We’re Just a Bunch of Suckers

It is quite amazing that we are going to allow Donald Trump to run for such a powerful office without the public knowing what his foreign business dealings have been in the past and without him providing information about his federal income taxes. Let me tell you this: we’re all just a bunch of suckers.
by Charlie Leck

Let’s suppose the man is a fraud! Why? Perhaps he’s been telling the IRS that he has not been making any money for the last ten years and that he’s in debt up to his ears. Perhaps he can’t hold on to his property very much longer without an infusion of significant cash. Suppose that he’s paying his office rent these days on the contributions his campaign is receiving – using that money as rent to pay campaign costs while they are really helping to pay the high costs of his phony businesses (there have been some indications that this might be true). Maybe he’s not doing any such thing! Why can’t we find out?

Let’s suppose, for just a moment, that he has a fortune invested with a bunch of Russian oligarchs. Who knows? We don’t! We don’t know because he won’t provide the information we must have to know just what he and his business is really doing abroad. Are we as a nation about to get into bed with a number of Russian bad guys?

We’re just a bunch of suckers, man! We’ve been duped by one of the slickest traveling salesmen of all times. I remember, as a kid, those greasy looking guys who would stop in my dad’s general store and try to sell him all kinds of miracle ointments that would cure hundreds of chronic problems that the human body develops.

Donald Trump, with his ridiculous hair-do and his long, ugly ties and his mysterious eyes, reminds me of those hucksters that wandered up and down the streets of my town selling their phony cure-alls.

Ugly ties and mysterious eyes,
     with hair than nearly all despise
This is the man that tells all these lies
…..that simple sense and logic defies

Will millions vote for him? Suckers! That’s what they are! My old man used the word a lot – suckers. All those people who came to their doors and they believed the slick guy selling them miracle treatments that were nothing but rebottled cough syrup! My old man called them suckers.

What if it had been poison in those bottles, man? What if? What if, slowly but certainly, those miracle syrups would really hollow out and destroy our innards? America's innards?

Suckers, man! Suckers!

America has always been a land with masses of people who are vulnerable to the slick, traveling salesmen – guys who would rob us blind and then leave us behind, laughing all the way to the bank.

Oh, how my old man talked about people “laughing all the way to the bank!”

These guys rob you blind
     and kick your behind!
On our stupidity they yank,
     laughing on the way to the bank

That’s what all this reminds me of. Donald Trump is trying to sell a cure-all and the masses are believing him, not realizing how sick the stuff he’s selling us really is.

In the old west, the traveling salesmen caused so many problems that the sheriff of this town or that would often have them tarred and feathered and run out of town. Too many townspeople bought into what these miserable twits where selling and the people wouldn’t have anything left to spend on their real needs. They were tough on a small town’s economy.

If we buy into what Donald Trump is trying to sell us, we’re going to become a very sick nation. It will probably start with the economy and then it will infect our schools and even our health care system.

These traveling medicine men – these miserable vermin – they count on all of us being a bunch of suckers. They take us for all that we’ve got and then they go laughing all the way to the bank.

I cannot believe how many suckers are following this man around as if was leaking candy and sweet-tarts from his behind – when what he’s really leaking is what a behind is suppose to leak!

America, listen to the rhythm he spews
     and heed this dastardly mixture he stews!
People, stand up to your terrible leanings,
    refusing to take such miserable beanings!

America! America! Wake yourself up from this terrible nightmare we’re in! America, America, the good side of your nature is calling! Do not buy Donald Trump’s terrible, dangerous concoction! He’s trying to sell us poison that looks like tasty candy!

*Image is a photograph of a Normal Rockwell painting: "Selling Ice to the Eskimo" 

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Think This Is A Wild Election?

This is a rough, tough election. No doubt about it, but there have been crazier ones in U.S. History.
by Charlie Leck

A Washington Post editorial (15 September 2016) calls Donald Trump a scam artist. I don’t think any presidential candidate in the last one hundred years, has been described so harshly as Donald Trump is being pictured by many leading news organizations.

What I think we need to look at is why so many, many potential voters continue to favor Donald Trump for this job. Is that a reflection on the America we live in and the character of its people?

I wonder how so many people can buy into such irrational promises from any candidate. Do they actually know that the promises are impossible to fulfill and just want to go with the guy because he is such a radical change from traditional candidates?

There are many questions like that in my mind. I am hoping that some of the investigations by both news organizations and legal authorities will make serious progress in the next 30 days in order to answer some of the dizzying questions about candidate Trump. It appears his family foundation is something of a hoax. This foundation received donations from other charitable givers and gave it away as if it were from Trump’s personal fortune. It also purchased, for $20,000, a six-foot painting of Mr. Trump. The foundation also bid $12,000 on a football helmet autographed by Tim Tebow. And, there is much more we don’t know about Trump’s rental policies in many of his New York City apartment facilities. And, former students of Trump University are coming out of the wood work every day, drawing vivid depictions of the fraud that went on in that Trump program.

There are so many things we can’t quite figure out about Mr. Trump without a close look at his federal income tax filings. It certainly appears that Mr. Trump is never going to give us the right to do that.

There is so much “evidence” of possible fraud about Mr. Trump’s activities over the last three decades; and yet, it is Hillary Clinton that Donald Trump keeps calling crooked and fraudulent.

What a campaigner the man is! He’s like a boxer throwing the wildest of punches, hoping one or two of them will land. He makes stuff up like the best of fiction writers.

I’d like to say this is the weirdest campaign for the office in American History. That wouldn’t be true. Prior to the twentieth century there were a number of very crude and rude campaigns. The first campaign of Abe Lincoln is a good example. Lincoln was falsely called all kinds of vile things by the opposing press and the opposing candidate.

The second campaign of John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson in 1828 is a good example of enormous political sleaze. Though Jackson’s party was called “The Democrats,” it much more closely resembled today’s Republican Party because they had a strong commitment to individual liberties, very limited government and heavily favored strong states’ rights. Jackson was known as “Old Hickory” He was a southern man of humble means and he was orphaned early in life. He was, however, a military hero.

John Quincy Adams was the complete opposite of that; for he was the son of one of the nation’s founders and, as a man of wealth and privilege, he had traveled the world and spoke a number of languages. “Erudite” is the word that comes to mind when trying to describe JQA.

Adams had won the 1824 election battle against Jackson by the slimmest of margins, actually losing the popular vote but winning when the electoral votes were in his favor.

Adams had little trouble exploiting a rather questionable reputation that Jackson carried. An extraordinarily strong temper was one of Jackson’s weakness (remember, he was the man of a number of duels). Jackson had also disobeyed direct military orders in 1819 and had invaded Spanish Florida in spite of the orders not to. Jackson also had to fight charges that he was an adulterer.

But, Jackson fought hard and called Adams a man of corruption and pointed to a number of possible examples. Of course, the south hated Adams and loved Jackson. The good church-going people of the south also accused Adams of owning a pool table and of gambling at card games! It seemed, Jackson claimed, that the pool table had been paid for with government money.

The pressure in that campaign was so intense that Adams withdrew from actual appearances, but many northern newspapers took up the campaign for him. One newspaper reported that Jackson’s mother was “a common prostitute!” The paper also claimed that the woman ended up marring “a mulatto man” and Jackson was one of the children of that marriage.

In the end, Jackson took 56 percent of the vote in 1828 and 178 electoral votes were tallied for him; while Adams received only 83 such votes. Jackson was so angered by Adams that he refused to make the traditional visit to the outgoing president on the day of his inauguration.

One of my favorite stories about early political campaigns comes from the Lincoln/Douglas fights and debates in 1860. Out on the campaign trail, Douglas was to call Lincoln one of the ugliest men of all time – “horrid-looking… sooty and scoundrelly… a cross between a nutmeg dealer, the horse-swapper and the nightman.” Stephen Douglas had no room to talk – himself being 5’4’’ tall and the same measurement wide.

Smithsonian Magazine listed the 1876 election campaign between Samuel Jones Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes as one of the dirtiest campaigns ever. Tilden was boldly called, over and over, “a briber, a thief,” and “a drunken syphilitic.” It was documented that southern Democrats prevented thousands of eligible blacks from casting votes all across the southern states. Neither candidate got enough electoral votes to win and a constitutional crisis developed. It wasn’t until early in 1877 that a compromise took place – it gave Hayes the presidency in exchange for removing all federal troops from the South (and that, in essence, ended Reconstruction.)

When I first read, many years ago, about the history of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I was completely taken by this remarkable comment by Abraham Lincoln. I wrote it down carefully and tucked it in a special “quotation notebook” that I keep. This if what Abe Lincoln said in one of those debates:

“That is the real issue. That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, ‘You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”                                                                                                        [in the debate at Alton, Ill on Oct 15, 1858]

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The Many Reasons Trump Should Be Turned Away!

Here’s your chance to see a thorough and carefully compiled list of the reasons Donald Trump should be soundly defeated in November. I like Keith Olbermann’s style and he outdoes himself here.
by Charlie Leck

In a Gentlemen’s Quarterly column, Keith Olbermann listed 176 reasons why Donald Trump should not be elected President. Here are a few of them. You can find the rest on-line.

“The Emperor's New Clothes quality to the Trump campaign has survived these 15 months because, as we react to each outrage, our shock and revulsion have been refracted like light through a prism. But these outrages are not separate events, not even a pattern. They are, simply, Donald Trump. Seen all at once, they—and he—are horrifying. You must see them all at once. Thus—in brief—the story so far:” 

(Below are the first 7 of his 176 reasons.)

·         The Republican party has actually nominated for president a man who attacked the Pope.

·         Who attacked John McCain for being captured by the North Vietnamese.

·         Who attacked Gold Star parents Khizr and Ghazala Khan and then juxtaposed their names with the phrase “Radical Islamic Terrorism.”

·         Who attacked Hillary Clinton as a “bigot.” Who attacked her as “brainwashed.” As “unhinged.” As “a monster.” As “the devil.” As “the most corrupt candidate ever”—showing her face on piles of hundred-dollar bills and the Star of David.

·         Who attacked her as someone whom “Second Amendment people” should do something about. As someone whose religion “we don’t know anything about”—after he explained he had never asked God for forgiveness.

·         Who attacked President Obama and implied he was a traitor. Who attacked him as having been complicit in the Orlando terrorist attack. Who attacked him for having lower approval ratings than Vladimir Putin, as if Putin’s could be trusted. Who attacked him as being born in another country. Who attacked him as the founder of ISIS, then said it was sarcasm, then said it wasn’t sarcasm, then attacked him again as the founder of ISIS.

·         Who attacked Carly Fiorina for her face; Hillary Clinton for her non-presidential “look”; Heidi Cruz for herappearance; Megyn Kelly for having “blood coming out of her wherever”; Mika Brzezinski as “crazy and very dumb,” “neurotic,” “not very bright.”

I hope you’ll read the rest of these reasons in Olbermann’s column. It is just all too, too true.

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Trump Would Not Make Us Great!

Rather than making us great again, Donald Trump would tear us apart!

by Charlie Leck

I get quite confused by so many people I know claiming that “America is the greatest nation on earth!” My confusion comes from not knowing what that means – especially when I hear the Donald Trump campaign for the presidency shouting out all the time: “Let’s make America great again!”

I’m also confused because I do not have much experience with other nations – I’ve been in quite a few but there are so many I know nothing about. For instance, I know France and I absolutely love it. If it weren’t for the idea of leaving so many children and grandchildren, I would try to convince my wife to give living in the area of Avignon a chance. I also loved Japan. There is something about that nation’s calm demeanor and its gentleness that I really like. And, of course, Canada is a remarkably civilized and well-informed nation. Eastern Canada would be someplace I could easily live.

America seems so much more violent than those three nations mentioned above. It seems to me that so many Americans don’t understand our constitution and the extraordinary rights conferred to us by that remarkable document. My own surveys and quizzing has proven to me that very few Americans understand that we are a republic – a democratic republic to be sure – and not so much a pure democracy. This comes as the result of being a nation of 50 individual states. History shows us a lot of perpetual rancor between the states.

I wish Americans would stop boasting so much about our greatness. I know it somewhat irks dear friends and relatives of mine who live in other nations. Why can’t we just strive for being a great nation and let others decide just how great we are?

I want to ask the question: What is a great nation? Or, what makes a nation great or greater than another nation? I think my answer to those queries would be quite different than the replies most people would give. I would want to know how well the nation takes care of the least of us (as Jesus is said to have put it). How concerned are we that our nation is fair to everyone and gives everyone an even chance for success? How vast is the wealth of the wealthy and how vast is the poverty of the poor? How well do we take care of our very young and our very old? Have we a real compassion about justice for all or do we just recite it to be politically correct?

Only six out of ten eligible voters will vote in America. That troubles me. And don’t think it is this uneducated or poor or ill who don’t vote. As the NY Times points out in a remarkable story this morning, “…the majority of people who didn’t vote in the 2012 presidential election were white, middle-income and middle-aged.” Why? A great nation ought to fix that! The republic is not quite working as it should.

I am asking myself all those questions as I prepare to vote this year. After careful thought, I am quite certain that Donald Trump would not make us a greater nation. A lot of people would be left out under the Donald Trump promise. His comment at one of his campaign rallies, about a protester, is a perfect example of the attitude that Donald Trump would bring to America as its president: “I’d like to punch that guy in the face!”

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Ohio and Florida are absolutely crucial and you will see lots of campaigning there; and I don’t think Mrs. Clinton can lose both of these states and still win the election.
by Charlie Leck

I began blogging in 2007 during the early days of the Presidential election race. I followed the polling results of a dozen major poll takers and kept my readers up-to-date on how things stood (the kind of thing done so much more expertly and fashionably now by 538). A couple of days before the 2008 election I was able to ensure my readers that Barack Obama would be the next president. It won’t be that easy this time. I am shocked that this nation is giving such serious consideration to Donald Trump for the office.

Clinton v. Trump: The count as I see it now!
In my wildest imaginings I would never have considered that the race would be this close.

270 electoral votes are necessary to win the presidency. As of right now, I see Clinton able to hold on to and win states that add up to 240 electoral votes – leaving her in need of 30 more. Then there are the following states that keeping sliding back and forth between her and Trump: Colorado (9), Florida (29), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), Wisconsin (10). The electoral votes in those states are listed with each state.

It doesn’t take a polling genius to see how important Florida is in this election. If Hillary were to lose Florida, she’d need to take at least two of the other four remaining states – two if they were Ohio (18) and Michigan (16). I’ll put it this way: She’d better win three of the five states listed in the paragraph above!

The following are the states that appear certain to vote for Donald Trump (a good number of them are not surprises but a few are)..

Kansas (6)

Louisiana (8)

Mississippi (6)

Montana (3)

North Dakota (3)

South Dakota (3)

The following states are leaning toward Donald Trump

Indiana (11)

Nebraska (1)

South Carolina (9)

Montana (3)

Texas (38)

Utah (6)

Here are the states that experts consider absolute toss-ups… but I’m not sure Georgia (a state that always disappoints me) belongs here. I think the Peach State will vote for Trump. I think Pennsylvania and Virginia will vote for Clinton. Maine, at the moment, is leaning toward Trump. Ohio and Florida are absolutely crucial and you will see lots of campaigning there; and I don’t think Mrs. Clinton can lose both of these states and still win the election.

Arizona (11)

Florida (29)

Georgia (16)

Iowa (6)

Maine (1)

Missouri (10)

Nevada (6)

North Carolina (15)

Ohio (18)

Pennsylvania (20)

Virginia (13)

Wisconsin (10)

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Why not become a follower? If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner (Join this Site) and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.

I Am, Proudly, a Liberal!

    The train station in Canton, Mississippi, where I got off
    the train on 22 June 1964 and learned that Michael Schwerner,
    Andrew Goodman and James Cheney were missing and likely
    dead.

When it comes to politics, I am a liberal.
by Charlie Leck

That won’t surprise anyone who really knows me – it’s been commonly known for decades. My Facebook friends, however, should probably understand this about me and they then can make any sort of decisions they want about continuing to friend me or defriend me (or secretly block me).

I didn’t know what I was (politically) until it came time for my first national election vote in 1962, when I found myself mostly in agreement with Democratic Party principles. John F. Kennedy was in office and I liked where he was trying to move the nation and I liked the stances he was taking on desegregating the Deep South. His assassination pretty well sewed up for me my political stances.

In 1964 I went to Mississippi for the summer voter registration project, arriving there on the day the three young civil rights workers (Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman) were reported missing. Mississippi was red hot that summer in so many ways. My time there forever convinced me that I would spend my life fighting racism and racial injustice. I have written a series of blogs about my Mississippi experience and privately published those blogs a couple of years ago. (I can make them available to those who are interested.)

The war was also raging in Vietnam and any simple reading of the history of that battle and how we got ourselves into it showed it to be stupid politically and morally wrong for us to be there. I took a public position on the war in ’66 and began working against it and marching against it.

In ’68 I took the step into political involvement and associated myself with the famous Democratic Farmer-Labor Party of Minnesota and attended my first State DFL Party Convention as a supporter of Eugene McCarthy for the Presidency.

The nation, that autumn, was to make the incredible mistake of defeating Hubert H. Humphrey and electing Richard M. Nixon as President. Nixon was a disaster!

Now, the same party considers electing a man of even worse standards and abilities and I am left dumbfounded.

“Why can’t they see how stupid and poorly fit he is for the office?” My wife just called that question up to me.

“Because they don’t read,” I answered her. And, I believe that must be true; for, if you read, about Donald Trump you will understand how unprincipled he is and how everything he has done in his life has been for Donald Trump. What he will do to the nation, if he is elected, is appalling to think about. Nixon will seem like a prince and a clergyman in comparison.

For starters, read Trump Revealed by Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher. (They subtitled their book “An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money and Power!”)

There is no changing the minds of Donald Trump's followers because they are closed-minded. They don’t really understand who this man is and how, over the years, he has disqualified himself for consideration to such an office. I can only say – very sincerely – “God help America if he is elected!”

Can you not hear the many wise, prophetic voices warning us?

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Trump Deserves to be Turned-Away

[sketch by C Leck)

Think about it readers, please! Donald Trump does not deserve your vote. He deserves to be rejected by huge numbers. It will send a message to other frauds who seek to take over this office.
by Charlie Leck

Paul Waldman in the Washington Post calls the following a history of Donald Trump's corruption, double-dealing and fraud [see the story here).

•  Trump’s casino bankruptcies, which left investors holding the bag while he skedaddled with their money 
• Trump’s habit of refusing to pay contractors who had done work for him, many of whom are struggling small businesses 
• Trump University, which includes not only the people who got scammed and the Florida investigation, but also a similar story from Texas where the investigation into Trump U was quashed. * The Trump Institute, another get-rich-quick scheme in which Trump allowed a couple of grifters to use his name to bilk people out of their money 
• The Trump Network, a multi-level marketing venture (a.k.a. pyramid scheme) that involved customers mailing in a urine sample which would be analyzed to produce for them a specially formulated package of multivitamins 
• Trump Model Management, which reportedly had foreign models lie to customs officials and work in the U.S. illegally, and kept them in squalid conditions while they earned almost nothing for the work they did 
• Trump’s employment of foreign guest workers at his resorts, which involves a claim that he can’t find Americans to do the work 
• Trump’s use of hundreds of undocumented workers from Poland in the 1980s, who were paid a pittance for their illegal work 
• Trump’s history of being charged with housing discrimination 
• Trump’s connections to mafia figures involved in New York construction 
• The time Trump paid the Federal Trade Commission $750,000 over charges that he violated anti-trust laws when trying to take over a rival casino company
• The fact that Trump is now being advised by Roger Ailes, who was forced out as Fox News chief when dozens of women came forward to charge him with sexual harassment. According to the allegations, Ailes’s behavior was positively monstrous; as just one indicator, his abusive and predatory actions toward women were so well-known and so loathsome that in 1968 the morally upstanding folks in the Nixon administration refused to allow him to work there despite his key role in getting Nixon elected.

I don’t need to say anything else. Anyone who votes for this man in November is a bit crazy and unconcerned about the health and wealth of our nation.

Trump will likely threaten to sue about the list of claims above. As in the past, it will only be a bluff and the man won’t dare sue because he’d face such embarrassment at a trial which would prove these charges true.

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Why not become a follower? If you read my blog regularly, why not become a follower? All you have to do is click in the upper right hand corner (Join this Site) and establish a simple means of communication. Then you'll be informed every time a new blog is posted here. If all that's confusing, here's Google's explanation of how to do it! If you don’t want to post comments on the blog, but would like to communicate with me about it, send me an email if you’d like.