Unable to understand the Rosenstein situation, I crawl into bed with a cup of tea, a plate of cookies, and my copy of “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”

By Mark | September 25, 2018

I want to write about Donald Trump being laughed at by the world’s leaders at the United Nations General Assembly today, and the growing suspicion that, when he returns to DC from his comedy tour, he may very well fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, but I just can’t seem to summon the energy. So, instead, I’m just going to lay in bed and attempt a mental reset by watching The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

For those of you who have never seen the film, which is absolutely brilliant, here’s the trailer.

Before I completely close up my cocoon, though, I’ll just say that I’ve spent the last 48 hours thinking about this Rosenstein stuff, and I still can’t make sense of it. If I had to guess, I’d say that Trump doesn’t have any real intention of firing him before the midterms, as he must know that it would not only galvanize the resistance, but force a few Republican Senators, like Jeff Flake and Lisa Murkowski, off the fence, and over to our side. I suspect, however, he also knows that the drama over whether or not he’ll trigger a constitutional crisis by firing the man in charge of overseeing the Russia investigation may keep Brett Kavanaugh off the front page long enough to get him through the confirmation process. And I think this must be why someone in the administration leaked the story a few days ago about Rosenstein allegedly suggesting, just after FBI Director James Comey was fired, that he “wear a wire” against the President, giving Trump cause to come out and publicly flirt with the idea of firing his Deputy Attorney General. I think a decision was made to “play the Rosenstein card,” and members of the press were only too happy to do the heavy lifting, pushing out stories all day long yesterday about how Rosenstein had been summoned to the White House to be canned. As it turns out, this wasn’t the case, but it totally dominated the news cycle, and pretty much killed the news about Kavanaugh’s second accuser, at least for a while.

But, really, it doesn’t matter when Trump attempts to pull the plug on the investigation. What matters is that, whether it’s this Thursday, or the day after the election, during the lame duck session of Congress, he will do it. As with Nixon, there will come a time when he attempts to kill the investigation against him. And we need to start taking precautions, so that we’re ready when that happens. Regardless of whether Trump does it on upon his return to D.C. this week, or waits until after Election Day, we need to get ready by passing legislation to protect the Mueller investigation. And, with that in mind, here’s something that I wrote a while back about the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, and what we can all do to make it a reality.

…Right now, today, we can all demand that our representatives in D.C. support legislation to protect the Mueller investigation. The legislation already exists. It just needs to be brought to a vote. And we can help do that.

First, here’s the history.

On April 26 of this year, Senate Bill 2644 (S.2644), the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act, passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with a 14–7 vote. The bill, which, if signed into law, would “give any special counsel 10 days after being fired to challenge the termination in front of a three-judge panel in federal court,” passed through committee with the support of every Democrat, as well as four Republicans; Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, and Senators Thom Tillis, Jeff Flake, and Lindsey Graham, who authored the bill. Sadly, though, as it passed through committee over the objection of Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, it was doomed to failure. McConnell, saying, “we will not be having this on the floor of the Senate,” refused to bring it to a vote. [“I don’t think (Donald Trump) should fire Mueller, and I don’t think he is going to,” McConnell told Fox News at the time. “So this is a piece of legislation that’s not necessary, in my judgment.”] And the legislation, since then, has languished in limbo.

Yes, I realize that, even if it were to pass the Senate, it would likely be an uphill battle to get it through the House. [The House version of the bill, sponsored by Jerrold Nadler, is H.R. 5476.] And, even if it were to pass both the House and the Senate, it would still have to be signed into law by the President, which would be incredibly unlikely, given that he’s almost surely under the control of Vladimir Putin. With that said, though, I still think it’s a fight worth having, if only to know definitively, once and for all, which members of Congress, when push comes to shove, are willing to stand up for the rule of law.

So, if you’re looking for something to do, other than just vent about the most recent outrage, here are a few things that you can do right this very minute.

1. You can look up the phone numbers of your Senators, give them a call, and request that they come out publicly in favor of S.2644, and demand that Senate Majority Leader McConnell bring it to a vote immediately.

2. You can look up the phone number of your member of the House of Representatives, call their local office, and demand that they come out in favor of H.R. 5476.

As I noted earlier, up until now, Republican leadership has been stalling, saying that such legislation isn’t necessary, but, maybe, with the tide beginning to turn against Trump after his side-by-side appearance next to Vladimir Putin, during which he took the side of the Russians over his own intelligence community, things may have shifted enough to make it possible. And, let’s not forget, as McConnell will need every Republican vote to get Brett Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court, there might be an opportunity for Republican Senators to force him to first bring the Special Counsel Independence and Integrity Act to a vote. At least, I figure, it’s worth a shot…

Of course, I wrote that well before The Ghost of Keg Parties Past came back to take a huge bite out of Brett Kavanaugh’s ass, and change the trajectory of his confirmation, but you get the point.

update: Oh, one more thing… Speaking of Trump being laughed at by the members of the United Nations General Assembly yesterday when he said that he was the most successful U.S. president ever, he set the record straight today during his unhinged press conference, explaining that, “They weren’t laughing at me. They were laughing with me.” Here’s the video.

Posted in Mark's Life, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

A Kavanaugh classmate at Yale alleges that the Supreme Court nominee shoved his penis in her face at a party… and, believe it or not, that’s not even the worst story about the man to come out today

By Mark | September 23, 2018

Well, it looks as though there’s another allegation of sexual misconduct against Brett Kavanaugh. This one dates back to the Supreme Court nominee’s freshman year at Yale, when, according to a classmate by the name of Deborah Ramirez, he dropped his pants and thrust his penis into her face at a party without her consent. Here’s an excerpt from the story by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer, which was just published by the New Yorker.

Oh, and the Republicans apparently learned last week that this allegation might be forthcoming, which is why they’ve been pushing so hard to move on with the vote, and not slow things down in order to conduct a proper investigation of the charges made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford… “Senior Republican staffers,” Farrow and Mayer write in the New Yorker piece, “also learned of the allegation last week and… soon after, issued renewed calls to accelerate the timing of a committee vote.”

As Senator Elizabeth Warren just said, “If Republicans have blocked an FBI investigation, bullied Dr. Ford, and tried to “plow right through” and put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court – all while holding onto credible information about a second sexual misconduct claim – then this isn’t a confirmation. It’s a cover-up.

But, wait, there’s more… Just as the above news was breaking, attorney Michael Avenatti went public with a letter he’d sent to Mike Davis, Chief Counsel for Nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanding that he ask Kavanaugh about his participation in a “gang rape” while in high school. “We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the DC area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, and others participate[d] in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them,” Avenatti said in the letter, telling Davis that he would be coming forward with evidence to substantiate the claim in the next few days. [And I think we now know why Mark Judge has been so insistent about not appearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.]

Oh, and completer unrelated, Jason Miller, former senior aide to Donald “only the best people” Trump, has been accused of giving his pregnant stripper girlfriend an abortion pill in a smoothie without her knowledge. [How’s that for “family values”?]

Posted in Civil Liberties, Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 116 Comments

Ken Segall, the man who named the iMac, on Steve Jobs and the quest for simplicity

By Mark | September 23, 2018

A week or so ago, I went to the Michigan Theater to hear a lecture by Ken Segall, a former creative director at Steve’s Jobs’ go-to ad agency, TBWA\Chiat\Day. Segall, who worked with Jobs for over a dozen years, as the maverick tech entrepreneur moved between NeXT and Apple, is credited as having both authored Apple’s hugely successful “Think different” campaign in ’97, and named the iMac in ’98. Segall, now an author of marketing books on the subject of simplicity, like the popular Insanely Simple, had been brought to Ann Arbor by the folks at the local tech startup Trove, and, as long as he was here in town, someone had the bright idea to put together a public event at the Michigan Theater, which I was fortunate enough to hear about. What follows are my abbreviated notes, for those of you who are interested in marketing, product naming, the history of Apple, or just the idea of simplicity in general.

[above: That’s Ken Segall to the right of the giant quote from Steve Jobs.]

• Apple’s first logo, drafted by company co-founder Ronald Wayne, was, to put it kindly, something of a mess. It was a drawing of Sir Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree, accompanied by the text, “Newton… a mind forever voyaging through strange seas of thought… alone.” It was ornate, and unnecessarily complicated. From that point in Apple’s history, Segall said, it was all about stripping things away in an attempt to get at the underlying essence. And this is something that Segall kept coming back to during his talk… this need to get at a more pure, simplified distillation of that which you’re attempting to convey, whatever it might be. This, it was clear, was the big lesson he learned during his time with Jobs… Here’s that first Apple logo, a far cry from the iconic apple that eventually came to represent the company. [The simple, elegant Apple logo we know today was first conceived of by Rob Janoff in 1977, not long after this first logo of Wayne’s was rolled out.]

• At Apple, Segall said, Jobs was always looking to pare things down. When Jobs returned to Apple from NeXT, Segall said, he eliminated a good number of their product lines. Jobs, Segal told us, whittled the company’s product offerings down to just four models, whereas HP and Dell had 26 and 41 respectively. This wasn’t about giving customers less choice, Segall argued. It was about giving them less confusion. People don’t like being paralyzed by choices, he said. “Do fewer things, and do them better,” was the edit at Apple, he said. [Jobs cut away at Apple’s product offerings until all that was left were four items that could fit in a simple 2 x 2 matrix. “Home” and “Pro” were on one axis. “Desktop” and “Laptop” were on the other.]

• Simple things, Segall said, at least in the world of advertising, aren’t actually simple. It’s the “perception of simplicity” that you’re striving for, he said. And the way to get there, according to him, was through authenticity. Authenticity, he argued, can be a shortcut to simplicity, or, as he would say, the perception of simplicity. “Authenticity is simpler,” he said.

• “Simplicity breeds love,” Segall said. You want an emotional bond with your customers, he told the audience. Bad things will inevitably happen over the lifespan of any brand, and you need for people to stick with you through those times. In order for people to do that, they need to really love your brand. You need to speak “humanese,” and connect with people. You want to, “simplify, and then beat that message to death,” he argued, until it’s pat of them. You want them to love you so much that they’re willing to overlook the occasional mistake.

• Illustrating this quest for simplicity, Segall shared “The Bull,” a series of 11 lithographs created by Pablo Picasso in later 1945. Through the series, the artist continued, through a process of abstraction, to get to the true “spirit” of the animal.

• “Leave out the layers of detail,” he said. Your customers don’t need it. They don’t have to know every nuance. They just need to know the underlying, authentic spirit of what you’re trying to do. That, he argued, is what will resonate with them.. We “make progress,” he said, “by removing the superfluous.”

• Jobs, he said, wanted to call the iMac the “MacMan,” but they kept pushing through it, offering alternatives that, in their opinion, better conveyed the real power of the new model, which was its ability to elegantly deliver internet (“i”) into the home without external modems, and the tangle of wires that, up to that point, had been necessary. The idea was that this new model was a faster, less complicated, more user-friendly way to get internet connectivity in the home, and the name iMac, they were eventually able to convince Jobs, best conveyed that.

• The announcement of the iMac, he said, “paid off’ the “Think different” campaign beautifully… They’d been running “Think different” ads for months, in response to IBM’s “Think” slogan, and, when they unveiled the iMac, it all came together. They announced to the world that they weren’t going to be just another beige box, but that they were going to focus on user experience, style and the human-computer interface… things which, until then had been overlooked.

Posted in History, Marketing, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Even people in his own party think Bill Schuette is a douche

By Mark | September 20, 2018

I haven’t been watching the Michigan gubernatorial race all that closely. Today, though, when I read that the Grand Rapids Chamber of Commerce had decided to endorse controversial, far-right Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, and that Founders Brewing had, in turn, left the Chamber, citing the Republican’s anti-gay agenda, I decided to do a little research… And do you know what I found?

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of enthusiasm for Bill Schuette, who, to be honest, a lot of people, even people in his own party, seem to think is kind of a douche.

Even with the endorsement of Donald Trump, and corporatist shills like Scott Walker and Pam Bondi, he just doesn’t seem to be making much headway. The most recent polling data shows him trailing Democrat Gretchen Whitmer by over 10 points, and, from the looks of it, he’s not even going to get the endorsement of Michigan’s current governor, Republican Rick Snyder. [As you might recall, Schuette, courting the Tea Party, came out against Proposal 1, Snyder’s attempt to raise the Michigan sales tax in order to fix the roads. The Prop 1 failed, and the Governor, as I understand it, never forgave Schuette.]

While having Donald Trump tweet awesome things about him might have been enough to get him through the primaries, it’s looking like it’s just not going to be enough to put him over the top during the general election. In fact, given Trump’s increasing unpopularity in Michigan, it may actually hurt him, which is probably why, over the past few months, we’ve seen Schuette start to distance himself from the President (while, of course, keeping the racism, sexism and fear mongering that he’s deployed so effectively). But, it just doesn’t seem to be working. Today I read that Schuette had lost the endorsement of the usually-conservative Michigan Association of Police Organizations. And, what’s more, some powerful Republicans, according to Jonathan Oosting of the Detroit News, have launched a new organization… Republicans and Independents for Whitmer.

And, it would seem, all Schuette has in response is more racism, and more fear.

Here, if you need further convincing, is a still from Schuette’s most recent television spot, where he tries to make the case that the Democratic ticket wants terrorists outfitted with surface-to-air missiles walking our streets.

If you’d like to give a few dollars to the Whitmer campaign you can do so here. Or, better yet, give a few hours of your time to knock on door… This, I don’t think I need to tell most of you, is really, really important.

One last thing… In Schuette’s defense, he does have some friends.

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Where are the human trafficking obsessed Q now?

By Mark | September 20, 2018

As some of you may recall, during our recent conversations about the far-right conspiracy theorist collective known as QAnon, a few of the more reality-challenged readers of this site came forward to out themselves as members, and take us on a magical “fan fiction” adventure, explaining in exquisite detail how the Democrats, led by Hillary “probably a time-traveling humanoid lizard creature” Clinton, are really an international human trafficking ring run by drug-fueled, baby-eating pedophiles. Well, as it’s being reported today that the Trump administration is unable to account for the whereabouts of approximately 1,500 migrant children in the care of federal agencies, raising concerns that many of them may have fallen into the hands on human traffickers, I thought that our local QAnon contingent might want to weigh in and demonstrate to all of us that they care just as much about real victims as they do about imagined ones.

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