It just gets better, doesn't it?

I was thinking about writing another Christmas-themed blog as we head toward the Big Day, but then I saw a chyron crawl across the bottom of the TV screen the other day that said RFK's lawyer has petitioned the Food and Drug Administration to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.

What the bloody hell...?

Here we go. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is president-elect Donald Trump's nomination to head up the US Department of Health and Human Services. Aaron Siri is the lawyer affiliated with Kennedy who filed the petition in 2022 on behalf of the Informed Consent Action Network, a nonprofit that challenges the safety of vaccines and vaccine mandates under the guise of "medical freedom."

The key word here seems to be "informed."

I am 73 years old, soon to be 74, and I remember back in the 1950s – probably around 1956 or '57 –  when we were given little pink sugar cubes in elementary school. The sugar cube was the delivery device, and the pink coloring was the actual polio vaccine. Mmm, sugar. I probably would have ingested the whole tray if they hadn't told me to take just one.

And now, decades later, we know what sugar can do for us, right?

At any rate, it must have worked. I didn't get polio, and neither did millions of others. I take that as empirical evidence that the vaccine worked.

So now along comes Kennedy, an acknowledged vaccine skeptic, and his lawyer 70 years later indicating that further testing of the inactivated polio vaccine is needed. The inactivated vaccine is different than the oral vaccine in that it is injected and doesn't use a live version of the virus like the oral vaccine did. It doesn't stop the virus itself, but rather helps the immune system to recognize and fight the virus. The inactivated version has been in use for decades with startling success, but Siri is arguing that there were no placebo-controlled clinical trials to prove the safety of the inactivated vaccine.

The thing is, most placebo-controlled trials are considered unethical because there is a percentage of the participants who would not get the shot – and thus be susceptible to contracting the disease.

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority leader and a polio survivor himself, stated on Friday that "the polio vaccine has saved millions of lives and has held out the promise of eradicating a terrible disease. Efforts to undermine public confidence in proven cures are not just uniformed (there's that word again), they're dangerous."

The FDA is reviewing Siri's petition, but if Kennedy is confirmed as the head of HHS, he could intervene in the petition review process. Great. A nonmedical person making uninformed medical decisions for us. This is the kind of government nearly 50 percent of us voted for because they argued price of the eggs was too high.

As it is, vaccination rates have been falling in this country, which might correlate to a rise in whooping cough and measles. One of the vaccines Siri wants to withdraw is for hepatitis B.

I don't know if Siri's petition will succeed. It very well may not. But after decades of success, why are these vaccines even being reviewed at all? And if they are being reviewed, there's a chance that under an autocratic government with a politicized Supreme Court, these life-saving vaccines could disappear, just like Roe v. Wade did. It's just another form of control, and it's happening right in front of us.

Merry Christmas.

Hallmark holidays

I was surfing through my 2,000 TV channels the other day trying to find something mindlessly different to watch because I wasn't in the mood for critical thinking. We'd just finished with the presidential elections, which proved to me at least half of the nation wasn't into critical thinking, either.

Kim was on the phone with a relative so I knew I had at least 90 minutes of my own.

I made my way through several offerings until I came across the Hallmark Channel. It doesn't get any more mindless than that, so I stopped surfing. I'd already missed the first half hour or so of this particular Christmas flick, but I stopped because one of the actresses, Danica McKellar, had a vaguely familiar face.

Just at that moment, Kim walked in and sat down. She was  89 minutes earlier that I expected and I was halfway embarrassed because, you know, I was watching a Hallmark movie, Crown for Christmas, and not Field of Dreams or Saving Private Ryan or even It's a Wonderful Life.

"Who's that?" asked Kim when McKellar's face came on the screen. "She looks familiar."

So I Googled Danica McKellar. It turns out that she was Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years back in the late 1980s and early 90s.

"Winnie! It's Winnie!"

My Google research told me that she was something of a math wizard, having published several best-selling children's books on mathematics, specifically targeting young girls to help build their confidence.

My mind immediately drifted to Mayim Bailik, who played Amy Farrah Fowler on The Big Bang Theory. Bailik has a PhD in neuroscience.

And then there's Brian May, the lead guitarist for Queen, who earned his doctorate in astrophysics from Imperial College in London 33 years after he first applied. It took him that long because, you know, he was busy touring the world. Stars with other lives, who knew? We will rock you, indeed.

Anyway, back to Hallmark.

As much as we enjoyed watching Winnie, Hallmark's hallmark production values kept getting in the way. At least it did for me.

"All the Hallmark movies are the same," I told Kim. "It's about either a bookstore or bakery or bed and breakfast that is in financial trouble. A beautiful female CEO who recently lost her job or who is an author with writer's block somehow gets involved with the handsome owner of the failing business in an effort to help. He's usually a widower with a precocious child (never more than one kid, though). They fall in love in spite of themselves and seal the deal with a long anticipated kiss in the final 60 seconds of the movie."

Most of these movies are filmed in Canada, I think, and there's always a dusting of snow which makes everything look like a Norman Rockwell Christmas card. You want to live there because everybody is so happy and helpful, which really doesn't explain why the bookstore or bakery are failing in the first place.

I'm already revealing too much about myself here.

I don't know. Maybe there's something to be said for mindlessness. Then again, I guess I'm grateful there's 1,999 other channels to choose from.

Winner, winner, turkey dinner

We are in the midst of eating season, and if you don't believe it, just ask your waistline.

Or your scales.

In my world, the eating season begins Oct. 31 with the annual sugar grab on Halloween. It continues 27 days later with Thanksgiving before waxing high tide at Christmas with cookies and cakes. It then reaches its denouement on New Year's Day with a pork and sauerkraut meal supplemented by collard greens and black-eyed peas designed to make you stop eating forever.

Stacy's incomparable table setting is an art form.

In between, there are virtually two solid months of picking, sneaking, and cheating with M&Ms, potato chips and dip and Cheez-its because we have endless football games in front of us that require mindless snacking as we watch power sweeps and post patterns. Maybe even flag plantings. You probably don't even know you're doing it.

The eating season.

My eating season includes a stretch of a couple days around Thanksgiving where I have to sample my favorite food group: turkey. Usually, I search out a local restaurant that offers a Thanksgiving meal the day before Thanksgiving. It's become something of a tradition in my house.

Sure, it's usually processed turkey and dressing that came out of a box, but, hey, it's the holidays. You make concessions.

Anyway, this year, we had a bonus. Southern Lunch prepared its turkey meal on Tuesday as well as Wednesday, so that gave me an extra day to get a head start on my white meat fantasy.

Thanksgiving with the Wests and Wehrles.

Here's where I give owner Herbie Lohr his props. Tuesday's meal was delicious. I had generous slices of white meat turkey with dressing on top and underneath and swimming in gravy. I ordered mac and cheese as my side, along with a sweet potato casserole that was so good it could have been dessert. Thanks, Herbie. Mission accomplished.

On Wednesday my pre-Thanksgiving meal came from Village Grill. I don't remember VG preparing this holiday dinner before, so I gave it a shot. Their turkey was cut into bite-sized pieces and mixed into their dressing, and then piled high on my plate like an offering to the gods. I also had a side of mac and cheese, along with baked apples. Mmm mmm, good.

I was off to a good start.

But the piéce de résistance came on Thanksgiving day. Because my family is scattered to the four winds and are hundreds of miles away from each other (one brother is in Pennsylvania and another is in Oklahoma), our next door neighbors – Billy and Stacy West – have invited us over for Thanksgiving for several years now.

Billy used his grill to create a moist, delicious bird while Stacy went nuts in the kitchen, making mac and cheese (there's a theme here), an addictive sweet potato casserole, roasted cauliflower and roasted broccoli, collard greens and a pear salad assembled with fresh greens from our shared garden. Oh, and pumpkin pie, too. Kim contributed with an asparagus dish, mashed potatoes and her magical family dressing that she learned from her mother and for which she doesn't even have a recipe. It's somehow summoned from her DNA.

Oh, my.

This was the best meal of all because it was a meal culled from camaraderie. Both of the West's kids were home from college (Emma is in grad school at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Boston and Sam is a freshman at the University of North Carolina) which fully completed our circle. The conversation at the dinner table was easy, the neighborliness was enhanced. I guess it's why Billy blows the leaves out of my yard every week. I guess it's why I wheel his garbage containers back to their respective spots every Friday. I guess this is what agape love is.

Anyway, the meal was so good we had it again the next day. As leftovers. In front of a football game.

And Christmas is just 24 days away. Pass the cookies, please.

On Tyranny

One day last week I received an unexpected package in the mail that I thought, at first, was something that Kim had ordered for herself from Amazon.

We get a lot of stuff from Amazon.

Instead, after opening, it turned out to be a small book entitled On Tyranny, written by Yale professor Timothy Snyder and copyrighted in 2017. The book, which I'd heard of before, was gifted to me by a friend and fellow political compatriot from out of the clear blue sky. Apparently, my friend thought it was important enough for me to read.

The book is only 126 pages and about the size of your average Christmas card. Each page contains about three paragraphs of copy, so the book (or booklette?) can be read inside of two hours.

The subhead of the book is Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, and the 20 chapters offer titles such as "Do Not Obey in Advance," "Defend Institutions," "Believe in Truth,""Be Calm When the Unthinkable Arrives," and "Be a Patriot."

You get the gist.

There are many comparisons to Nazi Germany within the pages, which is not surprising because Snyder's field of study is 20th century European political history. The first sentence in his book, in the prologue, reads "History does not repeat, but it does instruct." Nazi Germany thus becomes the primary example of tyranny for our times because Nazi Germany is still relatively fresh in our minds in terms of timeline. Nazism happened less than 100 years ago. There are still some people walking around the planet with serial numbers tattooed on their arms and impossible pain tattooed in their hearts.

So the book can be instructive. You don't have to agree with all of it, or any of it. but as we enter the second nonconsecutive term of nonConstitutionalist Donald Trump as president, the book becomes something of a field manual for democracy.

We are less than two months away from Trump's inauguration and if we believe the very words that dribble from his mouth, we are two months away from the deportation of millions of migrants. We are two months away from detention camps. We are two months away from the U.S. military rounding up citizens seeking nothing else other than political amnesty from their own repressive governments.

We are two months away from the dismantling of the administrative state that has done a pretty good job of providing us freedom and security, about 248 years worth. Now all of that is in jeopardy.

There's a part of me that wants to say Trump's agenda (in actuality, Project 2025 is about to kick in) is about as unAmerican as you can get, but the reality is that the United States built detention camps to control Japanese-Americans in World War II. You can argue that the U.S. already used its military to gentrify the country's original indigenous population. And where does American slavery fit in? It's always been about the control of other people – usually by white men and usually over the poor – and it's not just in the United States, but nearly everywhere on the globe. Governments ideally are created to maintain social order but governments almost inevitably bring on social injustice, especially when the moral compass is broken. The result is a power grab. The result is tyranny.

I think we've seen some signs of hope. Trump wanted ultraconservative Rick Scott to be the new Speaker of the House, but centrist John Thune was elected via secret ballot instead. Trump wanted right-wing radical Matt Gaetz to be his Attorney General, but a straw poll of the Senate showed that Gaetz – under a Senate ethics committee investigation for sex trafficking – revealed he would not get the votes he needed for the position.

That can't please Trump.

There is a bit of weirdness here. Trump, in spite of being an adjudicated rapist and a convicted felon, has a chance to be a real hero here if he only would do things correctly and within the purview of the law: if he nominates qualified people for his cabinet, if he abides by the guardrails, if he respects the Constitution. Instead, he appears intent on traveling down the road to retribution and retaliation like an undisciplined child.

And how is that good for the American experiment? How does that benefit the American people?

Maybe there are more surprises in store. We'll see.

 

Get ready for what's coming

Before I get into this week's blog, let me clear up a thing or two.

After my blog from two weeks ago ("Autopsy"), where I gave brief observations as to why I thought  Kamala Harris lost her bid for the presidency to the adjudicated rapist and convicted felon (say that to yourself a few times just for effect because the reality of that fact seems to have evaded many voters) Donald Trump, I apparently raised a hackle or two.

Let me be clear: just because I oppose Trump and nearly everything he stands for doesn't make me a hater.

Just because I didn't vote for Trump doesn't mean that I love my country any less than you do, nor does it make me any less of a patriot, and how dare you think otherwise? In fact, as Trump attempts to tear down the administrative state piece by piece, I consider myself to be more of a patriot now than ever.

I'm old enough to remember when those who opposed the administration in power were considered to be the "loyal opposition." Now we are told we are the enemies of the state, or the enemy from within. Good God, and you wonder where the divisiveness comes from? Seriously.

Get a grip and learn the difference between hate and dissent. Dissent gave birth to this nation. As far as I know, dissent is still protected by the First Amendment. I will continue to dissent as long as I'm allowed to in my effort to nurture the Madisonian democracy and values that I cherish.

Moving on...

Welcome to Project 2025, the right-wing Heritage Foundation's published 900-plus page Republican manifesto that Trump denied knowing about (what, do you think he lied to us?) but who is now in the process of putting into effect.

Forthwith are some of Trump's nominations for his second administration:

• Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense: A combat veteran with two Bronze Stars and with degrees from both Princeton and Harvard, Hegseth appears at first glance to be an appropriate choice for the position. But he's also been a host on FOX since 2014 (a disqualifier, in my world) and if his nomination is approved, he's a white guy who promises to end what he considers to be diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) and wokeism in the military. He wants women removed from combat roles. He also wants to fire and/or court martial top generals, including chiefs of staff, for their roles in exiting Afghanistan. As you can see, the military could be the next domino to fall in Trump's authoritarian takeover.

• Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence: A former Democrat who served in the House, Gabbard has zero experience with deep intelligence. I'd leave it at that, but she's also something of a Putin apologist. Therefore, I can't see where any of our allies in the international community would have any confidence in her, especially when it comes to intelligence sharing. She only makes us more vulnerable, in my opinion.

• Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: the newly created Department of Efficiency: Two guys for one job? That ought to tell you something right there. Anyway, it seems to me a government department of efficiency is something of an oxymoron at best. And now we'll have two oxymorons in government playing together in a made-up job. What could possibly go wrong?

• Kristi Noem, Director of Homeland Security: She's the governor of South Dakota who shot her pet puppy and goat because they irritated her. During the height of Covid-19 in 2020, South Dakota under her leadership (she supported an anti-mask policy) suffered the tenth highest death rate despite being one of the least populated states in the nation. That's all you need to know about her character. Feel secure now?

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: Director of Health and Human Services: Great. We'll probably soon have an HHS director who is a conspiracy theorist and an anti-vaccine proponent. This is chilling. Will he suspend research on future vaccines? Will we be safe from the next pandemic? Will children still be required to be vaccinated before attending school? Too many questions for where no questions previously existed. Does anyone here believe in science anymore?

• Matt Gaetz, Attorney General: I think this nomination is Trump's joke on the rest of us. He's trolling us. He's trolling his supporters. Gaetz was under investigation by the House Ethics Committee for the sex trafficking of a 17-year-old girl (fits in with the Trump legacy, no?), illicit drug use and accepting improper gifts. There's respect for the law right there, huh? Word is that at least 30 Republican senators are opposed to his nomination, so that's something.

There are others, of course, but these are enough to mull over.

I wonder if Trump voters knew they were getting this kind of incompetence when they told us Harris was an awful choice. But awful is a relative term, especially when comparing these two candidates. It seems to me those voters not only chose Trump, but Project 2025 as well. 

Let's see how well Trump and his cabinet perform. As of today, the inflation rate is 2.6 percent, which is fueling a strong economy. The national murder rate is 5.5 per 100,000, down from 6.3 in 2023. It was 7.8 in 2020, Trump's last year in his first administration. The stock market, which often is influenced by international pressures, has the Dow Jones at a near-record 43,950.  Border crossings were 53,900 in September, down 7 percent from August and down 75 percent from September 2023. And gas prices, which presidents can't control but are usually considered to be an economic marker by the consumer, are $2.95 a gallon where I tank up. Let's see where Trump takes us in a year, especially if he unveils new import tariffs that many economists say could lead us into a recession.

In the meantime, let's hope we don't become sicker, dumber, poorer and more violent as a nation under Trump's proposed regime of retribution.

Autopsy

After listening to Kamala Harris' concession speech Wednesday afternoon, I was shaken with the look of despair on the faces of many of the young women in the crowd.

In the despair of adjudicated rapist and convicted felon (but not for long) Donald Trump winning a second term as President of the United States, it's little wonder tears were falling. In the wake of the demise of Roe v. Wade by an extremist Supreme Court, women's healthcare has become a top priority.

Even now, as we speak, women are finding adequate OB/GYN care to be difficult, if not impossible, in states that have imposed severe anti-abortion restrictions. Doctors are simply leaving those states in fear of being arrested for providing abortion-like treatment.

Women are dying.

Consequently, I thought the abortion issue would carry Harris and Democrats to victory, making her the first female president in the country's history. About time, I thought.

Instead, the abortion issue was a distant third, behind the economy and democracy in voter concerns. The women who lifted the Democrats in previous off-year elections – and the general election that put Joe Biden in office – simply vanished in the face of other concerns.

What happened?

I'm only a humble observer here, not anywhere close to being an expert, but it seems that Trump was able to establish a coalition among the working class that crossed nearly all demographics. The country took a decided turn to the right.

I originally thought misogyny and racism were behind this: Harris is a Black-Asian woman married to a white Jew. In any epoch of the American story, that's three strikes against you right there. No matter how well you thought Harris conducted her remarkable 107-day campaign, her battle essentially was lost before it even began.

But even that observation, while an obvious factor to me, is too simplistic.

Harris simply couldn't divorce herself from what was perceived as uncontrolled inflation. It didn't matter that inflation was world-wide and created by the pandemic, it was just that the Biden/Harris administration was seen as unable to control the high cost of eggs and gas, among other things. The real cost of living, in other words.

Never mind that inflation today is 2.4 percent. Butter still costs too much. She couldn't separate herself from Biden (and "Bidenomics") and paid for it with her loyalty.

I also thought the role of misinformation (deliberate falsehoods) and disinformation (outright lies) was critical. For a born liar like Trump, this was his ace card. His most egregious campaign ad – and his most effective – was the ad showing that Harris supported gender assignment surgery for inmates at the expense of taxpayers.

It turns out this was a bill signed during the Trump administration and it affected only two inmates. But the ad ran 30,000 times during the NFL season and it was aimed at a male audience, and it worked. The Democrats hardly ever responded to the misinformation and suffered for it.

Side note: Transgender people are just one percent of the population. Seems to me there are deeper issues facing us than reassignment surgery.

There's no doubt the Democratic Party has to  undertake massive self-assessment and find a way to reach the common working man, who thought the Dems were mostly elites. Democrats proudly talked a lot about their ground game during the election. Now they're going to have to show us an updated version that learns what the electorate really wants.

And right now, it's not a female president. It's been tried twice, and twice defeated by the willing voters of a misogynist.

As of today, a resistance movement is already underway. The ACLU is currently making preparations to slow Trump's attempts to circumvent the Constitution. Lawyers across the country are also preparing for action. I expect demonstrations to sprout across the nation by those disaffected by his election.

But as Trump prepares to take the White House for a second time, we're still in troubled waters. We already know what one Trump administration looked like with chaos swirling about like dust devils in a gutter. This time there will be no guard rails. If we are to believe what Trump already has told us, incarcerated January 6 prisoners will be freed. Muslim bans will return. Child separation will be back. There will be detention camps and deportations. Police will be given free reign to ignore the Constitution that hasn't been reduced by 10 or 12 amendments  as he finalizes his vision of the authoritarian state. His words. He can do it because SCOTUS says he has immunity.

Welcome to Trump's America? Maybe. We'll have to wait and see. But for 51 percent of you, don't be surprised. This is what you voted for.

On the precipice

With less than 60 hours remaining before the close of polls in this year's general election, there's probably little use to make another plea at this time to save Madisonian democracy in the United States.

Either we will, or we won't.

Convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump could very well regain the presidency he lost to Joe Biden four years ago, and if you can sort through the sewage that has spewed from his mouth the past few years, we clearly know that he would have no issue suspending the Constitution (see here). He actually proposed that unAmerican abomination several years ago.

He had four years to correct the border issue and the best he could do was separate children from their families. His solution this time around – in addition to the resurrection of his child separation policy – is to to build detention camps for the millions of migrants he plans to deport. Detention camps. Let that sink in.

He has an economic plan to increase tariffs while lowering taxes. If all you see is "lowering taxes," you missed the part where tariffs would raise the price of everything this country imports by 20 percent. Nearly every creditable economist in the country has indicated Trump tariffs would lead to a recession within the year of his administration See here.)

Women's health care is on life support after Roe v. Wade was repealed. If Trump is defeated on Tuesday, it will be because women have revolted on the assault of their reproductive rights.

A few weeks ago, Trump denigrated the city of Detroit while campaigning in Detroit. I'm still trying to figure out the strategy behind that. But then in another campaign rally in New York less than a week later, the island of Puerto Rico was described as "garbage." I wonder how many votes that got him in Pennsylvania, which has a large Puerto Rican population?

In an interview with Tucker Carlson  on Thursday in Arizona, Trump talked briefly about Liz Cheney, the congresswoman who served on the House select committee and helped investigate Trump's role in the Jan. 6 riot. During the interview, Trump called her a "war hawk," whatever that is.

"She's a radical war hawk," Trump told Carlson. "Let's put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, OK?"

Holy crap. I don't care how that statement gets spun and  interpreted by the right, it's still describing a firing squad. This takes on further color with Trump's latest description of his opponents as "the enemy from within."

As Cheney pointed out, statements like this "is how dictators destroy free nations." 

This is how democracy's die. And keeping our democracy is the true issue here – the only issue, in my view – for which we are voting on Tuesday.

God help us all.

Be aware

Early voting for this year's general election is underway in most states, and it's occurred to me that many have already voted for rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump – now 78 years old and in obviously questionable mental health – for a second term as president of the United States.

If you voted early and voted for Trump...

• You voted for a racist. You can jump up and down and shout all you want in denial, but Trump has an obvious history of racism behind him. As a young man, Trump was sued by the Justice Department for violating the Fair Housing Act in 1973. Evidence shows his management corporation refused to rent to Black tenants. Then there was the Central Park Five incident in 1989, where Trump called for the execution of five innocent men of color for an alleged rape of a jogger. Even more recently, during the pandemic, Trump called Covid-19 the "China" virus. The evidence just goes on and on, too numerous to list. Look it up yourself.

• You voted for a convicted felon. Why he hasn't been sentenced four-and-a-half months after 34 convictions for fraud is beyond me. A two-tiered justice system? You bet. And it favors Trump. Who else gets to wait more than four months for sentencing? He should be in jail.

• You voted for a rapist. More than a year ago, a jury found Donald Trump guilty of sexually abusing journalist E. Jean Carroll. A federal judge, Lewis Kaplan, said Carroll was digitally raped by Trump, which, in any meaning of the word "rape," is still rape. It was a civil case so no jail time was involved. Trump was fined $5 million for that, and then later fined $83.3 million for denials Trump made in his defamation countersuit. Clearly, presidential material.

• You voted for an insurrectionist. Trump rallied (fooled) his followers into assaulting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to block certification of the vote that elected Joe Biden to office. Not only were members of Congress threatened with their lives, but more than 140 Capitol police officers were injured in the most treasonous action since the Civil War. You not only voted for an insurrectionist, but for a fascist. Or, in simpler terms, you voted for the most unAmerican president in American history as he attempted to subvert the will of the people.

• You voted for a pathological liar. The Washington Post has documented more than 30,000 lies, untruths or misleading claims during his four years in office. My rule of thumb: whenever Trump speaks, believe in the opposite of what he says because that is most likely the truth. I also love how most of his lies are either admissions or projections.

• You voted for an evil heart. Trump had his own four years to "fix" the southern border, but all he came up with was the separation of children from their parents. To this day, there are more than 1,000 children who are seeking to be reunited with their families. To me, this is the most egregious episode in the most profane presidency in American history. And now, if elected, he wants to create detention camps for illegal aliens. Pick up a history book and see if you can find something similar in world events. It won't take long. Our own country had internment camps for Japanese citizens during World War II that ultimately resulted decades later in $1.6 billion in reparations for those interred or their offspring. And then there's those camps in Nazi Germany. Don't talk to me about border issues when Trump was a spectacular failure during his own administration. How's that wall coming along, by the way?

• You voted for a misogynist. Trump managed to stack the Supreme Court with enough of his lackeys to overturn Roe v. Wade, thus inciting a war against women and their reproductive freedoms that should be nobody's business but their own. Women are dying now because of this. They're being arrested for miscarriages. They are being punished by men who feel themselves losing power.

• You voted for a murderer. Okay, I might be splitting hairs here. But it seems to me when Covid-19 first appeared in this country, we had all those refrigeration trucks filled with corpses and not enough ventilators to keep afflicted people alive. Remember those days, or is our memory so short? Although Trump did come up with Operation Warp Speed to quickly develop a vaccine for Covid, he almost immediately downplayed its effectiveness. And people died. Republicans who listened to him died. This pandemic was so mismanaged that, yes, I think I can say he murdered those people.

I know my rants about Trump the past few years mostly have fallen on deaf ears for those who need to hear them. That's OK. It's just the way it is. But I feel good writing them. I know they are the truth.

And the truth shall set us free.

The last thing I need...

Including today, there are only four Sundays remaining before election day.

So the last thing I need to hear is adjudicated rapist and convicted felon Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for president of the United States, telling me that the FEMA response to Hurricane Helene is a disaster when his idea of hurricane relief is tossing rolls of paper towels to a small crowd of Hurricane Maria survivors in Puerto Rico in 2018.

Trump then waits three years before he releases $13 million in relief just before the 2020 elections. It's estimated that 2,600 persons died within a year as a result of the hurricane.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump criticizing current hurricane relief efforts when, after Hurricane Matthew in 2017, the Trump administration allocated just 1% of the aid North Carolina requested primarily because the state was run by a Democrat, Gov. Roy Cooper. Childish immaturity for all to see as people suffer.

The last thing I need  to hear from Trump is how poorly the border is being handled by the Biden/Harris administration when in fact, Trump built only 80 miles of new border wall during his term as president. And Mexico did not pay for it as he promised.

By contrast, the Obama administration built 128 miles of wall where none had existed before.

Trump already had a four-year term (2016-20) to solve the border question, but all he managed to do was separate children from their parents as administrative policy. A revised estimate claims that 1,300 children are still waiting to be reunited with their families.

The last thing I need to hear from Trump is how a presidency under Kamala Harris would destroy the Constitution when Trump himself has threatened to suspend the Constitution and that he would be a dictator on the "first day" of a potential return to the presidency.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump talking about a "Biden crime family" when he is the one convicted of 34 charges of falsified business records.

The last thing I need to hear is how great the economy was under Trump when he inherited a booming economy from the Obama administration. Economic growth under Obama was 2.4 percent. The average quarterly growth under Trump was 2.5 percent.

The last thing I need to hear from Trump is his concept of plans for health care. When Covid arrived in 2019-20, more than 400,000 people died during his administration because of conspiracy theories, mismanagement and incompetence ("Maybe we can inject bleach").

Covid brought with it supply chain issues and ultimately world-wide inflation and loss of jobs. All of those issues can be brought to Trump's incompetence. Don't even start with me.

The last thing I need to hear is Trump talking about rebuilding the military when it's already the most effective fighting force in the world. I especially don't want to hear him call our troops "suckers" and "losers." Why would any veteran vote for this insult? 

The last thing I want to hear is Trump deriding President Biden's mental acuity when his own early onset dementia is evident with every campaign speech he gives.

The last thing I need is another four years of Trump.

Lying liars

I didn't know we could control the weather. Did you? How'd I miss that one?

But Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene insists that the devastation caused by the remnants of Hurricane Helene in the mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee 10 days ago is the result of weather control. 

And, specifically, by Democrats.

Hmm. Let me wade through my cognitive dissonance and lack of critical thinking skills to look at this a bit closer.

Apparently, in 2001, there was a patent application submitted to the United States Patent and Trademark Office by an Andrew Waxmanski of Chipley, FL, for a hurricane and tornado control device.

Weather control patent.

 Well, so far, that makes sense. A guy in Florida wanting to control hurricanes. I'll buy that.

But his idea incorporates the use of sound waves set at a certain frequency which in turn are supposedly used to affect the formation of a storm. 

Or to move the storm to a desired location. You know, to cause havoc and chaos by one political demographic to gain influence over another, or perhaps to make certain members of a certain political party look foolish – or maybe even heroic and informed – to their followers.

Well, don't worry. There was no way in hell this device was going to work and the patent application was abandoned in 2003.

And yet, the hurricane and tornado control device story was resurrected after Helene stormed through the mountains. The hurricane, manipulated by man, was designed and executed by Democrats to prevent Republicans from voting in next month's presidential election. Or so goes the accusation.

As if the Democrats don't have enough to do trying to win an election. Now they're creating hurricanes in their spare time to disrupt Republican voters. It's so outlandish that this doesn't even qualify as Artificial Intelligence (AI). More like Zero Intelligence.

And Marjorie Taylor Greene supports it.

There is plenty of misinformation to go around in this disaster. Former president and convicted felon/adjudicated rapist Donald Trump suggests the Biden administration is diverting funds from FEMA to aid illegal migrants. claiming that FEMA has no money remaining for hurricane relief. So far, the only president to ever do that is, umm, Trump. Back in 2019, Trump took $155 million from the FEMA disaster fund and used it to pay for detention space for immigrants seeking asylum.

Trump is out of office. How would he know how much money FEMA has? Good grief, the man never even read the daily presidential briefs unless they contained pictures. And that was when he was in office.

Some have criticized the Biden administration's response to this disaster, claiming the National Guard hasn't been alerted or that crucial supplies are not reaching impacted areas.

But according to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety, 1,500 National Guardsmen have been deployed, along with 775 FEMA personnel.

Biden actually approved emergency relief two days before Helene made landfall. 

One thing I think we must keep in mind is that we're talking about the mountains here and not the coastal plain. Roads have been washed out. Landslides and tree falls are still possible. Remote areas will be inaccessible for a long time. Weeks may go by before we think we see progress. A person living in one area of the disaster field likely has no clue what is happening somewhere else.

There are just too many false claims out there, most of them politically oriented, for me to address. 

But you can do what I do. Check with trusted news sources, especially the Associated Press. And Heather Cox Richardson. Use logic instead of conspiracy theory to sort through the information and draw your own conclusions.

It's the kind of relief that could help everybody.

Disaster

 You don't expect hurricanes in the mountains.

Mast Store Annex in Valle Cruces.

But the remnants of Hurricane Helene absolutely devastated western North Carolina and parts of eastern Tennessee on Friday when her unlikely path of destruction brought a trail of misery from the Florida gulf to deep within the mountains of the Blue Ridge.

You expect blizzards to bring the mountains to a standstill. Not tropical storms.

And yet nearly two feet of water have inundated and isolated historic Asheville; rock slides have taken out portions of I-40, maiming a critical transportation artery for perhaps months; and cell towers have collapsed in the face of 60 mile per hour (or higher) gusts, shutting down communications. Power is gone for hundreds of thousands.

All roads in western North Carolina are closed. Asheville, at one point, was approachable only by air.

It could take years for recovery.

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo took a similar path after making landfall, only much closer to Charlotte. By the time it reached us, it, too, was a tropical storm, but I remember trees down all over the place. I mean, heck, we lived on a street called Woodsway Drive.

The Village of Chimney Rock.

 But we also lived on a hill, so flooding was never a problem for us. It was mostly the cleanup and power outages, as I recall. It might have been different for others.

It looks to be considerably worse for western North Carolina. As of Saturday morning, emergency crews in Buncombe County responded to more than 5,000 calls and performed more than 150 swiftwater rescues.

In Asheville, the largest North Carolina town in the mountains, flooding from the French Broad and Swannanoa rivers clobbered Biltmore Village and the River Arts District. In Boone, home to Appalachian State University, famous King Street was turned into a torrent of water.

Chimney Rock Village, a popular and scenic destination location, has been washed off the map.

The Lake Lure Dam was close to imminent failure for up to nine hours before Rutherford County engineers lifted the warning to evacuate.

There is also a political angle to this story. Helene was created in the gulf by unusually warm waters and intensified into a Category 4 hurricane when it made landfall in the Florida Bend area. The heated gulf waters added more moisture to the storm, causing heavier rainfalls than previously recorded

One element of Project 2025 – the Republican blueprint and its proposed agenda should it win the general election in November – is to defund FEMA, an agency critical in aiding natural disaster victims. The Project is also looking to shut down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Weather Service for no other reason than I guess they don't believe in science.

And yet, the empirical evidence we have to keep these agencies is in our own backyard.

Jim

I figure the first time I ran into Jim Lippard was probably sometime around 1977. I was an export from Pennsylvania grasping how to be a sports writer for The Dispatch. I'd just arrived a few months earlier – in the middle of football season – and I was still learning the local ropes.

I can't say precisely how or when we met, but I can take a reasonable guess. I bet I was at a baseball game, and more precisely, an American Legion Post 8 baseball game at Holt-Moffitt Field.

Jim Lippard and the Order of the Long Leaf Pine.

In addition to covering the game while keeping score and taking notes, I also had to occasionally take pictures. Serious camera work was unfamiliar to me, but there was this guy out there, working inside the fence, snapping away with his Nikon. I assumed he was from another newspaper and I thought nothing of it. Turns out, Jim was the Post 8 photographer and he was as much a familiar part of the game as a well-worn glove or a favorite baseball bat.

And I bet you a dime to a dollar, he's the one who came up to me and introduced himself. I know there was a smile in that introduction and a friendliness in his personality that simply embraced you. He made you feel comfortable almost immediately.

Over time he taught me little tricks that he'd picked up about shooting baseball games. If there was a runner on first, focus on second in case there was a steal or the start of a double play. If there was a runner on second, go ahead and focus on home plate for a potential play at the plate. Stuff like that.

Within a few years, Jim became the Post 8 athletic director and we saw more and more of each other. Then he became Post 8 commander, and after that, Area III commissioner. Meanwhile, I'd become the sports editor for The Dispatch, and our paths seemingly crossed all the time as fortune favored both of us.

There was another reason our paths crossed: my expanding waistline. By 1984, Jim had opened his own tailor shop on East First Avenue and it seemed like I was always going in for alterations. Or maybe it was for the conversation, I don't know. His shop, in fact, was a meeting place for hundreds – perhaps even thousands – of patrons and his outgoing personality seemed boundless. I think his personality alone would have provided him with a comfortable living, but geez, he was a damn good tailor, too. And pretty much self-taught.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, Jim had a vision: after deep research, consultation and hard work, he founded the Davidson County Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. I always thought the Hall of Fame was an important element in the county's sports culture and it warms me to this day to know that Jim was the driving force behind it. I think this creation of his may be his lasting legacy.

By 2000, he was inducted into the North Carolina American Legion Baseball Hall of Fame and in 2009, he was inducted into the very Hall of Fame he created. Then, in 2015, he received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest honor a civilian can receive in North Carolina.

But of all of his achievements, the thing I think he was most proud of was his family. He adored his three daughters – Jamie, Lisa and Julie – and was forever in love with Ann, his wife of 67 years. It just never got better than that for him.

The other day, Kim and I were taking our daily walk when my cell phone rang. The caller ID told me it was Jamie and even before I answered, I caught my breath. I could guess what was coming. And then, "Daddy died today."

Jim was 88.

I reflected on all of this the past few days and as I thought about it, I realized my friendship with Jim was one of my oldest, spanning more than 40 years. How could I ever know that would happen back in 1977?

It's been said that in our essence, we are stardust, nurturing the basic elements of the universe within ourselves. Goodness. Kindness. Vision. Charity. Friendship. Family.

Stardust. Jim was all of that, and for that, I am forever grateful.

The evisceration

Almost immediately after Kamala Harris' takedown of adjudicated rapist and 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump following their presidential debate Tuesday night, one of the first things I thought was how easy it seemed for her to politically undress and expose this incredibly weak and immoral blowhard.

The second thing I thought was why couldn't this have been done eight years ago? Why did this nation have to endure for so long Trump's lethal incompetency while he was president and his hateful poison when he was out of office?

I guess it was because eight years ago, Harris wasn't available back then for the evisceration. She was honing her skills as a U.S. Senator, not as a presidential candidate.

But on Tuesday, Harris cut through Trump like a hot knife through butter. No, wait. Too cliché. Like a weedeater through dead grass. No, wait. Like a Shakespearean soliloquy through a vacant soul. Something somewhere along those lines.

It looked too easy. Harris, the former prosecutor, set the bait all night long and Trump, a true narcissistic simpleton, just couldn't resist. Herewith: his campaign crowds are small and bored; he has no healthcare plan ("I have the concept of a plan"); his immigration policies are criminal. And so is he.

You could almost physically see her digs burrow under his thin skin and see his orange makeup turn white around his mouth and eye sockets like a sorry clown. It was incredible television.

No wonder Trump doesn't want to debate her again. Coward. Must be those bone spurs acting up. As each minute of the debate passed, he became angrier and more rattled. She became, well, more presidential.

The absurdist moment came when Trump insisted Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of people living in Springfield, Ohio. The planned attack, inspired by neo-Nazis, serves nothing more than to illustrate his innate racism, particularly against black and brown-skinned people. His xenophobia knows no bounds. How is this presidential?

Why is this cockroach even allowed to run for office?

I have no idea how the election is going to turn out 51 days from now. Republicans in power in key states are doing their best to purge voter rolls and other acts of voter suppression reminiscent of Jim Crow days.

But Harris seems to be building momentum.

Can she do it?

There are two inherent strikes against her: she's Black. And she's a woman. In this country, where it took women 131 years to get the vote after the Constitution was ratified, gender politics is still a thing. And so are the politics of race where the vestiges of America's Original Sin (slavery) still lingers in the air like lingering swamp gas.

Moments after the debate ended, the Trump campaign was delivered a blow when megastar pop singer Taylor Swift announced her endorsement of Harris for president. In the real world, star-powered endorsements are nice to have but usually don't move the political needle one way or the other.

This might be different. Within 24 hours of her announcement, there were more than 300,000 newly registered voters in the books.  And most likely, they were probably voting age females, which is significant in a world where women have lost their constitutional right to an abortion after the reversal of Roe v. Wade.

As a side note, I'm going to take a guess here. Swift is from Pennsylvania. West Reading, in fact. I'm guessing her endorsement of Harris could coalesce a bloc of young females from Allentown to Harrisburg and maybe push Pennsylvania and its critical 19 electoral votes toward Harris.

We'll just have to wait and see.

 

 

Pet grief

Kim and I have entered into a strange, colorless and empty land where we are grieving for the passing of our cat, Halo.

It's been nearly two weeks since we made the decision to put her down. She was suffering from arthritis, 100 percent renal failure and quite possibly lymphoma, which probably accounted for her drastic weight loss in her final months. There was no coming back from this. 

Halo

It's not as if this kind of grief is anything new for us. In our nearly 44 years of marriage, we've had cats in the house for about 41 of those years. Five cats over that span, actually. And now we've buried all five.

But the grief we feel for Halo is somehow subtly different for us than it was for the others. We made the deliberate decision that we will no longer have any more pets. I am 73 years old and Kim is 64, and we just don't want any future pets to outlive us.

I asked Kim if she was feeling the difference in grief we felt for our other cats in the same way I was, and she said yes. We tried to put our finger on it.

The grief we have for Halo seems sharper – harder – because we know there will be no more pets in the house. There's a finality in that.

There are times when I feel a sense of guilt because my grief for Halo – as well as for our previous cats – sometimes seems to transcend the grief I've felt for some humans, even family members. I've talked with a few other pet owners about this phenomenon and they pointed out that we are with our pets nearly every day. We are their daily caregivers, almost from their birth to their death. If you do have any emotional ties to your pet, it's almost inherently impossible to divorce yourself from them.

Having a pet is both a total commitment and an unspoken promise. You do that because in return you receive an unfettered loyalty and – dare I say it? – an unconditional love.

And as Kim pointed out, Halo was a solo cat. At no time in her nine years with us was there another cat in the house. Maybe that's what made her seem different to us. She was her own cat. She was independent, as cats are, but she also needed us as her stewards, as pets do. I call it independent dependency.

So now Kim and I are in that colorless, empty land where the urge to get another cat is starting to pull on us.

I kind of knew this could happen. A day after Halo passed, I collected everything in the house that belonged to a cat – scratching posts, litter boxes, toys, food, medicine, anything – and donated them to a local cat rescue. I'm hoping that by giving that stuff away it reinforces our decision not to get another pet. It's removed a lot of the household triggers to our grief.

We do have one reminder. We've kept an old cloth basket that at some point all of our cats have curled up in. That stays. For some reason, there is no hurt in that basket.

There are neighborhood cats around, so it's not as if we can't get our cat fix.

And I can sense with each day that passes, the grief is diminishing. I guess that's healthy. I don't think we'll require counseling.

As with anything that passes, we have our memories. We know we kept our promises to Halo. That will be enough. 

Halo wants her chair back.

 

 

Halo

Ragdoll cats are supposed to be one of the more docile feline breeds around. They are named Ragdoll, in part, because of the way they go limp in your arms when you pick them up. Limp like a child's ragdoll.

And that's what we were looking for when we got Halo.

We'd had a Ragdoll before. Years ago, Dolittle gave us infinite hours of love, joy and amusement. When Dolittle was a kitten, she actually jumped up on the bed and slept on the top of Kim's head. Repeatedly. That's what Ragdolls do.

So when Dolittle died, we debated whether or not we wanted another cat. It wasn't a decision we made lightly. I was already 64 years old – Kim was 55 – and we were pretty sure we didn't want any future pets to outlive us. But we took a chance and picked up Halo from the same Ragdoll cattery in Salisbury where we got Dolittle.

She was extremely cute, as kittens are. She was a Blue Mitted Ragdoll and she had those signature blue eyes, but she also had a white blaze on her forehead and nose. That was all it took and we brought her home.

We even named her Halo, not only because she looked kind of cherubic, but we also looked forward to her angelic Ragdoll personality to kick in.

And we waited. And waited. And waited.

Turns out, Halo never read the Ragdoll manual. While most Ragdolls by trait are laid back, apparently about 10 percent or so are not. They exhibit contrary or antisocial behavior.

Lucky us. We got the 10 percent.

Halo was OK with us, but probably moreso with me than with Kim. Since I was retired, I was the one who was home most of the time. She'd follow me around the house, let me stroke her cotton-like fur, fuss when she needed her litter box cleaned. Kim was just a visitor who showed up to put kibbles in the food dish and tell her how pretty she was.

In truth, she was tolerant of Kim, often times swiping at her feet or complaining when Kim would pick her up to hold her. We actually timed Halo – you could hold her for exactly 30 seconds before she would squirm to be put back down on the floor. She would not sit on your lap or by your side. If she hopped on the bed, she slept by your feet, not on your head.

She would squaw at visitors. She would show them her claws as if they were switchblades. She would tell them where to go. She was, as Kim said, opinionated.

And yet...

As the years passed, we grew accustomed to her behavior, taking solace in the fact that nobody else likely would put up with her, and that she was lucky to have a home with us.

But a few months ago, she was diagnosed with arthritis even though she was just nine years old. She started peeing outside the litter box because it was difficult for her to step in. Visits to the veterinarian temporarily alleviated some of her issues, but they weren't going to go away. She would require more visits.

Today her bloodwork revealed 100 percent renal failure and her dramatic weight loss – from 15 pounds to just 6 in a matter of months – suggested possible lymphoma as well. Even her vet, Dr. Salli Steward – who last saw Halo in May – was taken aback by her rapid slide. There was no turning back.

So we made the difficult decision that nearly every responsible pet owner makes sooner or later, because, you know, nothing lasts forever.

Dr. Steward hooked up the IV catheterization port. We laid her down and I put the palm of my hand over Halo's head – over her blaze – which she always liked. It was her safe spot and I could always feel her pushing back in appreciation, just as she did this one last time. Then Dr. Steward introduced the Euthasol and Halo peacefully slipped into another dimension.

Halo was lucky to have us?

She was feisty. She was loyal. She was beautiful. We were lucky to have Halo.

 

What's with these guys?

Do Republicans have any decency at all?

I can understand political attacks directed at an opponent to make him look weak, uninformed and not part of the main stream, but geez, when you go after the neurodivergent child of a candidate, well, that gets pretty low.

That's what happened the other night when vice presidential candidate Tim Walz was speaking about his family during the acceptance speech at the Democracic National Convention. Walz's 17-year-old son, Gus, erupted into tears of joy and the national TV audience saw him point to his father on the stage while mouthing the words, "That's my dad!"

Most viewers saw Gus's display of love and tears as endearing.

But not all.

"Now that's weird," posted conservative columnist and lightening rod Ann Coulter on Elon Musk's social platform X almost as soon as Walz was done leaping for joy. And, apparently, she wasn't the only one.

Souless.

It seems that conservative males become emasculated when they shed tears of joy (or pain, or grief, or heartache), according to recent Republican canon for manhood.

Coulter took down her post when she learned that Gus had learning disabilities, but not without claiming – and I paraphrase here – "well, the Democrats called Republicans weird first." Which totally misses the point in addition to sounding childish.

This episode reminds me of the time when convicted felon Donald Trump, who is the Republican candidate for president and is seeking a second term, mocked severely disabled New York Times journalist Serge Kovaleski, who suffers from a congenital joint condition.

That was during Trump's first campaign back in 2015, but it apparently opened the doors for sheer, thoughtless meaness to sweep across the country. We see the results to this day. If a presidential candidate can do that, why can't the rest of us?

In a similar but different vein, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan accused the Dems of stealing Republican values during their convention this past week. Values like faith and patriotism.

Say what?

I generally respect Noonan's opinion on most things, but she missed the boat on this. Those aren't Republican values. They're American values. As David Corn, the Washington DC bureau chief for Mother Jones responded, "Stole? No one has an exclusive claim to patriotism." 

C'mon, Peggy. Be better than that.

C'mon, Republicans. Be better than that.

All of us need to be better than that.

Are you better off?

Every now and then, when I'm perusing Facebook these days, somebody inevitably posts – usually a Republican – President Ronald Reagan's now-famous question to voters: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

The question has become nearly iconic during every election season. It doesn't matter who's running for office, or which party they represent. It's a many-faceted question that almost always demands a response. It's a dig, it's accusatory, it's penetrating, it's superficial, it can be rhetorical and it can be literal at the same time. It's not avoidable.

I've thought about this a little bit. My own question is why are some people asking this now?

But let's take a look.

Four years ago was August 2020. The now-34-time convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump was the president and he was running for a second term. And he was drowning in Covid-19, which, by that point, had claimed the lives of at least 350,000 Americans in a pandemic he totally mishandled. He asked if we could maybe inject bleach. And some people did. Thank you, Dr. Trump.

I think there's been a collective amnesia that has conveniently (for Trump, at least) blocked out the temporary morgues that sprang up, complete with refrigeration trucks, outside of hospitals as people died on their ventilators. Well, if they could get a ventilator in the first place. It was real carnage, not the kind you make up for an inauguration speech.

To his credit, Trump did bring us Operation Warp Speed, which gave us a Covid vaccination when we needed it most, and in record time. But then, paradoxically, he downplayed the vaccination, creating anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers. People died, predominantly cultist Trump Republicans. Trump even came down with Covid himself and required life-saving efforts from a medical team at Walter Reed Hospital.

So there's that. Covid. It set the stage for what would follow. The unemployment rate rose to 15 percent. The supply chain was in its initial stages of breakdown. Inflation was low, 1.9 percent or something like that early on, but the worldwide pandemic would jack that up to nearly 10 percent by the time Joe Biden took office.

The economy was strong under Trump (which he inherited from President Obama), but then Covid came on big time in March of that year and suddenly, both the job and stock markets cratered. Guess who stood by and played golf? Thank you, Prof. Trump.

All of this chaos was handed over to Biden, who had exactly one day – his Inauguration – to enjoy as his honeymoon period. But working with a severely divided Congress, Biden has created more jobs – about 15 million – than any one-term president. The inflation rate has dropped to 2.9 percent as wages rise.  The unemployment rate has fallen to about 4 percent. A couple weeks ago some high-profile hostages were released from Russia, and this week, the administration announced it has renegotiated lowering prescription drug prices with Big Pharma. I'll be able to afford my Eliquis in a year. Border crossings are so low that Texas Governor Greg Abbott doesn't have any illegals to ship off to Northern sanctuary cities anymore. 

Crime is down. Well, except for Trump crime. Why is this guy still the Republican candidate?

My 401k has never been better. Has yours?

So the next time somebody asks if I'm better off than I was four years ago, the answer is a resounding Hell yeah! Vote blue.

Building Walz

There's at least two things Republicans should never do during campaign season (or ever, for that matter): they should never accuse their opponents of lying, and they should never make an issue of the southern border.

The lying part is easy to discuss. When former President and convicted felon Donald Trump was in office, he let loose with approximately 30,500 documented lies, with the bulk of them – about 15,000 – coming in the final year of his presidency, according to The Washington Post.

So any accusations of political opponents lying for gain only adds to the considerable pantheon of Republican hypocrisy. Go ahead and lie and see how well that expands your tent. You are, after all, the party of the Big Lie.

The lying issue came to my attention after vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance, in his self-righteous indignation, said his opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, lied about Walz' military service when Walz said in a 2018 video that he carried a gun into combat. Vance also argues that Walz retired just in time to avoid his unit's deployment to Iraq, insinuating cowardice as well as disloyalty to his men.

Let's back up a minute. Walz is a 24-year veteran of the National Guard who achieved the rank of command sergeant major, the highest rank an enlisted man can reach. He was deployed twice in those 24 years – once to Norway above the Arctic Circle, and another time to Italy in 2003 while backfilling troops who were headed to Afghanistan.

Vance is also a veteran. He enlisted in the Marines after high school and was subsequently deployed to Iraq. Apparently, that's enough for Vance to jump on Walz' case since Vance was actually in a war zone. He asks Walz "what gun did you carry into combat?"

What Vance doesn't say much about is that during his tenure in Iraq, he was was a correspondent armed with a keyboard and where he quickly skyrocketed to the rank of corporal before serving out his enlistment. Technically, by virtue of rank, Vance should be saluting Walz, not denigrating him.

Additionally, Walz – who served with an artillery unit and consequently suffered hearing loss – retired after 24 years as a Guardsman. In January 2005, after much consideration, he filed a statement of his candidacy with the Federal Election Commission to run for Congress, so his decision to retire was already known. By May of that year, he officially retired, and in July, his unit received it's mobilization alert. It's not until 10 months later, in 2006, that his unit is actually in the field.

By this time, Walz would be 41 years old with a hearing impediment. I'm not sure that's who the military wants on its front lines.

But I find it beneath any sense of dignity that Vance should attack a fellow veteran for his service. This simply illustrates that the Republican party has shown no sense of dignity or respect anywhere during the Trump years.

I don't think Walz' misstep in the 2018 video was intentional, but even if it was, the Harris campaign has addressed the issue.

“In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the Governor misspoke,” said Harris campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt. “He did handle weapons of war and believes strongly that only military members trained to carry those deadly weapons should have access to them, unlike Donald Trump and JD Vance who prioritize the gun lobby over our children.” 

That's another blog right there.

As for the border, well, Trump surely had his opportunity to fix things during his presidency. He did build 452 miles of border wall that Mexico did not pay for (the US taxpayer did, at the tune of $15 billion), but his most disgusting legacy is the separation of young children from their families. That was actually administration policy. Nice job fixing the border there.

Now Trump says he wants to build "detention" camps for illegal immigrants. Guess who's going to pay for that?

Even worse, the GOP recently vetoed a strong border security bill authored by Oklahoma Senator James Lankford. They did so because Trump thought the bill, if it passed, would give Democrats the credit and the advantage in the upcoming elections. The bill seemed to be a step in the right direction. If nothing else, it would have been progress to a problem that has plagued several administrations – both Republican and Democrat – for decades.

So now, whenever the GOP attacks Democrats about the border, it's a weak argument with little substance.

Just like most everything else they propose.

Weird

When former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump took the stage on Wednesday to answer questions before the National Association of Black Journalists, it kind of surprised me that he wasn't wearing a white robe with a pointed hood.

In one of the most repulsive spectacles of his repugnant career as a politician, Trump insulted, insinuated, implied and incensed an entire culture with elements of his white supremacy.

His tirades began almost before he settled into his chair when he scolded ABC News correspondent Rachel Scott for not being "nice" after she posed her opening question of the event.

What a boor he is. Journalists aren't tasked with being nice. It is their job rather to ask the tough questions – especially of elected officials –  in an effort to seek truth and accountability. Those are two things that Trump repeatedly shows us that he knows nothing about.

After thus setting the tone right from that start of the Q&A for the next 35 minutes, the bottom came fast when he said he didn't know that presumptive Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris was Black (her parents are Jamaican and Asian). 

Ridiculous. Who is he to question how a person identifies herself? So who is he, indeed? He's an adjudicated rapist. He's a 34-times convicted felon awaiting sentencing. He's a fraudster. These are absolute truths, in the way that it's true Harris is Black. So the question is, when will Trump identify himself as a felonious rapist and fraud?

If his appearance before NABJ was meant to clarify his always inarticulate positions for Black voters, I think he instead began shedding votes like a (Donald) duck sheds water. I don't see how this kind of performance (which I thought was intentional) helps his candidacy, either among Blacks or other voting coalitions.

It just highlights his repugnance.

I can only imagine that Trump pooped in his pajamas Friday morning when he learned that 16 prisoners were released from Russia, including Americans Paul Whelan and Evan Gershkovich. Trump once claimed only he could get Gershkovich back home because of his "close" ties with Putin. Trump said he would do that after he won the election in November.

So instead of being gracious and welcoming the prisoners back home, Trump became his truculent self and criticized the entire process, saying he could have done better.

He claimed he could have gotten all the prisoners back home without making concessions in the deals to have them released.

Truth is (there's that word "truth" again), Trump is lying. Imagine that. During his first term as president, three Taliban leaders were exchanged for one American in November 2019. In December 2019, one Iranian prisoner was exchanged for on American. Later, 5000 Taliban prisoners were exchanged for 1,000 prisoners "of the other side" in February 2020. In July 2020, one Iranian prisoner was exchanged for one American. And in October 2020, a total of 250 Houthi rebels were exchanged for two Americans.

That's the Art of the Deal right there.

Weird.

 

Well, that was quick

I certainly didn't see that one coming.

I thought 81-year-old Joe Biden was doing a pretty good job as president of the United States. In a country that's severely divided by its political biases these days, Biden has succeeded in bringing us some critical bipartisan legislation.

Witness:

• The American Rescue Plan (a stimulus plan to speed up the nation's recovery from the economic and health effects of COVID-19).

• The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (investment in drinking water and eliminate lead lines, among other things).

• The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (provides federal grant funding to states for crisis intervention programs).

• The CHIPS and Science Act (funding to create semiconductors in the United States).

• The Pact Act (eliminating benefits delays for veterans).

• The Respect for Marriage Act (requires states to recognize same-sex marriages and protects religious liberty).

• Confirmation of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court

• The Inflation Reduction Act (a law that aims to reduce the federal budget deficit and lower prescription drug prices).

• Protecting the Affordable Care Act.

• Student Debt Relief.

In addition to those accomplishments, border crossings are down nearly 58 percent over last year (and certainly lower than that under the Trump administration, which made Nazi-like child separation from parents an actual thing). Also, the violent crime rate has dropped 15 percent in the first three months of 2024 while murders fell 26.4 percent and rapes dropped 25.7 percent. The unemployment rate is 4.1 percent (it was 14.90 percent under Trump in April 2020, so were you really better off four years ago?). The inflation rate is 3 percent, down from a high of 9 percent during the peak of the COVID crisis. It's been a remarkable run. So I had mixed emotions when Biden announced last Sunday he wasn't going to seek a second term.

Yay, I said to myself because Biden looked horrible in his debate last month with convicted felon and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump. Clearly, Biden's age had caught up with him.

Oh, no, I said to myself because Biden is a decent human being whose administration has had considerable success (see the list you just read above).

I wasn't particularly impressed when he endorsed Kamala Harris, his vice president, to be the next president. Until I was.

Just like that, Harris has energized the spirits of the Democratic Party. Fundraising has skyrocketed (nearly $100 million in 48 hours). Volunteers are rising to help. And for the first time in several months, Democrats feel like they're firmly on the right track.

Harris, 59, has attracted the youth vote while at the same time making Trump, 78, the oldest person ever to run for president. She's building interest among the Black and Hispanic communities, which are critical demographics. Voter enrollment has increased. She herself has shown remarkable growth since her own brief presidential bid four years ago. It could be because of all that on-the-job training she had as the vice president. At any rate, her transformation into a serious candidate has been remarkable. Even down-ballot Democrats seem buoyant about their chances.

There are exactly 100 days to go until election day. Anything can happen in those three months. Look for the campaign to turn particularly bitter, and look for Trump to become even more childish with his absurd nicknames and tantrums in the face of his opponents (Aww, he's just joking). Past experience shows he never ran a proper government in his previous term – he ran an asylum based on personal loyalty to him and not to the Constitution, which at times he's even threatened to suspend.

This is not to say Harris has the election in the bag. Trump has shown a remarkable resiliency over the years to weasel out of jams, although he's been aided by recent favorable (though questionable) court decisions.

But the Democratic Convention is coming up in a few weeks. Trump is still awaiting sentencing for his 34 felony convictions. Both could give Harris a significant bounce in the polls and at just the right time.

Buckle up. It's going to be some ride.

 

Project 2025

Perhaps one of the most remarkable documents in world history is the Constitution of the United States of America. It might be right up there with the Magna Carta, which said the English king and his government were not above the law. That was back in 1215.

Hmm.

The Constitution sets the guidelines for the creation of our democratic republic. It is invigorating in its scope, even in its opening paragraph: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."

 It's inspiring. It's unprecedented. It's glorious. Ratified in 1789, the Constitution offered an earth-shaking form of government in a world filled with monarchies. You know, King Louis this and King George that.

You would think that the Constitution, all 4,400 words of it, should be enough for us. That's especially true when you add in the Bill of Rights – the original first 10 amendments – which were designed to protect the citizenry from an overbearing government.

But no. In a country whose demographics are inexorably changing from white to non-white, a band of right-wing hair brains known as the Heritage Foundation have presented their own 900-page document on how to conduct (or deconstruct) the American government. It might as well be America's Mein Kampf.

It's called Project 2025. It was actually published several years ago in 2023, but with the approach of the 2024 election in November, the so-called Presidential Transition Project has drawn deeper scrutiny. This is especially so because if former president Donald Trump should regain the presidency, he'll put into effect many of the proposals found in P2025. The plan is to implement much of P2025 in the first 180 days of a new Trump administration. It basically serves as the de facto Republican Party platform.

One quick glance at the bullet-point proposals reveals an unlikely vision of an America we would no longer recognize. Some of these proposals are already in effect, one way or another, thanks in part to a partisan Trump-loving Supreme Court:

• A complete ban on abortions without exceptions (pages 449-503). Already in effect in some red states.

• Ban contraceptives (page 449). What? Let me get this straight. We're going to have more unwanted children because there are no contraceptives, forcing many women – most likely those who are poor – to seek abortions that are illegal. Sounds like an overbearing government to me.

• Elimination of unions and worker protections (page 581). Well, that's a century of progress down the tubes. Say farewell to overtime and while we're at it, let's have 10-year-olds operate heavy machinery 12 hours a day. You don't think so? Who's got control of the Supreme Court these days?

• Cut Social Security (page 691). Yeah, right. A workforce filled with 75-year-olds working for minimum wage. They'll have to because... 

• ... End the Affordable Care Act (page 449). Not only will we be dumber as a nation, but sicker, too. Republicans have no plan to replace the increasingly popular Obamacare.

• Eliminate the Department of Education (page 319). That ought to make us dumber (read more controllable. Anyone seen a civics class lately?). Their reasoning is that students are being indoctrinated to become liberal by all those liberal teachers and professors.

• Teach Christian religious beliefs in public schools (page 319). For P2025, this is really their own brand of indoctrination. And in a government designed for We the People, how do you think the Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities might feel about this? Christian nationalism is knocking at the door and thinking only of itself.

• Ban African American and gender studies in all levels of education (page 319). See, we told you that slavery wasn't the cause of the Civil War.

• End climate protections (page 417). Notice how hot it's been this summer? Notice how we haven't gotten any snow here the past two winters?

• End marriage equality (page 545-581). I'm not sure what this means exactly. We love who we love. Does it mean ending gay marriage? Does it mean a woman is not the equal of a man in a marriage? Why is this even a thing? Oh, right. Christian nationalism.

• Defund the FBI and Homeland Security (page 133). Well, that ought to make us weaker in addition to being dumber and sicker. Remember when Republicans were the Law and Order party? Now we have a Republican candidate for president who is a convicted felon 34 times over. How did this happen?

• Mass deportations of immigrants and incarceration in "camps" (page 133). We tried this once during World War II by putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps and ended up eventually paying those affected Japanese families $1.6 billion in reparations. Nazi Germany, where they read Mein Kampf, took their camps a little further. Additionally, there are about 10 million undocumented immigrants in this country working at jobs for a nation that is starving for laborers because the unemployment rate is so low (4.1 percent). Imagine what might happen to the economy if you take those people out of the work force. Can you say recession?

• Eliminate Federal agencies like the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (pages 363-417). So you like botulism in your food? Polluted lakes and rivers? Notice the intensity of tornadoes and hurricanes lately?

The Heritage Foundation is an ultra conservative think tank that has Trump's ear (in case you wondered where his ear went), but after perusing some of the bullet-points of this document, I have to wonder what they're actually thinking about. Power, mostly. Control. Money, no doubt. Making women second-class citizens. I don't see much in this manifesto that promotes the general welfare or secures the blessings of liberty for our posterity.

In fact, this might be the most un-American document I've ever seen. 

November is approaching. You know what to do.

Has everything changed?

I was going to write my blog about Project 2025, the Republican Party's repulsive 900-page guideline on their plans to deconstruct the American government and rebuild our country into a conservative white man's orgiastic wet dream under an expected Trump presidency.

You know, immigrant detention camps. Christian nationalism. Voter suppression. The end of medicare and social security. Stuff like that.

And then the rifle shots rang out, like they often do in this country. The shots were aimed at Donald Trump himself, giving a campaign speech in a rally in Butler, PA., yesterday.

Those shots changed everything, I think. In what was essentially a 50-50 campaign for the presidency against incumbent Joe Biden, yesterday's horrific events (one person was killed and two others were critically wounded for doing nothing more than attending a carnival barker's sideshow) will virtually hand Trump the keys to the Oval Office. As well as the nuclear codes. And state secrets. Again.

Trump luckily suffered only a grazed ear in the shooting, but the blood trickling down his face will serve him well in campaign posters, maybe as soon as tomorrow when the Republican National Convention begins in Milwaukee. He now looks like a war hero, after all. As the former Commander in Chief, does Pvt. Bonespurs qualify for the Purple Heart? The Congressional Medal of Honor? Stay tuned.

But now he will have an element of sympathy behind him, as well as the anger of his retribution and a sense of martyrdom. All of this, and perhaps more, will carry Trump into the presidency and there's nothing the Democrats can do about it. I bet Trump's poll numbers take a 10-point bounce. His voters are energized more than ever by this event.

Already conspiracy theorists are claiming that this was a deep state CIA operation, but early indications are that the shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, now deceased, was just two years out of high school and was a registered Republican. I wonder how that little tidbit will fit into the overall scheme of things?

I want to say that assassinations only happen in banana republics, but the United States host lost four of its presidents in the last 235 years (dating back to the ratification of the Constitution in 1789). That comes out to one murdered president every 59 years. Throw in attempts to Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan and then to candidates like George Wallace and Robert Kennedy, well, assassination is something of an American tradition. If we disagree with someone, shoot them.

So does the conversation turn once again to guns? Probably should. Probably won't.

In the meantime, we're probably four months away from another Trump presidency. Four months away from the implementation of Project 2025. Four months away from more Trumpian chaos and insanity. Four months away from the possible end to the American experiment in democracy.

Everything is changing. Except this: Trump is still an adjudicated rapist. He's still guilty of fraud. And he is still a 34-times convicted felon.

 

What now?

Did you know that there are only 4,400 words in the original U.S. Constitution?

And not a single one is the word "immunity." Nor "democracy" for that matter. Or even the word "God." You can't find them. Not there.

I bring this up because this past Monday the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in a stunning 6-3 conservative majority opinion that our presidents now have total immunity in the core powers of their office for "official" acts (as opposed to "private" acts) that they might commit while serving in office. SCOTUS left it up to the lower courts to decide between what is private and what is official and then quickly left town in their RVs. Cowards.

That ruling suggests presidents are now above the law, which essentially puts them above the Constitution, the very document that created and endowed their position in the first place. Go figure.

What is amazing to me is that prior to Monday's decision, there was no need for a Supreme Court ruling as to whether or not a president had total immunity in order to function. Andrew Jackson didn't need it during the civil rights abomination of The Trail of Tears. Abraham Lincoln didn't need it while bending (or ignoring) certain laws when conducting the Civil War. Franklin Roosevelt didn't need immunity when he created detention camps for Japanese-American citizens during World War II. Harry Truman didn't need it when dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

But Donald Trump needs it. Trump, an adjudicated rapist who is seeking a second term as president, also has 34 felony convictions that he would like to see disappear. So he took his case  – Trump v. The United States – to the Supreme Court, where five of the nine judges were appointed by presidents (including three by Trump in his first term) who lost the popular vote. Minority rule. Ain't democracy great?

There was no need to mention immunity in the Constitution because the Founders already established the Speech and Debate clause (Article I, Section 6, Clause 1), something which could confer immunity to congressmen, if they needed it. Presidents, however, supposedly were not granted immunity. Do you think there could be a reason why? Did the Framers know what they were doing? Does the Roberts court?

The actions of this seemingly partisan Roberts court seem to follow the road map set up by Project 2025, a 900-page manifesto composed by the Heritage Foundation that wants to reshape the government in its conservative image. It's already foaming at the mouth impatiently waiting for Trump (whose name is mentioned more than 300 times in the treatise) to win election in November so it can begin its fascist policies of power and control.

Two years ago the court overruled Roe v. Wade, eliminating a 50-year-old freedom for women to have autonomy over their own bodies and reproductive rights.

Last week, the court reversed a 40-year-old precedent in the Chevron case, which now curtails the power of federal agencies to interpret the laws. What stare decisis?

One by one, the guardrails of a government based on the separation of powers that worked so well for nearly 250 years are falling apart, enabled by a severely diminished and narrowly focused Supreme Court. 

We are moving ever closer to a single option of salvation: our vote. Read Project 2025. Educate yourselves. Save yourselves. Save democracy.