I Have a Problem

I have a problem with bacon wrapped dates.

I have a problem with The Vegas Golden Nights in the Stanley Cup Finals, remember New York Islanders 1972-73: 12-60-6. Now that is an expansion team.

I have a problem with students who don’t study…if you only knew me as a student…heee,heee.

I have a problem with our California Governor candidates, really!

I have a problem with the cheapest ticket at Dodger Stadium is $28.00, and you need oxygen to survive the heights watching the game.

I have a problem with (here we go again) “reply all” emails.

I have a problem with Coors Light.

I have a problem with professional golfer Jordan Spieth, boring.

I have a problem with hitting 16 in Blackjack, “the book” says to but I always lose.

I have a problem with Boards of Trustees losing control of their higher education institutions: University of Southern California, Michigan State University, Penn State University, etc.

I have a problem with the drivers in the City of Claremont, CA. on Friday afternoons. God save us.

I have a problem with Fox News.

I have a problem with Interstate 15, Interstate 405, Interstate 210, Interstate 5, need I say more.

I have a problem with sea salt in chocolate.

I have a problem with too few faculty members attending Commencements.

I have a problem with the infield shift in major league baseball.

I have a problem with Dominos Pizza, it has changed.

I have a problem with why no one reads a newspaper any more.

I have a problem with summer being too short.

I have a problem with Canton, New York being so far away.

I have a BIG problem with Clarkson University.

I have a problem with my golf game, out of bounds.

I have a problem with the following cabinet members: Wilbur Ross (Commerce), Betty DeVos (Education), James Perry (Energy), Scott Pruitt (EPA).

I have a problem with why I cannot win the Lottery.

I have a problem with (here we go again) people especially law enforcement officers never using their turn signals.

I have a problem that this has gone on too long…

SCOTUS - The Supreme Court has 29 cases to decide by the end of this month, including all of the term’s biggest blockbusters.

The big questions the court still has to resolve:

•          Is President Trump’s travel ban constitutional?

•          Can a Christian baker refuse to bake a cake for a same-sex couple?

•          Can the police track the location of your cell phone without a warrant?

•          Can public-sector unions collect fees from non-members?

•          Can states collect sales taxes from online retailers?

•          Can purely partisan gerrymandering — not racial gerrymandering — be unconstitutional?

All of these cases have enormous political implications. Some, like the gerrymandering challenges, could directly and immediately affect the actual practice of politics.

POTUS WEEK - Monday: Trump has lunch with VP Mike Pence and Defense Secretary James Mattis. Trump also participates in the Gold Star Families Memorial Day reception.

Tuesday: Trump meets with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Trump also hosts the Super Bowl champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, at the White House.

Wednesday: Trump will sign S. 2372, the “VA Mission Act of 2018” and he'll visit the Federal Emergency Management Agency Headquarters and attend the "2018 Hurricane Briefing." He's also expected to host a dinner at the White House to recognize the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Thursday: Trump meets with Secretary of State Pompeo.

Friday: Travel to Charlevoix, Canada. (Per the AP, Trump is expected to attend a meeting of the Group of Seven major industrial nations in Quebec, Canada, through June 9.)

500 DAYS- Everything changed:

•          Trump has wiped out a large portion of Obama’s legacy. He’s exited the Paris climate deal; signed major tax cuts, especially for corporations; confirmed an ultra-conservative Supreme Court justice and record numbers of circuit court judges; deregulated like crazy; exited the Iran deal; exited the TPP trade deal; repealed the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate; and moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing it as Israel’s capital.

•          New hardline immigration enforcement is in place, including separating children from parents of illegal immigrants. An extraordinary percentage of Trump’s senior staff has quit or been fired.

•          Only one campaign original remains on Trump’s staff: social media director Dan Scavino.

•          A national security adviser who began with bombastic high hopes of enforcing a new hard line against radical Islam — Mike Flynn — is now at personal peril in the Mueller investigation.

•          Trump no longer talks about wiping out the national debt by ending “waste, fraud and abuse.”

•          Trump no longer talks about shutting down federal agencies.

Nothing changed:

•          Family survives despite many premature obituaries about Jared and Ivanka (Javanka).

•          Trump still watches a ton of TV, views everything through a media lens, and obsesses over negative coverage.

•          Trump still views foreign negotiations as zero-sum games with a clear winner and loser. The scorecard is the bilateral trade deficit; Trump’s hardline instincts on trade and immigration are unchanged from the campaign trail.

•          There’s no trillion-dollar infrastructure package.

•          Mexico hasn’t paid for the wall — and Congress has only given Trump a pittance so far.

•          The national debt has climbed ever higher under Trump’s stewardship.

•          Trump still lies, exaggerates, distorts and responds to paper cuts by butchering his enemies.

•          Vice President Pence remains — and nobody I’ve spoken to has ever seen him criticize or debate the president in any meaningful way.

•          Trump has the same media diet: heavy on Lou Dobbs, Sean Hannity and "Fox & Friends" (with a sprinkling of hate-watch channel-surfing to CNN and MSNBC), and the same core diet of print newspapers, led by his hometown New York Times and New York Post.

Be smart: In 500 days, Trump’s hijacking of the formerly conservative GOP is complete — an astonishing accomplishment. The majority party in America is fully defined by his policies, his popularity with the base, his facts-be-damned mentality, his ability to control and quiet virtually all Republican elected officials.

•          Oh, don’t forget: He has 962 days left in this term.

BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK – Birthday wishes and thoughts this week to Johnny Depp (55) Oceanside, CA; Paul Giamatti (51) Brooklyn, NY; Tom Jones (78) London, England; Seth Kogan …famous UCLA Doctor; Boz Scaggs (74) Maui, Hawaii;  Nancy Sinatra (78) Rancho Mirage, CA; Mike Zazon …famous owner of the “Z” Ranch.

NETFLIX RISE - Netflix Inc. has firmly established itself as the world’s most valuable media company:

•          An 11-year-old app that charges $11 a month is worth more to investors than the legacy conglomerates that earn billions more from TV advertising, box-office hits and cable and internet packages.

•          Netflix leapfrogged at least one traditional media giant in market value each year since 2015, when it became twice the size of ... CBS.

TARIFF - A tariff is actually the U.S. government charging a U.S. buyer to buy a foreign good. It's not charging the foreign country anything.

MARKET WEEK – The Trump administration showed no sign of backing down from tariffs in the face of resistance from allies and China over the weekend, isolating the U.S. and complicating the president’s meeting this week with leaders of Washington’s staunchest partners. Top finance officials from the Group of Seven leading nations met in Canada, where the non-U.S. members—the host country, along with France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the U.K.—publicly rebuked Washington for its new steel and aluminum tariffs. Beijing said it won’t abide by any agreement to buy more American products if the U.S. goes ahead with trade sanctions. President Trump now must face leaders of countries who have termed his policies extreme, unwise and in some cases illegal when he arrives in Quebec for a summit of G-7 leaders scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

The global growth story is fading. Stock indexes that rode accelerating growth to fresh records in January are now hamstrung by a moderate but unmistakable slowdown in economic momentum in Europe and elsewhere. The Dow industrials have struggled to push past 25000 since March. Hardly anyone expects a recession soon. But with government-bond yields near record lows in many countries and the median S&P 500 stock trading at a price/earnings multiple seen only rarely in the past century, many investors are buying government bonds and other lower-risk assets in a bid to brace against what is expected to be a volatile market year.

ON THIS DATE - June 5, 1968:

Tuesday marks 50 years since the assassination in Los Angeles of senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, age 42, who had been attorney general for his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

•          For 12 weeks he traveled the country, up and down the coasts, to Indiana the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed; to Nebraska, where he won a vital primary in a devoutly conservative state; to Oregon, where he suffered the first political loss by any member of his family; and then to California, where he vowed to go on to the Democratic convention 'and let’s win there,' only to walk through a hotel kitchen where it all — the campaign against a long war, the campaign for a new sense of national purpose — tumbled to an end with an outstretched arm and spray of gunfire.

•          He might have won the presidency, he might have brought the Vietnam War to an earlier conclusion, he might have healed a broken nation. Or he might have lost to Richard Nixon (Hubert Humphrey, a more experienced and in some ways more sophisticated politician, did lose), he might have found the conflict in Southeast Asia much more difficult to wind down than he expected (as Barack Obama discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan), he might have stoked resentment from his foes and produced a furious conservative backlash (as Obama, as fluent a campaigner as RFK, surely did).

•          Robert Kennedy was perhaps the most religiously driven of the Kennedy men, and certainly the most self-examining ... By 1968, Kennedy — drowning in despair and inflamed with anger — felt free to speak and act for himself.

•          Jeff Greenfield, the TV journalist, who was an RFK speechwriter: "The Bobby Kennedy campaign was an investment in hope, in the hope that if Bobby were elected, we could end the Vietnam War and bring the country together."

•          Mark Shields, the syndicated columnist, who organized 40 Nebraska counties for Kennedy: “He’d have been a more revolutionary president than Trump ... We have never had a tough liberal. He was the last tough liberal. Every one after him was a can’t-we-get-along, bleeding-heart liberal."

•          Peter Robinson, the conservative Hoover Institution scholar who wrote Ronald Reagan’s “tear-down-this-wall’’ speech: "Bobby is the pivot of the Kennedy family."

•          That is the ultimate meaning of Robert Kennedy — not so much his accomplishments but his legacy as a man whose changed voice changed the American conversation.

SPOTTED – 1,582 University of La Verne graduates this weekend at beautiful Campus West in La Verne, CA. This writer was fortunate to work with 224 of these graduating students, all wonderful, hard working men and woman. Much success to all.

POOR TRAINING IN AMERICAN COMPANIES - The most successful job training through the decades has been organized by companies finding smart people, then skilling them up for specific positions.

But this tradition is long passé. American companies today are only rarely prepared to spend the money to train their own workers.

•          Instead, they want fully formed workers to show up at the door.

One person vexed by this paradox is Kim Arnett, a software developer at Expedia. Arnett posted an open letter on LinkedIn to technology companies, tut-tutting them for setting up a potential future crisis by failing to create enough entry-level positions.

•          Her suggestion: "As an organizer of a meet up that aims to help beginners and marginalized people, I ask you to back up. Start a training program, add internships and entry level positions to help fill the gap. People are here, give them a chance."

Edward Alden, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, tells Rink Rats that European companies naturally train their own workers but "that hasn't permeated U.S. companies" as yet.

•          But, Alden said, some seem to be starting to grasp that they will have to take the lead on training for their own workforces.

OUT AND ABOUT – St. Lawrence University Reunion this past weekend saw some old SLU hockey boys from the 70’s: Gary “Nik and the Nice Guys” Webb ‘73, Terry “The Original Bugsy” Moran ‘71, and Peter Brennan ‘72. Wish we were there to hoist a couple. A thank you to Bruce Carlisle, St. Lawrence ’78 for the picture. Bruce is our west coast St. Lawrence hockey version of Wally “White Shoes” Johnson. He keeps us up-to-date on all the St. Lawrence hockey information.

Stay tuned this summer for Rink Rats Special Edition, "The Way We Were".

SWAMI’S WEEK TOP PICKS –

MLB Game of the Week – Saturday June 9; New York Yankees (37-17) at New York Metropolitans (27-30), Mets suck, Yanks win this one 7 – 3.

The Belmont Stakes – Saturday June 9; Elmont, New York:

1). Bravazo               2). Hofburg               3). Justify

STANLEY CUP FINALS – Though The Swami picked Nashville and Pittsburgh to be in the Stanley Cup Final, we now select the Washington Capitals to win in five games over the Vegas Golden Knights (too much like Clarkson).

NBA FINALS – We are sticking to our original picks of Cleveland Cavaliers vs. Golden State Warriors Final. With The Warriors winning in six games.

Season to Date (15 - 10)

DRIVING THE WEEK – Tariffs will remain the center of attention all week with a list of Chinese goods to be subjected to the new levies expected by mid-June at the latest ... G7 meetings begin Friday in Quebec following a rare rebuke of the U.S. from G7 finance ministers ... House Financial Services subcommittees hold hearings Wednesday at 10:00 a.m. homeless youth and 2:00 p.m. on the CFPB ...

ISM Non-manufacturing on Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. expected to tick up to 57 from 56.8 ... Productivity and Unit Labor Costs on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. expected to rise 0.7 percent and 2.7 percent.

Tuesday (June 5): Midterm primaries in eight states, including California; Tesla's annual shareholders meeting.

Wednesday (June 6): 74th anniversary of D-Day

Next Blog: Summer Reading and lollygag.

Until next time, Adios

Claremont, California

June 4, 2018

#VIII-29-371

CARTOON OF THE WEEK – The New Yorker, Alex Gregory