Politics & Prose: John Leland: 'Happiness Is A Choice You Make'

Source:Politics & Prose- John Leland, at Politics & Prose. 

Source:The New Democrat

I believe in the cliche life is a highway and then add Tom Cochrane's line, I want to ride it all night long. On the highway of life ( to use a another cliche ) you make a lot of turns, stops, you accelerate, you stop for gas and just to get a bite to eat and get some rest.

Imagine driving from Washington to Los Angeles in a cross-country trip. Ordinary if you don't run into bad weather, car trouble, have any major accidents, decide to go for a joy ride after getting loaded one night on one of your stops in St. Louis let's say, and you're a good driver, this cross-country trip should take you about 7-10 days. Well, imagine your life being a a cross-country trip or a trip around the world but it takes you about 80 years ( give or take ) instead and not because of car trouble or any of the other factors that I just mentioned.

That is what life is which is a very long journey if you live a normal life in years. And on that journey you're going to have a lot of ups and downs. Richard Nixon once said that he wanted to die with at least one more victory than defeat. Well, hopefully life for you will be a lot better than that and the best thing about this is that you have complete control over your own life once you move out from your parents and start driving on your own highway of life with the ability and freedom to make your own decisions. But even before you move out from your parents as a young adult you still have a lot of freedom to make your own highway and ability to decide what that journey will be for you.

Do you finish high school, to use as an example. Do you do well in high school which allows for you do be able to go to college. If you go to college, do you do well in college. Do you stay out of trouble as a youth or get into trouble on a regular basis. These are all choices that we make as children, adolescents, young adults, full adults, and moving forward. It's up to us to make either good decisions or bad decisions with our own lives and then we have to live with the consequences of our own decisions for good and bad, or for in-between.

In a free society like a liberal democracy like America, we all have choices that we make in life. The question is what kind of choices do we make. If you have not just a habit of making good choices like you just happen to be very lucky and perhaps you should take that luck to Atlantic City or Las Vegas, but you tend to make good choices and decisions because you've decided to based on good information and facts instead of flipping a coin, drawing straws, you're going to be happy in life. At least compared with a screwup who acts on impulse, or doesn't care about anyone other than them self, perhaps lost their brain somewhere and never went back to look for it.

To achieve happiness in life you have to figure out what makes you happy. What you're good at and what you want out of life. And then make the right decisions to accomplish those things. Instead of sitting on your ass and expecting happiness to pick you up off your couch or getting lucky. The ultimate investment in life is your own life. The more you put into it, the more you'll get back and the happier you'll be. You only get out if your investments what you put in them.
Source:Politics & Prose

Politics & Prose: David Frum- 'Trumpocracy'

Source:Politics & Prose- conservative author David Frum at Politics & Prose in Washington.

Source:The New Democrat

“David Frum, former White House speech writer and senior editor at The Atlantic, discusses his book, “Trumpocracy”, at Politics and Prose on 2/7/18.

Frum’s ninth book expands on his eye-opening March 2017 Atlantic column, “How to Build an Autocracy,” which argued that Trump is leading the nation into authoritarianism. An experienced Washington insider and one of the country’s leading conservative commentators, Frum examines the implications of Trump’s behavior as well as his policies. From Trump’s admiration for strongmen such as the Philippines’ Roderigo Duterte and Turkey’s Tayyip Erdoğan to the president’s threats against the media, his impulsive decision-making, and flouting of tradition and even law, Frum sees evidence that Trump’s presidency, if left unchecked, will seriously damage America’s democratic future.”

From Politics & Prose 

David Frum’s Trumpocracy argues that thanks to President Donald Trump and perhaps other people and other things our liberal democracy and liberal democratic form of government is at risk. That Donald Trump represents a right-wing nationalist populist movement that puts their political and cultural values over everyone else and everything else, including the U.S. Constitution.

The one clue that you need to know about the Trump Nationalist Tea Party populist movement is not conservative, is that they’re not traditionalists. They don’t believe in conserving the status quo. They want to blow up the system and the Washington way of doing things and replace that system with their own political system which wouldn’t be democratic.

Just as political and current affairs junkie, I hate it when political commentators and reporters, call people Conservatives when they’re not conservative. The tax bill and budget that the Republican Congress passed in the last two months that will add trillions of dollars to the national debt and as a result we’re looking at a deficit of over a trillion-dollars next year which would be our first trillion-dollar deficit since 2012.

Conservatives don’t borrow and spend and they don’t blow up tradition and the status quo. They protect and conserve the system that they’re part of because it works and they helped design it. Donald Trump represents an anti-conservative movement that is nationalist, tribalist, and authoritarian, that believes their movement are the real Americans and everyone else are Un-American.

Donald Trump by himself I don’t believe is as scary as people want to believe. As much as a wannabe nationalist dictator that he wants to be the problem is he operates in a system with checks and balances and still is part of a liberal democratic form of government and there real limits to what he can do by himself and he like no other President in American history is above the law. If he’s guilty of anything illegal or impeachable, we’ll know about it and Congress will have an opportunity to act on that.

What people should really worry about are the people and voters that Donald Trump represents and the prospects for those people coming to power in America. Not just at the Federal level but the state and local levels which is more important, since a lot of members of Congress come from state and local government. And establish regimes that pass laws that make it close to impossible for members of the opposition to even vote. That is what we should worry about as people who believe in checks and balances and liberal democracy. 

Movie Clips Trailer Vault: Groundhog Day (1993) Starring Bill Murray & Andie McDowell

Source:Movie Clips Trailer Vault- Bill Murray, as The Weatherman.

Source:The New Democrat 

Groundhog is one of my favorite comedies from the 1990s as well as all time. Because the movie which obviously is not believable that a basically normal even narcissistic man like Phil Connors ( played by Bill Murray ) could literally live the same exact day over and over with only Phil making any changes for how his day goes, unless he's literally dreaming and just having the Hollywood dream of a lifetime. The movie is only about 1:45 minutes give or take, so why couldn't a man be sleeping have this dream going on his head while he's asleep.

The movie starts off with Phil who is a selfish unhappy narcissistic weatherman for a local TV station in Pittsburgh, which is a midsize city in a small market, with hopes of landing a job for a big station in a big market like New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, wherever it might be. But instead of getting a job like that he gets another assignment from his Pittsburgh station to cover another small-town event in rural Pennsylvania small-town Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. Doing exactly what he doesn't want to do which is to cover small-town events with small-town people with Pittsburgh perhaps being the biggest city they've ever seen in their lives.

And narcissistic Phil sees himself as much bigger than that is unhappy and cynical the whole time he's there, until he realizes he's living the same day over and over again. Groundhog Day which is a one day event for everyone else in this town becomes a daily event for him. With no one else realizing what's going on with him. Because everything else is normal for them. But in Phil's case the same day starts over and over again every time he goes to sleep and wakes up in his hotel room.

Groundhog Day for me is the opportunity for one guy to live the same day over and over and learn from those experience and try not to make the same mistakes. Phil becomes a less sarcastic, cynical, narcissistic, selfish man as the movie moves along. Once he realizes he's in the same day over and over with no tomorrows. He also becomes adventurous knowing that there's basically no consequences for anything that he does. He can literally do whatever the hell he wants because he knows he'll start the same day over and over once midnight comes.

There's a scene in the diner where he drinks an entire pot of coffee and eats all of the pastries in the diner while he's smoking. He robs an armor truck. He jumps off a building. He drives a truck over a cliff intentionally. He drives a car on the train tracks and gets into a police chase and spends a night in jail. Of course, only one night because the same day just starts over for him once midnight comes. He also starts to get involved with his producer Rita ( played by the adorable Andie McDowell ) who doesn't like him and sees him as an egocentric selfish jerk. And spends each Groundhog Day learning about her and what she likes and is interested in and changes his behavior and interests just to get her to like him.

I prefer movies that are realistic, with great actors, great plot, cover original great writing, with clever wit with a cast that is also witty but can act as well. Groundhog Day has all of that except for the realism. Unless again we're talking about one man with a really strange dream while he's asleep that no one else could possibly know about. Groundhog Day is that 100 minute escape from reality when people simply just need an entertaining break and time to escape and is a very entertaining and very funny movie.
Source:Movie Clips Trailer Vault

Politics and Prose: David Cay Johnston- 'It's Even Worse Than You Think'

Source:Politics and Prose- Author David Cay Johnston.

Source:The New Democrat  

"David Cay Johnston discusses his book, "It's Even Worse Than You Think" at Politics and Prose on 1/24/18.

Johnston, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, has been covering Trump since 1988. In June 2015, he was the first national journalist to write about a possible Trump presidency and in his 2016 bestselling The Making of Donald Trump he gave a comprehensive account of Trump’s business practices, associates, and family background. Now Johnston follows up that profile with a detailed analysis of the Trump administration’s first one hundred days. He shows how Trump’s policies are affecting ordinary people’s jobs, finances, and security, explains the federal agencies charged with carrying out Trump’s executive actions, and illuminates places where the system can hide what’s really going on." 

From Politics & Prose

I agree with David C. Johnston that Donald Trump is not the disease in American politics, but a symptom. His presidency is an example of what can happen when Americans are literally so pissed off about American politics, American politicians, the lobbyists that they actually represent instead of the everyday American voters who work very hard for their living and proud of that.

Not just Independents but Democrats voted for Donald Trump. Far-Left-Wing Democrats and third-party voters who voted for Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries for President, voted for Nationalist Republican Donald Trump for President. Who came out in favor of banning Muslims from entering America and a huge border wall that is supposed to be about two-thousand miles along and cover the entire American-Mexican border, even though no one actually believes that is even possible to accomplish let alone will ever happen, except for Donald Trump's Far-Right Breitbart Fox News voters. Even Donald Trump knows enough about immigration to know his wall won't ever happen, but he's also smart enough to know that his base doesn't know that.

Think about that for a second: Socialists voting for a right-wing Nationalist for President, even though they had Green Party Socialist candidate Jill Stein, as an option to vote for President. 

Donald Trump for all of his weaknesses and lack of knowledge about everything other than how to make money for himself and entertainment, understands the American political system very well. Not the governmental system where he's not even a student of American government at this point, but instead barely knows it exist and sees the U.S. Justice Department and White House Legal Counsel Office, as his personal law firms that are supposed to be in the business to only represent him.

But Trump is smart enough about American politics to know where American voters are at least on the right-wing side of it and not the Center-Right of the Republican Party, but the hardcore Right if not Far-Right. And he knows what he can do and has to do to get those voters to vote for him and support him. 

Trump also knows that there is this so-called Reagan Democrat wing in the Democratic Party who generally vote for Democrats for President and who voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama for President twice, but that these voters haven't been part of the economic recovery that we've been living though since 2009. And hate our American political system and the politicians that get elected for obvious reasons. And that Donald Trump completely represents the anti-political as well as government establishment in America.

Donald Trump represents what can happen when you have a Congress with a 15% approval rating, where you have a large percentage of middle class workers who haven't gotten a raise in twenty years, where corruption in politics and government looks like the norm instead of a surprise. And for the Far-Right in America Trump represents what can happen when you have an America that looks like America which is the world ethnically and racially, instead of just looking like Europe.

All Donald Trump did in 2015-16 was to be smart enough to understand these things and be smart enough to take advantage of them. You want to get the Donald Trump's of the world out of the American political system and more importantly out of the American government, you need better government and better people working in government especially at the top. And even more importantly you need better and smarter voters who vote for good people to represent them. Even if they tell them things and take positions that they don't want to see and hear from time to time.