Read Evelyn Turner’s recounting of Alabama history with Jefferson Beauregard Sessions in a position of power, which he used to subjugate black Alabamans.
Now read Coretta Scott King’s letter to Sen. Strom Thurmond, chair of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary in 1986, which was then considering the nomination of Sessions to serve as a federal judge. They rejected him for cause.
Finally, look at the Slate account of Sessions’ history of legally and ethically questionable behavior.
Now, call your Republican senators (also Joe Manchin, D-WV, the only Democrat to vote for Sessions). It’s too late for them to grow a spine, do the right thing and reject the nomination of this morally bankrupt racist to be Attorney General and Sessions won’t indict himself. But senators can put him “on notice.”
Go to www.Senate.gov, click on the drop-down in the top, right corner, select your state and click GO in the light blue box to the right. The next page will give you the name and phone numbers of your senators.
Call them and tell them how disappointed you are with them because of their vote for Sessions. Tell them you’ll be watching for them to put Sessions “on notice” and you’ll remember all of this quite well when they’re up for re-election.
Telephone hint: If the line is busy, it’s okay. That’s what the redial button is for. Use it.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
We’re politically polarized to an extreme not seen since the Civil War. We’re in debt to a level that most people cannot even comprehend and we have no plan to make things better. We have the highest cost of medical care in the world and only fair results compared to other industrialized countries. Congress is perpetually locked in a battle for stagnation and our infrastructure is crumbling. We wring hands over the hard-boiling of our planet and steadfastly not only refuse to make things better, we actually do things that make things worse. We honor our military people but continue to get them killed for dishonest reasons in perpetual wars. And we are angry all the time.
I’m a card-carrying member of the Baby Boomers, lodged in the leading edge of that group. I grew up in the late 1940s and 1950s, which was itself a rather odd time. We had won the war and America had the only fully functioning industrial economy in the world. Being number one was a pretty easy thing to do and we dominated the world economy and expanded our belief in American exceptionalism as the natural order of things.
We were steeped in the culture of stability, of conformity and of reverence for authority – after all, that had worked. Then Elvis wore his hair long and wiggled his hips and the Greatest Generation didn’t like that. The electric guitar put an end to big bands and music changed to something that was called everything but music by anyone who was part of the establishment and that rocked the boat even more. And we sent our military people to Vietnam and suddenly everything changed.
We were raised with the expectation that all men had an obligation to serve at least two years in the military, but the military was being sent to do something that was simply unacceptable to those who would be drafted. It was a war we were lied into (ref: the phony Gulf of Tonkin attack), a war that was never declared by a cowardly Congress and a war that eventually cost the lives of over 58,000 American men and women before we left that country.
Even larger were the lies President Johnson told us. We were told by the press that he had a “credibility gap.” That was polite speak for saying that he lied. We’re only now getting to the point where the press is willing to name it directly when a president lies – odd that it took so long. But lie he did.
So did Richard Nixon, who told us he had a secret plan to end the war, but instead was driven to continue it because, in his words, he refused to be, “the first American President to lose a war.” The plain translation of that is that his reputation as a winning war president was more important to him than the lives of the 28,000 military personnel who died while he was in office and continuing that war.
And, of course, there was Watergate. Yes, our president really was a crook, and our sense of trust ratcheted down even further.
Gerald Ford should have been a calm respite from the torrent of deceit coming from Washington, but then he pardoned Nixon for crimes he committed or might have committed. So not only did Nixon betray our trust, but the next guy in the Oval Office ensured that he got away with it. What happened to the notion of penalties for doing wrong? We couldn’t even trust those who were sent to restore our trust.
Jimmy Carter may be best known for having been the leader who couldn’t lead our 52 citizen hostages out of Iran. We trust our leaders to keep us safe, but he was unable to find a way to do that.
Ronald Reagan brought us the glamour of a Hollywood actor, with all the performance chops that implies. He told us it was morning in America and that this country was the shining city on the hill. He promised smaller government and then he tripled the size of our debt.
And he was in charge of the masterly deceitful Iran-Contra affair, which broke multiple laws. And he got away with it. His operatives barely got a slap on the wrist. How could we trust our justice system after that?
George H. W .Bush told us over and over, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Then the burden of his and Reagan’s spending caught up with him and he had to raise taxes. Who can you believe?
Then the Clinton era began, bringing with it things we simply had not seen before. Even before Clinton first sat down in the Oval Office the Republicans started smearing him with immorality-laced charges. Ken Starr spent millions of dollars looking for Clintonian malfeasance and couldn’t find a single example. But that didn’t stop the accusers in Congress, who continue that drumbeat to this day.
Once Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House he managed to stop Congress and the government from functioning at all. He was trying to strong-arm Clinton, but instead strong-armed the country. That was before Gingrich was found to have illegally used a tax-exempt organization for political purposes and provided false information to the House Ethics Committee. He was forced to resign. So much for trust in Congress.
And, of course, Bill Clinton assured us that he, “didn’t have sex with that woman – Ms. Lewinsky.” But he did, regardless of what the meaning of “is” is.
Then we got George W. Bush. He refused to listen to the experts and 9/11 happened. His spin-meisters then spent the next seven years telling us how Bush had kept America safe. Go to the 9/11 Memorial in New York and repeat that phrase as you walk around the reflecting pools and read the engraved names of the 2,996 people who died there on that day when Bush was keeping America safe.
Bush lied us into two wars that continue in one form or another and have destabilized an entire region of the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people and displacing millions more and with no end in sight. He was all about deregulation and lower taxes (especially for those already wealthy). The wars were put on the national credit card, making this the first time our country went to war and refused to pay for it, leaving us with trillions of dollars of debt, an amount that continues to grow.
And Bush presided over the largest crash of our economy since 1929. Presidents are supposed to have the best experts advising them about what to do to avoid catastrophe, but Bush utterly failed to protect America or Americans. At the end of his presidency over 700,000 Americans were losing their jobs every month.
The banking industry had managed to make itself doomed to collapse thanks to brainless deregulation and in the process harmed a lot of people, including the thousands of Americans whose home mortgages were foreclosed, many illegally. The entire banking industry showed itself to be untrustworthy.
The entire mess – the loss of employment for millions of Americans, the foreclosures, the banking collapse Bush poured money into and his two wars – fell into Barack Obama’s lap.
We needed a national stimulus to get the economy going, but the Republicans had dedicated themselves to making job one, “Making sure that Barack Obama is a one-term president.” That is to say, America and Americans came second.
So, the stimulus was half the size it needed to be and Republicans made sure that one-third of the money wound up in the pockets of wealthy people rather than stimulating the economy. Then they blamed Obama for a stimulus plan that failed.
In fact, they blamed Obama for everything. They opposed bills that they themselves had offered prior to Obama taking office, once Obama supported them. They opposed a healthcare plan that the very conservative Heritage Foundation and Republicans had been proposing for decades. All of the blaming and demonizing put yet more stress on Americans’ trust in our institutions, trust which was further eroded by yet another Congressionally led governmental shutdown, this time over whether we would pay our debts. How could anyone trust when we threaten to default?
The Supreme Court is supposed to be the arbiter of disputes and laws and keep us in line with the Constitution, but in 2010 Chief Justice John Roberts contorted the Citizens United case into something that was not in contest and produced the legalization of big money influence of our elections and our government. With that, all three branches of government were plainly untrustworthy.
Now we have a president who makes baseless attacks on the press, calling them the most dishonest people in the world, so now trust in the press is in question.
The list of examples of trust killing events could be many times the length of this list, but the point is that we have repeatedly been lied to, undermined, betrayed, robbed, our rights have been stolen and our needs ignored, our standard of living is dropping, the rich get richer and the number of our poor expands. And that is why:
Everyone knows the system is rigged
Over 40% of our citizens don’t bother to vote
We’re a nation of apathetic, disinterested citizens
We’re a nation of angry people
We are politically polarized and haven’t a clue how to have a conversation with one another
Our toxic symptoms have come about through our decades-long decline in trust in our institutions and that loss of trust is because of the untrustworthy things our leaders have done. Failing to fix that will be catastrophic for all of us. The challenge before us right now is to figure out how to do that and then get to work.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Dr. Jill Stein’s initiative for an election recount is in process as of this writing. Regardless of the outcome of that process, what follows remains true.
Let’s leave aside issues around whether the Democratic primary was fixed and even your notions of who had the better plan for America. Forget about who was more inspirational or more pragmatic, who and what spoke to your fondest dreams and let’s simply focus on what we faced in the general election.
It came down to Clinton, Trump and a few other candidates who could not possibly win the Presidency. If you voted for Jill Stein as a protest vote or you refused to vote, you surely made a statement. The question I pose here is whether you made the statement you truly wanted to make. Often, integrity isn’t as simple as we want it to be.
The 2000 election between Al Gore and George W. Bush at last hinged on the results in Florida. It is a sad tale of hanging chad, intervention in the people’s election by the Supreme Court and the votes of tens of thousands of Floridians being ignored, leaving Bush a victory of just over 500 votes.
Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, ran in that election and garnered 97,488 votes in Florida. This from RealClearPolitics.com:
Political scientist Gerald Pomper summed up the results [of the 2000 Presidential election results in Florida] in a 2001 Political Science Quarterly overview: “approximately half (47 percent) of the Nader voters said they would choose Gore in a two-man race, a fifth (21 percent) would choose Bush, and a third (32 percent) would not vote. Applying these figures to the actual vote, Gore would have achieved a net gain of 26,000 votes in Florida, far more than needed to carry the state easily [emphasis added].”
Had that happened, we likely would not have invaded Iraq, a country that never attacked us and never posed a WMD threat to us or anyone else. Had Gore been President, do the math on how many now dead people would be alive today, how many trillions of dollars we would not owe and the likely condition of the Middle East right now. All of that bad stuff happened and more because about 26,000 Floridians stood on their short-sighted principles.
With a switch to Clinton of only 107,000 Jill Stein votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, Donald J. Trump would be holed up in his gold tower right now and nobody would be paying him any attention. We wouldn’t be fearing extremist policies and unconstitutional actions. Note that the voting adjustment proposed here doesn’t even consider the people who stayed home but would have voted for Clinton in a two way race.
Elections have consequences, so your vote has consequences. When you stand on principle and refuse to concede that the better of a two choice pair is preferable over enabling the worst to happen, you ensure that the worst does, indeed. happen. It just did. Again.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Reading time – 49 seconds; Viewing time – 1:42 . . .
Andrew Young was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations under President Jimmy Carter. He was an active and passionate leader for civil rights and was the first African-American to hold that ambassadorial position. Young created a bit of controversy when he was interviewed by the French newspaper Le Matin de Paris in 1978. While discussing the plight of dissidents in the Soviet Union, he referenced events in the United States, saying, “We still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons.” That commentary earned Young a visit to the White House woodshed.
President Carter made it clear to Young that he no longer represented just himself or the civil rights movement, nor was he speaking any longer as the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. As the Ambassador to the United Nations he now represented the United States of America and everything he said publicly was a statement representing our country, our views, our positions and our values. Ambassador Young never made that kind of mistake again.
Donald J. Trump is the President-elect. He is nearly always short on specifics, long on broad brush generalizations of often unintelligible meaning and he frequently changes his positions, sometimes doing so within a single sentence. Worse, he is an ongoing fountain of ad hominem attacks. Now that he is representing the United States of America to our fellow citizens and to the world, who will take him to the White House woodshed?
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Donald Trump talks glibly about the use of nuclear weapons on whomever he might think of as our enemy, like those he thinks pose an existential threat to America because of a tweet that’s critical of him. And he has proposed exporting nuclear technology to at least 3 nations that currently don’t have it, thereby proliferating the annihilation threat to life on Earth. In short, Trump is cavalier about bringing about the end of civilization. That fully, completely and permanently disqualifies him from being President of the United States. No other issues need be considered:
. . . even if he says he was speaking in hyperbole
. . . even if he says that he wants to be unpredictable to keep the bad guys off balance
. . . even if he says he had his fingers crossed when he said those things
No matter what, Donald Trump must not become President of the United States. Ever. Under any circumstances. No matter what else he says he believes or wants to do or, oddly, if he should ever actually make any sense. Never, ever.
So, great, you agree and you won’t vote for Trump. But you don’t trust, can’t stand and otherwise find Hillary to be pukable. You see her as untrustworthy and dishonest and perhaps as too hawkish and you fear she’ll get us into yet another avoidable war. You dread that her presidency might become a series of yet more Bill Clinton zipper scandals and, besides, the thought of Bill croaking out more of his Clintonian nonsense with a White House size megaphone is one of your worst nightmares. So, you can’t and won’t vote for Hillary. Got it.
But if you don’t vote for Hillary, who benefits?
Neither Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate, nor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate, could benefit from your protest vote because they won’t get enough votes to win even a single state. The only one who benefits from your refusing to vote for Hillary is Donald Trump, because yours is one less vote that his vote total has to overcome.
Translation: If you don’t vote for Hillary, you will have voted for Trump. And,
Hillary was ahead by 8 – 20 points (pick a poll). Then Bernie won MI. We can’t trust polls – gotta vote.
So, do something to ensure there really is a future: Put a clothespin on your nose and vote for Hillary. All that hangs in the balance is civilization on Earth and it’s on you and me to do something about it.
What, these words aren’t persuasive enough? Well then, have a look at this and this and this and this and this and this and this. They are all Republican sources telling you to vote for Hillary. There are plenty more like these, but if you still want to vote for Trump or a candidate of one of the other parties or abstain from voting, then go ahead. Just don’t call me next year crying that you are bent over and braced for impact because civilization is ending.
Go vote. And bring your neighbors, your voting age children, your cousin Rita and your googly-eye Uncle Ralph. It’s time for every eligible voter to – get this: stand up for what they stand for.
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
– See more at: https://jaxpolitix.com/7679-2/#sthash.kHAUnsqU.dpuf
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
What if our state and federal legislators were held to this standard?
Reading time – 2:55; Viewing time – 4:39 . . .
At a time when a high school education is so often woefully inadequate for success in a global, interconnected world, where old time manufacturing skills have given way to computerized everything and where millions of employers are frustrated because they’re unable to find people with the proper training to do the jobs they have open, Republican Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin continues to slash support for the formerly wonderful state universities in Wisconsin.
Rick Snyder, Republican Governor of Michigan, headed the drive to allow the state to take control of any municipal government in Michigan that the geniuses in Lansing deemed was in financial distress, the sanctity of the municipal voting ballot be damned. That led inexorably to the poisoning of the children in Flint, MI due to the diabolical economic decision to change the source of the drinking water for that city. Instead of the safe Great Lakes water they had used for a century, the Lansing imposed Flint dictator decided to provide water from the Flint River, water which is corrosive, and that resulted in the city drinking water becoming laced with lead. Nobody knows the human toll or the financial cost that ingestion of lead will exact over the long term, but it will be enormous. Snyder and his Republican legislature in Lansing are doing a tap dance around accountability and as of this moment they are still dragging feet on fixing their mess. Meanwhile, the residents of Flint are trapped in a water quality disaster and an economic squeeze of Rick Snyder’s doing.
Sam Brownback (R-KS) promised Kansans that if they elected him governor that he would slash taxes and that would magically result in increased revenue for the state because of the dramatic economic expansion that lower taxes would induce. So, they elected him governor. Instead of the results he promised, his plan resulted in way lower revenue for the now nearly bankrupt state and a depressed economy across Kansas. Who might have even guessed that reducing the state’s income might reduce the state’s income?
Bobby Jindahl is the Republican governor of Louisiana. His state is a financial disaster. It is ranked the worst in the nation in educating its children. There’s lots more – and none of it is pretty. Let’s just move on.
Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) is the titular head of the state with more real estate in peril as the oceans rise than anywhere else. The streets of Miami Beach are often under water and much of south Florida is at or only slightly above sea level, so it doesn’t take much of a wave or much of a rise in sea level to flood it. And Rick Scott, a former fossil fuel homie, denies global warming and the human imprint on it, so he does nothing.
And, of course, right here in Illinois where we have a bottomless pension debt, our governor is so out of touch that we’ll call him Bruce Rauner (R-Pluto). He hasn’t offered a thing to fix the pension crisis and he continues to govern by refusing every attempt to establish a budget. Yes, that’s right: Illinois has been operating without a budget for well over a year and Governor Rauner seems to think in the way of Ted Cruz, that if we just shut down the functions of government that somehow all the best things will happen. That hasn’t work out too well for Illinois college students, as threats of shutdown of entire institutions were imminent, nor did it work out for our mentally ill who, because of the governor’s draconian methods, were not even getting their meds. Let the games of the rich continue, because they aren’t affected by their restrictive policies, even as those who are most needy continue to suffer.
These are the D. S. of A, the Disaster States of America, although not all of them. The Republican leaders in these states proudly and self-righteously thumb their noses at our bloated federal government and the over-taxation of the public. Yet, oddly, as they fail their states, or their states face crises, like Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey, they expect the federal government to bail them out of their catastrophes. Either that or they just do more of what doesn’t work and declare victory.
How are you feeling about that? Keep that in mind as you vote for your state legislators on November 8.
Thanks to Steve Sheffey for pointing out this video.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
At a 2007 Democratic Candidates Debate, Joe Biden famously said about Rudy Giuliani, “There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb and 9/11.”
The cause of this behavior was recently discovered to be Reality Denial Psychosis, or RDP. Here is how it manifests itself today.
There are still three things Rudy Giuliani mentions in a sentence, but the pattern is slightly different: a noun, a verb and trash talking Hillary Clinton with imaginary scandals.
CUBS WIN! Goin’ to the World Series!
There are others who suffer from this tragic brain disorder. Kellyanne Conway can’t seem to remove that plastic smile, as she does one Giuliani after another, pathologically and seamlessly shifting from any topic into an unconnected attack on Hillary Clinton. Boris Epshteyn does the same thing, although he doesn’t smile as he rips yet more angry fantasy from the air and talks over everyone.
Donald Trump has his own RDP pattern, but expecting from Trump a noun, a verb and then anything related to the noun and verb will only lead to frustration. Indeed, when people suffer from RDP we should expect disconnected fantasy.
For example, Trump received not one, but two national security briefings. He was told directly and in no uncertain terms the same thing the nation was told, that the Russians are behind the hacking to affect the outcome of our national election. Nevertheless, he denied that connection on stage during the second debate. He even questioned if hacking had happened at all. It is reported that because of Trump’s blizzard of words, neither the noun nor the verb has yet been found.
Sadly, Trump and his surrogates all suffer from this not-rare-enough disease. The primary symptoms of Reality Denial Psychosis are quite real:
The inability to recognize facts.
An overwhelming desire to ignore the topic at hand and instead blurt fantasies.
The ability of the disease afflicted to deny straight-faced what they have previously said, statements which are recorded for anyone to easily fact check.
The strange need to rationalize deplorable behavior, like suggesting that criminally misogynistic “locker room” banter among male adults is somehow okay.
Seeing oneself as a victim whenever confronted by adverse reality. This is often compounded by recurring claims that “The system is rigged” any time an RDP infected subject loses or thinks he will lose. Even with extensive treatment, most patients never overcome their “poor me” mental limitation and instead live their entire lives tragically both feeling sorry for themselves and enlisting others to whine along with them.
It will serve you well to keep this pathology in mind as you realize that yet another political interview has wasted your time with a noun, a verb and some unconnected personal attack. A noun, a verb and a national security fantasy. A noun, a verb and criticism of a woman’s appearance. A noun, a verb and mindless self-promotion. A noun, a verb and ___________ (you fill in the blank).
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Pam Verner is a psychotherapist who specializes in treating people with addictions. She is compassionate and caring and she is an expert. She recently penned a clarifying and compelling message and gave me permission to share it with you. Her message is vitally important. Now Pam.
I rarely (actually never) send out group emails—because we all generally get enough. I figure, why take up your time to read yet another email? But this time I decided I wanted to speak and share a video—just this once. This email is particularly for those who are unhappy with Hillary and want to vote third party just to make a statement to the current political parties. This is not the time for that. Here’s why.
First my take—(please know this is based upon my professional training and experience as a psychotherapist dealing with addictions):
Trump behaves and speaks like every addict in the throes of addiction. Please know, I deeply love alcoholics and addicts—and pray for their recovery. But they should never be at the helm of our country when they are held within the throes of their addiction. Someone in the throes of addiction needs help and support to see a better and truer path in life. Whether Trump is currently consuming drugs, alcohol, sex or whatever in an addictive pattern—I truly do not know. However, his thinking and behavior patterns surely resemble what I would call a “dry drunk,” i.e.– a pattern of addictive thinking. And that snorting he does when he is in a debate and appearing to feel somewhat threatened—well, to me that appears he is trying to call upon some sense of “remembered” power before speaking. Notice that he snorts deeply, then speaks. This is also reminiscent of a dry drunk —only perhaps more telling, a “dry drug.”
A hallmark of the mental pattern of addiction is to be caught within the web of “victim/rescuer/perpetrator.” It’s a classic dynamic in my field with which we frequently work. Trump is extremely skillful and intense in engaging with these three dynamic roles. I believe his populist support comes from sounding the rescuer trumpet. When he believes he is being attacked, he sounds the victim trumpet. The inordinate number of lawsuits he has [filed] against others shows how skillful he is in doing victim yet going into perpetrator role. What we are seeing now with the current tapes and female testimony is his perpetrator role.
With Trump, I believe the victim role and the rescuer role are simply covers for his primary pattern of perpetrator. Make no mistake, he is a threat to any vulnerable aspect of our country—our women, our children, our environment, our small businesses, our minorities, our public schools and anything else that does not have the strength to fight. Because that is the simple definition of a predator: A person who exploits vulnerability.
Watch this video of Trump being a predator. He looks as if he is stalking Hillary when her back is turned. That’s one thing a predator does – strikes when backs are turned. This video is both funny and horribly unsettling.
Remember the predator and vote [in] this election. Please do not throw your vote away on any third party.* The stakes are higher in this election than in any other in our history.
Instead, send Hillary to the White House (yes I know for sure she is not perfect). And send Trump to the treatment facility where he can get help to restore his humanity. It must be in there somewhere—it always is.
Watch the video. It’s creepy, but it’s important that you see it. While I was watching the second debate I desperately wanted Hillary to turn around, mid-sentence, and say, “Donald, this isn’t your turn, so go to your chair. I don’t care if you sit or stand, but women don’t like to be stalked.”
Share this with your people, your friends, your colleagues, your neighbors, every Millennial you know or have heard of and even with your crazy Uncle Bill. Link it to your FaceBook page – just use the FaceBook linking button below (blue square with an “f”) and link it to all the other social media you use, too.
THANK YOU PAM VERNER for your professional insight and wisdom and for your courage to speak out!
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Uh-oh. Some snark follows. Sensitive readers should squint.
What candidates say matters. And to paraphrase Barney Frank, you want your next president to be someone who spends the majority of his/her time on this planet. Well, here’s how Politifact scored the candidates’ claims made in the second so-called debate. (Here’s the New York Times’ fact checking). NOTE: There is a pop quiz following the charts.
Clinton Scorecard, 2nd Debate
Trump Scorecard, 2nd Debate
Pop Quiz
Do you notice any differences, any imbalance between the charts? Compare and contrast, especially the False and Pants on Fire statements. No credit will be given for incomplete, weenie answers.
Which candidate appears to spend the majority of his/her time on this planet? Explain your answer using a language common to Earth.
For extra credit: Exactly how much do you believe that Donald Trump is sincere, much less contrite, in his apology for his misogynistic, “locker room” comments in which he confessed to having committed criminal sexual assault?
When did you first recognize the warts that identify this reptile?
Enter your answers in the What Do You Think? section below. Your score on this quiz will become 50% of your letter grade for the semester and will affect all of your future life options.
One more thing.
Following the first debate many people were speculating about the cause of Donald Trump’s frequent sniffling. Did he have a head cold? Was he really sad? Did a bug fly up his nose? The sniffing was far more pronounced throughout the second debate. Oddly, he doesn’t do that at his rallies, so what’s going on? Let’s put the speculation about this into the Donald Trump style of rhetoric:
Many people are saying – I don’t believe this myself – but many people are saying that he might be doing coke. This I am hearing. I don’t know if this is a fact. I’m just saying that people are saying these things. Believe me. This is true. I am hearing this. I’m a very successful businessman – I am the best – and I got that way because I know how to read people. He’s a total disaster. A total loser. Believe me.
So tell us, Donald, how do you you like it when that kind of crap is aimed at you?
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Bonus Section – You absolutely must read this piece of clarity from David Leonhardt, Opinion Editor, New York Times. Plus, here is his guide to second debate, Trump fact-checking:
Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
Reading time – 1:49 plus 44 seconds for the Bonus Section; Viewing time – 2:31 . . .
Timothy Snyder is a professor of history at Yale University and he penned a most interesting essay in the New York Times entitled How a Russian Fascist Is Meddling in America’s Election. It is a worthwhile read if you want to understand a bit of Vladimir Putin’s anti-America behavior. It seems that Putin, the object of Donald Trump’s heart-pitty-pat bromance, is much enamored of the now deceased Ivan Ilyin, whom Snyder described as “a prophet of Russian fascism”.
Ilyin was all about the demise of individuality and democrace, which he saw as evil, both of which he saw as evil. He believed in some idealistic oneness of Russia ruled by a “national dictator” who would be “inspired by the spirit of totality,” whatever that means. If you are an ordinary Russian citizen and a hammer and sickle Russian fanatic, that might sound pretty good to you, And it will stay that way until the commissars snatch you from your home in the middle of the night and send you to a Siberian labor camp. And why wouldn’t they do that if individuals – you – are evil and have no individual value?
It’s so very Soviet Union yesterday.
Which isn’t the main point for us, but it does provide context. Snyder writes,
“For a decade, Russia has been sponsoring right-wing extremists as “election observers” – most recently, in the farcical referendums in the Crimea and in the Donbas region of Ukraine – in order to discredit both elections and their observation. Since democracy is a sham, as Ilyin believed, then it is right and good to imitate its language and procedures in order to discredit it. It is noteworthy that the Trump campaign has now imitated this very practice, supplying both its own private “observers” and the advance conclusion about the fraud they will find. [emphasis mine}
“The technique of undermining democracy abroad is to generate doubt where there had been certainty. If democratic procedures start to seem shambolic, then democratic ideas will seem questionable as well. And so America would become more like Russia, which is the general idea. If Mr. Trump wins, Russia wins. But if Mr. Trump loses and people doubt the outcome, Russia also wins.” [emphasis mine]
How in the world can Donald Trump be about making America great when all that he says and all that he does rips at the very fabric of our democracy?
BONUS SECTION – PLEASE ASK THIS QUESTION AT THE DEBATE:
Mr. Trump, before and during this campaign you have said ugly things about women, including calling them dogs and worse, as well as fat-shaming one of your own Miss Universe winners. You have steadfastly refused to moderate your comments and you have refused to apologize to people you have harmed with your cruel words, much less to the rest of the women of America. Now we have seen a video of you clearly objectifying women, making cruel and lewd statements about them and claiming with pride that you are free to commit sex crimes with women because you’re a star. You responded to the unveiling of your horrific statements with a limp apology.
Given that your words and your actions loudly proclaim your disdain for women, explain to all Americans why we should even consider the possibility that as president you would care about and respect over half of us – girls, women, daughters, spouses, mothers, sisters, friends – and look out for their welfare. And don’t tell us yet again that you respect women, because it’s manifestly clear from your words and actions that you don’t.
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Ed. note: There is much in America that needs fixing and we are on a path to continually fail to make things better. It is my goal to make a difference – perhaps to be a catalyst for things to get better. That is the reason for these posts. To accomplish the goal requires reaching many thousands of people and a robust dialogue.
YOUR ACTION STEPS: Please offer your comments below and pass this along to three people, encouraging them to subscribe and engage.Thanks! JA
– See more at: https://jaxpolitix.com/7836-2/#sthash.J67dlWgD.dpuf
Copyright 2024 by Jack Altschuler Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.
With 25 years of hands-on executive experience as CEO of the commercial and industrial water treatment company I founded, I now use every bit of what I learned there in delivering workshops and keynote speeches on leadership. And it seems our national political leaders need a bit of that training, too. Let's talk about it here.
