Month: September 2017

Demagogues need an identifiable enemy, someone or something guaranteed to get people riled up enough to dislodge their better angels (if they have any). Donald Trump road to fame on the backs of Mexican immigrants who come in illegally, pegging them as druggies, rapists, welfare cheats, and worse (if there is such a thing). But Trump is wrong. Mexicans and other Hispanic immigrants, both legal and otherwise are some of the best, most productive, people in the country. The real enemy of our great and grand experiment in participatory democracy are not immigrants, but those who would take the country back to the bad old days of Jim Crow, of institutional racism, segregated schools, and all the problems in human misery that goes with it.

Republicans know full well that Americans want the Affordable Care Act to be improved, not repealed. Everyone also knows that when any Republican politician was campaigning anywhere in the 2016 presidential election, they could always get a cheer and applause with the promise to “Repeal Obamacare!”. Notice they never referred to it by its correct name, the Affordable Care Act, and of course, never described what would replace it. They had no idea. They still don’t. It apparently matters only that the name Obama is involved and that the Republicans have not yet erased every trace of anything with that name attached. It also matters not.to some Republicans that repeal without suitable replacement will, in many cases, cause direct harm to many of their own constituencies, nor does it matter that so many institutions, important ones, and many of our largest and most influential corporations, have declared their opposition to repeal. But still the Republicans persist, not through traditional legislation, but sneakily, in the darkest of night, almost, to force their members to vote, sight unseen, on a bill that will haunt their party for years to come. As my wife said, “it defies logic”.

Amy Warner’s recent warning (September 19, 2017): “…you will be sorry”… was true, so true, that it bears repeating, but also warrants the additional prediction of the opposite situation, that is: the rewards you can expect if you bear the child rather than the regrets if you don’t. You should know that there is no greater happiness in life than what derives from raising children, and it is multiplied over and over when those children have children of their own, and so on and so on. If you are unable or unwilling to raise the child, there are bound to be families who would take it into their home and raise it with love and care. Think of the unborn child as a soul, a spirit, not yet a person, just waiting to become a blessing in someone’s life.

Can the Republicans really be serious about yanking health insurance away from so many people, knowing the unnecessary additional load on emergency rooms across the country, the serious diseases untended, the unnecessary deaths? Is Republican hatred of Obama so ingrained that it compels this added insult?

Conservatives can always be counted on to pull every trick in their book to suppress the vote whenever the stakes are high, including: extreme gerrymandering, arcane voter ID laws, and even a Supreme Court nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act. With conservatives currently in total control of government, it is unlikely that anything will be done to eliminate the various obstacles already enacted to suppress the vote. Further, anything done by a future, more liberal, Congress could easily be undone the next time the conservatives get control. Therefore, what is needed is a constitutional amendment that would survive any attack by future conservatives. So, someone in a position to do so should introduce an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, to wit:
Voting rights amendment
Voting is both the right and the duty of every adult citizen of the United States of America. To this end, it shall be a federal crime to take any action, direct or indirect, which shall have the effect, direct or indirect, of suppressing or discouraging the exercise of any part of the voting process in a national election.

Conservatives can always be counted on to pull every trick in their book to suppress the vote whenever the stakes are high, including: extreme gerrymandering, arcane voter ID laws, and even a Supreme Court nullification of part of the Voting Rights Act. With conservatives currently in total control of government, it is unlikely that anything will be done to eliminate the various obstacles already enacted to suppress the vote. Further, anything done by a future, more liberal, Congress could easily be undone the next time the conservatives get control. Therefore, what is needed is a constitutional amendment that would survive any attack by future conservatives. So, someone in a position to do so should introduce an amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, to wit:
Voting rights amendment
Voting is both the right and the duty of every adult citizen of the United States of America. To this end, it shall be a federal crime to take any action, direct or indirect, which shall have the effect, direct or indirect, of suppressing or discouraging the exercise of any part of the voting process in a national election.

Occasionally, you hear people talk about a president’s “legacy”, meaning “what did he leave us?” It is too soon to speculate who will write Trump’s legacy, but you can be sure people are taking notes. In the meantime, we are forced to live with Trump while he is creating his legacy, and judging from the people with whom he has surrounded himself, it will probably be one of callous regression. So while the Donald is doing his thing, let us not forget that it was the GOP, the Republican Party, that put him in the White House for the sole purpose of grabbing control of the government, not because they had any delusions that this particular con man would make a decent President of the United States, not at all. Gaining control of government will be the GOP legacy, and that one is not yet written.

The Trumpocalypse covered in your September 11/18, 2017, issue was actually the second one visited upon America in my lifetime. The first was the one Ronald Reagan delivered in 1980. His Four Horsemen were: Privatizer, Tax Cutter, Deficit Hawk, and Regressor.

We seem to be looking at a total potential damage of hurricanes Harvey and Irma in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That’s billions with a “B”! (Some say it might pass a trillion.) How in the world are we going to pay for it? Do any of the victims have insurance coverage or savings accounts large enough to cover this kind of damage? Probably not. But… If you added up all the cash squirreled away by every citizen of the USA, how much would it aggregate? Would it be asking too much for everyone (we are talking about every citizen of the USA)). To share a small percentage of their savings with those who have lost everything, including the cities and towns that suffered infrastructure destruction? Would the top 10% of Americans (in terms of accumulated wealth) feel the pinch if they were assessed a small percentage ( say five percent)of their net worth? An even smaller assessment (say one percent) could be applied to those with smaller net worth, (the appraised value of the homestead, of course, would not be included in calculating net worth). This is a terrible idea. That is obvious. It is not everyone’s fault that houses and cities, factories and roads were built willy-nilly in flood-prone areas. But it is right and proper that we start monetizing our climate- change denial and its overall effect on the severity of weather events such as these killer storms.

Donald Trump had a chance, an opportunity, to do something really good for a large number of very deserving young people. He could have reaffirmed the DACA program, but he did the opposite. He blew it.