It’s not about Biden vs. Trump.

It’s about the process.

Oh, you can follow the horse race, be outraged at Trump and his minions’ shenanigans at their convention this week, but it won’t make any difference. Just like the pardon of Roger Stone didn’t make a difference. Just like the Senate’s report on Russia didn’t make a difference. Just like Trump’s sister’s statements won’t make a difference.

It’s simple folks, in a fair election, Biden wins by a landslide. Oh, I could point to reasons, but that would be a waste of time, the same waste we’re going to endure for the next two months in the media. It’s a sideshow. Forget the issues, the personalities, the personal attacks, they’re all irrelevant. It comes down to the election itself. The actual voting. Who gets to. Whose ballot is counted. How are ballots counted. What qualifies and what is not legitimate. What is the time frame for delivery and counting. Who gets to certify the results.

This is the story and most people are not getting it. Especially those still in thrall to last week’s DNC show, believing their hearts are in the right place, that we should all shut up and rally around old Joe and we can ride the wave to victory and a restoration of the good old United States we grew up in. WRONG!

Where to start?

The law. It always comes down to the law. That’s how Bush emerged victorious in 2000. The Supreme Court handed him the victory. Because Republican attorneys were more savvy and fought harder than the lawyers representing the Democrats. They played to win. They even had Roger Stone organizing the Brooks Brothers riot in Miami.

So, you need to listen to Larry Lessig on legal shenanigans, ones you’re completely unaware of:

Lawrence Lessig

Yes, it’s my podcast. But Lessig does the talking. Right up front. You don’t need to listen for an hour and a half, but you should. There are many ways the Republicans can turn a losing election into a winning one. Or at least muddy the water to the point there’s no consensus on a result.

Emotions are irrelevant, at the end it comes down to the law. This is why you don’t want to defend yourself in court. You’re operating under the illusion if you just explain, the judge will see the wisdom in your words and exonerate you. WRONG! It’s not like talking to your dad, deciding what is fair, it all comes down to the statutes. Under the codified law, under stare decisis, i.e. decisions prior, are you guilty or not? It’s a game wherein you fit the facts into a system. You can’t win Monopoly by jumping from Boardwalk to Park Place, you must pass Go! Remember that. It’s kind of like the people who believe Ticketmaster is the devil and if they were in charge, ticketing would be equitable… They ignore history, they assume concert promotion is not an established game executed by serious players. Everybody thinks they can do everything in America, but they’re wrong.

Which brings me to the concept of “Useful Idiots.”

“How the ‘Useful Idiots’ of Liberal New York Fueled Income Inequality”

Read this interview, it won’t take long. The bottom line is the educated bleeding heart liberals telling us all to shut up and line up behind Biden are the same ones who enabled the rise of the right, they were complicit. I know, sounds wrong, but the truth hurts.

And if you want to go deeper, read the review of the book:

“Kurt Andersen Asks: What Is the Future of America?”

It is written by Anand Giridharadas. If you’re unfamiliar with Anand, watch his appearance on the unnecessarily canceled “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” start at 8:10.

Yes, we have met the enemy and he is us. We not only stood by, we enabled Wall Street and the corporations to remodel America in their vision, where taxes are low, income inequality is high and the average punter has no idea what is going on.

But, once again, the theme of this screed is the election process itself.

Which leads me to:

“What Happens If Donald Trump Fights The Election Results? – Stealing a Presidential election in America is difficult, but it has been done before.

You can scroll past the history of the election of 1876. it lends perspective, but it is not necessary.

Bottom line…they’ve been war-gaming the election, an organization entitled the “Transition Integrity Project.”

Not that this “New Yorker” article is the only coverage of this.

Just shy of a week ago, Michelle Goldberg, who happened to be complicit in the killing of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy, her husband worked for Warren, and even after Warren’s campaign was decimated she attacked Bernie, wrote:

“Trump Might Cheat. Activists Are Getting Ready. Election sabotage needs to be met with the largest protests yet.

But bottom line, the articles raising the flag about the system, about corruption therein, about manipulation thereof, are vastly overwhelmed by news about the horse race.

If you think Trump and the Republicans are gonna allow a fair fight and then accept loss you haven’t been paying attention. Furthermore, why are you so sure Trump’s team won’t take to the streets, what makes you sure he won’t tell them to take to the streets?

Like I said, it’s over. It’s as if they played the World Series and the only issue is instant replay. Even better, the Super Bowl, where there are so many nuanced, questionable calls. And then it not only becomes about the calls, but who hired the refs. And then who provided the technical equipment. And then who owns the teams. And then which network broadcast the game. You can go up the food chain and muddy the water to where a great percentage of the public questions the result, then what?

But the same people, the same useful idiots who believed that Wall Street and the corporations were their friends, if for no other reason than the value of their real estate went up, keep focusing on the issues, when they’re completely irrelevant. We already ran this movie, they called it the midterm election of 2018. Wherein the night of the results the pundits, these same media people sidling up to the privileged class, said there was no change, that it was business as usual, and then as the ballots continued to be counted found out they were wrong, that there was a sea change, the Democrats took over the House, leftists got elected. And in the ensuing two years conditions have only gotten worse!

Yet we’ve got those in the DNC, the prognosticators, saying to beware of 2016, that Trump might pull it off again. HE CAN’T! The main reason Trump won in 2016 was because Hillary Clinton had been vilified for decades, to the point where even Democrats wouldn’t vote for her. Furthermore, Trump was someone with no record, and now he’s got one, and anybody who thinks it looks good is blind.

Then again, the dirty little secret of many Trump voters is that their position has nothing to do with the issues, they just hate liberals that much.

So, Biden vs. Trump is a sideshow. If there were no more politicking, no more coverage, Biden would still win the election. Instead, because it sells papers, like the Kardashians and the rest of the nonsense the media promotes, we’ll be subjected to facts and analyses for two months to the point where we’ll dig deeper into our holes, argue further for our candidates when it all doesn’t matter.

Then again, the press is not fair and balanced anyway. All that coverage of Kurt Andersen’s book? It was placed there by PR people. Andersen is a certified member of the journalistic class. You could write the same book and have no chance of being reviewed in the “New York Times,” get no ink at all. Kind of like Sarah Kendzior with her book “Hiding in Plain Sight,” the “New York Times” and the “Washington Post” wouldn’t even review it. But if you want to know the score in today’s America it’s the number one source. You see Trump is playing by the authoritarian handbook. One that Democrats doesn’t think applies to the U.S. and therefore shouldn’t be addressed. Because if you do address it, you realize that the law doesn’t matter, that it’s all about the authoritarian getting their way with the end goal of always remaining in power. Can you say Russia? Can you say Belarus? In Belarus the ruler supposedly lost in a landslide yet he claimed just the opposite, but he’s still in power, and despite protests in the street he just shut down media outlets.

And everything’s more complicated than it looks. In today’s “Washington Post” there’s a story about the pandemic killing independent bookstores:

“People want to support their local bookstores. They might be hurting them instead”

The bottom line? Books are ordered but they can’t be delivered, because they’re out of stock and they’re printed in CHINA!

You think it’s as simple as shutting down TikTok, when the truth is the world is so intertwined that you lose out if you’re not playing the international game. Yes, people lost out in globalization, but you can’t go backwards, even though the U.S. and the U.K. are trying. I’d explain it to you, but it doesn’t feel right so you won’t accept it. Stealing the election via the process doesn’t feel right so you won’t accept it. A fair and just election feels right so you believe in it.

WAKE UP!

Doobies

And they say the quality of the sound no longer makes a difference.

If you had told me in 1972 or 3 that the Doobie Brothers would be one of my favorite rock bands, one of the artists who I listen to the most, I would have laughed in your face. Wasn’t this the band with the obvious monster hits on FM radio? I mean I liked “Listen to the Music,” but although I also liked “China Grove,” I never cottoned to “Long Train Runnin’,” which was ubiquitous not only on the radio but late night TV. I saw the Doobie Brothers as meat and potatoes rock. By ’73 FM rock radio reached everywhere, they finally had album rock stations in the hinterlands. And it took the advent of corporate rock to make the whole paradigm implode, kicked in the ass by disco and then fading until MTV revived rock, ultimately via the English new wave, which wiped away the bloated detritus of the seventies.

But then…

Music used to be limited. You knew what was on the radio and what you owned, and people didn’t own that much, and if they did, it tended to be the same albums. And I had a larger record collection than anybody I knew, but there were still things I hadn’t heard, like “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.”

Who knows if there will even be a ski season this coming winter. But in ’74, after I’d graduated from college, I immediately broke my leg in a freak accident and therefore missed the first few months of the season in Utah and when Snowbird ultimately closed near the end of April I was not satisfied, I needed more. On a tip I hooked up with the freestylers, the bumpers who dominated the ‘Bird, and joined them in a condo for the month of May in Mammoth California. They needed my money.

And this was pre-internet, pre-webcam, pre people really knowing what happened outside their burg. Mammoth in May was a wonderland. No bare spots, the ski area was ultimately open until July 4th that year, sun and ski bums, that was all there was, it was the greatest month of my life.

I was the outsider. But what hooked me up was the music. It was the first weekend and everybody was lamenting the passage of the evening. I said “It’s ten o’clock and I want to rock!,” which they thought was the funniest thing they’d ever heard, it immediately ingratiated me (as well as being willing to drop into Hangman’s and ski Philippe’s), little did they know it was just a paraphrase of a lyric from Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright (For Fighting)”.

Now I had twenty four cassettes. Which I’d recorded before I’d left Connecticut the previous fall. But this was rare, most people still listened to 8-tracks in the car, and Jimmy had an 8-track recorder, as part of his all-in-one record player, and he’d made tapes for Mammoth. Including “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits” and “Physical Graffiti.” But recording on 8-track…there were essentially four stereo tracks of equal length, and albums could not be broken up this way, so Jimmy recorded songs out of order and filled them with cuts from other albums and…I could not distinguish what was on “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits” and “The Captain And Me.” And one of my absolute favorite Doobie Brothers songs opens the latter LP, “Natural Thing,” what puts it over the top are the contributions of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff who were responsible for the programming on Stevie Wonder’s “Talking Book,” one of the best LPs ever, but it was not on the 8-track tape, I had to wait until I purchased the LP to learn it. But all of “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits” was on there, albeit in a whacked order.

“What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits” was heavily anticipated, after all it was the follow-up to the big smash “The Captain And Me,” with the aforementioned FM radio and late night TV albums were selling more copies than ever before. But it did not live up to expectations. The initial single “Another Park, Another Sunday” failed and it wasn’t until nine months after release that “Black Water” was a hit, after a renegade radio station began playing it. Then it was everywhere.

I’ve got these Genelec speakers. They’re my computer system. The satellites have got a woofer and a tweeter. They’re ten or eleven inches tall, about four inches square, and there’s a connected subwoofer. You can replicate this system for about $1500, but today no one spends that much for a stereo, never mind their computer speakers. I got e-mail from a reader saying he wanted to get his kids into vinyl for $300, I said you couldn’t, not to bother, you had to spend probably at least that much on a turntable and cartridge, never mind an amp and speakers.

And I’ve got Amazon Music HD. And I’d be lying if I told you it sounded light years better than anything else. Actually, Apple sounds better than Spotify, Spotify’s codec is inferior to its competitors’, but Amazon Music HD will play at UltraHD level on my computer, that’s 24 bits, with sampling ranging from 44.1 kHz to 192 kHz. And for the uninitiated, that’s better than CD quality.

So…

I was listening to Led Zeppelin. “Thank You.” A hangover from yesterday’s “Ramble On” session. But then I was interrupted. My mood changed. And music is all about mood. So I decided to shift to “Physical Graffiti,” to “Ten Years Gone,” my favorite Zeppelin track, but I still wasn’t reached, so I decided to go to the Doobie Brothers.

Yes, can you believe they’re my go-to band? I can’t either!

So I started off with “Toulouse Street,” because it’s warm. But then I realized it was the title track which was warm, and it was a bit too low-key for my mood, so I decided to play…

“What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.”

“Song to See You Through.” That’s what it was. Mid-tempo. Warm. With that smooth yet slightly rough Tom Johnston vocal and then the horns and suddenly I was on the horse, galloping through the rolling golden hills of Northern California.

And the killer is “Another Park, Another Sunday.” It’s genius. Maybe too smart for radio back then, maybe it’s true that radio felt unjustifiably dissed by the lyrics, but I cannot burn out on it, never have, it’s more sophisticated than what came before in an era where radio was getting dumber and dumber.

But I decided to just let the album play…

The version of the album I was listening to was the 2016 remastered version. They do this to hoodwink people to buy again what they already own. It used to be extra tracks, now it’s improved sound, but who has the system that can hear the difference, almost nobody.

But I do.

I don’t want to get into an argument with the studio rats. All I’ll say is Genelec is basically studio audio, not home audio. And listening, with the right sound source is…about as close as you’re gonna get to the original sound.

Sun and the stars are a a travelin’ man’s companion

It used to be about the road. Come on, how many rock songs focus on that? But not the modern sound, not hip-hop, because times have changed, if you want to go anywhere you take a plane, hopefully a private jet, and what’s between here and there is…irrelevant.

And the truth is once you’re out west there’s oftentimes not much between here and there, but you’re rockin’ down the highway, with the tunes cranked and you meld with the scenery, it’s a unique experience.

Now it’s up to you
Do you know you’re pulling through
Man it’s not easy and you know it

It’s not. Easy that is. Used to be you could make it, pay your bills, but if you wanted more than that…you had to decide your destination and commit to it. It was hardest to be a successful musician or athlete, but the rest of us…sure, you could become a doctor or a lawyer, but otherwise there were no guarantees, you could not work at a monolith like Google and make close to six figures with no experience, if you wanted to lift yourself up…it was not easy.

Children in a happy place
They’re always smiling
Showin’ all their love with no deception
Treatin’ each other like brothers and sisters do, yeah, yeah
Children in a real good place, they’re always tryin’
Jumpin’ and playin’ in the middle of the afternoon
Just havin’ a ball don’t worry at all, yeah

We were children. That’s who we wanted to be. We wanted to play forever. I’m not talking Peter Pans, but desperados. We weren’t forestalling growing up, we knew the score, we could make ends meet, if not much more. and we knew life was about experience long before the millennials realized this.

And I’m only into the second song of “What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits” and I get the inspiration to write, it’s this song “Spirit.” It’s rocking yet down home with a fiddle and exquisite picking and this is the sound of the west, the sound of freedom, there are no walls you need to break down like on the east coast, the landscape is open, what do you want to make of it, and when space is unlimited you look inside, you huddle up and make this music that looks inward yet is joyous.

And I don’t want the mood to change. But “Pursuit on 53rd St.” has got that chunky Doobie Brothers guitar sound and a sweet vocal and enough energy to make anyone in tech wish they were in music.

And the album is playing and “Road Angel” does the same thing.

I was ridin’ down that highway…

The Road Angel is not one of the Housewives, she’s not all about makeup, not all about plastic surgery and a look that takes hours to perfect, she’s got it naturally, it emanates from the inside, she’s cool and she knows it and she makes men’s hearts melt.

And I haven’t eaten lunch and it’s 3:30 in the afternoon and my mind is fried and I’ve already sent two missives already, but…

I’m in that space. Where it’s just me and the music and that’s all I need, that’s enough.

I’m in the soundstage, there’s no scrim, no fuzziness between me and the band, the instruments are defined, it’s a positively magical experience. The one we were in search of all that time ago. This is not what the tweaks want, they’re searching for perfection, but that was never what we were looking for, the music was never perfect, this was before all the studio trickery, comping vocals, we just wanted to get closer, we wanted to spend enough to get closer. We didn’t need a Ferrari, but a Chevy was insufficient. We had to lay down as much as we could for our stereo before we hit the point of little return. And even back in the seventies, that was way over a thousand dollars, but not five.

I’m sittin’ in my room, I’m starin’ out my window

Literally. I’m perched on the hill. It’s a smoggy day, but I’m in suspended animation, removed from the world.

I’m just tryin’ to find me

I was and still am. This life, it’s a strange thing. You can buy into the system and work for retirement but that was never my thing. Like I said, I’m a child, I don’t want to grow up, I want to eat life up, go everywhere and do everything, look for like-minded people, stay alive.

Just when you think you got a good thing
It seems to slip away

That’s how I felt. That’s how I feel. If I got up to eat, the mood would have evaporated. I just want to sit here all afternoon in this groove. Another park, another Friday.

We’ve been on a bad streak. We’ve watched a bunch of shows that have not been up to recommendation level, but last night we started one…

If there’s one show I want to recommend before that, it’s “Srugim,” on Amazon. My sister Jill said to check it out, but I was reluctant because its focus is Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem and Felice is not Jewish. But she got hooked and was sad when the show ended as was I. You get involved in these people’s lives, you know them, and then the series end and you’re wondering where they are now. Actually, with these Israeli shows, with a lot of these foreign shows, you can look the actors up online. Of course it’s real life, as opposed to their characters, but still… They’re on Facebook, Instagram. It’s different from the U.S. They don’t consider themselves stars so much as actors. They partcipate online as regular people, as opposed to boasters reinforcing they’re better than you are. Maybe it’s because the markets are so much smaller. Unless they graduate to American productions, they can only be so well known, can only be so rich. Furthermore, you get used to the people, the same ones appear in multiple shows. Like Caroline Proust in “The Tunnel.” Proust is the star of “Spiral,” which if you haven’t watched I once again will recommend that you do, it’s one of the best streaming shows on television. Anyway, in “Spiral” Proust is a beautiful, but down to earth cop, who is psychologically screwed up and therefore can’t have a good relationship. In “The Tunnel” Proust is a mousy housewife, you almost don’t recognize her. And it’s strange that she’s got a lesser role even though “Sprial” was already a hit. This does not happen in America, once you’ve made it, you must be the star.

Anyway, relationships are relationships, which is why “Srugim” resonates. Yes, they are Orthodox Jews, but they are not black hats, and other than praying and wearing kippahs, they’re no different from you and me. One is a doctor, one is a graphic designer, another a teacher… But there is a strong sense of community. They get together every Friday night for Shabbat dinner. But if you’re thirty and unmarried, whether a girl or guy… And there are unfulfilled crushes and… I really recommend “Srugim,” assuming you’re into relationship shows. And, one of the stars, Tali Sharon, was in the original “In Treatment.” Yes, it was an Israeli show first, as was “Homeland.”

As for “The Tunnel”… I recommend it, but probably the original Danish-Swedish production entitled “The Bridge” is better. It’s kind of like music, the person who wrote the song usually does the best version, it may not be a hit, but the way they emote…they wrote the words! Anyway, I will not buy a series, what am I going to do with it after I watch it once? It’s not like a record, which you can play over and over again. And a show should be on one of the services I already subscribe to, I subscribe to all the major ones. But, “The Tunnel” is good, very good, but not “Srugim,” not great.

Oh, did I mention “False Flag”? That’s another Israeli show, it’s just that like too many crime novels there are twists at the end that explain it all, keeping the series from being absolutely top tier.

And we just finished watching “La Mante.” A French series about serial killers. It stars Carole Bouquet, one of the most beautiful women in the world. You might know her as the face of Chanel. Anyway, in “La Mante” she wears no makeup, and she’s had no plastic surgery, pretty fascinating. But despite the acting being good, “La Mante” is flawed.

But “Delhi Crime”? WHEW!

We’ve only watched one episode, but usually it’s best to write when I’m hot, when I feel it, when I can’t wait to watch the next episode.

Now sometimes “Delhi Crime” is in English, not that you’d fully understand it, but if you’ve got a problem with subtitles… Once again, all those American remakes of foreign shows are inferior to the originals.

So, “Delhi Crime”… It’s based on a real crime. And it’s on Netflix. And they spent a ton of money, you can tell by the images. Funny how cinematography has moved to the flat screen. Beautiful images made “Goliath,” at least the first season, after that it’s junk. But “Delhi Crime”…

Cops. Where there’s not enough money and too much crime.

And we believe in the U.S. that everybody with a different skin color in a far away country is exotically different, probably inferior. But you watch “Delhi Crime” and that is not so. These are educated, middle class people.

So, the rich colors, the rickshaws…this is India. If you’ve been there, you’ll recognize it. And if you have, you’ll want to go back. Despite the huge economic issues, so many people living in poverty with few chances of moving up the economic ladder, once you do, everybody’s got a college degree, everybody can analyze the issues, it’s mind-blowing. In the rest of the world, the music business is not an intellectual pursuit, but in India… Well, maybe I’m overstating the case, maybe I should just say the people in India are as sophisticated as those in the rest of the world. And it’s a huge country with a different system, everything derives from Bollywood and…

The head cop’s daughter wants to go to school in Toronto. If you’ve been to Toronto, you know it’s a hotbed of nationalities, a cab driver told me more than any other city in the world, and he’s got to be at least, if not more, trustworthy than those testifying in Congress.

And the head cop knows who is slacking.

And the window to catch the perps is short.

And the infrastructure of the police is so bad. Cops manning a checkpoint who don’t, they let everybody through. Cops without wheels. Favors to get anything done.

You can tell watching these shows, what is great and what is not. You can feel it, you’re drawn in, it’s a whole world that you are now inhabiting. This is the richness of streaming television. It used to be in the movies, but those days are gone, as for foreign films, they’re only two hours or so, these series can go on for years!

So, I’m always looking for something that demands my focus, that I enjoy experiencing, with a visceral edge, with a sense of truth. That’s “Delhi Crime,” at least so far.

TWO MONTHS??

We had to endure this story for all this time for Lori Loughlin to essentially get a slap on the wrist? Meanwhile, get caught with drugs and you go up the river for years!

As for her husband, Mossimo, he got five months, but it’s still de minimis, there was a threat of twenty years, but since these people are rich and famous they may not skate completely but their lives are minimally impacted while the general prison population resides in hothouses of coronavirus, with their lives at stake.

Oh, Lori and Mossimo are not going into the general population, this is not “Oz,” they’ll go to the country club prison, read, go online, and wait out their time. It’ll be little different from vacation other than the food.

Our system is screwed up. We’re busy focusing on these rich people gaming the college admissions system when the real story is…THEY’RE GAMING THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS SYSTEM!

Want to have riots in the street?

Tell private schools that twenty five percent of their students will have to sacrifice their first college choice so the slots can be filled with the underprivileged and disadvantaged. This is why the Democrats lose. They disproportionately make up this privileged class. They’re willing to lift those on the bottom up but they can’t sacrifice a whit, not whatsoever, it’s somebody else’s fault.

As for the truly rich, the Republicans, like Jared Kushner’s father, the rules never applied to them, they just buy a building and their kid gets in.

And what do you get at an elite institution? It’s less about what goes on in the classroom and more about the people you meet and hang out with. Would Mark Zuckerberg have come up with the idea of Facebook if he hadn’t run into the Winklevoss twins at Harvard?

As for Lori and Mossimo, they got bad legal advice from the start. Of course they were guilty, it’s even come out their kids were complicit, which they denied until they fought the charge and the investigation went deeper.

Then again, the legal fees are a drop in the bucket for these two. Look at their real estate holdings. That’s where celebrities make their money in L.A. today…a TV show may come and go, but if you own enough property, you’ll be okay.

And if Lori had offered a mea culpa from the beginning, she could have saved her career, on Lifetime, on “Full House.” America loves the repentant. I sinned, what was I thinking, give me a few lashes and let me back into the club. And speaking of the club…unless you kill someone or abuse someone sexually you’re never kicked out of the celebrity/rich/elite club. So, you got caught. Members are testing the limits constantly, that’s how they get ahead. Just think about Hollywood, it’s built on fraud. The studios owe money to the profit participants they never pay, no matter how successful the project becomes.

So, you hire a lawyer and obfuscate. Bad strategy in this case, since Lori Loughlin is a public figure to begin with, people are interested in her life, it sells ads. She threw gasoline on the fire. And, she got bad legal advice. Never forget, lawyers are business people too, they have to make money. A reasonable attorney would have assessed the landscape and settled soon. But then the attorney would have gotten paid much less.

As for Loughlin and Giannulli… What made them think they could win, when every other parent was convicted? What made them different? Oh yeah, they didn’t go to college, they don’t know how to analyze the issues, which is what you learn at the elite institutions they want their kids to go to.

So, this whole fracas has turned into a celebrity story when it should be framed as an income inequality/rigged system question.

As for discouraging shenanigans in the future… If the worst offender only got a handful of months in prison, maybe it’s worth the risk! Do you really think the arrests in Singergate are preventing rich parents from trying to game the system? They’re just finding a different way. Because an elite education is worth more than any real property, for the rest of your life you can say “I graduated from _________” It opens doors. It gives you the imprimatur of success. It’s priceless.

You’d think this was O.J., that people had died, with all this focus on Loughlin and Giannulli. But that’s America today, the sideshow becomes the main show so people won’t focus on the real issues. You can buy the Kardashian perfume, but you go to a school without supplies, with a low graduation rate.

Furthermore, these two won’t even serve their complete sentences. Loughlin will be in for six weeks, maybe only a month, she’ll be let out for good behavior or overcrowding or some such nonsense. If you think her attorneys are now off the payroll, you’re nuts. It’s kind of like curling, the lawyers are gonna continue to sweep the ice in order to change the speed and the direction of the stone.

And then, if they care, somewhere down the line Loughlin and Giannulli will pay someone to get them pardoned. Like Marc Rich or Michael Milken. Or maybe a good friend will do the same for no cash, like Donald Trump with Roger Stone. Loyalty is everything at the elite level, never forget, you circle the wagons and don’t let info seep to the outside. For all the TMZs and Housewives shows the truth is the public knows very little what goes on with the rich and famous. And the truly rich are smart enough not to be famous, so attention is not drawn to them.

Just imagine if these two were sentenced to five years. Even two. Whew! Penalties are never stiff enough for white collar crime. If only we’d sent some Wall Streeters up the river for a decade back in 2008, that would have changed things…instead, all the wanker bankers just bitched about their bonuses and went back to wreaking havoc in the financial system. And when things get bad, the government bails them out. Whereas if you’re a member of the rank and file you lost your job because of Covid-19, the federal government is sending you no more money and you’re on the verge of being evicted.

America, what a country.