Tag Archives: politics

BIG BABY FOR PRESIDENT

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Did Republicans hurt themselves by using Don Trump’s tactics against him?

Remember Carly Florina’s face
Remember which orifices women (including Trump’s wife) bleed from
Remember mocking a handicap person (Bad tactics especially when the disabled person is more intelligent than Don Trump).

These are all Don Trump’s playground bullying and grandstanding showing he is tough, he doesn’t care, he’s above civility, he’s a Neanderthal and not part of the human race. No one in New York City cared about these manhood manifestations until the Thursday night event. Republican opponents raised and asked about real stuff, not playground insults:

  1. Don Trump swindled thousands of students who have incurred tens of thousands of dollars in student debt at Trump University. Trump is being sued.
    2. Trump’s stump speech can be repeated in 20 seconds. No use listening to him for any longer.
    3. Trump hires foreign nationals to work within the United States of America. That is his idea of ideal immigration enforcement.

If this is a playground dispute as the reporters claim, politics in New York City must be soft, soothing and nice. New York City reporters and commentators want everyone to be gentle and polite to Don Trump because he is fragile and breakable. He is crushed by criticism. He’s “not being treated fairly” by the Republican party.

Seeing Don Trump melt away is not surprising. He’s a big blob of jello; give it a little heat. But he wants to stay in the kitchen while all people are presenting the truth. Cry, Don Trump. Cry. Your new campaign slogan, BIG BABY FOR PRESIDENT.

CHRISTIE, AN ENDORCEMENT?

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Getting support from Chris Christie is like buying used tires. Christie has been around many blocks, around and around, and has had many flats along the way. How is bridge gate going? Did they get that last bit of information from the New Jersey’s Governor’s office? Is bridge gate as volatile an issue as Don Trump’s University gate?

Will Christie love Trump when the big Duck is found guilty of violating the RICO statute (the statute Christie supposedly enforced civilly and criminally). The Big Duck will pay plaintiffs counsels’ fees plus triple damages. That will greatly diminish Don Trump’s net worth by at least one billion dollars.

Is Christie looking for a job, vice president perhaps? A lot of men are already kissing up: Scott Brown, Mike Huckabee, Joe Scarborough and now Christie. Image sculpting statues of these men, and most will have double chins. I wonder how they will hear they are fired. Brown might be too skinny. Christie is too short. Scarborough is too much of a mouthy know-all. Thereafter, Christie can have another s-fit. Let’s hope it’s not public.

Trump is the last person in politics anyone should befriend with an endorsement. Christie’s name goes from respectable competitor onto an ever-expanding s-list. When asked about Trump last summer, Christie said being in Trump’s presence was tiring. When nothing is going on in life or life is ending (Christie has a year or so as Governor of New Jersey), tiring becomes attractive and entertaining. The move today makes Christie slow and thick.

Move over, Christie’s wife draws a big salary from a financial services firm. Businesses in financial services are shedding employees to reduce costs. Christie’s wife may lose her job unless Don Trump is nominated. Don Trump will protect all the favors that Wall Street has as he preserves its status quo. NO REFORM ON WALL STREET!

Christie’s enforcement guarantees that Trump will take none of the states in the Northeast in the general election. Christie is that polarizing and untrustworthy, like Don Trump. The people who know Christie and Trump best will not vote for the big Duck.

In his endorsement statement today Christie became totally like Don Trump. It is not resolve in his voice. It is hate. Christie hates what happened to him during the campaign and he despises everyone who did better than he. Hate is not a religious, moral or ethic virtue and trait prized in our Judeo-Christian culture. Don Trump and Christie can camouflage tones of voice, can use different words, and can soften hardened gazes. But each of them presents behaviors that add up to hate. Listen to Don Trump’s on-going harangue today after the endorsement. One wonders if Christie found that tiring. I’m sure Christie loves hearing Don Trump repeat himself, every two minutes (sometimes more frequently) because he has no new material.

So who do Christie and Trump hate? Anyone who disagrees with them. Anyone who is more talented than either of them. That is reminiscent of Richard Nixon, and the American experience is, Americans do not want to elect persons who hate and thereafter are in charge of the FBI.

An irony in the Christie endorsement is the missing iPhone. On it are all the plans, details, timing and contacts between Governor Christie and Don Trump: How to close the bridge and anger everyone. After the iPhone is found in May, Apple Corporation will refuse to disclose its contents for review.

TRUMPET PRIDE

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I’m in the Political Elite so I talk this way. I try not to be politically correct, preferring the locker room of New York City where guys joke about bleeding chicks and gunned down crooks. I live in New York City, the broadcast center of political correctness, along with satellite offices in Frisco, Berkeley, Venice, Cambridge and Santa Fe.

I’m always politically correct to the mugs richer than myself, like Mike Bloomberg. Maybe I can cut a deal with one or more of them and try to steal a billion or two. Most politically correct places are cesspools – too many people, too much trash, too many government services, too many feces, too many minorities, too many, too many, not enough drugs. I’m tired of too many and not enough. It’s not American. Few people in those towns want me to develop and build anything. I can’t list all the people I hate. Names on the list would stretch between New York City and China. Los Angeles approved a giant skyscraper now built with China-money, but I lost a bundle when I offered to build a 125 story jobbie away from downtown, where it wasn’t commercially feasible. I sold the property at a loss.

All big time real estate developers stick among the politically Elite. I can’t count how many brats of politicians I’ve put through school by giving them overpaid summer jobs. Black, brown, LGBT – I can’t tell which color. I don’t know if I always wear the same colored socks. I really want people to work in fast food restaurants in my buildings for peanuts. That’s why they have to get college money from drug deals – a terrific way to learn business: If you flub it, you die. So buy adulterated product, cut it, debase it, sell it as prime. Rich, using suckers are lucky to get off. I’m happy so long as my employees make the minimum wage and sell drugs.

New York City is full of drugs. I’m obviously above street deals, but my college courses never taught anyone anything. It is best to learn everything on the street in trial and error fashion. Real estate is the same way – the Art of the Steal. Consulting is best, a position unavailable in the drug business. I make more money consulting than I do in business. It’s my rosy reputation. I can answer with a cliche or perhaps dance a gig. I want all my employees to be like children, dependent, diligent, quiet and orderly. It is the primary means to make money – 99 cents for me, a penny for them.

That’s the way to be Elite, and that is bigger than the real ratio. The economy is running into the sewer, and Americans are suffering. When I become President, I’ll increase the National Debt, so people like me can make as much money as Bill and Hilary. They left the White House broke (so they said), and now have hundreds of millions. I’ll start with billions and end up with hundreds of billions. Meanwhile the United States will have 30 Trillion dollar debt.

I like being in the Elite not people with a prize 1959 Edsel. My father, Fred, knew that car was a flop. Among the rich and isolated I talk political incorrectness because it is easy. I don’t pretend that I care about anybody but me. I learn cliches and everyone knows what I’m talking about. They hear and talk about nothing but cliches and a few homilies. I consume day-old Twinkies and Caviar that Old Bald Vlad sends me. Little people have no right to demand respect from me. I can be rude and offensive because I don’t like any of them – strangers. I may deport them all if they don’t vote for me. I’ve fooled supporters who think I’m on their side. They are morons and retards. I’m standing on their shoulders.

My enemies have said because I think this way, they don’t need a degree in psychology; they don’t need to be a psychiatrist. Every American can know I can be diagnosed by watching the shows, like Doctor Phil. Because I think this way, I may have Borderline Personality Disorder, at the least.

I don’t want to bother the little people with my medical and mental conditions. They have their own childish concerns and petty problems. I tell them: Make money; Take my courses, Art of the Steal; Get a life; Work for peanuts; Eat garbage; Lick my caviar containers; Relish my pollution and hate.

ADJECTIVES

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Campaign 2016

Republican comments about the President’s State of the Union speech demonstrated the weakness of one candidate running for his party’s nomination.

Ted Cruz described the speech as not the “State of the Union,” but a “State of Denial.” Agree or disagree, it expresses criticism in a complete thought. Marco Rubio made a multi-sentence criticism which was understandable. Agree or disagree.

Another candidate shunned nouns and verbs; he avoided sentences completely. He spouted adjectives, the list of which never seems to end: “boring, slow, lethargic, rambling, very hard to watch…”

The impressions derived from using adjectives are the same in writing as in speech: (1) This candidate complained about the speech as he, alone, reacted to it. (2) Using adjectives means he has no nouns and verbs to formulate policy. (3) He said nothing about the substance of the President’s speech, no matter how boring it was. (4) This candidate has no position, except adjectives to modify, about the speech or any issue until it seeps into his brain, stirs neurons and wheels finally turn – a week, a month or a year later.

Politics requires an immediate reaction to speeches and circumstances offered. In the House of Commons 150 years ago Gladstone pontificated about something, and he directed a dig at Disraeli opposite: “…only Jews and imbeciles go there.” Disraeli stood and offered his arm to Gladstone so they could leave the Commons to go to the destination.

This candidate mired in adjectives is too retarded and old to have the facility to make circumstances his own.

 

 

 

 

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ADVERTISING 2016

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It’s a big day, an opportunity to change jobs, except everything that was said since summer 2015 belies every advocacy made today. He’s a politician, through and through, a member of the Eastern political establishment – relationships, bribes, corruption – he knows how to make those deals. He even wrote a book about the DEAL. Other candidates for the nomination have pointed to shifts in position, what is said now, and what was said two months ago – six months ago – a year ago – three years ago – five years ago – eight years ago when he was a Democrat. What job is he seeking? He is lying and a liar.

He supported and voted for the Democratic nominee for president. If anyone is consistent, it is she. On the other hand, he is fickle, jumpy, nervous and uncertain, like he has Adult Attention Deficit Disorder. I don’t mind calling him a weakling and being critical of his disability. There is no political correctness. There is either a physical cause or it’s mental: Weak memory, poor principles, inadequate learning, jumbled logic and muddled and addled thinking. In Britain they would say he was potty.

Nobody dare ask him where he is and where he’s doing. It’s painfully obvious when questions of policy come up. He is at a loss, answering in assorted and random cliches. Get out the Atlas and show him where Vietnam is. That’s a country he wanted to avoid militarily and in foreign policy.

The big game plan, because politics is so much like sports, is to go to TV commercials now. He has to distance himself from the people, make his divine soundings widespread across the boob tube. To tell the truth he has tired of meeting cows in Iowa – he’s never met a cow he hasn’t eaten. He’s tired of meeting maple trees in New Hampshire. For all that the American people know of TV (the idiot box), they knew screen time is fake, except for Americans running out and buying cars on impulse after watching one minute commercials where the automobile performs devised road feats. These are the same Americans who wonder why food in restaurant commercials does not look the same as when it is presented to them in restaurants.

The advertisements try to link together cliches by using images (pictures). Show Africans in Morocco running in one direction. Claim willingness to solve immigration problems into the USA by showing sprinting Moroccans. [They may be going to Walmart for discount TVs.] The candidate is telling Americans – “Good out and buy that car. Eat in that restaurant.” The justification for the pictorial deceit: America is becoming a Third World Country, the subliminal message: “Too many minorities.” The candidate’s real message is unintended and one he, himself, cannot stomach – the Moroccans are physically fit, unlike himself and many Americans.

2016 CAMPAIGN: SOURCES

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2016 politics has revealed a candidate using methods of oratory to make himself a hero in the public’s eye. This storyline is easily plotted from two sources: Joseph Campbell’s How-to books and Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Mein Kampf is one of the worst written books by anyone. Heinrich Boell, the German novelist, tells of exercises a school teacher mandated: Rewrite Mein Kampf. In class students reduced the book to one-third its length while preserving its hate and abortional shrills. Historians, politicians and literary persons have spotted one bit of brilliance in Mein. The Mad Mustacher knew how to sway the common people with oratory. A favorite line was, “Making Germany great again.” Mein is an excellent how-to book about persuasive, swaying oratory.

Chose issues or people and say outrageous, impolite, anti-social cliches about each one. Rich guys, bad people, and bad situations, mention them all. Talk like Kim Jong Un, North Korean Leader. When he speaks, he has to threaten war, this year a Sacred War. Claim the words spoken represent reality. Repeat, repeat, repeat, like a broken record; utter childish impulses and label anyone. Accuse anyone who disagrees is opposed to the truth. Hide behind the American flag. Anyone running for President wants the USA to be great in the future, not great once again. Personally attack anyone who mentions inconsistencies, dishonesties and depredations, always the fault and and shame of the orator but now the problem of all Americans. Monopolize the news media, always hot for dispute but lacking independent criticism and fairness, an acceptable result: Push the Orator’s name and recently used cliches. Everyone must follow the new trail.

Americans have never fallen for so simple a tactic as oratory and cliches. They want substance, beyond what they have learned from talk shows: They crave understanding in candidates beyond the use of cliches. The Constitution itself has a Preamble of cliches, but the remainder is meat and potatoes, which must be known, consumed and digested. Will the American people again chose someone in experience who is so uncomfortable and sensitive that he is frozen in office? Will the American people choose someone with a mind oriented to cliches? Or do Americans want someone appreciating the balance of faces affecting political power and who is capable of working within that system and producing results?

The Germans believed the oratory, and that it was communicated by a savior, the Mad Mustacher. He never got more than a third of the vote. Coming to power he dismantled structures of democratic government and quickly made Germany a totalitarian society. That would never happen in the United States. Americans own too many guns.

But some Americans and one group of broadcasters believe the Savior has arrived in the 2016 campaign. Late in 2015 newbie-broadcaster objected to the Savior being labelled a clown. Again and again the show guest repeated “clown,” and the newbie-broadcaster said, “He is not a clown.” On another show a guest said the appeal of the Savior was understandable but the messages were hogwash and shams. The program host decried none of it was hogwash or a sham. Preferably Americans would understand if the show hosts asked the reasons or facts behind the clown, hogwash/sham conclusions. Those broadcasters did not. Americans learned nothing.

What is the source to the incompetent existence allowing journalists and politicians to survive? Joseph Campbell. Let’s the the record straight. Campbell’s learned from Mein Kampf, the Nazis, German philosophy and the Germans. All his books were published after World War Two. Campbell knew Nazis and fascism were not marketable. He said his books had everything to do with myths. Anyone historically knowledgable know the Nazis were big myth resurrectors, and looking for myth, Old Joe C. copied Nazi ideology.

All right, I concede Americans live in an age of myths – Harry Potter, Star Wars, Vampires and the Undead. It’s a scary world, but don’t be deceived.

Old Joe C. was an academic who believed he had discovered a how-to-write-a-compelling story. Hero, make the protagonist a hero. The reader and movie audiences will fawn over him. Old Joe listed the ingredients [elements]. [steps], [manifestations], [parts], [units] and discussed many of them. Other writers have picked up these lists which comprise their interpretation of Old Joe’s work. It is therefore easy to conclude that Old Joe’s books are not well-written (because a lot of other authors make much more money explaining Old Joe myths things).

From the standpoint of literature Old Joe’s work is pure crap. However less refined and less rigorous media like movies and TV, have accept Joe’s methods. The quality and the quantity of each has declined. More frequently the audience is presented with characters in impossibly human situations, parakeets running wild, and deep sea adventures which end in outer space. The players are supposed to work through each scenario: A myth! How does a favorite actors handle it? It does not matter. It’s a myth! Don’t make it real, the myths of reality TV shows.

The American audience has lost the idea and the appreciation that forms of art in TV and movies can reflect human existence on Earth. What is offered to Americans? Rote and routine from Old Joe’s myth’s, hero, savior, everyone will be all right if one follows blindly because no one can ever see a Savior let alone understand speech of an orator, now a mad tyrant.

Indeed, the 2016 campaign one candidate presents his myth fitting Old Joe’s compendium: There have been no claims of his being born in a manger or found floating among the bulrushes. But suppressing underlings and deriding the poor is his stamp, and his greed, extravagance and profligacy are trump cards he loves to play.

Some hero elements used in 2016 are off Old Joe’s list, but indoctrinated, ignorant audiences are ready to overlook oversights and incongruent addenda: Producing far more harm and hardship to thousands of people than the orator has ever had himself. Making misjudgments that cost thousands of people employment. Having a sense of entitlement and privilege feeding the most extreme forms of narcissism and opportunism. A physical inability to portray himself as a human being, but as a piece of plaster of paris statuary on display at a Carnival. An unwillingness to expose himself to danger, hoping surrogates will carry that lead. An imprudent mouth not controlled by temper, judgment or reason. Lies, deceptions and tergiversations are primary communications.

The public relations make for an incoherent, uncogent campaign. Pick an issue out of the blue, and sky is the only common connection it has to Americans. Many of the comments are ill advised, infantile, ignorant or poorly put – make up the words, which ever words meet whim. Sentences don’t have to make sense, just bombastic, revealing emotion, irrationality and the intuition matching that of an ape, pounding the chest, hitting the ground and truly wondering what to do next.

This is 2016, time for Americans to get beyond the oratory, and search for a human being who understands issues beyond cliches.

PETITION: TRUMP BUILDS WALL

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We, the undersigned, demand the United States Government make Donald Trump pay for and build a wall on the border of Mexico and the United States of America, for the following reasons:

  1. Building a wall is Trump’s idea.
  2. Trump claims he has the money to build a properly done wall, whatever the dimensions.
  3. Trump is rude and offensive.
  4. Trump is fat, obnoxious and old.
  5. Trump should do something for the United States of America other than being a draft-dodging coward who shirked military duty to avoid fighting in the Vietnam War.
  6. Trump owes the American people billions for the four bankruptcies he has declared.
  7. Trump (and MSNBC) owe the American people billions for the pitiful TV show.
  8. Trump owes the American people billions for exposing them to the worst hair job atop a face covered with cosmetics.  That crap covering his face does not just remove pimples and blackheads.
  9. Trump owes billions for lies and slanders against mainstream religions. Presbyterians are not mainstream; Trump claims to be one of them. According to the Internet there are more Catholics, Lutherans, Baptists, Methodists, Mormons, Episcopalians, Jehovah Witnesses, Jews, Moslems, Hindus and Buddhists in the United States than there are Presbyterians. Seventh Day Adventists outnumber Presbyterians ten to one. There are more Presbyterians than wiccans and pagans. Presbyterianism is truly a backwater religion.
  10. Trump owes billions because his pout looks preposterous.
  11. Medical bills are high because Trump bleeds from every orifice.
  12. When Trump talks he says nothing. When asked about Vladimir Putin in the last debate, Trump talked about North Korea and Kim Sung Putin.
  13. Trump’s plan to cut taxes will provide insufficient funds to give Trump the tax breaks he wants.
  14. Trump should pay because he is the only candidate who can determine when the wall is properly done. He has vast experience, frying his brain and cooking the books.
  15. Hilary handily beats Trump is the polls at a General Election. That is why Trump called Bill Clinton before announcing his candidacy for the Republican nomination. AND,
  16. Trump has a pathological ego, also known as a terminal ego, the sort that Richard Nixon had.

RELIGION AND THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY POLITICIAN

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GOD’S ENGLISHMAN, Christopher Hill

Normally, I would not review or comment about this excellent biography. Oliver Cromwell is nearly four centuries old. He was an excellent general who would rather use diplomacy. He had complete power less than a decade, 1649-1658). While involved in affairs of state, he contended with religions, factions of Protestantism, left and right; Catholics who he always declaimed but left alone; Jews whom he allowed to return to Britain.

Much happened while Cromwell was in power. England had no king; the government was less corrupt. Commerce expanded. Wars against the Dutch (after diplomacy failed) were commercially motivated. The court system was limited and became more independent. Universities were founded and supported. Within a decade after Cromwell’s death Isaac Newton published. The English people had a better sense of nationhood. England was respected by all nations in diplomacy and commercially.

Cromwell was unable to remove tithes; he could not expand the franchise. From the beginning of his rule, members of his army, Levelers (wanting to iron out inequities in Britain, NOW!), pressed Cromwell with their agenda which no one else supported. Knowing that the Levelers could not succeed, Cromwell promised and let time pass. England finally enlarged the franchise 170 years later, and gave the vote to all men in 1908; all women in 1928.

Cromwell had opinions about the Levelers:

“‘The expressions …are very plausible,…if we could leap out of one condition into another. But how do we know, whilst we are disputing these things, another company men shall gather together, and they shall put out a paper as plausible perhaps as this.’ What Cromwell wanted was not a perfect theoretical scheme but that that, as before the Lord, I am persuaded in my heart tends to uniting us in one to that that God will manifest to us to be the thing that he would have us prosecute. ‘It is not enough for us to propose good things, but it behooves honest men and Christians only to make proposals that they think will work. Professions of confidence were not enough. We are very apt all of us to call that faith that perhaps may be but carnal imagination and carnal reasonings.'” (p. 95, Chapter 4)

“‘I do not condemn your reasonings. I doubt them. It is easy to object to the glorified actings of God, if we look too much on instruments… How hard a thing is it to reason ourselves up to the Lord’s service, though it be so honorable, how easy to put ourselves out of it, when the flesh has so many advantages….’ [C]onfidence in the Cuase enabled [Cromwell] to transcend mere human reasonings. Such reasonings, where God is concerned, may miss the main point.”(page 245, Chapter 9)

A politician trying to meet religious criteria while deciding problems and handling persons is distracted. Religion sometimes becomes a crutch, a diversion, an excuse not to know and understand a problem and reason through it but to avoid responsibility. Seventeenth century Britons were mired in religion. Twenty-first century Americans should reject it.

WORDS, AND THERE ARE WORDS

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Blood, anyone? If Americans are lucky, they will observe DONALD bleed, losing his political life based upon common decency. Has it ever been appropriate to say, infer, suggest that DONALD did? NO.

Any loud-mouth politician of the nineteenth century would never refer to women of his day in this way. Twentieth century politicians avoided it. Twenty-first century politicians – there were clowns from the Republican Party a guy from Missouri who became an expert on pregnancy after rape, and an Indiana senate candidate stepping in a similar pit during the same election: Both lost. Now there is DONALD who purports to support women’s issues and health but likes to criticize women for their overall wavering emotional state, as though they are vampire slaves submissive to male overseers and masters. DONALD has read too many undead fantasy stories and seen too many movies with overly made-up actors.

That slice of culture does not allow DONALD to cast aside civil and social norms and rules of propriety that Americans have followed and accepted for centuries. DONALD’s locker room giggles, boardroom chuckles and men’s club guffaws are exceptions, but every male in those settings recognizes and knows the rules. Outside limited settings society’s rules and norms must be always observed.

DONALD’s debate was predicated by DONALD saying he was not a debater. This debate was a joint press-conference, not a debate. Yet, DONALD told the world, I am not preparing, I’ve never debated, I don’t need to prepare because I’m Donald, I’m as dumb as dirt, I am unprepared. Apparently, DONALD has never had a press conference. Unprepared is not the sort of person to become President.

Because he was unprepared for a joint-press conference, DONALD claims the questions were unexpected and unfair. Actually DONALD was too lazy to study, and to agitated to sit down and to self-assured to rehearse responses. DONALD had campaign support which he did not use. The message that he was not a debater was all right, but the message has became and is now DONALD WAS UNPREPARED.

So how did DONALD respond? The only way DONALD knew. Produce locker room giggles, boardroom chuckles and men’s club guffaws, all in a nation wide social setting. Where are society’s rules and norms? They should never come from DONALD whom no one should ever want as President.

Everyone in America has changed language used to describe one another. The last big outburst was in the early 1970s when language flowed freely, especially in the media. Words and terms American grew up with are justly and properly disused and locked away. The result comes not from political correctness. It comes from common decency, politeness and civility.

[Political correctness may be demonstrated by a list of words which should not be used to describe Hilary Clinton. It came from her campaign in the Spring of 2015. Polarizing was one such word. I don’t know what happened to that list, but any child of the Sixties knows what polarizing means, and that Hilary fits the definition.]

An inability to control’s one’s use of language and using those terms in speech or in emotional outbursts reveals a lack of intellectual rigor, an unceasing spontaneity of a mind spiraling out of control and a terminal ego. These are the physical and mental revelations of DONALD who should not be rewarded with any more attention from any American.

ART HEIST – Review

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This movie stars Ellen Pompeo and Steven Baldwin.

Theft of El Greco in Madrid. Ellen, a high-powered art dealer, might lose her most lucrative client. She advised him to loan the painting to the Madrid museum which was robbed.

At home in America she loves her daughter and husband (Baldwin-cop) recently separated. They live in New Jersey.

To protect her relations with her client, Ellen goes to Madrid to help the investigation. Who are the suspects? Pompeo is not convincing in the role. Her New Jersey house looks like a set from a Doris Day movie in 1958, not the digs of a dealer/one time aspiring painter. She says nothing smart about painting or the market for stolen art. Her role in the movie is pathetically clear.

She’s driving in the first chase scene, after the same art culprits steal a painting from an art auction. She rips along the streets of Madrid, across plazas and around circles. She crashes into a coffee shop, but is too injured to order. Baldwin and daughter fly the Atlantic to comfort her.

If I had seen this movie before the tragedy in Paris, I would have been incredulous about the lack of local police activity to violent crimes within the city: Boots on the ground, investigators looking into high value thefts, electronic resources. In California when someone boasts a car or just doesn’t want to stop for a traffic ticket, there are at least five cop cars trailing him along with the police and media helicopters. Within the last decade when Eastern Europeans robbed a bank in the San Fernando Valley, cops stopped them. The bad guys were wearing full body armor; at least 100 cops including SWAT were on scene within ten minutes. End of bank robbers.

In Paris this year twelve people were murdered; 11 were wounded; police officers were killed or wounded. The bad guys drove 12-15 miles and were located on the second day and killed. Meanwhile, that festering situation allowed the attack on the grocery store. A question arises, and the answer is not, C’est la vie. If the murdering bad guys had been stopped immediately, would have the attack on the grocery store have ensued?

in Art Heist people are murdered during the art theft. Paintings worth $100 million are stolen. There are no cops anywhere. Ellen has to chase the bad guys herself. A week later (a few minutes of film time) Ellen is threatened (knife to throat). Baldwin intercepts and chases the two bad guys. Three minutes of motorcycles through Barcelona, making old people jump, young people watch and children cry. Baldin catches up with them, fights, loses (two against one). There’s not a cop closer than 20 miles.

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON? TAKE WHAT YOU WANT. EUROPE IS UP FOR GRABS!

Art Heist becomes preposterous: Baldwin tells Ellen the situation is dangerous. He knows of the people accused of the thefts. He advises return to New Jersey. She gives him every illogical, unrealistic, unreasonable, unfathomable explanation why she will stay, be insensate and endanger herself. About this time in the movie, Baldwin, doing real police work (his character is the only credible one in the flick), meets a promising babe-informant (seen her but don’t know her name). She has a day job in a sporting goods store. It’s time for abandon Ellen to the wilds of Spain, take his daughter and the sporting good woman home to mother in New Jersey.

NOPE, and I can neither write more nor recommend the final 20 minutes of this movie, any more than I can the beginning.