FOLLOW me on my popular Twitter feed. Just click this photo! @hbbtruth - David - Common sense on #Politics #PublicPolicy #Sports #PopCulture in USA, Great Britain, Sweden and France, via my life in #Texas #Memphis #Miami #IU #Chicago #DC #FL 🛫🌍📺📽️🏈. Photo is of Elvis and Joan Blackman in 'Blue Hawaii'

Beautiful Stockholm at night, looking west towards Gamla Stan

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

Happy Holidays from Hallandale Beach: A taste of chutzpah, hypocrisy & incompetency with your eggnog -again!- thanks to Mayor Joy Cooper




South Florida Sun Sentinel
Blogger's latest crusade: 'In Satan We Trust' plaques at city halls
By Susannah Bryan 
Dec. 29, 2015 1:52 PM

I'm torn b/w tweeting this to poke Hallandale Beach Mayor Joy Cooper publicly -the same thin-kinned HB mayor who called me a Nazi when she thought I could not hear her, BEFORE a HB City Comm. mtg. started- and my desire to not draw attention to Sun-Sentinel reporter Susannah Bryan, whom, unfortunately, I believe the evidence reasonably shows has done real damage to the community for years by her consciously favoring #frivolous over more serious reporting of issues in Hallandale Beach and Hollywood.
A fact I have written about many times on the blog previously with self-evident examples.

Which is to say, her apathy and HER refusal to report on things when they happen so that HB and Hollywood citizens can know the true facts, and not have to wait until 6-9 months later, or longer, AFTER a formal (and often criminal) investigation has begun.
Which has been Bryan's habit for years, with too many examples to mention quickly here -but then most of you already know some if not most of these examples by heart! :-(

If you hadn't already guessed by the headline, Blogger's latest crusade:  In Satan We Trust' plaques at city halls, this story involves our friend and fellow South Florida civic activist, Chaz Stevens.

In case you forgot some of the unintended irony of this article, which the reporter fails to note, Joy Cooper first ran for the HB City Commission in part, so she said at the time, to complain about what she said was the city's flagrant and self-evident use of religious items on taxpayer property at holidays in ways that she thought were inappropriate.

And once elected, Joy Cooper promptly did nothing about something that she'd previously said was a real problem. Something she'd be willing to sue the city about.
Surprise! 

I wrote about that issue six years ago on the blog: Happy Holidays from Hallandale Beach: A taste of chutzpah, hypocrisy and incompetency with your eggnog; Joy Cooper's change of heart after getting elected is just another one of those things that makes us all shake our heads

And so it goes...

More info about Chaz Stevens at 


Dave 
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Thursday, December 24, 2015

It wouldn't be Christmas without... Jill Johnson, "Away in a manger"; Yohanna, "Don't Save It All For Christmas Day"; Point of Grace, "When Love Came Down"








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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Some quick thoughts re Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report, his unique role in D.C., his feelings about tonight's GOP debate in Las Vegas, and the 2016 presidential campaign thus far... @CharlieCookDC






The National Journal
What’s on the Line in Las Vegas - For some of the Republican wannabes, Tuesday’s debate could matter a lot.
Charlie Cook, December 14, 2015

As we get older, some of us ac­cu­mu­late pet peeves. For me, this is one: when journ­al­ists write of an up­com­ing event as tan­tamount to a turn­ing point in the his­tory of civil­iz­a­tion, or at least since the in­ven­tion of sliced bread. In polit­ics, many im­port­ant events shape elec­tions, and a suc­ces­sion of events big and small make up what we call the cam­paign. For some of the can­did­ates, Tues­day night’s Re­pub­lic­an de­bate in Las Ve­gas, sponsored by CNN and Face­book, is crit­ic­ally im­port­ant; for oth­ers, even a strong per­form­ance would likely be too little, too late. There are likely to be no ad­di­tion­al events between now and the first week of Janu­ary—noth­ing that’s planned, any­way—that can change the dy­nam­ics of this race.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.nationaljournal.com/s/126039





I first met Charlie Cook of the eponymous Cook Political Report in 1992, when I had a 5-6 month gig at Roll Call newspaper in DC in-between some interviews I was having for some fulltime jobs at trade associations and law/lobbying firms, starting in the spring before the 1992 General Election that Bill Clinton won. 

This was in the pre-Internet era when Doug Bailey's The Hotline was faxed daily to eager subscribers aroung the Beltway and the country, and their most-eagerly anticipated 'coverage' in the 15-20 pages we'd print out were whatever crazy smart or crazy cruel thing that Mary Matalin had said in defense of President Bush or against Bill Clinton and the Democrats, and she pulled no punches, much to everyone's delight and constant amazement in the office. 
(If only Twitter had existed then!)

This was back when Roll Call was co-owned by Arthur Levitt before President Clinton nominated him to be SEC Chairman, and the paper was edited by James "Jim' Glassman. 
Which is to say, before it was owned by The Economist, and before The Hill existed.

Charlie's then-independent Cook Political Report was then-located in the same office around the corner from DC's Union Station as us, a few blocks north of the Senate side of Capitol Hill. 
It's while there that among other things, that I first met future Washington state's U.S. Senator Patty Murray months before she won her Senate primary and before her consultant's "mom in tennis shoes" ad campaign became a bit of a national thing via CNN.

That came about because a colleague in the Washington state Senate had once, foolishly, said she was “just a mom in tennis shoes. Go home. You can’t make a difference.”
Then as well as now, sometimes, left to their own devices, your opponents create your golden opportunity.

So, naturally, given all this, we were all VERY curious what Murray would wear for her first appointment with Charlie, which we all knew in advance would be crucial to her, and if positive,would likely have a tidal wave effect on DC PACs and the Beltway Dem money crowd IF she impressed him and his staff.

Surprise! She made a point of wearing sneakers with her smart professional outfit, looking like most of the women I'd just seen on the Metro train a few minutes before, wearing some sort of Anne Klein II thing. 
Murray's now the highest-ranking woman in the Senate.

 In large part because of his amiable personality and disposition towards fairness -and his remarkable lack of a large ego despite his renown- as well as his zeal for facts and analytics, and his crazy memory for arcane facts, Charlie is probably the most-universally respected person I ever met in my 15 years in DC from 1988-2003.

Dave 


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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Confirming what most of us have long suspected, apparently, some #Broward cities & communities must be divided so that some political careers can manage to stay afloat. For instance, Eleanor Sobel's. Her track record in office is cringe-worthy!; Matt Dixon: Deposition questions partisan emails of redistricting plaintiffs

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Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Our new German problem: lack of effort. Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

Have you really considered how little #Germany has been doing and is prepared to do in the future against #ISIS? Why is this topic continuing to be ignored in Washington and by the U.S. news media?

For months I've closely followed the glacial pace of things in Germany largely via DW,
Deutsche Welle, both on TV and in print, since the U.S. news media has seemed to decide to give Germany and their current Ambassador to the U.S., Peter Wittig, a 'hall pass' on all controversial topics, like #Ukraine #Russia #sanctions #ISIS. 
Any one of which, Once Upon a Time in the '70's, '80's or '90's, would have gotten him an invite he could not really turn down.

If you didn't know it, even for something as insignificant as sending 100 German military 
"advisors" to Iraq who would never be put in a position to actually face the enemy, there
was months and months of Sturm und Drang in the Bundestag, in the country 
where Sturm und Drang was born.

As someone who spent LOTS of time over at the German Embassy in Washington, D.C. pre and post Fall of the Berlin Wall, on trade and economic issues, and who made enough 
friends there to attend the party at the Embassy celebrating the unification in 1991 -even bringing a German chocolate cake with the German flag's colors on it that I ordered at the #1 German bakery in greater DC, not far from my house in Arlington County- I was especially aghast last year that Germany's policy was, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to be firmly against arming Ukraine so that it could better defend itself.

Which is how it came to be that back on February 8th, before Chancellor Merkel's visit to DC, I asked the Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, @SenBobCorker - 
How is #Merkel #Germany an ally vs. Isis if sending 100 Bundeswehr 2 TRAIN Iraqis is political crisis? 

Condescending, patronizing pols in Germany acted like their troops were almost too important to actually deploy them to the Mid-East to accomplish something tangiblethat was in the West's best interests. But did you see anything about this in the newspaper or on network TV at the time?

And not once in all the many long months since the shoot down of the Malaysian flight 
MH17 over Ukraine last August by Russian-armed and trained separatists has the Ambassador Wittig gone on a single American Sunday morning TV chat show to lay out the position of Germany to the American people, whose own sons and daughters, husbands and wives continue to be stationed in Germany in the tens of thousands to defend Germany against the existential threat that President Obama claimed in one of his 2012
debates with Mitt Romney did NOT exist -Putin's Russia.

Well, history has shown us who was right about that question, haven't they?
And the Russia reset, too.

No, these days, the Foreign Ministry geniuses at the German Embassy on Reservoir Road prefer to employ their old standby, checkbook foreign policy, and simply pay for ads on Foreign Policy magazine's email newsletters, like this one I received, below, so they aren't forced to explain or defend their policies in-person to people who know the facts and could pin them down.
Yes, it sort of explains a lot about the current Foreign Policy Establishment and what it just winks at:

And paying for ads also means they don't have to deal with curious ethical issues like this:
#Germany hires ex #Stasi to check #Facebook for critics of #immigration policy. 

So, to sum it up, Peter Wittig, the German Amb. to the U.S. has not appeared on one of the most guest-friendly forums he could possibly appear on in all of DC, esp. for an important ally like Germany, Sunday morning chat shows, and been forced to defend Germany's feckless position on all these important matters, even while smaller countries with much less resources are continuing to punch above their weight.

Meanwhile, Germany, the European economic giant opts largely to stay on the sidelines as a spectator in the fight against ISIS, preferring to play the role of pit-crew grease monkey,
and not be one of the actual participants.
How much longer is this kind of unhelpful behavior going to be allowed to continue -and continue to be unremarked upon by the American press?




















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