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Potpourri v22.0


POST 1080

Source unknown

Readings & Quotes

“One important decision was handed down today, so we know the justices are at work. In what seems to be the ultimate no-brainer (but this is where we are), the court upheld a federal ban on gun possession by suspected domestic abusers. Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter. [In the Trump immunity case,] Trump’s claim that he is above the law seems as absurd as giving firearms to alleged abusers.”

“So why has a case of such importance taken more than 109 days to decide? The answer from a Trump-packed court is becoming obvious. Slow-walking justice is justice denied.”

– Dan Rather, Why Are They Taking So Long?, June 21, 2024

Get this critical difference: progressives, traditional Americans and believers in the rule of law are in Constitutional outrage over the idiocy of the Trump immunity motion and the Supreme Court’s obvious abuse of our justice system. MAGAs are chuckling evilly over their clever manipulation and distortion that is allowing both Trump to avoid trial and removing another brick from the foundation of our nation.

“But when Joe Biden talks about the “hostages” he is working to bring home, he’s talking about the 120 people held by Hamas in Gaza. When Donald Trump talks about “the hostages” who are treated “horrifically,” he’s talking about January 6 insurrectionists held in U.S. prisons who he plans to pardon.”

– Steve Sheffey newsletter, June 16, 2024

Pardoning insurrectionists, traitors to our country, is yet another Trump promise of destruction. Many Americans foam at the mouth repeating his threats. They want to destroy America, too. They cheer when Steve Bannon demands that we “tear it all down” and “victory or death!”* That is what we must defeat. Otherwise, the thugs actually will tear it all down.

“With his recent felony conviction, Trump can no longer legally own a gun. Should he be re-elected president come November, however, he will have the power to launch a nuclear weapon without any oversight.”

– Kathleen Kingsbury, New York Times Opinion Today, June 17, 2024

Maybe we better not allow him to have any power anywhere over anything. Besides, he’s on mental overload with the very serious task of deciding if he’d rather be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. Very presidential stuff. See the video link below.

“We protect the press because the press protects democracy.”

– Richard Stengel, former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy

Trump keeps telling us that the press is “the enemy of the people.” In truth, the legitimate press is only the enemy of cheaters, liars and traitors – people like Trump. They are the people whom we need called out by that Fifth Column. Go buy a newspaper today so that our journalists can continue to be our watchdogs protecting democracy.

“For decades, [Richard] Lynn was one of the loudest proponents of the unfounded idea that Western civilization is threatened by “inferior races” that are genetically predisposed to low intelligence, violence, and criminality. His work has been repeatedly condemned by social scientists and biologists for using flawed methodology and deceptively collated data to support racism.”

– STAT Morning Rounds, June 20, 2024

Richard Lynn died last year, still a committed racist. Plus, he was a dishonest scientist. His work is still cited by people scheming to promote White supremacy. Today’s Confederacy revisionist history, with its claims that the Civil War was a “war of northern aggression,” that the war wasn’t about slavery, that Blacks were better off under slavery and various other disgusting lies, is still malignantly alive. These people demand “states’ rights,” a miserable term for, “You can’t tell us what to do. If we want slaves, we’ll damn well have them.” You’ll find the revisionism in the calls for the restoration of Confederate monuments to traitors, calls to violence*, racial slurs in dog whistles and those bellowed out loud by haters.

Our nation continues to refuse to see the obvious, that nobody is going away and that the only way forward is to stop hoping for a better yesterday and figure that out how to make a better tomorrow, one both with-and-for all of us. That “better tomorrow” cannot include the work of Richard Lynn or those who discriminate like he did. The first critical step is to stop the extremist minority thieves.

“The choice in the election isn’t Biden vs. Trump. It is MAGA vs. America.

“Sides must be picked.

“Indifference is a side. So is hate.”

– Steve Schmidt, June 19, 2024

“For the religious right, erasing the constitutional right to abortion was just the beginning. They are coming after all our reproductive rights and freedoms, every single one of them, and the only way to stop them is with our votes.”

This tyrannical minority is coming after more than reproductive rights. They’re coming after religious freedom, equal justice under law, your right to vote and so much more. Robinson has it right:

“The only way to stop them is with our votes.”
Must Read

You better decide – while you still can.

Thom Hartmann’s post, America’s Darkest Hour: Battling the Second Great Insurrection, is a chilling explanation of the terrible consequences creeping into our lives and from which we will suffer greatly if we don’t saddle up and ride to the rescue of our nation. Here’s an excerpt:

“Democrats — and Americans more generally — must finally realize that Trump’s MAGA GOP is no longer interested in policy or politics but solely wants to seize absolute political and economic power to end our democracy and reinvent the [C]onfederacy.” [emphasis original]

Yes, the Confederacy! Click through and read his post – you’ll understand immediately.

Here’s more from Hartmann’s piece:

“The new GOP motto might as well be, “We don’t need no stinkin’ issues; we just want power and revenge for the heroes of the Old South and the New Insurrection.

“It’s why they lie so easily on the Sunday talk shows and in political campaigns: They don’t give a damn about issues. All they care about is power.”

And because all they give a damn about is power,

they don’t give a damn about you!
.

Click through and read Hartmann’s  post.

Creepy Cranial Catastrophe in 1 Minute 23 Seconds

Here is an update of a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

Click me

Finally,

“There isn’t a good thing to say about Trump except he supports fast food.”

– Richard Sack

__________________________________________________

* “Victory or death!” – Convicted criminal Steve Bannon screamed this maniacally at a rally, June 15, 2024

“Friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”

  • – Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    6. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source information.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Nonsense


POST 1078

Regular readers recognize that I occasionally post an essay from other writers, pieces that are enlightening, important and timely. Today we have such a piece.

Ed Gurowitz is a friend and an RSP – “Royal Smart Person.” Today he offers timely insight into our current iteration of Supreme betrayal. If this isn’t top-of-mind for you, reconsider, because this perfidy is not nonsense. This is a five-alarm fire, a fundamental threat to everything you hold dear.

NonsenseEd Gurowitz
By Ed Gurowitz, Master Coach, Diversity and Inclusion (DEI) Specialist, Strategy Consultant, Executive and Leadership Consultant

Published Jun 13, 2024

Referencing her husband, Mrs. [Sam] Alito says, “He’s like, ‘Oh, please don’t put up a flag.’ I said, ‘I won’t do it because I am deferring to you. But when you are free of this nonsense, I’m putting it up and I’m gonna send them a message every day, maybe every week, I’ll be changing the flags.’ (Quoted in Rolling Stone)

In all the reporting general outrage over Mrs. Alito’s flag comments (including that she wants to put up a “shame” flag to counter the Pride flags she has to endure for a whole month), no one seems to have picked up on one thing: “when you are free of this nonsense . . .”

The “nonsense” in question is her husband’s lifetime appointment as a Supreme Court Justice. Get that one of the top nine judicial seats in the United States Government is, according to dear Martha Anne, “nonsense!” Nonsense that is interfering with her right to fly offensive flags, though it’s not interfering that much, given the upside-down flag at their home and the Liberty Tree flag at their beach house. But, like a good little Maxwell Housewife, she is “deferring” to her husband’s nonsense just as another wife might put up with her spouse’s going fishing or building models in the garage.

This really should tell us all we need to know about [Justice Sam] Alito, Mrs. Alito, [Justice] Clarence Thomas, and Mrs. Thomas and their contempt for judicial ethics. Why would ethics matter when it’s all nonsense?

So to all the attorneys hoping to one day have the opportunity to argue before SCOTUS, to the judges who hope to one day have an appointment to the high court, and to others who hope to bring appeals to the court (including [for damages due to exposure to] Agent Orange), don’t bother – it’s all nonsense.

To women who desperately need health care up to and including abortion, fuggedabotit! It’s all nonsense.

To BIPOC groups hoping for justice and righting centuries-old wrongs, quit worrying – it’s all nonsense.

So, I guess, was the coronation of George W. Bush as POTUS when he had clearly lost to Al Gore – makes no difference – it’s all nonsense, just like Brown v. Board of Education and all the landmark cases.

Given it’s all nonsense, I guess we should just kick back and let Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, along with Nonsense-in-Chief Roberts rule the land according to their version of Christian Nationalism.

Folks, it’s time to end the nonsense – here’s how: VOTE! Take back the House, keep the Senate, and make it a prime order of business to impeach Alito and Thomas and replace them with Justices for whom the highest court in the land is not nonsense. Then Martha Anne can fly a damn pirate flag for all anyone gives a damn, and Ginny Thomas can prostrate herself at the feet of Trump and worship him as the second coming of Jesus until those in white coats come and take her away.

Many thanks to Ed for allowing me to post his essay.

The Nonsensical 74 Million

The Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 and who continue to send Trump their money and attend his rallies and spew the equivalent of Seig Heil! obeisance to him believe that our extremist Supreme Court is taking us in the God-ordained and Founder-intended right direction. They foam at the mouth for a Constitution-destroying New Reich in America. For them, anything less is nonsense.

The point is that our problem isn’t Trump. He’s just the felonious, slimy circus barker, the self-immolation conductor. The problem is actually the large minority of Americans who like the snake oil that the circus barker is selling and who will self-immolate to get it. They’ve been manipulated for decades by self-promoting cons whose only use for the 74 million is to steal their money and power and rule over them. And it’s been easy, because angry people are putty in the hands of skillful con men.

Trump is an easy target for progressives, with his outrages and ever present, addled-brain ramblings. The true dishonor belongs to his followers who: cheer his calls to violence; who ignore or who completely miss his wanderings in dementia and the horror of such a person having the nuclear codes; and who don’t care if their president is a convicted felon.

They are well on their way to transforming the United States of America into a despotic wasteland. You know that’s true because Trump has repeatedly promised to do exactly that. He declares that after he wins he will force this country, this land of the free and home of the brave, this land that’s your land and my land, to become a dictatorship that is his alone; that he will imprison or execute his political enemies; that he will have in our government only loyalists to him, not people loyal to the Constitution; that he will have only nonsense Justices on the Supreme Court who will dance to his nonsensical, despotic loony tunes.

You can dismiss Trump’s cruel, dreadful doom, believing that while he might do those things, that he’s just three Big Macs away from cardiac arrest, so we’ll be rid of him. But he will have laid the foundation for the even worse despot who will follow him, courtesy of the nonsensical 74 million and the nonsensical Supreme Court.

Nonsense Math

On October 1, 2017 a murderer opened fire from a hotel window, shooting into revelers at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. He used semi-automatic weapons fitted with bump stocks that effectively turned them into automatic weapons. He killed 58 people and injured over 500 in just 11 minutes. Authorities report that he fired over 1,000 bullets in that time. Let’s do some math.

Assume 600 people were shot over those 11 minutes. That means that someone was shot every 0.9 seconds, or 10 people shot every 11 seconds. 1,000 total shots in 11 minutes equals an average of 2 bullets fired every 3 seconds, which includes time to reload. Apparently, that isn’t swift enough murdering to qualify that firearm as an illegal automatic weapon, according to our Supreme Court.

The assault rifle used at Sandy Hook Elementary School to murder 20 first graders and 6 teachers and staff. Also used at Robb Elementary school to kill 19 kids and 2 teachers. Imagine how many more could have been killed if this war machine had been fitted with a bump stock. The SC says it doesn’t care.

Writing for the “conservative” majority, Justice Clarence “Mega-donor Gifts” Thomas proclaimed that semi-automatic rifles fitted with bump stocks are not fully automatic weapons. This is so, he would have us know, because of some arcane, nonsensical differentiation the Court majority invented for this case. Bump stocks remain legal for private citizens to possess and use.

Effectively, Clarence says, “Boo-hoo, little blubbering victims. We don’t care about you. The next mass murderer is free to fit his semi-automatic killing machine with a bump stock so that it will fire automatically at the rate of 2 bullets every 3 seconds. That way our domestic terrorist mass murderers can kill more people at a very rapid, punched-man-card rate. Bummer for you if you’re in his fully automatic sights.” Horrifyingly, that sounds a lot like legalized Nazi mass murders.

It’s yet another case of Supreme Court homicidal nonsense.

Clearly, we must end this actual Supreme Court nonsense – this contempt for reality, ethics, equality, honor, freedom, justice and even for human life.

What will you do?
.

Check the countdown clock below. Every time I look there is less time to take action to stop the “nonsense.”

“Friends do not let friends vote for con artists.”

  • – Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), 2016
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!


.

Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

Thanks!

The Fine Print:

  1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
  2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
  3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
  4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
  5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
  6. Clicking on most pics in these posts will take you to the source information.

Click me

JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Liars and Cheaters and Frauds, Oh My! and a Ghastly Contrast


POST 1076

CAUTION – Contains snark, which is known to trigger bouts of doing the right thing, as well as generating an occasional smirk.

In what should be an alien, other planet move, 10 Republicans wrote in a public letter that they would no longer pass legislation, fund the government, or vote to confirm the administration’s appointees because, they said,

“[t]he White House has made a mockery of the rule of law and fundamentally altered our politics in un-American ways. As a Senate Republican conference, [actually, there were only 10 of them, hardly a conference] we are unwilling to aid and abet this White House in its project to tear this country apart.”

Apparently, these kings and queen of mentally deranged projection are going on strike. They are betraying their constituents, their oath of office (which they clearly didn’t take freely and without mental reservation) and the entire nation in this performance of cowardice and servility to the orange convict.

Here are the on-strike, Senate Republican frauds:

Name and State             Re-election year

Mike Lee, UT                   2028 Vows to oppose raising the debt ceiling until there’s a balanced budget amendment. He doesn’t care who we cheat. Quite Trumpian of him.

J.D. Vance, OH                2028  Author of The Trump Suck-Up Elegies

Tommy Tuberville, AL      2026  Carpetbagger Alabama senator who doesn’t even live in Alabama.

Eric Schmitt, MO             2028

Marsha Blackburn, TN     2024  Bless her heart.

Rick Scott, FL                  2024  Net worth: $250 million. He says you should pay an extra $4,500 in taxes so you’ll “have skin in the game.”

Roger Marshall, KS.         2026

Marco Rubio, FL              2028  Doubts global warming, as FL is going underwater and as property insurance costs 4X the national average, if it’s even available to Floridians.

Josh Hawley, MO             2024  The model for double-crossing, traitorous insurrectionist fist pumps

Ron Johnson, WI              2028  Talks on a dead phone to avoid reporters’ questions.

Click the pic for a more readable view

As you can see, for most of these grand-standers there is plenty of time between now and their next election for the public to forget their infantile, performative temper tantrum. Regrets go to the folks in Florida and Missouri who now have no representation in the Senate. And don’t forget that several of these posers were key traitors in the attempt to steal the votes from 80 million Americans in 2020.

From Harlan Coben’s I Will Find You, in the context of making moral choices:

“She could have done the ‘right’ thing that night, but we only do the right thing when it doesn’t cost us.”

“We pay lip service to a vague greater good, but only when it serves our interest.”

That’s harsh, of course, but before you take umbrage, think of those statements in the context of Republican senators and representatives who know better but cave in to Trump and then say and do abhorrent fascist things. Here’s some of what that gets you.

– You get idiots in dark blue suits, white shirts and red ties showing up at the trial of the orange menace in Manhattan and saying patently stupid and flamingly false things attacking America. That’s very fascist of them.

– You get valueless, anti-American, fraudulent congressional hearings about “the Biden crime family,” a non-existent cabal fantasized by Rep, Jim Jordan (R – Alpha Centauri). “Mmm .  .  .  There is much dishonesty in this one.” – Yoda. This, too, is very fascist.

– You get the list of buffoon senators above and more, fully embracing the Republican “mass psychosis,” as Adam Kinzinger calls it. BTW: After reading this post, link through and listen to Kinzinger’s comments.

All of these Republican blabbers, these fascism promoters, these democracy killer authoritarians know what the “right” thing to do is. They all know about the greater good. But doing those “right” things would cost them just a bit of their immediate self-interest. They aren’t willing to pay the price for their integrity, much less do anything for the greater good, so they cave and they burnish their cowardice and hypocrisy skills. Very fascist – even brown shirt – of them.

Liars and cheaters and frauds, oh my!

What a ghastly contrast that is to those whom we honored last week.

D-Day

Lt. Richard L. Altschuler, 62nd & 61st Fighter Squadrons, 56th Fighter Group, 8th Army, USAAF. 69 combat missions. Photo: Boxted England, 1943

My father was in a lot of dogfights as he flew his fighter plane “escorting” our bombers over Europe to push back the Nazi terror in WW II and he flew sorties to provide cover for our ground troops, too. A lot of bad guys shot bullets, canon and anti-aircraft flak at him, but he, like 16 million fellow Americans, soldiered on, doing his duty.

156,000 soldiers and Marines stormed the beaches of Normandy 80 years ago doing their duty. 4,400 died just on D-Day. President Biden was at Normandy last week to honor all of those brave men and he did that in our name.

Click the pic for the original. Many thanks to Sheila Markin for sharing this tweet.

In ghastly contrast, during a November 2018 trip to France to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, President Trump refused to go the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris to honor the thousands of our troops from both World Wars who are buried there. Dad would have been horrified by Trump’s insult.

Trump said our military dead were “losers” and “suckers.” Those words would have made Dad and all who fought alongside him furious. We all should be furious at Trump’s disrespect for those men and his dishonoring of America.

So, it was gratifying – a reset of honor – when President Biden made the trip to Aisne-Marne American Cemetery last week to salute our fallen.

About 420,000 Americans paid for World War II with their lives. They were driven by their oath, by their love of their country and by their sense of duty.

  •                    “We must make the solemn vow to never let them down.”
  • – President Joe Biden, Point du Hoc, Normandy France, June 7, 2024

We honor all our veterans on Veterans Day. When you do that later this year, say thanks to Dad and the over 16 million Americans of the Greatest Generation who did what it took to defeat fascism so that you could live in a democracy and sleep safely in the arms of freedom.

Don’t make us have to fight that fight again.
.

You know what to do. Take Dad’s picture with you as a reminder when you vote on November 5th or bring a picture of one of our military in your direct line. They would rest easy knowing that we are preserving their American values. They’d thank you if they could, knowing that we continue to honor them, what they fought for and what so many died for.

This message isn’t about the past, however brave, honorable and praiseworthy those heroes were. It is about our present and our future. It is about honor and duty to freedom and our absolute rejection of tyranny and authoritarianism. It is a dedication to democracy in our time and for our children and grandchildren and those who will come after them.

That is why we will never, never, never betray our heroes or their sacrifice or the democracy that they fought for.
Quote of the Week

“In their generation, in their hour of trial, the Allied forces of D-Day did their duty. Now the question for us is: In our hour of trial, will we do ours?” [emphasis mine-JA]

– President Joe Biden at Normandy American Cemetery, June 6, 2024

Click the pic for the video.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    6. Clicking on most pics will take you to the source information.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Cherry Picking


POST 1075

Under Attack

There is a cynical and dangerous checklist that is a playbook for the destruction of America. It has been festering for decades in plain sight and has somehow been tolerated, this to our peril. Here’s a piece of Sheila Markin’s post of May 19 detailing some of that checklist.

CAN OUR LEGAL SYSTEM SURVIVE TRUMP and the MAGA MOVEMENT?

Since he came on to the political scene, Trump has attacked every system in America: the press, our FBI, CIA, government institutions, the electoral system, checks and balances, the peaceful transfer of power, and now the judicial system is being tested and attacked. When you understand how autocrats (dictators) get into power, you understand what Trump is up to. The way it works is that you take over a political party (check), create ever greater cynicism in the voting public for institutions that uphold democracy (check), get your state party members to suppress the vote, limit vote by mail and drop boxes, purge voter rolls to get an advantage for your party (check), use propaganda networks like conservative media to create and sustain the alternate universe in which you are the only trustworthy person left (check). Once in power you never leave. The next election will tell us if Americans can see what Trump is up to and reject it. [emphasis mine]

This check list was obvious as far back as the Reagan administration, when they largely defunded higher education, putting millions of students into lifelong debt, at the same time beginning the destruction of our labor unions that are so expensive for our suffering Big Biz and Billionaires.

From Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s post of May 21:

Trump’s refusal to take the stand [in his hush money trial] encapsulates the MAGA approach to politics. Since the 2020 presidential election, he and his surrogates have made repeated accusations and statements about how the system is rigged against them and alleged there is evidence that proves them right.

Crucially, they make those arguments only in front of television cameras or on podcasts and radio. They refuse to make them under oath in a court of law, where there are penalties for lying.

And on May 22 Richardson wrote,

There is indeed a sense of power and entitlement coming from MAGA Republicans as they impose new limits on their fellow Americans and call those constraints freedom.

Exactly so. That is what minority rule does.

Well, actually, most do know – just not what you think, T-Shirt guy.

Whether it’s a politician, an ordinary citizen or a podcast/talk radio/TV/cable blabber, when they declare that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, that the justice system is rigged, that non-citizens are voting, that the rights and freedoms of true Americans have been stripped from them by Democrats. leftists, the elite, space lasers or some imaginary cabal, they haven’t even a shred of evidence for their claims. None.

The best they can offer is a wimpy “everybody knows” or a promise of retribution, as they thump their chests. They conveniently fail to mention that they’ve lost all of the lawsuits they filed trying to prove their phony claims. Still, they try to take your freedom and rights.

There are lawsuits in the pipeline now waiting to prosecute the liars and cheaters. Be sure to have a BS cancelling headset so you won’t hear them declare how unfair our justice system is to them, like the sociopaths wailing now over convict Trump’s conviction.

From David Corn’s Our Land of May 21:

.  .  .  Trump spoke in Dallas at the annual convention of the beleaguered National Rifle Association—which in February was found liable in a civil corruption case—and accepted its endorsement. He said many idiotic things. As music tied to the bonkers QAnon movement played, Trump wailed that the United States was a “failing nation” with an economy that’s becoming a “cesspool of ruin.” He called the insurrectionist rioters who attacked the Capitol on January 6 “hostages” who have been “unfairly imprisoned” for merely mounting a “protest.” He pledged to withhold federal funds from any school in the nation with a vaccine or mask mandate. (Make Measles Great Again!) He claimed he was a “better physical specimen” as president than Barack Obama. He referred to himself as “a freakin’ genius.”

Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC). Donald Trump’s “Black Individual”

Yeah, it was the usual megalomaniacal and dishonest crap from Trump. What caught my attention was this comment, which drew applause from the audience.

And honestly, there’s been no president since Abraham Lincoln—and perhaps, in a certain way, including Abraham Lincoln—but there’s been no president since Abraham Lincoln that has done more for the Black individual in this country than President Donald J. Trump. There’s been nobody. Not even close. [emphasis original]

Of course, the most curious thing about all of that is that so many Americans swallow that evidence-free poison. How does that happen?

From Why do so many Americans support a neofascist? | The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich:

When people feel like the game is rigged against them and they feel like there’s nothing really to lose, and they’re angry and frustrated and anxious, they will be fodder, exploited by a demagogue.

That’s how it’s done. You get ordinary people with “issues” to fall for an orange, comb-over con man, a liar, cheat and philanderer, a supermarket tabloid bombast phony and, as Robert Reich says, a demagogue, one who will steal the rights of those ordinary, chest pounding people to make himself a tyrant dictator.

From Ed Gurowitz’s post of May 20:

Here’s my question: if you knew that by withholding your support for Biden, by supporting the Kennedy headcase or Jill Stein, or Marianne Williamson, or “none of the above,” you were guaranteeing a Trump victory AND emboldening Trump in his authoritarian agenda, would you feel the same?

In the next six months, whether you’re pro-Biden or anti-Trump, or just pro-democracy in America, I’m asking you to get your head out of whatever dark place it is in and stand with and for Biden. He’s not perfect, but right now, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, he’s our only hope.

That’s because we really are under attack. We are being pummeled by cowards posing as tough guys who care about only what is in their own interests and who have wholly abandoned their oath of office and obligation to you and to our country. Almost as bad, they don’t even try to disguise their hypocrisy. They parade it in public like they’re wearing a Joker costume on Halloween, confident that we are too stupid to see these very worst criminals, the ones right in front of us. More on this on Sunday.

America stands with a gun to its head and about a third of our citizens are pulling on that trigger with all their suicidal might.
.

So, heed what Master Yoda teaches us:

“Always the opposite of truth the Trump and his Storm Troopers say. Always the way of the Dark Side they pursue.

“Arm yourself you must against this danger, young Jedi. Use the Vote. Reach out with your finger and feel the force bringing you to your ballot on November 5. If this path you do not follow, the vote will not be with you always.”

Today’s Quotes
  • From Aaron Sorkin’s wonderful movie The American President, but now in the context of MAGA:

“How do you have patience for people who claim they love America, but clearly can’t stand Americans?”

From Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles on how we can prevent a Republican destruction of America:

“The magic pill is us.”

Use the vote!

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    6. Clicking on most pics will take you to the source information.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Finding Optimism


POST 1069

Third in a series (see Ignorance and Lies and The Underlying Disease)

Stand Up
I asked [my friend] what we would do if 150 crazy people — a mix of deranged narcissists, political extremists, weirdos, conspiracy theorists and other assorted friends of theirs — showed up suddenly on the perfect deck [where we sat overlooking the ocean]. I wanted to know if he thought we’d fight with them or leave.
.

“Obviously,” I told him, “we would leave.” He agreed. Crazy people make normal people want to leave.

That’s exactly what we must not do if we hope to provide a cure for our terrible national disease and exit the craziness. Leaving would guarantee a ramping up of the crazy, the vitriol and the siege against the design of the Founders. They had lived under the thumb of despotic King George III and they knew the perils and the pain of autocracy. Our leaving would be capitulation to the forces seeking to undermine the very strength of our nation, our democracy.

So, don’t leave. Stand and fight back. Fight forward. Fight in every direction for your freedom, your rights and for everyone and everything you hold dear. That means standing up to the ignorants and the liars, like Ron Johnson, Jim Jordan, J.D. Vance, MTG, and all the rest of the extremist crazies. Stand up for equity and justice. Stand up to the 50-year-long war to disempower you, make rich guys richer and impoverish the rest of us. Stand up.

A Parallel

Today’s shrill voices and the violence, the threats and the chaos, the crazy and the stupid are all around us with propaganda and lies and visions of doom. Those voices aim to scare good people into capitulation. Those who give up – who leave, to use Steve Schmidt’s term – are today’s version of Neville Chamberlain and his capitulation to Hitler and tyranny.

Click me

Having given away the Sudetenland (then part of Czechoslovakia) to Hitler, Chamberlain came back to England from Munich in 1938 claiming, “Peace for our time.” Less than one year later Germany invaded and overran Poland and a year later began bombing London in the Battle of Britain. Here is the message, the learning:

  • Capitulation never works. It never brings peace. Never.
  • It only emboldens the bullies to do yet worse.

On October 29, 1941 things looked overwhelmingly dark for Britain. Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited The Harrow School, which he had attended years before. Here, in part, is what he told the boys that day:

.

” .  .  .  this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never — in nothing, great or small, large or petty — never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Steve Schmidt is right: “Crazy people make normal people want to leave.”

But we aren’t going to do that. We’re going to stay and stand up to protect our democracy and our self-rule. We’re going to stay and stand up to the hatred and thwart the cruelty. We’re going to stay and stand and fight. We must not – we will not – leave.

We will never, never, never, never give in.

Optimism

I received a private reply from very long time friend Frank Levy to a recent Disambiguation, Ignorance and Lies. He’s given his permission to post some of his comment – many thanks to him for that..

My experience living among these American ethno-fascists [he lives in a deeply RED state], seeing their racism, watching them legislate for destructive and terrible policies for anyone that does not look, vote, pray, or love the way they do, watching them commit crimes of violence and hate against those very same people, watching them live out their misogyny and need to subjugate and humiliate women, and experiencing their virulent anti-Semitism leads me to two truths.
.
One, these people are who they are and they do what they do because they have been taught by their mommies and daddies to hate all the people their relatives hate (thank you South Pacific), and who [they believe] their religion teaches them to hate (thank you Christian Bible and Quran).
.
Two, they are who they are and they do what they do because they fear losing their privilege and power to the very people they despise and hate. And they hate democracy, while at the same time proclaiming themselves true patriots, because they know that they are a minority and that in a fair election they and their ideas are losers.
.
So, here is why I think your optimism is misplaced: you can’t undo this kind of hate and fear through conversation and education.
.
I believe Frank is right, that conversation and education won’t make a dent in the certainties of the fearful, the haters and the dispensers of cruelty, so I replied,
.
Our national salvation doesn’t lie in conversions of the BillyBobs and the vitriol droolers – as you put it, the ethno-fascists. Rather, it lies in activating everyone else.
.
We cannot wipe out the hatred and thuggishness in those who feel the imperative to hate and to be thugs. Their identities are wrapped up in that cruel package, making change for them impossible. What we can do is to overpower them at the ballot box and in legislatures, making their institutionalized bigotry and mania for domination of others a powerless thing, perhaps no more than an artifact.
.
Maybe the more remote polling places and mail-in ballot drop boxes will be returned to North Carolina, Michigan, Wisconsin and Kentucky. Maybe millions will have their names restored to the voting roles in Georgia, Virginia, Arizona and Texas. Perhaps an overwhelming defeat will make Kari Lake shut up.
.

It’s entirely up to us to make that happen. That’s the reason for optimism.

Obstacles to Optimism

Last Thursday a chunk of the MAGA extremism cult (please forgive the redundancy) came to Manhattan to parade themselves as brainless suck ups to Trump. They violated the gag order that

Judge Merchan placed on Trump and, in effect declared that they renounce justice.

Matt Gaetz (R-Young Girls) announced that he’s with the Proud Boy felons, saying, “Standing back and standing by, Mr. President.” Having already created chaos, these cheaters are attacking our justice system for being chaotic and broken. That’s what the extremists do: they break government, then blame Democrats for the ensuing chaos.

Also on Thursday, the news of Justice Sam “The Insurrection Man” Alito and his upside-down distress flag crashed into our Constitution. Is there nothing that is below him and Justice Clarence “Free Vacations Man” Thomas? Oh wait .  .  .  never mind.

The Republican pollution of the Supreme Court by insurrectionist sympathizers has driven disapproval of the Court to well over half of Americans. A few decades ago being a Supreme Court justice was the most highly respected profession. Now it doesn’t even make the top 20. It’s pretty hard to be optimistic about that.

Since impeachment isn’t going to happen and the Court’s newly drafted ethics guidelines have no teeth, perhaps now it’s time for Biden to pack the court with four additional justices, each of whom, refreshingly, has a moral compass. That would give us something to be optimistic about.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.
    6. Clicking on most pics will take you to the source information.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

The Underlying Disease


POST 1068

Second in a series (see Ignorance and Lies).

The Diagnosis

The slavish devotion of so many to worshiping ignorance and lies is baffling and the translation of that into violence is fraught with grave danger. It has been easy to criticize, saying those people are voting against their own interests, which is a high-minded way of pointing fingers and ridiculing. That’s only useful until the reality of the true danger lands with the force of an asteroid.

So I continue to try to understand the appeal of absurd and hateful conspiracy theories, the popularity of a con man with people who used to follow their common sense, and the anger and hatred that infect so many in our nation. At root it is all about trying to understand what seems, on the surface, to be both self-righteous and self-destructive. It is an existential challenge of our time.

It was in this quest that I came upon an interview in The Atlantic of Walter Kirn, my first brush with an outspoken and successful author, thought leader and iconoclast. The title of the piece is The Blindness of Elites: Walter Kirn and the empty politics of defiance, by Thomas Chatterton Williams. Kirn seems to speak for the people in “flyover country” who feel betrayed by, blown off by our “elites.” Note that even our use of the term “flyover country” declares our contempt for those who live there and demonstrates our elitist attitude.

I’ve written about the drivers of this sense of betrayal and have come to believe that there’s something there that, even after so many years of knee-jerk anger, we’ve hardly done more than knee-jerk right back. That’s not helpful to anyone, other than for momentary self-satisfaction. In other words, and to mix metaphors, all we’ve done is to repeatedly kick the hornets nest, never dealing with the the reasons for the swarm of angry hornets. Little wonder that we keep getting stung.

Try these short, non-sequential quotes from the essay:

Today [Kirn] regards Trump’s supporters not as the proverbial basket of deplorables but as more or less reasonable citizens with valid concerns. The movement around Trump, Kirn told me, is “an expression of American frustration on the part of people who feel like they got a really raw deal.” [i.e. betrayal]

.  .  .  his resentment against the tastemakers and gatekeepers is so unrelenting because it’s fueled not simply by dislike but also by real affection—a sympathy for Americans in unimportant places, people without power or influence, whose opinions and lifestyles he believes are often dismissed as retrograde or irrelevant.

.  .  .  the government’s attempts to manage the pandemic were a “behavioral-engineering enterprise, no longer having much to do with the truth, no longer having much to do with your right to desire what you wish or not desire what you don’t wish.”

Everyone, he suggested, was in on the game. “This group of legacy media institutions, along with a whole array of academic—what is called ‘civil-society organizations’—and frankly, Homeland Security, clerks of the government, got together and … ganged up to preserve this preferential cartel status for those [elite] groups and start shooting down the rebel ships.” [a reference to Kirn’s “Star Wars” metaphor}

You get the idea.

And even if at times Kirn seems to be contrarian only for the purpose of being a contrarian, he provides an insight into what America looks like and feels like from a non-elite perspective. The danger is that makes for easy pickings for a charlatan huckster promising to be the “retribution” for people who feel aggrieved.

The point is that what seems to be devilishly absurd actually has a sound footing in the realty of millions of Americans. It led to a first Trump presidency and over 74 million votes cast for him in the 2020 election. That’s bad news for democracy, but our collective ignoring of real grievances is leading to the possibility of a second Trump presidency and our continuing threat of dysfunction and violence.

If grievances based in reality are the underlying driver of otherwise sensible Americans electing a megalomaniac sociopath, what else are those grievances causing? Thom Hartmann put his finger on that recently, identifying inequity and inequality as the drivers.

So how does inequality provoke criminality? The research on the topic is pretty exhaustive, albeit poorly publicized, and the simplest explanation is among the most easily understood: humans are wired to rebel against unfairness. Unfairness thus destroys social trust.

Inequality causes crime because it destroys social trust, the core fabric of any society. It essentially makes us crazy. Without social trust, empathy and shared values weaken and culture begins to disintegrate. [emphasis original]

So, inequality provokes our social unrest, often called our “political divide” or “cultural divide” and that drives criminality. It drives our us-them animosity and makes us distrust our neighbors, demonize and attack all the “others” we can identify and in all ways rip apart our social fabric such that people are outright warning against and even promising a civil war.

Bernie Sanders is flamboyant and has crazy hair and a crazy manner, but,

He’s right about the inequity and unfairness baked into our American cake for decades.

For at least 50 years our poor and middle classes have been sending their wealth to the very rich via tax schemes that make golden promises for everyone but only benefit the rich. In 2010 our Supreme Court, rife with billionaire backed justices outright wrote legislation – they made it up themselves. Citizens United has allowed billions of big money bucks to buy our government and enrich already rich people. And that exacerbates our outrage over unfairness.

That is the diagnosis. Wealth inequity. Unfairness. Legalized cheating.

That is the betrayal, the rot. That is the primary source of so much of our social unrest. And that betrayal leads to anger and cruelty. From Mother Jones:

The relentless rot is exactly why huge swaths of the electorate do want [Trump] back. As it’s been said, the cruelty is the point.

The inequity and unfairness is tearing our country apart – that’s our national sickness.

Trump has already told us that if he wins the election he will further enrich the already fabulously wealthy. He will do this at the expense of everyone else and of our future generations.

We better get about moving past our swatting at symptoms – those angry hornets – and deal with the underlying disease. Our present abdication of that is what is driving this existential moment.

Your mandatory assignment: Read Hartmann’s post.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Law And Order: Special Hush Money Unit


POST 1062

Headline of the Month

From Politico of 4/14/2024 –

“A porn star, a president and a publisher named Pecker:

“The key potential witnesses at Trump’s criminal trial”

The Hoped For End of the Hush Money Trial

It’s the conclusion of jury deliberation in the Donald Trump hush money/criminal fraud/election interference, multiple count felonies case. The courtroom is silent in anxious anticipation, as the jury solemnly returns to Judge Merchan’s tense courtroom. The defendant has awakened from his courtroom nap and is focused on the jury with a sneering stare.

Judge Merchan: “The defendant will rise.”

Trump rises slowly, belligerent and hostile in rebellion against authority.

           Judge Merchan:   “Jury foreman, have you reached a verdict?”

Jury Foreman:     “We have, Your Honor.”

Judge Merchan:   “Regarding 34 counts of falsifying business records to cover up a crime, what is your verdict, guilty or not guilty?”

The jury foreman reaches into a pocket, pulls out a pitch pipe and blows a note. The entire jury turns menacingly toward defendant Trump. They furrow their brows in obvious distaste and snarl in unison,

“YOU’RE FIRED!”

Gang-Greene

You’ve known all along that Marjorie Taylor Greene is cruel and dishonest, vulgar and infantile and constantly inappropriate (ref: any Biden State Of The Union address). Her foaming-at-the-mouth refusal to help Ukraine leaves European nations and the U.S. at risk from the war mongering new iteration of megalomaniac Josef Stalin. That’s why she has earned a special title from Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL), who said, “that Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene . . . should be appointed as Vladimir Putin’s Special Envoy to the United States Congress.”

In one of her most desperately cloying, grabbing, begging, pleading for attention idiocies, Marjorie Taylor Greene threatened to call for Speaker Mike Johnson’s removal from his speakership for his impudence to bring to the floor a bill for support of Ukraine. Putin didn’t want that to happen, preferring the continuing depletion of Ukraine’s war matériel so he can succeed in his invasion. Greene and her extremist conspirators in un-American activities, the Gang-Greene, are brain-free suck-ups to Donald Trump, who is completely captivated by Putin and proudly wears the title Putin has given him: Useful Idiot. That title goes for Greene and her abominable Gang, too.

Boomer Corner

From a recent post by my friend Ed Gurowitz:

It is this thoughtlessness that worries me. I have many German friends and family, and I’ve asked some of them what their parents told them it was like during the rise of Nazism. Even allowing for a people providing exculpatory explanations, what I have heard overwhelmingly is that people just let it happen – whether through apathy, feelings of powerlessness, or secret sympathy, it doesn’t matter. As Edmund Burke famously said, “All that is needed for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”

That is what I’m afraid of – good people doing nothing when the opportunity to vote is there.

Me, too. Which is why I offer the following.

From Wikipedia – Click the pic

We Boomers did some good work in the 60s when it was our asses on the line in a senseless war, our values were being assaulted by a continuation of centuries of cruelty that seemed like it would never stop. It was our time to respond to Abigail Adams, who expected her husband John to come home with a Constitution that guaranteed women the right to vote – he didn’t do that. And it was even time to (gasp!) guarantee non-Whites all the rights of citizenship. Crazy, right?

But those days are gone.  Our job was largely done, so we left the protests and went about our lives. The world moved on, only not always in a good way. Some of what we accomplished was tragically reversed and now we face a very bad threat.

We never thought we’d have to fight this fight again, but right now the forces of destruction are shaking our world, this time with an even greater threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The bad guys have been plotting this since we left the protests behind and they are organized and well funded by billionaires, who plan to be our fascist overlords.

You know what that means:

It’s time for us to saddle up again and fight for what is right.
.

It’s time for we Boomers to once again make our voices heard in a deafening thunder to say that we’re not going back. We will never back down. We will stop the forces of destruction. We will protect our sacred democracy.

READ THIS: An Urgent Call To All Boomers.
.

Then take action. You’ll know what to do.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Civil War


Post 1,052

A blogger friend recently posted, “A few years ago, CNN reported on a survey indicating that over 40% of Americans believed that a civil war was ‘somewhat likely’ in the next ten years.” He mentioned globalization as at least part of the cause. I assume that means that it has caused disruptions leading to angry citizens.

There are a lot of people who believe they remember better times, regardless of whether the “old days” actually were better. Think: false message MAGA hats.

To be fair, there is some truth to their grievances. There has been off-shoring of jobs, “right-sizing” (i.e. massive layoffs) and the rise of the big box stores that decimated whole towns and more. Their frustration is being amped up by those who would accrue power and money to themselves by keeping people enraged.

Today millions hate the “elites,” which I suppose means anyone wealthier or more educated than themselves. One or two generations ago big company CEOs made 35 times what a regular wage earner made. Now it’s 320 times. Corporations often demonstrated a sense of duty to their communities. Now most obligation has shifted to serve only shareholders and C-level officers, who are, by definition, elites. And thanks to creative legal manipulation we have ensured that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer through the magic of legalized bribery (see Citizens United). Roughly $50 trillion has shifted from the bottom 99% to the top 1% over the past 50 years. That carries enough power to infuriate a lot of people.

If there is to be a civil war, it will probably look like guerilla warfare, not cavalry on horseback or infantry in trenches. It will look like attacks on elected officials, churches (Blacks), synagogues (Jews), grannies in supermarkets and children in schools. Anyone who is vulnerable and perhaps blame-able will be a target. We already know what that looks like* and it may well get far worse. The fires are stoked every day to keep the angry people agitated, like Trump declaring at his rallies that if he doesn’t win the election that there will be “a blood bath” and “bedlam.” He specifically enourages his followers to commit violence. Just like January 6.

Bottom Line

We need leadership to grow this nation instead of fracture it. We need a new clarity of purpose, which is now looking like dealing with existential threat. It could be a foreign threat, but at the moment it appears to be more like home grown terrorism encouraged by self-serving extremists.

Coming together for such a challenge is the job of each of us, of course, but most of all it is the job of the leader to bring us together. Anyone listening to and following those seeking to divide us against ourselves** is willingly seeking to destroy America. Don’t fall for the hypocrisy or let those you love fall for it. Then maybe, just maybe, we won’t have a civil war.

Key Reads of the Week

See Note #5 below – then click the pic.

See Note #5 below – then click the pic.

Prof. Timothy Snyder teaches history at Yale and is the author of On Tyranny and other books. If you have not read this brilliant, pamphlet-sized book (rather like The American Crisis by Thomas Paine), do so immediately.

The idea of a strongman leader has become quite popular, having been promoted over and over by Donald Trump to his largely uninformed audience. Having lived in, studied and understood strongman leaders in many countries, Prof. Snyder offers a most helpful post to explain what having such a leader always means and what profound and terrible consequences would descend on Americans should we choose such a path. Read Snyder’s post here.

Next, you must read Prof. Heather Cox Richardson’s clarification of the 2025 Project. Perhaps you already know that project is the product of the ultra-conservative (i.e anti-democracy) Heritage Foundation and is 1,000 pages of anti-American, dictatorial drivel. They think we should have a pharaoh or fuhrer, Stalinist, Viktor Orbán or Vladimir Putin, the far right’s BFF, to control our country and to control and minimize you. They believe that all power should go to the 1% wealthy minority and that there should be subservience and few rights for everyone else. They believe that all men are created equal except themselves, who are created superior and entitled.***

That’s what a civil war would bring us.

Take the pledge and internalize it deeply. Then click the pic.

Watch for the post this Sunday’s for some ideas of what we must do if things are to get better.

___________________________________________

* We are less than 22% through the year and already have over 12,000 dead from guns.

** It isn’t just Trump. Aaron Rogers thinks that 9/11 and the Sandy Hook murders were both staged by actors. He believes dumb and potentially homicidal theories about vaccinations, too. That’s why Rogers is on Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s short list for a running mate for the presidency. So is former pro wrestler Jessie Ventura. They are all dividers. And delusional.

If you want our nation to follow people like them, it’s possible you’ve sustained as many traumatic, brain injury bashings as Rogers.

*** Psst! Do you think you’re “more equal” than others? Most important, do you love to hate? Boy, oh boy do we have a tip.

This may not be the best country for you. Give Russia, Hungary, Sudan and Uganda a look. Those guys know how to suppress and murder “others” – they’re your peeps! Pick one and go there soon. Please.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.

  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

There Are Two Kinds of People


Post 1,051

Comedians say that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who laugh and there are people who make people laugh.

I, too, say that there are two kinds of people in the world. There are people who see nuances, shades of gray as well as of color; and there are people who only see black-and-white.

The black-and-white vision people are most fond of absolutes. Something is either good or bad, black or white, up or down and there is only one way to see things – their way. There is something satisfying in such simplicity. It’s the absence of troublesome “yeah-buts” and a lack of discomfort from uncertainty. Plus, there is the ease of never having to expend the energy to understand others. These people haven’t the rods or cones or whatever it is that allows some to see complexities and other possibilities. For these folks, there is no need for others’ conflicting opinions because those opinions are wrong.

We have many people in positions of authority who are black and white absolutists, unable to see anything but their own certainties. We saw that in the in vitro fertilization decision from the Alabama Supreme Court recently. The judges’ decision was supported by absolutist biblical understandings and beliefs. They included biblical quotes and invoked God multiple times in their written opinion. Apparently, they believe that everyone should believe as they do. That’s the law. Just ask them.

The First Amendment begins, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion .  .  .  ” If that prohibition against establishment of religion is the real deal, then that Alabama Supreme Court just violated it with their religious justification for their decision.

The absolutist judge who wrote that opinion effectively mandates, “You have to follow my religion just as I see it.” He is both wrong and dangerous.

He’s a threat to our Constitution, our democracy, our freedoms and what the Revolution was all about. Whatever his personal feelings about in vitro fertilization or religion, none of that belongs in this legal issue.

This is compounded by a U.S. Supreme Court which likely will affirm that decision when a case is brought to it, because they seem to sing, “Gimme that old time religion.” Today’s Supreme Court seems to have difficulty understanding plain language and has made clear that settled law isn’t settled at all. Pay no attention to their having sworn fidelity to stare decisis (leaving settled law alone) in their confirmation hearings. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Which brings us to my favorite West Wing scene. Watch it here. But before watching it decide if you believe that learning stopped several millennia ago. Because if we are limited to what pre-science, largely ignorant people believed and the fanciful stories and rules they made up about their universe in a hopeful but vain effort to explain what they could not understand, you won’t like that clip. Otherwise, go ahead and enjoy a view of human foolishness.

You Need To

Last weekend the New York Times Opinion Today newsletter ran this headline:

Humanitarian aid should be a bipartisan issue. Congress needs to unlock the needed aid funds. There’s no time to lose.
.

It was linked to the author’s guest essay on famine.

We all should stand and applaud that, just as Mike Johnson and his fellow smug Republicans should have stood and applauded at the SOTU after Biden said there should be no violence in politics and that we should make sure every kid can read by the time they’re in the third grade. But, of course, they didn’t applaud or stand and the Republicans are proudly resisting aid to starving people.

Gotta hand it to Republicans for their consistency of doing anything and everything to ensure that no Democrat, especially one residing in the White House, is ever allowed to have even the smallest win. It doesn’t matter to Republicans who gets hurt by their intransigence.*

The Republicans cling to their small-mindedness and their lack of care for anyone other than themselves and their monomaniacal lust for power and money. With each mean spirited, foolishly proud event we learn more about their adherence to the Dark Side and these lemmings march ever closer to the cliff. One can hope.

Which brings me to the words above from the Times. The troublesome part is “Congress needs to.” Does that mean that all in Congress have that need? Because if the Times does mean that, I think they should double check their sources. I think rather that we’ve picked up the “need to” phrasing as a weenie, chickening out of what is really meant: “Millions of Suffering People Need Congress to Unlock the Relief Funds.“

It’s much like the very popular phrase following a statement of opinion, “Just sayin’.” It’s a way of trying to avoid responsibility for taking a stand. Both phrases – “they need to” and “just sayin'” – chicken out of standing upright and making a clear declaration.

Here’s the thing: We don’t need any of that chickening out in Congress. Indeed, we need straight talk and sticking to what we know is right. Like ensuring that third graders can read.

So, in keeping with the theme, there are two kinds of people in the world: people who can think beyond themselves, who care about others and whose word means something. They say what they mean and they mean what they say. Then there are people who are weenies.

This is my shot across the bow of the USS Weenie. And no, I’m not just sayin’.

See Note #5 below

Today’s Quote

From Cassidy Hutchinson’s book Enough, page 354:

“I had seen how fragile democracy is, and my conscience recognized our duty as citizens to attend to it for its survival.”

There are two kinds of citizens in this country. There are people who believe in the Constitution, democracy and the rule of law. Then there are people who want to tear everything down and cause us to devolve into a brutal, feudal existence ruled by a despotic tyrant. On November 5 we get to vote on which we will be. Choose wisely.

Hint: You can do more than vote like a real American. You can encourage others to do the same. Click here.

__________________________________________

* Read Thom Hartmann’s post, How Come Everything the Republican Party Stands for Involves Other People Dying? The horrible part is that Hartmann is right.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

Hope


Post 1,049

Thomas Paine

248 years ago the slightly known young patriot and freedom zealot Thomas Paine* penned the first pamphlet of The American Crisis, a series of 13 pieces published periodically over 6 years. This first was written as Washington and his army were retreating across the Delaware River and was published in the Philadelphia Journal on December 19, 1776.** That dispirited army then had to endure a dreadful winter, with many freezing or dying of disease at Valley Forge.

Click me

Paine wrote Crisis because we in the Colonies were at a flex point of either knuckling under to a capricious and abusive king with his greatest army and navy in the world, or standing up and saying, “No more!” That decision looked to be anything but certain.

The American crisis was, indeed, most real. Paine sought to reach the masses with his pen, hoping to inform and inspire. He opened his work with words familiar to us even today.

“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.” [caps original]

Of course, Paine was right then – and he’s still right. Today we rebel against no unstable monarch across the sea, yet we are in danger of creating our own home-grown capricious despot, eager to steal our highly revered and celestial FREEDOM.

Here’s how Professor of History Heather Cox Richardson closes her 2023 perspective,  Democracy Awakening – Notes on the State of America:

Click me – and read Note #5 below.

“[Lincoln] called on his neighbors to defend equality before the law and the right of everyone to consent to government under which they live. They must reclaim the history of America so that it would have ‘a new birth of freedom.’

“When Lincoln said those words in 1863, it was not at all clear his vision would prevail. But he had hope because after decades in which they had not noticed what the powerful were doing to destroy democracy, Americans had woken up. They realized that the very nature of America was under attack. They were divided among themselves and at first they didn’t really know how to fight back, but ordinary people quickly came to pitch in however they could, using the tools they had. ‘We rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach – a scythe – a pitchfork – a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver,’ Lincoln recalled. Once awake, they found the strength of their majority.

“In Lincoln’s era, democracy appeared to have won. But the Americans of Lincoln’s time did not root out the hierarchical strand of our history, leaving it there for other rising autocrats in the future to exploit with their rhetoric and the fears of their followers.

“So far, the hopes of our Founders have never been proven fully right. And yet they have not been proven entirely wrong.

“Once again, we are at a time of testing.

“How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.”

I’m grateful for the optimism in Richardson’s title, Democracy Awakening, and hope beyond reason that her optimism is well founded. But, as many have said, hope is not a strategy. Hope by itself is allowing inertia or others take over direction and, ultimately, inertia concedes the battle. Hope needs action and awakening requires effort. That’s where we find ourselves today.

The current assault on our democracy isn’t a sudden event. It was concocted through decades of scheming and incremental undermining of our institutions and our culture to make it possible to take away our rights and FREEDOM. The schemers learned how to inflame Americans to fight against America with false claims unmoored to facts. Nevertheless, the usurpers didn’t just sit with their hope of conquest. They took action and oddly, in that way, they offer us a message, a road map for stopping them, for holding fast to our values and promoting our true American hopes and dreams.

Our task as patriots is to hear the call, that these are, indeed, the times that try men’s and women’s souls. Ours is not to grab “a scythe – a pitchfork – a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” It is to awaken and to stand a post with a voter registration clipboard to register new voters. It is to canvass and make phone calls and send postcards to voters in battleground states, reminding them that their FREEDOM is on the line, that their American dream is at stake, that their children’s future is in peril of collapsing beneath them before they’ve even started. It is to show our people that they and we can win the days to come by standing for the America that Lincoln taught us we are meant to be.

As Richardson makes clear, “How it comes out rests, as it always has, in our own hands.” It’s time for us to put our hands to work, to stand and say to those who would crush our democracy, “No more!” Then we will have put hope to work and we will be worthy of it.

Speaking Of Hope

Photo credit: Al Jazeera

Hey Bibi!

We know that you feel like you can’t make peace in Gaza because there would immediately be an election in the Knesset which will throw you out of office and into court to stand trial. And we know there is validity to wanting to demolish Hamas before it demolishes Israel, as it has promised to do. But you cannot kill an idea.

Really, Bibi, does this little kid look like a threat to you? Or does the bubbe standing behind him? Or any of the people in any of the Al Jezeera photos here?

Shocking truth #1: Regardless of the destruction you rain down on Gaza, Hamas will not surrender. Ever. And they will only release the hostages when they feel they no longer need them. Bombs won’t set the hostages free or protect Israel for more than just a short time.

Shocking truth #2: This is not all about you. You’re not the center of the universe. You’re just a guy bombing helpless people. The world needs you to wake up. Step over to the right side. Call yourself a mensch if it helps you to do so. Regardless, turn off the attacks. You know: like a statesman. Or a mensch.

You liked Ronald Reagan, right? To paraphrase him,

Mr. Netanyahu, tear down your attacks.

______________________________________

* For a glimpse into the world in which Paine wrote his charged missives, read this fine piece on that history by Steve Schmidt.

** The first pamphlet of The American Crisis was, by order of the Commander – Washington – read to his troops at Valley Forge. It provided sufficient inspiration so that shortly thereafter Washington and his little army re-took Trenton.

The final pamphlet of The American Crisis was published on April 19, 1783 on the 8th anniversary of the first shot of the war, the one “heard ’round the world” from Lexington and Concord. I invite you to link through and read Emerson’s short poem out loud. In a surprising and metaphorical way, we today are required to be the embattled farmers standing by that stream.

Today is a good day to be the light

  • _____________________________
  • Our governance and electoral corruption and dysfunction and our ongoing mass murders are all of a piece, all the same problem with the same solution:
  • Fire the bastards!
  • The days are dwindling for us to take action. Get up! Do something to make things better.


  • Did someone forward this post to you? Welcome! Please subscribe – use the simple form above on the right. And pass this along to three others, encouraging them to subscribe, too. (IT’S A FREEBIE!) It’s going to take ALL OF US to get the job done.

    And add your comments below to help us all to be better informed.

    Thanks!

    The Fine Print:

    1. Writings quoted or linked from my posts reflect a point I want to make, at least in part. That does not mean that I endorse or agree with everything in such writings.
    2. There are lots of smart, well-informed people. Sometimes we agree; sometimes we don’t. Search for others’ views and decide for yourself.
    3. Errors in fact, grammar, spelling and punctuation are all embarrassingly mine. Glad to have your corrections.
    4. Responsibility for the content of these posts is unequivocally, totally, unavoidably mine.
    5. Book links to Amazon are provided for reference only. Please purchase your books through your local mom & pop bookstore. Keep them and your town or neighborhood vibrant.

    Click me

    JA


Copyright 2025 by Jack Altschuler
Reproduction and sharing are encouraged, providing proper attribution is given.

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