A misty veneer keeps the sunshine under wraps. Mists devour the greenery, truncating the world view to a small circle of existence. Rain keeps everything looking wet. A secure house with a little heat keeps it all cozy.
It’s Saturda, May 3, 2025, and 46 F. Not far off from the tops of 50 F.
Our ride home yesterday was uneventful. Traffic was light and moved well. Fascinating to leave the coast and arrive in a warm and sunny day in Roseburg. We stopped for gas at the Costco station there and then zipped on down I5. Total travel time was 4.5 hours, with a stop to eat egg and cheese croissant sandwiches we’d bought at a bakery that AM, and the stop at Costco for gas, using the restroom, and wandering around that Costco for a few to get a taste of it.
We did have one close moment. A semi began moving over on us. Think he saw a ramp ahead where traffic was coming on. Didn’t see my silver SUV in his mirrors alongside him. Fortunately, we had shoulder room. I snapped us left and punched the loud pedal while my wife let out a large gasp. Looking back, I saw everyone slow down behind the truck. Took a long time before people began passing that truck again.
Today’s music was inspired by AKing. They reminded me in comments of Rory Gallagher and “Bullfrog Blues”. I first heard Canned Heat do the old blues song in the 1960s. I had it as my theme music back in 2019. You know, during the first Trump administration.
Well, did you ever wake up With them bullfrogs on your mind? Well, did you ever wake up With them bullfrogs on your mind? You had to sit there laughin’ Laughin’ just to keep from crying
And many of Trump’s bellicose, Constitutional contrary, authoritarian wannabe whining texts have me shaking my head. So it’s an apt theme song for today’s political atmosphere where you have to sit there laughing just to keep from crying.
Here’s a copy of Canned Heat performing “Bullfrog Blues”.
Then here’s a tape of Rory Gallagher and his band doing a rousing performance of the same ol’ tune.
Both renditions have me remembering and grinning.
Coffee has been reintroduced into my biosystems. Neurons are beginning to fire in order. Hope your weekend rockets you to good state of mind. I’ll do my best on my head. Here we go. Cheers
Yes, this is about politics. The life aspect called Fuck Around, Find Out. Trump voter edition.
A woman posted about how bereft she was. She met a boy when she was sixteen. He was her first in all relevant ways. In love, they married and had a child.
She voted for Trump. She doesn’t say why. But that love of her life is an ‘illegal’, as the political shorthand is used. Even though he’d been in the United States before he could walk and lived here and here alone all of his life. He’d tried a few times to become a U.S. citizen. For sundry reasons, it wasn’t accomplished.
Now, fulfilling his campaign promises, Trump’s forces came and took her man away.
I surely do feel for her and her daughter. I don’t want to pile on. Explain, this is what you voted for. Nor remind her that her vote was going to upend many other people’s lives.
I really just wished she had listened to Trump before she voted. Thought about the ramifications of his promises. Then made her vote. And I want to ask her, what lessons will you take from this?
Thirstda is here! Thirstda is here! Yep, it’s finally Thirstda. If this is Thirstda, it must be May 1, 2025. Get ready to set your clocks back a little more under PINO Trump’s agenda.
Isn’t it special of Trump to make light of the potential pain people face with higher prices? Reducing the situation to a comparison of children’s dolls. “They’ll only have two instead of thirty.” So out of touch with reality and anyone below the wealthy class. It’s more like, they’ll only have one meal instead of two. Put less gas in the car. Go to bed hungry. Pass on eating to pay medication. Pause on buying needed medications to purchase the most needed medication. Make down with worn out clothes and shoes.
Sure, some are better off than that. But they’ll go out less often. Purchase less expensive meals. Perhaps skip desserts or drinks. Go to less expensive places. Drop some streaming services.
Trump doesn’t know. He lives in a bubble. Has for years. He’ll golf and make speeches and sign more unconstitutional E.O.s. Pretend that it’s all going great. And if it isn’t feed the continuing need to look good by passing on the buck. Blame others. Blame previous administrations. His cult slurp it up with a straw. Plastic, of course. Because he doesn’t think all that plastic in our bodies or in the ocean, all that plastic in landfills and killing animals, is a problem at all. He’s just too ignorant to know. But then again, more ignorant folks voted him in. He was going to ‘shake up the status quo’. He spoke to them. And many of them are still happy with him. They like the chaos. They enjoy how Trump takes it to the libs. They admire how he’s ‘making America strong again’ by wrecking the economy and thumbing his nose at the world.
Today’s music is “The Monster”. Yeah, that is Trump inspired. The Neurons are thinking of the offering by Eminem with Rhianna. “I’m friends with the monster under my bed. I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed. Get along with the voices inside of my head. You’re tryin’ to save me, stop holding your breath. And you think I’m crazy, yeah, you think I’m crazy.”
That’s pegged with those people who shake their heads and tell me that I just can’t see how well Trump is doing. But I’ll see, they tell me. I’ll see when Trump announces new deals with all of those countries calling him and begging him for deals. I’ll see when we’re all swimming in wealth.
Yeah, we’ll see.
Here’s the mental morning music stream sound. Have a fresh day. I’m after a fresh cuppa coffee, myself. It’s clear, quiet and calm down here at the water’s edge. 54 F with a high of 66 F coming. Later, gators.
Today’s provocation comes from a friend named Herb. His opinions are published every Friday. Here’s his latest. I’m firmly with Herb; capitulating to Trump or trying to appease him inspires him to take more.
Where do you stand on this? Resist, appease, or capitulate?
After World War II, when the U.S. went to war, apologists frequently would cite Munich to justify it. Their point was that British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and his French and Italian counterparts foolishly believed that they could appease Adolf Hitler’s territorial ambitions by signing an agreement in Munich on Sept. 30, 1938, that allowed him to annex a portion of Czechoslovakia. Such capitulation to an autocrat’s demand was a mistake that must never be repeated.
Herbert Rothschild
I was much too young to assess the justifications for the war in Korea, but not for the one in Vietnam. The Vietnamese lived in a small country that had been under the colonial control of the French, then the Japanese, and the French still again after the Allies defeated Japan. I could see little resemblance between their long, painful and heroic struggle to recover their independence and Nazi Germany’s aggression against its neighbors.
Historical analogies are tricky, but they aren’t useless. Indeed, I believe that the United States now has reached its Munich moment. To compromise at all with President Donald Trump’s demands only abets his quest for unlawful executive power. Each concession encourages him to demand more. When he meets firm resistance, though, he quickly pulls back.
The latest confirmation of that analysis is the difference between what happened to Columbia University and what happened to Harvard. In March, the Trump administration froze approximately $400 million in federal funding to Columbia, citing alleged violations of civil rights laws, including the university’s handling of antisemitism and campus protests. To restore the funding, Columbia agreed to place its Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies under “academic receivership,” transferring control from faculty to administrators for at least five years. The university also agreed to overhaul its admissions policies and disciplinary procedures, aligning them with federal directives.
Encouraged by that victory, Trump then went after Harvard. On Friday, April 11, the university received an emailed letter from Sean Keveney, the acting general counsel of the Department of Health and Human Services, making even more sweeping demands. The next Monday, Harvard firmly rejected the interference. Trump immediately announced that he was freezing $2.2 billion in research funding to the school and threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Still, Harvard refused to back down.
Lo and behold, shortly thereafter one of Harvard’s lawyers received a call from Josh Gruenbaum, a top official at the General Services Administration. Gruenbaum, along with Thomas Wheeler, the acting general counsel for the Department of Education, and Keveney constituted Trump’s so-called antisemitism task force. Gruenbaum first said that he and Wheeler hadn’t signed the April 11 letter and that it shouldn’t have been sent. Then, he changed his story and said the letter was supposed to be sent at some point, just not on Friday while the task force was still talking with Harvard’s lawyers.
Harvard sued, claiming that the government’s freeze on its research funding is unconstitutional and the demands for control over its academic policies violate the First Amendment and other federal laws. The $2.2 billion is still frozen, but further threats have stopped.
After Trump assumed office, he veered back and forth over tariffs on Mexico, trying to intimidate Sheinbaum. On March 4, he imposed the 25% tariff, then two days later said he was postponing it until April. What finally happened was that Mexico was included in the 10% tariffs Trump has imposed as a minimum on all countries, but Mexican products that comply with regulations in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that Trump negotiated during his first term were exempted. That exemption covers about half of Mexico’s exports to the U.S.
Trump’s apologists say that these aggressive moves and subsequent pull-backs are part of his negotiating strategy, and in a way they are correct. But the real goal of Trump’s negotiations isn’t deals but the enhancement of his own power. His aggression is the way he tests how successfully he can bully his opponents.
That is what he did with Columbia University. That is what he did with the law firms Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and Kirkland & Ellis and Latham & Watkins. And that is what he’s done with all the Republicans in the Congress. All of them caved, and their “prudence” simply incentivized him to push further. Like Harvard, like Mexico, like the law firms Perkins Coie and Susman Godfrey, like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the only way to deal with Trump is to say no.
Resistance breeds resistance. Early this month more than 500 law firms and 300 retired judges asked for leave to file two amicus briefs condemning Trump’s order stripping security clearances from and severing government ties with Perkins Coie. And this past Tuesday the American Association of Colleges and Universities issued a statement signed by leaders of almost 190 other universities denouncing “unprecedented government overreach and political interference” in higher education. That’s how movements grow.
On April 17, New York Times columnist David Brooks called for “a comprehensive national civic uprising” to oppose Trump. In the much-cited piece, he said that Trump is only interested in the acquisition of power “for its own sake” and is engaged in “a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men.” He argued that we cannot deal with him piecemeal — institution by institution, sector by sector. We must coalesce into “a movement that possesses rival power.”
Good for Brooks, who was shaken out of his complacent conservatism when Trump assumed control of the Republican Party in 2016. The specific forms of resistance he advocated are lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns and boycotts. While ending his list with “other forms of noncooperation and resistance” used by past movements that challenged illegitimate power, he stopped short of mentioning civil disobedience.
I think civil disobedience is necessary. Only when the Trump administration begins to jail nonviolent protesters will the diversified mass movement Brooks envisages coalesce. If I don’t get arrested in the next 12 months, I’ll consider that I missed my Munich moment.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear Fridays. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at herbertrothschild6839@gmail.com.
Yes, the United States is taking a deep nosedive into being an authoritarian state under Trump.
Didn’t start with him. No. We’ve been on this course almost since the nation’s inception. Growing differences in ideologies fed rising polarization. Voter apathy and a two-party system that often operates more like private clubs threw on heavy and recurring douses of high-octane fuel. One issue voters contributed. So did a professional class of politicians homesteading in Congress, more eager for continued employment and personal prestige and power than effective governing, or even the rules of order. A deliberate decision for several news outlets to blatantly skew news to promote their agendas helped the flames grow brighter and hotter.
Dark money in political donations is a cause. As is the growing wealth divide. That divide has always been there. We’ve had robber barons before. Railroad, oil, and ranching empires. Now we have power-hungry oligarchs corrupting the system and controlling the technology and means of communications. As our founders warned, don’t trust the bankers. Beware of the money men. And, as always, beware of religion taking over the state. Even if that religion revolves around the worship of cash and power.
With these issues, things are frequently simplified and boiled down to semantics. Sound bites. PR campaigns. Streaming and television ads. When does life begin? What is sex and gender? Who has the right to citizenship and due process? What is meant by a ‘well-regulated militia’?
Republicans in recent years have become effective bigfooting facts and the truth. Now they’re attacking science and education as the enemy. Outlawing words, history, books, and ideas. They’ve long wanted to reduce the size of the Federal government. We all know the famous quote about drowning it in the bathtub.
Of course, our eagerness as a nation and as individuals to embrace cults and saviors is complicit. We want order. But we want equal rights. Principled people are requested to make decisions and lead us. But principled people in charge are growing rarities. It costs money to run a political campaign. Big donors want something in return for their money. Bullying tactics are employed. Toe the line or you’re gone. Executive Orders become royal decrees. Doesn’t matter what Congress appropriated; a POTUS gets in office and attaches strings to the spending. My way or no way.
It’s little surprise that threats, bullying, and being obstinate is the usual political tactic of choice. Many of us learn it via parenting, from being parents or being ruled by parents. “Do it like this because I said so.” “Do your homework or you won’t get dessert.” That parenting and teaching style, that management style has been reinforced by popular culture via television shows and movies. It takes place in sports. How many players will simply ‘hold out’ for more money and better conditions? Workers are forced to strike for better conditions because executives and CEOs want greater profits even at the cost of workers’ health, lives, and safety. Being tough and strong means not backing down. “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” Except that’s exactly what we do. Taking it to the ultimate step, corporations and the wealthy demand conditions to build new factories. Tax breaks. Special rights. If they don’t get it, they’ll take their manufacturing elsewhere. For the affected communities, it’s often lose-lose. It is effectively financial terrorism as a negotiating ploy.
So it goes, a long and ugly downward spiral, the perfect mélange of power, money, capitalism, apathy, ignorance, and greed.
We are not the first nation to face this challenge. We were one of the first nations to attempt a democratic rule of the people, by the people, for the people. Catchy slogan, isn’t it? As always, who should be included as part of ‘the people’ is in disagreement. Women weren’t originally included. Blacks were marginally involved. Indians? No. Gays, lesbians? Never thought of. Many still don’t want to think of them. Claims that it’s against science. Or their religion. Or it personally offends them. Myths about it all are created and circulated. “Blacks are dumber.” “Gays groom children.” Anecdotal tales are held up as absolute truths. See Willy Horton. See ‘the welfare queen.’ Or for a more modern example, see ‘DEI’. Now many live in fear of the servant of the people, the current White House resident, unsure of how he’ll wield power, unsure what it’ll do to our lives, unsure what we can do about him, afraid of the economic and political forces he’s accumulating, afraid of him acting as a power of one.
We’ll probably survive this threat posed by Trump and the spineless GOTP and their base. But we’re not likely to address the structural deficiencies which brought us to this point. That’s hard work. Challenging. We disagree on too many elements to come together and fix it. Or many wealthy people want more wealth. Wealth spells improved comfort. More security. Greater freedom. So, aided by the wealthy, indifferent, and uninvolved, we’ll keep devolving until even our name is a mockery of who we pretend to be:
Papi cat is not happy. I know this because of the shouting meows. Not just the sound. He faces me and leans into it. Stretches his jaws wide. He’s Maria Callas using his diaphragm to belt it out.
“I know,” I tell him.
Rain fell all night. Sometimes in buckets. Papi is not a friend of rain. We also re-installed the pet door. In days past, Tucker slept on the mat in front of the pet door. That meant no other animal was entering. With Tucker gone, we decided the food bowls needed to be moved further away.
Background is, we had a buncha cats at one point. They usually didn’t get along. So we had three feeding stations. One in each the laundry room, the office, and the bedroom. In the bedroom, the feeding station lives by the wall beside the sliding door where the pet door resides. We thought it needed to be moved further away so that some passing animal didn’t sniff the kibble richness and come in through the pet door. Since Tucker is no longer guarding the pet door.
But all that change has Papi irritated. Pour the rain on top and he feels that the world is a cruel and injust place.
“I know,” I tell him. “I had to change my diet due to high blood pressure. It sucks.”
“Meyeah,” Papi wailed back.
Yes, it has rained all night. It’s wet and chilly this morning. 44 F and rain. The high will be 51 F and rain. The low will be 41 F and rain. The rain is good for the land, we remind each other. The pep in our pep talks is petering out, though. Everyone wants sunshine until they don’t. Then we want rain. Until we don’t. It’s the cycle of complaint. Weather version.
This is Saturda. April 26, 2025. Still spring in Ashlandia. And typical Ashlandia spring weather.
I’m a little miffed. I had yard plans. I’d been making progress. The rain has placed a pause on the cause. I can’t do the things planned, cause rain and electric power equipment. I’ve read somewhere that they are not a good combination.
I’m happy it’s Saturday. The news cycle slows on the weekends. News doesn’t stop but less people are reporting and airing it. Much as I’d like a break from it, we need to stay vigilant against the Trusk Regime’s evil. That evil goes 24/7. Just when you think their empathy has bottomed, they show a lower side. Most recently, they deported a two-year US citizen. Because, Trump. He no like the 16th Amendment. So he decided to ignore it. Because that’s what you do if you dislike laws. It’s the Trump U.S.A. way.
Snark alert: The other ‘good’ news is that the number of measles cases keep rising. Looks like RFK Jr’s plans just can’t get an angle on stopping it. Probably because he eschews using science and medicine.
Final bit of irritating news. Trump says he’s talking to China about the tariffs. China says, “No, he isn’t.” Either side could be lying. Given Trump’s record, I believe it’s him. Trump is lying. Yet again.
Puttering through the kitchen at pre-coffee speed, The Neurons raised a line in my head. “Let me remember things I don’t know.” I further slowed. I know the line. That wasn’t the line. That was a mondegreen: a misunderstood song line. Urging The Neurons into more effort, the song and real line punched in:
“Let me remember things I love, Lord.” CCR. “Green River”.
Coffee has made a safe landing in my body. Dressed, fed, and caffeinated, I am re-animated for another day. Hope you have a day that works in your favorite. It can happen. Cheers
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of wrongly-deported Maryland dad Kilmar Abrego Garcia, spoke out after the Department of Homeland Security posted her address on X.
The Trusk Regime is such an abomination. They care not at all about the Constitution, due process, history, tradition, or people’s safety and privacy, including children.
Clouds have moved into Ashlandia. As neighbors go, they tend to being quiet but flighty. They’re also large but I don’t want to body shame anyone.
With the clouds, we get warmer nights but colder days. Last night only slipped down to 51 F. Today’s high will be 61 F. Will it rain? Let me consult with my digitized Magic 8 Ball. Magic 8 says “It is decidely so.”
Today, BTW, is marked as Friday, April 25, 2025. One third of 2025 is about to end. Despite all of PINO Trump’s promises, preening, and bullying, the Russia-Ukraine goes on. The government is in miserable shape and not saving any money. People are losing 401K money because the stock market and bond market are waaayyy worse than under the previous POTUS. Tourism is down. Talk and worries about empty shelves, increasing unemployment, recession and even economic depression is increasing. Pundits already call it the Trumpcession.
PINO Trump responds to it all with glee. “Look how much money my billionaire friends made.” He alternates that with, “What, me — worry?”
I have The Outsiders performing in the morning mental music stream. The song is “Time Won’t Let Me”. Released in 1965, it grew into a hit and radio staple. That led to its purchase as a 45 RPM offering. The record became part of the basement playlist in our neighborhood. We usually did that over at Tracy and Carolyn’s house, as they had a finished basement.
The Smithereens did a cover for the 1994 movie Timecop, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. I admit, I prefer the original song.
Coffee has come to my aid again, fortifying my psyche for reading the news. Hope you’re all well out there in streaming land, cuz here we go. Cheers
