No !

“No.”

Such a simple word. Nothing ambiguous about it. It doesn’t have a lot of letters. And it’s easy to say. “No.”

Now, someone finally said it to Donald Trump. Maybe you missed it, with the headlines that talked about a $1.6 trillion dollar budget being passed by Congress that the President signed under protest. Or, under something. It was hard to tell from his rants and the pundits' pronouncements.

But, Congress voted - Democrats and Republicans, if you were looking for that - and the budget was signed. And, hanging over the entire process was that simple word, that elegant word. That completely unambiguous word. “No.”

It is, simply, the strongest of negative responses. Tell a small child to go to bed, and they will say “no.” Same thing you say to them when they reach for candy at the supermarket check-out line. “No.”

Grown-ups use the word when they are dating. I used to hear “no” a lot. Ask your boss for a raise, and you will likely hear it too. A lawyer might charge you $300 an hour and give you a 30-page document explaining why your neighbor can’t run a business out of their garage. That letter, boiled down to its true meaning, says “no.”

Those kinds of examples are true for almost all of us. Almost everyone is used to hearing “no” from their parents and their teachers and their friends, their classmates and the people they marry. From police officers and the bouncers guarding the door at a new club. You even hear it from the people taking reservations for airline flights.

“No.”

And, yet, there is an exception or two, special rules carved out by the rich and powerful. They are the lucky people that no one ever says “no” to.

 It’s something we all envy, at least at first. Most people, sooner or later, will dream of being a king or a queen. Heck, we used to say everyone’s home is their castle. Absolute power!

Now imagine getting the best table at any restaurant you want, getting a front-row seat to every play on Broadway, flying anywhere you like in your private plane whenever the mood strikes you. And, you can even avoid drug addiction by just saying “no” and going to a really expensive private clinic anywhere in the world. There, away from prying eyes, you can get a couple of weeks of gentle treatment and - presto - you have been detoxified and cured. Life is wonderful again.

But, it’s a dream with horrible real-world consequences. (You can see where I am going here. Donald Trump is a real victim of not having people say “no” to him as a child or as a grown up, not even when many of his corporations failed to pay contractors or live up to their contracts. He was protected by some well-paid lawyers and some business-friendly provisions of the law. Now, we have become his second-hand victims.)

Get ready to live through his tantrums to come. The people who said “no” to him must be punished. But, so many of them. Where to start? Where to start? Transgender folks in the military clearly won’t be enough. And, there isn’t much left for him to say about Hillary. His real betrayers are the Republicans who - I am sure he believes - were only able to take over Congress because of him.

Betrayal is such an ugly thing. And, who better to punish it than our President.

Imagine. They said “no” to him.On his very own budget. No money for the wall. Too much money for pork barrel spending that didn’t even give him a cut.

 Now, let’s just all watch what happens. Just as soon as those investigations blow over. 

Or, maybe, before they blow over. Just in case.

Death to the Drug Dealers

Our president has called for the death penalty to be imposed on the drug dealers who kill thousands of people by selling their illegal and highly addictive products. Drugs.

He is right, of course. If you cause someone’s death, then you should pay. That’s the law. Still, our law is seriously flawed because when you go to trial for murder, you have to show that you actually caused the victim’s death.

Well, we get around that problem a little bit in state courts all the time. We have different degrees of murder. The penalties are higher if you kill a police officer or a witness to another crime. If the state can’t show intent, there is always reckless endangerment or criminally negligent homicide. 

And there’s the rub. Proving that a drug dealer wants to kill all their customers is a really hard battle to win in court. How can you stay in business, the defense might ask. No death penalty for reckless endangerment, or every drunk driver who causes a fatal accident could be facing the death penalty.

Not to mention that for every major drug dealer that gets taken off the street, another one is ready to move in and take over the market. Heck, in good old England when they used to hang pickpockets, a crowd would gather to watch. It drew lots of pickpockets.

But, stopping the tens of thousands of drug deaths in our country each year really is important. And, I have some ideas. But, first, just two words. State and Federal.

                                                                   Huh?

Well, even if Congress passes a law that allows death sentences for drug dealers, it would only be for federal violations. It’s not a federal crime when a cop in Milwaukee or Detroit or Holtsville arrests someone for selling their aunt’s prescription painkillers that they stole from her bathroom.

So, let’s look at a federal penalty. It could be applied to the drug mules who come across the border, or through the airport. But, that would be a pretty small bite at the problem. Better to stop a truck filled with drugs, or a cargo ship with a hold that is loaded with crates of drugs from China or Mexico or, perhaps, a transshipping company in Germany or Canada.

But, heck, they are all now incorporated in Panama anyway, and the owners of the ships and trucks could easily transfer their company headquarters to some place which won’t extradite them. Like Switzerland. Or Afghanistan. Or Bangladesh.

(Disclaimer: Or, maybe not. The list of nations which do not have extradition treaties with the United States - or which have really limited treaties, or have very workable treaties on paper but do not actually extradite people - is long and constantly changing. So, for any big drug dealers who read this, check it out before you form a corporation in some country you might have to move to.)

Well, you say, there aren’t any major drug dealers who are reading your blog, you self-centered and demented liberal-leaning critic of our President and our Way of Life. Well, to you I have one word. “Feh.”

It stands for Forget Everything you have Heard about drug dealers.

Now, we haven’t seen this part reported out at length. But, let’s look at one really important thing. There are just two essential sources of illegal drugs on our streets and in our children’s pockets and in bodies in the morgues. Doctors and manufacturers.

Now, we all know - or should know - that a very small percentage of doctors write a very big percentage of scripts for the illegal drugs that hit the streets.

And it is big business. West Virginia, a small state which had the nation’s highest rate of drug deaths in the nation, found one small town with only about 3,000 residents had been sent 20.8 million prescription painkillers between 2008 and 2015. The hydrocodone and oxycodone went to two drug stores only four blocks apart.

Well, the state sued the manufacturers and suppliers, and settled with two of them for $36 million. It helped with anti-drug and with treatment programs.

Now if Donald Trump’s program had been in place - it became a federal crime because the drugs were sold across state lines - the heads of those corporations would have faced the death penalty.

Heck, a special prosecutor could have been appointed to go after the real drug dealers, the people who were making all the money off the sale of those drugs.  

                                                 Is This For Real?

Let’s make it real. The New York Times recently reported a federal indictment charging five New York doctors with bribery and taking part in a kickback scheme to increase a drug company’s sale of a highly addictive fentanyl spray. The firm was charged with illegally paying some doctors $100,000 a year for prescribing millions of dollars worth of its product, and funneling the payments through a phony lecture scam.

So, what should we do if Dr. Gordon Freedman - said to be one of the company’s top prescribers of the drug and the company’s highest-paid speaker - is found guilty of the charges.

Now you get it. It won’t be the college students flying back from vacation or the immigrants who manage to get over the big fence who will be facing the death penalty for drug dealing. It will be the officers of the companies which make millions by producing drugs we don’t need and selling them illegally, and the doctors who push all those prescriptions.

And, if we follow the money, the people getting rich off the illegal sale of those drugs could also be in danger. Who would they be? The stockholders.

Everyone who owns stock in a company that manufactures drugs could face the death sentence. It will keep the courts in business for the rest of our lifetime. And, the best part is that civil forfeitures will cover all those court costs.

Doctors in jail. Stock Brokers in jail. All of those one per-centers who own stocks in companies that own stocks in other companies that profit from the manufacture and sale of drugs...well, it will certainly upgrade our prisons.

And, our streets will be a lot safer. If anyone is left to walk on them.

What Makes Hillary Run?

There she goes, again. 

Hillary Clinton recently said something that will turn around and bite the Democratic Party, and - thanks to Donald Trump and his endless controversies - it was almost pushed into the dead zone which exists somewhere between pages 11 and 32 of our larger newspapers.

What did she say? Well, she told an audience in India that while she lost lots of states in the middle of the nation, she did win in the biggest states on the East Coast and the West Coast, states which produce two-thirds of our nation’s gross domestic product.

Well, thanks to the Washington Post, her comments didn’t completely vanish. She said the states which voted for her were the states that were economically advanced, more dynamic and more forward-looking.

She didn’t call the other states less progressive and less wealthy, or the home of the Deplorables - although she might well have - but she did say they were filled with people who hated and feared women and minorities.

Just the right thing to say in a year that Democrats are trying to take back Congress.

Well, after I got done wincing - I was only able to regain my balance by watching Sarah Huckabee Sanders for a few minutes -I mused for a whole hour on Hillary and her problem. Why can’t she stop? It’s the same question the Press has been asking, and I think that it is the wrong question. It should be “why should we expect her to?”

I had been viewing Hillary as the flip side of Donald Trump - he dumb and popular (at least at first) and she smart and unable to connect with half the nation. Then the LED flare went off in my head (I’ve upgraded from light bulbs). They aren’t opposites. They are the same.

Clearly, they didn’t start that way. Their backgrounds are as different as they could be. But, something happened. Maybe it’s the kind of thing you see in some movies - the war movie where the kind and innocent young soldier decides the only way to fight the vicious enemy is to become like them, or the honest cop who gets an undercover assignment and ends up being just like the bloodthirsty gang members.

Hillary Clinton as Michael Corleone? Well, even with her long, complex relationship with her husband and our former president, that might be a bit of a push.

Still, neither of them can see the small picture. They can see parts of the Big Picture - where are we going as a nation,  what are we doing right and wrong - but they have long passed the time when they could see individual people and realize what our economy and our government are doing to them.

It’s the same problem the media has when it talks about tax reform and the impact on the average family, forgetting that none of us are average and the still-evolving tax changes (just what, exactly, did that regulation mean, asks the IRS people who must enforce it) will impact all of us differently.

Now, in my life as a reporter, I crossed paths with Hillary Clinton several times. Watched her walk by as she and her husband, the President, flew into Westhampton Beach. Saw her work the crowd at a big-ticket fundraiser. Watched her meeting for an hour or so with farmers from Eastern Long Island (almost all of them Republicans, but her constituents) to discuss their need for seasonal workers and their problems with proposed new pesticide regulations.

She smiled the same smile that all candidates and their spouses smile when they walk past the press. She touched hands and whispered a brief greeting quite properly as she figuratively collected checks. 

And she absolutely glowed as she and the farmers sank deeper and deeper into the technical issues involved in controlling the unwanted and accidental spread of pesticides and the impressive system (integrated pest management, if you must know) that allowed farmers to use less pesticides and get better control for their crops. She knew more than enough to keep up with them.

Yes, she is a wonk. And, she believes so deeply in her graphs and charts and analytics that there is no room to look at the side of the road and see what is happening to the people who are bypassed. Kinda the same thing that happened to her when she was trying to bring health care to the nation.

Trump, meanwhile, believes his own press releases. The ones he writes himself. Deep in his heart, he believes all those Russians got together with him only to discuss Soviet orphans. All the rest was just coincidental.

He listens to Fox News and he has no patience to read long briefing papers or to study the subtleties of building a great wall on the border with Mexico. No, he just sees the big picture of a strong President protecting the nation from a mostly non-existent threat, and leaves the details to others. That has always been his job in the Trump organization, and nothing has really happened to make him change now.

Perhaps that’s why I like local government so much. There is something magical about people making decisions in small villages or towns where the people who make the decisions for the municipality come face to face with the voters every week in the supermarket or library or at the school.

It’s why a lot of people who get elected to county or state office, or who get elected to Congress or go to work for a large government agency start to see the people they work for - you and me and everyone else - as groups, not individuals.

Officials can take polls to find out what the public thinks, and they can go out to meetings where they are treated as visiting royalty - “It is an honor and a privilege to introduce Councilman Jones, who is on the town parks committee...” - but when they stop seeing people as people who have to deal with their big picture on a very personal level, things change.

You really can’t tell some people face-to-face that some other people 10 miles away are getting a new park while they are getting an expanded landfill, no matter what the big picture says about transportation and expansion costs. 

It’s why a lot of elected officials know that the bag of good will they earn when they are first elected just keeps getting emptier and emptier as time goes on. And, sometimes there is nothing left.

So, let’s look again at Hillary and The Donald. She could be comfortable (her net worth was estimated at $47 million last year by Forbes) but she is driven, and driven hard, by a desire to be right. Donald, I think, is driven by an endless maw of revenge, fed by a sense of inadequacy. Run out of enemies, and just keep fighting the old ones, or go out and attack your supporters, until there is no one left on the sled to throw to the wolves.

Maybe they both should go away on a long, long vacation. Or get therapy, or just play golf. 

We could use the rest.

So, What Shut Me Up?

I haven’t written a blog in the past two weeks. Rather, I haven’t published a blog in a couple of weeks. The ones I wrote are just sitting in a file on my computer, getting more and more stale each day.

The events in Washington and the rest of the world are just coming too fast, and what was true yesterday seems almost irrelevant today.

It’s like a punishment from the News Gods, where all the bright shiny objects we have learned to pay attention to have suddenly become really worth paying attention to. 

Who would have thought that Stormy Daniels was turning into Monica Lewinsky, or that Donald Trump really held the secret to settling the crisis in Korea and ending a police action that started there in 1950, when the army of North Korea invaded its neighbor to the south.

Of course, we don’t know what will happen with Stormy or with the prospects for peace in Korea. Still, those things seem more solid than Trump’s big beautiful wall that Mexico will pay for. possibly with a special tariff of $50 a head in illegal immigrants coming across the border.

Now the trouble with the media and the people who consume it is that they and we can’t pay attention to more than two or three things at once. And, the bigger an event gets, the harder it is for us to understand.

You know that Louisiana still hasn’t recovered from the last hurricane to hit it? Puerto Rico too. And even some parts of Florida and a batch of islands in the Caribbean, and California from the fires and mudslides. And our infrastructure is still getting older and bridges are breaking down, and health care still isn’t available to many people in our country.

Pop quiz. How many people have been indicted in the probe by the special prosecutor? Extra points if you can name them. And, a big bonus if you can remember just what they were indicted for. (hint - it was reported in several major newspapers across the country).

Now, how many of them have pleaded guilty.

And, tell me, what, precisely, has Congress done to stop the slaughter of innocent people by demented killers with assault rifles? Yes, it’s a trick question. And, hopes and prayers are not the answer.

So, can you blame me? There is a breathless rush to report an off-year Congressional race next Tuesday in a district in eastern Pennsylvania that won’t even exist the next time voters cast ballots. Yet it is being analyzed to death, and figures show that as of Feb. 21, Connor Lamb has raised $3,3 million, compared to $700,000 for Rick Saccone.

Pop quiz. Which one of them is the Democrat and which is the Republican?

So, short and sweet, can you blame me for spiking all the blogs I have been working on for the past two weeks? Whatever I write about becomes old news before I can re-read it and publish it. (Yes, I still look for mistakes before I put something up for the public, an old habit I just can’t get rid of, and really don’t want to.)

Well, there’s talk of another storm coming up the east coast, and new insights into the looming debt of 666 Fifth Avenue, and a new policy for our military in some nation in the Middle East. And, is Syria really using poison gas on its own people, and is Russia still poisoning its critics in London?

Better get this out fast, before something really important happens.