HAVE YOU NO DECENCY!

Republican Greene New Deal Sucks

So far, I have managed to avoid writing about the junior representative from Georgia’s 14th congressional district, Marjorie Taylor Greene. As they say on the playground, however, she started it. Her first Democratic opponent in her run for Congress dropped out for family reasons. The next candidate was underfunded and not viable. The Peach State is highly conservative and Republican so it would have been an uphill battle for anyone, but what was left can best be described as roadkill.

There is no I.Q. test administered to those who run for office, whether it be for dog catcher or president. There’s also the interesting fact that some candidates have been declared dead before an election, but still won. In my estimation, a dead representative for Georgia’s 14^th would have been more productive.

The 47-year-old Greene is an ideolog who has a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Georgia. She graduated from South Forsyth High School in Cumming, Georgia, a town that until 35 years ago had a law that prohibited African Americans from staying within its borders overnight.

According to Atlanta’s ABC affiliate WSB-TV, Marjorie Taylor Greene filed homestead exemptions on two homes, which is a violation of state law. She claimed it was a “paperwork mistake” and it’s since been cleared up, but she continues to stain her reputation in real time every day by just opening her mouth.

The list of positions she’s taken on almost every issue is eye opening, and she enjoys pulling stunts to get attention. Greene was early to assert that Donald Trump was elected in a landslide and the 2020 election was stolen from him. She also filed articles of impeachment against Joe Biden the day after his inauguration alleging abuse of power. Now she is misleading America once again.

She compared US mask and vaccine mandates to the rights taken away from Jewish people when they were put on trains, sent to concentration camps and executed by Germany during the Holocaust. While her antics were blown off the front page by a mass shooting in San Jose, California, her words finally warranted a response from Republican leaders, although they waited five days before condemning her remarks.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said this, “Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.” Okay, but he then went on to accuse the Democrats of anti-Semitism. Why? Nine people lost their lives in San Jose, Kevin’s home state, yet he took a cheap shot at the other party. Mr. McCarthy shows himself to be a lowlife by his awkward attempt to semi-reprimand a member of his caucus. Kevin has the power to throw Greene out of the caucus, which could lead to her expulsion from the House of Representatives.

Expulsion is the most serious form of disciplinary action that can be taken against a Member of Congress. The United States Constitution (Article I, Section 5, Clause 2) provides that “Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.” On the other hand, censure, a less severe form of disciplinary action, is an official sanction of a member but does not remove them from office. Ms. Greene could be headed to one of those two destinations if she doesn’t clean up her act.

Just as Kevin McCarthy and his gang of political thugs removed Liz Cheney from her leadership roles because her viewpoints were said to be “disruptive” to the caucus, only a fool wouldn’t see that Taylor Greene’s harmful and misinformed opinions are distracting the country from what the Republicans want to accomplish. We aren’t quite sure what those goals are because the party still doesn’t have a written platform. Their only discernable goal is pleasing the big orange guy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have the gravitas or profundity to navigate the aisles of Congress. Hell, I’ll wager that she would mess up a trip to the 7-11 to buy a six-pack of beer. She openly speaks her mind, but there’s nothing in that organ that produces any intelligent discourse. She would sound articulate if she was a homeless person smoking a cigarette standing in front of that 7-11, but as the representative of one of the more important states in our country she’s nothing less than a buffoon of epic proportion.

I just finished reading a new translation of a book titled, “Night,” a 1960 work by Elie Wiesel. This true story is based on his and his father’s Holocaust experiences in the Nazi German concentration camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald in 1944-45. Sadly, his father didn’t make it. If only Ms. Greene would take the time to read this short, 120-page book, perhaps she would experience the visceral pain and intellectual slap of Wiesel’s experiences. Being asked to wear a fucking mask to protect yourself and others from a deadly virus is nothing like being starved to death in a prison camp and watching your family being thrown alive into a crematorium.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not fit to be a citizen of this great country, let alone a representative in Congress. She was elected to that office, but most experts agree that if the election was held today, with any decent human being running against her, she would lose. She should be recalled by the electorate, but unfortunately too many of them believe her lies and carry with them the embedded racism and anti-Semitic viewpoints that her remarks stimulate and validate.

She doesn’t realize that her comments are lessening the importance of the tragedy of Nazi death camps. She can’t comprehend that her lack of empathy and disregard of the real pain suffered by a generation of Americans aids and abets prejudges. An African American says, “Black Lives Matter,” and Marjorie Taylor Greene would thoughtlessly answer, “All lives Matter.” Well then, why does she walk on the unmarked graves of Jews? This Republican Greene New Deal sucks!

AMERICA’S IMMENSE CHALLENGE

A Return to Making Things Here

There was a recent flurry of press coverage concerning activity at the Micron plant in Manassas, Virginia. US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with the company’s chief executive officer, Sanjay Mehrotra. She was joined with two key lawmakers in a debate about funding for electronic semiconductors (chips) manufacturing and American competitiveness. Yes, we are finally going to use taxpayer money to create more jobs in America.

Most of the chips we use in our technologies come from Asia. According to Bloomberg news, “Semiconductor manufacturers have pushed the U.S. to create incentives through grants and tax credits to help spur production in America. Congress is debating legislation to fund semiconductor research and development and may include it in a broader China bill in the coming months.”

President Biden is smartly pushing modern-future technologies rather than trying to prop up the old ways of doing things, you know, like burning coal to produce electricity. Just look at what happened in Texas over the winter. The Hightower Lowdown newsletter pointed out that Governor Greg Abbott has received more than $26 million in campaign contributions from the companies that didn’t prepare for the future and caused a power outage that killed 111 people and cost the state $130 billion in damages. If proper maintenance and management of our energy girds are not a paramount responsibility of our leaders, then what the hell is?

We also need to find water, cleanly process it and then pump it out to our citizens. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of dangerous lead pipelines in every state. Since Jimmy Carter was president, federal funding for water systems in America has dropped by 77%. The Flint, Michigan water crisis is only the tip of the iceberg. U.S. water systems have been rotting away for more than 50 years. If we cannot produce the most important product in this country — Water — then we are incompetent.

But let’s get back to chips. It’s not that we couldn’t design and manufacture semiconductors in our country, we just found is easier and cheaper to source them from Taiwan. To be clear, it will take years to beef up our plants and produce the volume of chips that our industries demand. The good news is we have the Spruce Pine Mining District, a swath of the valley to the North Toe River in the Blue Ridge Mountains of northwestern North Carolina. Located there is the largest cache of “Spruce Pine” ever found on Earth. It’s the purest natural quartz — a species of pristine sand — and this ultra‑elite deposit of silicon dioxide particles plays a key role in the manufacturing of computer chips. The Spruce Pine area is mined for its mica, kaolin, quartz and feldspar. So, you see, we already have the natural resources. Now all we need is plants, highly skilled workers and money.

Back in the day, we let the steel mills move out of the country and we closed many manufacturing plants because we could import lower priced goods manufactured elsewhere. Having fewer American employees was considered “good business,” because it allowed us to compete more effectively. However, I’m almost ready to say it was anti-American not forcing offshore manufacturers to pay higher import taxes on their goods. Many of those companies paid little or no taxes, and now are we going to offer federal funds to these same companies to make them more productive? The Obama administration tried that with solar panel manufacturers, some of which turned out to be scams and cons.

We need to understand the competitive landscape as it pertains to the U.S. economy, but it’s getting harder to discern exactly what is happening. Take digital currency, for example. It stores billions of dollars which cannot be traced or investigated, and with all the loopholes in our tax laws monetary incentives will continue landing in the bank accounts of donors and political operatives. Despite that, we should at least try to make improvements.

We are the leaders in technologies and software, yet we always bring in players from other countries to help us build our products, and that makes us vulnerable. Even with the best security in place, some of our intellectual property ends up in the minds and hands of other countries. In addition, smart developers in foreign lands have the will and time to reverse engineer our concepts and devices. The best way around this challenge is continually improving and upgrading our products. It’s harder to hit a moving target.

We should no longer be concerned about blue and white collar workers. Think about the WeatherTech company, 100% owned by its founder and CEO David MacNeil. In 1989, Mr. MacNeil said he was dissatisfied with the quality of existing automotive floor mats and started a company out of his home in Clarendon Hills, IL. WeatherTech began by importing the mats directly from England, but that changed with the introduction of digitization and CAD- CAM technologies. Now, all the mats are made in Illinois. Made in the U.S.A.

Can we make smart phones in America? Well, we could, but the path is scattered with the carcasses of many companies that tried to make flatscreen TVs, only to fade away because of costs. Can we make steel in America? Sure, but the investors would probably want to see a unique market. We make cars and trucks here and we probably always will, although with each new robot and automation breakthrough fewer workers are needed.

Tesla manufactures 100% of their cars in this country. The Tesla factory in Fremont, California is one of the world’s most advanced automotive plants, with 5.3 million square feet of manufacturing and office space on 370 acres of land. Currently 10,000 people work in Tesla’s Fremont plant. You may not like Elon Musk, but he’s done more for American manufacturing that anyone. Yeah, an immigrant from Pretoria, South Africa seems to have better vision than many U.S. titans.

A new business has to start out with a marketing plan, but companies like Micron that have been around for more than 40 years understand their markets. Micron made their money by producing computer components such as random-access memory, flash memory, and USB flash drives. They were never a wafer chip producer per se, but they understand the tech. However, if we try to up-covert a company like Micron, or ask Kodak to make chemicals for vaccines, we might have a flaw in our thinking. Maybe it’s time we fund NEW companies that aren’t burdened with debt, legacy equipment or outdated thinking. It always takes longer to convert an older company rather than creating a new one. Ask China. That’s how they do it.

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THE DIMINISHING AMERICAN I.Q.

Does Our Size Make Us Dumber?

People use intelligence as a weapon. I do it, perhaps you do it, many of us do it, but why? Let’s begin with the worst infection that kills human life: War. Edwin Starr’s 1970 hit song said it best, War, I despise, it means destruction to innocent lives, war means tears to thousands of mothers’ eyes. When their sons go out to fight and lose their lives, War, huh, yeah, (What is it good for?) Absolutely (nothing)!

Culture Club updated the theme in 1984 with “The War Song.” It says, War, war is stupid, and people are stupid, and love means nothing in some strange quarters, War, war is stupid, and people are stupid! Okay, we get it. We just saw a stupid war played out once again. Stupid terrorists in the Gaza Strip launched missiles into Israel, which retaliated by bombing the shit out of the strip. To be clear, the Gaza Strip is 150 square miles of territory with about two million people and no army. Israel has nine million people and an armed force of 120,000 troops with another 500,000 on reserve. This was just two unfriendly neighbors shouting at each other with weapons resulting in hundreds of deaths. I hope they can keep the ceasefire.

I read an amazing news story today that says 42% of Russians refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus. They have this guy named PUTIN and his buddy, Russia’s former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev. He has expressed support for compulsory vaccinations as the country grapples with slower-than-hoped-for coronavirus vaccine uptake. Why don’t they trust the “miracle cure” vaccine that their own country produced faster than any other? Could it be concern that the guy running the place has no problem putting poison in his critics’ tea?

We are doing much better battling Covid-19 here in the United States and our three vaccines are bringing down the case numbers. Even so, there is a disparity between those who are getting the vaccine and those who won’t. A troubling article in the New York Times stated, “It is common to hear about two different demographic groups that are hesitant to receive a Covid-19 vaccination: Republican voters and racial minorities, especially Black and Latino Americans. For Republicans, the attitude is connected to a general skepticism of government and science. For Black and Hispanic Americans, it appears to stem from the country’s legacy of providing substandard medical treatment, and sometimes doing outright harm, to minorities.”

There are also religious attitudes from sects like the Christian Scientists and Anti-science Evangelicals, but Americans are generally not against medicines. We take a pill to wake up, a pill to go to sleep and a pill to read this blog. So, what gives?

The greatest influence on virus denial was the handling of the 2020 global pandemic by the White House. Its revolts against mask wearing and the pitch to “not let the virus rule your life” accelerated the penetration of the disease. Those who created doubt about the advice of medical experts are responsible for much of the vaccine hesitancy in this country. When the far-right media told their viewers, they don’t have to be vaccinated if they are young, that masks only make things worse and that vaccines will hurt you more than help, they became medical terrorists in my estimation.

Rand Paul claimed that if you had Covid you don’t need to get a vaccine. He has a right to state his belief, but it’s only an opinion. He is not an expert in viruses; he is an eye doctor with poor vision.

When we were a smaller country, we had a stronger belief in our government. It led our people to fight in three wars and send their young sons to Vietnam, but for what? Absolutely nothing! But this piece isn’t so much about war, as who decides to help fight a war and who stays behind. One comedian called those who won’t get a Covid vaccine “freeloaders.” Yes, that’s a bit harsh, but funny, nonetheless. We all know people who take advantage of others’ generosity without giving anything in return but isn’t it strange that in this world of givers and takers, it’s the takers who are NOT taking the shot. Besides the twist of the meaning there is some evidence that when a person cannot comprehend how something works, they won’t trust it.

Republicans aren’t stupid and I’m sure they don’t want to get coronavirus, but they think it’s cool to not get a shot. Not sure why that is. They approve large sums of money for the military but refuse to improve infrastructure, They read the Bible every Sunday but can’t find the funds to end poverty. They like good roads and would cry bloody murder if a bridge collapsed in their town, but they are following the old maxim that when it’s NOT MY IDEA then it’s bad.

I was having dinner with a smart man who said, “There is no way to give everyone a raise to $15 an hour.” When I asked him why, he replied that “It would destroy the economy.” Would it? Really? We spent trillions of dollars on blowing up things in the Middle East but we cannot take care of the people who live and work here? The “America First” dogma of the last five years was a damn lie. When we placed tariffs on China, our soybean farmers went out of business and we all paid more for everything. We must not solve trade problems with tactics that hurt our citizens.

If you told all those people who haven’t gotten the vaccine that Trump would return instantly to the presidency if they did, the lines to secure immunity would be wrapping around blocks. Sad, but that is true. You see, the people who are sticking with the big lie and pushing back against the progress we’ve made with Covid, don’t care about truth or logic, they just want their false prophet back. If they really cared about all Americans, they would step up and help. They may not be dumb, but they certainly are foolish.

We should take 50% of our military budget and invest it in education. It’s clear that the poor job we’ve done in schools means not only that Johnny can’t read, but Suzy will let them take her rights away. Those who want to block abortions also want to cut money for social services and education for those families with “too many kids.” Large families are harder to manage. America’s size is keeping us down and maybe even lowering the average I.Q. So, why are the fucking “geniuses” still running Congress? Oh yeah, we voted without thinking.

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PANDEMIC BY-PRODUCT

Capitalism Goes Back to School

You have probably heard a theory about why employment figures haven’t roared back to pre- pandemic levels in America. The grand presumption from Republicans is people are not returning to their previous jobs because they are making so much money from the government’s pandemic relief checks.

As you might suspect, I have thoughts on this. First, let’s examine unemployment history. In October of 2009, right after the financial collapse, unemployment was at 10%. After a great recovery under two presidents, Obama and Trump, that number fell to 3.5%, one of the lowest unemployment numbers of this century. Then, Covid-19 came to the world and unemployment jumped to 14.8%. The federal government handed out assistance checks to people and some companies enrolled in the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) to obtain government loans to pay employees and keep their businesses afloat.

In March 2021, US unemployment dropped to 6%, but instead of cheering on this great improvement the GOP complained that recovery was taking too long. They insisted that all pandemic relief payments needed to end so that poverty and need would drive people back to work. Okay, that description is tilted and subjective but let’s stop and think about this. The Republicans may be wrong.

I found this interesting viewpoint in The Hill, “Is questioning whether unemployed Americans respond to the availability of unemployment compensation just another way of insulting their intelligence? If one can make more money being paid to stay at home, a rational person should do that, mindful of any effect on future employability, of course. Do we really need proof of the obvious? To be sure, it is a bit cynical to frame this as ‘being paid to stay home,’ but that’s what it is — or more neutrally, compensation for being unemployed, which one will lose by taking a job.”

The restaurant industry is facing a huge workforce challenge. I tried to go into a Starbucks and another breakfast establishment recently only to see signs that they were closed because not enough workers showed up to work that day.

Here’s a headline from the Restaurant Manifesto blogsite: The Restaurant Labor Shortage Was Inevitable – Stimulus payments aren’t the only thing keeping workers on the sidelines. They say, “Some hospitality professionals have abandoned the industry altogether. Months of waiting to return to their old jobs has left many workers worried about being left alone at the altar. Others chose to relocate to places where jobs are plentiful—cities like Miami where disruption to restaurant businesses has been ameliorated by more permissive public health policies.” I would add that some workers didn’t want to return to a job placing them in direct contact with mask-less customers.

The article continued, “Some individuals who’ve lost their jobs also lost their health insurance coverage during the worst public health crisis in a generation. When the industry shut down, many owners immediately laid off their entire staff, no questions asked, even their most loyal workers.”

One of my suppositions is that laborers who were isolated and quarantined had time to question what is important to them. They started to see the difference between a low-paying job with ill-tempered supervisors as compared to fulfilling work that paid them properly under managers who treated them respectfully and fairly. It’s not hard to find someone who has worked in the food business with many stories of rotten experiences, including tales of sexual harassment, tips being stolen by co-workers and long shifts with meager compensation. Maybe that’s why they aren’t going back to their former jobs.

The good news is capitalism never sleeps, it continuously finds ways to survive and grow. What has the pandemic mentality forced companies to do? Well, motivation is at the top of the list. Companies are offering bonuses just to get people in the door to fill out an application. From free food to fifty bucks, the corporate lords have found religion – MONEY.

While trying to get more workers, they are also reviewing their hourly wages and benefits such as healthcare. They are now forced to compete with not only direct competitors but also other industries. Our media outlets love to point out how “bad” it is to work for Amazon, but their warehouse jobs are plentiful and they pay well. You can work in a restaurant and hope your daily tips are substantial or you can punch-in every morning to feed the monster Jeff Bezos created and making good moola.

It’s appalling to me that the Republicans assume everyone getting financial assistance is scamming the federal government. Instead of investigating and understanding real people problems, they just cut off the money, stop the abortions and make it harder to vote. Thanks for nothing. Maybe it’s time you do some research and listen to objective logic.

Congress has become a hydra, with each of its two heads canceling the other. The Democrats want to help but fail to unite around one solid plan. The Republicans lay in wait until an idea floats to the front, then they attack it regardless of its substance. I cannot believe that grown men in Congress are still afraid of Donald Trump. It’s clear that Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy are nothing but Trump puppets, lacking backbone and vision.

If we take 6% as a starting place for recovery, we could be much more optimistic and perhaps see that slower reduction of unemployment might be driven by businesses reluctant to overextend themselves until the coast is clear. I suggest Republicans open the book about the disaster of a global pandemic to learn the number of permanently closed businesses. If Lindsey Graham knew the real number of those places that closed forever, and counted all the workers they used to employ, he might be a bit less vindictive toward people who are getting checks. If you are curious, South Carolina currently has an unemployment rate of 5.1%, and in government employees they are at negative-3.5%. Time to give out some government jobs, Lindsey.

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THE WOKE JOKE

American Trends & Fads

Americans either stay on top of things, or they don’t, and when they don’t, they may feel a bit out of place with the conversations around them. For the longest time, I wondered how many folks understood the term “woke” to describe people.

One of my favorite resources for understanding the street interpretations of the words and phrases in Americana patois is the UrbanDictionary.com. They define “woke” as the act of a person being pretentious about their care of a social issue. The attempts of some to impress by dishing out their feelings of importance about issues does overwhelm at times, but I think the crowd-sourced Urban Dictionary misses the mark by weaving pretention into its definition. It was similar to the way Fox News spent so much time disparaging the concept. It’s like a mother beginning to use Facebook and then her kids deride the platform because it has gone mainstream and is no longer hip.

Hip is a baby boomer word. Back in the day we used it when we liked some thing or person. When a band was hip, it didn’t mean “hipster,” like today, it meant the group was trendy, cool and up on all the latest things. Some say it was a perversion of the word “hep,” as in “hep cat” from the Jazz era, but who knows? The only hip baby boomers care about today is the joint that connects their legs to their upper torsos.

American trendsetters often guided us toward the next big things, but they weren’t always right. If you bought a Betamax video recorder, you may have been hip but you were also wrong. During the fashion era, woke fashion leaders told us guys to wear skinny ties, then wide ties, then no ties at all. Women know this game much more profoundly than men because their styles are annually dictated by the wild ideas of Paris and New York. It takes a long time for JCPenney to catch the fever of a new style, but by the time they do it’s no longer woke.

It’s funny to me how politicians get their underwear in a wad, whether they are wearing briefs, tidy whities or if they have gone commando. Thanks to the Urban Dictionary, we know that means not wearing underwear. The origins for this are either “out in the open” or “ready for action,” but one must know the difference between a fad and a trend.

In 1982, I read the book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives. This was written in our pre-internet days, so the author used newspaper coverage as a gauge for analyzing data. He simply counted the number of column-inches each subject got in all the newspapers and used that to determine how those topics were trending. He also explained the difference between a short-term fad, like Davy Crockett hats, and the true megatrends that propelled our nation. By reading that book I learned that northern industrial cities would lose populations and southern cities would grow, and that’s exactly what happened.

In June 2020, the magazine Psychology Today published an article titled, The Promise and Problems of Being Woke. Here’s an excerpt, “Many people, especially the youth, have a heightened awareness of our troubled past and, understandably, seek to correct our collective wrongs. This is where the term “woke” comes into play. It is defined as, ‘aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice).’” Note the difference between the Urban Dictionary definition. In this case, being woke is all about alertness with no posing implied.

The article continues, “Perhaps the long-overdue correction of ‘wokism’ is, sometimes, leading to an over-correction of sorts.” We saw that recently with the uproar about the Academy Awards that led to the Twitter campaign of #AcademySoWhite. The Academy acted and moved the needle rapidly because they had a huge backlog of African American scripts, projects and casting. Aside from the host-less, humor-less awards show this year, there were so many honors for projects by people of color that someone commented, “Why is everything about Black people?” That wasn’t racist; it was merely an observation. It reminded me of being the only white person at a 1970s Motown review concert. I loved the music but wondered why I was the only white guy there.

Our society often uses political correctness and shunning to block people with different opinions. There was a strange reaction when the term #BlackLivesMatter surfaced. First, it wasn’t very “woke” to say “all lives matter.” The goal of that phrase wasn’t promoting equality but rather diluting the indictment. When Trump stated that the “BLM movement is racist,” all chances of respect were lost. Most people don’t understand that slogans like “blue lives matter” create one colossal petri dish of cancel culture.

Here is a question. If the idea of being woke is “seeking to correct our collective wrongs,” then aggressors who push back at the woke patrol are attempting to stop that effort. The rebellion by some Republican lawmakers against the New York Times 1619 Project is an attempt to block truth from the next generation so they will never do the “woke” thing. I used to use the term “mulatto” when referring to people of mixed race, then stopped using the word when I discovered it’s appalling “nod and wink” origin as the offspring of a male donkey (a jack) and a female horse (a mare). A person of mixed race is not an animal, they are a person. Once I had the correct information, I was able to eliminate a wrong. I’m not woke for knowing, I’m just trying to do the right thing.

I would suggest that the term and concept of “woke,” is not a trend but a fad. People may hang their hat on the word, but the expression and label don’t automatically fix the world. “Woke” is just another class one joins. The belief beyond the word has the potential of profoundly changing the world. And of course, conservatives hate the word because they know, deep down inside, they will never be allowed in the club. Poor babies.

The foundation of the woke movement is people with strong social convictions wanting to make a better world, but it’s a world they are defining, not really a democrat truth. I might get canceled for suggesting here, but all they want us all to do is wake up and smell the coffee, or for a woke person, smell the cappuccino.

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The book that tells it like it is…

Gold, God, Guns & Goofballs: If you only read one chapter of this book, try “Take a Knee for America” and think about our never-ending conflicts between minorities and the police. I’m not asking you to take a stand but having a deep and honest conversation about why some people think the way they do would be productive. This is a book for the moment which seeks to start a conversation about peace. And if you are worried about social media, you really should check out the chapter called “Social Media Menace.”

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COMING SOON

An Open Letter to Rep. Elise Stefanik

Absolutely Corrupt

Representative Elise Stefanik

21^st District of New York

2211 Rayburn House Office Building

Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congresswoman Stefanik:

Congratulations on your rise to the third most powerful Republican position in the House. You must be extremely excited! I have been following your political career for several years. I used to live in Mayfield, New York, the 19^th District.

I can’t help noticing your bizarre transformation from a semi-reasonable, moderate New York Republican to an ideolog of epic proportions. How many glasses of the Kool-Aid did you consume?

I’ll get right to the point of this letter, which I wonder if you will even get to read. What you are doing is morally reprehensible on so many levels but let me focus on a question. Why are you lying? Do you really want to be known as a public servant who never served all the people and was okay with being labeled a liar? YOU ARE LYING to the American people about the election. If the BIG LIE is okay by you, then you are not worthy of serving your district, your state or our country.

You took an oath to uphold the Constitution. It’s not too late for you to tell the truth, but it may be too late to save your reputation. What would Melanie and Ken think of their daughter lying her way into power? I just wanted to let you know that we know you are lying.

Have a good day and enjoy that power which has already absolutely corrupted you.

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COMING SOON

THE CASTRATION OF TRUTH

Unbelievable Lies & Unamerican Activities

I’m fairly sure most Americans didn’t watch the vulgar logic of Republicans on display yesterday in the fact-finding hearing about the January 6^th Insurrection, but I did. What a barrel of bullshit was unloaded in that session! It’s too bad Congressional members are NOT under oath when they go into their diatribes and pontifications during these important hearings. What I heard was outrageous.

Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia claimed that anyone who says that an insurrection occurred on January 6^th is a bold-faced liar. He continued by saying that anyone looking at the video could see that it was “a normal tourist visit.” WTF? Whack job Paul Gosar of Arizona claimed the DOJ has been harassing peaceful Americans who participated that day. Rep. Jody Hice of Georgia laid out his fantasy that it was “Trump supporters who were killed that day” rather than the mob trying to kill Capital police. I could go on but I won’t. Just thinking about it makes my blood pressure increase.

This hearing took place right after minority leader Kevin McCarthy’s kangaroo court took a voice vote to remove Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney from all leadership roles she earned in the Republican party over the years. Cheney is the daughter of top-dog neo-Con Dick Cheney, the man with someone else’s heart. Just to make sure we are on the same light beam here, neo-Conservatives comprise a political movement that was created to protest what was perceived to be an increasing influence of those who have been called anti-war, left-leaning pacifists. During both Bush administrations, people like Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld believed a victorious war and nation building were strong foreign policies. That is why former President Trump keeps calling Liz Cheney a warmonger. It’s an unfair characterization, but when has the large orange one ever been fair, truthful or coherent?

We’ve all heard that the Republican party has embraced the “Big Lie” and believes the presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump. Yesterday, Kevin McCarthy’s head turned more revolutions than the possessed little girl in the Exorcist. According to Newsweek, Kevin McCarthy said, “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” and then the California Republican added, “I think that is all over with, we were sitting here with the president today.” Okay, then why is it wrong for Liz Cheney to say the same thing?

I think it’s time for everyone in Congress to tell the truth. I would have been quite okay had Representative McCarthy made this kind of statement, “Former President Trump does not like Liz Cheney, or her father, and to keep him happy I just had to get rid of her. It’s nothing personal. All of us guys here in the caucus really don’t want to piss Trump off. We really are afraid of him.” Those words would have been fine and truthful, and then we could move on from this. But no, McCarthy and others in his party constantly lie and push an immoral, unamerican dogma. Cheney is absolutely right, it’s a cult of personality, a dangerous, anti-democratic cult that has the potential to destroy who we are as a people. Too much? I don’t think so, McCarthy has already ruined American and created more divide.

I don’t care about the Republican party. They don’t have a real leader, they don’t have a platform and they don’t care about anything other than power and punishing those they don’t like. Instead of focusing on the proper V-word — Victory — they are focusing on the other V-word, Vindictive.

If Liz Cheney was a man would the same thing have happened? Probably, but not the same way. A man would have been pressured. The dirty tricksters might have found some nasty the guy did in his past and they would have threatened him with disclosure. But wait, that hasn’t kept them from throwing Matt Gaetz off his committees, so it is a double standard. Ms. Cheney isn’t about to change her tune and deny that she ever said negative things about Trump. She hates him. She has always hated him.

Liz Cheney says Trump’s ongoing support of the Big Lie proves “he’s unfit for office”. She also said she will do everything in her power to make sure he never runs for the highest office again. Wow! That’s a strong, gutsy position undeniably unpopular with those who fear Trump. But what is best for America?

What if Liz and others were to create a third party with more of a Max Boot, Cheney, Bush alignment? They could resurrect the Constitutional Party. Or perhaps call it the Bull Moose Party, those are big in Wyoming and they also have a swell logo. Any political operative will tell you that a new, right-leaning third party would dilute votes for the Republican party and neither would win. A third party of classic Republicans would mean the Democrats would take every election. To be clear, Cheney said on NBC-TV today that she would never leave the Republican party, so she’s going to have to mount a fairly powerful exorcism of the party.

When a bull is castrated, the male animal can no longer produce offspring. Liz Cheney is not a male, however, and we should all remember that old saying, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” That maxim was adapted from a line in William Congreve’s play, The Mourning Bride (1697). So, this is not a new concept.

Cheney will use every connection, every power, every tactic to completely cut Donald Trump from the body politic of this nation. How do I know this? Because she said so. I have little in common with her politically and probably philosophically, but she tells the truth. It might be her truth, but she won’t stop promoting it. Like her father, she will persist. Let’s not forget that Dick Cheney didn’t let the fact he knew there were no weapons of mass destruction stop him from invading a country, to “finish the job.”

It’s distressing that with everything going on in the world and our country, dimwit Paul Gosar, who can hardly read, sits there in Congress and on our TVs spewing lies and conspiracy theories. Maybe we should castrate the top three liars to serve as, you know, a deterrent to others who may want to speak untruths. Oh, too far? Really? If Gosar can’t understand that the Capitol Hill riot was an insurrection, why is he allowed to serve in Congress?

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COMING SOON

CRITICAL RACE THEORY IN SCHOOLS

Three Kinds of Americans

I don’t expect everyone to get the nuisances and subtleties of American life. It’s difficult explaining to those across the pond why we do certain things here. They often laugh at us, then say with a slight smirk, “That’s not how we think.” No shit, Sherlock, as in Holmes, a Brit.

Let’s start with a brief look at US history. A bunch of white religious zealots came to a new land in search of religious freedom and food. They bought into a false biblical allowance of slavery, bought Africans from British traders, and started a new country with free labor. You may try to defend that atrocity by pointing out all the great things slavery did for our new, democratic form of government, but you cannot and should not ignore the original sin. Unlike the Irish, Italians, and others who came here, Black people were slaves.

Critical race theory, known as CRT, is an academic movement of United States civil rights scholars and activists who seek to diagnostically examine the law where it intersects with issues of race and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. CRT examines social, cultural and legal issues as they relate to race and racism. Just so we get our timetables aligned, CRT started in the 1970s and became full-blown by the 1980s. Now, these scholars are encouraging us to teach their position to young students in America.

Attempts against CRT are simple. Some ask why we are making young people hate America, while many on the right feel some CRT findings are untrue. As John Oliver pointed out on his HBO show, store owners cannot justify why Black hair products are locked up while the same products at about the same price for white people are openly stocked on shelves. One might say that hair products for African American women are stolen more often, but even if that’s true the store owners’ actions are fundamentally “racist.” Oh my, I used the R word.

According to Stamped from the Beginning, a book by Ibram X. Kendi, there are three kinds of people in America. There are anti-racists, racists and assimilationists. That last group takes significant heat because their goal is to assimilate all “others” into their Caucasian-European social, cultural and legal viewpoints. They are more or less saying that if everyone is more like them then everything will be fine. If you don’t know the essential qualities of racists and anti-racists, you might want to take a course in critical race theory. Without historical knowledge a person cannot offer a reasoned viewpoint on racism.

Louisiana is one of many states where legislators have proposed bills to bar educators from teaching “divisive” concepts like white privilege and racial equity. Former President Trump, who says he’s anti-racist, went out of his way to denounce school teachings with critical views of the white men who founded our country. Boy, wait until the history books are written on him; now that will be embarrassing. His biggest punch to the movement came when he was convinced by Congressional racist Tom Cotton that the 1619 Project was an evil work. Too bad it wasn’t a book; they could have simply burned it.

Trump condemned the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 New York Times report led by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. It contends that America was not founded in 1776, but rather in 1619 when the first enslaved people were brought to the colonies. Educators embraced the message and began a search for resources to teach a more accurate and holistic history of the country.

According to NBC News, “Trump rebuked the project as a ‘warped, distorted’ portrayal of American history.” It is uncertain if Donald John Trump ever read any of the 1619 Project, but his and Cotton’s comments sparked a special commission that presented a white paper titled The 1776 Report, which combatted the contents of the 1619 Project. The 1776 Report is not a serious historical work. I characterize it as a “pro-America” document that warps, distorts and justifies some dark aspects of our history.

No matter how hard people like Trump and their cotton-pickin’ masked racists try to defend slavery, it’s still slavery. Many Republicans have pushed into the bright lights to claim that America is not a racist country, yet not one of them has said there is no racism in America. Former Attorney General William Barr claimed there is no systemic racism in America’s police departments, but quickly added that there are racists in America and certainly some of them are police officers. Is that progress?

Ask just about any white American if they are racist, and I suspect they would quickly unflinchingly answer “No.” So, there you go, that’s that. Are we done here? We have not only a failure of communication but many different interpretations of what “racism” actually is. As Larry David pointed out on his TV show, the mere action of checking the locks on your car doors when you see a black person could be racism. If you honestly believe that your high school football team got better because African American families moved into your district, you just might be a racist. If you are shown a photo of two white guys and one Black guy and are asked, “Which of these men do you think raped the girl at the beach,” you are probably a racist if you select the Black guy.

The debate about critical race theories gets under the skin of many white Americans because they are called “critical” and are merely “theories.” Maybe it’s a nomenclature problem. “Global warming” was the wrong name for a condition that would not only create heat waves but also 25-inch snowfalls. If a person’s response to the saying “Black Lives Matter” is “All Lives Matter,” then it’s clear they don’t understand racism. Then there’s this. Why do some white people want dreadlocks? Is it an attempt to assimilate the Black race or an appropriation of white privilege? Oh, I’ll take that.

Maybe we need to change the name of Black History month to HISTORY MONTH. African Americans don’t own American History or critical race history — we all do. It’s time to own up to the fact that some of what has happened and what is happening here in the good old U.S. of A. is damn embarrassing. I am mortified when Tom Cotton and Donald Trump speak about racism because I honestly believe both of those guys are racists, but we allow them to speak because we have a First Amendment, and we are the home of the free. By the way, Tom, and Don, Black people weren’t free in 1619, and couldn’t speak their minds for more than 240 years in this country and judging by your whitewash of history you still don’t want them speaking here in 2021. Shame on both of you!

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COMING SOON

FAKE POTUS & FACEBOOK

The Ayatollah of Mar-a-Lago

Third-world dictators are watching with great interest as Donald Trump continues to deny the results of the 2020 US election. Who is this fat man in the suit and tie? Will he regain power and ascend the throne once more, or is it all pure political theater that will only cement the lowest Congressional approval ratings of all time?

While we are trying to recover from a coronavirus and economic downturn, some people are more driven to protect, defend and serve their master, Donald John Trump, instead of helping the American people. You know who I’m talking about.

Liz Cheney’s role in the Republican caucus has no bearing on this country’s ability to pick itself up from the mat and become a respected world power again. That’s on Joe Biden and his policies. However, the way Republicans will turn on their own and publicly demote a woman is damn embarrassing. And why will she be fired? Because she has decided that truth is more important than Donald Trump. I assume she believes that Trump caused the insurrection on January 6, 2021, which he did.

It’s not only the “Big Lie” that gets in the way, but bad thinking also plays a role. Over the last 24 hours, I have heard dozens of Republicans say that Facebook is bad because they have no rules, and they arbitrarily censor conservatives. That’s a fucking lie. I’ve been thrown off Facebook for posts I’ve made, and I am hardly a conservative. By the way, that social media behemoth does have rules and they also created a phony “supreme court” so that little Marky Zuckerberg can disavow his power. Don’t fool yourself; he’s in control. And if you think I am pro-social media, said the guy banned from Twitter for life, you should buy this book and read the chapter titled Social Media Menace. It’s abundantly clear that social media companies don’t at all care about privacy or people. They’re in it for the money.

Facebook continues to ban our lunatic former president from the service because should they allow him to return, they know he will proceed to say he won election. He will get a warning, get tagged and then do it again. A second warning will follow, which he will ignore and get bounced again, causing more elephant underwear to tighten up across the country. You see Trump wants the power but without all that “work stuff” that comes along with being president. If you want one-way communication, check out his damn website/blog. Most of use who think he’s a danger to democracy would love to see him back on Facebook. We would drill the site with lots of anti-hate messaging, but he would unfriend us or delete our posts. Donald Trump would be just another Facebook poster with all the rights afforded that status.

If the wannabe dictator thinks that one day he will march back into the nation’s capital like the Ayatollah did in Iran, he’s dead wrong. America is better off without Trump involved in any element of government. Many of those who praise the fallen leader are banking on his power never diminishing. Well, it has, and it will erode further with each month he’s out of office. Donald thinks his policies can be kept alive by sycophants like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who signed Senate Bill 2006 into law Monday. It bans the use of Covid-19 “passports” in the state and blocks businesses from requiring proof of vaccination. It is, as they call it, “red meat” for the base, but a terrible law. In his effort to please Trump, DeSantis cost the state money.

Florida’s new law may take a toll on its cruise business. According to CNN, “The CEO of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. said Thursday it could cause the company to suspend Florida departures and move its ships elsewhere.” Oh yeah, DeSantis forgot that cruise ship companies are NOT Florida firms and they must abide by international law. The company can be sued should a cruise passenger contract COVID-19 and die. This new law doesn’t help business, it demonstratively hurts it.

The new laws restricting voting by making it harder to vote are being pitched to us as a way to improve confidence in voting results, but the only people who aren’t confident are those who lost the election. It comes off to me as sour grapes and sore loser shit. The important point is this. People who want to vote in these defensive red states will just have to work a little harder to get past the roadblocks built by insecure little minds being led by a failed former President whose ego is more important to him than morality and the Constitution.

Let me conclude with this. People need to stop calling him “President Trump.” He should always be referred to as the “former president.” The US has only one president, and right now it’s Joe Biden. Fewer people are dying from Covid and the stock market is up, so Republicans should shut up and stop playing stupid games. Liz Cheney is the least of your worries. You don’t have a platform. Trump is a loser and you have become a failed party. Take that and smoke it.

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GOD VS TRUMP

Can Religion Cure the Divide?

The evangelical community often poses a strong question, “What Would Jesus Do?” It’s often shortened to the acronym WWJD. The Bible tells us that Jesus came to a Jewish temple and disrupted the tables set up by the “money changers” in front of that place of worship. It is said that Jesus had no quibble with paying the temple tax, but he drove the moneychangers out because they had been deceitful. The famous quote is, “My house will be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” Let’s, as they say on TV, unpack that statement.

According to the word of the internet, the Temple tax amounted to a half shekel and was paid by Israelites and Levites to maintain the Jewish Temple. It’s hard to calculate the worth of half a shekel today, but a rough guess is somewhere near $12.

I have a feeling that the young preacher was aggravated because the moneychangers were “quick grifting” at the doors of the temple. Jesus called it “my house,” which was purely a literary trick to connote ownership for the gossip writers who would cover the event 70 years later. Assuming Jesus was the son of God, the meaning is God’s house was, in fact, his house as well. I’m willing to wager that clause was in God’s last will and testament.

Temple politics was a problem for the Galilean man from Nazareth, probably gleaned from John the Baptist. Both Jesus and John questioned the political aspects of Judaism at the time, saying that one didn’t need to have the temple and its high priests involved in communication with God. Jesus preached that people could cleanse their souls and save themselves by praying directly to God. The rural rabbi ignored the rules of the Temple and the laws of the land which placed him in direct conflict with the power structure.

Not to compare Liz Cheney with Jesus, although it’s tempting, she has decided that followers of the Republican dogma do not need to communicate to the world through Donald Trump. Now please hold onto your prayer books here. Isn’t Donald Trump similar to the high priest Joseph Caiaphas from Year 30? Caiaphas had no use for the 72 members of the full Sanhedrin, the Congress of the Temple. He also believed himself to be above the law and could pick who lived and who died in the party, ah, I mean church.

The Roman guards who arrested Jesus didn’t bring him to a Roman jail or the full assembly for judgement as stated in the book of Mark. The hastily organized indictment of Jesus was conducted under a cloak of darkness, with many believing that Caiaphas wanted to get past the whole “Jesus matter” as soon as possible. He did so behind closed doors, without the Sanhedrin present.

Okay, back to the present. Next week, a vote will be taken to cast Liz Cheney, the elected Representative of Wyoming, from all leadership roles in the Republican Party. Minority leader Kevin McCarthy will then return to his office, wash his hands of the matter, and say it was the people’s will. That would make Kevin, Pontius Pilate.

Clearly, I am quicker on my feet with politics than religion. I presented a similar idea in my book “If God Could Talk,” and when I participated in a local book club discussion about that, the gossips in my community decried my use of atheism to tell a story. Some members thought the fiction was real, they couldn’t separate the writer from the characters, which made me feel that my writing was taken seriously.

There is a huge divide in America. Some peoples’ belief in fiction, or as it’s called THE BIG LIE, prevents them from seeing non-fiction as truth. Heavy, eh? But the greatest curse is the blend of politics and church. Jefferson never went far enough with his observations and, of course, he also didn’t go far enough countering the enslavement of Africans.

I just read a great piece by Bruce Ledewitz, a law professor at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. He says, “Many theologians have tried to explain that the wonder-working God is a misinterpretation.” Heavy stuff. It reminds me of a Republican who says Trump was “just joking” about drinking bleach. Some try to lighten up the miracle aspect of Jesus so that more people will come into his tent while some Republicans downplay Trump’s errors to rewrite history. Shameful and sad. But Ledewitz wasn’t trying to say the miracles didn’t happen, he was just pointing out how 2021 interpretations may lead to more people finding faith a solution to their own personal problems.

If God can’t do miracles, then who can? The “wonder-working” is what drew me in as a young Presbyterian. I always felt that no matter how bad things got, God could set them straight and provide a fix. God didn’t thrash the money changers in the Temple, Jesus did. Was Jesus enforcing God’s will on Earth or was he just a rebellious preacher taking matters into his own hands?

Of course, 2,000-year-old writings pale in comparison to today’s science and realities. However, the more things like QAnon beliefs and support of centuries old racism leech to the surface, the more we are tempted to think that religion and church teachers are out of sync with reality. If your reality is all wrong, how can you embrace a true belief in the almighty God? It’s the thinking that gets in the way, not the believing.

Trump is not going to live forever, and those who have decided he is greater than truth, the party, or more importantly, the country and democracy itself are hollow human forms who shall perish in time. But before they do, they must be stopped. All Congresswomen should join together and submit an article of censure against Keven McCarthy. Those who can’t or won’t are complicit in the rampant sexism and idol worshipping of the Republican Party. If they cannot support a member who has taken a stand against Trump’s lies and attack on democracy, then what good are they? They are just moneychangers, lying to the people, cheating the citizens and converting cash into their own power.

There are too many Pilates and way too many Caiaphas who would go so far as to kill truth and the son of God to keep their power and prestige among the high priests. The leaders of the evangelical movement do not have the wisdom to know a lie from a truth and they will NOT be helpful in curing the divide. Why haven’t they spoken out? Have they already counted the money and washed their hands? I fear they have done exactly that.

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How to Hire Great People: Tips, Tricks and Templates for Success

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