Donald Trump vs Bill Clinton on Illegal Immigration?

One of my Facebook friends posted a video of President Clinton once proposing stern measures against illegal immigration arguably not so dissimilar to what President Trump proposes now, and she says: "What happened to this concept and why is it deemed so wrong today, by so many? I don't get it. I supported President Clinton on immigration then and I support President Trump now." This is how I replied to her:

"There's an old Zen saying that goes like this: "When the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way." One could argue that whether one agrees with Trump's immigration policies or not, he is so blatantly odious in personality and character and unsuited to the presidency in temperament and aptitude that everything he does, for good or ill, bears the insufferable stench of his overwhelming psychopathology and personal repulsiveness."

Robert Reich Endorses Obama

Robert Reich was President Clinton's Secretary of Labor and has been a longtime friend of the Clintons. He now teaches public policy at U.C. Berkeley and has a blog. In that blog, he recently announced his support for Barack Obama for president. Below is a clear and concise statement of his reasons for doing so.

I believe that Barack Obama should be elected President of the United States.

Although Hillary Clinton has offered solid and sensible policy proposals, Obama's strike me as even more so. His plans for reforming Social Security and health care have a better chance of succeeding. His approaches to the housing crisis and the failures of our financial markets are sounder than hers. His ideas for improving our public schools and confronting the problems of poverty and inequality are more coherent and compelling. He has put forward the more enlightened foreign policy and the more thoughtful plan for controlling global warming.

He also presents the best chance of creating a new politics in which citizens become active participants rather than cynical spectators. He has energized many who had given up on politics. He has engaged young people to an extent not seen in decades. He has spoken about the most difficult problems our society faces, such as race, without spinning or simplifying. He has rightly identified the armies of lawyers and lobbyists that have commandeered our democracy, and pointed the way toward taking it back.

Finally, he offers the best hope of transcending the boundaries of class, race, and nationality that have divided us. His life history exemplifies this, as do his writings and his record of public service. For these same reasons, he offers the best possibility of restoring America's moral authority in the world.

Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes

I just finished watching Leslie Stahl interview Alan Greenspan on 60 Minutes. It sounds as though he is and always has been the stereotypical geek. An economics geek, if you will. He spent his honeymoon with his wife, writer and TV journalist Andrea Mitchell, at an economics conference. His idea of a fun and relaxing read is poring over reams of economic data.

My first thought was how terribly boring that must be. But it obviously isn't boring to him. He loves that stuff. If I loved anything as much as he loves economics, I'd probably be much happier and more successful than I am.

Some of the interesting things Greenspan said were that Richard Nixon's language was laced with so much profanity that he thought there must have been something "extraordinarily wrong" with the man; that Gerald Ford was an extremely decent, good, and moral man; that Ronald Reagan had an unusual kind of intelligence that uplifted the country at a time when it sorely needed it; that George Bush Sr. and he got along poorly in large part because Bush overstepped his bounds by publicly telling Greenspan what he and the Fed should do, such as lower interest rates; that Bill Clinton was the smartest and most "effective" president he served under; that Hillary Clinton is extremely intelligent and eminently capable of running the country even though he would prefer a Republican as president; that he does not approve of George Bush Jr's economic policies of debt-swelling tax cuts and other forms of profligate spending; and that he did not foresee the mortgage crisis but thinks this and the housing crisis will pass even as he anticipates some pretty gloomy economic times ahead, especially with respect to recession.

It was also interesting to learn that Greenspan was a promising young jazz saxophonist as a teenager and even toured for a time with a professional jazz band playing bebop. He also confessed to crafting his "Fedspeak" testimony before Congress as Federal Reserve Chairman to be as obtuse as possible so that when two newspapers published diametrically opposed headlines summarizing the gist of his testimony, he had accomplished precisely what he set out to do.

I did not expect Greenspan to come across as a particularly warm and friendly man, and he surely didn't. But I found his geekiness and straighforward demeanor charming and even inspiring in its own way.