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5/9/25

5/9/2025

3 Comments

 

FIRST, THEY CAME FOR
THE ‘DUDES IN DRESSES,’
THEN ...

 The Supreme Court clears the way for bigotry, starting with transgender soldiers

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PictureEMILY SHILLING Credit: US Navy

THE NATION’S HIGHEST COURT, among its many obligations, is supposed to protect individuals and groups that are often small and unpopular.
     But the U.S. Supreme Court on May 6 did the opposite: the justices said that President Trump could go ahead with his ugly, unfair, bigoted attack against transsexual soldiers.
     Specifically, the high court halted a lower court’s order that had stopped Trump and his underlings from wrecking the careers and lives of military men and women who have changed genders.
     Earlier that day, the buffoon, Pete Hegseth, who is Trump’s secretary of defense, outlined the mission of the world’s most powerful military force this way.
     “We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind” Hegseth boasted at a special operations forces conference in Florida.
     “No more pronouns,” Hegseth crowed. “No more climate change obsession. No more emergency vaccine mandates. No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.”
     The quotes are from the official Department of Defense transcript, which made sure it spelled out “shit” and noted that the audience applauded and cheered Hegseth.
     Maybe a lot of us are out of patience with this transsexual nonsense.
     Maybe we believe Democrats lost last year’s election because they were lured into political sideshows that turn off most voters, who worry about the Big Picture issues like inflation, the border and turning the Oval Office into a gold-leaf throne room.
     But prejudice is not trivial.
     Trump won the election because he has a weird charisma that I don’t understand; and because Joe Biden looked, sounded and acted his age; and because Kamala Harris didn’t have enough time to make her case; and, not incidentally, because she is the wrong sex and the wrong color.
     So, we can try say that transsexuals – athletes, soldiers and other trans folks – who are an annoying minority that’s too small and too out-of-step with mainstream America to matter.
      But bigotry is America’s – and humankind’s – original sin. We fought a terrible war because we rationalized that Black slaves, economically  useful were subhuman. Later, we hoped the civil rights movement of 1960s had finished the human rights job the nation abandoned after the Civil War. And in the 21st Century, we hoped anew that the Black Lives Matters movement would, this time, actually finish the work.
     But bigotry hadn't gone away and never does.
     Prejudice is one of the reasons that Donald Trump is now bigot-in-chief, elected on a platform of hatred that started with immigrants and transsexual students and soldiers but ultimately will find new and larger targets.


THE SUPREME COURT’S ORDER on Trump’s transsexual ban got what seems to me too little media attention when the story broke, and I haven’t seen any news stories following up in the several days since.
     Part of the reason, as with any Trump outrage, is that there are too many Trump outrages to cover adequately.
      And it could be the nature of the courts, which often seems to delay final word about what they are up to.  In this case, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could proceed to discriminate against military transsexuals while the legal issues are thrashed out at the lower-level Court of Appeals.
     But it seems to me that the justices left plenty of time for even the incompetent Hegseth to get rid of every one of the 4,200 transsexuals that the Department of Defense knows about, a group that makes up less than 1 percent of the nation’s more than 2-million soldiers.
* * *
UPDATE: The Guardian reported May 9 that the Department of Defense began the process of forcing transgender soldiers to “voluntarily” leave military service, estimating that 1,000 would be expelled initially.  The Pentagon said it would scour health records of transgender soldiers who do not “self-identify.”
* * *


IT’S WORTH MENTIONING something about the people involved in the total of three court cases challenging the Trump policy.
     Take the seven plaintiffs in the federal District Court suit in the state of Washington, which happens to be the case that the high court acted on and in which a judge declared a nationwide halt to the attack on trans soldiers.
     “Throughout their 115 years of collective military service,” wrote Judge Benjamin H. Settle in his March 27 order, “they have been awarded over 70 medals for their honorable service and distinctive performance – in many instances after coming out as transgender.”
      Judge Settle singled out Commander Emily “Hawking” Shilling, whom he said had transitioned during the period when former President Joe Biden allowed transgender people to serve. A Navy pilot, Shilling had flown 60 combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, earning three medals during a 19-year career.
     Judge Settle wrote:
     “There is no claim and no evidence that she is now, or ever was, a detriment to her unit’s cohesion, or to the military’s lethality or readiness, or that she is mentally or physically unable to continue her service. There is no claim and no evidence that Shilling herself is dishonest or selfish, or that she lacks humility or integrity.”
      Those mentions of unit cohesion and potential character flaws were not random literary flourishes – they are among the reasons that Trump and his goons claimed that transsexuals threaten military functioning.
       The Trump smear on transgender soldiers is that they are liars – men pretending to be women and vice versa; that their medical care wastes taxpayer money; that fellow soldiers can’t work alongside them.
     Not true, the judge wrote of  Shilling, saying that “Yet, absent an injunction, she will be promptly discharged solely because she is transgender.”


SO WHAT?
     The point is not that Commander Shilling is a war hero; it's that her performance, not her transsexual self, should determine her military career.
     According to Judge Settle, worries about character flaws, unit cohesion that were bigoted excuses that had been disproved during the real-life four-year experiment which Biden allowed transsexuals to serve.
     Shilling and her comrades in the Washington court case had proved themselves, and it does matter that the these people be allowed to succeed on their merits.
     Equallys important is that banning transsexuals in the military is a first step in the resurgence of prejudice as national policy.
     Biogtry, as we've said,  often starts small, with one unpopular group, then extends to the next, until it metastisizes into apartheid, a Jim Crow system of legalized discrimination, always with the potential to become outright genocide in a new Holocaust.
     It's a cliché, that prejudice is a “slippery slope.”
     Starts small, and grows.
     But does the fact that we’ve heard this all before make it irrelevant?
     That we have been warned of the danger  over and over, is the danger  any less true?
     Which is why It's worth repeating, once again, the progression outlined by Martin Niemoller, the pastor, who had witnessed what had happened in Nazi Germany:


     First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a socialist.

     Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out — because I was not a trade unionist.

     Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — because I was not a Jew.

     Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.

     Mocking “dudes in dresses” is a slur, not a military special operation.
     Human “rights” are not optional.
    When we marginalize anyone’s rights – as the Supreme Court has done in the short run and seems likely to do overall in the cases of transgender soldiers  – we put everyone's future in peril, our own and our country's.
3 Comments

May 03rd, 2025

5/3/2025

0 Comments

 

WANT TO STOP TRUMP?
DEFEND NPR AND PBS:
DONATE, LOBBY & LISTEN

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ON HIS 101st DAY IN OFFICE, Donald Trump handed an easy answer to the question millions of Americans have been asking since he won the 2024 election: “What can I do to stop Donald Trump?”
     It’s simple: Defend NPR and PBS.
     Trump on May 1 moved to destroy the country’s two public broadcasters, National Public Radio and the TV equivalent, the Public Broadcasting Service.
     Which gives ordinary citizens the opportunity they’ve been craving: to really do something that will count, perhaps the most important action they can take to counter Trump’s hideous second term.
     Two reasons.
  •  1: NPR and PBS are absolutely state-of-the-art news and information sources. When it comes to journalism, they are as good as it gets. They are available – for free – in every  corner of the United States. It’s like having the New York Times delivered to any doorstep, whether you live in a big city, or a rural village. The only difference is that when NPR and PBS are really cooking, they can be better than the world’s greatestnewspaper
  •  2: The rescue of NPR and PBS is something that every one of us can absolutely do, regardless of our income, location, physical condition and available time. And here’s the best part, what we do will really matter
       Here's our triple play of options. And we don’t have to do all three, even doing just one will be a big deal:
     * Send money.
     * Call, write and lobby ( preferably in person) Senators and Representatives in Congress
     * Tune in – perhaps the most crucial step of all.
    

 HEAR ME OUT, because I know that many  of us have been feeling, if not helpless, not as effective as we’d like with the available tactics to counter the sacrilege  of Trump’s second presidency.
     Yes, millions have turned out for massive street demonstrations, putting our bodies and souls on the line for big, noisy turnouts. Big crowds have overwhelmed Congressional town halls. People have constructed clever signs; braved the cold; rung cowbells and waved flags. All of which has been inspiring and necessary and must continue..
     People have sent money to support progressive Democratic candidates in special elections, and they’ve won.
     We’ve been on the phone to our members of Congress and sent letters and emails. We’ve told pollsters that we consider Trump a disgrace.
      And it’s all vital if we are to weather  the next horrible  weeks and months until the November, 2026 midterm elections,  our next chance to turn the House of Representatives Democratic and thus put the brakes on the Trump madness.
     But in the meantime, nothing that we can do as ordinary individuals will have the enormous effect in preserving democracy than to keeping NPR and PBS as the nation’s robust truth-tellers.


TRUMP THE AUTHORITARIAN, Trump the psychopath, and Trump the bully is at war with the truth.
     Trump doesn’t want us to know what’s going on, and what he’s up to.
     That’s what’s behind his attack on the universities. It’s not that they are too liberal, too woke, too anti Semitic. It ‘s that the professors, the students, the researchers know too much about what’s going on.
     It’s what is behind his drive to hollow out of federal government: getting rid legions of smarty-pants bureaucrats who know if the air will make you sick, whether the weather is killing us and if tariffs make sense.
     It's why he doesn't like the Weather Bureau, the National Science Foundation, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the National Institutes of Health.
      But nothing scares Trump more than the champions of the First Amendment -- the press, the media, the newspapers, the broadcasters, the news services -- whose business is the truth.
     So for Trump, nothing is more important than curbing NPR and PBS.
     PBS connects with 354 TV stations; NPR interacts with 1,024 local stations, with a weekly audience of nearly 30 million people.
     As a lifelong liar, Trump cannot abide these kinds of information systems. As a dictator in the making, nothing is more perilous for him than such an enormous, accessible and credible combined source of trustworthy  information.
     So,  Trump issued his gazillionth executive order, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” in which he ordered the independent Corporation for Public Broadcasting to stop funneling a half-billion in federal dollars a year to NPR and PBS.
     Trump, whom I’m betting  has never spent a day without telling a lie, told a bunch in the executive order, including the proposition that in the Internet era, federally supported broadcasters are an anachronism.
      It’s not true that there are many alternatives to trustworthy media. Most newspapers have failed because of changed financial and cultural underpinnings, leaving the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal as the only credible major survivors. Much of the remaining media is one-sided, like Fox News and MSNBC.
     But his main point is that public broadcasters, even if they aren't needed, are biased. The executive order states:
     "At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.  No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the Government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.  The CPB’s governing statute reflects principles of impartiality:  the CPB may not “contribute to or otherwise support any political party.”  47 U.S.C. 396(f)(3); see also id. 396(e)(2).
     The CPB fails to abide by these principles to the extent it subsidizes NPR and PBS.  Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter.  What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens."

     Trump is absolutely wrong about bias at NPR and PBS. Their reports are exemplary for their professionalism and efforts at fairness - sometimes infuriatingly so.
     An example, the PBS News Hour, the network’s flagship TV news program, began its broadcast Friday evening with the latest economic news, when, in fact, Trump’s attack on PBS and NPR was the bigger story, at least in my  opinion. But you could see the editors struggling to figure what most impacted its audience, and maybe the national jobs report, rather than the attack on their own survival, came first.
     NPR, in its website story about Trump’s attack on the public broadcasters - headlined  "Trump says he's ending federal funding for NPR and PBS. They say he can't" -  appended this endnote to explain that the news judgements were left to the journalists, not the corporate bosses:
     "Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp, Managing Editor Gerry Holmes and Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly."
    Indeed, I suggest you read the story – at this link – as an example of the fairness and depth which underlies NPR’s journalism, day in and day out.
      Which brings me to Trump’s main charge – long a Republican talking point – that NPR and PBS have a liberal orientation.
     It’s true. Just like the Times is a “liberal” newspaper, and the Wall Street Journal is a "conservative" rag, NPR and PBS are more blue than red.
     That does not mean that the remaining big newspapers or the public broadcasters slant their news stories, or focus on only reports that reinforce the political and cultural viewpoints of their staffs. Indeed, as I said, both bend over backwards, too much so to my liking, to achieve fairness and balance.
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 WHICH BRINGS ME BACK to the triple threat of actions every one of us can  take to defend public broadcasting.

SEND MONEY. If every individual or family that listens to and watches NPR or PBS sends even a small amount to their local stations, that can quickly replace the relatively modest  subsidy Trump wants to confiscate.
     Both NPR and PBS already rely on public and other non-government giving for most of their funding. Indeed, there is nothing more tedious than the periodic fundraisers that they air for contributions. But as obnoxious as their fundraising is, it also provides an easy mechanism to weather the Trump attack.
      So hold your nose, cover your ears and eyes and give what you can to the local stations.
     (Regular or “sustainer” amounts are preferred, and giving through bank accounts rather than credit cards is considered a cost-effective payment  mechanism).
     Don’t wait to be asked.

LOBBY CONGRESS.  Republicans have long complained about NPR and PBS. But in the past, defunding threats have been thwarted because many Senators and House members realize outlets in their states are popular.
     Things likely are different this time. Republicans are in charge of both congressional chambers, and so far the party is totally under Trump's control and are not inclined to stand up to him on any issue.
     Still, with the House within reach of a Democratic takeover next  year, enough Red State members may still be listening to their constituents, especially because the money at risk is relatively small.

TUNE IN. As I said, perhaps the most important step that anyone can take is to watch and listen.  
     If you are not, as I am, addicted to NPR, try it out the next time you’re in in your car, or at your computer, or have a radio handy at home.
     If you watch network news on TV, give the PBS News Hour a try. You’ll be amazed at the depth and the scope of the 50 minutes of reporting, minus the horrible drug ads clogging the end of the skimpy newscasts of the commercial networks.
     The more you listen and watch, the more appreciation you'll have for what the public broadcasters do.
     The bigger their audiences, the more likely that the public networks will survive.
     

FINALLY,  DON'T EXPECT PERFECTION. PBS and NPR in the Age of AI are still  operated by people, not saints. They can be as obnoxious, off-the-wall and fallible as the rest of us. So cut them some slack.
     Nothing any of us will do in the next year and a half will be as important to the survival of the country as we know it as our support for NPR and PBS.
     Donate.
     Call.
     Listen & watch.
     Save democracy.

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0 Comments

4/10/25

4/10/2025

1 Comment

 

WHAT IF GOD TELLS DONALD TRUMP TO GO NUCLEAR?

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THE NAGASKI atomic bomb, Aug. 9, 1942
Donald Trump is killing us.
     That’s not in dispute. The only question is how many of us will die too early, when and how.
     A doctor friend reminded me recently of the predicted death toll that could result from Trump’s early moves to stop funding health programs in foreign countries.
     Many of us have  probably forgotten Trump’s attack on USAID and similar programs because there’s so much else going on now. I know I’d put that out of my mind.
     But my friend pointed me to a Nicholas Kristof column in the New York Times last month that predicted 1,650,000 million people might die annually without continued U.S. funding for HIV prevention and treatment. He noted other outcomes – such as a half-million annual deaths from lack of vaccines.
     We know that two children have died in Texas of measles, and both were unvaccinated. We can’t blame Trump for those deaths, but we know that he appointed Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, to oversee public health.  Without vaccines, children will die.
     We know that the Trump is trying to end programs meant to slow, stall and  reverse climate change. Our tortured environment already is producing catastrophic firestorms, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes, heat spells and floods. Unchecked, a wounded climate could make the earth unlivable.
      The nation’s attention currently is on Trump’s assault on the economy – our own and the world’s – by imposing high tariffs, resulting in stunning shifts in stock and bond markets.
     For days, Trump vowed to stay the course until he sort of didn’t, "pausing" ” most big tariffs hikes, but leaving in place  10 percent tariffs on most countries and boosting China’s levies to 145 percent.
     Markets rose joyfully at first.  Then they fell.  Who knows what they’ll do next Monday morning or on Thursday afternoon, as financial wizards undertake a fool's mission - trying to make sense of what Trump is thinking .
     Which brings me to the most serious danger of all – Trump’s singular ability to activate the United States' nuclear arsenal.


LIKE EVERY PRESIDENT since Harry Truman okayed two atomic attacks on Japan in 1945 to end World War II, Trump can launch a nuclear strike and no one can stop him. It's a vestige of the Cold War, when deterrence – fear of retaliation – was supposed to keep the Soviet Union from attacking the U.S.; the president needed to act quickly if the “other side” moved first.
     But Donald Trump would never be that reckless.
     Even Trump would never unleash an unprovoked nuclear holocaust.
     That’s what we all believe. The Trump “base” thinks he’d never, for one reason or another,   fire off a nuclear missile. Democrats, progressives and Independents and apolitical citizens of all sorts, really can’t imagine that.
     But here’s something that the great horror writer Stephen King said about Trump during his first term:
     “That this guy has his finger on the nuclear trigger is worse than any horror story I ever wrote.”
  

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      That line was posted on Twitter, now X, which was cited in a 2017  Esquire magazine article.
     Two years later, King was interviewed about a character in his 1979 novel, “The Dead Zone,” which imagined an emerging demagogue, who had eyes on the White House. The video interview appeared in a “Rolling Stone” magazine article.  
     “Do you think that the Trump presidency is scarier than a Stephen King novel?” the interviewer asked.
     “Short answer to that is yes, I do,” King replied. “I do think it’s scarier.”   

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STEPHEN KING
      Those 2017 and 2019 comments seem to have been blended into a inaccurate quote that’s widely attributed to King: “Donald Trump is worse than any horror story I’ve written.”
      You can find this wording easily in a Google search. But if it's not a literal quote, it is an apt paraphrase of King’s insight into both Trump, as well as the public’s appetite for a charismatic, dangerous politician.
     King  long has had a feel for leaders who go off the rails. I’ve read two of his novels, “The Stand,” published in 1978, and “Under the Dome,” 2009, that feature dangerous characters who have sway with groups of citizens.
     I haven’t read “The Dead Zone,” the novel discussed in the 2019 piece in Rolling Stone , but book summaries describe a rising politician, Greg Stillson, whom another character envisions  triggering a nuclear war if he makes it to the White House.
     King, in his interview, says that his Stillson character, like Trump, wasn't taken seriously as a politician at first, but gained a following and that there were other similarities between the imagined and the real.
     “I know that American voters have always had a real attraction to outsiders with the same kind of right-wing ‘America First’ policy,” King told his interviewer.  “And if that reminds people of Trump, I can’t be sorry, because it was a character that I wrote. It was a boogeyman of mine, and I never wanted to see him actually on the American political scene. But we do seem to have a Greg Stillson as president of the United States.”
     Happily in "The Dead Zone," the fictional Stillson’s political career was cut short and the envisioned nuclear launch never took place.


IN REAL LIFE, United States finds itself in the grip of a president who is as frightening as any in American memory
      And as, King suggests, actual, historical monsters – Hitler, Stalin, Mao – are far scarier than those who are made up.
      Donald Trump has many disturbing attributes. He's racist; he’s cruel, a liar, abusive, vengeful and unpredictable.
     On occasion, Trump has alluded to the use of nuclear weapons.
     Sparing verbally with North Korea during his first term, Trump issued this warning:
     “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” Trump told reporters at his New Jersey golf club in 2017. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”


MOST DISTURBING  to me is that Trump says he’s God’s instrument, meant to guide the United States into a new era, the proof being his narrow escape from an assassination attempt during last year’s campaign.
     Trump put it this way in his inaugural address:
     "Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear.  But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason.  I was saved by God to make America great again."
     This is a man who has carelessly, recklessly brought the country to the edge of a recession, who has arbitrarily shipped immigrants to a dangerous foreign prison, moved to abandon life-saving health programs, mused  about taking over Canada and extorted universities and law firms with financial and legal threats.
     So much is worse today in America and the world, so many lives put in jeopardy, than was was the case just a few months ago, all because of one man.
      It makes me wonder what Donald Trump might do – now or in the future – should he get a signal from God.

1 Comment

3/28/25

3/28/2025

2 Comments

 

THE WAR AGAINST EMPATHY

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RUMEYSA OZTURK, in white parka, Tufts University doctoral student, is captured by masked federal agents on a street in Somerville, Mass., March 25, and whisked away to Louisiana. Donald Trump hopes that most people won't care.
I SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SURPRISED. And neither should you.
     The story I heard last weekend on NPR seemed so preposterous that I thought at first it must have been a satire, a spoof, or maybe I just heard it wrong.
     So I went to the online archives of “Weekend Edition,” found the segment, and listened again.
     Yup. I heard it right the first time. It was a story about  empathy. And it wasn’t good. Not the story; the story was okay. The problem was empathy – empathy, it turns out, is bad.
     Empathy has been added to the Right Wing's enemies list.


HOW COULD THIS BE, I WONDERED? Doesn’t the Right  have enough to do without picking a fight with empathy?
     Aren’t there enough college students to deport? Aren’t there millions of people my age to be impoverished by undermining Social Security? And what of the campaign against Canada? There's so much history to distort. So much climate to change.  And so many hungry school children to make hungrier.  It's a long list.
      So why pick on empathy? Sweet little old empathy, which is the harmless – should I even say it, virtuous – practice of understanding what someone else is going through or thinking?  You know, that "Walk in the other person's shoes" sort ofthing.
      The problem for the Right Wing, it turns out, is that empathy has been hijacked by the Left Wing. The liberals have weaponized empathy as an underhanded way of advancing their nefarious causes.
      Headlined, “How empathy came to be seen as weakness in conservative circles,” the NPR story included soundbites from the front lines. One went like this:
      “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
      Turns out that the speaker isn’t just any Joe Blow spouting off at the neighborhood bar.
      It’s none other than the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, the rocket guy, the electric car guy, the satellite guy, the guy who’s tearing the bejezzus out of the entire U.S. government.
     Elon was talking in February on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” one of the most-listened to podcasts of our moment.
      Elon and Joe were chatting about immigration and how it can get out of hand, imperiling a country’s politics and culture, and empathy was part of the problem.
     “There’s so much empathy that you actually suicide yourself,” Elon says.
     “Yeah,” says Joe.
     NPR seems to have picked up the idea for its story from David French, a New York Times columnist, who explained the basics in an essay “Behold the Strange Spectacle of Christians Against Empathy.”
     French mentioned other Right Wing “thinkers,” who are so bothered by empathy they’ve written books about it. Allie Beth Stuckey, a podcaster, authored “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion.” And  Joe Rigney, a theologian, turned out “The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits.”
     One chilling fact about empathy: women.
     Women are empathy’s fall guys. The girls are easily led astray by the empathy lure. NPR found a soundbite from Stuckey on a podcast, “Family Talk,” explaining how liberals exploit the ladies:
     “They’ll use emotional, compassionate, kind-sounding language in order to get a woman to think, ‘Well, in order to be a good person, in order to be kind, in order to even love my neighbor, then I have to be pro-open borders, I have to be pro- LGBTQ, I have to be pro-choice.’”


AS I SAID, there’s nothing here that should surprise us as we head into the fourth month of the Trump nightmare.
      Cruelty, the opposite of empathy, is essential to the Trump agenda.
      I don’t know why the president is so angry, so savage, so sadistic and so determined to inflict pain, terror and fear on friend and foe alike.
     But it turns out that he is.
     Most people aren't. At least, I don't think most people are like are like Donald Trump.
      Most people  are kind. They care about other people, and they want others to care about them. Most of us don’t want each other to be hungry, homeless, to live in poverty, to be sick without medical care, to suffer in pain, or to be scared out of our minds every day when we tune into the news.
      For Trump to succeed in whatever it is he’s up to, he has to change the fundamentals of being human, to warp the national character.
     Compassion must be turned into disgust, love into hate,  empathy into revulsion.

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 SO THAT WHEN WE WATCH that video showing the capture of the Tufts University doctoral student, Rumeysa Ozturk, by masked federal agents on a street in Somerville, Mass., on March 25, and see her hustled away in an unmarked SUV, we must not care.
      We must not care that Ms.  Ozturk ends up in Louisiana, where, lacking her medications, she has an asthma attack. We must not care that her apparent “offense”  is co-authoring an op-ed essay in a student newspaper. We must not care that a former  classmate, Jennifer Ruth Hoyden, tells the Boston Globe that Ms. Ozturk is “an extremely gentle human being, who could not use a swear word if you paid her.” We must not care that Ms. Ozturk, is 30 years old, from Turkey, enrolled in Tufts’ doctoral program for child study and human development.
     Because empathy has no place in Donald Trump's America.

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DONALD TRUMP'S "bad picture" at the Colorado State House before he pleaded for its removal.
THERE'S AN EMPATHY EXEMPTION, of course, because nothing is straight forward with Donald Trump.
     Trump demands empathy for Donald Trump.
     An example is Trump’s recent complaint about his portrait in the Colorado State House, which he described this way on his social network platform:
     Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before. The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst. She must have lost her talent as she got older. In any event, I would much prefer not having a picture than having this one ….
     By March 25, the day on which Ozturk was, in effect, kidnapped by Trump’s goons, empathetic Coloradans had taken taken down the hurtful painting, which produced a sort of win-win outcome: Trump got his wish; State House visitors no longer had to look at him.


BUT FOR TRUMP TO SUCCEED, empathy must seen as a fool’s errand, too naïve, so wrong-headed and dangerously foolish.
     Which suggests one way to counter the horror Trump is inflicting on our country and on our world.
     Maybe we can’t make it to the next big protest.
     Maybe an inspiring Democratic leader has yet to emerge. Maybe we can’t contribute to every email demanding campaign money. Maybe we don’t own a a Tesla that we can trade in as a rebuke to Musk. And for sure none of us can speed up the calendar to get to the 2026 midterm elections.
      But we can do one simple thing.
     We can care.
     We can be kind.
     We can empathize.
     We can do that every day.

2 Comments

3/21/25

3/21/2025

1 Comment

 

CAN WE HAVE ANOTHER WORD?
Readers have suggested more words to define Trump. The hunt continues.

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A DEMONSTRATION ORGANIZED by the Newport Democratic City Committee at the interchange to the Newport Bridge March 19 featured American and Ukrainian flags and signs saying “No kings,” “Stand for democracy/ Stand with Ukraine,” and “Protect democratic rights.”
 EARLIER THIS MONTH, when it was still winter, and as Trump was deporting people for speaking their minds, openly defying court orders and continuing to betray Ukraine, I wondered if there was a single word that described the president.
     I threw out a couple of my own – CRACKPOT and BONKERS.
     Acknowledging their flaws, I invited suggestions. I proposed ground rules: no swears; no comparisons to animals; none that would degrade people with mental illness; no compound phrases; the choices should suggest meanness, racism and depravity.
     “I like MALIGNANT,” wrote one friend from the Other Coast. She said that her husband calls Trump “THE FERAL HOG. But,noting the contest rules against animals comparisons, she suggested just “FERAL.”
     “I vote for MANIACAL,” said another respondent, who included a fragment of a dictionary definition: “Afflicted with extreme mental derangement … wildly irresponsible.
     “And DEMENTED,” this person continued. “It’s a word I use a lot about Trump.”
     Still another also supplied two words, averring both were “probably not good for reaching a wide enough constituency. I chose them because my Gut reacted when people said them to me.”
  • CRUEL – “This is the word used by animal rights advocates in ads destined to get us incensed and motivated to donate to ASPCA”
  • GREEDY – “I was struck when a Scottish immigrant told me that when he told his college professor colleagues he was moving to the USA, they said to him: ‘Just remember, you are going to a country that can be described in one word, GREED.”
Three other correspondents supplied one word each, without explanations, figuring that they spoke for themselves:

     BASE
     NARCISSISTIC
     ARSONIST


I PARTICULARLY LIKED ANOTHER SUGGESTION, finding it chilling in its depth and intimations of malevolence:
     SADISTIC
     “It’s a word that comes to mind when I think of Trump (and I think of him way too often).
     “I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to understand the moving parts beneath behavior, and “sadistic” comes as close as any to suggesting Trump’s animating dynamic.
     “He’s all about ‘getting even’ with the original sin against him, rooted in his personal history. It’s ‘getting even’ with a bullet.
     “He’s addicted to the satisfaction of his own cruelty, and those cruelties, large and small, play out, over and over again.”

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 A HEADLINE IN THE ATLANTIC magazine purported to echo the same idea I had raised: “One Word Describes Trump.”
     “Wow,” I exclaimed, “a Vulcan mind-meld just in the nick of time, and I began to devour the piece by writer Jonathan Rauch:
     He wrote:
     “Even those who expected the worst from his reelection (I among them) expected more rationality. Today, it is clear that what has happened since January 20 is not just a change of administration but a change of regime—a change, that is, in our system of government. But a change to what?
     “There is an answer, and it is not classic authoritarianism – nor is it is autocracy, oligarchy, or monarchy,” Rauch continued. “Trump is installing what scholars call patrimonialism.”
     That’s it? The elusive last word in defining Trump?
     I despaired . I never heard of the word, had no idea how to pronounce it, much less the foggiest idea about what it meant.
      PATRIMONIALISM ?
     That’s supposed to go on my bumper sticker? Or my next protest placard? No wonder the forces of truth, justice and the American way lost last year’s election.
     Rauch explained that a German sociologist, Max Weber, wrote that the word refers to a ruler who considers himself the “father of the people – the state’s personification and protector.”
     Such regimes, he said, have two self-destructive flaws: they are incompetent and corrupt, and democracy advocates can use both weaknesses to undermine and defeat them.
     Maybe PATRIMONIALISM fits Trump just like his fake hairdo and orange skin, maybe it provides political strategists with the secrets of turning back the Trump assault on democracy.
     But it’s not the word that I and many Americans are looking for.


SO THE HUNT GOES ON.
     Lately, CRIMINAL lately is working for me, both as a noun and an adjective.
     Trump literally is a CRIMINAL. Remember, he was convicted last May of falsifying business records in hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
     And Trump’s manic campaign to destroy America is CRIMINAL in its lawlessness, heartlessness and  thoughtlessness, with equal parts savagery and selfishness mixed in.
     So today, the second day of spring, I thank responders for their suggestions. But the work is not done.
     Defining Trump – which will help in his undoing – remains a continuing and important pursuit.
   The suggestion box remains open and hungry.

1 Comment

3/17/25

3/17/2025

2 Comments

 

INTERLUDE
A joyful parade reminds us of cherished traditions worth defending

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OVER THE WEEKEND, my neighborhood was invaded by federal troops, State Police with K-9 units, sword-wielding militias, demonstrating university students, scores of local cops on the march and a truck loaded with rugby toughs.
     Taking all of this in was a crowd numbering in the thousands lining both sides of more than a mile of city streets, shouting and waving and hollering.
     The occasion was the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, an institution in Newport, R.I., with the march ending conveniently at the end of my street.
     For more than an hour, what might be symbols and mechanisms of oppression in an America now struggling to defend its democratic roots and commitment to the rule of law, instead helped celebrate one of this community’s most cherished traditions.
     The military units included a marching band from the nearby Newport naval base, along with a free-spirited National Guard groups, outfitted in camouflage uniforms, playing jazz and dancing and swaying as they played.
     The State Police K-9 units strolled the parade route, encouraging bystanders to pat the friendliest pooches. Firefighters rode on the back of their red trucks, holding on with one hand, and waving frantically with the other.
     The student “demonstration” broke out spontaneously at an approaching float sponsored by Salve Regina University, whose ocean-side campus was only a few blocks from the reviewing stand.
     The “militias” were traditional groups hearkening back to the country’s founding, with classic uniforms and "guns," plus a crew of bearded, grouchy and aging pirates.

     There were men in skirts. And a St. Patrick "cleric" more than willing to pose for selfies with his pastoral flock.
      Heading the line of march were the state’s top political leaders: Gov. Dan McKee, Atty. Gen. Peter Neronha, U.S. Rep. Gabe Amo and the state’s two U.S. Senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse.
     But you hardly would have known the big shots from the spectators and other marchers mingling at the end of the route as the parade broke up. The governor posed with some Cub Scouts; Senators Reed and Whitehouse – among their chamber’s leading members – chatted with folks in silly green hats and other “Irish” trappings who happened to wander by.

      It occurred to me that this was a rare moment in our national life.
     An hour or two to wave at the cops, and for the cops to wave back; to clap for the local high school bands; to smile at Shriners scooting around in their ridiculous mini-cars; to sing along with flat-bed trucks loaded with musicians belting out live music; to stare at the a guy on stilts and to say “Hello” to Elmo.
     If felt like a huge weight was lifted, if just for a moment.
     Gone was the oppressive, scary, cruel, monstrous assault by Donald Trump, determined to tear apart the United States by crippling its agencies and departments, thumbing his nose at the courts, reversing civil rights, setting one group of citizens against another, betraying foreign allies and getting chummy with the nation's enemies.
     Instead, hundreds of marchers and thousands of spectators gathered in a common purpose stretching back decades – honoring  the folklore and traditions of a once-oppressed immigrant group, determined that this edition of the parade would deliver the friendliest, excessively exuberant and  most exhilarating  edition ever.
     Don’t get me wrong.
     The St. Patrick’s Day parade did nothing to stop or slow the Trump onslaught.
     But it did provide a welcome interlude – a moment to cheer and to wave and to share the comic, friendly, silly and profound symbolism of a united community.
     It was a reminder of the kind of traditions that we may have taken for granted in America, but now find ourselves in an urgent life-and-death struggle to defend and preserve.

2 Comments

3/9/25

3/8/2025

3 Comments

 

CAN WE HAVE A WORD?
What word best describes Trump and the awful country he is crafting? How about  “crackpot?” Maybe “absurd?”  Perhaps “demented,” “bonkers?”

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 WE NEED A WORD.
     Just one  that describes what Trump – and so many of our fellow citizens  – are doing to our country.
     I’ve been puzzling about this for a while.
    We need a word – one, in Trump-speak, that’s “perfect.”  A word that captures the outlandish, abnormal, cruel, bizarre, destructive and just plain stupid changes in the national character that have evolved since Trump took office in January.
     A word that describes his unfunny joke of annexing Canada. Or expelling the Palestinians from Gaza, so it can be turned into a beach resort. Betraying Ukraine. Reviving America’s racist roots. Breaking the government. Imperiling the economy. Snuffing out scientific and medical research. Accelerating climate destruction. Replacing truth with lies. Playing the bully.
     The various actions that Trump has undertaken as an individual are  ludicrous, lethal, silly, absurd and hurtful, and need a word to define them.
     The same applies to the country – our country – when it  likewise becomes ludicrous, lethal, silly, absurd and hurtful. Because the new America is not just one man - it's all of us.
      Is there a unique word that will describe all of these dreadful individual and national betrayals? Here are some ground rules:
  • We need just one word.  No cheating with hyphenated concoctions. No phrases. No subtitles.
  • The word must apply to both Trump and the country.
  • However tempting and fitting, the word must not be salacious or profane.
  • The word must not compare humans to animals, especially when that is meant to degrade people, while simultaneously insulting the creatures.
  • It should not belittle people with mental illness or physical disabilities.
  • It must convey the cruelty, malice and sadism in which Trump thrives.
  • The word should suggest betrayal of American ideals and traditions.
  • It should note the racism that is Trump’s only core principle.
  • It’s probably an adjective.
     You might well ask: Why fuss over the “perfect” word, when the crisis demands real action?
     We already know the damage, which Trump is inflicting and which  many people are mimicking, actively or passively. So, screw the semantics, and let’s concentrate our limited resources on the practical challenges of resistance, reform and recovery.
      My answer is that language is a weapon beyond all others.
     If we can somehow divine the right word, one that puts Trump in his place, while doing the same for a Trumpified America, we will clarify our goals in defending democracy, while increasing our chances of success.


HERE’S A LIST of some of the words I’ve come up with.
     I’m not at all satisfied with the list. For one thing, it's too short. And none of the words completely hits the spot. So consider this just as a starting point:
  • CRACKPOT
  • MALEVOLENT
  • BONKERS
  • DEMENTED
  • CRAZY
  • MAD
  • ABSURD
  • VINDICTIVE
  • MANIACAL
  • MALICIOUS
  • MALIGNANT
  • EVIL
     One way of testing a candidate word is through a fill-in-the-blanks exercise.
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     Donald J. Trump, America’s _________ president, today declared a “Freedom to Drive” program, the latest in a series of __________ proposals, programs and “ideas” announced since he took office.
     Under the --------- executive order, individual drivers will decide on which side of the road to drive, and whether or not to be guided by traffic signals and signage at intersections.
     Trump is considering imposing more  ____________ tariffs on countries that penalize visiting American drivers who operate vehicles under ________________Freedom to Drive principles.

 I’M PARTIAL TO “CRACKPOT.”
     CRACKPOT president.
     CRACKPOT country.
     But it’s not a winner. As one friend noted, CRACKPOT conveys a charm and zaniness that you might associate with a favorite uncle who invents things in his backyard shack. CRACKPOT lacks the serial-killer menace that infuses Trump’s activities.
      Still, the word does imply danger. Who knows what the CRACKPOT  uncle is actually up to in his shack. And it does convey silliness, stupidity and recklessness of a president and country, neither of which are firing on all cylinders.
     It also works nicely in our test sentences.

 the       Donald J. Trump, America’s CRACKPOT president, today declared a “Freedom to Drive” program, the latest in a series of CRACKPOT proposals, programs and “ideas” announced since he took office.
     Under the
CRACKPOT executive order, individual drivers will decide on which side of the road to drive, and whether or not to be guided by traffic signals and signage at intersections.
      Trump is considering imposing more 
CRACKPOT tariffs on countries that penalize visiting American drivers who operate vehicles under  the CRACKPOT Freedom to Drive principles.

     Another favorite is BONKERS. While it lacks the fire of some of the others on the list, it does capture the ridiculousness of Trump and his presidency.  
     Strangely, it seems to me more judgmental than I would like, since I’m searching for word that’s objective and descriptive.
     But BONKERS also works in the test case, and has a nice cumulative effect:   

     Donald J. Trump, America’s BONKERS president, today declared a “Freedom to Drive” program, the latest in a series of BONKERS proposals, programs and “ideas” announced since he took office.
     Under the
BONKERS executive order, individual drivers will decide on which side of the road to drive, and whether or not to be guided by traffic signals and signage at intersections.
      Trump is considering imposing more 
BONKERS tariffs on countries that penalize visiting American drivers who operate vehicles under the BONKERS Freedom to Drive principles.

I INVITE SUGGESTIONS.
     As noted, my list is imperfect. It’s distressingly short, and there’s a problem with every word.
     Some of the words stray into prohibited mental health area. For example, CRAZY, while not an approved medical term, implies discomfort with mental illness, although its meaning is broader than that.
     Another favorite is ABSURD, but someone knocked that one down, because it lacks fire, and it seems a little too happy when there’s nothing happy about Donald Trump or the cloud smothering democracy and its citizens.
     At one time, I hoped that TRUMP itself would the perfect word, that it would enter the language as its own universal pejorative, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao or any of the other  monsters of history.
     So far, however, TRUMP is a word that won the last election, has mesmerized the Republican Party, intimidated business leaders, frightened much of academia and so far seems to be holding its own in the polls.
     If anyone has a nomination, I’d invite you – no, I beg you - to suggest it.
     Proposals  can be submitted to the comments section of the blog, or as replies to emails that alert readers to new blog posts.
     If there are enough suggestions, I'll include them in a new post.
     Should this treasure hunt be successful, the terrible times in which America finds itself  will be closer to ending, heralding a day when we've written the last word on Donald Trump.

3 Comments

2/25/25

2/25/2025

1 Comment

 

FIVE (5) BULLETS
TO SAVE MY JOB –
EVEN IN RETIREMENT

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BEN, Acting Manager for purposes of our version of the Five-bullet Memo ordered by the Musk Administration from federal workers
IN SOLIDARITY WITH FEDERAL WORKERS targeted for intimidation, humiliation and firing by the Musk Administration, I began on what is now yesterday with a vow to justify my existence.
     My plan: write a memo, cc'd to my “manager,” similar to that demanded of government employees in two directives that surfaced over the weekend and that amounted to asking the workers to dig their own career graves.
     One was a posting by Elon “Chainsaw” Musk on his social media platform known as X, but if Chainsaw knows what's good for him, might sometime be renamed “T”. The other was an email from the federal Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
     Workers were ordered to highlight what they had done on the job during the past week.
     The OPM email said workers should detail in "approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager,” according to NPR. Replies were due 1 minute before midnight, Monday Feb. 24.
     Confusion abounded. The OPM email omitted Chainsaw’s threat on X that "Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”  Thus, the OPM version sounded a tad kinder; or was it a trick, lulling a procrastinating worker into thinking his or her job was not in jeopardy, while unwittingly providing clear grounds for immediate dismissal?
     There was further uncertainty after some workers were told not to respond to the directive at all, with outfits like the FBI  apparently worried about  security breeches. Other agencies took a middle of the road approach, advising workers to draft replies – but not send them, pending further instructions.


MY FIRST HURDLE in drafting a personal version of  a work worthiness memo was the matter of the “5 bullets.”
      What, I asked, was the meaning of “bullets?”
     A survival-minded federal worker might turn to an official manual for guidance.  Finding, of course, no guidance,  he or she might take the next logical step, consulting  the online Merriam-Webster dictionary.

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     As you can see, this turns out not to be that simple, with the dictionary  giving multiple definitions of  “bullet. To wit:
     1:  a round or elongated missile (as of lead) to be fired from a firearm
     2-a : something resembling a bullet (as in curved form);
     2: b : a large dot placed in printed matter to call attention to a particular passage
     Common sense (a virtue promoted by the Assistant to the President) argues that you consider using the first definition first, bcause it's first. So, in this case, we should go with the "elongated missile."
     But how to obtain five (5) elongated missiles in a hurry?  I’m pretty sure there aren’t any ammo shops in my neighborhood. And even if I’m able to obtain said elongated missiles, how to deliver them to my manager before midnight?
      Worse, what if the OPM email, defying common sense, intended that the respondent  use Merriam-Webster's definition 2-b, “a large dot,” and a total of five (5)  large dots?
      In which case, sending sending five (5) elongated missiles, instead of five (5) large dots, might reasonably cause the manager to conclude that the worker was making some sort of melodramatic warning, or worse, a terrorist threat, warranting immediate transport to Guantanamo.
      Arresting the worker would serve the Musk Administration's twin goals by a) reducing the workforce and b) supporting the renewed mission of the notorious Cuban prison, soon to be named Camp Musk, or Camp Trump, or Camp Musk-Trump or Camp Trump-Musk.


THEN THERE WAS A SECOND PITFALL, finding a “manager” to whom I would cc my five (5) arguments for continued employment.
     Being retired, I not only have no job, but I have no manager.
     With our "children" grown and moved out of the family homestead,  there’s just me and my wife. She is highly organized and mission-driven, but not inclined to manage her husband unless in emergencies, such as reminding him that this is the week to move the compost bin to the curbside for pickup, or that with February coming to an end, maybe it's time to consider taking down some of the Christmas decorations. And  I’m pretty sure that she would turn down the managerial job even on a one-time basis, because anything to do with the Musk Administration, in her judgment,  certainly would be loathsome, but hardly urgent.
      Which leaves Ben.    

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     Ben is our Bengal-like cat, who, along with several litter-mates, spent his early kittenhood under a porch in Florida, before being whisked off to a shelter in Rhode Island.  Through no fault of his own, his next assignment was to “keep up with the Joneses.”  This was not a particularly exciting move in a  young cat's life, but neither was it exceptionally difficult.
      At 17-pounds, Ben  devotes most of his daily activity to deciding which couch, unmade bed, pile of blankets or collection of pillows offers the softest, warmest, sunniest coziest radiator-adjacent place to get his obligatory 23.6 hours of daily sleep.
      So, for this one day, Ben would be The Man.

TO: Ben, Acting Manager
FROM: Brian C. Jones, Acting Worker
SUBJECT: Career-ending memo
DATE: Feb. 24, 2025.

Sir: Herewith and as instructed, my five (5) bullets detailing my accomplishments during the past day. Or maybe the past week. Hard when you are (hopefully) more than halfway through one's early 80s to tell the difference.
  • TO-(2)-DO LIST. I find it useful to organize my day with a daily To-(2)-Do list of things I’m determined to accomplish on any given day/week/month/year. Today, however, given the massive assignment of listing five (5) job accomplishments, I never did get around to completing the To-(2)-Do list, on which my work accomplishments would take the Number One (1) placeholder.  In my defense, I thought about this a lot.
  • MORNING NAP. Given the furious pace of the day’s events, not only was I unable to complete the To-(2)-Do list, I could not arrange  my usual pre-lunch nap.
  • AFTERNOON NAP. See the preceding Number Two (2) bullet, which describes the same circumstances, just in a different time period, this being the post-lunch work-nap slot. Busy as I was, I noticed that you, Mr. Acting Manager, were able to squeeze in a “cat nap” or two (2).
  • DOOM-SCROLLING. Continued to scour five (5) online legacy news sites to track the latest outrages and betrayals of our democracy by the Musk Administration and its Assistant to the President, while searching for signs that the forces of democracy will come to life and find ways to save an imperiled nation. Silly me.
  • BEDTIME. What a hectic day! Had to stay up late to finish this memo in case the Assistant President gave the thumbs up to the Actual President to automatically fire workers who failed to (2) file the memo by 1 (one) minute before midnight.

ADDENDUM. It is now 12:02 a.m. Feb. 25, 2025, meaning what? I missed the deadline.
     My only excuse is that I was working so gosh darn hard all day on the memo, along with my regular duties, that I just worked too (2) gosh darn hard, which the President and his Assistant might do well to factor into their assessment, presuming that my Acting Manager  performed HIS duties in presumably analyzing the five (5) bullets, although, in his defense, the Manager's duties were not explained in the OPM email.
     I would like to add - and I realize that I'm risking my own non-job in providing excess perspective - that no cat, just like no federal worker, deserves to be part of in a degrading, punitive and humiliating make-work debacle.
     As for the rest of us, it remains my hope that, as unlikely as it seems at the moment, we will all get through this. Somehow.
     -- bcj


1 Comment

2/12/25

2/12/2025

4 Comments

 

   VICTORY AT THE
   GRASSROOTS - WHERE
   IT REALLY COUNTS

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MY HOMETOWN CHALKED UP A GENUINE VICTORY yesterday – the kind that gives us reason for optimism as Donald Trump seeks to crush American democracy.
     It happened in Newport, R.I., and it won’t make the national news.
     But it serves as an inspiring, practical example of what people can do when they get  the chance, especially at the local level, where democracy in its most basic form is  tested.
     The issue was a proposal by the Newport School Committee to “rescind” a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) policy, which the school board had approved only a few months earlier.
     The reason for trying to “rescind” the policy remains murky.
     The committee chair, who proposed the move, maintained it was strictly procedural. When the board had approved the six-page policy last October, he said, it had not been reviewed by the committee’s lawyer.
     The presumption was that by rescinding the policy, the subcommittee that drafted the document and a lawyer would have a chance to tidy up any legal slights, after which the policy would be reinstated.
     But community and political activists smelled a rat.
     Why “rescind” the policy, meaning it wouldn’t be in force while it was being reviewed?
     Instead, was this really a sneaky way of deep-sixing the policy altogether, given the ugly national attack by President Trump to eliminate diversity programs in government, as well as those in corporate and academic organizations?
     Indeed, the Trump campaign is widely seen as racist – because of its argument that people (Blacks, women, gay, transsexual and disabled individuals) who benefit from DEI programs are unqualified and therefore crowd out more talented folks (White, straight boys and men).
    

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT was textbook American democracy.
     First, word spread fast, helped by an online news service, What’s Up Newp (WUN), which decoded the school board’s obscure agenda item: “Request to rescind Policy 1050 -Student Excellence and Success.”
     WUN quoted the committee chair as saying the concern was procedural, just to review legal issues. WUN also printed the text of Policy 1050.
    Secondly, people acted.

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PART OF THE CROWD at the Feb. 11, 2025 meeting of the Newport School Committee to discuss a DEI policy. SCREENSHOT frin a school system video
 I’M NO EXPERT ON ESTIMATING CROWDS, but I’m guessing that between 50 to 75 people showed up for the school board meeting a few evenings later at an elementary school named for the late U.S Sen. Claiborne Pell, a much-cherished Newport resident.
     I can also tell  you, after a journalism career of covering too many city and town councils, boards and commissions, nothing focuses the attention of municipal leaders like an actual audience of disgruntled  “citizens.”
     Before too much time had passed, school committee members proposed changing the word “rescind” to “abeyance” – as in placing Policy 1050 in limbo pending its review.
     And then a final change in the resolution, to keep the policy in force while it was sent to a policy subcommittee for a legal review.
      Before the school board voted, 13 speakers variously questioned the use of the original word “rescind,” with some wondering how long any review would take, since time itself might bury the policy.
     When each of the speakers had their three-minutes of talking time, it was clear that the DEI defenders had won – and won big.
     Every speaker was cheered – and there were some eloquent statements about how important equity efforts are to a school system in which diversity itself is not in dispute: Whites make up 33 percent of the student body; Hispanics 39 percent; and Blacks 10 percent.
     One speaker identified as a transgender leader of a Girl Scout troop, said the scouts included gay, Latino and other Newport students, who came from a variety of economic backgrounds:
     When I see them after school, and they already have a smile on their faces, it  is because they spent the day in a classroom where they were welcomed and supported . . . This policy keeps a supportive and engaging learning environment possible, and it protects my kids' well-being.
     If  there were any DEI opponents in the crowd, they remained silent.
     The final vote, directing that a legal review be made of the policy, was 6 to 1, and the committee member who voted no did not explain his vote.


THIS IS A TIME when many people across the country are desperate to stop Trump’s demented and cruel campaign to wreck democracy and crush our souls.
     GOP acolytes hold both chambers of Congress, and the Supreme Court leans toward Trump, leaving few places where the Constitutional system seems to be working.
     Thus, there is a national chorus asking: “What can I do?" Calls overwhelm Congressional phone systems – at least for Democratic offices. Pundits  endlessly wonder where “The Resistance” has gone.
    But let’s state this as a fact, because the contrary is unacceptable: it is not too late to rescue democracy, which begins not in Washington, but always in the communities where we all actually live.
     The obvious venues are town halls and  school cafeterias, where simply showing  up can make a difference.
     And last night’s school committee meeting was an inspiring example that, at least in one seaside community, this kind of activism really worked.

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 NOTES:
  • Here's a link to What's Up Newp (WUN's) first story:  https://whatsupnewp.com/2025/02/newport-school-committee-to-vote-on-rescinding-equity-policy/)
  • You can read WUN’s final school board story, and watch a video of the meeting at this link: https://whatsupnewp.com/2025/02/equity-policy-debate-draws-crowd-at-newport-school-committee-meeting/
  • I used to write for WUN, but haven't recently.
4 Comments

2/10/25

2/10/2025

1 Comment

 

LIVING WITH DONALD TRUMP: LESSON 2
LIKE ANY OTHER BULLY,
TRUMP CAN BE STOPPED.
BUT THE COST IS REAL 

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IT’S A QUESTION HALF THE COUNTRY has been asking since Trump became president last month: How do you stop a bully?
     The answer is simple:
     When enough of us stand up to a bully, he or she stops.
     That’s goes for any bully, whether he's lurking in the school yard or the White House.
      But there’s a catch: the bully will hurt us.
     The school yard bully will break your nose, punch you in the gut, twist your arm, knock you down, get his pals to kick and taunt you, then send you away, bleeding, bruised and broken.
     The Oval Office mutation will do much worse.
     He will insult and libel you on social media; bring phony criminal and civil lawsuits against you, to exhaust your savings; get you fired or at demoted; tell armed militias where  you live and what your phone numbers are;  cancel your research grants; cripple your small business; run a primary campaign against you; track where you drive, what you read and whom you text; audit your taxes; bankrupt your daycare center; and ship you to Guantanamo (and you thought that was just for immigrant detainees).
     This explains, in part, why there’s been little effective push-back to Trump: It’s scary and difficult to go after a bully.
     It’s comfortable to belittle the people – particularly Republicans -  who worshipfully cheer him on; or who hint at opposing him, then back down; or those office holders, the worst villains of all, because they say and do nothing.
     The press has been particularly complicit, largely ignoring this army of Republican snivelers that's empowered Trump to become the world’s master bully, as if the subject is old news and unworthy of repeating.
     Meanwhile, there’s entire wing of the media devoted to mocking Democrats for failing to counter Trump as too divided, too old, too progressive, too tongue-tied, too boring, too slow and too alienated from the Working Class.
     I swear that the New York Times has created a special  Demoralize the Democrats Desk by churning out headlines like:
  • Are the Democrats in Even More Trouble Than They Think? (Jan. 20)
  • ‘We Have No Coherent Message’: Democrats Struggle to Oppose Trump (Feb. 2)
  • Many Americans Say the Democratic Party Does Not Share Their Priorities  (Feb. 2)
  • Where Are the Democrats?  (Feb 6)
  • As Ground Shifts, ‘Flailing’ Democrats Struggle to Find Footing in Diversity Fight (Feb. 8)
 
A NATION OF COWARDS?
      What's remarkable is how an entire nation, from coast to coast, border to  border, seems cowed by the bully-in-chief .
      Among most despicable quislings are individuals and institutions that  have the most power and financial wherewithal to stand up to Trump and therefore to encourage the rest of us to push back.
     Where to start? Jeff Bezos, the billionaire genius behind of Amazon, whose embrace of Trump is astonishing,  donating to Trump, winning a choice seat at the inauguration. Doesn’t the man read his own newspaper, the Washington Post, to understand the damage Trump is causing?
     Former FBI Director Christopher Wray, with years left in his term, could have shown a touch of stewardship by forcing Trump to fire him, rather than slinking away the minute Trump took office.
     It’s perhaps too easy to point  at  Sen. Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican, who, if she had done the “right” thing, might have encouraged fellow GOPers to question one of Trump’s most clownish, but dangerous cabinet nominee.
     Ernst had doubts about Pete Hegseth’s nomination as secretary of defense. A combat veteran, who had been sexually assaulted in college, Ernst had credible cause to question Hegseth's fitness, given his opposition to women in combat, while facing accusations of sexual misbehavior.
      But Ernst, receiving threats of a primary challenge,  eventually supported Hegseth, who got the job when Vice President JD Vance broke a Senate tie after  three other Republicans joined Democrats in voting no.
     The Dishonor Roll is vast and growing.
     The Boston Globe last week reported that top medical organizations chickened out of criticizing Trump’s nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, even though individual doctors have condemned his skepticism of vaccines.
     Paul Offit, a pediatrician and expert on vaccines at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, as calling the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association,  “cowardly” for their silence.
      “I think it’s shameful that the AAP or AMA or the other major groups don’t step forward clearly and definitively with statements about how dangerous this man could be,” Offit said.


IN DESCRIBING THIS NATION OF COWARDS, I don’t want to suggest that I’m any kind of role model for leading the resistance, the rebellion or whatever you call it.
     I’m a fearful, timid man, a lifelong milquetoast, who still cringes at the memory of the scary parts of the “Wizard of Oz,” identifying only with the appearances of the Cowardly Lion.
     When I was a reporter, I was a member of the labor union at my newspaper.
     Absurdly, I was chair of the grievance committee, charged with defending workers who had been disciplined or fired by management:  (“The Cowardly Lion has your back”).
     The union won most of its cases. But workers who ran afoul of management suffered immensely. They lived under the shadow of being labeled “bad employees,” with some  demoted or suspended during the months, even years it took their cases to go through arbitrations and regulatory and court hearings.
      After individuals “won,” clearing their records and sometimes being compensated financially, most chose to leave the company. And in the rare cases where someone was returned to his or her job, the personal and professional scars were permanent.
    The lesson:  Yes, you can fight City Hall; and, yes, you can win. But there's always a price.


TAKING ON TRUMP,  therefore, means both being willing to act, while acknowledging the personal danger.
     From the outset, any of us who challenge Trump should  recognize the consequences, which will be far worse than those suffered by the people I’ve described, who were involved in old-fashioned, vanilla labor disputes.
      Each one of us has to decide not only what we can do, but if we are able.
     Just as important is to recognize that if we remain a fearful, cowardly nation, our lives and our country will be ruined.
     Donald Trump is ripping our country apart, aided by Elon Musk and his team of techno-two-year-olds, who are out to destroy entire federal departments and agency, invade citizens’ personal information, fire professionals and halt medical care and research.
      Trump-Musk are moving to re-segregate America, accelerate climate destruction, degrade the economy, grab land from other countries and lie about their reasons and motives for doing all of that.
     It’s also clear that we are not helpless.
     I believe that success is not only possible, but certain - certain if millions of us do something. Our own roles will vary as to who we are, what we can do and when we can act.
        I wish I could say I will be brave enough – knowing I’ve always have been a person of uncertain courage, and, that over a long life, I have witnessed the real the cost of protest.
     So, I can’t promise you that I’ll be up to the challenge.
     Only that I want to be.





1 Comment

2/3/25

2/3/2025

1 Comment

 

LIVING WITH DONALD TRUMP: LESSON ONE
     DON’T BELIEVE HIM

Picture
TRUMP, at his press briefing about the airliner/helicopter crash at Reagan National Airport. Click on the photo to go to the video
DONALD TRUMP CANNOT BE  TRUSTED  WITH THE TRUTH.
     What? This is something new?
     If anything is certain about Donald Trump, it’s that he’s a man who mostly doesn’t tell the truth – ever. Almost everything he says is a distortion, an exaggeration, a misstatement, a falsehood, a fib or a lie.
     This was the key lesson Trump’s first term, and now of the president’s second, as demonstrated by his disgraceful “briefing” to reporters Jan. 30, hours after a jetliner-helicopter collision killed 67 people in Washington, DC.
     It can be argued that of the many sins that Trump committed in his talk about the crash, his contempt for the truth is the least shocking. Other elements seemed worse:
  • Using a tragedy to make political points, namely tying the crash to his crusade to undermine diversity initiatives, with the implication that race lowers quality work.
  • Casting blame on people who were key players – pilots, air traffic controllers – before the causes of crash were known.
  • Injecting mean, ugly and hateful emotions into a moment that demanded empathy, sorrow and caring.
     But I think Trump’s overall narrative is important, because it’s an example of what is going to happen over and over and over again as his presidency unfolds.
     When crises happen, Trump, at the presidential podium, and supposedly armed with the facts no one else has, will be among the first to provide the “news.”
     If China attacks Taiwan, Russia explodes a nuclear device, a new pandemic emerges; if there’s another mass shooting; if the economy tanks and if an asteroid heads for earth, Trump will be guiding our brains, and, in the process, messing with them.
     Which is why I wanted to look closely at how his briefing that distorted the events surrounding the crash, using it as a guide to what to expect in the future.
     If  you’re interested, I’ve included the link to the White House YouTube video of Trump’s news conference , so you can watch and listen yourself.

      Press conference:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShRYdYTtIx8
    And I’ve appended a partial, homemade transcript of what Trump said, along with his exchanges with reporters, at the end of this post.


HOW TRUMP OPERATES
     Some guidelines for listening to Trump:
  • There’s often a crumb of truth buried in whatever gruel Trump is dishing out – not much mind you, but a morsel or two to put you on your guard.
  • He introduces topics that have nothing to do with the matter at hand.
  • He speaks in a kind of mobster’s code, rarely saying outright what he means. His past as a shifty businessman may have trained him to speak as if somebody is listening in, hoping to find “smoking gun” words.
  • The result is that it takes a lot of re-listening and re-reading sessions to figure it out exactly what Trump has said.
     In the end, you realize that it’s largely been a waste of time, since he has contempt for words, for language, for meaning and for you.

A FEW FACTS
     Of the 4,000 or so words in the transcript, about 400, or 0.1 percent are a factual summary of the disaster. The passenger jet and Army helicopter collided on Jan 29 and sank into the Potomac River. The water was cold. There were no survivors. It happened at night. There was a large-scale recovery effort. The cause or causes were under investigation. Nothing that the public already hadn’t heard .

A DOLLOP OF SYMPATHY
     As a layman, I’ve long felt that Trump is a psychopath and doesn’t care about other people. But he can read, and here’s some of what he read aloud in “sympathy” about the crash:

     On behalf of the First Lady, myself, and 340 million Americans, our hearts are shattered alongside yours, and our prayers are with you now and in the days to come. We'll be working very, very diligently in the days to come.
     We're here for you to wipe away the tears and to offer you our devotion, our love,  and our support is great. In moments like this, the differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all, both as Americans and even as nations. We are one family and today we are all heartbroken.


     It's a lie, this business about being “one family.” He sure didn’t mean the people involved in the tragedy, or the nation as being part of “one family,” unless he’s referring to families whose members are at each others' throats.
     As he got rolling, he blamed lots of the family’s members and activities: programs to bring diversity into the workplace;  former Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden for supposedly allowing lax air travel safety standards; and air traffic controllers and now-dead helicopter pilots as possibly being  culpable for the crash.


WHAT HE SAID.
WHAT HE DIDN’T SAY.
MAYBE WHAT HE SORT OF SAID

     The shocking element of Trump’s discussion of the crash was that he inserted one of his favorite bugaboos - DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs – as possible factors contributing to he disaster.
     He read from news stories about DEI programs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). He said that those programs lowered safety standards; that they were the fault of Obama and Biden; and that DEI promoted incompetent personnel. He ranted incessantly about how he acted in his first term, and now again in his second, to correct this betrayal of competence.
     But he never said  outright that DEI was to blame for the crash. Over and over, Trump insisted that the causes were not yet known:

      We’re all searching for answers.
* * *
     The FAA, and the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) and the US Military will be carrying out a systematic and comprehensive investigation.
* * *
     It’s all under investigation.


     Then he said this:

     We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we’ll probably state those opinions now.
    
     You got it. The leader of the country, the guy with all the information that the rest of us don't have, the commander-and-chief, has some opinions and ideas.   As if he were just another guy at the bar, spouting off  about why his sports team just lost.    He said:

     Over the years, I’ve watched as things like this happen and they say, ‘Well, we’re always investigating.’ And the investigation, three years later, they announced it.

     So, why wait? Instead, a president, like anyone, can speculate.
     Think about the cruelty of presidential musings. We can presume the air traffic controllers on duty that night were already overcome with grief and guilt; and the families of the helicopter crew, not only were mourning the losses of their loved ones, now listened to their commander-in-chief suggest the whole thing might have been the crew’s fault.
     As to the air traffic controllers: were they placed Reagan National Airport towers because of lax standards? Were they the kind of people DEI allows to do critical jobs, so that the FAA staffs control towers with people who have issues with “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism?”

      We’ll see. We don’t know that necessarily it’s even the controllers’ fault."
    
     Okay, how about the folks in the helicopter?     Trump said:
    
     You had a pilot problem from the standpoint of the helicopter. I mean, because it was visual, it was a very clear night. It was cold, but clear and clear as you could be. The American Airlines plane had lights blazing; they had all their landing lights on.
    
     Trump went on to say the helicopter may have been told to change course.

     And the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told. We don’t know that that would have been the difference, because the timing was so tight.
    
     So, maybe it wasn’t the fault of the helicopter crew, after all.
     Then why speculate?  The answer, Trump said, in an exchange with a reporter, is because this president has special powers:

     REPORTER: Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren't sure that the controllers made any mistake. Then said perhaps the helicopter pilots that were the ones who made the mistake.
     TRUMP: It’s all under investigation.  
     REPORTER: I understand that. That's why I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash.
     TRUMP: Because I have common sense, okay? And unfortunately a lot of people don't.”


NEVER ENOUGH FEAR AND HATE
     Trump seems  always to add an extra element of misery and hurt to whatever he’s talking about.
     Some people think he does this to confuse an issue, or deflect attention away from one in which he has a role. But I think he does it just to be mean.
     In this case, Trump introduced the aforementioned DEI subject, so that he could insult former presidents, push blame onto the people directly involved the crash and add hatred to the discussion.
     He claimed that DEI programs – which are meant to expand the pool of employees to folks whom may have been excluded in the past by prejudice and bigotry –  have lowered safety standards, allowing  second-rate people to be hired and promoted.
     Trump claimed that had he raised personnel standards in his first term, and did so again immediately after taking office.

     We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. You remember that. Only the highest aptitude, have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers.
     That was not so prior to getting there, when I arrived in 2016, I made that change very early on because I always felt this was a job that and other jobs too, but this was a job that had to be superior intelligence, and we didn't really have that. And we had it. And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before.
     I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first and they put politics at a level that nobody's ever seen. Because this was the lowest level, their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse.


     Trump also insulted Pete Buttigieg, the former director of the Department of Transportation, which includes the FAA, as a “disaster” – “He’s just got a good line of bullshit.”
         I’m sure the families of the crash victims were comforted by the president’s barnyard language and attack on previous office holders. On the other hand, maybe they believed Trump was on to something – he’s the president after all, and the one with common sense. Maybe, in their grief, families could hate the controllers, the pilots, Obama, Biden and Buttigieg.
      And certainly people with disabilities, or who are in groups subjected to historical prejudice, once again felt abused, misrepresented and slandered.


CLEANING UP THE MESS
    With Trump, the clean-up always takes more effort and time than it took Trump to deliver his fibs, insinuations, lies and maybe's.
     For days afterwards, news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times explored in detail the issues Trump had raised. Here’s some of what they found:


THE DEI BACKGROUND. For all of Trump’s bombast about reforming DEI, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler wrote that Trump did not change the DEI program in place at the FAA during his first term.

      Trump claimed that he had changed Obama’s criteria for hiring air traffic controllers with greater diversity — when in fact he left it unchanged. Moreover, he decried the fact that FAA hired controllers with a range of disabilities that he listed at the news conference. But that program was launched during his first term.


THE FOLKS IN THE TOWER
     As to whether dwarfs, quadriplegics, the blind and other potentially impaired people were running the control tower, that’s not likely, since background articles said applicants for controller jobs undergo rigorous procedures and most  never make the cut.
     But both the Times and the Post found that the control tower was understaffed: normally, one controller would be assigned to regular aircraft, another to helicopters; but at the time of the crash, one controller was doing both jobs.
     And if you wanted to throw some blame around, members of Congress should be included,.
     Congress, ignoring critics’ warnings about safety at the crowded airfield, expanded the number of flights there, because some like to use that airfield, which is so close to the capitol, while commuting to and from their districts.


THE FOLKS IN THE COCKPIT
     Trump made a big deal about there being a clear visual field last Wednesday night, so pilots might have seen an oncoming aircraft and possibly taken evasive action.
     But among experts reporters sought out later was the iconic pilot, Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger,  famous for safely landing an airliner in New York City’s Hudson River in 2009.
     Sullenberger said night flying, over water, makes visual judgements difficult.

     Nighttime always makes things different about seeing other aircraft — basically all you can do is see the lights on them, You have to try to figure out: Are they above you or below you? Or how far away? Or which direction are they headed?


TODAY’S LESSON: A REVIEW

     If you have made it this far, you realize that you have wasted your time in giving Trump a close look.
     Just as I’ve wasted my time listening to the video. Making a transcript. Checking it. Studying it. Reading news reports. And then writing a long winded, but hardly complete review.
     In any event, with the crash coverage fading, which happens to every Big Story, it’s time to move onto the next one.
      Today, tariffs seem to be taking the center ring.
      Trump will have lots to say.

     * * *
     Below are links to some of the news stories I’ve looked at in writing this post:
  • https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/30/faa-dei-trump-fact-checker/
  • https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/01/30/dc-plane-crash-helicopter-recovery-no-survivors-potomac-river/
  • https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/plane-crash-potomac-lessons-sully.html

     * * *
TRANSCRIPT
This is a partial transcript of President Trump’s press briefing Jan. 30 about the Reagan National Airport crash the previous evening.

TRUMP: I speak to you this morning in an hour of anguish for pit nation Just before 9:00 PM last night, an American Airlines regional jet carrying 60 passengers and four crew collided with an Army Black Hawk helicopter carrying three military service members over the Potomac River in Washington, DC while on final approach to Reagan National Airport. Both aircraft crashed instantly and were immediately submerged into the icy waters of the Potomac.

A real tragedy. The massive search and rescue mission was underway throughout the night, leveraging every asset at our disposal, and I have to say the local, state, federal military. Including the United States Coast Guard in particular. They've done a phenomenal job. So quick, so fast. It was mobilized immediately. The work has now shifted to a recovery mission.

Sadly, there are no survivors. This was a dark and excruciating night in our nation's capital and in our nation's history, and a tragedy of terrible proportions. As one nation, we grieve for every precious soul that has been taken from us so suddenly, and we are a country of, really, we are in mourning. This is really shaking a lot of people, including people very sadly from other nations who were on the flight,  for the family members back in Wichita, Kansas, here in Washington, D.C. and throughout the United States and in Russia.

We have a Russian contingent. Very talented people, unfortunately, were on that plane. Very, very, very sorry about that. Whose loved ones were aboard the passenger jet. We can only begin to imagine the agony that you're all feeling. Nothing worse.

On behalf of the First Lady, myself, and 340 million Americans, our hearts are shattered alongside yours and our prayers are with you now and in the days to come. We'll be working very, very diligently in the days to come.

We're here for you to wipe away the tears and to offer you our devotion, our love, and our support is great. In moments like this, the differences between Americans fade to nothing compared to the bonds of affection and loyalty that unite us all, both as Americans and even as nations. We are one family and today we are all heartbroken.

We're all searching for answers. That icy, icy Potomac. It was  a cold, cold night, cold water. We're all overcome with the grief for many who have so tragically perished will no longer be with us.

Together, we take solace in the knowledge that their journey ended not in the cold waters of the Potomac, but in the warm. embrace of a loving God.

We do not know what led to this crash, but we have some very strong opinions and ideas, and I think we'll probably state those opinions now because over the years I've watched as things like this happen and they say, well, we're always investigating. And then the investigation, three years later, they announced it.

I think we have some pretty good ideas, but we'll find out how this disaster occurred and we'll ensure that nothing like this ever happens again. The FAA and the NTSB and the US military will be carrying out a systematic and comprehensive investigation. Our new secretary of transportation. Sean Duffy, is (in) his second day on the job. When that happens, it's it's a rough one.

We'll be working tirelessly. He's a great gentleman. Whole group is. These are great people, and they are working tirelessly to figure out exactly what happened. We, we will state, certain opinions, however,

I'm also immediately appointing an acting commissioner to the FAA, Christopher Rocheleau, a 22 year veteran of the agency, highly respected. Christopher, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

We must have only the highest standards for those who work in our aviation system. I changed the Obama standards from very mediocre at best to extraordinary. You remember that. Only the highest aptitude; have to be the highest intellect and psychologically superior people were allowed to qualify for air traffic controllers. That was not so prior to getting there, when I arrived in 2016, I made that change very early on because I always felt this was a job that, and other jobs too, but this was a job that had to be superior intelligence, and we didn't really have that. And we had it. And then when I left office and Biden took over, he changed them back to lower than ever before.

I put safety first. Obama, Biden and the Democrats put policy first, and they put politics at a level that nobody's ever seen. Because this was the lowest level; their policy was horrible and their politics was even worse.

So as you know, last week, long before the crash, I signed an executive order restoring our higher standards for air traffic controllers and other important jobs throughout the country. So it was very interesting. About a week ago, almost upon entering office, I signed something last week that was an executive order, very powerful and restoring the highest standards of air traffic controllers and others, by the way,

Then, my administration will set the highest possible bar for aviation safety; we have to have our smartest people. It doesn't matter what they look like, how they speak, who they are. It matters, intellect, talent, the word talent. They have to be talented, naturally talented geniuses. You can't have regular people doing that job. They won't be able to do it, but we'll restore faith in American air travel. I'll have more to say about that.

I do want to point out that various articles that appeared prior to my entering office, and here's one “The FAA's Diversity push includes focus on hiring people with severe intellectual and psychiatric disabilities.” That is amazing ,and then it says FAA says people with severe disabilities are the most underrepresented segment of the workforce. Said they want them in and they want them, they can be air traffic controllers. I don't think so.

This was on January 14th, so that was a week before I entered office, they put a big push to put diversity into the FAA's program.

And then another article, the Federal Aviation Administration. This was before I got to office recently, second term. The FAA is actively recruiting workers who suffer severe intellectual disabilities, psychiatric problems and other mental and physical conditions under a diversity and inclusion hiring initiative spelled out on the agency's website. Can you imagine?

These are people that are, I mean actually, their lives are shortened because of the stress that they have. Brilliant people have to be in those positions and their lives are actually shortened very substantially shortened because of the stress where you have many, many planes coming into one target and you need a very special talent and a very special genius to be able to do it.

Targeted disabilities are those disabilities that The federal government, as a matter of policy, has identified for special emphasis and recruitment and hiring, the FAA's website states. They include hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability, and dwarfism. All qualify for the position of a controller of airplanes pouring into our country, pouring into a little spot, a little dot on the map, a little runway. The initiative is part of the FAA's Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan. Think of that. The initiative is part of the FAA's Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan, which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel. I don't think so. I don't think so. I think it's just the opposite.

The FAA website shows that the agencies guidance and diversity hiring were last updated on March 23rd of ‘22. They wanted to make it even more so. And then I came in and I assume maybe this is the reason -  the FAA, which is overseen by Secretary Pete Buttigieg. A real winner, that's the guy, a real winner. Do you know how badly everything's run, since he's run the Department of Transportation, he's a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor. He ran his city into the ground, and he's a disaster now. He's just got a good line of bullshit. The Department of Transportation is a government agency charged with regulating civil aviation. While he runs it, 45,000 people, and he's run it right into the ground with his diversity. So I had to say that it's terrible.

Then it's a group within the FAA, another story. Determined that the workforce was too white that they had concerted efforts to. get the administration to change that and to change it immediately. This was in the Obama administration just prior to my getting there. And we took care of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, we took care of everybody at levels that nobody's ever seen before. It's one of the reasons I won,

But they actually, came out with a directive, too  white, and we want the people that are competent

But now we mourn and we pray, and we would like to ask all Americans to join me in a moment of silence as we ask God to watch over those who have lost their lives and bring comfort to the loved ones and. I just want to say ‘God bless everyone in this room.’ This has been a terrible, a very short period of time.

We'll get to the bottom of it. So we all saw the same thing. We've seen it many times. I've had the honor of hearing tapes. Tapes are scary, very scary types. You had a  airliner coming in, American Airlines, He was doing everything right. He was on track. He was (on) the same track as everybody else that came in, and it's probably the same track as they've had for 25 years or more.

He's coming in to the path. And for some reason, (you) had a helicopter that was at the same height. Obviously when they hit, but pretty much the same height. And going at an angle that was unbelievably bad.

When the air traffic controller said 'Do you see?’ you know, he's talking about do you see him? But there was very little time left when that was stated.

And then also he said ‘Follow him in,’ and then almost immediately after that, you know, seconds after that, that was the crash that took place. Well, follow him in and that means like everything's fine. Follow him in.

You had a pilot problem from the standpoint of the helicopter, I mean, because it was visual, it was very clear night, it was cold, but clear and clear as you could be. The American Airlines plane had lights blazing. They had all their landing lights on.

I could see it from the Kennedy Center tape. We had a tape up on the Kennedy Center. That seems to be the primary. That's why I'm sure we'll see other tapes because it's such an area where there are a lot of cameras, a lot of cameras looking up in into. the air into space, so we'll probably see many other shots of it before too much time goes by.

But we had a situation where you had a helicopter that had the ability to stop. I have helicopters. You can stop a helicopter very quickly. It had the ability to go up or down. It had the ability to turn. And the turn it made was not the correct turn, obviously, and it did somewhat the opposite of what it was told.

We don't know that that would have been the difference. because the timing was so tight. It was so it was so little, it was so little time to think.

But what you did have is you had vision. The helicopter had vision of the plane because you had vision of it all the way, perfect vision of it all the way from at Kennedy Center where the tape was taken and for some reason there weren't adjustments made.

Again, you could have slowed down the helicopter substantially. You could have stopped the helicopter. You could have gone up. You could have gone down. You could have gone straight up, straight down, you could have turned, you could have done a million different maneuvers.

For some reason, it just kept going. And then made a slight turn, at the very end, and it was by that time, it was too late. They shouldn't have been at the same height,  because if it wasn't the same height, you could have gone under it or over it and. Nobody realized or they didn't say that it's at the same height.

At the same height would, it would still wouldn't have been great, but you would have missed it by quite a bit; could have been 1,000 feet higher; it could have been 200 feet lower, but it was exactly at the same height, and somebody should have been able to point that out.

So all of this is going to be studied, but it just seems to me from a couple of words that I like to use the words ‘common sense.’

Some really bad things happened and some things happened that shouldn't have happened. So you had a helicopter going and in an identical direction you had a helicopter that was at the exact same height as somebody going, and essentially the opposite direction; you had a plane that was following a track, which is a track that every other plane followed.

And I, I don't imagine, I know I've heard today that they might have been following the preceding plane, which was pretty close, but not that close (to) the preceding plane. But you wouldn't have even been able to see that because of the direction that the helicopter was coming in at.

So you had a confluence of, of bad decisions that were made. And you have people that lost their lives, violently lost their lives.

* * *

REPORTER: On DEI and the claims  you’ve made, are you saying this crash was somehow caused and the result of diversity hiring? And what evidence have you seen to support these claims?

TRUMP: It just could have been. We have a high standard. We've had a higher, much higher standard than anybody else and there are things where you have to go by. Brain power, you have to go by psychological quality, and psychological quality is a very important element of it. These are various very powerful tests that we put to use, and they were terminated by Biden, and Biden went by his standard that’s the exact opposite.

So we don't know, but we do know that you had two planes, at the same level, you had an air helicopter and a plane, it shouldn't have happened. And we'll see. We're going to look into that. We're going to see. But certainly for an air traffic controller, we want the brightest, smartest, the sharpest. We want somebody that's psychologically superior, and that's what we're going to have here.

 * * *

REPORTER: Do you yet know the names of the 67 people who were killed, and you are blaming Democrats and DEI policies and air traffic control and seemingly the member of the US military who was flying that Black Hawk helicopter.  Don't you think you're getting ahead of the investigation right now?

TRUMP: I don't think so at all. I don't think where the names of the people - yYou mean the names of the people that are on the plane? You think that's going to make a difference there ….

REPORTER: Does it comfort their families for you to be blaming DEI…

TRUMP: They are a group of people that have lost their lives. If you want a list of the names, we can give you that. We'll be giving that very soon. We're in coordination with American Airlines. We're in coordination very strongly, obviously with the military. But I, I don’t think that's not a very smart question. I'm surprised, coming from you.
* * *

REPORTER: Thank you. Thank you, President Trump, for being here. Based on your analysis so far, do you have a sense of who was at fault, if it was the plane, the helicopter, air traffic control, and can you assure people that it is safe to fly in and out of DC?

TRUMP: Well, I've given you the analysis and the analysis was, it was based on vision. You had a lot of people that saw what was happening. You had some people that knew what was happening. There was some warnings, but the warnings were given very, very late. You know, those warnings were given very late. It was almost as they were given. A few seconds later there was the crash. It should have been brought up earlier.

But the people in the helicopter should have seen where they were going. I can't imagine people with 20/20 Vision not seeing, you know what's happening up there. Again, they shouldn't have been at the same height you're going with in reverse directions or sideway directions. Obviously you want to be a different heights. I see it all the time when I'm flying. If you have planes going in the opposite, they're always lower, we're higher or they're so if somehow, there's a screw up, there's not going to be a tragedy. It'll be close, but you know, there's never going to be a tragedy if you're in a different elevation. For whatever reason, they were at the same elevation. And also from the American Airlines (word unclear), he's along the track that every plane is along. See what was helicopter doing in that track? It's very sad. But visually somebody should have been able to see and taken that helicopter out of play. and they should have been at a different height.
* * *

REPORTER: You’ve already issued an executive order. You say, well, you start aviation safety, right? This crash happened after that. Was the executive order successful? And what more needs to change?

TRUMP: People say, well, you know, we issued it three days ago and we were in the process of making those changes. This is this is something that should have been done a long time ago.

Actually my original order should have never been changed and I think maybe you wouldn't have had this problem. Maybe. Yeah, please, yes, thank you.
* * *

REPORTER: You see like everyday life that's very often those  diversity hires those sometimes issues as you just mentioned. So what,  when do you have, are we going to see some firings? Are you going to fire some of those diversity hires in the federal government wants? What's the plan do you have?

TRUMP:  I would say the answer is yes, if we find that people aren't mentally competent, you, you see the language, the language is put out by them. And if you see that, I'm not going to bore you by reading it again. But these are not people that should be doing this particular job. They'd be very good for certain jobs, but not people that should be doing this particular job.
* * *

REPORTER: Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren't sure that the controllers made any mistake. Then said perhaps the helicopter pilots that were the ones who made the mistake.

TRUMP:  It’s all under investigation.  

REPORTER: I understand that. That's why I'm trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash,

TRUMP: Because I have common sense, OK? And unfortunately a lot of people don't.

We want brilliant people doing this. This is a major chess game at the highest level When you have. 60 planes coming in during a short period of time, and they’re all coming in at different directions and you're dealing with very high level computer, computer work and very complex computers.

And one of the other things I will tell you is that the systems that were built, I was going to rebuild the entire system and then we had an election, that didn't turn out the way it should have, but they didn't build the systems properly. They spent a lot of money renovating a system, spending much more money than they would have spent if they bought a new system for air traffic controllers….
 


















 


1 Comment

1/21/25

1/21/2025

1 Comment

 

 'I was saved by God to make America great again.'

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 I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.
     I don’t want to think about it.
     I don’t want you to talk to me about it, since that makes you have to think about it.
     I don’t want to watch it, hear it, read about it. I don’t want it my home, coming out of my speakers, on my computer and my TV screen. I don’t want it fouling my rubbish bins and poisoning my state’s sold waste landfills.
     The Trump presidency is a pestilence, an affliction and a blasphemy.  It spoils our history, corrupts our conscience and stains our souls.
     But we must, at the very least, pay attention. And in paying attention, take the next step, which is to do something.
     But do what?
     I know I'm a day late in talking about  the inauguration. The smart people, the brave people, the effective people have already had their say about Inauguration Day, and they’ve and moved on to Day Two, which is going on right now, even as I’m writing this.
     But I’m doing what I can.
     I watched the inauguration, wearing headphones, because my wife is allergic to Trump’s voice. She was not hiding out, but like another hero of our time, Michelle Obama, my wife did not want give to Trump the honor of her presence.
      As for what I took away from what I saw and heard, just a few things, because that's all I can handle. I know there was a lot more, and still more happened today.


“SAVED FOR A REASON”
     Beyond the irony of the ceremony being in the Rotunda that was desecrated by the Jan. 6 insurrection four years ago – when some of the inauguration guests could have been murdered or injured – there was this memorable section from Trump’s triumphant, arrogant address:
      Over the past eight years, I have been tested and challenged more than any president in our 250-year history, and I’ve learned a lot along the way.
     Those who wish to stop our cause have tried to take my freedom and, indeed, to take my life.
     Just a few months ago, in a beautiful Pennsylvania field, an assassin’s bullet ripped through my ear.
     But I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.

     Frank Bruni, a New York Times columnist, pinpointed this part of his address as more important perhaps than sending troops to the bordered, proclaiming the U.S. as a two-gender nation and renaming the Gulf of America.
     “That’s the keeper this time around,” Bruni wrote. “Trump’s trademark narcissism and usual grandiosity, along with an unsettling measure of theocracy, in one profoundly disturbing sentence.”
     That one statement took us back centuries,  to the divine right of kings. The monarch knows all, can make no mistakes, everything he does and says is a Heavenly mandate.


THE PARDONS
     God, it turns out, has been troubled by the American system of justice.
     On Inauguration Day, Her emissary  moved to abolish justice, at least as we’ve come to know it, as a system of laws, impartially and fairly administered by the courts.
     Trump used his Constitutional powers to commute and pardon the insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
     As described by the Times:
     Trump, “in one of his first official acts, issued a sweeping grant of clemency on Monday to all of the nearly 1,600 people charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, issuing pardons to most of the defendants and commuting the sentences of 14 members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers militia, most of whom were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
     “Mr. Trump’s moves amounted to an extraordinary reversal for rioters accused of both low-level, nonviolent offenses and for those who had assaulted police officers.
     “The pardons will also wipe the slate clean for violent offenders who went after the police on Jan. 6 with baseball bats, two-by-fours and bear spray and are serving prison terms, in some cases of more than a decade.”

     What does this mean for justice overall?
     Does it make sense, any longer,  to dial 911?
     Should police arrest bank robbers, rapists, embezzlers and  thieves?  Should prosecutors bring cases to grand juries? Should citizens sit as jurors? Should judges pronounce sentences according to established guidelines? Should appellate courts review lower court decisions? Why bother, if crime is to be defined as only whatever Donald  Trump, speaking on behalf of God, says it is? Or isn't?
     And God help us if the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and other violent, racist groups come after any one of us. Because maybe the president, chosen by the people and by God, wants them to assault our homes and beat and shoot and hang us. It's all for a reason.


THE HAT
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      I’ve always found it petty to talk about what First Ladies and other celebrities, especially women, wear to events like inaugurations.
     But, as many people have commented, it was hard to avoid staring at Melenia Trump’s hat – its wide brim hid her eyes and even interfered with her husband’ attempted  kisses, which may have been a good or a bad thing.
     But, overall, that hat, which surely was chosen for a reason gave her – and the entire proceedings - a severe, menacing and dangerous look.
     Almost as scary,  as Elon Musk’s Nazi-style salutes later in the day.


THAT IS WHY THIS IS SO HARD TO TALK ABOUT.
     Yes, we knew what was coming. But this does not make it less shocking.
     Yes, we knew it would hurt. But this does not take away the hurt or make it hurt less.
     The United States, the people who voted for Trump and the people who voted against him, are going to suffer the coming days and years in so many ways.
     We  will be sicker, less safe, more frightened, less apt to get justice. We will be discriminated against, unfairly taxed, defrauded, lied to, detained, assaulted, insulted, and  our homes will be destroyed by floods and fires.
     “My life was saved for a reason,” Trump said
     That was an applause line at the inauguration.
     And today, it’s among the many reasons it’s so hard to talk about.

1 Comment

1/17/25

1/17/2025

2 Comments

 

IS THIS DEMOCRACY’S LAST WEEKEND?

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HERE'S WHAT WE ALL HOPE:
     Democracy will survive the return of Donald Trump.
     Not since the Cold War, with its shadow of nuclear annihilation, and World War II, with Hitler’s campaign of global domination, has the future of the United States been under greater threat.
     Trump is a psychopath, an authoritarian, who has promised to use the power of his office to undermine justice, compassion, innovation and all of the other aspirational hallmarks of the country.
     If Trump is successful, this may be America’s last weekend as a democracy.
     It’s a weekend that I wish we could preserve forever – in our memories and in our prayers - as a reminder of how good our lives have been, and as an inspiration of how fruitful our lives could be again.


THE WEEKEND CONCLUDES at noon, Monday,  which will be a day of contrasting dreams, one a nightmare, the other a poem.
     It’s a day on which that Trump will outline his inaugural vision for the next four years, sure to be darker and more divisive than the one he first outlined eight years ago.
     Monday is also a national holiday, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. and invoking his great “I have a dream” speech in Washington,  promising inclusion, caring and hope.
     In a sense, we have a choice about how we think and what we do: Do we let Trump have his way? Or do we continue King’s vision?
     I’ll tell you straight up that I’m struggling to figure out the practical solutions, both personally and as a citizen. I don’t have many answers, and can’t vouch for the ones I do have.
     But I believe we have to try.  Here's more ideas about how to do this:


BE A DEMOCRAT.
     I mean the partisan kind, with uppercase “D,” and not just the generic, lowercase “d” democrat.
     It’s not an attractive proposition these days. The Democrat Party doesn't have,  at first blush, inspiring national leaders. The party suffers the indignity of being the loser in a hard-fought election. And some Democratic office holders seem unsure of themselves, with many flirting with right-leaning words and actions.
     But democracy depends on a strong, enduring liberal, left-wing and progressive movement, and no more so than when the country’s power center is in the hands of a tyrant.
     Let’s not demand perfection of Democrats, only passion.
     Over the long haul, the Democratic Party has promoted the policies and crusades that have been the best of America: economic equality, civil rights, environmental progress, education and justice.
     And stop with this "I'm an Independent" nonsense. You either agree with the core concerns of the Democrats or you allow the Republicans to degrade the country with policies that are mean, stupid and destructive.
     There’s no middle ground.


CHAMPION WOMEN.
     Next to the restoration of Donald Trump, the most distressing theme of the 2024 election was the Republican war against women.
     You would have thought that the impact of the Supreme Court’s reversal of abortion rights – which introduced unequal medical care for half the nation's population – would have inspired both men and women to take to the streets, and then onward to the voting booth.
     But then came JD Vance’s sneering description of “childless cat ladies,” promoting a diminished role for women, centered on child-bearing, not leadership or success in business, science, the military, athletics and scores of other activities.
     We’re left with an incoming president, who has  a history of sexual abuse against women, who has nominated a secretary of defense, who believes women are not fit to be soldiers.
     Men and women alike should stop this backward movement and, instead, promote the full citizenship of women, something you’d have thought had been settled in 1920 with the right to vote.


DON’T QUIT, OPT OUT OR UNSUBSCRIBE.
     Institutions are imperfect, and there’s no better posterchild for a troubled organization than the Washington Post.
     It’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has been shameless in his attempt to get on the good side of Donald Trump, axing an editorial that would have had the paper endorse Kamala Harris and later contributing to Trump’s inauguration.
     Some of the paper’s top staffers are jumping ship, the latest being the excellent columnist, Jennifer Rubin, who has started a new enterprise on Substack, Tens of thousands of subscribers have quit, deepening the paper's financial losses.
     I hope subscribers will reconsider, and continue to support the paper (digital subscriptions are relatively cheap; mine is $60 a year) and that the remaining readers  will stick it out – at least for a little longer.
     I was cheered earlier this week at reports (from outside the Post) that 400 staffers had written to Bezos, asking to meet with him about their ideas and hopes to improve and sustain the paper.
     Quitting sounds noble. But once you’ve left, you no longer have a voice, either as a journalist or reader.
     In the Post’s case, I can’t imagine anyone happier to see the newspaper’s best and brightest journalists walk out the door than Donald Trump.
     A continued outflow will have two possible outcomes: hastening the paper’s death; or furthering its diminishment, as the people leaving are replaced with less talented and morally compromised journalists.
     It might be that Bezos’ embrace of Trump has doomed the Post, and it cannot be saved as a journalistic force equal to the New York Times.
     But I believe that our most treasured and irreplaceable institutions need to be defended and sustained. Quitting should be a last – not a first – resort.


I COULD BE WRONG.
     Maybe the Democratic Party will do just fine without any extra commitment. Or that its shortcomings mean that it should atrophy.
     It could be that a homegrown Taliban isn't coming for American women after all.
     Perhaps it’s naïve to ask journalists and others to reform their institutions from the inside rather than voting with their feet.
     On this final weekend, we don’t know what the Trump nightmare will be like.
     The only certainty is that it will be crueler, more harmful and far more extensive than we imagine today.
     Just as unclear is what to do during the next four years, except that we have little choice to do everything we can.
     We must  limit the harm, care for the victims and most of all, to survive, both as individuals and citizens.
     Meanwhile, here’s wishing you a nice weekend.





2 Comments

1/3/25

1/3/2025

3 Comments

 

COUNTERING THE TRUMP CATASTROPHE
Three good ideas

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HERE ARE THREE EXCELLENT IDEAS – the kind of imaginative thinking that's needed to counter the Trump catastrophe.
  • FREE-PRESS DEFENSE SUPERFUND – A massive fund to combat news censorship and intimidation, taking the financial and strategic burden off the shoulders individuals and organizations targeted by Trump.
  • WASHINGTON POST RESCUE – In which the country’s troubled, second-best news organization would be converted to non-profit status, and hopefully endure as a major source of reliable information.
  • DEMOCRATIC PARTY MESSAGING “WAR MACHINE” - The Democratic Party would create an aggressive communications effort to target destructive Trump policies, contrasting them with Democratic alternatives.
    These three ideas are just small steps in confronting the horror that already is unfolding as a result of last year's election.
     They may be impractical.
     But they represent the kind of imaginative,  concrete steps that are needed  to prevent or mitigate the barbaric political and cultural consequences of the election.
     The sweeping nature of Trump’s victory – a clear win of his own,  plus MAGA’s takeover of Congress, in addition to an already captive Supreme Court – has left millions of Americans without obvious defenses.
     I, for one, remained shocked by the breadth of the election’s outcome, unsure how to proceed in the coming years, and frankly uncertain whether destruction of America can be prevented.
     But we have to try. The United States is too great, both as a democracy and as a philosophical concept,  to give into despair and bewilderment.
     The appropriate cliché, derived from both underdog sports teams and  long-shot lottery players, is especially important now:
     “You can’t win if you don’t play.”
     I wish I was an idea factory. I'm not. But I admire people who try , and I think we should celebrate everyone who makes a good-faith effort to invent what's possible.
     In that spirit, these three good ideas.
     All have this in common: information. Information will  attacked by Trump, because it’s the key to countering  his abuses and to reform and recovery.


FREE-PRESS DEFENSE SUPERFUND
     One Trump tactic will be to attack the press through  lawsuits and government actions intended to crush writers and organizations, not just with the outcomes, but the sheer expense and strain involved in fighting them.
     To counter this, Josh Marshall, founder and editor-in-chief of the “Talking Points Memo” website,  has written about one possible counter offense.
      He notes that there's been discussion  about “creation of an organization or fund which would take on the job of defending the various lawsuits, prosecutions and generalized legal harassment Trump will bring to the table in the next four years.”
      The effort would require a massive mountain of money and an army of lawyers and other expert staffers.
     Whenever a media outlet would be threatened, the Superfund would step in to shoulder the expense and determine the tactics to defend the attack, fighting fire with fire, punishing the perpetrators legally and financially.
     It would require both philanthropy by billionaires as well as small-fry contributions from thousands of individuals.
     The Superfund would help big outfits, like national newspapers and TV networks, as well as lone bloggers and small outlets like Marshall’s.
     “Trump’s retribution may focus on individuals,” Marshall writes. “But it’s a collective harm. So it makes sense to spread the cost of dealing with it.”
         Here's the link to how Marshall discussed the idea in one of his columns.
         As far as I know, no Free-Press Superfund  has materialized.
    

WASHINGTON POST RESCUE
      News organizations on the scale of a major newspaper are still the most important source of reliable, in-depth information, even as the industry itself has withered.
     The “paper” part isn’t important. What counts is the hefty "news" resources of a New York Times and a Washington Post.
     What has distinguished newspapers in the past has been their enormous newsrooms  – staffed with hundreds of reporters, plus editors, photographers, artists, technologists.
      And it’s not enough to have just one.
     The New York Times appears now to be financially successful, and it IS a great paper. But it has both massive and minuscule  faults for the simple reason that it's run by humans. It needs competition.
      When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos brought the Post  years ago, it seemed that the Times had a needed counter-balance, and, indeed, the Post flourished during Trump’s first term.   

PictureANN TELNAES' cartoon
 But it’s fallen on difficult times and is losing money. Bezos shouldn’t be required to subsidize the paper indefinitely - and he won't.
     Further, he’s shown himself to be an increasingly flawed owner, quashing the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just days before the election and shamelessly sucking up to Donald Trump.

     Recently, some top reporters have jumped ship to work for The Atlantic magazine, and the Post's top cartoonist, Ann Telnaes quit, when the paper  killed a cartoon mocking Bezos' and other billionaires' seeming to buy Trump's favor.
    
     Press critic Dan Froomkin suggests that Bezos turn the Post into a non-profit organization, guaranteeing its independence.
      Here's how he put it:
     "The good news is that there is a way out of this mess – a way out that would restore the Post’s grand tradition of independence and speaking the unvarnished truth to power.
    "It would also reestablish Bezos’s reputation as a great philanthropist.
Bezos must relinquish ownership of the Post to a nonprofit organization, devoted to journalistic independence."
     Froomkin suggests that Bezos could get a big tax benefit in the process. I wonder whether Bezos might fund the non-profit with a huge endowment, parting with just a fraction of his Amazon billions.
     “We need the Washington Post,” Froomkin writes. “The only way to save it, Jeff Bezos, is to let it go.”
     Here's the link to Froomkin's column.
     I'm not suggesting we hold our breath for Bezos to adopt the idea.
     Which doesn’t mean its not an inspired  proposal.


DEMOCRATS’ MESSAGING “WAR MACHINE”
     The cruelty, stupidity and impracticality of the coming Trump administration will offer an easy target for critics, especially  the Democratic Party.
     But so far, Democrats have failed to speak with a strong, persuasive and unified voice.
      Indeed, the party’s several factions have seemed more interested in either fighting among themselves over the election loss or finding common ground with Republicans.
     U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of my home state – Rhode Island – is having none of that.    


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U.S. SEN. SHELDON WHITEHOUSE
 Instead, Whitehouse wants the party to come up with a communications “war machine” that will attack Republicans.
     Whitehouse made the proposal in a letter to chairpersons of state Democratic parties, a letter  reported by Politico, the online news outlet.  Politico wrote:
     "Whitehouse argued that Democrats have no institutional and centralized setup to attack the GOP, writing (that) Republicans 'rapidly and effectively deploy false narratives, while we struggle to bring true ones to bear.' "

      “We in Congress customarily say we’re ‘fighting’ for things when we really mean working or toiling,” Whitehouse said. “A fight means a defined adversary, a battle strategy, and actual punches thrown. Done well, it involves exposing and degrading your adversary’s machinery of warfare.”
     I think Whitehouse is on to something. The Democrats’ best hope isn’t to get along with Republicans or imitate them or to abandon long-held ideals, but to present Democrats as an attractive, convincing and inspired alternative to Trump and his acolytes.
     Here's the link to the Politico story.
     I  wasn’t able to find the text of the letter itself – it was written in advance of the national party’s selection of a chairperson on Feb. 1. Nor have I heard whether anyone in the party has seconded Whitehouse’s suggestion.
     But it sure sounds like a good approach.
   
                                                     * * *
     As I've noted, none of these ideas will bring down the Trump administration.
     In fact, none are likely to happen.
     But what they have in common is the kind of thinking that is needed to slow, stop and reverse the evil that Trump will unleash when he's sworn in Jan. 20.
      Fresh, imaginative, practical ideas - lots of them - are the key to unlocking the puzzle created by the election. It's a puzzle which only seems impossible until it's solved.

3 Comments

12/13/2024

12/13/2024

5 Comments

 

THE PERILS OF SUCCESS
* What if Trump's victories, not his misdeeds, advance his downfall?
* Plus: Where have our heroes gone?


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WHAT IF WE’VE HAD IT ALL WRONG?
     In looking for Donald Trump’s downfall, we’ve been expecting that a heinous self-inflicted episode would be his undoing – that elusive “He’s gone too far” moment:  his salacious “Access Hollywood” tape comments;” his traitorous role in the Jan. 6 insurrection; his slurs against military veterans.
     But what if it’s success that finally undercuts him?
     I’ve been thinking about that possibility since Trump’s stunning victory on Nov. 5, when he won not only the Electoral College count, but the most votes overall – and he didn’t even have to lie about it.
     To say nothing of the fact that his MAGA thugs gained control of the Senate and held onto the House.
     Too much winning.
     I mean, what happens when your luck – which never is  an infinite commodity - runs out? What goes up, must go down. The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
     Take what happened Dec. 12. The president-elect had what the New York Times postulated as possibly “Donald Trump’s Perfect Day.”
     He simultaneously was named Time magazine’s “Person of the  Year,” and was given the “honor” of ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, as cries of “USA,” “USA” sang out.
     But what if his Perfect Day was actually Peak Trump?
     Could this have been the moment when there was no more “up,” and from now on,  Trump’s public and private life would be relentlessly downhill and not in a pleasant way.
     I’m a believer in life’s perverse physics.
     It works this way: things are actually the opposite of what they seem. A victory turns out to be the beginning of the end. Losing is the opening chapter in a story about a promising future.
     Understanding that Trump’s lizard brain is uniquely unknowable, I wonder if this is something that troubles him.
     Does his massive, far-reaching winning streak - so relentless, so expansive, so unfair, so undeserved and so perverse - begin to prey on  him? Does he ruminate in the wee hours,  wondering that maybe his number is up,  that he’s exhausted his personal supply of close calls, chance escapes and unexpected victories?
     Does he worry that, having dodged a literal bullet, he’s now threatened by a virtual one?


             WHERE HAVE ALL THE HEROES GONE? PART 1
ONE OF THE LETDOWNS of the current Trump phenomenon is its disappointing dearth of heroes on what has become a bleak and troubled political and cultural landscape.
     Christopher Wray did not have to announce his resignation as FBI director, timed to Trump’s assumption of the presidency on Jan. 20.
     Wray actually has three years left on his official stint as head of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. The 10-year term was deliberately set to straddle presidential administrations, an attempt to insulate the FBI from political influence and whim.
      A president has a right to fire the FBI chief, and Trump had vowed to do so if Wray had decided not step aside. And there’s little doubt that Trump would do what he said.
     But by forcing Trump’s hand, Wray would have stood tall for the FBI, demonstrating that the agency is not a president’s plaything, forcing Trump to challenge its independent traditions.
     Wray, at least from the outside view, has been a credible leader, with little to apologize for. He could have let his record speak for itself and the credibility of the agency.
      Now, Trump has an unobstructed course in putting a patsy in charge, most likely his designated director, Kash Patel, who is sure to work diligently to corrupt the agency with political investigations and policies.


          WHERE HAVE ALL THE HEROES GONE? PART 2
U.S. SEN. JONI ERNST, an Iowa Republican, seemed to have had reservations about a particularly noxious Trump appointment, Pete Hegseth, whom the president-elect nominated as secretary of defense.
     Hegseth has said in the past  that women shouldn’t serve in combat, and he’s been investigated for, but not charged with, sexual assault.
      Ernst is a combat veteran and a sexual assault survivor.
      But after she wondered about Hegseth’s qualifications, she was subject to intense MAGA pressure, with threats of being challenged in a primary in 2026.
     Later, while not endorsing him, Ernst said she had had an “encouraging” meeting with Hegseth, and that she looked forward to supporting Pete the Creep through a “fair hearing.”


           WHERE HAVE ALL THE HEROES GONE? PART 3
IT'S NOT TRUE THAT AMERICA is without modern heroes.
     At least we have Luigi Mangione. He’s the suspected assassin of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO  who was gunned down in New York City on Dec. 4.
     The killer left behind shells inscribed with “deny,” “defend” and “depose,” part of the vocabulary health insurers use in deflecting patients’ coverage.
      Instantly, sympathy bent toward the alleged murderer.
     “He took action against private health insurance corporations,” wrote one admirer on the social platform X. “In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero, end of story!”
      The real villain? The Pennsylvania McDonald’s restaurant , where folks told the cops that a man who looked like the fugitive’s photos was eating. Mangione’s arrest prompted online negative reviews of the fast-food outlet, forcing Google to take down the phony notices.
                                                                              * * *
     A FBI chief caves.
     A combat veteran retreats.
     An accused murderer is lionized.
     And 37 days from now, Donald John Trump, a crook, a liar, an abuser of women, an insurrectionist and a bully, will be sworn in as our country’s role-model-in-chief .


5 Comments

12/3/24

12/4/2024

0 Comments

 

BIDEN'S BETRAYAL

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    (Note: This post originally went out as an email because I wasn't able to access the website service. I apologize for using the word “betray” that was the centerpiece of an earlier post – but no other word fits.-   Brian Jones)
 
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN, by pardoning his son, Hunter, has disgraced the presidency, destroyed his legacy and betrayed all who trust in justice.
    Biden has cleared the way for Donald Trump to continue his abuse of the presidential pardon powers, which began in Trump’s first term and is sure to accelerate in his second.
    If Trump, for example, carries through with his threat to pardon the outlaws who overran the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the excuse should be written large on Washington’s memorial’s and buildings:
   “Joe Biden did it, too.”

 
I’LL NOT GET BOGGED DOWN
in Hunter’s crimes and travails.
   What counts is that he was convicted by a jury of federal gun charges and pleaded guilty to tax evasion charges.
    Beyond those crimes, he traded on his father’s name for years in his business deals.
    That the Biden family has been beset by tragedy, a terrible car accident, his Hunter's brother’s death from brain cancer, Hunter’s drug addiction, is truly sad.
    It's no excuse for the misuse of the Constitution’s unique pardon authority to keep a family member out of the slammer.
 

COMPOUNDING THE PARDON DISGRACE is Biden’s version of the Big Lie. He and his spokespersons repeatedly said that he would never use those powers to protect his son his son.
    For example, after Hunter’s gun conviction last June, Biden said:
    “I abide by the jury decision. I will do that and I will not pardon him.”
    The pardon means that we cannot believe a word he says.
    About anything.
 

I BELIEVED IN JOE BIDEN. And maybe you did, too.
     I thought he had rescued the United States from the depravity and disgrace of Donald Trump’s first term; I respected the way he returned the country to its normal, if imperfect, function. And all of that eloquent "soul of America" stuff.
    Which is now meaningless.
    One of the few defenses that the forces of good have had following the Nov. 5 election has been the moral authority against which to measure Trump’s corruption.
    Now Biden -- selfishly, hypocritically, faithlessly -- has stripped the country of even that standard.
    We are betrayed.


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11/24/24

11/24/2024

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  THE SEASON OF STUPID

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THIS IS THE TIME IN AN ELECTION YEAR when people, myself included, say stupid things.
     Summer is history, and if Donald Trump has his way, it won't be back.
     This is a time of  skeletal tree branches, rotting leafs and four-o’clock sundowns, hinting at what's to come on Jan. 20, when Trump takes over.
     There are about two months of official democracy remaining before the avalanche of Trump’s authoritarian winter sweeps across the continent, suffocating whatever is good about the United States.
     One of the agonies of this waiting period is listening to lectures about what went wrong – not from the winners, who are still planning their MAGA re-education centers – but from the losers, our own comrades.
     How could we have been so witless, the Democratic ask.
     How could we have been so deaf, so arrogant, so elitist that we lost our connection to the hard-working working-families, the economic innocents cheated out of a carton of inflated eggs, while their small towns were overrun by pet-devouring immigrants?
     Why have we Democrats become so alienated from those authentic Americans, leaving them little choice but to seek guidance from the king of common sense, Donald John Trump?
 
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SETH MOULTON
 ONE EXAMPLE OF STUPID came from Seth Moulton, a Democratic Massachusetts congressman, whose star-studded resume includes degrees from Harvard and medals from his service as a Marine during four tours in Iraq.   
 
      The day after the election, The New York Times sought out Democratic heavies for some quickie insights as to the party’s devastating loss. Here’s what Moulton said:     
 Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.
     Captain Moulton had scouted out the enemy and reported the chilling results to the American people:
     Oversized transgender freaks have been roaming America’s athletic fields alongside authentically gendered daughters, whom we’ve left undefended and endangered, because adult enablers from the Democratic left have censored sensible, kitchen-table conversations on this and other  hot-potatoes.
     If only the Democrats hadn’t been burdened by those gender changelings, to say nothing weighted down by those other pesky issues, like police brutality and climate change, that have absolutely nothing to do with what authentic Americans really care about, like the price of eggs.
      In the days following his Times statement, Moulton had a chance  to acknowledge the absurdity  of laying the blame for Trump’s victory at the feet of transgender children, a fragile fraction of the U.S. population that Trump’s goons traumatized in millions-of-dollars worth of campaign ads.
     Instead, Moulton positioned himself as a champion of intraparty free-speech and  as a savant-emissary to practical, hard-working-America. In a clarifying statement the next day, he said:    

      I stand firmly in my belief for the need for competitive women’s sports to put limits on the participation of those with the unfair physical advantages that come with being born male. I am also a strong supporter of the civil rights of all Americans, including transgender rights. I will fight, as I always have, for the rights and safety of all citizens.
     These two ideas are not mutually exclusive, and we can even disagree on them. Yet there are many who, shouting from the extreme left corners of social media, believe I have failed the unspoken Democratic Party purity test. We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue.
     We lost, in part, because we shame and belittle too many opinions held by too many voters and that needs to stop. Let’s have these debates now, determine a new strategy for our party since our existing one failed, and then unite to oppose the Trump agenda wherever it imperils American values.    

     Notice that Moulton dropped in that line repudiating the thrust his Times' statement: “We did not lose the 2024 election because of any trans person or issue.” But that was overshadowed by his overall charge that lefty purists had squashed honest discussion and therefore distanced the party from mainstream America.
     What should he have said? First, he owed transgender individuals – especially youngsters – an apology.
     'My stupid. I fell into the Republican trap of picking on a vulnerable group of children, whose desperate search for gender identity can literally cost their lives.'
     Secondly, he should have followed that by saying the only thing we all know for certain about why Trump won is that none of us actually knows the answer.
    

EVIL FORCES WERE AFOOT on Nov. 5, and my best guess now is that nothing could have stopped them. Like Seth Moulton and everyone else distraught by the election results, I have no proof as to why that happened, just sorrow.
     Personally, I don’t buy the economic excuse – that, battered by inflation, voters turned on the incumbent party. Nearly as many voters supported Kamala Harris, but I guess they were immune from inflation – maybe coastal elites know where to shop for cheap eggs.

     What I don’t understand is why Democrats seem angrier at each other than at the people who voted Donald Trump into the White House and who handed Republicans control of the Senate and House.
     The result will be a storm of terror and hate unlike the worst fire and brimstone descriptions in the Bible, and it’s entirely the fault of the Trump voters.
  • Trump voters put the planet on a death watch, because Trump will accelerate climate change; Trump voters upended the lives of millions of immigrants, their families and their children, who live in fear they’ll be deported – and thousands will be.
  • Trump voters dispatched a recovering economy to the tariff poor house; Trump voters abolished the concept of fairness, as a criminalized Department of Injustice will use the law as a club to attack Trump’s enemies.
  • Trump voters reactivated the GOP’s enduring dream of taking money from the poor – food stamps and Medicaid – and pass it to the rich as lower taxes; Trump voters set back women’s rights to medical care and equal status.
  • Trump voters cleared the way for  U.S. soldiers to confront protesters - be they their neighbors, cousins and friends - with deadly force, having left dissenters few options beyond taking to the streets.

A LITTLE MORE ABOUT TRANSGENDER MATTERS.
     I don’t know a lot about the subject. What I’ve read is that a slice of the population is betrayed by a confounding quirk of nature. At some point in their lives, some girls realize their bodies have lied to them, and that they are boys; the same with some males, who  identify as females. The journey to balance the scales is fraught and perilous, but can be successful and life-affirming.
     Do female athletes face unfair competition from some transitioned males? Maybe, but  hormone treatments that they may take, and which some sports associations require, can narrow the differences.
     Because the numbers of transgender persons are relatively small, and their athletic cohort is even smaller, the chances that Seth Moulton’s daughters will be run down by such a contestant are small.
      But transgender players do show up on female teams – and there is hell to pay when the culture warriors sink their teeth into the actual human beings involved.    

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THE SAN JOSE SPARTANS volleyball team, including the transgender player, whom the Washington Post isn't naming. CREDIT: San Jose State University website
  The Washington Post has a distressing and complicated story this week about the women’s volleyball team at San Jose State University, where one player has been identified as transgender, and the resulting controversy has seen five other teams refuse to play against the squad.
     The issue turned so ugly that a San Jose co-captain is part of a lawsuit seeking to have her transgender teammate banned, the filings saying the player had unfairly displaced other players; the captain even claimed the teammate conspired unsuccessfully to injure her.
     There are differing views as to the potential danger and competitive disadvantage posed by that  player, whom the Post didn't identified because the player hasn’t talked about her background. An official of one volleyball team wrote this about competing against San Jose:   

  I do think it is important to note, we have played against this athlete for the past two seasons and our student-athletes felt safe in the previous matches. She is not the best or most dominant hitter on the Spartans team.
PictureSARAH MC BRIDE
     The San Jose website lists the player as 6-feet, 1-inches tall, which at first seems male-advantaged; but of the 19 players, seven women are 6-feet or more, including one who is 6-feet, 3-inches.

THE MISCHIEF THAT COMES from exploiting transgender issues has sprung up in the Capitol, where the country’s first elected transgender Congresswoman, Sarah McBride, a Delaware Democrat, has been cornered in one of the GOP’s favorite battlespaces, the bathroom.
      GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina has demanded McBride be barred from women’s bathrooms; Speaker Mike Johnson is delighted by the idea of restricting bathrooms, a move that will affect trans Capitol staffers and visitors.
      McBride says she’ll follow the House rules. But that’s made her a target of transgender advocates, who say that she has let down the cause, betraying less powerful and more vulnerable people whom McBride should be championing.


ADMITTING THAT I’M AT A LOSS as to why Trump won and what to do about it, here is what I hope, at a minimum, will happen:
     I  want Democrats to defend vulnerable groups, always, and to reject scapegoating or abandoning individuals as tactic to win the hearts and minds of voters.
     Lots of people, like Congressman Moulton, have taken to blaming Democrats for losing the election because they’ve lost touch with voters’ prejudices, which I find to be both unkind and unlikely.
     I wish the critics would save a little of their fury for the real villains, the Trump voters.
     It’s the Trump voters who have condemned themselves and the rest of us to years of treachery and cruelty that represent America at her very worst.
     The Season of Stupid can’t end soon enough.


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11/7/24

11/7/2024

3 Comments

 

CATASTROPHE!
The election wasn’t our fault.
What we do about it will be

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 I WISH I HAD THE ANSWERS.
     Just a couple would do.
     One insight or two into why Trump won and won so big.
     A few profound ideas about what we, the losers, can do.
     But like Trump himself, the election is a hideous mystery.
     That our friends, neighbors could willingly, purposefully, thoughtfully, soberly and deliberately push the country over the cliff into autocracy and chaos is, and always will be, baffling.
     As I write this, I’m still in shock. When I woke up the day after the election, I was amazed that I could still breathe in and out, that my heart continued to beat and my eyes blinked.
     So, still dazed, these are my thoughts after talking with my wife and hearing from faraway friends, their dear voices so welcome and comforting just to hear.
     I outline a few ideas in the first person, because I feel unworthy and unequipped to write a prescription for anyone else. Maybe you’ll find these useful, if only to advance  your thinking.

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 ABOVE ALL, I MUST BE KIND. If a driver is trying to pull out of a side street, I must stop to let him in. If there’s somebody struggling for exact change at the checkout, I need to be patient. If I pass someone on a sidewalk, smile. Hold the door. Pick up the stray candy wrapper.
     If I want the Next America to be more humane, I have to act that way. Instead of being a scowling, grumpy, self-centered creature, I’m pledged to at least try to do the kind thing.
     It will be important to remember the beauty and wonder of America – its astonishing landscapes, and its inspired creative and cultural energy.
     I want especially to be kind to Kamala Harris and the Democrats.
     The virulent post-election Blame-A-Thon now underway is unseemly and unfair. Harris ran a robust, brilliant campaign that culminated in her devastating trouncing Trump in their one TV debate.
     Her mastery of the mechanics, decision-making and rhetoric of the campaign in the short, crisis-driven campaign showed that she was absolutely qualified for the presidency.
     Her loss was far more than a lost chance to banish the evil of Donald Trump. It squandered a rare opportunity for a the nation to enlist a capable, even great president.
     To beat up on Joe Biden, or find fault with Harris’s failure to “understand” the economic pain purportedly felt by the Trump voters, is unnecessarily wasteful and cruel.
     The scope and depth of the voters’ embrace of Donald Trump is as bewildering as it is grotesque.

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 I’M ANGRY AND MUST STAY ANGRY.
     The Trump voters – every single one of them – are betrayers not just of democracy, but decency.
     They have a lot to answer for.
     They endorsed racism, nativism, corruption, criminality, cruelty and sexism.
     The big Trump policies will include massive deportation of immigrants, which will ruin lives, imperil the economy and set the stage for attacks on many other groups and lead to an eventual turnback of civil rights.
     One half the population – women – will be recommitted to second-class citizenship, not just in terms of healthcare, but in every sector of society.
     Climate change will continue to imperil the planet and all of us who live here.
     The economy – the supposed excuse for voting for Trump – will weaken and become more unfair, with all of us “little people” imperiled on a bipartisan basis.
     Every aspect of American life will be worse under President Trump than it would have been under President Harris.
     What Trump voters have done to us, in other words, is unforgivable and must never be excused or rationalized.


EVERY DAY WILL PRESENT CHOICES. I must make the right one every time.
     Do I speak out?
     Join this group?
     Donate money?
     Let this car in line?
     Subscribe to this newspaper?
     Follow this podcast?
     Buy from this company?
     Pick up that stray candy wrapper?

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 ACKNOWLEDGE THE CATASTROPHE
     I know enough about myself that I will want it all to go away, that I’ll wear out, become exhausted, frightened, and weary of what it will take to get the country back on course.
     The only certainty of the next four years is that every aspect of American life will be worse – far worse – than we expect, mirroring the astonishingly breadth the election itself.
     The first attack will be on free speech and free assembly. Trump will wage war on all media; he will criminalize demonstrations; he will turn the national security apparatus against all citizens.
     I must pay attention, and respond individually, and participate collectively, to counter every assault on the First Amendment. A big part of what otherwise should be “charitable” donations will go to individual media and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union.
     The ultimate agenda is breathtaking, because the election was so sweeping, and because Trump’s appetite for malice is so vast.
     I don’t know whether I’ll be up to the challenge, only that I want to be.

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11/5/24

11/5/2024

3 Comments

 

DAY OF DREAD & HOPE: THE ELECTION FINALLY ENDS

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ILLUSTRATION CREDIT: Frank Gerardi
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THIS IS THE DAY.
     I’ve dreaded it for years, and yet I’m glad the final day of voting is here. The campaign had to be finished at some point, and there is much to rejoice in looking back at what has been accomplished.
     America is threatened as at no time since the Second World War, and I think the nation has battled back with energy, ingenuity and courage.
     Millions upon millions of people recognize that Donald Trump is out to destroy democracy and corrupt our culture.
     It is amazing to me that one man could hate the country so thoroughly as he does, turning liberals like me into zealous flag-wavers, the kind of super patriots we used to scorn in the Cold war days.
     Some of the most startling counter-Trumpsters have been Republicans like Liz and Dick Cheney and even Mike Pence, who did the right thing at the right time on Jan. 6, 2021.
     Some of the sharpest and most insightful commentary has come from conservatives.
     Millions of "ordinary" Americans, as if there are such creatures, have donated a billion-plus dollars to Harris, visited battleground states to knock on doors, dispatched post cards, joined Democratic phone banks, argued with relatives, attended rallies, phoned talk shows, listened to podcasts, scoured newspapers and hollered at TV screens.
     I have said this before, turning 82 personally has had plenty of downsides, but among the benefits has been the privilege of being around to witness this crusade to defend American democracy.


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 IT’S NOT BEEN PERFECT, of course, the campaign to rescue a country.
     The major news organizations have done a fine job letting us know the ups and downs of campaign events.
     You and I could not know the terrible threat of a Trump second term without the remarkable journalism of the New York Times and the Washington Post.
     Yet, both of these great surviving newspapers betrayed their readers and the country.
     The Times has failed to treat the danger Trump represents as an unqualified, unquestionable threat to the country, of the sort you might expect as if an asteroid were headed our way. Instead, it has portrayed a largely normal campaign, airbrushing Trump’s betrayal and downplaying Harris’s emergent  leadership.
     The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, let down his readers and reporters by withdrawing, at the last minute, an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, an obvious move to curry favor with Trump, should he win.
      (My wife notes Bezos's disregard for his reporters' safety, in light of Trump's constant attack on reporters, saying recently he wouldn't mind if would-be assassins turned their guns on the journalists covering his rallies).
      My personal nomination for cowardice goes to present-day folk signer-songwriters, offspring of a noble earlier generation that  gave voice to the civil rights and anti-war crusades of the 1960s and 1970s. But today’s singer-poets have had nothing to sing about when it comes to Donald Trump.
     I’m guessing why: they feared losing half or more of their audiences if they trained their satire and psychic insights toward Donald Trump, and maybe they were scared of Trump's legal attacks and being blacklisted by radio and web-hosting monoliths. Sing a song of shame.
      And what to make of the Republican Party “leadership,” and most of all, the Trump faithful, who have been blind and deaf to Trump’s vulgarity, authoritarianism, violence, cruelty and brutality.

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UNTIL TODAY, it has been comforting to know that the election was somewhere down the road, with enough time to work and strategize our roles in the campaign, and, frankly, to bask safely  in Joe Biden’s democracy.
     So, I hated the relentless turning of the calendar, and then to come to the end of October and now the beginning of November.
     In our family, November is usually a special month: my wife’s birthday is at the end of election week, my grand daughter’s birthday arrives shortly after that; and capping it all is the best of all American holidays, Thanksgiving.
     What are those celebrations going to be like if . . . ?


 I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA how this will end.
     I have avoided anything about the polls, because early in the campaign they took the focus off the critical issues – democracy versus dictatorship – and also, because common sense says that accurate polling seems impossible.
     Who in their right mind answers a phone call from a pollster? And those who do, it seems to me, have an agenda – either to hide their true intentions, or to poison the survey with corrupt answers.
     So, maybe the race IS tied. My guess is that the outcome will be anything but close, and victory will be quickly apparent and well-defined. I just don’t know if that imagined big margin will belong to Trump or to Harris.
     In my hometown, Newport, R.I., I have yet to see ONE Trump sign, although I'm told there are some, and I've seen only a smattering of Harris posters.
     There are plenty of local city council and school committee campaign signs, so it’s not like Newport residents have lost the skill of planting a poster or two or seven on their front lawns, hedges and fences.

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    But I take no comfort in the famine of Trump and Harris signs. My guess is that residents simply don’t want their fellow citizens to know their thinking when it comes Harris vs. Trump, and a lack of lawn decorations avoids conflicts, arguments and grudges erupting before and after the election.

LIKE EVERYONE ELSE,  I have been amazed at the dynamics of the election.
     Who could have predicted that two disasters, the Supreme Court’s abortion decision and Joe Biden’s debate debacle, have given Democrats a fighting chance, with abortion becoming a defining issue and Kamala Harris emerging as an instant  maestro of the political orchestra.
     I’m disappointed that some of the country’s most challenging issues – climate change, economic inequality, racism and the conflicts in Ukraine and Middle East – have not been central to  the campaign.
     Still, I think the voters need all they need to know: Trump will ruin America; Harris will advance it.
     My expectation is a definitive Harris win.
     But that’s just me. I have no insight, special antennae or any way of measuring the pulse of America, scientifically or otherwise.
     Like many, I have daily panic attacks about the human catastrophe that would follow a Trump victory.
     I am not a brave man. I don’t know what kind of a resistance fighter I would be if Trump wins. Not as fierce and relentless as I would wish. Especially knowing that however awful his regime can be imagined now, the reality will be far worse.
     Every day, I allow myself to imagine the relief, joy and celebration of a New America that a Harris victory will unleash.
     Especially today, I’m filled with hope.

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3 Comments

10/29/24

10/29/2024

3 Comments

 

An American Dream
          HARRIS WINS!
        United States elects its first woman president;
      Voters reject Trump’s dark vision of the county.

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WE’RE ONE WEEK AWAY from Election Day.
     I’ve been thinking about what will happen. Here’s my vision:
     Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College count – both by decisive margins.
     The headlines and stories reflect astonishment.
     The polls, once again, got it wrong.
     As  did the political soothsayers, who usually opt for pessimism, cynicism, and skepticism - not without reason, since the world is savage place - and because they're scared silly of being wrong.
     And surely, the pollsters and experts never want to be accused of the ultimate sin of being soft-headed, sentimental and impractical.
     Both the commentariat and the polls had indicated a discouraging outcome, in which the momentum in the final days belonged to Donald Trump.
     Even Harris’s supporters, when asked how they were feeling about the election, gave a candid one-word answer: “nervous.”
     Many of The Nervous remembered but never recovered from the shock of 2016, in which Trump illogically, and against the best polls and the wisest punditry, gathered enough Electoral votes to become president.
     Trump’s presidency had been a disaster,  even worse than imagined. Yet, here he was again, with a resume that had more in common with a criminal’s rap sheet than a list of presidential qualifications; more popular than ever;  a survivor of twin impeachments and two attempted assassinations;  filling auditoriums and stadiums; spewing racism, lies, vulgar jokes and promising a brutal, cruel authoritarianism.
     How could so many millions of Americans be enthralled and devoted to such a repulsive figure, who promoted so many un-American beliefs?


THE ANSWER, ON ELECTION NIGHT, was that Harris had upended all of that.
     How?
     Once again, Americans proved that they believed in the American dream.
     It’s a dream often defined by material prosperity – the house with the picket fence, the car(s)  and affordable eggs.
     But the important part of the dream has always been about more. The American dream, from the beginning, is about hope. Hope that in one country, ideas and ideals count. Hope that things could, would and will get better.
     America’s sins are real and lasting. Slavery powered the country's original economy, and its “manifest destiny” was realized by slaughtering and betraying Indians.
     But generation after generation, the country sought to better live up to its founding language.
     Now, in the election of 2024, all “men” really meant that everyone really was equal; a woman was elected president; finally, the country had doubled its chances of electing a capable leader.
     With a mixed  background, Harris was more representative of the country America was becoming: mixed-race, mixed faith, mixed origins, all in service of the American dream.

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 LOOKING BACK ON IT ALL, Harris’s win was all the more inspired and astonishing because it was born out of an unprecedented political crisis.
     Joe Biden, an accomplished, and wildly underappreciated president, had been showing his age and/or health as he sought a second term, and when he confronted Trump in a  TV debate, Biden disintegrated.
     Under immense pressure from fellow Democrats, Biden on July 21 withdrew from the race, leaving his largely unloved vice president – Kamala Harris – as the only viable replacement as the Democratic nominee.
     From that moment on, Harris emerged as a confident, competent and capable leader, instantly eloquent and in control, never making a strategic stumble or verbal misstep.
     At the Democratic convention a month later, on Aug. 23, Harris succinctly summarized both Trump’s weakness and threat:
     Fellow Americans, this election is not only the most important of our lives, it is one of the most important in the life of our nation. In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences — but the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.
     More than any policy position or stirring speech, Harris demonstrated that she had what it takes to be a president, and in  their single TV debate, she demolished Trump.
     But Harris’s personal qualities were not the only factor in her win.
     During the three-month, exuberant and desperate campaign, millions of American rose to the challenge. Progressives mostly held their tongues as Harris reached out to conservatives. Conservative icons, like the Cheney family, set aside their ideology for core democratic principles. People from solidly blue states traveled to the seven battleground states to knock on doors. Volunteers made phone calls, wrote postcards and prayed.
     On election night, it was too early to tell whether Harris would be among the good presidents; or whether she would be admitted to that rare group, the Washingtons, the Lincolns, and, with my bias is showing here, the Bidens.
     But what we did know is that Harris’s election opened a new, promising chapter in the American story.
     Now we would be able to confront a brutal economy, which leaves many American impoverished, homeless and hungry. Now we would be able to confront climate change, Russian aggression, deadly conflict in the Middle East and all the surprises and challenges that are the ordinary, everyday elements of American life.
                                                                                *   *   *

IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR, you may say that my vision of what we’ll be experiencing next Tuesday is a fantasy, born of wishful thinking and spacey sentiment.
     Maybe.
     But my American dream is based in our country’s difficult, aspirational and inspired history.
     And without this dream, we will never have the country that we want for ourselves and that our children deserve.

3 Comments

10/27/24

10/27/2024

3 Comments

 

BETRAYED!

After the Washington Post shamefully bows to Trump, what should readers do? Cancel?  Keep footing the bill?
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WE ARE BETRAYED.
     In a nauseating, abject, obsequious act of subjection to Donald Trump, the Washington Post this week killed its expected endorsement of Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president.
     It was a betrayal on many levels: of the paper's extraordinary journalistic history, its talented staff, its readers, and most importantly, of the country, at an unprecedented hour of peril.
     It was Jeff Bezos’ doing.
     He’s the owner of the Post, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest men. He moved the election’s outcome toward Trump, perhaps only by inches, but closer.
     What should those who care about a storied newspaper and its place in our public life do about this shocking, surprising treachery?
     Should the paper’s editorial board, which had prepared an endorsement, resign? Should the rest of the staff – the writers, analysts, cartoonists, columnists likewise quit?
     Should readers – myself included – cancel our subscriptions?
     Tens of thousands of readers, who denounced the endorsement debacle in online comments and letters to the paper, threatened to do just that – quit paying for the Post, and thereby give up reading it.
     To all of those possible moves, I say no – please don’t.

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THE STAFF, INCLUDING THE EDITORIAL BOARD, should stay put and continue producing its insightful commentaries. The reporting staff should keep working and writing, turning out some of the country’s best political, investigative and other journalism.
     And the readers should keep paying the Post’s bills, galling and infuriating as that might seem.
     Newspapers, especially the good ones like the Post, which have survived the near collapse of the industry, are simply too precious and rare to be allowed to disappear, even if, at the moment, it seems that the Post has brought injury upon itself.
     As for those of us who are subscribers, withdrawing our financial support is simply a self-inflicted wound, one that’s only momentarily satisfying in the heat of our collective tantrum.
     The fact is that newspapers are unique, even in the digital age. The really good ones, with huge, experienced staffs, are the only news outfits equipped to do proper journalism.
     So if we undermine the paper’s financial footings, we only hurt ourselves, as well as the country.
     It may well be that the Post will not survive, anyway. While it flourished initially after Bezos purchased it and wisely recognized the Internet could make it a national, subscription newspaper, the paper these day seems not to be so healthy, financially or journalistically.
     And if Trump wins the election with the help of cowards like Bezos, Trump has promised to include high-quality news outlets among his first targets. It’s just what dictators do.
     Then there’s the practicality of the limited responses available to the paper’s staff and to the readers.
     Bezos won’t care if reporters and other staffers disappear from his payroll; he won’t miss the readers’ contributions – the fact is the Post's online subscriptions aren’t all that expensive, so a rich man may be willing to lose thousands of readers.
     And frankly, now that the paper is struggling, he probably won’t care very much if “his” Washington Post lives or dies.
     He is, after all, a traitor to journalism, or he wouldn’t have done what he did in the first place – refused to honor his own writers’ voluminous reporting that showed Trump to be a clear and present danger to the country.

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 MANY OF THE POST'S past and current writers, eloquent folks that they are, have written on the Post’s own pages and website with far more insight and spirit than I can, about the endorsement disgrace.
     Marty Baron, the iconic former editor of the paper, was quoted in a Post story:
     “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
     Look, I don’t hold out much hope for the long-term future of the Post after this traumatic injury.
     But I want to be wrong.
     Maybe the Post will continue its courageous, remarkable work. Maybe Jeff Bezos will hold a news conference today, apologize for his mistake, read the endorsement out loud and then publish it – thanking the readers for caring so much.
     It’s obvious in the real world that the paper can continue only if the staff stays put and readers foot the bill.
     At the very least, let’s not do Donald Trump’s dirty work for him.

3 Comments

10/22/24

10/22/2024

3 Comments

 

Election countdown - 2 weeks left
TRUMP’S VULGAR FABLE ABOUT A GOLFER’S PENIS WON’T DEFEAT HIM. BUT AMERICAN VOTERS CAN.

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I THOUGHT – STUPIDLY – that when Donald Trump told a political rally last Saturday that the late golf icon, Arnold Palmer, had a substantial penis, and, later, at the same event, he called his opponent a “shit,” those would be major developments in the campaign.
     Trump’s behavior was so awful and so unseemly that the rally story had to have implications for the election, and at the very least, it would have a longer than usual life in the news cycle.
      Because it was profane and vulgar.
      Because it showed Trump is continuing to lose his grip. (Or that he's not).
     Because it was one of those simple to understand parables that explains so much about why Trump should not be president.
     If Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, had done that sort of thing, it would have been the finale act of her campaign – Curtains for Kamala.
     As it was, I saw only one really good story about the rally,  in the Washington Post, although even in that paper, it never got top billing; the New York Times “explained” it academically as another Trumpian visit to the sewer. And NPR at one point mentioned that Trump had described Palmer’s “anatomy,” without saying which part.
     I am embarrassed to say I was surprised and genuinely shocked that he would discuss somebody’s dick and that he would describe his rival as poop.
     And at the very least, I expected that the story would be talk of the liberal press, the liberal blogs, the liberal podcasts. But it faded quickly in the ongoing blizzard of other “news.” Did you know, for example, that the next day Donald Trump dished out french fries at a staged visit to a McDonald’s restaurant?
      If you've read this far, you’re probably saying : “Where have you been the last nine years? Nothing that Donald John Trump does or says matters. Don’t you know that? By now?”
     Even worse, a remote part of my brain involuntarily continues to expect Donald Trump to self-extinguish, so that sooner than later he will go too far, and that suddenly there will be a national consensus that whatever the elusive “too far” is, Trump will reach that threshold, and that will be that.
     Of course, that's not going to happen. Donald Trump is not going to bring Donald Trump down. Which doesn’t mean that Donald Trump is invincible – only that Donald Trump won’t be the one to do himself in.


I’D LIKE TO LINGER in the Trump gutter briefly. Both his Long Schlong Story and his Harris-Is-A-Shit assessment tell us much about the man, who, according to the polls, has at least a 50-50 chance of becoming president – as we mark the two week point before Election Day.
    I would add this warning:  we should not take Trump at his word that Arnold Palmer had an outsized penis. Trump is a serial, pathological liar, and we should always presume he's making up stuff until we know otherwise.
     I’m not even sure  how you'd begin to fact-check this story, or whether PolitiFact or similar organizations have tried to.

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ARNOLD PALMER, RIGHT, with Palmer statue at Laurel Valley Golf Course, Ligonier, PA, near Latrobe
     Palmer’s Wikipedia page makes no mention.
     I suppose someone could ask members of his family or other golfers, whom Trump claims were witnesses to the phenomenon.  
     It’s possible there are biographies that include a chapter or two. Or, maybe there’s an archival edition of Golf Digest with insights.
     But for our purposes, size is not the main issue; it’s the rudeness and Trump's obvious delight in telling the fable.    
     
     Trump’s rally was in Pennsylvania, the most important of the seven battleground states, specifically in the community of Latrobe, which was Palmer’s hometown. Palmer, who won 62 PGA Tour titles,  died in 2016 at age 87.

        Here’s how Trump's story played out, and you can see it yourself on a C-Span video by clicking on this link: 
     Trump spent a good 10 minutes extolling Palmer’s golfing career. But you could tell all of that background was just a long-winded introduction to the story that he really wanted to tell:

 So, you know, I've been here before and I've told the story before, not in this kind of detail, because, you know, you have these teleprompters. If I would read it off a teleprompter, it wouldn't be so good, right? And  it would be a lot shorter. It wouldn't be as good. And I didn't want to do that. I said when I come here, I'm going to tell the real story of Arnold, but Arnold Palmer was all man. And I say that in all due respect to women and I love women. (Crowd cheers)

But this guy, this guy, this is a guy that was all-man. This man was strong and tough, and I refused to say it; but when he took showers with the other pros, they came out of there, they said: “Oh, my God, that's unbelievable.” (Laughter). I had to say it. I have to say we have women that are highly sophisticated here. But they used to look at Arnold (garbled). But he was really something special. Arnold was something special. So I just want to tell you, you're very lucky, the  people that live in Latrobe.

And it's an honor for me to be here, because of him. And he was actually, he was a great man, and I don't think there would be golf to this, to the extent that you have it today. It probably wouldn't be that way without the great Arnold Palmer. So enjoy it. Everybody enjoy it. And I had to tell you the shower part of it because it's, it's true. What can I tell? We want to be honest, we want to be upfront. It's true.

     Again, you and I don’t know that “it’s true.” What’s also not clear is why Trump or anyone else would want to tell this story in public (or private).
     Did he want the people of Latrobe to know an important historic detail? Certainly, the folks at the rally and maybe the nation watching on TV will never be able to “unhear” it. Did Trump want the world of golf to know? Did he want us to believe that long ago golfers took showers and that they made sure they checked out the size of other people's equipment?
     Maybe, it's just that an old man,  with the brain of a middle-schooler,  likes to talk to talk dirty,  so that he'll be noticed.


IT WOULD BE UNFAIR to say that Trump limited his remarks to a supposedly legendary body part. His rally went on for more than an hour, and as usual, Trump zigzagged from topic to topic. Immigrants are drug dealers, murderers and mental patients. Joe Biden has been a foreign policy failure. Recently, “Bibi” Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, phoned Trump. Elon Musk is a genius; tariffs will push the economy into high gear.
     At one point, Trump apparently caught a glimpse of himself in a TV monitor, prompting this remark:

  I’m looking at my hair up there. Let’s say, “Oh, I don’t like it. I don’t like it. Excuse me. I’m going to recomb my hair.” Do you mind? I’ll leave the stage for five minutes. I’m going to recomb my hair.”
      Trump apparently had second thoughts about ducking the spotlight for the recomb.
      Lest anyone forget that he has twice escaped assassination attempts, he noted that his Secret Service protection has increased – and he turned that point into another opportunity to reference Palmer.

 They give you a little extra security now. It has, you know, hey, I got more machine guns than I've ever seen in my. Look at these guys. Hey, yay, yay. I got more machine guns. I never saw guns like that. I said to my son, Don, he knows a lot about guns and Eric knows – they are great shots; they really understand. I said, “What kind of a gun is that?” They said, “Dad, you don't even want to know.” They are serious guns. We got more guys than … every one of them is like central casting, too. Holy. I'm looking -they look like Arnold Palmer. They look like Arnold; can't look better than Arnold.
AND, OF COURSE, TRUMP made many mentions of Kamala Harris. Here’s one, in which he compared her to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and managed to get in a barnyard word:
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  Bernie is radical left and this one, Kamala, is further left than them. So you have to tell Kamala Harris that you've had enough, that you just can't take it anymore. We can't stand you. You're a shit vice president, the worst. You're the worst. Vice President Kamala, you're fired. Get the hell out of here, you're fired. Get out of here, get the hell out of here.
     If Harris had discussed a man's private parts, that would probably end her chances of becoming the first woman president.
     If she said that Trump had been “a shit President,” that would have been big news and reason for much worry, despair and critical editorials.
     I don’t know why Trump gets away with it all. He tried to overthrow an election. He’s been convicted of falsifying records to cover up payments to a porn star. He wants to let global warming destroy the planet. He’s a liar, a business cheat, a misogynist and a bigot. He proposes detaining and expelling millions of immigrants. He sent  Russia's Vladimir Putin Covid drug tests during the pandemic.
     Here’s the bottom line:
     The only way we are going to be free of Trump is to defeat him in the election, which ends just two weeks from now on Nov. 5.
     Donald Trump won’t rid America of Donald Trump.
     But American voters can.

3 Comments

10/15/24

10/15/2024

1 Comment

 

OH, REALLY? THERE'S A DANGEROUS ELECTION HEADING OUR WAY?

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 WE’VE BEEN HAVING THE BEST WEATHER of the year in Rhode Island. Gorgeous conditions – warm, crystal clear air, drenched with sunshine, piercingly blue skies and the most gentle winds.
     And that’s a problem.
     You’d think that everything is terrific, and it will stay that way.
     It’s not okay, of course, not in North Carolina and Florida and the other states that have been devastated by hurricanes Helene and Milton, with their homicidal winds, sea surges, monsoon rains and sneak tornadoes.
     Even more treacherous is the election, now just three weeks away, which will turn the country in one of two directions: toward dictatorship or toward democracy.
     And yet, just as with the balmy weather here in Rhode Island, there is remarkable calm about this election, easily the most important in my eight-decade lifetime.
     I can’t figure out why.
     Kamala Harris promises essentially a New America, one in which the country continues to make progress toward our founding ideals and principles.
     Donald Trump will plunge the country into an authoritarian hellscape, probably one from which escape will be impossible.
     If a hurricane – or an asteroid - were threatening the entire country, not just part of it, there would be alarms and warnings aplenty.
     The airwaves and cyberspace should be filled with announcements; there’d be leaflets, billboards, sound-trucks (Do we still have those?). Volunteers would be spreading the word. We would be filling the equivalent of sandbags, towncriers would alerting us to the coming catastrophe.
     We had a terrific street fair in Newport last Saturday. Shouldn’t we instead have been taking to the streets about the election?

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SURE, IF YOU ARE TUNED IN to MSNBC or political podcasts, you know what the stakes are.
     But for much of America, my sense is that  life is proceeding as usual. Yup, there’s an election. But also Halloween.  Daylight Savings Time is about to end, drastically shrinking afternoon daylight. But heck, these are things that happen every year.
     In one sense, this sense of Everything’s Fine is a tribute to the Joe Biden presidency. He promised to return the United States to normal after the chaos of the Trump years.
     And Biden delivered. The country recovered, with exceptions, from Covid; the economy surged, if imperfectly, because a market-system is unfair to the underdog; climate control got its strongest forward push, although still far too feeble. Mainly, the machinery of democracy is working as it’s supposed to.
     But the peril of a Trump return to the White House is real and possible.
     Trump makes no secret of his awful plans.
     He wants to imprison, and deport, millions of immigrants, a crusade of hatred that will have massive spillover into scapegoating other groups and eventual reversal of all civil rights.
     He wants local police to crack heads. He’ll appoint political judges and if there are openings in the Supreme Court, he’ll do what he did with his three nominees, who dispossessed women of equal medical care and created unheard of legal immunity for presidents, mocking the principal that “no one is above the law.” Trump lies and lies and lies. The election was stolen. Refugees eat their neighbors’ cats and dogs. The election was stolen. Biden won’t even call governors in storm-torn states. The election was stolen.
      Last night, at a “town hall” event in Pennsylvania, after two people apparently collapsed in an overly hot hall, Trump stopped answering questions and spent the next half hour encouraging his audience to listen to his favorite songs played over the sound system, twisting and shifting to the music.
     The Washington Post’s headline:

  Trump sways and bops to music for
  39 minutes in bizarre town hall episode
    
     Why wasn’t this the Post’s main headline, the banner headline on every newspaper, the lead story on every newscast, the talk of the town and the country, a  rocking would-be president off his rocker?
     Trump will change the culture, and turn it mean, ugly and strange.

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 SO MUCH FOR OUR SWEET, GENTLE AUTUMN.
    A terrible storm – the most frightening in our history – is headed our way.
     Unlike natural disasters, this is ours – the voters – to control.
    We can let the storm have its way with our country, ripping apart our traditions, and degrading the lives of every one of our citizens.
    Or we can change its course, and send it  harmlessly out to sea.
     As of this moment, as a country, we don’t seem to care all that much which way the winds blow. Nice weather here in the east. Baseball playoffs underway. Football is getting started. Donald Trump is twisting and lying.
     What’s the big deal?

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1 Comment

10/8/24

10/8/2024

3 Comments

 

WITNESS TO A GREAT POLITICAL CRUSADE
What I learned during an afternoon of calling Democrats at  home

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YOU’D THINK THAT CALLING PEOPLE, even for a righteous cause – like saving the country from a dictator – would be rotten work.
     We all hate these phone calls; so you’d wouldn’t want to be the one doing it.
     Bothering folks at home, interrupting them, spoiling lunch, making them drop  the paint bucket to answer a call on the chance it might be the medical lab tests results, or the monthly call from an overseas cousin or the lawyer with news you’re in the will of a rich godmother you never knew existed.
     I was on one of those national phone banks last Sunday for the Kamala Harris-Tim Walz campaign, which enlisted hundreds of volunteers to make political calls.  I came away, after two hours, inspired.
     The excitement, enthusiasm I heard in the people who actually answered their phones – and more than half did – was extraordinary. It made me realize what a crusade we are witnessing – this effort to preserve democracy as the cloud of Donald Trump once again menaces the country.
     The people I reached were all-in for Harris . They really, really liked her, admired her and saw in her a hopeful future that is the antithesis of the hellscape Trump has in mind for America .
     “I am one-hundred-thousand-and-ten-percent for her,” exclaimed one woman, reaching for a number to adequately measure her support for Harris.
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KAMALA HARRIS on 60 Minutes Monday night
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      “I am absolutely voting for her,” said another woman who was walking not one but two dogs at a park, dogs that didn’t necessarily welcome meeting other pooches.
     Wrangling the two dogs, which weren’t small, would have made an acceptable excuse for her hang up her cell phone, but she wanted to stay on the line, just to talk about how much she appreciated the campaign.
     I reached a woman in Puerto Rico. She had gone there from the mainland to take care of an uncle who was in his 80s. She was a bit younger – in her 70s – but said she was eager to vote.
     How eager?
     Well, she was planning to return home at the end of October, so she could vote in person, and then planned to fly back to Puerto Rico, to resume her care-taking duties.
     “I’m old school, and I want to vote in person,” she said. Then she added, ominously, I thought at first: “I have two cousins in Pennsylvania and Florida – and they are going to vote for Harris, too.”
     Another person said that four years ago, there were a few  Trump signs in her neighborhood, but that so far, the only signs she was seeing were for Harris and Walz.
     “Now, this is anecdotal,” she cautioned me. “You can’t always tell what’s going on with those signs. I’m just telling you what I’m seeing.”



LIKE THE SIGN SPOTTER, I don’t want to give you the wrong signals.
     If you are a Democrat, or an Independent leaning left, or a Republican Never-Trumper, you are worried and have been for nine years, "worried" being a euphemism for being scared silly and sleepless.
     Most of my friends are nervous in the closing weeks of the campaign. It just doesn’t feel right. Harris should be doing better in the polls. The euphoria that surged when she assumed the nomination this summer seems to have cooled now that it's fall.
     I'm sorry that I can’t relieve those fears, based on the feedback I was getting from my calls, which were steered to Democrats.
     And we know Democrats are born scared and nervous, it’s in  their DNA; and Donald Trump’s 2016 victory is a trauma from which they will never fully recover.  Plus, it’s a fact that Trump has a crazed following for whom facts have no meaning.
     Most importantly, I wasn't talking with a cross-section of normal Democrats. Mainly, the people I seemed to be reaching seemed plucked fom a data base of super Democratic voters.
     In essence, I was calling up the choir. On a Sunday.
     The purpose of the calls was to recruit people to do just what I was doing, making phone calls from home, through the wizardry of campaign shoftware linked to me laptop computer. So, maybe the same software was finding people likely to be activists, or, at least might be recruitable, or, as a pollster might put it, “leaning recruitable.”
    Indeed, of the 30 or so calls that got through, five or six said they would give phone banking a try – especially after I explained that if I could follow the campaign's instructions, anyone could. (The campaign holds a Zoom learning session before the calls start).
       One guy said flatly "No, I can't do it today." But then he said that if I texted him the contact information (the software does it for the volunteers), he might be able to fit a shift into his schedule later - maybe Tuesday or Wednesday .
     More than a handful said they already were doing stuff and lots of it:  door-to-door canvassing for “down-ballot” state and local candidates, writing postcards, and doing some phone work.
              

AND THAT'S THE POINT:
     There are a lot of people across the country – millions, actually – who are working hard, pulling out all the stops, running scared, but feeling glad and upbeat.
     Nobody can tell whether the enthusiasm I sensed will be “enough.”
     But it sure is good to know that it is there, and that its real and its powerful.
     And without this remarkable enthusiasm, Harris will have no chance.
     I’m now 82, and there’s a lot I don’t like about being old.
     But I’m grateful for having lived long enough to witness all of this - one of the greatest political crusades the country has experienced in decades
                                                      *    *    *

NOTE: Interested in doing something in the closing days of the election? Here’s a Democrats’  volunteer website: https://events.democrats.org/



3 Comments

10/5/24

10/5/2024

1 Comment

 

Election countdown - 1 month to go
            "SO WHAT?"

Trump’s callous rebuke, after learning of his vice president’s escape from Capitol rioters, may be the question that decides the 2024 election
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SO WHAT? if Nibi, the rescued beaver, were forced to return to the woodlands this winter.
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SO WHAT? If Donald J.Trump, defendant, were returned to the White House this winter
IN ELECTIONS, as in life, what really matters often boils down to this short, but loaded question: “So what?”
     With Election Day now down to just one month away, Nov. 5 – 30 days, to be exact – “So what?” is profound, because it’s the answer that matters.
     "So, what?" if there’s an election a month from now. Well, for one thing, it could mean whether American democracy will continue to evolve or will die – that’s what.
     "So what?" comes in two flavors. It can force us to considers how deeply we care about something; or it can be a thoughtless remark about to something that should matter.
     The question popped up recently in a legal filing by Jack Smith, the special counsel prosecuting criminal case Number 23-cr-257, “United States of America v. Donald J. Trump, defendant.”
     That’s the indictment  about Trump’s “scheme to overturn the 2020 election.”
     The legal memo recalls the chaotic events of Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters broke into the Capitol to halt Congress’s certification of the election. Enraged by a Trump Tweet criticizing Vice President Mike Pence for not cooperating with the scheme, the mob chanted for Pence’s death.
     “One minute later, the Secret Service was forced to evacuate Pence to a secure location in the Capitol,” the legal memo says.  An aide rushed to tell Trump what had happened, hoping he would protect  his vice president.
     Instead,  “the defendant looked at him and said only, ‘So what?’”


IN NORMAL TIMES, “So what?” can have an easy answer, as in the matter of Nibi, a beaver, who had been found two years ago as a kit, or infant, by the side of a Massachusetts road.
     Nibi was brought to a rehabilitation facility, which tried, but failed to have her bond with wild beavers. 
     
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      Nibi, it turned out, preferred to hang around with humans, while enjoying her quarters at the refuge, which included a large enclosure and her own pond.  
     Alarms were raised when state wildlife officials declared Nibi had to be returned to the Massachusetts woodlands. Her caretakers feared she would not survive the winter.    

      As news reports spread word of the plight of furry little Nibi, the question of “So what?” played a major role in what would happen next.

BUT “SO WHAT?” becomes a more consequential question when Election Day is a month away.  The polls say the contest is a tie, while skeptics wonder whether it’s actually a landslide - but for whom?  
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      You’d think the answer would be a no-brainer.
     Trump not only tried to overthrow the election he lost to Joe Biden four years ago, he’s been convicted, and now awaits sentencing, for filing false business reports to hide hush payments to a porn star; and he’s facing two other cases, one about improperly taking government records and another about election skull drudgery.
     He was a terrible president for four years after his upset victory in 2016, but he retains a mystical connection with a cult-like base of voters, who shrug off his lies, his racism and his unhinged campaign orations. Adding to his mystique has been his survival of two assassination attempts, one in which a bullet grazed his ear.
     Trump’s only real accomplishment in the current campaign was watching Biden disintegrate on national TV during their only debate, which resulted in the president dropping out of the campaign, replaced as the Democratic nominee by Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris.
     Harris effortlessly took over the race, picked a charmingly down-home running mate in Tim Walz, governor of Minnesota, stage-managed an enthusiastic national convention, and went on to demolish Trump in their only debate.
     "So what?"
     It would seem to be a no-contest choice.
     Harris, an energetic, 59-year-old former prosecutor, California attorney general and U.S. Senator and now a vice president; pragmatic, well-spoken, nimble, multi-racial, the epitome of someone ready to lead the country into an exciting new, chapter.
     Trump, 78, increasingly bitter, insulting, and spreading cruel lies at every campaign stop, with dark, authoritarian plans to deport millions of immigrants and turn the Department of Justice into the Department of Revenge to punish his enemies.


“SO WHAT?” haunts the election.
     We know a lot of people have answered: Trump’s devoted base remains loyal; and apparently, an equal number of Democrats and others alarmed by Trump, support Harris.
     It’s difficult to imagine in the election’s remaining days that very many minds can be changed.
     What’s more, there’s not as much time left as it seems, since voting has started in some states, either by mail ballot or in-person early voting. So many votes already are locked in.
     The Pew Research Center says that in the 2022 midterm elections, only 43 percent of voters waited until Election day; 36 percent cast mail ballots; 21 percent voted early.
     In the face of the stubbornness of Trump’s supporters and the dwindling time that’s left, I’m impressed at how hard people are working to elect Harris, and by the breadth of her support.
      Millions of people have donated money, volunteered to knock on doors and make phone calls and send post cards into the battleground states.
     I’m also encouraged in the way that some rock-solid Republicans like Liz Cheney, once the third highest leader in the House, have endorsed Harris. And the same goes for her father, Dick Cheney, the former vice president who once was the Democrats’ Darth Vader.
     Liz Cheney this week went a step further by campaigning with Harris in Ripon, Wisconsin, where the Republican Party got its start.    

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KAMALA HARRIS, Democratic nominee for president, and Liz Cheney, arch Republican, on the same stage, united in their determination to defeat Donald Trump
     Cheney, who served on the House committee that investigated the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, said:
     “Donald Trump was willing to sacrifice our Capitol, to allow law enforcement officers to be beaten and brutalized in his name, and to violate the law and the Constitution in order to seize power for himself.”
     “I don’t care if you are a Democrat or a Republican or an independent,” she said. “That is depravity, and we must never become numb to it.”
     Will all of this be enough?
     I have no idea – I swing back and forth between recurring daytime nightmares of a Trump return and late-night fantasies of the celebrations that would follow a Harris landslide.
    But more and more, the campaign certainly will come down to whether enough people reach deep within their souls for the answer to “So what?”


EPILOGUE
     If we don’t yet know the power of “So what?” in the election, we do know how it played out for Nibi, the abandoned beaver in Massachusetts.
     There’s nothing like a photogenic furry face, plus the talent of operators of a wildlife refuge for public relations, to stir the collective conscience.    

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      As reports of Nibi’s life-and-death crisis spread, a lawsuit delayed Nibi’s return to the wilds of Massachusetts, and 25,000 people signed an on-line petition to support the beaver remaining at the only home she'd ever known.
     Next came a demonstration of government at its best – responding to the public’s (aka voters') “So what?” moment.
     Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey decreed that Nibi could remain at the Newhouse Wildlife Rescue refuge in Chelmsford, to enjoy her own enclosure and personal pool.
     Along with her reprieve, came an official assignment for Nibi.
     Healey said the beaver’s new duties would be “… to educate the public about this important species.”
     “So what?”
     It’s the positive thing that can happen when people of good will - and not the defendant, Donald J. Trump -  choose to answer one of life's most profound questions.

1 Comment
<<Previous
    BRIAN C. JONES
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      I'VE BEEN a reporter and writer for 60 years, long  enough to have  learned that journalists don't know very much, although I've met some smart ones. 
      Mainly, what reporters know comes from asking other people questions and fretting about their answers.
       This blog is a successor to one inspired by our dog, Phoebe, who was smart, sweet and the antithesis of Donald Trump. She died Feb. 3, 2022, and I don't see getting over that very soon.
       Occasionally, I think about trying  to reach her via cell phone.


     

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