Category: politics

Tuesday’s Political Thoughts

Trump’s latest is — hold up.

This is Donald J. Trump. Felon. Just to verify who I’m writing about. He’s the Republican nominee for President of the United States in 2024. One-time POTUS, elected back in 2016, he failed to hold onto the office in 2020, but he refuses to go away.

Trump’s latest declaration is that children are getting sex change operations at school. Going in as one sex, coming home as another.

“Kamala supports states being able to take minor children and perform sex change operations, take them away from their parents, perform sex change operations, and send them back home,” Trump said in a Mosinee, Wisconsin speech.

That’s one of the greatest most out of touch things I’ve heard of him saying. Crazier than his speculation about getting killed by sharks versus being electrocuted if your electric boat sank.

Crazier than his declaration that Mexico will pay for a border wall. Crazier than his lies that wasn’t what he said.

Crazier than windmills causing cancer.

Crazier than his recounting of how the American military took the airports during the American Revolutionary war.

Crazier than his idea that raking forests may help prevent forest fires.

Crazier than his assertion that he actually won the 2020 election, even though he also admits that he lost it. Crazier than his assertion that he has ‘every right’ to interfere in the election results. Crazier than his declaration that he’d been dictator on day one. Crazier than his insistence he knows nothing about Project 2025, despite the evidence of him bragging about it.

Do you realize how crazy and out of touch this latest is? Schools don’t have the money to buy school supplies, and he thinks they have enough money for surgical operations?

C’mon, man. Where are the operating rooms? Are teachers doing this surgery or are they hiring surgeons on the sly? Maybe he thinks the surgeons are volunteers, right?

Seriously, though, this is the best the GOP has to offer the nation, the world, and themselves, a man claiming without any evidence that children are being operated on in schools?

That party has lost its way.

Vote blue in 2024. Please, please, please. Are you seriously willing to accept a person who makes such baseless claims?

If so, I have an airport to sell you. It’s secret, though, at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Trump goes there all the time. You’ll love it.

5

Tuesday’s Theme Music

Mood: Anticipedged

It’s Tuesday, September 10, 2024. The national elections are 56 days away. Vice President Kamala Harris and felon Donald Trump will debate policies and positions tonight to sway undecided voters. I expect Donald Trump to lie…a lot. I expect him to act like a little and put on an entertaining act for his base. He is all low-style and little substance. I don’t expect him to say anything about Project 2025; if he does, he’ll probably deny having anything to do with it.

I expect Kamala Harris to be well-spoken, intelligent, and upbeat.

We’ll see what happens. Kinda holding my breath. The Harris – Walz campaign has demonstrated a lot of positive energy IMO. My wife and friends are also pretty stoked. But the media casts the race as being a dead heat. While we scratch our heads and ask WTF, we wonder what people are seeing and thinking in the nation’s other regions.

Second point to that, I thought President Biden was going to be strong at his debate with Trump. Instead, President Biden’s performance ended with him stepping aside for Veep Harris a few weeks. Not a bad move in the end, but the debate night performance undermined my confidence about my perceptions and thinking. So I’m leery about tonight.

It’s 62 degrees F outside of my Ashlandia home. Today’s high will be a comfortable 83 F. The air is fresher again today, with little hint of smoke. I’ve watched people walking — with and without dogs, alone and in pairs — and runners, taking advantage of the temperature and clean air. Airnow.gov pegs the air quality for Ashlandia overall at 52, just above ‘good’. Purpleair shows the air quality is 33 down the street and 75 up the street. We’ll see how it flows.

We’re pretty excited at my house. Rain is in the forecast for tomorrow. Rain, with a high in the 60s. Giddyup.

I’m anxious about the elections. I tell myself I need patience and to be positive. The Neurons responded this morning by springing the 1989 Guns N’ Roses “Patience” on the morning mental music stream (Trademark worn). Yes, a little patience to get through this is mo def needed for this era. I’m a person who struggles to be patient at times. That’s what led to me into taking transcendental meditation instructions in the Philippines in the mid 1970s. That helped a great deal, as does my continued meditation, but impatience still gets the better of me too often.

Gotta go close the windows. Smoke smells are curling in and congestion is rising in my nose and sinuses. Purpleair has the reading at 129 up the street.

Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee is being sucked down. Here is the music video. Cheers

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Monday’s Wandering Thoughts

Each morning, I post to WordPress. The first time each day, WP usually suggests tags to add. I click to add them. And every day it tells me, ‘No tags added’.

It amuses and dissatisfies me.

Amuses me because it’s so consistent. Dissatisfies me for the same reason. See, it’s offering something, and then it’s failing. Every day, without fail.

For me, it’s part of a much longer list of small tech failures encountered on a daily basis. Little things. Buttons and widgets not working. Apps crashing.

We see it on a larger scale. One is quiet, like how fucked up deliveries with the post office have become. I tracked a package last week from Newark, California, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Portland, Oregon, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Medord, before it reached me in Ashland. Ashland, BTW, is closer to Newark than Roseburg, Portland, or Medford.

This week, I tracked a package to Fife, Washington. Where the package entered another dimension and the system has no idea where it is.

We all figure it’s a one-off, so we don’t complain about it. Then, when we do, we often discover the problem is affecting more of us than we realized. It’s a larger problem than realized.

But sometimes, the tech failure is so visible, we can’t look away. Take the Boeing aircraft failures. Or the Boeing Starliner failure that has stranded two astronauts at the space station.

The United States is steadily spiraling downward in many ways. We can’t deal with our gun violence; the GOP stops actions. We can’t deal with climate change and wildfires and the extreme weather it causes: the GOP stops it. We can’t deal with quality failures…well, that’s more about money.

People can’t afford houses. Meanwhile, college students are drowning in debt. Do you think that’s not related?

As always, as these things happen, the GOP is pointing at other things as problems that aren’t problems. Books in schools. DEI. Declining church attendance. Voter fraud.

Yes, there’s a pattern here. We as a nation are stagnating. As a small group gets wealthier and achieve a better life, the rest of us are left dealing with small problems. Problem with small problems is that they add up.

Just ask Boeing.

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Monday’s Theme Music

Mood: angrified

8 AM. My wife has left for her exercise class, Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) is talking to me about breakfast, sunshine is streaming in through the windows, and I need to pee. Time to rise and stalk coffee, I decide.

I step onto the back patio with the cats. Papi is chatting up a storm. Tucker (pronounced Tuck-ah) is more reserved. Sunshine baths us but smoke lingers in the air. Not as bad as yesterday. The air worsened yesterday as the sun arced over the sky. The air quality plummeted, skating through 190. Forests and mountains disappeared behind the smoky curtain. Fortunately, the curtain rose lost night for a while and we had a night of relatively fresh air. Looks like it’s getting pulled down again.

This is Monday, September 9, 2024.

It’s just under 60 F right now. We expect a high of about 92 F.

BTW, the MAGA answer to wildfires and its smoke pollution is to cut down all the forests. Short-sighted as hell, but that’s them: intellectually bankrupt.

I have “Good Thing” from Fine Young Cannibals ringing in the morning mental music stream (Trademark hazy). It’s because I was singing to that 1989 melody with a word substitution. “Good air, where have you gone,” was my lament.

I shifted from good air to good things as the song played. Good things like the efficient post office and delivery systems we knew for a while. Good things like safe schools.

Which triggered reflections on Vance’s comments about school shootings being a way of life because schools are soft targets, which are attractive to a ‘psycho’, as he delicately phrased it.

“And again, as a parent, do I want my school to have additional security? No, of course I don’t,” he concluded. “I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like they’ve got to have additional security. But that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

Vance’s memory is not impressive. People have been killed in churches. Most people passing a church will note the lack of security. And a Pittsburgh syngagogue was found to be a soft target. Malls and shopping centers are soft targets. Grocery stores. Paint stores, hardware stores.

Remember the shooting from a hotel room in Las Vegas? So a concert is a soft target.

What about the college campuses? They’ve been shown to be soft targets.

Police officers being ambushed are not soft targets, yet we read about that numerous times a year.

I remember that several work places, post offices, and a McDonald’s restaurant have been a soft target through the years.

Beyond them, we had vigilante types like Kyle Rittenhouser out looking for targets, or Trayvon Martin’s killer, who thought the kid going for skittles was a threat.

And let’s not overlooked the people shooting others knocking on their door because they’re afraid, a fear the GOP actively stokes to harvest votes. Or the man who shot a woman because he thought she was part of a scam.

As long as you dance around the obvious and pretend it’s something else, nothing will get done and the problem won’t be fixed. And the problem is America’s worsening gun culture.

Congress sort of addressed it for themselves: they’re made themselves a hard target, surrounded by security forces, a place where guns are not permitted.

Funny how that works.

Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee has broached my system. Here’s the music video. Cheers



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Sunday’s Theme Music

Mood: Patientoptimism

Sunday morning brings us a dirty gray blue sky with a dirty white veneer. Air quality is in high double digits, so not too precarious as far as the readings go. Just looks off.

This is September 8, 2024. Currently 69 degrees F with smoke but it’ll climb to 92 F with smoke. Meteorological rumors has Wednesday’s high capped in the mid to upper sixties, with a 92% chance of a quarter inch of rain. We’re pretty jazzed about that in this Ashlandia household.

Peter Sage, a retired person who is now a political blogger has a post today, Easy Sunday: A word from a Trump supporter.

The beginning of Peter’s column gives the guest’s background.

Lynn Myrick is a Trump supporter. He is a retired Southern Oregon family law attorney. He practiced for 47 years and still serves as an expert witness on attorney ethics and billing practices.

Myrick is a regular reader of this blog. My critique of Trump’s criminality, his business frauds, his sexual crimes, and his seditious effort to overthrow the election did not dampen Myrick’s support of Trump.

Peter goes on, Critics may think he sounds drunk, stupid, willfully uninformed, profoundly biased, or worse. They may think Myrick is mired in the alternative reality of a religious cult led by a con-man guru. But Myrick is not stupid. This is what he thinks. Something along the lines of this interior monologue takes place in the minds of a near-majority of our fellow citizens. Read it as literature. Read it for insight on how it is possible Americans might choose to elect Trump.

I was hugely disappointed in Myrick’s post. Less of a word salad than Trump himself would present, it’s a right-wing talking points gush, without any context, historic perspective, or critical thinking. For me, it seems like he gets all his news from right-wing sources and challenges none of it. That’s a common perception, right or wrong, that I have about most Trump supporters; they’ve inculcated a narrow perception of the world and hunts facts to bolster that perception. Those facts are often wrong because the purveyors providing the false information are catering to the right wing’s need for false facts. The right wing is going through life with blinders on these days.

Worse, Myrick is like, ‘look how terrible Biden/Harris is’ without any contemplation of the alternative, Trump and Vance. Trump has rightfully earned himself a label of weird. Hugging the flag, claiming he wants votes and doesn’t want them, lying about everything and anything without any limitation. Add to that, he’s under several indictments and has been convicted. He is a felon. He tried overthrowing the election in 2020. That’s apparently okay with Myrick. He offers no comments at all on Trump. Just staunch, no Dem! Dem bad!

But then, that’s what the right wing chamber declares, along with ‘Trump good’, without offering evidence.

Myrich probably thinks he wrote a sharp, damning piece. And the right-wing probably agrees with him.

I guess from thinking about the GOP, which can be called ‘the other side’, caused The Neurons to summon “The Other Side” by Aerosmith to the morning mental music stream (Trademark dark). I remember this song coming out. I was already familiar with it, as it was released in 1990 as a single but it was from the album, Pump, which I’d already purchased. Holland–Dozier–Holland, the Hall of Fame songwriting team, threatened Aerosmith with a lawsuit because “The Other Side” had some resemblance in parts to “Standing In the Shadows of Love”.

Alright, on to other things. Smoke is getting worse out there. Over 100 now on the air quality index. You stay positive and be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Coffee has been swallowed a few times. Here’s the music. Cheers

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A Word

My wife and I contributed to the Harris – Walz campaign three times. We’ve also purchased shirts, signs, and bumper stickers.

Yesterday, I received nine more email requests from them for donations. That’s typical for me, and my wife said she’s receiving the same. This bombardment is getting annoying. In one email yesterday, they thanked me for the donation, while in the next, they asked why I haven’t donated.

Just a friendly word, Harris-Walz, but you might want to tone it down a little. I support you but your bombardment is wearying me, and there’s still a few more months remaining before the election.

Vote blue in 2024.

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Saturday’s Wandering Thoughts

Tl/DR: It’s all about me. I’m a pretty self-centered peckerhead.

I’m still on Facebook. Yes, I know. It’s mostly to track friends who are now far away and keep up with family events. Those are both fading.

Got a friend request from a friend today. I’d met her on Red Room, where I used to post, and we continued our friendship on Green Room before I moved to WordPress.

Problem with the friend request was, we were already FB friends and she, a retired teacher, writer, and grandmother, died several years ago. I deleted the request.

Damn hacks.

WaPo headline: Swift charges against Georgia father mark a cultural shift on school shootings. Yes, but that’s not the cultural shift needed. I am pleased the father is being charged. I hope he is found accountable for his part in this tragedy. Unfortunately, the many politicians responsible for it will not be held accountable.

My wife and I had a conversation as we were running around doing errands on Thursday. I referenced the conversation. She looked blank. She remembered having it but not what it was about. I was also struggling to remember the details. A minute later, the details flooded back into my memory. I shared them with her and we went on. I would say that it was disturbing but this sort of thing has been going on for years. Memory is a tricky thing.

I have a foot issue. I’ve written about this before. My right ankle was sprained in May and again in June, rolling over each time. I eventually had an MRI and discovered a tendon was ruptured. I’ve been wearing various wraps and braces but they were dissatisfying. Something was needed, as the ankle felt unstable. I became incredibly mindful how it was placed and employed.

My wife talked me into getting a Bioskin TriLock brace. Been using it for three days. It’s providing needed stability and is reasonably comfortable. Putting it on properly does need practice and thought.

I’d noticed I was compensating for the injured foot. Other places were beginning to feel stressed and mis-aligned. These were just what was being noticed; imagine what was being damaged and stressed under the radar.

Seeing an ortho surgeon in a few weeks. We’ll see where it goes from there.

Happy Saturday.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

Mood: smoketeased

Saturday padded in on floof feet, bringing clouds. Not so chilly this morning, it’s already 73 but will climb to only 95 F today. That’s 10 degrees less than I saw at my house yesterday.

Quiet outside, the main news comes from the avian Karens known as scrubjays. They get involved in everything, flying around making loud announcements about what people and other birds and animals are doing. A small aircraft putters by hundreds of feet overhead, its putter a steady sound that gains volume and then falls into a distant hum.

Air quality is okay on Siskiyou Blvd., about a hundred yards down the hill from us, but quickly deteriorates into mid-triple digits as you travel up the mountain flanks. A burnt wood smell hangs in the air, leftovers from some fires, somewhere.

We did two jigsaw puzzles in August. A three-hundred-piece puzzle was done on the first night of vacation. Another was started there, and then transported home, where we finished it. We started a third one last week and finished it last night. This was another Wysocki puzzle, produced by Buffalo, one thousand pieces.

The Neurons have plugged “Notorious” by Duran Duran into the morning mental music stream (Trademark seedy). Don Old Trump’s latest round of speeches and proclamations set off the 1986 song in my head. Trump is just notorious for saying notorious crap.

At one of his rallies, Trump claimed he didn’t want more votes if they were from people who didn’t vote for him before.

“Donald Trump apparently doesn’t care whether or not he wins in November anymore.

At a Fox News town hall on Thursday, the Republican presidential nominee revealed that his 2024 campaign strategy excludes anyone who he doesn’t believe supported him in the last election cycles.

“One person who didn’t support me—he said, ‘I must admit I had the most successful four years of my life but I’m gonna vote for some—’ and now that person came back to me. I don’t want that person,” Trump said to muffled applause. “I don’t want that person.

“You know, they say you should take everybody, but that’s not the way I’m built. It’s one of those little problems,” he added.

All of this is probably depressing to those people who want him to talk about policies and be a serious politician. But he’s just too weird.

He said those things at a town hall meeting on Thursday. But on Wednesday, the day before in Pennsylvania, he was pleading for votes.

“Even if you don’t like me, you can sit there and say, ‘I can’t stand that guy, but there’s no way I’m gonna vote for her.’”

He also apparently forgot on Wednesday where he was, alluding to New Hampshire instead of Pennsylvania, and who he was running against.

“I can’t imagine New Hampshire voting for him. Anyone in New Hampshire who votes for Biden or Kamala…” he told the crowd.

Trump has become notorious for mental gaffes in 2024 as well as ducking responsibility and claiming he’s never said anything, or that he’s responsible for things. He’s claimed that he knew nothing about the photo at Arlington National Cemetery. He also claimed that Vice President Harris made it up. His campaign claimed there wasn’t a physical altercation with anyone as described.

Meanwhile, a Trump spokesperson wrote, “For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hollowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery,” he said in a written statement, misspelling the word hallowed. “Whoever this individual is, spreading these lies are dishonoring the men and women of our armed forces.”

The person they’re referring to is the U.S. Army employee who works at Arlington National Cemetery.

That’s Trump and his campaign. Notorious for word salads, lies, and contradictions. Notorious for lacking principles or honor. Notorious for blaming others. Notorious for being a hot mess.

Stay positive, be strong, and vote blue in 2024. Here’s the music video. The smoke pollution is worsening. Gotta go close the windows and turn on the air purifier. Cheers

3

Friday’s Theme Music

Mood: speculativitis

It feels like a diluted summer day. An archapelago of gray fuzzed small white clouds spill across the sky. Today’s blue is diluted into a pale hue. Weirdly feels like rain is possible in the cold mountain air shouldering me through the window. But it’s 70 F at my house and will top off at 99 F.

Of course, summer is on its heels. Autumn is crowding in again. This is Friday, September 6, 2024. Diluted, the door is also pregnant with a sense of finality. I don’t know what pseudo psycho-quantum vibes has me feeling that.

I read my fill of the story about the Apalachee school shooting. The alarm buttons in the IDs. The congratulations that the system worked and kept the loss of life down, spoken without irony. The continued reporting that the system failed because the kid had been investigated by the FBI who couldn’t tie him to the social media threats he’d previously made about carrying out a school shooting. The later news that the father had been arrested for his role after giving his son the murder weapon for a gift — after the child had been investigated for making the threats.

The wonder, the murder weapon was a Christmas present. Ho, ho, fucking, ho. Peace on Earth, goodwill toward men. Anyone care to bet that it was part of a Black Friday special? How sinisterly ugly is that?

The wonder, what were the dynamics in that household, with the kid allegedly making these threats and also apparently asking for mental health help, and Dad giving his boy, a troubled 14 year old, a killing machine? The wonder, what is the truth, and will this shit ever change?

Bet there are a lot of hopes and prayers being offered the family of the dead. They can take those hopes and prayers and add five dollars and have a coffee at Starbucks as they grieve.

All this has The Neurons playing “Once In A Lifetime” by the Talking Heads in the morning mental music stream (Trademark cracked). The 1981 song has a refrain that goes, “Same as it ever was. Same it ever was.”

You get where I’m coming from. I mean, mass shootings are a recurring part of the U.S. news scene. And let’s not overlook the other shootings. Children accidently killing themselves or another child because they found Mommy’s gun.

Let’s not overlook how frequently police officers are being ambushed and killed with firearms.

Yeah, but we don’t have a problem. Thoughts and prayers will take care of that shit.

Meanwhile, I’d read of Don Old Trump’s response to a child care question. This is part of it:

“But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about — that, because look, child care is child care, couldn’t — you know, there’s something — you have to have it in this country. You have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers, compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to. But they’ll get used to it very quickly. And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country.“

And nothing in the rest of the answer will stop the swirl of ‘what is he talking about’ that’s circulating around many people’s head.

Also, though, I’m amused by the cognitive dissonance needed for this question to be asked in the first place. Project 2025’s architects wants women to return to the home and take care of the family. She won’t be working; ergo, child care isn’t needed in their heads. Plus, they want to remove barriers against children working. So the child won’t need anyone to take care of them, because Mom will be home, or when the child is old enough, they’ll be at work to help support the family, which will be needed now that Mom doesn’t work.

Asking Trump, which Project 2025 specifically mentions throughout its contents, with many of the authors directly tied to him, what he’s going to do to help with child care costs for working women, demonstrates that some folks just aren’t paying attention.

Hah, same as it ever was, right?

Pause. Or maybe the person asking the question knew and got the answer that they wanted: he’s not thining about it, and is incapable of forming a coherent sentence about it. If so, brava to her.

Alright, let’s roll on. Be strong and stout and positive, and vote blue. Here’s the music. Cheers

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Thursday’s Wandering Thoughts

Saw an article which articulated that Kamala Harris is ready for the moment. Then the author added, “Too bad the media isn’t.”

Yep. That sums it up.

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