Tag: coup

Sunday’s Theme Music — Beginning

Sunday, August 23, 2026. Ashland, southern Oregon.

We’re again fortunate to have ‘good’ weather. Sunshine, blue skies, 74 F now, 90 F later. Some rain would be nice. Through today, we’re at 7% of normal precipitation for the year. Seven.

My wife and I greet each other many mornings with, “What’s the news? He dead yet?”

Then we laugh and say, “I know he’s not or you would have shouting the news.”

You know, this is the only person in our lifetime together — over fifty years — that we have ever said such things about. And we never specify who we’re talking about. That’s. Not. Needed.

Mom is complaining about her relationships with her daughters. “Three of them live nearby and none of them will take me to my appointments. Which will only HASTEN my death anyway.”

My sister’s daughter, May, is going to visit Mom tomorrow. We’re interested in the after-visit report. Mom helped raise May, and she and Mom had a great relationship until about four years ago. Then Mom became so angry and bitter, complaining about so many things, May declared, “I can’t do that any longer. It’s just too much.” Which is the case with my sisters and the rest of their children. Mom just became too much. I’d seen that trend developing and told Mom over and over through the last several years that all she does is complain and scold, that she’s always angry and bitter. Once she said that her partner, Frank, had just told her the same thing.

Trump has big action happening in DC with the Freedom 250 Indycar Grand Prix. It’s all part of Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! He’s just trying to distract all he can from how crappy things are going. Lots of corporations are going along with him. Retail sales are down, reflecting people’s challenges with the increasing affordability of living in the US. But corporations overall are doing well, with energy and technology companies doing particularly well.

So, yes, many corporations are all in for Trump’s Operation Epic LOOK — SQUIRREL! distractions. Hey, they’re getting theirs! Make hay while the sun shines! So what if the wealth gap continues to widen, if personal bankruptices are increasing, rural hospitals are closing, measles outbreaks are increasing, and the extreme weather gets worse? Corporation execs and shareholders are making money. Later, when the situation changes, they’ll contritely reduce prices, announcing ‘we’re all in this together’.

No. We’re not. They make that clear. They’re only in it together with us if it’s going to affect their profits, and then, they’ll only act under duress.

Today’s music emerges from my dream. I didn’t hear it in the dream but as I went through the night’s third dream, I suddenly heard Karen Carpenter singing “We’ve Only Just Begun”.

That could be an apt song for now, as far as the title’s sentiment. We’re about to go through some heavy duty loads with Donald Trump. He tried staying in power when he lost his bid for re-election, encouraging his supporters to resist the bona bide election results, encouraging them to ignore the law, resulting in death and destruction while widening the trust gap and polarizing the electorate. This year, he’s been working on trying to undermine the system.

Here’s the irony: Trump is cheerleading the nation’s 250th anniversary while simultaneously undermining the system that we’ve developed and improved for 250 years, the system which actually delivered him victory — twice.

Yet, Trump keeps whining and complaining about stolen elections without evidence. Is cutting much of the federal government in order to shift loads to states because of states’ rights. Meanwhile, he’s working hard to hollow out the states’ role in the national elections, basically usurping it so he can mold it as head of the executive branch of the federal government. It’s such a naked, wanton, power grab.

Trump is doing it because he’s a failure. His policies are failures, and people are awakening to this. His only way to get ahead, as always, is to lie, cheat, and steal.

So get ready: we’ve only just begun.

May your day begin with love and happiness and end on a high note.

Cheers

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Saturda’s Wandering Political Thoughts

I caught up on reading several posts by Heather Cox Richardson that I’d missed. I appreciate the historic angle she brings to news about Truskzilla’s destruction of the United States. Reading her, I belatedly realized, gosh, I’ve been normalizing Trump and his supporters.

I thought they cared about the United States and its founding principles. Wrong.

Or that the history and heritage of this nation matters. Nope.

That they worry about the Federal deficit and trade imbalances and the stock market. No way.

That usual barometers such as court rulings, disastrous economic results, or opinion polls would have an impact. No fucking way.

That the usual things like how history will judge them matters. It doesn’t; they believe, winners write history. We’ll be the winners. We will write the history.

I did understand that they didn’t care about democracy or voter rights. I did understand that they’re racist, sexist, misogynists, and reactionary. But that was mostly to unite people and put them in office. They needed racist, sexist, reactionary misogynists as their voting base to get them in through the front door.

Those are all normal terms about the normal course of events. Using them in terms of what Trump and the Trusk Regime is doing is normalizing them.

They are not normal. Nor can what they’re doing be called normal.

The Trusk Regime is interested solely in being in power. This is a coup. They’re interested in remaking the United States as an imperial power under a dictatorship. They suggest to each other, why build that mighty military if you’re not going to use it?

Like many dictatorships, the Trusk Regime and GOTP will put up window dressing as a democracy and a republic. But they are setting up the nation to be a military force. Cutting away the things we depend upon as a society — a working and reliable Federal government, healthcare, a safe and healthy environment, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, to point out some — destabilizes us. Growing unemployment increases people’s desperation. Rising prices limits their options and undermines food and shelter security. Sending children back to work breaks family. Ripping apart the education system reduces the nation’s collective intelligence, and with it, its will. All of these actions, taken in blitzkrieg fashion, demoralizes a growing number of people and spreads an increasing sense of helplessness.

That makes the people ripe for propaganda.

With the economy in shambles, other nations can and will be blamed for the growing poverty and starvation. Trade wars and political differences will be magnified and amplified. Trump, a prolific liar, has perfected the arts of projecting, deflecting, and blaming. That’s why he’s been boosted into position as the head of this monster.

They have X to help spread their misinformation. AI bots. Facebook. Threads. A weakening, capitulating media, itself owned by corporations and oligarchs, has already begun joining the effort.

A frustrated, starving population provides ample troops. And just as we saw with the Cheney/Dubya Iraq and Afghanistan wars, marketing can sell false causes. Helpless people hungry for someone to blame other than themselves will be served other nations as targets.

The clock is ticking. And the war drums have already begun beating.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Todays sunrise in Ashland, OR, was 7:40 AM. Sunset is 5:04 PM. A light gray overcast sky keeps the sunshine at bay. The temperature is 42 degrees F but a high of 56 is projected, along with light rain.

Today’s theme music is “Animal I Have Become” by Three Days Grace, 2006. I chose the music on behalf of the United States and the nation that it’s become. Torn by division, rhetoric and activity turns more violent and urgent. As blacks have been killed by police, people took to the streets to protest the deaths. Many of them were senseless, but officers were exonerated. Several particularly infuriating people, like Breonna Taylor, unarmed, in bed, innocent of everything but being black, killed by police in their zest to ‘serve and protect’. There was also George Floyd, killed by an officer who was busy serving and protecting, by kneeling on his neck until he died while his fellow officers, serving and protecting, looked on. This was apparently for a report of a crime of passing a counterfeit twenty dollar bill. Numbingly, those are just two examples that fueled the anger and protests that swept the nation on behalf of justice in 2020.

Meanwhile, on the right, they got busy protesting those protests, screaming in response, “Blue Lives Matter”. That blue lives really didn’t matter to them became apparent (as if we weren’t sure) as Trump supporters, who are quite right wing, conservative, and white supremacists, battled with the police in support of a coup attempt, beating many police officers, killing one. On the right, they believe that the 2020 election was stolen by ‘the left’. They think that there was all sorts of fraud, uncounted ballots, and thrice counted ballots that helped propel Biden to his landslide (in Trump’s words, as Biden won the EC by the same number as Trump did in 2016). Trump himself, and GOP cohorts, continue feeding this lie. They insist that evidence exists.

This evidence has never been shown.

On the right, they claim the evidence will be shown, and we’ll all change our tune. What’s keeping them from showing this evidence anywhere is the response given by the rest of us.

One note that has everyone (outside of the people who believe that the 2020 election as stolen) shaking their heads, is why would this all-powerful election-stealing apparatus only steal the presidential election? Why would they not steal the Senate and House? Why wouldn’t they also steal the state elections? They use the same ballots. Apparently, though, while the right believes this election-stealing apparatus is all-powerful, it’s not powerful enough to steal those elections. Yeah, SMFH.

With Trump impeached again, Trump unwilling to concede, little change to police policies and practices, and FBI reports that the right have violent plans to change the results of the 2020 election, “Animal I Have Become”, a song about a man struggling with drug addiction, seems right.

On a WordPress note, they appeared to have fixed some issues, in my experience. The site published properly yesterday. Of course, today when I went to post, I couldn’t bring up a page. Took three tries, and the whole ‘post/block’ sidebar had vanished and needed to be called up.

Stay positive, test negative, moderate your drinking, and wear pants (and a mask) when appropriate. Cheers

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