Another one for today:

Do the presumptive president-elect’s tweets re: China concern you?

I mean, really.

In our continuing curiosity about how our elected officials feel about the presumptive president-elect [PPE], we have a new entry in our Easy Answers series.

Today I emailed my senators:

On 60 Minutes this past Sunday, in reference to the presumptive president-elect’s tweet that “millions of people voted illegally,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan said, “It doesn’t matter to me.”

Does it matter to you that the presumptive president-elect tweeted an obvious lie?

(N.B.: it is an obvious lie.  Any references to the Pew Study will be disregarded, since 1) the author of the study has repudiated any validation of this lie; and 2) the study was performed in 2012,  not for this election.)

Also, Kellyann Conway made the astounding claim that because he is the presumptive president-elect, any such tweets were de facto “presidential behavior.”

Do you agree that the presumptive president-elect’s behavior is “presidential”?

One of the easy questions I recently asked of my senators was whether they agreed with the PPE’s tweet that people who burned the flag should be “stripped of their citizenship,” and whether they would vote for legislation that mandated that.  (Spoiler alert: there is no mechanism for “stripping” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship.)

Sen. David Perdue (R) responded via email:

 Thank you for contacting me to express concern over desecration of the American flag. I always appreciate the opportunity to hear from my fellow Georgians.

Like most Georgians, I find desecration of the American flag to be personally offensive, but unfortunately the Supreme Court ruled in the 1989 case of Texas v. Johnson that flag desecration is protected speech under the First Amendment. A year later, in the 1990 case of United States v. Eichman, the Supreme Court struck down the Flag Protection Act as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment’s protections on free speech.

In light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Johnson and Eichman, the only option available to Congress to prohibit desecration of the American flag is the passage of an anti-flag desecration amendment to the Constitution. This would require the support of a two-thirds majority of each house of Congress and ratification by three-fourths of the States. I will support the passage of such an amendment if it is proposed during my time in Senate.

Well.  Number one, as I replied to the senator, my concern was not over the “desecration” of the American flag; my concern was protecting free speech.  The idea that the U.S. flag is sacred is ridiculous.  That would imply it is part of some kind of state-sponsored religion, one that worships the state in fact, and we all know that is not the case.

Number two, he (once again) did not answer my question.  But I’m going to presume that yes, he does support passing legislation to “strip” a U.S. citizen of his citizenship if that citizen exercises his right to free speech.

note to Sen. Perdue and/or staff: I welcome any clarifications or corrections

When I got home from the theatre yesterday, there was a message on the phone.  It was from a Drew Robinson, a pleasantly-voiced man, letting me know that Sen. David Perdue’s office had gotten my email about waterboarding (the PPE and several of his surrogates had suggested it was dandy).

This was just prior to my deciding to make this a blog series so I don’t have the exact wording of my email, but I essentially asked if my elected officials if they were down with the U.S. torturing prisoners in contravention of international law.

Mr. Robinson’s message, and I paraphrase, was to assure me they would be passing it along to the senator that I opposed the reintroduction of waterboarding in the Executive Branch.

You, being the astute reader that you are, will already have noticed that this is not really an answer to my question.  I appreciate that they’re not going to keep my opinion from the senator, but my question was whether David Perdue agreed with the PPE that we should be waterboarding.

And so back we go:

I had a voice mail on my machine yesterday from Drew Robinson from your office, assuring me that they would pass along to you my opposition to the U.S. waterboarding in contravention of international law (“in the Executive Branch,” as Mr. Robinson phrased it).  I appreciate the contact, but my question remains:

Do you agree with the presumptive president-elect’s position that the U.S. should waterboard its prisoners?

Astute readers will also have noticed that Mr. Robinson (presumably following office protocol) did not call the PPE by name.

Oh my.  Our PPE certainly has some rather —what’s the word I’m looking for?— ignorant suppositions about U.S. citizenship and protest.

(There are those who are beginning to posit that whenever he does something dumb as shit like this, he’s just squid-inking to keep us from being even more outraged at his real problems.  I am not discounting the proposition.)

And so off we go to our elected officials:

The presumptive president-elect has tweeted: “Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag – if they do, there must be consequences – perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!”

Do you agree with his statement?  Would you vote for legislation which stripped an American of citizenship for participating in an unpopular form of protest?

This is another in our Easy Answer series, in which I ask my congressional representatives a pretty easy question to answer and await their response.

This time my concerns spring from the probable hypocritical stance taken by our Republicker friends in regards to the presumptive president-elect (PPE) and his business dealings with foreign sources.  My trigger was this article from the WaPo.  It’s worth a read.

For real, the howler monkeys have been shrieking and flinging poo about Hillary Clinton’s “corruption” in taking money from foreign governments, etc., to fund the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit her family runs to “convene businesses, governments, NGOs, and individuals to improve global health and wellness, increase opportunity for women and girls, reduce childhood obesity, create economic opportunity and growth, and help communities address the effects of climate change.”  Much was made of its diabolical nature during the campaign, despite its consistent high ratings from independent organizations like Charity Navigator.

Likewise, the Republickers cranked up that smoke machine and did their best to make the Foundation look as if it were some kind of money funnel to the Clintons themselves, which of course it isn’t.  One claim I read was that you could tell it was corrupt because only 3% of its funding was dispersed in donations.  This was of course a deliberate lie and not an easy one for the regular voter to see through: since the Foundation runs its own programs, little of its funding goes to other organizations.  Let me repeat that for the hard-of-thinking: because the Clinton Foundation runs its own programs, it uses its funding to do that rather than pay someone else to do that.

So with such high dudgeon and general fantods on the part of the Republickers, you might very well think it was because of their high moral and ethical standards.  You might think that now that the PPE is heading their way, they’d be clutching their pearls and staffing their investigative committees to root out all potential corruption from the PPE and his foreign business issues.  You might think that, but then again you might be A Idiot.

Today’s email:

Many of your colleagues have been quite vocal in their calls to investigate Hillary Clinton on the basis of “foreign donations” or “entanglements,” implying that the U.S. President should be above suspicion when it comes to money matters and foreign entities.
Do you share their view, and do you intend to apply the same ethical standard to the presumptive president-elect’s business affairs?

As usual, I concluded with, “As a matter of course I will publish my question to you and your response both on my blog and on social media.”

Already, we have a second post in our new Easy Answers series.

The presumptive president-elect [PPE] has selected Betsy DeVos to be his nominee for Secretary of Education.  The short version is that this woman has spent most of her adult life attempting to dismantle public education wherever she can: vouchers (of course); for-profit charter schools; no regulation for charter schools; characterization of “government schools” as “failing”; characterization of teachers as “the problem”; etc.

Here’s the first round of news articles on this piece of work:

• NYT: Betsy DeVos…Has Steered Money From Public Schools
• The Atlantic: 5 Things To Know About Betsy DeVos
• Detroit Free Press: What You Should Know About Betsy DeVos

And that’s just the legitimate news outlets.  You should hear what education organizations are saying.

edited to add: RawStory gives us the gory historical details in a story they’ve republished from five years ago.  This article is a must-read.

So here’s today’s email:

The presumptive president-elect has chosen Betsy DeVos as his nominee for Secretary of Education.  She refers to the public school system as “government schools,” usually categorizing them as “failing,” and has spent millions of her family’s fortune on promoting the diversion of tax dollars into private entrepreneurial schools while discouraging any kind of oversight of these institutions.

Do you share her values, and do you plan to vote to confirm her?

I’ll keep you posted.

Based on my post from yesterday, I am starting a new series, called Easy Answers.  Hope springs eternal, after all.  I will publish the question I sent to my congressional representatives along with some context for my concerns; if and when they reply, I will put up a new post with their answer.  If they reply with some boilerplate bullshit, then I will select the passage that seems to be the answer, then call his office and ask the poor twenty-something on the other end to verify that this is what his/her boss is comfortable with being published.

Should be fun.

So yesterday, the New York Times published the transcript of the presumptive president-elect’s interview with them.  The situation was already weird, with the PPE at first declining to be interviewed because the Times didn’t “agree to the terms and conditions.”

Of course he reversed himself.  I imagine someone must have explained to him that the press doesn’t have to agree to “terms and conditions” to interview an elected official, especially the President.  First Amendment and all that, eh wot?

It’s pretty rough reading.  The man is who he is, and those who thought he might rise to the challenge once he had greatness thrust upon ‘im are being disillusioned at a ferocious pace.

Here’s the quote I worked from yesterday:

In other words, in theory, I can be president of the United States and run my business 100 percent, sign checks on my business, which I am phasing out of very rapidly, you know, I sign checks, I’m the old-fashioned type.  (NYT, 11/23/16)

And in case you thought he was just riffing^1, he repeats himself:

 But in theory I could run my business perfectly, and then run the country perfectly. And there’s never been a case like this where somebody’s had, like, if you look at other people of wealth, they didn’t have this kind of asset and this kind of wealth, frankly. It’s just a different thing. (NYT, 11/23/16)

Well.

You might very well think that the man could not be telling us more clearly that the plutocracy has dropped all pretense of democratic faith, but let’s check in with Sen. Isakson (R-GA) and Sen. Perdue (R-GA):

The president-elect has stated that he could “theoretically” run his business empire while handling the duties of the office.

Do you agree with his statement?

Now we wait.

—————

¹ Just kidding.  He’s always just riffing.