The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

‘Don’t Throw Me In that Briar Patch’
Br’er Rabbit to Br’er Fox

You gotta pity the poor Democrats. The Mueller Report was replete with impeachable offenses and Mueller himself made it clear the ball was now in their court. His job was to investigate, provide facts, serve up indictments, refer to other judicial branches those issues outside his purview but crimes nevertheless. A sitting President, not his job to make the call. What he said was he could not, NOT, offer exoneration on the issue of Obstruction of Justice. That job would fall to the Congress using the powers of impeachment.

Congress, of course, has all the courage of the lion in the Wizard of Oz as it chews on its tail in trepidation. The GOP, as always, is willing to ignore just about anything short of murder to defend their new leader, the guy who has changed the Grand Old Party into the Greedy Obnoxious Partisans with scarcely a whimper from the boys in the club. The Democrats believe what the Republicans are threatening them with: that an impeachment will backfire on them in the 2020 elections. They think it might be better to let that go and fight for a replacement to the Boy King next cycle.

They could be right, of course, and expediency could trump justice here. But the argument against leaning into impeaching a president so utterly lacking in decency or morals is that the case is comparable to Clinton’s, who was impeached, but not convicted in the Senate. The Senate now has made it crystal clear they have no interest in Trump’s malfeasance so long as they can use him for their own goals. Profiles in Courage, not so much. Clinton’s impeachment was seen, ultimately, as partisan over-reach. He said under oath he did not have sex with that woman and most people could understand, if not condone, lying about sexual improprieties.

Trump, on the other hand, refused to testify for Mueller. We all know he lies constantly, possibly doesn’t even know the difference between what is true and what isn’t. We know he and his advisors met multiple times with the Russians, even asked them to find Hillary’s emails. We know why he fired Comey. We know why he asked his attorney to write a letter denying he had asked for Mueller to be fired. We know plenty. We know enough that if Trump were not President, he more than likely would be indicted for obstruction of justice. He may not have conspired with the Russians, but he certainly colluded. Collusion is not a crime. Conspiracy is and it requires coordination between the two parties. Trump mostly wanted a Tower in Moscow. The boob never dreamed he might actually win the election. The goal was that Tower. The rest was prototypically real estate shenanigans.

Mueller will be testifying in a few weeks but nothing much will change. Barr did his utmost to muddy the water. The swamp is growing suburbs out there in DC. And the real victim is government once again. Something stinks in America. Something is rotting. We all know what it is, we just can’t seem to do anything about it. Which brings us to the 2020 election. You won’t be hearing many Democratic candidates leading chants to Lock Him Up, Lock Him Up! We just passed that milestone and now we’re moving into the Next Chapter, just get rid of this angry little Fuhrer and let us put him behind us where historians can dice his legacy into a nasty puree of corruption and greed, small mindedness and self-serving illegitimacy. Trump will get his tower all right, one with no windows and his name in black letters. He will go down in the annals of American History as the worst of the bottom feeders. If there was truly any justice, we would blot his name from every edifice and every consciousness. We would completely and forever forget this sad chapter as, hopefully, a temporary madness.

Now that we can finally put the Mueller Report behind us, proof positive that Trump was right, this was all a Witch Hunt, nothing to see here, no collusion, no obstruction of justice, just Total Exoneration, maybe we can return to more important matters of state. Benghazi, for one. And the Clinton Foundation, #2. And while we’re at it, how about another look at Whitewater?

Attorney General Barr, a paragon of impartiality, pretty much wrapped up this waste of money and time. The poor guy, he said, referring to his boss, was under siege by rabid opponents and of course he felt the need to protect himself and by doing so, his country. That’s why he ousted Comey, why he ordered Mueller fired, why he berated Sessions, nothing to see there but a man protecting his good name. Trump. If ever there was a name meant to be writ large in gold letters, Trump is the name, the brand, the President of the United States.

My English major background no doubt has ruined my capability of reading the report correctly. I could have sworn it was clear that Mueller had no mandate to indict a sitting president, simply make recommendations to Congress which does have the power and the responsibility to investigate those obvious 10 examples of obstruction of justice. Something there between the lines, apparently to the Republican side of the aisle, that I completely missed. Even the part where Donald is quoted, upon hearing Mueller has been given the investigation, that there goes his presidency, he’s fucked. Or, as my news feeds keep quoting, ‘F***d’, so maybe it meant Freed. Or Fake Newsed. See, I jump to conclusions.

Like the one I kept asking myself: what about the Russian interference in the election? Barely before the ink had dried on the redactions on the report, I heard Republicans blaming Obama for that. His watch. His f***k up. Sure he went to McConnell and asked for bipartisan support before stepping into a hot election, didn’t want to seem prejudiced, and McConnell, always the good patriot, turned him down flat. Well, see, I jumped to conclusions again.

So it’s time to put all this behind us, I guess. Nothing incriminating in that report. But hey, where are those deleted emails of Hillary’s??? Something in those, I bet. Something worth investigating. Attorney General Barr, hopefully, will jump on that now that this dust has finally cleared….

And Congress, well, I kind of assumed they might start checking into Russian interference with our elections. Course, now we might as well cancel those. We got the right man in office for these dangerous times… No point pretending anymore we live in some kind of democracy. Once again, jumped to conclusions.

It’s time, apparently, to move the Statue of Liberty to Alcatraz and set up a new Ellis Island on our western shores in the San Francisco harbor. Actually, we won’t be needing an Ellis Island if the President gets his way. A week ago he announced the U.S. was full up, no more room, put up the NO TRESPASSING sign, build the walls, send out a tweet we don’t need no stinking immigrants, at least not those of color. But … hold the presses! This week he’s floating a brand new idea (surprised?) to put all those caravans of rapists and drug dealers and con artists congregated at our southern border and ship them by bus to those liberal bastions of anti-Americanism, the Sanctuary Cities.

Serve em right, these mouthy do-gooders who complain about the Wall and about ICE and about separating kids from parents. Show em who’s boss. See what they say then? Sure, they claim they’d welcome these immigrants, put them to work shoring up their economies, make them hard-working citizens. Oh right, the Prez sez. Okay, bring it on!

Well, sir, I say do it! Take the pressure off those border towns that are being overwhelmed by amnesty seekers with court backlogs extending past the next election cycle. But then you have to shut up about no more room. You have to acknowledge that you never had an immigration policy beyond simply shutting the gate. You have to admit you really don’t mind an open border so long as these migrants go to blue states. Immigration was just red meat, wasn’t it, for the folks who need to blame someone for what went wrong in rural America as we move into a digital future?

Just do it, Mr. Mouth! Send these folks to San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia and Seattle. In a week they can go pretty much wherever they want. Maybe get a name or two, height, weight, date of birth, then adios, amigos! With some luck they’ll spread into the onion fields of Georgia, the cherry orchards of New York, the construction sites of every state in the Union, the garment shops of L.A. Nothing much will change but at least, at the very least, we can look forward to a different topic than the Wall. Might be a good change of pace to go back to Benghazi or the Witch Hunt. A breath of fresh air, maybe not, but at least some consistency. Insanity gets ever so tiresome.

Just about when I finished our federal taxes … for the third time … I come across an article listing 60 large corporations that pay no tax whatsoever. Maybe you remember the whining and moaning awhile back that American corporations pay too much compared to other countries’ taxes. Maybe you even believed it. If so, all I can say is that your taxes are simple: put down what you earned, take your standard deduction, sign the form and send a check or wait for a refund. You probably figure corporations do the same thing. Put down their earnings, deduct their cost of doing bizness, that’s the profit, divide by 40% or whatever it used to be and lick their wounds and their stamp.

Tax laws are complicated. There are more loopholes in there than I have mice in my shack. If you ever wondered what lobbyists do to earn their salaries, spend a few hours looking through the IRS list of forms. There are quite a few. If you have a few days, scroll through a couple of them, maybe try to follow the worktables, see how they work. I guarantee you need to be a pretty good accountant. And if you’re a corporate accountant, I guarantee you’ll take every deduction you’re allowed plus plenty that are, well, arguable. Since audits are pretty much a thing of the past, you won’t have to make an argument, just breathe easy. And if in the end you don’t have to pay taxes, well, as a taxpayer who does, I’m just glad we aren’t sending these overtaxed corporations refund checks for all their bother.

Oh, wait, maybe we are. Allowances for next year’s taxes, carry-overs, tax exemptions for simply moving to our town, the list is long and depressing. Sure wouldn’t want them to feel disadvantaged, I know, but there is something inherently wrong with a company like Amazon paying zero taxes, then wrangling concessions from their new headquarter’s location, all the while using predatory tactics on their competition. The average of all corporations in 2018 for tax on their profits was, get ready, 7%. No wonder the corporations are crying bloody murder. 7%. Yeow, owww. Little doubt there why wages aren’t going up when these overtaxed companies can barely stay afloat under such fiscal onslaught. Over regulated, over taxed, overseas and over the rainbow. Why should I complain if I pay more than them? Just helping out the economy. So what if Amazon, Delta, Chevron, Netflix, Duke Energy, Honeywell, Occidental Petroleum, John Deere, General Motors and about 50 more large firms couldn’t chip in a dime? Little bizzy making profits for their shareholders, hey. Me, on the other hand, not too many shareholders in my company.

So once again, another fiscal year, another check to the IRS that pays my fair share of schools, fire and police, roads, welfare, the military, infrastructure, border walls, national forests and parks, all those things government does that make my life easier and richer. Corporations? Not so much. Good citizens? I don’t think so. The right to give money to political action committees just like the rest of us humans? You tell me….

You maybe remember Trump’s promise to simplify your taxes. Said he’d make em fit on a postcard. Well sir, he kept his promise, at least the part about fitting on a postcard. My 1040 really would fit on a postcard. At least page 1. Page 2 would fit on one too, maybe the back side. Course there was the Schedule C for my so-called bizness and don’t forget the Schedule SE for paying my own part of Social Security most folks’ employers pay. And Schedule B that showed interest on savings. Big whoop, that, considering that interest on a savings account or a CD is lower than inflation and inflation is pretty damn low. Then there was Schedule 1, additional income and adjustments where I got to deduct half of those self- employment taxes, and don’t forget Schedule E for supplemental income and losses.

Half of these would fit on a postcard, the others not really. All together they add up to a vacation that lasted a month with a postcard to everyone you know sent every few days. A lot of forms. A lot more than the good old days where most of that was on a 1040 somewhere but now is fairly obscure and way harder to find. Line 17 on form X goes to Line 54 on form E, then that gets moved after a subtraction or two to Line 22 on the 1040. It’s a little like picnicking in a woods that has 3 or 4 trails and poor signage. Although to be fair, you can go online and dig out the trail from a PDF. Again and again.

Now I know, being a small biznessman, one of those vertebrae in the backbone of the American economic engine, that my taxes are probably nearly as complex as Amazon’s. Even if I actually pay something and they do not. Fair is fair and I don’t want to come off as a Whiner. But … even though some of my taxes fit on a postcard they are not simpler. They got a lot more convoluted and complex. I ended up doing them twice because I screwed up a critical component early in the calculations and since I don’t have Turbo or Turgid Tax to redo the math, I spent half a day figuring out all those corollary tangents that octopused out into fiduciary hell.

What you figure out along the way, kind of like Dorothy on her way to Oz, is things aren’t as they seem. All those caveats and loopholes and deductions for this and depreciations for that, they’re in there for a very good reason and the reason is not simplification or transparency. They’re there for obfuscation. You’d have to be a forensic accountant to follow all these threads and when you got to the other side, surprise, surprise as Gomer used to say, shezam, the rich get richer. Is that simple enough for ya….?

I know my many Republican friends were more than happy to accept Attorney General Barr’s terse summary of the Mueller investigation as a total and absolute vindication of Trump. They’re the same folks who smell smoke but refuse to see fire. I get that. After all, I’m the boy who smelled smoke behind my electrical panel, called 911 and waited to see if they’d arrive before my old house burned to the ground. Never did see flame, but when we crowbarred the old barnwood off the walls, we could see melted wiring, gooey roofing asphalt and scorched metal. I don’t think the assumption was that nothing was going on behind those shorted out breakers.

Barr wrote a letter to Trump before he was nominated to be the next Attorney General that set out the argument that a sitting president couldn’t be guilty of obstruction of justice. He was, if you follow the logic, head of the Justice Department and therefore immune to the laws that govern other bureaucrats. I think Kings have this same inoculation. As do Dictators and Fuhrers. Needless to say, that kind of argument will get you a nomination from a President under siege.

Mr. Barr says he will offer up a redacted report sometime soon. Meanwhile he’s interested in investigating the spying that was done by the intelligence community on Trump’s campaign. As Roy Cohn taught Joe McCarthy and Trump years ago, the best defense is a hard kick to the groin. If anyone but the Republican Enablers thought the Attorney General might remain unbiased, well, we were disabused of that notion after the genital karate chop by the Attorney General.

Ditto the President’s tax returns. Not gonna see em, the Trumpster sez. Won the election so it proves nobody is interested. And anyway, they’re under audit and as everyone knows, the IRS can’t release them while they’re under audit. Long audits, all those years back, and no, the IRS tells us they can be released even if they were under audit.

I’ve spent the past three weeks putting my electrical back together. New wiring, new panel box, electrical inspections, nice new digital meter, conduits, new siding, new interior paneling, discontinued circuits, a long lament of remodeling and anguish. The place didn’t burn down … but plenty of damage was done. I’m hoping the government under Trump manages to survive these years, but I suspect that smoke we’re smelling is a lot more than partisan imagination. There’s plenty to see here. Whether we get to see it is another matter altogether.

At the entrance to an LAX restaurant stands a white robot with a round head, eyeballs with red sensors, blue eyes that blink in cute humanoid fashion as the head swivels to find its audience while it answers questions two kids about its same size ask by pressing a dozen or so prompts in the android’s chest. The kids are totally enthralled. Not so much by the voiced answers — they got gizmos and devices galore that do that — but by the creature’s white plastic androgynous physical self. It’s practically one of them.

The kids’ dad catches me watching this futuristic scene and we lock eyes momentarily and both smile. Kids, ya know? Cute. I wonder if he’s thinking what I’m thinking: it won’t be long, couple of years maybe, and they’ll have the real thing, a thinking talking responsive version, a parental substitute, a pet, a playmate, a helper, a babysitter, a counselor, a friend, all of the above. Cute.

Not too far back we had Chatty Cathy, pull the string in her back and she’d croak out a few inane comments. Even had one doll that would wet herself, if I remember right, so odd now I wonder if I’ve conjured a fake memory. Who wants a doll that pisses itself?

The robots aren’t going to piss their pants. If they even wear pants. Or clothes. They’re going to make us love them. We already love our smartphones and they aren’t cute, just useful, although watching 90% of my fellow airport travelers thumbing the gizmos, I’d say they’ve become indispensable, babysitters for the bored. Not too hard a leap to our own personal android, a smarty pants without pants, turning on the lights, adjusting the thermostat, playing our favorite tunes, using its GPS to give us directions from the backseat of the car, tucking us in at night, locking the doors and activating the alarm systems, doing our banking, dialing phone numbers, cooking dinner, cleaning the toilet. Permanent companion. Sex slave too, I’m betting, for those who can afford the premium price.

Those two kids have seen the future. Just not very much of it. Dad and me? Probably we’ve seen more than we wanted.

Check out the dude chillin in the LAX airport. Got his feet up on his suitcase, shoes off, got his hat tilted down over his eyes, got this little notebook and a pen. Goin home, goin home on the next flight out, finished with pitching his proposal for the biggest sheriff station in America, nice fat art budget, no telling if he won or lost.

You think he’s stressin, you’d be guessin. But you’d be wrong. The dude isn’t stressin, the dude is chillin, glad to leave sunny Southern California and its 10 lane freeways crawling 5 mph for 50 miles the day before. Which IS stress inducing when the dude wants to catch that next plane home with little room for delays at the car rental or the shuttle bus or the TSA line, any one of which would make him miss that flight with none until the following day.

What Joe Cool here knows — and you don’t — is these competitions are always crapshoots. The deck is stacked with jokers in hidden cards. A project you think you’ve won hands down goes to some dark horse. One you’re certain you lost lands in your lap. Joe’s been to this rodeo before. Joe doesn’t even mind mixing metaphors the way a blind bartender mixes drinks. Joe’s just glad to be chillin. Goin home. Getting the hell out.

If he wins the commission, swell. If he loses it, another will come along. The days when it seemed like life and death, succeed or get a minimum wage job, win or lose the farm, those are just memories gladly forgotten.

Oh, a small part of Joe Cool misses the tension, the excitement, the hunt. He misses the thrill of competing all-out. And he misses the elation of winning, but not the agony of defeat. He misses those but only a little. This is a blood sport, competing against other artists, some nationally known, but now he doesn’t bleed. He doesn’t even carry band-aids, not with ice water in those veins. Check him out, he’s chillin. He’s goin home. Later on he’ll find out if he’s a Loser…. But not right now.

Wandering cluelessly into the swamps of sexual harassment should make any of us men more than slightly wary. In fact it should scare the bejeebers out of any but the most hardened of my brethren who suffer from toxic masculinity, a malady most likely not treatable with pharmacological remedies or conversion therapy. For the rest of us feminine scientists, a wise man might just avoid the subject altogether and keep his hands in his pockets.

But … I am obviously not a wise man nor do I have deep pockets. So with some trepidation, let me opine about Uncle Joe. I happen to like Joe Biden. I would even vote for the guy under the right circumstances, although honestly, I think the country needs new ideas, not Joe’s call for comity and a genial hug all around. Joe is an old white guy who says he learns his lessons, but geez, c’mon Joe, you let those creeps tear up Anita Hill without much protest. Apologize all you want, you let her dangle in the wind while that committee gave her a hundred lashes. And for that and a few other latter day come-to-jesuses, I really have some qualms about your judgement. Nobody is going to heal the divisions in this country so let’s stop thinking you’re the one. I just want someone decent and intelligent and mostly ready to fight for a new vision for this backass country we’ve become. Not too much to ask, is it?

And yeah, I get it too, Joe. Some folks don’t like to be touched, hugged, kissed or otherwise have their personal space violated. Don’t care how touchy-feely, good natured you are, there are boundaries. Personally I don’t see you as a groper. At least not like our President who even boasts about groping women, then mocks you for harmless hair kissing. And for all those GOP who suddenly find their partisan sanctimoniousness, I have nothing but the utmost contempt.

But here’s the thing. I’m still pissed off about Al Franken being forced out of his Senate seat. Uncle Joe, well, this may cost him a serious run at the Presidency, something he should have taken a shot at four years ago. Al Franken, give me a break. The man was horsing around for the cameras, pretty juvenile comedy, but hey, the guy was a comedian. He didn’t harass. He didn’t grope. He didn’t even kiss hair. And yet, in the frenzy of the MeToo moment, Gillibrand and her colleagues demanded he step off the gangplank, as if his malfeasance rose to the level of a Weinstein or a Kavanaugh or a Trump … and the man, decent beyond the bounds, stepped off.

Gillibrand will not get my vote, trust me on that. Al Franken was a good and honorable senator. And funny as a boatload of monkeys. Go back and read his books, if you haven’t. You’ll laugh out loud. If there were justice in this world, and you know lately there is none, Al would be running for President in 2020, not banished as a scapegoat to political correctness run amok. At some point we have to more narrowly define the boundaries of what is acceptable behavior and what is not. Uncle Joe, from my vantage point, is not a monster and not a harasser, but he’s probably not going to be President either, okay by me. And Al, if you’re reading this instead of working on your next book, throw your hat in the ring. You got my vote and I didn’t need an apology.