Stephen Altschuler

thoughts on environment, politics, health, life issues

President Joe Biden

“Cause that’s where the money is”

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Someone once asked Willie Sutton “Why do you rob banks?” “Cause that’s where the money is,” Sutton famously replied. Same thing Trump would say if someone asked, “Why do you continue with the Big Lie?” Or “Why do you support LIV Golf?” Or “Why do you continually attack Liz Cheney?” Or why do you now attack the FBI?” Or “Why do you call the Capitol rioters patriots?” Or “Why do you continue to dangle the possibility of running again in 2024?” All the same answer for the same reason. Trump’s father drilled it into his head early on, “Whatever you do, go where the money is and do whatever you need to do to get it.”

And for Trump, all of the above leads to incoming money from gullible followers who will indeed support their cult leader, as he said, “even if I went out and killed someone on 5th Avenue.” It’s a sickness, on Trump’s part, certainly; but on his follower’s part as well, voters and politicians who each have their motives for supporting a terribly off-balanced human being who happens to have a lot of political power at the moment.

I say “at the moment” for that won’t always be the case. One day, Trump will be a cipher, a footnote, a paragraph, at most, in an exhaustive history of the U.S. We will survive Donald Trump. But, unfortunately, we must endure more of his intractable behaviors and shenanigans. How much more? A blip in the scheme of history, but a significant blip in an era of unbridled and unrestricted social media, conspiracy theories raised to the toxic level of truth, and fake news raised to a level of real news perpetrated by Fox “news”, “News”max, and One America “news”.

So, for the moment, we are saddled with the reality of a Donald Trump and friends such as Taylor Green, McCarthy, McConnell, He-Hawley, etc. etc. etc. It will change. And that change will occur through the action of voters like you and I, as long as trust in our election process remains intact.

Unfortunately, that faith and trust is weakening, and so our democracy is on the brink of crumbling. For what is a democracy if not the sacred ability of the people to choose its electorate? With dictatorships like China, Russia, Hungary, Afghanistan, Cuba, elections are a sham, decided in advance by the ruling party or leader. Rules and laws are also determined by the few loyalists to the leader or the leader himself. The Taliban now forbids girls from advancing their education, orders women to wear a full body veil, and bars them from holding government jobs. Stalinist Putin imprisons or has murdered those who actively oppose him. Xinping keeps his country’s people in a continual state of fear via the secret police and civilian informants.

As we’ve seen, Trump has similar inclinations, seeking revenge on all he deems enemies, weaponizing “his” Departments of Justice and Defense, and actively instigating a violent insurrection against the U.S. Government. He is a criminal, plain and simple. And we’ve only seen a preface to what will come if he, or any of his surrogates, is reelected in ’24.

But ’22 is still ahead, and Trump’s influence has been alarming in the primaries. So the lines are clearly drawn: Trump extremists versus Dems. It will not be an easy fight. Dems will need money, for with politics, money talks. Dems will need grassroots volunteers, for only volunteers can canvass neighborhoods directly, making eye contact with voters. And Dems will need voters to vote in record numbers, up and down the ballot to prevent the kind of results Republicans are crowing about will happen.

For if the radical GOP takes over either of the two Houses, they will stymie Joe Biden as they stymied Barack Obama, thus paving the way for a Trump run in ’24.

We can’t let that happen!

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Will 50 States Devolve into 50 separate countries? Seems like it!

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What the Supreme Court is doing is what white slaveholding southerners tried to do in the many years before slavery was abolished: to give civil rights granted by the federal government back to the states to decide what laws were right for their state. If that were carried to its utmost in our country at present, then on this July 4th, 2022, you might as well separate this union into 50 separate countries, each with its own legal system, monetary system, health care system, regulatory system, law enforcement system, legislative system, etc. so then traveling from state to state would be near impossible not knowing the differing laws, customs, mores, and traditions. One state/country might bring back slavery, while another might make it punishable by death. One may ban any and all gun restrictions, while another has extensive regulations that include thorough background checks, licensing that involves test taking as is required of a car license, and banning open carry. And of course one may allow unlimited abortions while another may ban them altogether with no exceptions for rape or incest (at the moment, in an actual case, a raped and pregnant 10 year old girl in South Dakota is ineligible for an abortion by state law, a fact confirmed and apparently supported by its present GOP governor!). There may be checkpoints at state borders not just for contaminated fruit but to check your car for abortion pills!

Not possible, you might say. Not in America. Well, we have already taken some major steps in that direction. This Supreme Court that we are saddled with seems intent on taking us back in time to before the Civil War. And given the ages of the reactionary justices, they will have many years to accomplish their caustic agenda. And these justices may be harder than presidents to impeach. The only option I can see is to increase the number of justices to balance its present right wing extremes.

This court has become a political party unto itself, apparently becoming part of a conspiracy to shift the country in a highly dangerous, anti-democratic direction. FDR threatened to increase the size of the court in 1937 when it gave strong indications they would declare Social Security unconstitutional. He called their bluff and they backed down without his having to follow through on his threat. But Joe Biden does not have the wisdom, courage, or the guts of a Roosevelt. He’s a cautious man. He’s a good man but a calculated Centrist who fears doing anything that would draw criticism from conservatives or progressives or liberals or independents. Perhaps he fears probable retribution of any acts deemed too liberal or progressive or over the top.

So we are essentially stuck with this SCOTUS for the next 45 years or so. But we are not necessarily stuck with a fascist-leaning Republican Party. On this Independence Day we are still, in theory, a democracy with a government elected of, by, and for the people. That’s important to keep in mind as election day approaches. The key of course is how many and who votes. In the controversial presidential elections of 2016 and 2020, it was 54.8% and 62.0% respectively. Nothing to write home about, but with midterm elections, only about 40% of eligible voters take the time to vote. When you consider the consequences of the next midterm, that’s downright discouraging, especially when you count the number of right wing wackos, Trump cultists, ’06 Capitol Hill insurrectionists, QAnonists, and other GOP snake oil salesmen and women running. Let me now change “discouraging” to “alarming!”

Of course, before and during the Revolutionary War, there were monarchist Americans who stayed loyal to the king and considered patriots extreme insurrectionists. But that was the 1770s. Things have gotten a little more complicated since then. Today, one man, Donald Trump, has been able to knock us off our democratic experiment as our Founders called our fledging country declaring equal rights for all. One man has shown us how fragile our democracy was in 1776 and still is. Perhaps more so.

So on this Independence Day perhaps we should all reflect on what it would take to keep this experiment in democracy intact, growing, and stronger than ever. Even with such as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, our country has never depended on the allegiance to one person as we did to King George III before 1776. Never has our country granted each state sovereignty over itself. For that would not be a United States. And if we are not united, at least in the value of democracy, what it entails, and what constitutes a patriot, then we are woefully divided, and a United States is no more.

Happy 4th, y’all.

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The Trump Conspiracy: Then and Now

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It started when Trump tried to prove that Barack Obama was not a natural born citizen, which helped Trump build a following, a base, and ultimately a cult. He sensed the undercurrent of racism in 2016, linked it with xenophobia around Hispanic immigration and fear of Islamic terrorism, enlisted the support of Russian cyberterrorists and was able to paint Hillary Clinton as a candidate worthy only of a prison cell. With a scorched earth approach, Trump blasted anyone who opposed him, regardless of party affiliation. He essentially and ironically stole the 2016 election, blatantly promising to appoint anti abortion judges to the Supreme Court, again parlaying a hot button issue among evangelical Christians and pro life Republicans to energize the Republican base to come out and vote for him, despite his obvious moral shortcomings.

Once elected, he conspired with Mitch McConell, another power hungry oportunist, even before the election, to block the Obama nomination of Merrick Garland to the court several months or so before the election, something entirely unorthodox as well as unethical, and probably illegal. It was also in violation of the Constitution but no one took any significant action to block McConnell. It was part of a plan to put a minority party into a majority position and essentially control the federal government through judicial control of the courts.

With McConnell’s help, a president Trump was able to nominate and push through three right wing judicial extremists to the high court who as he and the radicalized GOP had hoped would set the country back about what…50,60, 70 years, defining “Great Again” as white and segregated again and where women would return to the kitchen and their traditional place of mediocrity?

The next phase of Trump’s take over plan is to fill the congress with representatives and senators who are beholden to him for their election, and are therefore pawns in the game of his ambition, which ultimately is designed to increase the financial fortunes of the Trump family dynasty. That will lead, he hopes, to his regaining the presidency in ’24, and his solidifying his oligarchy–an essentially fascist rule which has absolutely nothing to do with government of, for and by the people. The people under Trump’s rule will be just that: under his thumb and forced by fear to pledge loyalty to him and his chosen oligarchs, modeled after his friend Putin’s increasingly fascist rule in Russia.

It’s not a very copacetic scenario, is it? We’ve not seen anything like a Trump before and so don’t quite know what to do with him. The 14th and 25th Amendments address it but no one really knew or knows how to enforce the Constitution, especially when trying to figure out how to handle a seditious ex president who attempted a bloody coup against the government, who would not agree to a peaceful transition of the presidency after he lost, who instigated a violent, armed mob to attack Congress with the intent of stopping the counting of electoral votes and hanging Mike Pence, who even tried to commandeer the car he was in after Ellipse rant, trying to grab at the wheel and choke the driver and head secret service agent who was insisting returning to the White House instead of joining the rioters as Trump wanted–a loyal civil servant who would take a bullet to protect this asshole. First time for that. Go figure. It’s got many of us pretty buffaloed, hasn’t it? As Riley (played by the great William Bendix) used to say, “What a revoltin’ development this is!”

Good day, y’all. Be well. Sleep tight tonight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.

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Sad to Say…and angry as well

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Sad to say, but it doesn’t matter how the vote turns out in the next election:
Trump-infused Republicans will win either way. If the vote shows they’ve lost, they will challenge it pathologically as they have done for the 2020 Biden victory. And if they win, they will continue to put in place the building blocks for an enduring fascist autocracy frosted with a culture of denunciation, as Timothy Snyder put it in his excellent book “On Tyranny.” That will amount to rule by one party regardless of what the broad electorate voted for or wanted. So we are currently caught between a rock and a hard place, firmly behind the eight ball, exactly where the extreme right wing (which is virtually all Trump Republicans) want us.

Now many may not think that a particularly big deal, but they would be wrong. Of course, those many may not think at all, and I suspect that to be the case. As was true of Hitler in the Germany of the 30’s, and Stalin in the 30’s and 40’s, and Putin from 2014 and since then, and Trump since 2016, voters who allowed these despots power were mesmerized by them, hypnotized really by their slick talk of Germany or Russia or America first. Slick talk of how they alone could solve their problems. Slick talk of how immigrants and foreigners and Muslims and Jews and Blacks and gypsies were the cause of all the problems. And slick talk of “getting rid” of these interlopers who were out to “replace” white Christians.

We’ve seen their tactics first hand now in the United States. That culture of denunciation that Trump and his allies have used to smear the reputations of their opponents as much as McCarthy did in the early 50’s. It’s scurrilous, to say the least, but it’s a tactic that works in America, sticking in the brains of gullible people, only to be spit out in gossip and misinformation passed on to their friends, relatives, and even children. Extreme right wing lawmakers and TV personalities perpetuate these lies, adding credibility to such toxic conspiracy theories such as QAnon, Replacement Theory, and the Big Election Lie bandied about since 2020.

Republican leaders have made sport of denouncing Joe Biden and his program to bring the country back from the ravages of the Trump era. They started with Bill Clinton, went on, via Mitch McConnell, to disparage Obama mercilessly, and then attack Biden without missing a beat. Let’s go, Brandon is a slanderous dogwhistle never heard before for a sitting President!

At the same time, they’ve set in place an infrastructure of suppression: via gerrymandering, voting restrictions, culture wars, books that need burning, strict guidelines as to what teachers can teach, and even stacking ballots with election officials with the power to reverse the decisions of the electorate, if need be. If you read a history of Germany in the 30’s and 40’s, it’s all been done before right after the Reichstag burned.

Now the figurative guillotine seemingly draws closer to Trump’s head. But will it drop? Trump senses danger so has lined up all his lawyers, all his cult members, all his loyal legislators, all his lackeys in a phalanx of suppression, innuendo, and a continued avalanche of lies. One of the Capitol police officers battered by the Trump legions thinks he will get away with all his crimes against the state. Teflon Don has a way of getting away with things, all the way back to his bullying childhood days. His father taught him well. We know that from Mary Trump’s depictions of her uncle.

So, sure, go ahead and vote. Go ahead and send in your hard earned money. Go ahead and write stuff like I do. Go ahead and rant and rave to your sympathetic friends and relatives and avoid your Trumpster relatives like the Covid plague. But I believe the die is cast. The coup is well plotted. January 6 was just the first salvo in a larger battle. That was just to get the saliva flowing from the bellies of the beasts.

I am sad, yes, but more so, angry. Enraged even. Our great democratic experiment is crumbling. And it doesn’t have to be that way. If we’ve learned anything from the past, it is one glaring fact: the Napoleans, the Alexanders, the Caligulas, the Attilas, the Hitlers, the Salazars, the Mussolinis, the Stalins, the Bolsonaros, the American white supremacists, the Xis, the Francos, the Uns, the Putins, and…the Trumps must be nipped in the bud and stopped cold in their tracks before they can dig their claws into their bid for eternal power–power fueled by their chronic hunger for greed, hatred, and delusion.

The DOJ is Not OK

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The Department of Justice was initiated in 1870 by President Ulysses S. Grant specifically to preserve civil rights. It began by fighting against domestic terrorists who had been using both violence and legal action to oppose the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. The newly formed Ku Klux Klan were the first group in their sights, and in Grant’s first term of office there were 1000 indictments against Klan members and 600 convictions. Members got relatively brief sentences but ringleaders were imprisoned for up to five years in federal prison. The result: a dramatic decrease in violence in the South.

Today, the DOJ seems downright timid in comparison. There have been prosecutions of rioters at the coup attempt on the Capitol, but no indictments against its ringleaders to date. There has been one case against voter suppression laws in one state, but no conviction to date and no actions against 18 other states. White supremacy groups are still able to operate without a domestic terrorism designation in seeming violation of the above mentioned Amendments to the Constitution. Mass current gun laws being violated or any pressure against gun shops approving the sale of assault weapons to those currently banned from buying such weapons in states that have laws against such sales or ownership.

Little has been heard from the present Attorney General Merrick Garland, except for a commencement speech at Harvard which the press has not even covered. He seems to be waiting for the House Committee Investigating the January 6 insurrection to conclude its hearings and send any recommendations for action to the DOJ. He is not bound by law to await the end of such hearings, but has refrained from investigating such ringleaders as former president Donald Trump, Roger Stone, former chief of staff Mark Meadows, a number of GOP Representatives, Trump’s lawyer Rudy Guliani, members of Trump’s family, and a multitude of other perps. No action, at least that we the public know about. No grand jury. No FBI investigations under way, apparently.

So what is the DOJ, the only reliable enforcer of the Constitution, doing? I’m not an expert, but it truly looks like nothing much at all. My wife tells me to be patient, that there are probably clandestine movements happening underground and out of the purview of mainstream, or any tributary, media sources. But most journalists today seem not be investigative in practice. They receive the news rather than dig for the news like Woodward and Bernstein in “those thrilling days of yesteryear!” So we can’t even depend on investigative journalists to help us understand what the DOJ is doing these days. We’re not far from the Russian propaganda system in that regard.

All of which I speak is of great concern to me, and should be to you. The integrity of our Constitution and its Bill of Rights is at stake. The very stanchions on which our democracy is built, those original documents and their preambles, are being applied to present day situations as if we were still in 1780. Originalists, the conservative Supreme Court Justices are called. But that’s absurd. The above mentioned Amendments refer to freed slaves alone but must also apply to all of us now or the democratic mechanisms of voting will continue to be torn to shreds by GOP-led state legislatures and the GOP in Congress. The Second Amendment has led to more guns in America than people, including guns that can kill hundreds in a matter of minutes. In 1790, it took a few minutes to load and reload a muzzle-loading rifle. Today it takes seconds to load a whatever bullet clip onto an AR-15 assault rifle. It’s insane that the Second Amendment can still be used to justify the ownership of such weapons and ammunition and make them relatively easy to purchase. Absolutely insane. Congress can’t even pass a bill to put a safety lock on these guns, a bill that if passed would probably be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court!

But the DOJ does nothing to right these wrongs, at least from my perspective. Why? Merrick Garland and Joe Biden are cautious men. Kamala Harris is a cautious woman. Chuck Schumer is a cautious man. Donald Trump is a dangerous man, as his niece, psychologist Mary Trump, points out. Many of his followers threaten death to those (and their families) who oppose their Dear Leader in any way, as the SS did to anyone who opposed Hitler in his occupied countries. Donald Trump has made no attempt to stop them. On the contrary, he instigates these threats! Are the Democrats in power intimidated? Perhaps.

Has the DOJ taken any viable action against these death threats? No. Just one or two prosecutions and convictions against those who issue a death threat could well deter others from the same verbal violence. But Garland and the FBI ignore these Mafia-like threats, and in ignoring them, condone them. Why has the DOJ done nothing about these threats and the other injustices I’ve listed above? Why is that?

And that is the question I will leave you with.

Why is that?

Heavy National Karma

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I hate to be a prophet of doom, but America has some pretty dark karma to work through–karma that started well before the official start of our country. Since that time we’ve fabricated myths to deny the realities of that karma, myths that are apparent to this day and that have created a polarized country that is, in effect, fighting another civil war. As in 1860 when half the country professed fealty to slavery and half the country was against the further enslavement of human beings, we’re now divided into Trump Republicans and Liberal Democrats.

Whether we proceed to enter a physical war remains to be seen but the two sides are deeply opposed to even talking to one another. The only thing they seem to be in agreement on is opposition to the war in Ukraine, although there are a number of Republican politicians who are against any further military aid to Ukraine and even lean towards supporting Putin. Their number one goal, amidst all the problems we have is apparently to make Joe Biden look bad so he will lose support in ’22 and ’24. Mitch McConnell has been obsessed with this strategy since Barack Obama was president. And with Manchin siding with the GOP on major issues and the Supreme Court taking an ultra conservative tack since Trump’s three appointees were confirmed, the Democrats busy themselves with defending against the baby formula shortage. It’s discouraging to see a democracy swirl down the drain without much attempt to plug the leaks in the tank.

We need an Abe Lincoln with the courage of a lion and not a bunch of whimpering victims of a junior high bully. We need someone with the guts of Lincoln who could beat Trump and his Republicans like a rug on a clothes line.

But that’s not the main reason I’m writing today. I have a theory as to how we got in this mess and how we might begin to extract ourselves before we end up like the Holy Roman Empire, and everybody knows what happened to it. Charles Darwin showed us how animals evolve in reaction to their need to survive and continue their species. (Although even there, many Republicans don’t ascribe to Darwinism and don’t want it taught in our public schools!). Animals make changes over time in response to the changes and threats in their environment-changes that eventually become so ingrained that they solidify in their genetic DNA material generation after generation. Human beings, of course, being mammals, are no different.

The seminal epoch in the history of our country was the advent and continuation for several hundred years of slavery, a time when human beings were treated worse than animals and were actually tallied as three-fifths of a human being in the original Constitution. You all know by now how they were abused, bred, and murdered over those horrible years so I needn’t inventory it all in these pages. Consideration was given to enslave Native Americans, called Indians by the original white setters, but they resisted from the start, drawing inspiration from courageous chiefs and wise elders. Instead, they were banished from their ancestral lands and murdered.

So attention turned to merchants who were selling Africans as slaves. Despite any moral considerations, landowners in the South seized the opportunity to secure free labor and proceeded to become rich men with vast political power as a result. So from 1619 to 1863, human slavery was the law of the land. And from 1870 to 1964, brutal Jim Crow practices and laws, particularly in the South, but also in varying degrees in other parts of the country, essentially enslaved Black Americans further.

What effect did this have genetically on Blacks and Whites in this nation? I submit that hatred and suspicion are largely prevalent in both races to this day, directed towards each other. Due to how they’ve been treated over these centuries, Blacks keep their distance from Whites, live in their own communities, work at jobs friendly to minorities, bank where they can obtain loans without discrimination, and make friends mostly with other Blacks. Whites also live where mostly other Whites live, shop where Whites shop, work in White controlled businesses or corporations, and fraternize mostly with other Whites. Generally if a White sees a Black, particularly a Black man or teen, approaching them on a lonely street in a city, they will more than likely cross the street to avoid the confrontation. A Black person will not cross a street to avoid a White, but will avert their eyes, genetically remembering the consequences for looking at a White directly from millennia of cruel punishment for doing so in the American South.

Behavior is largely conditioned as psychologists have shown. And conditioned behavior usually translates to corresponding genes that get passed from generation to generation. The behavior of white slaveowners has also embedded genetically, manifesting in today’s conservative politicians, in hiring practices, in blocking civil rights legislation, in continued housing discrimination, in educational opportunities, in blocking internal and external infrastructure, in income discrepancies, in police protection, in health care advantages. The list goes on and on.

Laws have been passed to right the wrong, but conservatives constantly push against these laws, and the often conservative courts follow suit. Even our present ultra-conservative leaning Supreme Court has reversed long standing civil rights legislation, along with other established precedents. And GOP-controlled state legislatures have enacted voter suppression laws not unlike the laws that blocked Black voters and politicians just after the Civil War.

This last point is critical given the inbred nature of systemic racism. In order to change the societal genetic landscape, the government and the courts must support laws that right the wrongs of the past. Otherwise nothing will change, and the principles put forth in the Declaration of Independence will be for naught, thus furthering our moral and legal downward slide as a culture and a viable democratic republic where “all men/people are created equal.”

Presently, we are a divided country, racially, politically, and, seemingly, morally. That can only be sustained for so long, as we’ve seen historically. Discord devolves into turmoil. Turmoil devolves into anarchy. Anarchy devolves into dictatorship and fascism. And this kind of fall is a result of years and years of genetic karma–the word karma coming from the Sanskrit word for action–of the kind I’ve described. The Buddhists say the way to change karma is to hold past actions up to the light and make a conscious, enlightened effort to see the error of that action and change direction–with honesty, courage, fortitude, compassion, understanding, and wisdom.

It’s not easy to change the karma of a nation. In a sense, each individual of that nation must also look at their own past actions and make changes on that level. There must be a common goal, a common mission statement, of which the United States has two: the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule.

Let’s live by them, shall we!

Do You see what’s coming, boys and girls?

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Do you see WTF is coming? It’s a steamroller coming down Main Street, USA. It’s a GD, SOB, MFing, right-wing, fascist Steamroller steamrolling down through Kalamazoo and every other red town America. And its coming fast. And its coming furious. And shit, it’s already here. And we don’t see it because most of us are fogged out asleep, are in such denial we don’t know the sound of our own names, are so overwhelmed that if a tornado hit us at this moment, we would be taking out our beach chairs to enjoy the brisk night breeze. And whammo, we’re hit with a load of right-wing, Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Donald Trump, shit. No shit! 4chan, 8chan, 16chan like a line of asteroids coming at us like some blitzkrieg of old, some Nazi volcano on its side, spiting mercury and sulfuric acid and rat saliva and death threats up the wazzoo. Watch out, y’all. Here she comes, all festered like a fingernail been bit too close. “I’m not kiddin’ ya. No, I’m serious, says the Pres. “No, I wouldn’t kidgya. Like my Dad always said…You see all these Fox news people here tonight: They all had to show full vaccination. I’m not kiddin’ ya.”

In the meantime, some 4chan-infused white supremacist asshole just shot four innocents, including a 12 year old girl because he just wanted to kill however many he could kill. He fired 200 rounds at whoever was in range and then posted it online as the police closed in on his apartment. They found 800 more rounds after they burst in and after he killed himself which he planned to do from the start.

Why? Because someone told him to on 4chan, the online source started by some asshole who is now running for U.S. Representative in Arizona. No lie! Guess what party? Guess who probably endorsed him? Right, you guessed it. I don’t f…ing believe what’s happening to this country at this time in history. You know how water as it goes down the drain goes faster and faster. That’s our country right now. And the only way to plug up the drain is with a vote that has been gerrymandered, suppressed, manipulated, defrauded, and, yes, rigged by…you guessed it: The Trump-infused Republican National Socialist Nazi Party. Ain’t that a pisser! Stop the Steal, indeed! And BTW, what bunker is Merrick Garland and his DOJ hiding in? I’m just saying, as we used to say.

One friend of mine asked me what can we do as individuals to stop the steamroller? Well, not much, but at least we can wake up from our dream life and pay attention to reality, take it in, worry about it, curse like I’m doing (OK, maybe not that much!), catharsis with a capital C. Shit, at least you won’t have to lose sleep over it than if you kept it all in in massive denial mode.

What can I say? Write to your congressperson? Yeah, right (the only time in the English language when two positives equal a negative!). Write to your minister? Uh huh. Write to the President? I did and got a reply that referred nothing to what I suggested in my note which was a copy of my last blog post. Besides, the President probably never saw it, as my wife pointed out.

But even with all the Republican dirty tricks to keep Dems from voting, we can still get out there and vote. They can put up all kinds of obstacles but if we are determined we can still vote in this country. And ultimately the Trump Republicans who run for office are, yes, scumbags, but the voters who vote for them are bigger scumbags. They will make or break this country, and believe me, when we break, we will break bad. Like other failed democracies, there will be no returning. It will be autocracy and dictatorship spewing fascism or communism or anarchy. Then, when any of us leave our houses, it’s Russian Roulette 24/7. The bullets will come unannounced, unbidden, and random like the 4chan guy. You can bet the white supremacists and other Trump cultists are lying in wait for that day.

What about money? Should we send money to ActBlue et al? Go ahead, but I’m not (with the exception of Stacey Abrams Fair Fight). With a few exceptions, people’s minds are made up already. The Trumpsters on one side: The Dems on the other. Some of the Dems are progressives and often don’t vote if a centrist Dem is running like Hillery in ’16. They’re scumbags too, and paved the way for Trump to win that year. All because their Dear Leader Bernie wasn’t on the Presidential ballot. It was the same when Nader ran in 2000 and 2004. His ego took away enough votes from Dem candidates that they lost to incompetent Republicans who further contributed to the demise of our country and our planet. So yes, my beef is also with progressives who always want it their way or the highway. I suggest we switch to European forms of democracy where we have multiple parties in a coalition form of government. In America presently, we’ve devolved into government by the minority, namely Trump Republicans, who essentially include Joe Manchin.

What that has led to is three Trump Supreme court inductees who lied their way into confirmation, particularly, as we’re seeing now, in regard to Roe vs. Wade. They are staunch political conservatives whose aim is to turn governance over to the states, emasculating the power of the federal government to insure constitutional civil rights, essentially the same situation as before the Civil War. Are we headed to another Civil War? I certainly hope not, but that water is draining away faster and faster down the political drain.

So vote, and vote Democrat, up and down the ballot. Surprise Democratic landslides in ’22 and ’24 really are our only hope.

Ukraine vs. Russia: New Rules

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David Milliband, a former UK foreign secretary, said on Fareed Zakaria’s show Sunday that the world needs established rules to guarantee peace and harmony–rules that Russia is obviously not following under its strongman president Vladimir Putin. And because of this, the present conflict has a much broader scope. And that is an Armageddon-like struggle between the West and Putin.

But the first immediate factor in this conflict is what is happening now in Ukraine to the infrastructure of the country and to the terror being endured by its courageous people. Because of longstanding and irrational resentments of Russia towards Ukraine, there cannot and will not be a diplomatic solution unless Ukraine defeats Russia on the battlefield. In light of that, the West must continue to arm Ukraine with state of the art weapons, defensive and offensive, administrative, communicative, and digital.

Amazingly, Ukraine is now winning this war, and consequently, despite sanctions, Putin is continuing to pour in troops and heavy weaponry into Eastern parts of Ukraine with the goal of subduing the population and taking control of that part of the country. President Zelensky, forever a hero of democracy to his country and to the West, has offered to negotiate and even give certain security assurances to Russia in return for peace. Putin will have none of it. He is acting more and more like a 19th century Czar or a 20th century Stalin, the difference being he has direct access to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons and has threatened to use them.

Which brings me to my next recommendations concerning the call for new rules for a peaceful world order. Putin only seems to respond to power and force, just as Krushchev responded only to Kennedy’s threat of retaliation if Russian ICBMs were not withdrawn from Cuba in 1962. Those of us who were around then, myself included, thought nuclear war was immanent. But Krushchev backed down and pulled the missiles out in exchange for the U.S. pulling out some missiles in Turkey, close to Russia’s border.

Now, Joe Biden, possibly unilaterally, must say to Putin, if you use weapons of mass destruction in Ukraine, the U.S. will respond likewise against Russia. Ideally NATO would be part of this deal, but if not, the U.S. should go it alone. We have the fire power to do so. At the same time we should offer Russia the kind of security reassurances they are looking for, such as neither Ukraine nor other countries that border Russia would be permitted entry into NATO–the EU, yes, but not NATO. We could also include an initiative for a treaty to further reduce nuclear weapons. This would be accomplished through direct high level talks between the U.S. and Russia. And if Russia pulled its troops out of Ukraine and did not attack any other neighboring countries, all sanctions against Russia would be ended, and normal trade, including gas and oil to Europe, would be resumed.

I’ll leave the rest of the negotiation details to the experts, as I am not one of those. I am just a citizen of a still democratic country who has ideas that could lead to a diminution of human suffering and a return to peace and harmony in this old world, tired of conflict and war and war crimes. Our Declaration of Independence holds “these truths to be self-evident, that all men (people) are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” I suggest our Declaration apply to any citizen of Earth, and the above rules presented to Putin could apply wherever weapons of mass destruction are used, or being planned to use, to subdue, subjugate, or conquer innocent citizens and countries.

To borrow Emerson’s words, I would call it a Doctrine of Compensation, or if that wasn’t clear enough, a Doctrine of Retaliation, or using history as a touchstone, the Kennedy Doctrine. Its purpose, of course, is preventative, causing dictators and demagogues to blink and pull back.