Trump Leader of the Free World? Don't Make Me Cry!

Astonishingly, in the last week or so I have heard several commentators refer to Trump as "Leader of the Free World". This would be laughable if it wasn't so sad. But there is no leader of the free world anymore and there hasn't been one since Obama walked out of the White House and the America First Trumpladyte slithered in.

To be sure, George W. Bush did great harm to our standing in the eyes of our fellow democratic allies, but it was still redeemable and that's what they saw hopefully in president Obama's steady hand on the tiller. But now that the American People have shown that they're ignorant enough to elect an ignoramus like Trump once, they know that we're just foolish enough to do it again and even if Biden wins this election, the specter of another selfish Republicon winning will be in the forefront of their thoughts for a generation when it comes to establishing any long-term commitments to the international order in cooperation with the U.S.

And who has stepped into the breach and is playing Trump, Pompeo and the rest of the betrayers of our hard won leadership in the post WWII world? China. It's China that is shaping the international order of the 21st century, not the United States of America. And what is China's primary goal in these efforts? To make the world not only safe for dictators like Xi Jinping, but to make the case that one party dictatorship's like China's are better models of government than democracies like ours and those of our allies.

So don't be foolish enough to think of Trump as the leader of the free world. In fact, if we're collectively naive enough to let him foul the White House for another four years, not only will we never lead the free world again, we won't even be in it!

Please read this very informative article by the great foreign affairs writer Anne Applebaum:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/trump-who-withdrawal-china/616475/

Vos' Legislative Dictatorship

 

Robin Vos has betrayed our Republics, that of Wisconsin and of the United States of America and he must go. In 2011, he and his so-called Republican co-conspirators imposed a legislative dictatorship on the people of Wisconsin for a decade. Through grotesque gerrymandering, Vos has destroyed representative democracy in the Badgered State, inflicting one-party rule Vlad Lenin would have been proud of, that need not heed the will of We the People.

In both 2012 and 2018, the GOP retained a strong grip on both the state legislature and our congressional delegation despite losing the overall vote to Democrats. It’s estimated that in this tightly split purple state, Democrats would need to get at least 57% of our votes to have even a small chance of winning control. Gavel in and out Vos knows this and therefore, feels no need to act for our welfare or be responsive to the will of the electorate.

Founder John Adams said that the representative assembly “should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large”. If the founders had meant for the people to have a say in their representation only every ten years, they would have prescribed that elections be held only once a decade. Through his self-serving and power worshiping authoritarian actions, Vos has broken faith with the people of Wisconsin and the very foundation of our state, our country and our democracy and should be relegated to the trash bin of history. Vote Joel Jacobsen November 3rd!

Echoes of the Election of 1876?

I accept the reality of coincidence, but not of omens. And that's good because I just finished reading the historical novel 1876 by Gore Vidal. It was kind of a slog as the author spent the bulk of the book setting the real social, socialite and political landscape in our centennial year, at the dawn of the gilded age in New York and Washington DC through the daily activities of the fictional protagonists.

I'm glad I finished though, because unbeknownst to me the book culminated in the presidential "election" of 1876, where the totally power hungry and corrupt Grant Administration and his (already no longer Lincoln's) Republicon Party used deceit, falsified returns from swing states and dueling sets of electors to throw the outcome into Congress.

NY Gov. Samuel Tilden won both the popular vote and the electoral college and was the rightful winner. But Republicons in several states submitted alternate returns and then sent alternate sets of electors for the electoral college. An extra-constitutional commission including members of Congress and the Supreme court ultimately handed power to the loser of the election, OH Gov. Rutherfraud B. Hayes.

Totally not an omen, couldn't happen today as we still have two parties with honest actors, integrity, respect for our democratic norms and traditions and strongly committed to our Republic, majority rule and the peaceful transfer of civil power that has been the hallmark of our democracy since George Washington willing stepped down. Yeah, just a coincidence!

Open Letter to the Moronisphere

 

To all you morons out there running around willy nilly, putting yourselves and others at risk in the middle of a global pandemic and crying for getting things back to normal and re-opening the economy, Ain't Gonna Happen! Because you can't do it without us and we're not playin'.

For an economy to grow you need everyone participating to the extent of their abilities. There's a ton of us here, watching your antics, shaking our heads in disgust at your foolhardy selfishness and doing our best to keep ourselves and our circles safe, by limiting potential exposure to the virus and you idiots to extent possible and practical. We're not living in fear, we just refuse to be stupid and selfish.

And you know what? We're keeping our powder dry. We're not going out and spending our money at bars and restaurants or travel or vacations, etc. and we're not going to as long as you chuckleheads keep this nonsense going. Furthermore, the more you morons keep fueling the surge in cases, the more people will see the wisdom of our ways and folly of yours and join us in our prudence, further lowering participation in the economy and extending the downturn.

Here in the once great Republic of Wisconsin, we've become the nation's premier virus breeding zone thanks to you cretins and your so-called "leaders. The Badgered State is now ruled by a Gerrymandered Republicon Legislative Dictatorship that needn't and doesn't give two shits about the will of the people or even our very lives. The Gavel-In-Gavel-Out Authoritarians have taken zero action in the months of this pandemic to stem the tied of spread. They have stymied any prudent actions by the reasonable Governor  and the Department of Health Services to protect the people of the Badgered State, not by taking action themselves, which they could do, but by using their weaselly lawyers & Robed Judicial Hactivists on their Extreme Court. And these sniveling little cowards, afraid to be seen doing the right thing, have been encouraging you idiots to run out and save their economy, while they are in hiding!

But you don't have to keep playing stupid for this futile and deadly losing cause. This pandemic and the economic disaster it's ushered in with the help of the Trumpublicons will not end until there is a vaccine that is effective and administered widely enough to bring the spread under control. The economy will not recover until then and there is no reason for there to be tens of thousands of excess deaths in the meantime because of your antics. Because, like I said, you can't do it without us and we ain't playin'!

Black Lives Matter - Not about your Ancestors, but the Here & Now!

I keep seeing the "I/my ancestors didn't own any slaves and you can’t fix history" argument in response to Black Lives Matter, so I feel like I have to say something because I find it to be a completely bogus and disingenuous line of reasoning.

First of all, while history is important for sure BLM is about what’s happening and keeps happening right now. This sort of “reasoning” also seeks to ignore many of the reasons for the problem of racial injustice we still face today and to falsely absolve people of their responsibility to be part of the solution. It's really not just about what you or I or our families did or didn't do. That's a self-centered perspective.

It IS about what OUR government legally sanctioned in the past, what's still tolerated now and the ongoing problems that persists today because of that history and because of current on-going conditions.

The end of slavery was in 1865, 155 years ago and was followed by the LEGAL Jim Crow era of disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching that sort of, but not really, ended in the 1960s with the civil rights and voting rights act, which was just gutted by the so-called conservative Judicial Hacktivists on the U.S. Extreme Court.

Racism is still alive and well in the brains of too many Americans and the effects of that and 400 years of oppression still strongly impact the lives of every black American alive today through the wealth gap, the achievement/opportunity gap and in the fact that they have to repeatedly have "The Talk" with their children, especially their boys about how to be very careful in public to avoid being abused or killed by police. Which just keeps happening anyway. It's an outrage!

One metric I heard several years ago and which is probably worse now after the great Recession and Covid 19, both of which disproportionately impacted minorities, is the net worth of American women. The average net worth of a white woman is over $40K. For Hispanic women, it's $1 and for black women it's ZERO. That's no accident, that is the result of government policy, OUR government. Through red lining, black were relegated to certain neighborhoods, largely in old parts of inner cities. Because they could not get home equity loans, they had great difficulty upgrading and maintaining their houses, which fell into disrepair and lost value. Covenants went with houses forbidding white owners to sell to blacks. How's that for Freedom? You couldn't sell the house You OWNED to who you wanted to and they couldn’t buy it! Blacks were excluded from social Security when it first came out.

A lot of black soldiers served overseas to defeat fascism in WWII (only to see it rise today at home). And did they get the benefits of the GI Bill? NOPE! While their white fellow veterans got the benefits to go to college and buy houses in suburbs, building inter-generational wealth and the middle class, black Vets weren't eligible. So instead of building equity and taking upwardly mobile jobs, they paid rent to build landlord wealth and took low skill dead end jobs.

One could literally go on and on with examples like this. History isn't past, we live with it every day. The gist is that our government and our society did these things, the adverse effects are on-going and as citizens of a Republic (so far) we are ALL responsible for resolving these injustices. So whatever your ancestors did or didn’t do, you don’t need to feel guilty or absolved. It wouldn’t do a bit of good anyway. What you should do that WILL do good is to stop making excuses, know the history, see the current conditions that have resulted with clear eyes and take responsibility as a citizen of our republic and demand the change that’s need once and for all, so that we can stop this endless cycle of inequality and injustice.

My Dear White Friends

Rosewood Massacre

My dear white friends, yes violence and destruction are egregious, counter-productive and wasteful crimes, no matter who perpetrates them. But if you don't understand why they happen, not just here, not just now, but across the world and throughout history, then you need to get a better grasp on human nature.

And if you think that you would behave differently under the same circumstances with the tables turned, then you need to stop patting yourself on the back and get a better grip on reality.

Furthermore, if you believe that these events are the result of the characteristics of a particular group of humans and not the result of the conditions that they have been subjected to by other humans for 400 years and counting, then you're being extremely foolhardy and exhibiting the flawed "reasoning" of racial prejudice. Then you're part of problem, sowing the very seeds from which this destruction springs.

Tulsa Massacre

Republicons Have Sold Out Our Republic

It’s said that suburbs are named after what they destroy. Today’s Republican Party is rushing toward holding that “distinction” too. This degeneration is no longer about political opinions or ideologies, it’s about values.  The GOP has lost its mind, sold its soul and exposed its depraved values. Their actions and inactions demonstrate that they value only one thing, money/power, flip sides of the same coin and they have thwarted representative democracy, our very Republic, in their morbid quest.

Here in the Badgered State we have laws, written and voted on in secret by far away corporations, and imposed on you by Vos and Fitzgerald without attribution. They’ve passed numerous laws taking away local control. Gross gerrymandering makes majority vote rule meaningless, the Republicans still control the legislature. They suppress voters, betraying the very foundation of our Republic. And they got the judicial hacktivist stacked extreme court to place the economy above our pandemic threatened lives, ruling absurdly that our constitution prohibits our government from protecting its citizens, its first and foremost function. That’s what kangaroos do. They even lame-duck limited the power of our governor when they objected to the choice We the People made.

At the federal level, the GOP has backed every un-American, authoritarian play of a cult figure who embodies the seven deadly sins and exhibits zero counter-balancing virtuous values. Their tax cut for the rich proved they don’t care about debt or deficits. Law & order? Please, he’s surrounded himself with felons, corrupticons and pedophiles and if you’re the president’s pal your pardoned.

The final evidence of this party’s degeneration to golden calf idolatry is their insistence on sacrificing our children on the altar of their moneygod. It’s not about education, it’s about daycare and pandemic prone parents being pressed back into service for fun, profit and Trump’s re-election, the prospect of which represents the final republican nail in the coffin of our republic. I never believed they were really pro-life, but this is proof positive and it begs the question, “Republicans, have you no decency!”

Pandemicized America's Healthcare Bankruptcy

America has the most unaffordable healthcare in the world. It is the #1 reason for bankruptcy in America, affecting over 500,000 families per year.

In the middle of this pandemic Americans are losing their jobs and therefore, their healthcare and getting sick on top of that atrocity. That isn't happening in Non-Shithole Countries. Here in the Badgered State, our so called representatives refused to take the medicaid expansion, costing the state millions and denying Wisconsinites healthcare. So much for "fiscal conservatism" and "pro-life". That didn't happen in Non-Shithole States.

Meanwhile, the Trumpladyte is trying to kill Obamacare, a move that would kick another 20 million American off their healthcare in the middle of a pandemic. USDA Grade A Choice @$$oul.

Decent countries care about their people and provide affordable healthcare to All. You want me to honor the flag? Be THAT Country!

The Looming Homelessness Pandemic

America, where your right to defend your home is enshrined, but your right to have one is not.

We were in a housing crisis Before the Pandemic. 11% of black renters are evicted every year in America, where on average there are 3.6 million eviction cases per year. Now we face the worst economy since the great depression and the moratorium on evictions is about to expire with no meaningful help in sight.

Many millions will soon face evictions in the midst of a sky rocketing pandemic. With not being able pay their existing rent and saddled with an eviction record, the prospect of finding new housing is dim at best for many of these people. Homelessness will surge and you can't social distance in a shelter, which will help the virus to surge, adding to our collective misery.

A decent country would value it's citizen's life, liberty and pursuit of happiness enough to actually fight a pandemic as well as recognize and work towards Everyone's right to decent, affordable and non-segregated shelter from the storm. You want me to Honor the Flag? BE THAT COUNTRY!