anything he seems more unruffled now than ever.  I find it strangely soothing, amid all the shouting.  Maybe the only thing cooler than being the swing justice of a nine-member court is being the swing justice of an eight-member court.  It's a nice metaphor for the end of term.  Furious dissents from the right, hopeful surges from the left, and Kennedy at the center poker-faced, playing the role of a justice."

I happen to think that the court still has a helluva long way to go before its constitutionally-mandated role is fully restored and the extra-judicial recklessness of the Roberts era is tamped down.  But in the meantime, thank you Ms. Lithwick and most especially Justice Kennedy.

CARICATURE BY DONKEYHOTEY 

Whatcha Gonna Do With Leftover Steamed Crabs? You Make Crabcakes, Dummy.

Beet's signature crabcakes jostle for position with a couple of softshells.

As befits someone who was born and raised in a small Eastern Shore town where the mighty Susquehanna River empties into the Upper Chesapeake Bay, John "Beet" Bailey has crabs in his blood.  (No crude jokes.  Please!) 

Beet was trapping, picking and eating crabs when most if us were tottering along on our first tricycle, and a few decades . . . er, years on, he is an acknowledged master of all things culinary when it comes to the Callinectes sapidus, better known as the Chesapeake blue crab.  So when Beet showed up at the mountain retreat the other day with a half bushel of fresh caught jumbo blues (by trotline in the Chester River, if you must know), it was akin to hitting the lottery.    

I too have been cracking crabs since I was knee high to a waterman, but had only occasionally eaten river crabs.  They're the best. 

Guarded by a ferocious crabhound, Beet cleans the leftover crabs.

We devowered most of the half bushel with the help of neighbors, which left about 10 crabs with which to make crabcakes.   

In the hands of mere mortals, these leftovers would have produced perhaps a pound of meat, but Beet's methodical and anatomically informed stem-to-stern dissection yielded a scrumptious two pounds. 

Beet explains how to separate meat from a crab: Patiently. 

With the crabs picked cleaner than clean, Beet turned to the other ingredients. 

Based on a pound of crabmeat, those ingredients are:

Half stalk of celery, chopped (for texture). 

Wedge of sweet onion, minced. 

2 teaspoons of mustard, brown preferred. 

1 ~ 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise. 

Half cup ~ cup of bread crumbs (for binder). 

A dicing Beet will go.

Once you have all the ingredients mixed with the crabmeat, form the cakes.  The size of each cake is up to you.  But we're not making chocolate chip cookies, and as you can see, Beet likes 'em generously sized. 

(If you've made more crabcakes than you're prepared to eat, they freeze beautifully.  Set them on some wax or parchment paper in the freezer until they begin to set up, then wrap and freeze them in a freezer bag.  When you're ready to eat them, let them thaw to room temperature and then follow the cooking instructions below.)

Why skimp now?  Make 'em big like Beet does.

Onward and upward to the stove.   

Put the heat on medium and melt a goodly-sized dab of butter in a saucepan.  Being careful not to overheat and burn the dears, brown them 10 ~ 12 minutes on a side and serve.  (NOTE: Remember that this meat was from steamed crabs.  Uncooked meat will take longer.) 

Yum!   

Lest you need reminding, crabs have a distinctive but delicate taste which is to red meat what Champagne is to red wine, so choose side dishes and beverages that won't trample on the taste.  We had Beet's signature crabcakes with my own recipe potato and mixed tomato and avocado salads, which were perfect hot-weather compliments.  I washed down the meal with Victory Prima Pils, while Saumur Les Pouches "Saumur Blanc" was the white wine of choice.

Yum yum! 

Looks good enough to eat.

Politics Update: Thomas Jefferson's Vision Of The U.S. Takes A Beating

JEFFERSON BY CHARLES WILSON PEALE (1791-92)

Some 190 years after the death of Thomas Jefferson -- fittingly on a July 4th -- the flood of biographies of perhaps the greatest of the Founding Fathers shows no signs of abating.  That also is fitting, especially in this tumultuous election years when Jefferson's vision of what these United States should be is alternately forgotten or under attack.

Indeed, if you like your dead presidents simple, then Jefferson is not your man, and that overriding fact rings out from Alan Pell's Twilight At Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson (2008). 

This 322-page exposition on the outer actions and inner thoughts of the most complex and contradictory Founding Father focuses on the 17 turbulent years after Jefferson handed the reins of state to James Madison  in March 1809, ducked out of his successor's inaugural ball through a back door and without fanfare rode into a retirement during which he never stopped fretting about the future of a republic at whose birth he had played such a huge role. 

Writes Crawford: 

"The survival of this exercise in self-government -- the first in the history of the world, he believed -- could never be taken for granted, as each day brought new dangers." 

How prescient that seems almost two centuries after Jefferson's passing because of an exercise in imperial excess, power grabbing and vainglory known as the presidency of George Walker Bush, and the likelihood that a Donald Trump presidency would be worse -- much worse.

Jefferson was a republican in politics, a deist in religion and a classicist in his tastes. He also was a spendthrift, shopaholic and lousy farmer, was overly possessive of his daughters and granddaughters to the consternation of their husbands, and was a master deal maker, something that to this day marks him as a hypocrite in his critics' eyes. 

The singular irony and failure of Jefferson's presidency was his insistence on the 1807 Embargo Act against England and France. 

Crawford: 

"[This] occured not because this advocate of political liberty exaggerated his countrymen's desire to be free from government interference, but because he underestimated it."

The greatest paradox of Jefferson's life is what he thought about slavery, a subject that has been dissected to a farethewell in hundreds of books, most notably Dumas Malone's six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time. 

It should not be forgotten that when Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal, he meant propertied white men.  He opposed slavery in abstract political and social terms, but he also was a slaveholder and dealt with them as a day-to-day reality.  His views did not so much evolve as remain in conflict with his actions, and while he tried while in public office to abolish or limit the advancement of slavery, he owned more than 600 slaves, 150 of whom he inherited and 20 of whom he bought.  The others were born into slavery on his lands.  In any event, he treated his slaves with respect and kindness by the standards of the day.  

Crawford: 

"Developed over years of practical political experience and scholarly study, Jefferson's approach to the problem of ending slavery, and of effecting radical social change of any kind, is at once more searching than has generally been granted, less self-serving that might be supposed, and yet nearly as imprisoning to thought and inhibiting to action as the political and economic realities that it attempted to explain.

". . . That Jefferson could not act when urged to do more to end an institution that he acknowledged to be a moral wrong indicates the extent to which he was lacking in moral imagination."

Crawford acknowledges that this is a surprisingly constricted view for the author of the Declaration of Independence: 

"It is nonetheless the one by which Jefferson lived, even if he seems never to have been completely comfortable with it. He could always insist, as he did throughout his life, that the time to end slavery had not arrived. But, tragically, that was so in part because Jefferson had resolutely chosen not to hasten its coming."

In the end, Crawford takes the road less traveled, spending little time on Jefferson's famous retirement years correspondence with John Adams, his predecessor as president, and perhaps too much time on Jefferson's daily routine and family life with all of its illnesses, miscarriages, scandals and deaths.  

After reading Twilight at Monticello, one might wonder if Jefferson was a failed idealist. I do not believe so, but he certainly was a flawed one.  

That is an understated theme of what in my view, beyond the Malone tomes, is the best book on Jefferson, Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power (2012). 

Meacham could be referring to Barack Obama here: 

"In pursuit of his ends, Jefferson sought, acquired and wielded power, which is the bending of the world to one's will, the remaking of reality in one's own image.  Our greatest leaders are neither dreamers nor dictators.  They are, like Jefferson, those who articulate national aspirations yet master the mechanic of influence and know when to depart from dogma. . . . Jefferson had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move me, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic."

Jefferson and Obama share another talent in that they invariably chose politeness over confrontation.

"He was a warrior for the causes in which he believed, but he conducted his battles at a remove . . . Part of the reason for his largely genial mien lay in the Virginia culture of grace and hospitality; another factor was a calculated decision, based on his experience of men and politics, that direct conflict was unproductive and ineffective."

Are you listening, Donald Trump?  No, of course not.

Jefferson sincerely -- if naively -- believed that he if could not end partisanship, he could transcend it.  Like Obama, he failed miserably, but unlike the current president, was able to negotiate a truce between his fellow Republicans and the Federalists, who were led by John Quincy Adams during the first of Jefferson's two terms and wrote, "The country is so given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offense." 

VISITING MONTICELLO

To visit the homes of many famous people is usually not to know them.  A conspicuous exception is Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, his self-designed masterpiece of Palladian architecture where he lived for 56 historic years -- from 1770 before he wrote the Declaration of Independence until his death.   

Monticello, Italian for "little mountain," sits atop an 850-foot peak in the Southwest Mountains above Charlottesville, Virginia and the famous university Jefferson founded.   

What was so striking for this first-time visitor was how small the house depicted on the flip side of the American nickel and countless other places actually is, although befitting the life of the great man himself, Monticello seems larger on the inside.  It also is full of hidden passageways, secret chambers and other surprises. 

A friend and I lucked into nearly perfect circumstances when we visited Monticello -- a Monday morning in early summer where there were virtually no other tourists and the mountains to the west were covered by a thick fog, which Margaret Bayard Smith, a dear friend of Jefferson's, wrote in 1809:

"[H]ad the appearance of the ocean and was unbroken except when the wood covered hills rose above the plain and looked like islands. As the sun rose, the fog was broken and exhibited the most various and fantastic forms, lakes, rivers, bays, and as it ascended, it hung in white fleecy clouds on the sides of the mountains. By the afternoon, when the clouds had rolled over the mountains, you could hardly believe it was the same scene."

That the scene was indeed the same on our visit is a testament to the private, nonprofit Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which maintains the Monticello plantation, supports scholarly research and however belatedly has come to acknowledge -- and even underwritten studies -- that show Jefferson almost certainly fathered six of slave Sally Hemings' children. 

Monticello is about 125 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. and is open every day of the year except Christmas. 

More here.

POLITIX UPDATE IS WRITTEN BY SHAUN MULLEN, A VETERAN JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER FOR WHOM THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IS HIS 12th SINCE 1968.  CLICK HERE FOR AN INDEX OF PREVIOUS COLUMNS. 

© 2015-2016 SHAUN D. MULLEN

Surprise! Poconos' Leading Newspaper Takes A Powder On Big Nestlé Water Story

The Pocono Record in some ways reflects the community it covers.

The daily newspaper still serves as a kind of town square even in an age of social networking and 24/7 cable news coverage, and that is especially true in smaller communities.   

The Pocono Record is the sole media outlet of consequence in one such community -- Northeastern Pennsylvania -- but it failed its responsibility in remaining silent on its editorial pages regarding the biggest story in the region.  That story was the year-long battle waged by the citizens of tiny Eldred Township to stop global bottled water giant Nestlé from taking its water. The Record also was played by a Nestlé ally who instructed the newspaper's classified advertising department to change the wording in a legal advertisement on a zoning ordinance central to the Eldred battle. 

The purpose of the change was to intentionally mislead readers, and as a consequence of this mischief the township has withdrawn its advertising from the Record.

Newspapers have many responsibilities. These including basics like covering the news, providing accurate sports scores, getting the names in obituaries right, and publishing legal advertisements. Legal ads -- which in olden days literally were posted in town squares -- are required by law when government agencies propose significant changes to laws and regulations.   

On April 14 and 21, 2014, the Record ran a legal ad for a proposed amendment to the zoning regulations in Eldred Township.  The amendment benefitted Nestlé in its efforts to get township approval to sink two bulk extraction wells on private property and pump 750 million gallons of water over a 10-year period at little cost and for enormous profit -- estimated at upwards of $3 billion -- for its Deer Park Spring Water brand from the fragile aquifer under Kunkletown village in the heart of Eldred.   

Nestlé, realizing it was on the verge of a potential public-relations disaster as news of its water grab spread nationally and then internationally, eventually abandoned those efforts. 

Moore found the legal ad submitted by Fareri's law office was misleading.

The legal ad sleight-of hand was first noticed last month by Don Moore, an engineer, teacher and community activist who is skilled in the tedious work of examining public records. 

Moore was a behind-the-scenes researcher and tactician for the Eldred citizens who opposed the Nestlé plan.  In researching whether the zoning amendment had been legally adopted -- it had not -- he examined the legal ad published in the Record and noticed a discrepancy. 

Moore filed a Right to Know request with the CJER Regional Planning Committee, a group made up of representatives from Eldred and three adjoining townships that had approved the amendment, in order to confirm that the wording in the properly worded legal ad initially submitted to the Record was identical to that approved by CJER.  It was. 

James J. Fareri was CJER's special solicitor for the amendment.  He is a partner in the firm of Newman, Williams, Mishkin, Corvelyn, Wolfe and Fareri of Stroudsburg, which also represents Ricky Gower, on whose property Nestlé was going to pump water. 

Because water extraction is only allowed in an area of Eldred zoned Industrial, Nestlé would have been unable to extract water from Gower's property, which is zoned Commercial, without the zoning amendment.  The amendment, which applied only to Eldred, was taken up by CJER without the knowledge of the full Eldred Board of Supervisors and was expedited by Darcy Gannon, the Eldred Planning Commission secretary.  Gannon's daughter, Gretchen Gannon Pettit, was a township supervisor at the time and Gower's girlfriend. 

The original legal ad had been submitted to the Record by Tracy Davidson, Fareri's assistant. 

The difference in wording between the submitted legal ad and the revised legal ad was small but significant.  A portion of the original, correctly worded legal ad read: 

While that portion of the intentionally misleading revised legal ad read:

The upshot of the sleight of hand was that readers were not informed of the existing zoning while the altered language obscured what effect the change would have, in this instance allowing an Industrial activity in a Commercial zone. 

Patty Meadus, who is the Record's legal advertising representative and was the newspaper's account representative for CJER in 2014, told Moore that there were multiple email exchanges between Fareri's assistant Davidson and herself in the Record's CJER account regarding the formatting of the legal ad, but nothing about altering its text. 

Meadus said she did not know who instructed that the changes be made and was surprised they were not made in writing, which is customary.  Moore then approached Kelli M. McFall, who is Meadus's supervisor and the Record's classified advertising manager, to ask who had instructed the Record to make the change.  She refused to say.   

McFall kept changing her story. 

She first told Moore that the change was in response to "an error" by the Record.  When Moore pointed out that this could not be the case, she then said that "we no longer have access to records from 2014."  When Moore noted that Meadus had shown him those records, she said Meadus "may have been giving out information to the general public that is owned by an advertiser and must remain confidential," although a legal ad is very much a public document.  When contacted yet again by Moore, McFall refused to answer any further questions. 

It was Fareri's responsibility as special counsel to CJER to review the zoning amendment and submit the legal ad.  But curiously, Fareri did not bill CJER for either, although he did state at a May 1, 2014 CJER hearing that "all legal requirements have been satisfied" and introduced into evidence an exhibit — the misleading Record legal ad. 

After being made aware of the Record legal ad wording switch, the Eldred supervisors voted on June 9 to henceforth publish the township's legal advertising in the Times News, another regional newspaper.  The unstated implication was that the Record could not be trusted. 

Meanwhile, an attempt by Moore to get further information from CJER was unsuccessful because Fareri forbade committee members from commenting although he insisted that everything had been done properly.  

Out-of-town media attention prompted Nestlé to abandon its plans.

The doctored legal ad was part of a larger pattern of deception that was shot through Nestlé's efforts to separate the water beneath Kunkletown village from its residents.  The attempted water grab was part of the Swiss-owned corporation's strategy to dominate the global bottled water market by making windfall profits on the backs of small communities it typically bludgeons into accepting its bulk water extraction schemes.

In addition to being helped by the actions of the planning commission secretary whose daughter was a township supervisor as well as Gower's girlfriend, Nestlé and its allies littered the public record with outright deceits, including willfully misrepresenting the boundaries of and right-of-way to its proposed well site property, and blocked a private road adjacent to the proposed well site without the permission of the people who had used the road for decades. 

Those actions were the subject of a property owners' lawsuit in Monroe County Court of Common Pleas, but the lawsuit will not be going forward because Eldred fought back hard.   

Nestlé's opponents argued that the corporation's plans were inconsistent with the township's comprehensive plan, substantial water tanker truck traffic would destroy roads while creating noise and safety problems, there would be no long-term public benefit while property values and tax revenues would plummet, no jobs would be created, there may be toxic dumps on the site that could leech into the water table, severe restrictions would be placed on the everyday activities of residents near the wells, and the township might eventually be wrung dry because Nestlé would be pumping from an area considerably larger than the Gower property, although it repeatedly and disingenuously argued otherwise.  

On June 8, Nestlé withdrew its application for the wells. It was getting hammered before the township Zoning Hearing Board, the lawsuit was likely to prevail, and national and international media attention on Eldred had turned its scorched-earth tactics into a potential public relations disaster. 

The Frein manhunt was an international story, but the Record blew it.

The Pocono Record in some ways reflects the community it covers.  Monroe County has a somnambulant, nepotistic and deeply risk-averse political establishment, as well as serious problems that are swept under the table.  The Record has shown no interest in reporting on that big-picture state of affairs in its news pages, let alone push for badly-needed reforms on its editorial pages.

The housing market crapped out in the mid-2000s long before the rest of the nation, and for a while Monroe led all counties in the U.S. in home foreclosures per capita, a story that the Record actually did a very good job of covering.  

That was 10 years ago, and the biggest story since — in fact the biggest story of the new millennium in the Poconos — is that politicians, not content to try to continue to build a 125-year-old tourist industry and brand the region as a one-of-a-kind destination with beautiful woodlands chockablock with trails, waterfalls, creeks and rivers, as well as golf courses, ski slopes and family-friendly resorts, climbed into bed with rapacious developers and usurious financial institutions after the 9/11 attacks to sell the Poconos as a safe haven from a world gone crazy.  That strategy has backfired badly, because a once special place has been transformed into a place like practically every other place with the same big-box stores, strip malls and fast-food restaurants, not to mention the same gridlocked traffic, an irony that has been lost on the business-friendly Record.   

At first, the strategy seemed to work as people flocked to the Poconos from the Bronx, Queens and northern New Jersey by the thousands after 9/11.  But the gauzy illusion that the area was a paradise soon gave way to a harsh reality of which wise locals were all too aware: Beyond the lethargic political establishment, many roads are more typical of those in Third World countries, social services are overwhelmed, schools range from mediocre to poor, crime rates are well above Pennsylvania county-by-county averages for telling indicators such as adult major crime, drunk driving and vehicular fatalities, there is an increasingly degraded environment and stratospherically high taxes that climb ever higher as Monroe bleeds people by the thousands who are ending up back where they came from, broke, broken and foreclosed on.  

Meanwhile, the Record has furloughed most of its reporters in an era when newspaper owners too often value making money over making news, which is the case with Middletown, New York-based Local Media Group, the Record's owner.   

The Record now has only a fraction of the full-time news reporters it had 10 years ago, and that was painfully obvious in its coverage of one of the more compelling stories of recent years, the manhunt for Eric Frein.

Frein, a survivalist nutcase who is charged with murdering a Pennsylvania State Police corporal and attempted murder of a trooper in September 2014, eluded a massive search by federal, state and local law enforcement authorities in the Pocono woodlands for 48 excruciating days — inconveniently at the height of the fall foliage tourist season — before being captured. 

The Record, gifted an international story right in its front yard, rolled over as out-of-town media broke the big stories while it dutifully kowtowed to the state police and took everything they said at face value even as it became obvious that the hugely expensive operation to bring Frein to ground had unraveled.  

Nestlé was another international story right in the Record's front yard.

The biggest story in the Poconos since the Frein drama has been the Nestlé-Eldred battle, and like the fugitive manhunt, the Record made a concerted effort to blow that, too.   

In the weeks since Nestlé literally pulled up stakes in Eldred, its defeat has reverberated through the international environmental community.  There have been dozens of articles on websites and in publications about the lessons that can be learned from a small community that fought to preserve its way of life, took its environmental stewardship seriously and battled back against an opponent with substantially greater resources.  Al Jazeera, the Middle East-based global news network, dispatched its chief American correspondent to Eldred to do a story, and that probably was the last straw for Nestlé.   

What do Al Jazeera, all those websites and publications and this writer know that the Record doesn't know?

To give credit where it is due, Record staff writer Howard Frank followed the story diligently despite being kept on a short leash by his editors, but the Record's editorial pages have been silent with one inconsequential exception, and again it fell to out-of-town media to give the story the kind of scrutiny and attention it cried out for.

A Record insider explained away the editorial page silence by noting that Paula Heeschen, the editorial page editor, is married to Arthur Zulick, the Monroe County Court of Common Pleas judge assigned to hear the Eldred property owner’s lawsuit. 

But that does not wash twice over: 

* The Eldred-Nestlé story has been in the news since September 2015 and Zulick was not assigned to hear the lawsuit until mid-April of this year.

* When an editorial writer has a conflict of interest and a newspaper still wants to editorialize, an executive not connected to the newsroom can be tasked with writing editorials so the newspaper does not have to remain silent.  

Heeschen refused a request to be interviewed, saying that she was much too busy to take out time for a mere blogger.  (This mere blogger has nearly 50 years of experience, has been nominated for several Pulitzer Prizes and received awards the Record's staff can only dream of getting.  His mere blog is closing in on 2 million visitors.) 

Heeschen did helpfully point out that she has written six editorials since 2011 on water-related issues.  Five editorials took the courageous stand that using disposable plastic water bottles is bad for the environment, while the sixth editorial, published in November 2015, praised the Eldred Township supervisors for doing the obvious by hiring their own hydrogeologist to monitor a Nestlé test well.    

It is unclear whether Heeschen is merely indifferent or is clueless, while the larger point is not that the Record didn't take a stand against Nestlé. 

The larger point is that the story was too big and too important to ignore, but it was ignored.  The Record could have supported Nestlé and argued on its editorial pages why drilling for water in Eldred was not a bad thing, or even written plain-vanilla On The One Hand-On The Other Hand editorials, but Heeschen and the Record as a whole (staff writer Frank excepted), took the cowardly way out and rolled over. Nothing to see here, folks, move along.   

Emails and telephone calls for comment to Record Publisher Joe Vanderhoof and Executive Editor Tom DeShriver were not returned.

The Record has plenty of company in not taking seriously its responsibilities to its readers.  Too many other newspapers of all sizes also are indifferent, but that does not excuse the Record's long tradition of trafficking in mediocrity.

If you believe your newspaper should not automatically parrot the official government line and be an informative and conscientious voice for you on issues that could have a substantial impact like the Eldred-Nestlé battle, then the Record reliably falls far short. 

And the community it is supposed to serve is the worse for that.   

  

Click HERE for an index of Poconos water-related stories.

Frein photograph by Mark Maketa/Reuters 

At Kiko's House: An Index To Poconos Water-Related Posts

(CLICK ON DATE FOR A LINK TO THE POST) 

(June 16) Nestlé Water Grab Ends Not With A Bang, But A Gracious Round of Applause. 

(June 14) Okay, So Tiny Eldred Defeated Nestlé, But Now It's Time To Pay The Bills. 

(June 9) When Good Things Happen To Good People: How Tiny Eldred Beat Giant Nestlé.

(May 31) Nestlé, Flashpoint In U.S. Water Wars, Is Longtime Partner Of Water Utility. 

(May 19) Update on Eldred: When The World News Media Beats A Path To Your Door. 

(April 21) A Tiny Township Tells Giant Nestlé It's Billion Dollar Water Grab Just Won't Float. 

(March 31) Update: The Great Nestlé-Deer Park Billion Dollar Poconos Spring Water Grab. 

(January 22) The Great Nestlé-Deer Park Billion Dollar Poconos Spring Water Grab. 

Photograph © 2016 Alyssa Meadows

In Which We Can Finally Applaud Politicians For Sitting Down On The Job

THANK YOU.

Photograph tweeted by Rep. Katherine Clark via Reuters

Politix Update: Trump Is The Ultimate Nowhere Man. He's Everything & Nothing.

The love child of Hitler and Mussolini Trump is not.  He lacks the discipline and zeal to be a successful fascist. ~ FRANK RICH 

For a year now, we've been trying to figure out who Donald Trump is, but in the last week that's become blindly obvious: He's everything and nothing. 

This has been hiding in plain view, but we can be forgiven that it has taken so long to sort things out. After all, we live in confounding times.  (The Cavs beating the Warriors in seven games in Oakland? Come on!)  The Trump clincher, at least for me, was the reaction of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, and it was only then that the whole 'orama finally clickety-clicked into place. 

You'll recall that Trump did not put politics aside, let alone call for Americans to come together. Instead he tweeted about his powers of foresight -- that he'd predicted such a thing would happen -- and then for good measure blamed President Obama, implying that he's a secret traitor, and demonized American Muslims while he was at it.   

In case we hadn't gotten the point, he added the next day that perhaps not even his proposed ban on immigrants from places where God is not a white Anglo-Saxon was strong enough, and noted that shooter Omar Mateen was from a country called "Afghan," although he, like Trump, was born in a country called New York City, just not in the wealthy, lily-white enclave of Jamaica Estates in Queens. 

Then on Tuesday, lest anyone miss his insinuation that Obama is a Muslim Manchurian candidate, Trump declared that "Look, we're led by a man that either is not tough, not smart, or he's got something else in mind.  And the something else in mind -- you know, people can't believe it."

Trump then asked us to remember that he's "a friend of women and the LGBT community," pledging to gay Americans that "I will fight for you."   We didn't remember any such thing, of course, because he supports an amendment banning same-sex marriage, which he reiterated on Wednesday.   

That was the day Trump really hit his stride.  He solidified the support of Native American voters by yet again calling Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas," and noted later in a speech that he had long opposed the Iraq war (he supported it) and called out the American troops who fought there for being "crooked as hell." 

"How about bringing baskets of money, millions and millions of dollars, and handing it out?" he asked.  "I want to know who are the soldiers that had that job because I think they're living very well right now, whoever they may be."  (A spokesman later denied that Trump had said what he said.) 

On Thursday, Trump rested.  Actually, he flip-flopped on gun control, noting that Hillary Clinton wants to repeal the Second Amendment (false) and tweeting that he would be meeting with the National Rifle Association, "who has endorsed me, about not allowing people on the terrorist watch list, the no fly list, to buy guns."  (The NRA dutifully responded that it too opposed terrorists packing heat, but it opposes the no-fly ban.)  Trump then wrapped up the day by claiming that "a tremendous flow of Syrian refugees" has been entering the U.S. because of our Islamofascist president.  (The total between 2012 and 2016 was a paltry 2,000.)   

On Friday, Trump said of Russian Thug-in-Chief Vladimir Putin, "In terms of leadership, he is getting an A,"  and suggested that a shootout at the Orlando club "would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks, that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight."

This was about the time that the latest results from national polls hove into view.   They were "brutal" as the banned-from-the-campaign bus Washington Post put it, but what the hay.   

"So I'm four down in one poll, three and a half in another that just came out, and I haven't started yet," Trump noted, ignoring the polls in which Clinton has opened a double-digit lead and the fact that his numbers are the suckiest in the last three election cycles.   

I haven't started yet. 

That's exactly what Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, among other Republican Party elites, fear as each succeeding Nixon-to-China moment in Trump's campaign sends his poll numbers further south while diminishing the party's longer-than-long longshot chances to take back the White House, let alone hold onto the Senate. 

These bigs kept hoping that Trump would "pivot," to use a favorite newspaper headline word of the moment.  (It's short and snappy, while "revolve on his axis" is anything but.) 

But . . . the chances of Trump morphing into a kinder, gentler and more grounded candidate who doesn't advocate violence, invite comparisons to dictators and repel most voters with insults and braggadocio, let alone do the bare nuts-and-bolts minimum to run a national campaign, are as remote as Jamaica Estates is to the real world.   

Trump's dismissal yesterday of campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who had steered the campaign with spectacular success through the primaries even if he had the tact of a Mafia hit man, was revealing.   It was the most pungent example to date of Trump finding a fall guy for his own self-inflcted mess.  It was too little too late.  Besides which, Trump does not have a campaign in the traditional sense with fundraisers, field workers and computer wonks.  And the move failed to elicited a single welcoming statement from a dispirited party elite.  (Although The New York Times did use "pivot" in its headline on the ouster. )

It is accepted wisdom by now that the Republican Party is a burned-out hulk that has been waiting for a Nowhere Man with a Nowhere Plan to send it over the electoral cliff, and denying Trump the nomination, even if that was possible, would only hasten the party's implosion.   

But the most important factor is that positive poll numbers have been Trump's oxygen, and now he's slowly suffocating.

POLITIX UPDATE IS WRITTEN BY SHAUN MULLEN, A VETERAN JOURNALIST AND BLOGGER FOR WHOM THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN IS HIS 12th SINCE 1968.  CLICK HERE FOR AN INDEX OF PREVIOUS COLUMNS. 

© 2015-2016 SHAUN D. MULLEN.

IMAGE FROM DONKEYHOTEY/FLICKR.  

USED WITH PERMISSION.