A bit of hope

I try not to get too excited about these things, because I've been disappointed enough before.

You know, like  President Trump being convicted 34 times of felony in the first degree for falsifying business records and yet not being sentenced to any jail time at all. Like being declared immune from prosecutions by the Supreme Court which apparently found in our legal system that at least one man is above the law.

But after Tuesday's off-year elections, which saw an incredible blue wave sweep across the country in repudiation of early everything the felon Trump is doing, well, I felt a little bit better.

In New Jersey, Mikie Sherrill became the first female Democrat of that state to be elected governor, winning by 13 percent over three-time loser Jack Ciattarelli. In Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger was the first female to be elected governor of that state, winning by 15 percent over Winsome Earle-Sears. In Pennsylvania, three liberal state supreme court justices were given 10-year extensions to their terms to preserve swing state control. In California, voters approved a new House map to counter the Republican gerrymandering of districts in Texas. In New York, a Socialist Democrat (not a Communist. Learn the difference), Zohran Mamdani, was elected mayor. In Maine, voter ID and absentee ballot restrictions were defeated. In Georgia, Democrats flipped two seats on the state's Public Service Commission.

The sweep was a loud rebuke of anything Trump. Reasonable people are tired of ICE violations by severely untrained and unfit masked agents and illegal roundups of innocent brown people; people are tired of drones blowing up speedboats of alleged drug runners in international waters because we'll never know who they really are if due process isn't served; people are tired of the tacky gold trim in the White House; people are tired of Trump's unilateral actions without the consent of Congress, which is how fascist monarchies are run.

Tired? Just look at the polling. Trump, the felon, is under water in nearly every category.

And now we're tired of Trump's government shutdown, primarily because about 42 million Americans – many of them Trump supporters – will go hungry as funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program runs dry.

On Friday, Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer made an offer to the GOP, saying Democrats would agree to a one-year extension of the expiring premium tax credits that support the Affordable Care Act. Without those credits, healthcare coverage will suffer for millions of Americans as the cost of premiums will skyrocket. About 75 percent of Americans want the credits to continue.

But the GOP rejected the offer outright, which put them in the position of rejecting the reopening of the government. They own the shutdown now, as if there was ever a question of who was responsible.

And just who is responsible for this immoral chaos? Trump refuses to engage with the Democrats in ending this disaster. Meanwhile, he's in Mar-a-Lago for another golf weekend as he defies constitutional duties.

And, oh yeah, release the Epstein files. 

 

 

SNAP! Crackle! Pop!

It's unbelievable to me that the current felonious Trump administration is playing games with peoples' lives.

Trump's failure to fund SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program  (food stamps) that provides food aid for approximately 42 million Americans is illegal (according to two federal judges), insensitive, invalid and immoral (according to me), especially as the country endures Trump's government shutdown.

SNAP provides assistance through monthly rechargeable credit cards. About 1 in 8 Americans are served by SNAP in what is considered a major social safety net. It's what government does for its people when government works well.

Until now. So for the moment at least, we have hungry Americans. Hungry children. Who could have thought?

"The administration is choosing not to feed Americans in need, despite knowing that it is legally required to do so," said U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), the ranking member of the Senate Agriculture committee that oversees SNAP.

She's right. Massachusetts judge Indira Talwani ruled the US Department of Agriculture has to pay for SNAP, writing that the suspension is unlawful. She ordered the government to advise the court by tomorrow whether it will use emergency reserve funds to provide reduced SNAP benefits during the shutdown.

A family of two can qualify for up to $536 a month in food aid.

"...suspension of SNAP payments was based on the erroneous conclusion that the Contingency Funds could not be used to ensure the continuation of SNAP payments," she wrote on Friday. "This court has now clarified that Defendants are required to use those Contingency Funds as necessary for the SNAP program."

In Rhode Island, judge John McConnell ruled that SNAP must be funded using at least the contingency funds. He asked for an update on Monday as well. 

So I guess we'll learn something tomorrow about the cold, beating heart of Trump.  SNAP or not to SNAP?

Meanwhile, Trump is apparently enjoying himself, thinking he can shift the blame for the shutdown and any subsequent horrors on the Democrats.

That would be funny if it wasn't so sad. Republicans control all three branches of government. That means in order to break the 60-vote filibuster (they only have 53), they have to negotiate and compromise with Democrats. So far, nada from the GOP.

Trump wasn't even in the country last week. He was wandering aimlessly through review halls in Japan accomplishing very little except further embarrassment. And when he did return to the United States, he held a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party for his wealthy donors at his Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida. Talk about tone deaf.

This trip to Florida cost the American taxpayer $3.4 million, bringing the total to date to $60.7 million that taxpayers spent on the 76 golf outings (so far) in his second term.

But he can't find the funds to feed his own citizens? 

And it gets even more ridiculous. There is, of course, the $350 million destruction of the East Wing. He announced that the Lincoln bathroom in the White House has also been renovated.

And the man who so desperately wants to win a Nobel Peace Prize because, heck, President Obama did, is blowing up speedboats suspected of smuggling fentanyl, and doing it without due process or congressional approval. That makes at least 64 people who have died in these strikes. Trump is committing murder and needs to be in prison.

Not only might we be on the verge of a shooting conflict with Venezuela (Trump wants to overthrow the Nicolas Meduro regime), but also with Nigeria because he's claiming they are killing Christians.

Americans going hungry because of a cruel president. Others dying in international waters because of a heartless president. When did my country shift to some alternative reality where you can hear people joyfully claim, "That's what I voted for!"

 Where am I?

 

 

 

 

East Wing debacle

Kim and I were hoping at some point in the new few years to make another trip to Washington DC and behave like tourists. 

You know, take in the Smithsonian, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and other sights. Including the White House. It's been decades since we last did that.

But the recent razing of the historic East Wing by convicted felon president Donald Trump has dampened our enthusiasm for such a trip. The White House campus just won't be the same as we remembered, what with his proposed 90,000 square foot (two acres), $300 billion ballroom looming over the South Lawn like some irritating bully.

Artist's proposed conception of Hell No.

 And it happened so suddenly. We woke up on Monday and the next thing we knew, the East Wing was being assaulted by bulldozers and dump trucks. By Thursday, the building that served as offices for First Ladies since World War II was gone. A memory. An American memory, mind you, pulverized into dust to make room for the felon president's vanity project. I don't even remember anybody even talking about the need for a White House ballroom prior to this travesty.

MAGA world promptly went into defense mode, rolling out story after story about how previous presidents added their own imprints to the White House. What you don't hear from MAGA is how Trump destroyed a portion of The Peoples' House without Congressional review or consent. He simply bulldozed his way through the entire process, ignoring the National Capital Planning Commission that is designed to oversee federal building construction. The NCPC even has priority over Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, which exempts the White House, the Capitol and the Supreme Court from review. But the White House is still subject to review from the NCPC as well as the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Codes and permits have been ignored in the razing process.

MAGA insists this entire scheme is different because it is being funded by private donors and not tax dollars, but that just raises another issue: is the ballroom being built with bribe money? Consider this: because of Trump's Big Beautiful Bill, Google gets an $18 billion tax break, Amazon gets a $16 billion tax break, Microsoft gets a $12 billion tax break and Facebook gets an $11 billion tax break. Meanwhile, the country is enduring Trump's government shutdown as federal employees – those still remaining after the DOGE cuts – find themselves nothing more than pawns in a political game of his undertaking.

It's been said that the proposed ballroom – which will make the existing White House 55,000 square foot building look like the add-on – is in reality nothing more than a monument to corruption. It likely will be Mar-a-Lago North on the White House campus. 

Game? The latest horror came Friday when the felon president said that while the government is in shutdown, it would not use any of the $6 billion held in reserve by the U.S. Department of Agriculture to fund the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps) upon which 42 million Americans depend to put food on the table.

This is unparalleled cruelty. I always thought government was designed to help its citizens to a path of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Meanwhile, Trump somehow finds $40 billion to prop up Argentina. So much for America First.

The destruction of the East Wing has become something of a metaphor for Trump's presidency. Because the East Wing is gone, so, too, is the symmetry of the grounds. The White House itself features a neoclassical architectural style that draws from the ideals of democracy and government from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The uniquely American influence offers us the Federal style that suggests the simplicity and balance of our nature as opposed to the European monarchies. from which we separated.

The assault on the East Wing is an assault on all Americans. It's an assault on our history, on our collective memory, on our democracy, on rule of law, on fair play and on the virtues we thought made us Americans.

 

 

 

 

No Kings, again

It's incredible how easy it is to get some MAGA people wound up these days. All you have to do, it seems, is take to the streets to exercise your First Amendment right to assemble, speak freely and protest, and suddenly you've become an ignorant clown who is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome for a laughable cause.

 

We add our First Amendment voice.*

Some of that blowback came our way after about 200 of us participated in the utterly peaceful No Kings demonstration held at the Old Courthouse on the Square Saturday. While the local crowd appeared to be a bit smaller than the Hands Off/No Kings demonstration held in June – an estimated 300 folks took part in that one – yesterday's event was tied to the larger national protest that drew an estimated seven million participants.

Seven million. It was the second largest political demonstration in American history. The largest gathering was the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million citizens gathered to create awareness of the Earth's fragile ecology. Earth Day was soooo woke that it appeared to us in an era before wokeness was a MAGA target of derision. In fact, Earth Day was so woke we didn't even know we were woke back then. It took Trump Republicans to tell us what wokeness is. And diversity, equity and inclusion, too. The old hippie in me thought wokeness and DEI were good things – righteous things, Christian things – to be, but apparently not in Trump world, where the cruelty is clearly the point.

A sample of No Kings day in Lexington.

 Why else would you separate immigrant children from their parents (an estimated 1,300 children are still missing from the first Trump administration's attempt to discourage asylum seekers from entry into the country)? Why else would you create concentration camps and deportation centers in America? Why else would you create a paramilitary agency like ICE to literally sweep brown people off the streets by denying them due process? When did that become the American way?

Why are we picking a fight with Venezuela? Why is Argentina getting $20 billion from us but we can't fund healthcare? Why are National Guard troops encamped in peaceful American cities when state governors – under whose control they belong – have not asked for them? Why are we blowing up boats (and killing people) in the Caribbean without the Coast Guard boarding them with due process?

When did we become lawless? 

MAGA tried its best to downplay No Kings day, responding mostly with retorts that we don't have a king in this country and so what exactly are you protesting, fool?

That response misses the point of the symbolism behind No Kings day, of course. Trump, the convicted felon who has been given a free pass from sentencing (and perhaps prison) by his buddies on the Supreme Court, has been busy centralizing the power of the presidency in his second term per Project 2025. Among numerous other violations, Trump has:

• Invoked capricious tariffs, which by Constitution only Congress can do.

• Impounded congressionally appropriated funds from federal agencies in violation of the law.

• Fired federal employees in violation of the law.

• Signed unconstitutional executive orders.

In other words, Trump is trying to seize the powers of Congress. As envisioned by the Founding Fathers, a president can make treaties with the approval of the Senate; veto bills and sign bills; represent the nation in talks with foreign countries, enforce the laws that Congress passes; act as Commander in Chief during a war, and call out troops to protect the nation against an attack. Those are the constitutional powers of the presidency.

Any other perceived powers Trump has of the presidency actually make him more like a monarch than an executive with limited powers. Hence, a king – exactly what we rebelled against in 1776.

The Founding Fathers struggled with the idea of a president as leader. They didn't want an all-powerful individual in charge, which is why we are a federal democratic republic with a division of power that is theoretically protected by a brilliant combination of checks and balances which gives the power to the people. If they can keep it. If they want it.

I want it. I want to keep it. It's why I protest against a king governing this country. 

*Photo by Kristi Thornhill. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MTG, my newest hero

The last thing I ever expected to find myself doing was to defend wacky Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extreme right-wing Republican Congresswoman and conspiracy theorist who believed secret Jewish space lasers were responsible for starting the devastating California wildfires a couple years ago, and who once told us in 2022 that the "gazpacho police" were guarding the Capitol building.

Yes, the cold soup police. She meant Gestapo, of course, even though I doubt she knows of the horrors they committed in Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s. 

Yet here I am agreeing with MTG as she tries to create some space between her and convicted felon president Donald Trump, who is allowing his current government shutdown to continue. 

Welcome to the Resistance, MTG.

She is primarily concerned with the rising costs of healthcare that are on the cusp of spiraling out of control under the Trump administration, who would rather pay for tax cuts for bazillionaires than help the average American stay healthy, many of whom voted for Republicans. She even cited her own adult children as being unable to afford  the projected rise in healthcare premiums.

She's making more sense now than she ever has. Proof, I guess, that some people can grow.

She's speaking out against the administration, and primarily House Speaker Michael Johnson, who has kept House members out of session since Sept. 19. Say what? By keeping the House out of session means its members cannot work on the budget, which, by extension, means they are not working to find a way to extend healthcare premium tax credits.

It also means there is no swearing in of Representative Adelita Grijalva (D-AZ), who won a special election on Sept. 23. She represents the 218th vote on a discharge petition that would release the Epstein files, which nearly every person in American – well, except those with the last name of Trump and those committed to protesting the Trumps – are clamoring to see.

Johnson keeps postponing the swearing in so we don't get to see the proof that Trump is a pedophile. Why else keep postponing?

Republicans are working hard on one thing, though, and that is trying to blame the Democrats for the shutdown. But considering that the GOP controls the House, the Senate, the Presidency and, in essence, even the Supreme Court, that accusation is as transparent as it is laughable.

Meanwhile, Trump continues with his childish but dangerous retribution campaign against perceived political opponents instead of actually governing the nation. ICE rounds up brown-skinned people without due process using agents that cover their faces with masks and wearing no name tags, acting like Gestapo.

Even MTG can see this. 

 

 

The week to come

I have a website bookmarked on my laptop called "The Drudge Report", which is a website that basically collects the https's of various news sources for easy acquisition. Created by Matt Drudge in 1995, it was once considered by some to be a conservative outlet, but not so much anymore. I mean, if you want quick access to The New York Times, go to Drudge.

Best of all, it's a collection of websites from all over the world. You can access The Daily Mirror in England just as easily as you can Die Zeit in Germany or The China People's Daily. It's a pretty handy tool to have if you want to take a peep at differing points of view.

So I took a quick look this morning, and the first story to hit my eye is "Trump ordering troops to Portland...Authorizes Full Force."

Uh-oh. Here we go again. Our convicted felon president is sending troops to yet another American city to quell rioting that doesn't exist except in his mind. Oregon Governor Tina Kotek hasn't asked for troops (it's unclear if the troops will be National Guard or general military, like the Marines or the U.S. Army). Neither has Portland Mayor Keith Wilson. This looks more like performative theater by Trump to satiate the MAGA faithful.

One of the things the Founding Fathers feared most was a standing army. That's mostly why the military is under civilian (Congressional) control. Plus, the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 limits the role of the military in domestic law enforcement. So what Trump is doing here, without Congressional approval, is probably illegal.

Kind of like raising tariffs without Congressional approval.

And what does "full force" mean anyhow? Is he laying siege to an American city? You good with that?

Anyway, right next to the Portland story is this headline: "USA Preps Military Strikes in Venezuela."

What? I don't think planning military strikes on sovereign nations bodes well for any Nobel Peace Prize considerations, which is something Trump is desperate for. You know, because Obama has one. You'd think blowing up Venezuelan speed boats without issuing due process would be enough, but I guess not.

Drudge is usually timely with its news collection, but with a government shutdown looming for Tuesday, I can't find anything right now. Maybe I will later in the day as the news cycle refreshes.

In the meantime, maybe I'll check out "MAGA Coming for the WNBA." 

Charlie Kirk

When I turned on the news Wednesday afternoon after a couple hours of working in my yard, the first thing that came on the screen was the real-time coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, the controversial right-wing podcaster, political influencer and activist.

"Uh-oh," I thought to myself. "This isn't going to be good."

As I watched the coverage, a kind of odd familiarity took shape: Rooftops. Crowds. Guns. Always guns.

And, minutes into the insanity and chaos, it was announced that Kirk had died of a single gunshot wound to the neck. Now the shooting had morphed into murder. 

I didn't know much about Kirk. I never listened to his podcasts because his political views aren't how I swing and I didn't need his kind of influencing or reinforcement to my life. I remember hearing that Kirk was the guy who said if he saw a Black pilot on his plane, he hoped the pilot was qualified. Sweet Jesus. He also suggested – among other things – that some Black women "did not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." Seriously? The movie and book "Hidden Figures" quickly comes to mind here.

DEI apparently wasn't in his alphabet. 

I sometimes got him confused with Charlie Sykes, another conservative political commentator who is often the voice of reason. Maybe I got them confused because they're both named Charlie, followed by a single syllable last name. Yep, that's how I roll. Complex.

When I learned that Kirk was only 31 and left behind a wife and two young children, I cried. Assassins never account for who else gets hurt when the bullet leaves the gun. Collateral damage. There used  to be a time, I think, when you could disagree with a neighbor on politics. It was the Norman Rockwellian American way. You could sit around the cracker barrel and hold heated discussions, pretty much knowing you wouldn't get shot. Now even the cracker barrel invites division.

I am so weary of this shit. 

As the days passed, I soon learned that Kirk was a brilliant debater, often taking on college students in places like Cambridge, even though he himself never graduated from college. Sharp. Quick. Slice and dice. I would've been mincemeat in a debate with him even though I know I disagree with his core values. My best responses in disagreements always seem to come about two days later, when I realize, "That's what I should have said."

I also heard in the wake of Kirk's assassination that this kind of violence "isn't who we are."

What? It's exactly who we are. We live in a gun culture where finality is often discharged in feet per second. Why are there so many guns? Why are they so easy to obtain? What exactly are we afraid of? Why does this happen in America and hardly anywhere else in the world? We are the only nation on the planet with anything resembling a second amendment, and we are killing ourselves with it. I'm still upset with the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King Jr. Why kill John Lennon? He was a Beatle, for God's sake. A musician. Hell, I'm still mad that Abraham Lincoln was murdered and I missed that one by 86 years.

I don't know what the answer is. Reasonable gun control has to factor in the mix somehow, especially now that school children have become targets. We also have to figure out how to disagree without malice, when to walk away, to understand somebody else's perspective without literally being triggered. But I don't know.

It means we have to change who we are.

I think we need good luck with that one. 

 

 

 

 

Art for art's sake

It's not every day you see an artist setting up his easel on the Old Courthouse Square in Lexington, taking a favorite bristle brush and applying some welcomed color and perspective to our lives.

The Square certainly makes for an unusual workplace.

But that's exactly what Lexington's Kenrick Jobe is doing these days as passing motorists take a gander at his work during red lights, or honk their horns in appreciation (we assume) in what is something like a drive-by studio.

Kenrick Jobe creates art on the Old Courthouse Square.

 Why the Square?

"The Square is probably one of the top three busiest places in the area," said Jobe, 30. "So I thought, 'Why not take advantage of that?' So I tried it.

"And I realized, it's a great way to meet new people there," said Jobe. "So I'm like, why not do that? You know? You live here in Lexington. I don't really want to move anywhere. I feel like this area would be nice to build something solid.

"And I've met some of the best people here." 

There is the occasional peeper who comes up to Jobe, stands behind his shoulder and watches as he works a canvas into something that can stir the soul. That's what artists do, after all.

A car horn shouts at us. We both look.

"You got fans?" I ask.

Kenrick Jobe

 "Well, I've definitely got support," said Jobe, a 2017 graduate of East Carolina University, where he majored in art. "I don't mind if somebody comes up and looks over my shoulder while I'm working, even if they don't say anything. 

"I kind of like it," said Jobe. "Maybe I get some people thinking, you know?"

Jobe doesn't consider himself to be a "struggling artist", but he hasn't exactly hit the financial jackpot, either.

"Right now, I'm just working from home," said Jobe, who is originally from Summit, NJ, but came to Lexington when he was 12. "But I do a lot of commissions and stuff like that. I did a mural here in the Old Courthouse. And I'm also an artist in residence at Grace Episcopal.

"At the end of this month, I'll be doing an art workshop at Duke. I think that's going to be pretty much fun."

On the day that I talked with Jobe, he was working on a piece featuring white blossoms. It was stunning. He often videos himself painting in rapid time lapse, so you get to see the painting's progress, and then he posts his projects on Facebook with a description.

In the painting that you see in this blog, Jobe wrote, "I think I'm most proud of this painting. When I look at it, I see growth. These days I'm so optimistic for the future, it's overwhelming. I know something big is on the way."

In just the few minutes I spent with him, I discovered that you can feel his enthusiasm – and optimism – reach out to you. It's almost contagious. Now that would be a pandemic worth having, wouldn't it?

In another post, for a different work, Jobe wrote, "It's hard to ignore someone that paints outside every day. I'm full of love and gratitude. I'm ready to meet every individual that wants to meet me. Let's talk Art. Thank you for giving me a chance to achieve my dream."

In a streetside studio that is filled with sensual stimuli – the scents, the sounds, the motion, the colors – Jobe often paints simply what he sees in his mind's eye.

"Sometimes I might get an idea by looking at a picture," said Jobe. "But then I'll go on it by myself because I don't want to keep looking back and forth at something. So you visualize. I want it to have character. I don't want it to look exactly like a photo, right?"

Jobe doesn't have a gallery – a gallery remains a goal – but his work is for sale. Some pieces can go for several hundred dollars, while others go for several thousand. "It all depends," said Jobe, echoing nearly every artist's pricing strategy.

In the meantime, Jobe continues on with brush and paints in hand and a smile on his face.

"Art is the only constant for me," writes Jobe. "That, and God." 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Go See Van Gogh

When I was a student at Kutztown State College (Pa.) back in the early 1970s, one of the courses that was required was art history.

Van Gogh's 'Bedroom in Aries' in 3-D

 I have no idea why. I was studying to be a U.S. history teacher, and later, when I decided I couldn't speak in front of groups of people who knew more than me, I switched to Liberal Arts English and became a sports writer. 

I think the idea behind requiring art history was to help make us informed and well-rounded citizens of the world. It probably didn't hurt that Kutztown was a teachers' college that massed produced art teachers for public education. Anyway, as I recall, the textbook for the class was outstanding, and I wish I still had it. To this day I can close my eyes and see selected works of such artists as Delacroix, Monet, Manet, Czanne, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh virtually jump from the pages and into my mind's appreciation vault.

I was fascinated.

So, decades after my introduction to art history, the Van Gogh Immersive Experience showed up in Winston-Salem last month at the former Jo-Ann's Fabrics Store off of Stratford Road, I had to go.

Kim and I went last week, and we thought it was spectacular. As you enter the exhibit, you get to see at least 100 copies of Van Gogh's work, accompanied in most cases with explanatory text. Then you enter the immersive room, the crown jewel of the place. Projections of Van Gogh's artistic style swim across the room and floor, literally engulfing you with stimuli as you relax in folding chairs or bean bags. You can let yourself float upstream and into the Starry Night.

•   •   •

I wasn't a very good student at Kutztown. I was a commuter who drove 45 minutes each way in my Volkswagen Beetle, five days a week, to keep my tuition down to around $50 a semester. No student loans for me. Much of my day was spent just trying to stay alive making the commute.

Anyway, as noted, Kutztown specialized in graduating art teachers, and every once in a while, those art students would hold exhibitions in the school's modern and spacious library.

I had two good friends that I'd meet with at the library most days, and instead of studying, we'd mess around, talking this and that, checking out the women instead of books. Stuff like that.

One day, we noticed one of those student art exhibitions going up. I decided to participate.

I took a sheet of composition paper and, with my multi-colored pen, drew four parenthesis (the singular of parentheses) in a single row, each parenthesis a different color. Like this: (  ) (  ). Then I ripped the page out of my composition book and placed it on the floor, near the other exhibits, which I feel certain to this day were being graded. We chuckled and didn't think much else of it.

Until the next day. My work was still on the floor. As it was the next day, and the next, and the day after that. We couldn't believe it. On one of those days, we saw a library worker vacuum around it. On another day, we saw a patron walk up to my work, stop for a few moments and rub his chin in contemplation as he took it all in.

I was beginning to think I had accidentally created a study in philosophical rhetoric: What is art? I never did find the answer to that.

Apparently I had switched my major yet again, this time from Liberal Arts English to Liberal Arts Smart Ass. 

As it turned out, my work stayed on the floor for the entire two weeks of the exhibit. It was the first and only time I've ever been displayed in a gallery. True story. Thank you very much. 

 (The Van Gogh Immersive Experience will remain in Winston-Salem through September. It's $35 per adult on weekends and $25 on weekdays and begins at 10 a.m. each day. There are small discounts for seniors, etc, so ask if you qualify.)

 

 

 

 

The Beatles: Her First Concert

She probably couldn't know it at the time, but Midway's Jane Pacific was kissed by stardust in August 1964. She was gifted a memory that only a fortunate few can ever share with the rest of us because, well, you know, that's how stardust memories work.

She was an eyewitness to Beatlemania. 

Jane Pacific with her Beatles ticket stubs.

 "I think I was around eight years old," said Jane, who grew up in Lakeview Terrace, Calif. "My parents got us tickets to see The Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl.

"It was my first concert. 

"Yes, I was young, but I was still old enough to know what was happening," said Jane. "My older sisters, Karen and Kris, were into The Beatles, and my mom and dad both loved The Beatles. And so did I. I knew all the songs and loved them." 

The first of three Hollywood Bowl concerts – now iconic in the lush lore of Beatlemania – came only seven months after The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February. That televised moment changed everything about the way we listen to popular music, from stage to studio.

Ironically, Jane couldn't hear a note The Beatles sang that night at the Hollywood Bowl. The nonstop decibel-splitting shouts of teenage girls drowned out The Beatles and their hopelessly inadequate amplifiers. Basically, Jane and her family attended a screamfest. Welcome to Beatlemania.

"I don't think we did any screaming," said Jane, whose family had pretty decent seats about halfway up from the stage. "I know my sisters said they didn't scream like that. But, yeah, the screaming is what I remember most. Not being able to hear the music as well as I wanted to. The whole concert was like that.

"I remember standing on the top of my seat because everybody else around me was standing, too." 

What the fans who were interested in the music missed was a setlist that went like this:

1. Twist and Shout

2. You Can't Do That

3. All My Loving

4. She Loves You

5. Things We Said Today

6. Roll Over Beethoven

7. Can't Buy Me Love

8.  If I Fell

9. I Want to Hold Your Hand

10. Boys

11. A Hard Day's Night

12. Long Tall Sally

And that was it. Twelve songs, clocking in at just under a half hour. G'night, folks, and thank you very mooch. Tickets went for $4.50 then, which comes out to about $46.00 per ticket today. Is that good enough for a half hour of The Beatles? That, my friends, is a rhetorical question. It needs no answer.

Anyway, Jane's family enjoyed the experience so much, they did it again. This time, they went to see The Beatles perform two years later at Dodger Stadium on August 28, 1966. By now, Beatlemania was shedding some of its luster. Beatle John Lennon had alienated a number of fans a few weeks earlier when he famously suggested the Beatles were bigger than Jesus Christ, and they weren't selling out some of their venues.

 But, you know. They were still The Beatles.

"What I remember about this concert is that from our seats it seemed like they were very far away and small," said Jane. 

Baseball stadiums can do that to you. The setlist at Dodger Stadium included:

1. Rock and Roll Music

2. She's A Woman

3. If I Needed Someone

4. Day Tripper

5. Baby's in Black

6. I Feel Fine

7. Yesterday

8. I Wanna Be Your Man

9. Nowhere Man

10. Paperback Writer

11. Long Tall Sally

"Sometimes I can't remember which concert was which in my memory," said Jane. "But it was pretty much the same thing at Dodger Stadium: screaming girls and a lot of people standing around me. I do remember my parents taking my hand and dragging me through all the people to leave."

As it turned out, Jane was witness to another bit of history. The Beatles performed at San Francisco's Candlestick Park the next night, and then they immediately gave up touring to focus solely on studio work. So she saw the next-to-the-last Beatles concert ever (the Savile Row rooftop doesn't count).

"Is that right?" said Jane. "I didn't know that."

Soooo, 60 years later, Jane can produce several ticket stubs from both the Hollywood Bowl and Dodger Stadium concerts. Who's smart enough to think to do that?

"When I was a small girl I had a little box that I kept stuff in," said Jane. "That's where I kept my tickets. I even have my Mom's ticket stub. It's just a box full of keepsakes that I'll never let go.

"They have real emotional value for me."

 Indeed. How could it be otherwise?

Note: https://youtu.be/KqOsmUthz74 is a link to The Beatles 1964 Hollywood Bowl performance. When Jane's husband, John, showed the video link to her several weeks ago, she said it brought tears to her eyes. And why not? Stardust memories, you know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Women, good and bad

Unless you're an Atlanta Braves fan, this one might have slipped underneath your radar.

But Major League Baseball made some significant history Saturday in its doubleheader sweep of the Florida Marlins. Jen Pawol became the first female to umpire in a regular season game when she took the field behind first base in the first game of the twinbill, which the Braves won 7-1.

Jen Pawol

 She covered third base in the nightcap without incident as the Braves won 8-6.

Today, she is scheduled to call balls and strikes behind the plate in what should be another historic moment. What's her strike zone like? She'll be in the spotlight and in clear focus. After all, nobody ever shouts "Kill the ump!" at the first-base umpire.

I suspect she'll do well. She was the first woman to umpire a Triple A championship in 2023. She also was the first woman to umpire in a spring training game last season. She is the seventh woman to umpire professionally, but the first to reach the major leagues.

A former three-time all-conference softball selection at Hofstra, where she played catcher, Pawol started umpiring softball in the early 1990s. What followed was a steady and yet passionate climb up the ladder, finally reaching her professional pinnacle yesterday.

"The dream actually came true today, and I'm still living it," said Pawol, 48, between games of the doubleheader. "I am just so grateful to my family, to Major League Baseball for just creating such an amazing work environment. To all the umpires that I work with ... it's just amazing camaraderie."

In today's political atmosphere, I wonder how long before some MAGA freak suggests that diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) was involved, even though women have been calling games in the NBA (six females) and NFL (three) for several years. The question for baseball is what took so long? And what is the NHL waiting for?

•   •   •

While Pawol has given most of us reason to celebrate the accomplishments of women swimming in vats of testosterone, we have Ghislaine Maxwell to consider

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her part in the sex trafficking crimes as Jeffrey Epstein's associate in procuring minors for sex work.

But suddenly, Maxwell finds herself moved from a Florida prison to a new minimum security facility in Texas MAGAland. This came about when assistant attorney general Todd Blanche paid Maxwell a visit behind closed doors in Florida last week. Within days, she found herself in a very different circumstance.

Kinda makes me wonder if this is the Trump version of DEI. Trump, a convicted felon who is also an adjudicated rapist who happens to be president of the United States, is frantically trying to disassociate himself from Epstein after it was learned that Trump's name appears in the Epstein files.

Do you suppose Maxwell didn't incriminate Trump in her interview with Blanche in hopes of receiving a presidential pardon? Speculation is that she did not implicate Trump of anything improper. Imagine that.

The cruelty behind all of this is astounding. Brown-skinned people who don't speak English (now the country's official language) are being rounded up by the SS, er, ICE, for either deportation or detention, often without due process, and often labeled by Trump as the worst of the worst.

Meanwhile, a pedophile sex trafficker might potentially wrangle a pardon from a criminal president for one of the worst crimes an adult can commit against children.

We are living in strange times where the Constitutional guardrails are being disassembled in front of our very eyes. 

 

 

 

 

Connect the dots

The president is a pedophile.

That's the first thing that came to mind when I heard a week or so ago after The Wall Street Journal (now my favorite newspaper. Who saw that coming?) ran a story that said Attorney General Pam Bondi informed convicted felon President Donald Trump that his name appeared "numerous times" in the Epstein files.

You, too? 

Jeffrey Epstein, we know, was the high falutin' financier who was convicted of child prostitution. He then mysteriously died in prison of suicide while awaiting trial for sex trafficking underage females to the rich and famous on a U.S. Virgin (oh, the ugly irony here) Island he owned called Little Saint James.

Suddenly, after years of MAGA world screaming for the Epstein files to be released, because, you know, high profile names of liberals like Clinton, Gates, Hanks, et al, would be revealed, embarrassed and prosecuted, we're now told there's nothing to see here.

Except for maybe Trump's involvement. For the first time ever, MAGA is furious with Trump. What? You mean you're the deep state? You lied to us? Release the files! What are you afraid of?

Trump's name appearing in the files is no proof of guilt of anything, and on the surface, that's true.

But when you start connecting the dots of his character...

• Like Trump's 34 convictions stemming from his attempt to illegally influence the 2016 election through hush money payments to a porn star (Stormy Daniels) who said they had sex. Dot connected.

• Like accusations of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment by at least 25 women. Dot connected.

• Like being declared an adjudicated rapist by a federal judge. Dot connected.

• Like the hot mic capturing Trump telling interviewer Billy Bush that women like to be grabbed by their genitals when you are a star. That was during the 2016 presidential campaign, and why that wasn't a disqualifier for the presidency is beyond me. Trump got elected. Bush got divorced. Dot connected.

•  Like owning the Miss Universe pageant franchise, which he felt allowed him to walk into women's dressing rooms while they were changing clothes. Dot connected.

• Like Trump's early associations with Jeffrey Epstein that goes back to at least 1990. At one point, Trump is quoted as saying "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side." Dot really connected. Holy crap.

There's more. I could fill today's blog with this stuff. but you get the point.

Trump, for his part, is predictably denying any of this because he is God's chosen angel and can do no wrong. In the past few weeks, sometimes on consecutive days, he's tried his favorite deflection tactics: like telling us that President Obama committed treason, or that Obama rigged elections (sounds like projection), the releasing of 200,000 pages of Martin Luther King Jr. files (but not the Epstein files?), Rosie O'Donnell, Harvard, tariffs, NPR and PBS, and even changing back the names of sports teams like the Guardians and Commanders back to their original Indians and Redskins. Please, lookit this and not this Epstein stuff. You still taking about him? He's been dead a long time.

It sounds like he doth protest too much. Dot connected. 

There are too many dots for me. There are too many connections. I could be wrong about where the dots lead me, but so far, Trump's not been able to talk himself out of the disgusting and distasteful deep-state swamp that he's created here. So for now, I have it in the back of my head: the president is a pedophile.

 

 

 

Epstein

I never saw the backlash coming. And when it did come, I never expected its fury.

Finally. A cry for accountability.

In case I'm being too opaque, I'm talking about the Jeffrey Epstein situation here. Epstein, of course, was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and who allegedly invited the privileged elite to his private Caribbean island for romps with underage females. Epstein supposedly kept an incriminating list of client names and flight logs that had everybody from Prince Andrew to Bill Clinton to Tom Hanks shaking in their boots.

And now perhaps even Donald Trump – himself a convicted felon as well as an adjudicated rapist, famous party boy and somehow the current president of the United States with that résumé – might be connected.

After all, Trump and Epstein were once close friends. There's video of Trump doing his fist-pumping white-boy boogie next to Epstein at a party, which kind of documents their friendship from more than 20 years ago.

Epstein was arrested again for sex trafficking of minors and was in prison in July 2019. A month later, he was found dead in his cell, apparently a suicide. But the circumstances of his death remain murky.

Meanwhile, since Epstein's death, MAGA has been clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, no doubt in hopes of embarrassing (and perhaps convicting) the privileged elite. Everything appeared to be headed in that direction until a couple weeks ago when Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi told MAGA world there was nothing in the files, that there's nothing to see here.

And thus the current outrage from Trump supporters who suddenly feel betrayed by their idol and are now screaming about a deep state cover up. "This is not what I voted for!" bellows MAGA. Given ICE arrests and deportation of immigrants, passage of the Big Bad Bill that will take health care away from millions, the deconstruction of the Department of Education that will send millions of children into poverty if not hunger, illegal tariffs that are just now raising inflation numbers, just what the hell did you vote for?

How Trump deals with the schism within MAGA could be the actual measure of his accountability, even if his name never shows up in the Epstein files. 

An interesting side note in the Epstein case is what is to become of Ghislaine Maxwell? She is Epstein's associate who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for child sex trafficking. With Trump claiming the Epstein files are fake and a hoax, can Maxwell now ask Trump for a pardon, or at the very least, a retrial? Trump, of course, wants her to stay quiet.

Trump is asking Bondi to release "pertinent" aspects of the Epstein grand jury testimony, but that's not a simple thing to do – not even for a president. By law, grand jury testimony can only be released by a judge and a court order, and that will take time. If it happens at all. Grand jury testimony is almost never revealed.

It's a freaking mess. But the MAGA monster seems to be eating its own over this. I don't know. Trump has wriggled out of accountability so often before that we've come to expect it to happen again.

Maybe this time it will be different.

 

  

 

Review

Last month I participated in my second political protest since my college days in 1970 – 55 years ago – when I joined about 300 other demonstrators for the "No Kings" rally on the Square by the Old Courthouse.

I was holding a hand-crafted cardboard sign that said "Hands Off Our Democracy" when a fellow came up to me and asked me point blank, with more than a little reproach in his voice, "Do you think we're a republic or are we a democracy?"

The question caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to attend a Q and A event. But without giving it much thought, I responded with a smile, "A little bit of both, I think." It's what I was taught in civics class back in high school, when civics was an actual subject and public schools were not considered a platform for leftist propaganda.

"You're wrong," he replied. "We are not a democracy. We're a republic," and then he stormed off to stand behind me, where he promptly gave a smart military salute to the American flag waving proudly on the tall pole in the Square.

I swear to God he did. 

Several thoughts raced through my head at once. I'm pretty sure his earnest salute to the flag was a protest to my (our) protest and that possibly he thought he was the only patriot in the crowd that day. I told myself, "Wait a minute. I'm exercising my First Amendment right to free speech here. I'm as much a patriot as you think you are. It's because I love this country that I protest against a president who sends brown-skinned people to detention camps in an overt act of racial prejudice and without due process, who places the Marines in American streets to intimidate protesters, who fosters an enforcement agency (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE) whose members wear masks and no identification, and who does all of this without the consent of Congress and through executive decisions that are probably illegal and can be challenged in court.

I want this country that I love to be better than this. 

In retrospect, I should have stepped next to this fellow and saluted the flag with him. All my best thoughts come after the fact.

I bring this up because I recently heard a conversation on TV where this Trump supporter tried to explain why this country is a republic and not a democracy. OK, I get it now. That's where I've heard this argument before. It's a MAGA talking point. If you take democracy out of the equation, you can justify to yourself that a president is all powerful. A monarch. A king. This is exactly what the Founding Fathers tried to avoid and why presidents were given limited powers in the Constitution.

Originally, a president was commander-in-chief of the armed forces; he could negotiate treaties (with Senate approval); he could appoint ambassadors and other officials (with Senate approval); he could grant reprieves and pardons, and he had the power to veto legislation. There's nothing there about suspending due process or building inhumane detention camps in the Florida swamp.

So what kind of government are we supposed to be? 

I see us as a constitutional federal democratic republic.

It is constitutional because we follow the  U.S. Constitution; it's federal because power is divided between national and state governments; it's a democracy because its citizens (We The People) have a voice through free and fair elections, and it's a republic because we elect a representative government.

There's not a lot I remember from high school. I do remember slow dances with Peggy, running cross country in the fall, chess club on Fridays. And all those civics and history classes. 

That was the good stuff worth remembering. 

 

 

 

 

1776

Every Fourth of July, I treat myself to a viewing of the Broadway musical 1776. I taped the show off TCM about seven or eight years ago and tucked it away in my video library, so I always have access to it. I can watch it any time I want to.

But mostly, I like to watch it on the Fourth.

As you might expect by the title, it's a Broadway rendition of the birth of our country. And while many aspects of the film (and the musical) are either composites or half-truths to move the narrative along (for example, Martha Jefferson never came to Philadelphia to be with her horny husband), it's still an inspiring film – especially given that the Second Continental Congress was held in secrecy and the nascent nation was in the midst of a shooting revolution.

If nothing else, the movie reflects the sense of purpose the Founding Fathers had in breaking away from England and the tyranny of King George III and thus drafting the Declaration of Independence. The half-truths and composites are not only entertaining, but they feel real. At least they do to me.

Anyway, the signing of the Declaration ultimately led to the creation of the U.S. Constitution in 1788 – just seven years after the end of the Revolutionary War. I tend to tie those two incredible documents together. The Revolution was fought to separate the colonies from a monarchy and the Constitution was designed and created by We the People to prevent the rise of another King George III.

The Founding Fathers were aware of this problem as they grappled with the danger of a strong president who could become a tyrant. That's why they created a bicameral Congress with three branches of government that is empowered with checks and balances to reign in a rogue president. 

It works when everybody does their jobs. 

Fast forward 237 years...

Somehow, some way, the Supreme Court has granted a felonious president with 34 criminal indictments complete immunity for the length and duration of his term. Where is the logic in that? Where is the logic of removing 50 years of settled law to prevent a woman from having control of her own body? How do detention camps exist in America after what we saw in World War II?

On this Fourth of July, felon president Trump signed the Big Beautiful Bill (who comes up with these stupid names anyway? Alligator Alcatraz. Really? It sounds like we're getting our government from out of a comic book) that will add $3.3 trillion to the nation debt over 10 years. It will cut $930 billion from Medicaid, thus endangering the existence of possibly 300 or more rural hospitals and perhaps 25 percent of the country's nursing homes. A total of $170 billion will be cut from Medicare. Another 12 million people could lose their health care. How about a $285 billion cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program? All of this in order to pay for a tax break for billionaires in what is amounting to be the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich. How does this help the American people? All it does is make us hungrier, poorer and sicker. Many of us will die before our time because of this immoral bill, but, hey, we all die anyway, right Sen. Joni Ernst?

Meanwhile, $10 billion is earmarked for missions to Mars (what?) and another $150 billion to immigration enforcement (those masked men from ICE who don't bother with piddly stuff like due process). You know all those criminals they're supposed to be deporting? Turns out less than 10 percent have committed violent crimes, and that is from ICE's own data. Another 65 percent have committed no crimes at all except, apparently, for the color of their skin. And to meet a quota.

I have a feeling this type of paranoid, fear-mongering government isn't what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they penned We the People. I might be wrong, but I assumed their concept of government was a bit loftier. Perhaps more idealistic. Certainly kinder.

I guess I might have to wait for the musical 2025 to find out. 

 

 

 

Whirlwind

Last night the U.S. Senate, powered by Republicans, approved moving convicted felon president Donald Trump's Big Beautiful (tax and spending) Bill forward toward becoming a reality by a narrow 51-49 vote.

If you're paying attention, you know this is the bill that will take cuts out of key social programs, most notably Medicaid, which stands to lose hundreds of billions of dollars. If the bill eventually passes as written, peoples' very lives could be in jeopardy. Especially – and ironically – those in red-state fly-over country.

The bill provides the lifeblood for many services, but it's particularly the sustenance for rural hospitals. If passed, expect many rural hospitals to eventually go out of business. People will suffer.

Even Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that some of the bill's provisions did not comply with Senate budget rules. Angry and irresponsible Republicans ignored her anyway. I guess this is what happens when a convicted felon sets the example.

In reality, the bill is designed to pay for Trump's pledged tax cuts for the incredibly wealthy. It will also add upwards of $5 trillion to the national debt.

And I thought Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility. If this bill passes, expect more hardships for all of us – unless you're in the top one percent. It's wealth disparity personified.

•   •   •

I woke up one day and discovered that the United States has a secret police force. It's called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Apparently, it has the power to seize, kidnap and arrest American citizens off the street and deport them – without the constitutional right of due process – to foreign nations for detention.

ICE officers wear masks, which is something I thought criminals did. Oh, OK. Right. They beat on people who fit a certain racial profile. Almost exclusively it involves people with dark skin. It doesn't even matter if targeted people were born in this country because the 14th amendment (1868) – the birthright amendment which proudly distinguishes this nation from all others – is under fire.

Even recent rulings by the Supreme Court seem to be ignoring the Constitution, granting Trump even more power to arrest and deport people considered to be criminals. 

I think what is happening here is a reaction to the browning of America, which is a demographic reality some folks are trying to reverse. People with white skin are in power and apparently they'll do anything to circumvent the Constitution to stay in power. And to keep the country white.

It's an abomination. It's unAmerican.  It's unconstitutional. This is what happens when an arrogant convicted felon is in charge.

•   •   •

Trump has declared that the bombing strike he ordered against Iranian nuclear facilities last week "obliterated" Iran's capacity to make a nuclear bomb.

But early assessment from his own military analysts seem to suggest otherwise. "Leaked" reports (probably from people in Trump's own administration) indicate that Iran's program may have been set back perhaps three to six months. That's far from obliteration.

There's even doubt that nuclear fuel needed to build these bombs was even in these facilities. Even Tulsi Gabbard, the Trump-appointed director of National Intelligence, said it was unlikely Iran was building a nuclear bomb. Trump, the bone-spurred military genius that he is, disagreed with her and his own intelligence agencies, and Gabbard hasn't been seen since.

If the early damage assessments we've been given are any indication, the 30,000-pound bunker bombs (designed to penetrate upwards of 200 to 300 feet underground) did not have the intended effect of obliterating the Iranian program. It's likely those B-2s bombed an empty mountain. Nobody is certain exactly where that weapons-grade fissionable material is right now.

The absurdity here is that Trump is desperately trying to bomb his way to a Nobel Peace Prize. You know, because President Obama has one.

The most reliable way to destroy a military target is to put boots on the ground.

This got me to thinking of the historical past.

During World War II, the Nazis had reinforced concrete pens along the French, German and Baltic states coastlines to house and protect their U-boat submarine fleets. Repeated bombing missions could not destroy those pens, and some still exist today. None were obliterated.

Concrete pillboxes still dot the Normandy beaches. Castles still abound in the French and English countrysides. Sometimes it pays to learn from the past. 

 

 

Hacked off

I instantly went into panic mode.

I'd clicked onto a text message. The next thing I knew, the screen on my laptop filled border to border with a message that my MacBook Pro had been infected, and instructed me to not hit the "off" button.

Oh, yeah. And here's the 1-800 number to Apple Security.

I know. I know. Whatever you do, don't call that number. There is no such thing as Apple Security. Little bells were going off in my head, clearly warning me not to call that number. In fact, I should have hit the "off" button.

But I called the number.

I mean, jeez, this was my $1,500 computer. I wanted it back.

So I'm on the phone with a fellow who speaks English with a Middle Eastern accent (another red flag, I guess). I'm on the phone with him for 90 minutes or so, following his instructions. He gets control of my cursor and I see it flipping around my screen as my mouse sits silently on its pad.

I'm sweating, feeling really uncomfortable about this. But he promises me we're almost done and I'll have my laptop back soon.

He transfers me to another person, who also speaks with a Middle Eastern accent. We're in my banking accounts. And then I get transferred again, to yet another Middle Eastern accent. It finally dawns on me that I'm being scammed. It's probably some troll farm halfway around the world, since everybody is speaking with the same accent. I hang up in the middle of the phone call and go directly to my bank, where I tell them what I did. I keep mumbling "idiot" to myself the whole time.

We start closing accounts immediately. We call my wife at work and tell her what happened. She's understanding, but I suspect I'll be divorced by the end of the day because she never bargained to be married to an idiot. She asks our banker if any money has been moved and we discover that $1 has been routed from one account into another. A test.

Kim gets home, and there's no shouting. No blaming. No accusations. I figured I'd deserve everything she could throw at me, but all she did was try to calm me down. We take the laptop and drive to Best Buy in Winston-Salem, where we let the Geek Squad take over. 

They look at the screen, where the hackers' "Any Desk" program was running. "Ah, the infamous 'Any Desk,'" said the associate. "We have the tools to repair this." Apparently, they've seen this hack before.

I have to tell you, those guys were great. They told me the computer would be ready in six days, but two days later, I got a text from them telling me my device was ready for pickup.

In the meantime, Kim and I were doing everything we could to protect ourselves. We've changed a lot of passwords. We've changed accounts. The computer has been scrubbed. We froze our credit cards. It's been an exhausting and stress-filled hassle to finally get here, but here we are. Finally.

I've been telling my friends what happened and several suggested that I write this blog to serve as something like a public service announcement. I mean, I have a college education and I still did this. It could happen to anybody. The bank told me that. The Geeks told me that. My friends have told me that.

So if anything happens to you while you're on the computer, just TURN IT OFF!

And DON'T CALL THE NUMBER!

Take it from me. 

When Johnny Comes Marching Home

So now we're at war.

I thought president and convicted felon (and don't forget adjudicated rapist) Donald Trump was going to keep us out of any future wars. He's a peacemaker. Wasn't that one of his campaign promises? What, you mean he lied to us? How is that possible?

Sometime yesterday afternoon, Trump ordered an airstrike against the nuclear facilities at three separate locations in the sovereign (albeit terrorist sponsoring) nation of Iran. If I understand this correctly, several 30,000-pound bunker buster bombs were dropped on the underground uranium enrichment plant at Fordo, while 30 Tomahawk missiles launched by the Navy found targets in two other sites.

I don't know how surgical these strikes were. I'm assuming some people have died. It's hard to imagine a 30,000-pound bomb as being surgical.

While the strike may satisfy the insatiable cravings of MAGA (comments like "It's about time," "He's the best president we've ever had," and "I've been waiting for this since 1981" have shown up in social media), there is a sense of constitutional illegality to this.

Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution says the president cannot unilaterally declare war. That privilege is the sole responsibility of Congress, which is supposed to serve as a check and balance to presidential overreach. The Founding Fathers foresaw this when they divided the powers between the legislative and executive branches to prevent a rogue president from having unchecked power over military actions. Los Angeleans might know something about that what with Marines and National Guardsmen in their streets in the wake of a civil disturbance that local law enforcement has under control.

The War Powers Resolution of 1973 also limits a president's ability to commit troops to military action without Congressional approval. It requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of deploying troops. It also requires the president to withdraw troops within 60 days unless Congress authorizes deployments.

I'm sure a felon president who insists on wearing MAGA baseball caps at cabinet meetings like some obtuse cartoon character would do this. Not. 

As the sun breaks through the morning twilight today, we can only wonder what Iran's response will be. American foreign military bases are clearly now in jeopardy of Iranian retaliation. Heck, I think Americans in our own country are in jeopardy. I wonder if that includes immigrants?

Trump apparently ignored American intelligence sources (putting the words "Trump" and "intelligence" in the same sentence seems like an oxymoron. Or maybe just moronic) insisting that Iran was not close to building a nuclear weapon at all. "I don't believe it," said Trump, disparaging American intelligence collection yet again. That makes yesterday's attack by the U.S. very opportunistic, especially in the wake of Israel's military actions against Iran in the days before. 

Some reports state that Iran already moved its fissionable material to other locations prior to the bombing. 

Trump promised (Oh, no. Not another promise) us a two-week pause while making a decision whether or not to attack Iran, but he waited less than two days instead. It has the feel that Trump had already made up his mind to bomb Iran in the moment. Like a child opening his Christmas presents early, he couldn't wait. Instead, he's fulfilling Israel Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu's wildest wet dream, because no other country in the world has bunker bombs.

And, hey. Have any of our allies commented on Trump's actions, or shown any support at all (other than Israel?) Not that I've heard as I write this. If a response from our Allies does come, it certainly won't be considered immediate.

Instead, we're left wondering what the Iranian response will be. You know Iran will not let this go. Could we find pain on American soil? Cyber attacks? Biological attacks. Do you not think Iran has sympathetic proxies and sleeper cells around the world? Is air travel less safe? Expect the cost of gas to soar. Maybe the stock market takes a dive. Did Trump consider any of this in his eagerness to blow up Iran?

In his desperate bid to win a Nobel Peace Prize (you know, because President Obama got one), Trump said he would keep us out of war. 

All we know is that we're in an undeclared war waiting for the next foot to fall.

And people die in wars. 

 

 

Brian Wilson

A friend of mine surprised me several years ago when he told me that he didn't particularly care for The Beach Boys music.

That didn't compute for me.

The reason, he said, was that their music was mostly about surfing and the southern California lifestyle, things he couldn't really relate to in North Carolina.

Brian Wilson

 To each his own, I guess.

The Beach Boys reached me in a different way. I loved their layered harmonies, catapulted by the shared DNA of the Wilson brothers: Brian, Dennis and Carl. Throw in cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, and suddenly you might find yourself in the harmonic realm of the Everly Brothers.

I didn't particularly care what they sang about – cars, girls, high school – it just sounded good. Heck, the music was so enticing that I actually wanted to go to southern California just to see what all the excitement was about.

As I grew older, I learned that Brian Wilson was the core genius of the California Sound the group produced, although each of the members made their own significant contributions. And as books and movies appeared, I was astonished to learn that Brian was the product of an abusive and controlling father. It was this abuse, said Wilson, that contributed to the mental illness that prevented him from touring with the group after 1964.

I didn't clearly realize it at the time, but The Beach Boys were running through the music charts concurrently with The Beatles in something of a friendly, unofficial competition.

In one of the stories that I like to read about, Wilson was stunned by the mastery The Beatles produced with Rubber Soul, a mostly acoustic pop music game-changer that came out in 1965 with many of the tunes inspired by work of Bob Dylan.

Wilson, in response, countered with a masterpiece in 1966, Pet Sounds, featuring such tunes as "Wouldn't It Be Nice", "Caroline No", "Sloop John B" (a remake of an old Bahamian folk song going back to 1916. Pete Seeger and the Weavers covered in in the 1950s) and "God Only Knows".

Wow.

When Paul McCartney of The Beatles heard Pet Sounds, he reportedly cried after repeated listenings. And so was born Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band as a response in 1967, yet another pop music game changer.

For those of us who lived it, we were awash in spectacular music.

Wilson's genius was not only in his songwriting and arranging, but also in his studio work. "Good Vibrations", written by Love, features an odd sounding electro-theremin, and Wilson's modular recording style, which splices together takes from different sessions, which was unusual at the time.

Wilson passed away Tuesday at the age of 82. There is a void out there now, I think. The passing of the hallmarks of my youth reminds me of my own approaching mortality. God only knows. 

 

 

Go Crimson

I don't understand Trump's vendetta against Harvard University.

Or higher education in general.

But Harvard. There's something about the sound of "Harvard" that suggests (or perhaps screams) intelligence. Or innovation. Or research. Or even America itself.

It's the oldest university in the United States, founded 389 years ago by Puritan clergyman John Harvard in 1636. That's 152 years before the Constitution of the United States was ratified. Holy smokes.

And almost from its very beginning, Harvard has been a magnet for the intelligencia. It's where smart people go to become even smarter, with the ultimate idealistic aim of making the planet a better place to live. Eight former presidents have attended Harvard, including John Adams, his son John Quincy Adams and Civil War hero Rutherford B. Hayes. There's also Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Notice that Donald Trump is not one of them.

Trump's rationale for attacking Harvard – he wants to limit or block the admission of foreign students to satisfy his xenophobic tendencies, and at the same time accuse the university of antisemitism  for student disruption on campuses based on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.

Trump also cites alleged civil rights violations, diversity, equity and inclusion policies and university agendas as reasons to freeze assets. 

So the threats come, including withholding grant monies not only to Harvard, but to Columbia, Princeton, Brown, Penn and Northwestern, to name a few.

So Trump, in all of his wisdom, has cut $450 million in federal grants to Harvard. In all, he's withheld over $11 billion in cuts.

Much of that money goes into research grants – like cancer research, especially at Harvard. I think this is an incredibly stupid move by the Trump administration as we move closer and closer to being a more unhealthy country. I mean, let's take the fluoride out of our drinking water. Let's discourage measles vaccinations. Hell, let's discourage Covid vaccinations while we're at it.

We are in the middle of Trump's retribution  presidency, the one where he pays back all the people and institutions he thinks wronged him during his first term. How does making us a dumber, sicker, crueler people make America great again? How does a 34-times convicted felon get to wield such power against a private university?

I think Harvard can survive the Trump era. It has a $50 billion endowment (which is not bottomless) and, so far, the support of the law community.

We need Harvard to survive, even if you might think it's elitist and liberal. It's still the beating heart of American education.

 

More crap

On Friday, we learned that the Trump administration denied North Carolina's request to extend FEMA's Tropical Storm Helene relief funding for debris removal.

The storm caused about $60 billion in damages for the state and killed approximately 100 people. It was awful. North Carolinians are still trying to figure out how a storm with the force of a hurricane could ravage the mountains.

To be fair, FEMA is still providing 90 percent funding, but the remaining 10 percent is the equivalent to $200,000 million, which is not insignificant when people are still living in tents.

A few months ago, Kim and I went to Asheville to hear one of our favorite bands, Underhill Rose, perform. On the way up, the first hint of damage we saw was at Old Fort. Trees were still down. Some buildings were uninhabitable. 

By the time we reached neighboring Black Mountain and Swannanoa, the scope of the damage was clearly evident – and almost unbelievable to process from the inside of a car.

When we finally reached Asheville, the Interstate still had a layer of river silt imprinted on its surface and storm damage – particularly fallen trees – lay strewn on either side of the road. And this was five months later. It's going to take a long, long time for complete recovery.

But on Friday, the Trump administration said nope, further assistance is "unwarranted" and gave no reason why. So much for the transparency they claim to have.

And this coming from a guy who criticized then-President Joe Biden for abandoning the state and mishandling the hurricane response. Forgotten, I guess, was Trump's own response to North Carolina in 2017, during his first term, when the state requested $929 million in aid in the wake of Hurricane Matthew. North Carolina received just one percent ($6.1 million) of what it requested. Thanks, bro.

In the back of my head I'm thinking the only reason to deny the state recovery funding is retribution. Governor Josh Stein is a Democrat who doesn't mind sparring with Trump now and then. And Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, voted heavily Democratic for Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election. She received 98,602 votes (61.47.percent) while Trump totaled 59,016 votes (36.77 percent). So the payback presidency continues because a child pretending he's a clown sits at the Resolute Desk.

Roy Cooper, another Democrat, was the governor in 2017, in case you're looking for a pattern.

Meanwhile, the idiocy continues. When he's not denying FEMA funding, Trump's trying to punish Harvard University by banning the enrollment of foreign students for absurd or inexplicable reasons. Fortunately, a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order to block the ban. That action puts a stop – at least for now – of a potential brain drain that could hurt this country for decades. Harvard, like most prestigious universities, do invaluable work in research and development. For example, Harvard is probably the leading university in the world in cancer research. So, yeah, let's shut that down.

•   •   •

On a side note, I've noticed that whenever MAGA responds to criticism of Trump, the explanation often given is that the critic is suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS), as if it's an actual thing that is treatable with counseling.

I've been seeing and hearing that for years. I suspect I'll get a few TDS's for today's blog. 

Political debate is a natural, even a genetic, part of this country's heritage. Unless free speech is suddenly declared illegal by executive order, agreeing to disagree is part of a normal and healthy exchange. Declaring that an opponent has TDS amounts to nothing more than a tired, childish ad hominem attack in an attempt to extinguish a person's viewpoint from the debate with a weak insult. 

Be better than that, MAGA.

 

 

 

 

Immigration game

The other day I saw a story published by The Wall Street Journal – a conservative newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns FOX News – that the Department of Homeland Security is considering a reality TV program that pits desperate immigrants against each other in a competition for U.S. citizenship.

I thought this was pretty much more dystopian Trump administration nonsense until I got to the part where TV producer Rob Worsoff has been pitching a show like this as far back as the Obama era (Worsoff, by the way, helped produce Duck Dynasty).

The story gained further credence for me when it noted that DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said she has been in contact with Worsoff and that the Trump administration is interested in the concept, revealing the idea is "in the very beginning stages of that vetting process."

Holy hell. Is there no end to Trump's indignities? His excessively corrupt administration (see: gold-plated Qatari 747 jet airliner) thrives on the pain and despair of others, and immigrants are an easy and special target for him. Not all immigrants, mind you. South Africans, who are white and speak English, are coming to the United States as asylum seekers and are welcomed by the Trump clown show. But Hispanics, who are usually non-Whites, don't generally speak English and are often being labeled, without due process, as MS-13 gang members, are being deported (probably unconstitutionally) to foreign nations not native to them. Cruel and unusual? Well, yes. That's the point, isn't it?

All this abomination got me to thinking about immigration in this country. It's not a particularly pleasant picture when you get right down to it.

Oh, sure. We've seen the images of poor Europeans coming off ships at Ellis Island under the shadow of the State of Liberty, and it's as feel good an image as there is. It's what America is all about. It's the Statue of LIBERTY, for crying out loud.

Until you consider that Black Africans were brought to these shores in 1619 to serve as slaves – by white Europeans, and primarily, by white Englishmen and who were mostly Protestant Christians.

Which makes the white Englishmen this country's first immigrants, not to mention its first slave holders. And one of the first things the white Englishmen do is steal the land from native Americans, who are not white. Oh, my God! It's an invasion!

It's a slippery slide from there.

As the country grew, so did its biases. As humans, we don't seem to do well with things we don't know about. Like somebody else's culture. Or their religion. So when the great potato famine sparked Irish immigration to the U.S. in the mid-1840s, it also brought with them large numbers of Catholics, and well, you know the rest: Irish need not apply.

Then it was the Germans in 1848, crossing the Atlantic to escape revolution. The resident Englishmen were so confused by this they called the Germans "Dutch" because the German word for German is "Deustch." Makes sense, right? It's a dehumanizing tactic to label an ethnic group something they're not. Well, we know that now. Because we're still seeing it happen.

About the same time that the Germans came over, the Chinese arrived, hoping to take advantage of the gold rush in California. Here's a factoid: the Chinese were primarily used to build the western section of the Transcontinental Railroad. Approximately 12,000 Chinese immigrants helped with the construction of the project from 1865 to 1869, often working under horrendously dangerous conditions. Imagine that. The American railroad system, made in China.

Then came the Italians in the 1880s, trying to escape hardship and political strife. Oh, my God. Mafia. More Catholics. And that Mediterranean dark skin. Watch out.

Meanwhile, Jews are coming to the United States in three significant waves from 1820 to 1924. One of the most shameful moments in American history, to my mind, occurred in 1939 when the German ocean liner MS St. Louis tried to disembark 900 Jewish refugees who were fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany immediately prior to World War II. But the United States, Canada and Cuba refused to admit the asylum seekers. Some returned to Germany, only to perish in the Holocaust.

And, of course, we have the Muslim ban. After all of our past history, it's no surprise, I guess. 

We like to think of ourselves as a nation founded on Christian values, but our past often reveals us for who we really are: humans who struggle with prejudice, fear and ignorance. The hope is that we can learn from our past.

And then the next thing you know, we find ourselves with government sanctioned immigration games on TV. 

Do you feel like we're being set up for something?

 

 

 

 

Mom, again

There's this picture of Mom that I love when she had just turned 19. She's just graduating from high school, so I figure it's about 1947.

I don't think the photo was professionally done because the top of her head was nearly cut off. It might have been taken by a family member. Perhaps one of her four siblings. Or maybe her dad, Harry. Or even my Dad, who was dating Carol at the time. I'll never know. 

 But it's beautifully posed.

She's standing in an open field, in heels, wearing dress gloves and an above-the-knee skirt, complete with a shoulder bag. And a corsage.

She might be smiling, but I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's the hint of a smile. Or perhaps the suggestion of one, as if she knows some really good stuff and she's not going to tell anyone. At least not yet.

What I love about this picture is that she is standing firm on her ground, facing 45 degrees from straight on. She's looking ahead. There's confidence there, I think. She's holding her shoulder bag with a measure of authority.

Mom and Dad are already an item by this point, and it'll be three more years before they are married. I remember hearing stories that Dad would take the trolley from where he lived in Allentown to see Mom, who lived in neighboring Bethlehem.

There's no way she can clearly see what awaits her, however. 

She never goes to college (she did major in accounting in high school and worked for an insurance agency for a while) but she and Dad end up having three sons who kept them pretty busy.

I'm supposing Mom was the ideal 1950s-60's housewife, but I have to guess this part: even though I lived it, I was in my world, she was in hers. Dad changed jobs fairly often, first as a high school English teacher, then a Red Cross counselor, then a teacher again, and then a Moravian minister before becoming a teacher once again and then, at last, back to the church again. I like to say he couldn't keep a job, but that wasn't it. I think he needed to find his true challenge; his authentic self. It always seemed to be somewhere he wasn't.

Consequently, the Wehrles lived in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut and back to Pennsylvania before moving to Ohio, and then, finally, to Wisconsin before Dad found himself. I'm pretty sure Mom never factored in all the traveling she would do as a housewife in her life, but there it was.

Sometime in the 1960s, Betty Friedan wrote a bestseller called The Feminine Mystique and a copy somehow ended up in our house. It wouldn't surprise me if Dad bought it for her because she was a voracious reader, but the book challenged the belief at the time that "fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949 – the housewife-mother."

I'm not sure if this book was life changing for Mom or not. I was only 12 in 1963. But I think an independent streak emerged and evolved in Mom. She got a job at Moravian College to help with finances while Dad was in seminary. A few years later, when Dad had a church in Coopersburg, Mom turned to oil painting. She was very good at it. I'm sure she found a sense of fulfillment in her talent and soon Carol Wehrle originals were hanging in many of the rooms of our house.

I have a few to this day.

She died in 1991 at the early age of 63 when she could no longer hold back the breast cancer that  ultimately ravaged her body. She outlived Dad by four years (who died of the prostate cancer that found his bones), and in those four years she displayed a courage and strength I don't think I'd seen in her before, even though she needed courage and strength to raise three sons.

I didn't see it then.

I see it now.

Thanks, Mom.

 

 

 

 

Home improvement

If you had asked me several years ago what a pergola was, I probably would have answered "Huh?" and shrugged my shoulders.

Our old arbor was in serious disrepair.

 "Something made in Japan?" might have been my guess. It's likely that I might actually have been thinking of a pagoda.

But we had this simple wooden structure in our backyard that over the years was seriously deteriorating. It was there when we bought our house more than 22 years ago. It was our decorative arbor and bench where the wisteria grew and climbed.

But the structure was in bad shape, even back then.

Finally, about a year or so ago – about the time we had our new backyard fence built – the arbor/pergola became a real eyesore. It had a bad lean to it, so much so that we figured it might collapse the next time a bird landed on it. Slats were falling off of it. The only reason it was still standing is that the wisteria was no doubt holding it all together.

We thought it was only a matter of time and that we needed to do something this year.

Our new pergola is a sight to behold.

 So we contacted Nico Barrie of A&K Quality Fencing in High Point, the same guy who built our fence.

"Help," I pleaded. 

Nico arrived in the nick of time to give us an estimate. I showed him a picture of an arbor that Kim and I liked at the Davidson County Senior Services Center and asked him if he could build us something similar.

He said he could. The day he started the job, he tore down the old structure within minutes, then set the new four main posts in concrete, which already made it different from the old one. He and his crew came back the next day, after the concrete had set, and finished the job within hours.

Just like that, we had a beautiful, brand-new pergola. (OK, OK. Turns out the terms arbor and pergola are pretty interchangeable. I think it might all depend on how upscaly you want to be). It's the perfect addition to our yard. I kind of wish we had done this a few years ago when our house was selected for the Master Gardeners garden tour.

Just for the record: By description, a pergola is "a garden or patio feature that creates shade and defines an outdoor space. It typically has vertical posts, horizontal beams and an open roof made of slats or of a louvered design."

By description, an arbor is "a vertical structure in a landscape or garden that consists of two or four posts with a simple slatted roof."

Nico settled the issue when he billed us for a pergola.