* A Chinese weather/maybe-spy balloon over America! Mobilize the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, screamed the right wing extremists! We’re under attack! Why doesn’t Biden do something? Our borders have been breached. Trump would’ve already acted, sayth MAGA spokeswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Well the fact is Trump had three such incidents and he failed to act on any of them. And the fact is to shoot down such a contraption over land would endanger civilians on the ground with shrapnel falling about randomly. And the fact is we need to talk to these people before we drift further to a Hot War that could turn into a World War. Yes, it finally was shot down over the ocean where the military has safely retrieved some of it and is studying the device. The operation was done safely and effectively under Joe Biden’s administration. Supposed strongman Trump, again, did nothing when he was confronted with three similar incidents.
* The classified documents cases against Biden and Trump are very different and cannot be compared. Trump lied, deceived, and covered up, choosing not to cooperate with the authorities. Biden fully cooperated, instructing his attorneys to act with complete transparency. Biden: Case closed. Trump: Indictment now.
* DeSantis and his Florida Fascist state legislators are requiring menstrual data from pubescent girls, in minute detail. I assume this is a stealth attack on transgender kids, as DeSantis is a stealth version of Donald Trump, but even Donald wouldn’t venture that far right.
* Representative Omar has been kicked off the House foreign affairs committee by Speaker McCarthy for her anti-semitic remarks which she has apologized for. Meanwhile avowed anti-semite and racist Marjorie Taylor Greene has been rewarded with key committee assignments after Democrats removed her from such assignments in the last session for irresponsible public statements she has not apologized for. The House is now essentially an institution of retribution and revenge instead of the People’s House, assigned to work for the benefit of all via productive legislation.
* Putin continues his war crimes by targeting apartment buildings and other civilian structures in the Ukraine, killing and maiming innocents in his insane war of genocide and cultural destruction. His propaganda machine has the majority of the Russian population duped into either supporting the war or remaining silent for fear of imprisonment. Russia, have you no shame? Have you no decency? Have you no brains?
* The Scorpion Police Unit in Memphis was designed to terrorize and intimidate the community supposedly to dissuade criminals from committing crime. The unit ultimately beat an innocent man to death after stopping him on a routine traffic violation. When police are trained to treat the community as the enemy and then assume they have the power of life and death over its citizens, something is terribly wrong. Most police are honest, hard-working people, but it only takes a few rotten apples to spoil the barrel. Police reform is needed throughout this country. The Scorpion Unit has been disbanded in Memphis and the violent officers have been dismissed and are now under indictment for murder. Good riddance.
* If our great country is to evolve and move forward to the goals professed in our original documents, we must own our history and face not only our successes and accomplishments but our failures and transgressions. For hundreds of years we deceived and mistreated the original inhabitants of our country, breaking treaties, stealing their land without compensation, and practicing a form of genocide against the American Native population. For 400 years we supported the transportation and enslavement of Africans, and when that was banned, we bred more slaves and sold them “down the river” to willing plantation owners in the South. It took the bloodiest and most destructive war in our history, and one courageous President, to stop this horrid crime against humanity. Now Republican politicians rant and rave against “wokeness” and reparations and Black history in classrooms and the 1619 Project and prohibiting the teaching of critical race theory in schools, which includes a specific prohibition, in Florida, on use of materials from the 1619 Project. Hiding our heads in the history’s sands will lead to the destruction of democracy itself. The lessons enumerated in novel 1984 loom even today in the first quarter of the 21st century.
* And finally, after all the crimes, all the fraud, all the lies, all commissions by omission, all the deaths threats he encourages, all the attacks on our democratic form of governing, Donald Trump still walks freely. When will we either put this criminal behind bars where he belongs or at least ban him from ever running for public office again? When?
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I’ve a new book out that offers some positivity, some order, some hope to the discourse. It is To Live a Life: 200 Ways to be the best person you can be. Each chapter is a lesson to be learned, to be reflected upon, to be used as grist for the evolutional mill. It can be found at Amazon in ebook or paperback format. Please check it out and if you like it, spread the word. Thanks.
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