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Disingenuous, adjective – not candid or sincere, typically by pretending that one knows less about something than one really does

As in, Robert Reich’s newest political video is disingenuous. I still give Reich some credit. He’s an intelligent guy, his videos explaining economics are very clever, he’s got a lot of experience, and I’d like to see him on our side, maybe even as a member of Bernie’s cabinet. But, this is bullshit.
I’m not going to link to it, I don’t want to spread the virus, but basically he says the Democratic nominee should be Warren-Sanders, or Sanders-Warren, and he goes to great efforts to conflate the two, including a hokey composite picture.

He says “Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have most of the grass-roots energy, most of the enthusiasm, and most of the ideas that are critical for winning in 2020.”
You could eliminate the first three words in that sentence, change the have to has and the result is a true statement.
He also cites Medicare for All as something they both support, but really that’s only Bernie, and a refusal to take PAC money, which Warren hasn’t always refused, and won’t always refuse in the future, because she’s said so.
He claims they are both anti-establishment, but Warren stood up and applauded during Trump’s state of the union speech, because she is ‘capitalist to her bones,’ and Bernie did not.
Reich, as I said, is an intelligent, well informed guy. He is aware of these differences between the two, but chooses not to discuss them. Just like in 2016, when he was saying ‘I like Bernie, I like Hillary, too.’
It’s disingenuous. Reich knows better. So, my opinion of him has dropped a bit. He should properly endorse Bernie, or join the other side.

Tulsi is announced that she is going to skip the next debate, to focus on campaigning in New Hampshire and South Carolina. I do find it rather curious that she specified those two and didn’t mention Iowa. Maybe she figures that in a caucus system, Bernie will get all the progressive votes, so why bother. Also, I find skipping a debate to be a strange tactic. Maybe she thought she wasn’t going to qualify (still one poll short) and figured it was better politically to make it look like her choice.
It’s a pity. I was looking forward to her eviscerating Warren or Buttigieg. Joe Biden keeps sabotaging himself, I think the best tactic against him is just to let him ramble on for as long as possible and pretty soon he’ll be talking about his hairy legs, or telling everybody they should vote for Trump, or something equally bizarre.
I do hope that when all the dust settles, Bernie is the nominee and picks her for the VP spot. There are a few reasons for this.
1. He owes her. She backed him when nobody else inside the Democratic Party would, and that act exposed the Democrats for what they are, because they came down on her like a ton of bricks. She’s the only candidate the DNC hates more than Bernie. (that is maybe a negative but, if Bernie chooses anybody who is any good, it’s going to be somebody the DNC doesn’t like. They want a corporate tool, we can’t accept that.)

2. Contrast. Bernie is old, she is young, Bernie is a man, she is a woman, Bernie has a gentlemanly style of campaigning, focusing on his own policies, Tulsi is a warrior, she will knock her opponent down and kick him in the teeth. What she did to Kamala Harris, she is perfectly capable of doing to Donald Trump.

3. It might set her up for a presidential run of her own, 4 or 8 years down the road, at which point she will still be decades younger than former Vice President Fingers Malarkey is now.

4. Strength on different issues. Bernie is all about domestic issues. Tulsi has a lot of foreign policy expertise. Not just because she is in the military, but also from serving on the House foreign affairs committee.

5. Bi-partisan support. Bernie gets votes from progressive Democrats, independents, youth, minorities, and many other groups, but Tulsi Gabbard actually gets some love from the crazies on the right. I’m not sure if that’s because she’s military, or maybe because she’s a good looking woman and they can be shallow like that, or if it’s issue based, but it exists. She gets along well with Rand Paul, and I think a lot of his supporters (and Andrew Yang’s) will be more inclined to support Bernie with her on the ticket.
6. None of the attacks on her (She’s a homophobe! She’s a Modi supporter! She’s a Hare Krishna cultist!) actually hold water. They are already out there, and she has survived them.
7. She sings and her husband plays the ukulele. How cool is that?

One thing I particularly love about Prague are the bits of strange art you find randomly here and there, now and then. Sometimes it’s brilliant, sometimes meaningful, sometimes not so much, and sometimes the line between art and graffiti is blurred.
And one thing that people who know me know, especially people who know me on the internet, is that I can be an insufferable grammar Nazi, and misspellings drive me up the wall.
So, I was walking in Žižkov today, from Lipanska down the hill to Husinecka, when I saw a building on a side street, with a mural top to bottom on the side of it. It was a dragon, or the head of a dragon like creature at any rate. The art work was cool, and it would have been otherwise a bland plaster facade, four or five stories high, so a net positive for the neighborhood. There was a little poem that went with it, or an epigram you might say, in three lines which, if the side of the building were a flag, would have been three evenly spaced narrow stripes. I don’t remember the words exactly, but it was something like:
The dream takes all the air from the room
leaving not enough oxygen for both of us
I try not to move or breath

Now, I see four possibilities. The least likely, IMO, is that they actually screwed up the spacing and just as they painted the h in breathe, they realized they were out of space. The h was flush with the corner, for sure.
I think that’s the least likely. The lettering was immaculate, and it’s clear the whole thing was mapped out. I mean, I make mistakes like that all the time, but I trust people doing major public art to put a bit more aforethought into it.
Possibility two is that they were making a poetic statement in that last line, the cutting off of breath, because there’s no more oxygen, that’s where the poem ends, without the final e. I like that possibility.
The third possibility is, unfortunately, the most likely. The artist just didn’t know the difference in spelling between breath and breathe, which kind of makes me feel bad after 20 some years of teaching English here. (I’m assuming the artist was Czech) But, perhaps I should not be so harsh. They did create a fine work of art, and I’ve seen Americans make the same mistake.
The fourth possibility is that they knew the difference in spelling, but just didn’t give a shit. “Hey, I’ll spell it however I like, people know what I mean.” If that was the case, I hate them.

Of course, there are literally millions of reasons to vote for Bernie Sanders (yes, I am using the word literally correctly), but I’ll try to narrow it down a bit, for the sake of simplicity. This is still going to be a longish blog.

1. Saving the planet. That is, by far, the most important issue and Bernie Sanders, it seems, is the only one who’s taking it seriously. Joe Biden says if you want to ban fracking you should vote for someone else (may I suggest Bernie Sanders) and Elizabeth Warren failed to oppose the Dakota pipeline, which is now spewing oil worse than that car I got for $600 back in the 80s.
If we don’t save the planet, the future will be dystopian at best, and completely devoid of human beings at worst. In addition to that, Bernie’s environmental plan will create so many jobs that unemployment will virtually cease to exist, and some of those jobs will be renovating homes (to be energy saving) and giving them to the homeless. Three birds with one stone. I like that.

2. Universal Health Care, his signature issue. Aside from the economic benefits (much easier to start a small business if you don’t need to worry about health care, preventive care saves money, and eliminating the insurance companies eliminates a lot of paperwork) it’s a moral issue. When the technology exists to save someone’s life, or just to alleviate their suffering, then it should be done. What kind of horrible people would even object to that?

3. Legalizing marijuana. I’m a bit of a pothead (O.K., maybe more than a bit) so this one’s important to me personally. Also, though, legalizing it would make it available to those who need it for medical reasons, and it would be one less thing the police would have to bludgeon the people with.

4. Ending private prisons. Seriously, whose bonehead idea was this in the first place? When it is possible for some people to make money off other people’s misery, the people making money will do everything in their power to increase that misery.

5. Getting money out of politics. We have, at the moment, three billionaires running for president (Trump, Steyer, and Bloomberg) Does anybody think they give a rat’s ass about helping poor people? An election should be a matter of debates, held on neutral territory (every American high school has an auditorium) and with neutral judges (or at least an even number of judges chosen by either side, to be fair)

6. Eliminating student debt. That would help a lot of people out, and therefore go a long way toward jump starting the economy. Eliminating medical debt, too.

7. Free college. It will reduce unemployment (by keeping newcomers to the work force in school longer) and, within 4 years, the U.S. will have a better educated, better trained work force. Again, good for the economy.

8. $15 an hour. Wow. Talk about an economic impetus. If all the people making less than $15 an hour suddenly start making $15 an hour, there is going to be a flood of spending, which will help all sorts of businesses thrive. Some people say this will force businesses to hire less, but in every city where it’s already been implemented, it has not had that effect.

9. He’s less likely to start wars than any other candidate with the possible exception of Tulsi Gabbard. He was one of the very few in congress to oppose the Iraq War.

10. Electability. If your only concern is getting rid of Trump, then Bernie is definitely your man. He’s a likeable, plain spoken guy with no scandals in his background to speak of. (No other candidate can say that) If anybody were more scandal-free than Bernie, that might be suspicious. He takes no corporate or PAC money, so he has no conflicts of interest. The only argument the Republicans have will be to constantly shout ‘Socialist!’ at the top of their lungs, but they’ve been doing that for over half a century now and it’s lost a bit of its impact. They might start shouting ‘Jew!’ but that’s likely to backfire. Outside of the wackadoodle evangelicals who think the president is appointed by Jesus, most people aren’t really that paranoid about Jews. The wackadoodle evangelicals are all voting for Trump anyway, and their numbers weren’t enough to prevent a black guy from being elected, so the Jewish thing isn’t going to be a big deal, either.
Bernie has support in virtually every demographic, and it’s huge support among minorities, youth, women, blue collar workers, and the poor. That’s well over half the country.

One of the things that amazes me about the Bernie Sanders movement is the general unanimity of opinion within it. Everybody agrees on universal health care, I almost never see the concept of a $15 an hour minimum wage opposed, we all want a greener planet, nobody is saying “Yeah, I like Bernie but maybe getting rid of private prisons is a step too far.”
Bernie has well known positions, internet publicized positions, on dozens of issues, and most of his followers can’t find more than a minor detail here and there they might have stated differently.
But, in any group of people larger than one, you will find some differences of opinion, and there is one bone I have to pick with some (I think they’re a minority, I’m not sure) of my fellow Berners.
This is their insistence on demonizing some people who are also Berners, just maybe not as 100% consistent over time as they would like.
Cenk Uygur is the case in point. I like the guy. I used to like him more when I only saw him in print, because live he can come across as kind of condescending, but the man knows his stuff, he’s generally on the right side of things, and he has endorsed Bernie Sanders. Also, he’s running for congress. Some Berners don’t like him (even though he’s endorsed Bernie) because he has said positive things about Elizabeth Warren as well.
Here’s the way I see it. We can’t expect every Berner to be a fanatic Berner, or we are limiting our numbers. We certainly can’t expect every Berner to have always been a Berner, because that shuts the door on recruitment, and we still need a lot more people to win.
I mean the nomination, for which we need 51% of the delegates on the first ballot, or the DNC will screw us again. The general election will be a piece of cake.
So, please, guys. Ease up on Cenk, O.K. And Sarah Silverman, too, while you’re at it.