Questions about a dark figure

 

The tranquility trump has stolen from our lives.

Why is everyone afraid of trump, handling him with kid gloves? He truly is the Teflon® man on whom nothing sticks. It’s beginning to look like even the 91 indictments won’t stick. Right now, I am indignant and furious over the image he posted of a hog-tied President Biden in the bed of a pickup. It is the most disturbing thing I’ve seen in a long time. Contrary to what trump spokesman Stephen Cheung claims, it was not just a pickup going down the road somewhere. It was an image posted by trump on his Truth Social network—and that makes him directly responsible for not only disrespecting the office of U. S. President but for threatening the current occupant. And that, my friends, is illegal, according to the constitution. Why is the country, at least the sane half of it, not up at arms, angrily calling for action? Has trump so blinded us to his violence and outrageous lies that we simply shrug and go on?

Cheung, in a kind of “All’s fair in love and war” aboutism, said that Biden has weaponized the DOJ against trump. We all know that’s not true. President Biden has deliberately distanced himself from any of the litigation involving the former president. If a sitting president did use the DOJ against a political rival, I doubt they would do so with an unbelievable 91 indictments, many of them felony. One or two strong cases should do the trick. trump earned every one of those indictments over a long career of grifting, cheating, and lying for personal gain.

Last night, I saw a clip on FB of a pickup truck with the entire back gate an image of trump—in an orange jumpsuit, clutching prison bars and staring angrily out at the world. For a millisecond, I thought about fair play, and I wished some anti-trump patriot hadn’t sunk so low (I still wish that). But I realized there’s no comparison—the image of Biden threatens unlawful violence, and it was posted by one person to threaten the duly elected president; the image of trump behind bars hopes for justice and Biden had nothing to do with it. In fact, we don’t know whose truck that was on or anything about it, but I assume the trump people haven’t found it yet or they’d be crowing about it.

One thing about this pickup controversy: it shows the power of AI and social media. Frightening.

This morning, Heather Cox Richardson’s perceptive column, Letters from an American, details how trump is conducting shadow foreign policy. He is pulling the strings behind Mike Johnson’s refusal to bring aid to Ukraine to the House, presumably because trump wants to weaken Ukraine to please Putin. The former president also has an “envoy” traveling the world on his behalf, meeting with dictators that trump wants to court because once in office, he intends to ally himself with Putin, Erdogan, and others—and break our alliances with democratic countries. This too is against the law, specified in the constitution. (Read Richardson’s column here for the extent of trump’s treason: (55) April 2, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson )(substack.com)

Last week, trump was under deadline and court to come up with $470-plus million in bond money or foreclosure on some of his property would begin while he appeals his gigantic fraud conviction. We all know what happened—the braggart billionaire couldn’t come up with the cash (no bank trusts him anymore). But the courts gave him grace and lowered the amount drastically. Would that have happened to any other billionaire? I doubt it. Why does he get special treatment? He’s not some saintly figure—he’s been convicted of fraud, he escaped conviction of sexual assault but was convicted of defamation, he was twice impeached, once for trying to blackmail a foreign leader, most of his cohorts have served or are serving prison time—and so much more.

Judge Juan Merchan has extended the boundaries of his gag order after trump threatened him and his daughter. Will the judge enforce that order? Will the threat to President Biden fall under it?

Then there’s the question of trump’s mental health. Is he sane? Is he suffering from progressive dementia as many health professionals claim? Senile? Psychopathic? I have never seen a man so full of anger and hate, so ready to lash out, at the same time he grossly twists facts, lies, and rants and raves—it’s all part of his threatening demeanor. Consider his impulsive behavior, his out-of-control mouth—do we want a man like that leading our country, making decisions about our welfare, negotiating with other countries. Is no one going to demand extensive testing? Are we all going to sit back and shrug and say we can do nothing about it while a severely disturbed (mild interpretation) man gets the nuclear codes again? We lucked out last time, but I have no confidence that we will again.

Where is America? Donald trump is playing America for the fool, and we are letting him do it. Why aren’t we speaking out? The world we leave for our grandchildren is at stake as it’s never been before.

Greg Abbot is wrong about gun control

 

Memorial at the site of the Allen, Tx shooting

Fair warning: this will be political, because I am angry—angry beyond words at Greg Abbott who is johnny-on-the-spot with praise for police and offers of all state support systems after a mass shooting but does nothing to prevent them, angry at the people who are growing numb, shrug their shoulders and say nothing will be done. I cannot believe that we have to live this way, afraid to go to the mall, to a ball game, to a birthday party, for heaven’s sake.

I’m not sure how Abbott has convinced himself guns are not the problem—oh, wait, I know. It’s the campaign money he gets from gun manufacturers and the NRA. After the shooting in Allen this weekend, he was way too quick to say there would be no review of gun laws but a focus on mental health. In a Sunday Fox News interview (yep, take the easy ones, Greg) he explained that the state has been grappling with this for a year now. Grappling has done them no good, because nothing has gotten better since Uvalde.

Mass shootings in Texas began, remember or not, in 1966 with the UT Tower shootings. Here’s a list of those since:

Daingerfield Baptist Church, 1980

Grand Prairie, 1980 (I don’t remember this one)

Luby’s Cafeteria, 1991 (boy do I remember that one)

Fort Worth Wedgwood Baptist Church, 1999 (I was at a meeting in my church wondering about all the sirens)

Fort Hood, 2009 and 2014

Ambush of Dallas police at a protest, 2016

Sutherland Springs Church, 2017

Santa Fe High School, 2018

El Paso WalMart, 2019

Midlan-Odessa shopping enter, 2019

Uvalde, 2022

Cleveland, Texas 2023

Allen shopping mall, 2023

Notice how the frequency increased after 2016? Perhaps because of loosened gun restrictions in the state? Greg Abbott has been governor since 2015. I am not saying, of course, that Abbott caused the shootings, but I am saying someone might look at the connection between loosened gun control and the frequency of shootings: more people had easier access to guns. IF I were Abbott and had that on my record, I would be quick to want to solve it and clear my good name.

Abbott claims focus on mental health is the answer, albeit a long-term answer. My first question is what he means by mental health, which is a catch-all nothing phrase, useful as a sop to the voting pubic. The variety of mental problems in any population is mind boggling. How does he plan to detect them? What programs will he institute? What kind of timeframe does he project? Biggest question of all: if he’s been grappling with mental health in the Texas populace for a year, why did he cut funding for those programs by over $200,000 last year so that Texas is the state with the lowest funding for mental health problems in the country. Greg is talking out of both sides of his mouth.

As for time, we don’t want to wait years for mental health programs to create a healthy population where no citizen wants to kill their neighbors. That’s not going to happen.

I’m willing, even eager to say that most mass shooters have mental health problems. To me, no one in their right mind could gun down countless people, including children, with those merciless weapons. But detecting them before the act is another thing: mental health is a huge net with lots of holes in it. Why and how did the Allen shooter get a weapon, when he had a record of extremism clearly documented online?

In almost all mass shootings, it becomes clear after the event that the shooter should never have had a gun. Texas does have background checks (my mistake, because I thought it didn’t)—a check so superficial that a store clerk completes it while the buyer stands at the counter and waits. And you do have to register with a federal database, probably for ATF. And if you order online, the weapon does not go to you but to a federally licensed store where, presumably, a check is done. Checks at gun shows are to say the least problematic.

It seems obvious that guns in the hands of the wrong people are the problem. An effective solution: ban assault weapons and immediately stop their production by manufacturers. A tall order, but it can be done. It was under Clinton and could be again, although there are millions more assault weapons in the hands of individuals now.

What to do about the weapons already out there? A buyback program would only be minimally effective, but how about a registration program that involved new background checks and heavy fines for failure to comply?

Background checks must be thorough and intense, with a long enough waiting period for a deep check to be done. By contrast I read somewhere that you can now rent an assault weapon for an hour or so—to vent your frustrations, I guess. There are minimal  restrictions.

One small step toward sanity: a bill to raise the purchase age for assault weapons from eighteen to twenty-one was passed out of committee today and will now go to the full Texas House for consideration. It might have stopped the Uvalde shooter but few others.

There is absolutely no reason for any civilian, eighteen, twenty-one, or eighty-five, to own an assault weapon designed to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible. Those weapons are killing our friends and neighbors, our children. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Birthday thoughts

 

The annual birthday picture with Jordan
Lovely birthday dinner tonight--Christians good hamburgers,
Jordan's blue cheese salad, and brownies

Actually, I’ve been thinking a lot about aging, long before my birthday, but today seems like an appropriate time to write about it. It’s no secret: today I turned eighty-four. I won’t say I never expected to live this long, because that would not be the truth. I will say that I am a bit surprised to be here, and no, I don’t feel my age.

When my mom was this age, she began a long, slow decline into dementia, painful for both of us. Maybe because the lovely, happy, laughing woman, always a prioer lady, was replaced by someone I barely knew, I began all those years ago to think about aging, and one very unscientific conclusion I arrived at is that some of us keep our physical health and lose our minds; others keep our minds but the physical body goes to pieces. Mom was generally in good health.

I on the other hand have 500 chronic physical problems—okay, that’s an exaggeration, but if you’d see the pills I take twice a day you might think it comes close to truth. And, as I said to Jordan the other day, it’s always something, often a little something, but an annoyance. The latest if that wearing sleeping shirts and sitting on the leather seats of my walker and desk chair, I took a layer of skin off the back of both thighs. Annoying and painful, plus needing a trip to the doctor, antibiotics, and messy wound dressing.

My mind, on the other hand, seems almost as sharp as ever (my kids might disagree). I’m still writing, still figuring out how to put concepts into words, and loving it. Sure I sometimes open a window on the computer and stare at it, puzzled about what I was going to do, and like all of us I sometimes wander into the kitchen and wonder why I’m there. And I forget names. Jean, who watched her husband disappear into the never-land of Alzheimer’s, tells me if you forget a name but get it back the next day and keep it, that’s okay. If you never get it back, that’s a problem. For some odd reason, the name I can never remember is a celebrity who has no direct effect on my life—historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. There! I did it! I called I up from memory.

I talked to my brother about this the other day. He’s ninety, with a lot of physical problems and not much stamina, but his mind is sharp. He agreed with my unscientific theory (not always the case), and I’m sure he too was thinking of Mom.

Pandemic did a number on me, and I have never gotten over quarantine. I am content in my cottage—going out is fun but a lot of trouble. And like my brother, I have no stamina. I couldn’t walk a city block if I had to. I’m a bit stunned to realize that I can’t do everything by myself and need someone to help me. Specifically, I can’t climb on a stool to get to high shelves nor bend down to the low (I’m afraid I’ll fall out of my walker). But when Jordan refers to herself as my caretaker, I wince a bit. Me? Needing a caretaker? I could survive on my own. I can certainly care for myself and feed myself, but there are many things I can’t do.

I’m the one who voluntarily gave up driving (long story, mostly involving the walker), but it’s sometimes a shock to realize I can’t jump in the car to run an errand but must ask someone to do that for me. And that’s a rub. My caretakers are busy, I am hesitant to ask for fear I’ll push them too far, but then I’m frustrated because the dog really n
eeds to go to the vet or I really need that package mailed. We have our moments of tension in this household, but then, who doesn’t. It’s a delicate balance. I have an occasional pity party—lonely, frustrated by anything from my work to isolation, discouraged—but then again, who doesn’t?

I’m fortunate in so many ways: I have a comfortable, manageable home in the cottage with my dog. I have work that gets me out of bed, albeit a little later all the time, I have friends who come to see me, and I have fun cooking some darn good meals. Eighty-four doesn’t feel bad at all, but then I realize I am so much luckier than many my age.

There’s a huge difference between aging and mortality, and the latter is a subject I’m not yet willing to tackle. Tune in next week—maybe. I will l say that it’s with curiosity as much as fear that I hear time’s winged chariot.

Happy Birthday from
Jordan and Sophie

Breaking the rules

For bloggers, there is one cardinal rule: avoid religion and politics. Tonight I am breaking that rule because those two subjects are what’s on my mind, so closely intertwined that I cannot separate them. As I have often said, my faith dictates my politics. And roughly quoted from Richard Rohr, my faith compels me to speak out.

Our minister’s sermon this morning took as text the words of the angel to Mary, from the Book of Luke: “Be not afraid.” It is so easy in these trouble times to be governed by fear. Indeed, fear is a tool used by others to shape our lives, from the politician’s mouth to the commercial world. We are afraid of change, of wars with which we are continually threated, of climate change which surrounds us, of disease, of immigrants. For heaven’s sake, in this age, I am afraid of traffickers who kidnap innocent teenagers. There is plenty in today’s world to fear.

Perhaps it is because of that fear that the underlying message of Christmas resonates with me particularly this year. Christians have heard all their lives that God’s gift to us of his son brings hope. And in spite of the fearful world we live in, I find that I am filled with hope. I am sure that we are going through our own Dark Ages but will emerge triumphant on the other side. Rohr says that the dark is necessary to the light—we must know fear to recognize hope.

For me, hope has a particular meaning tonight—or target, if you will. I hope for the preservation of our democracy, the defense of our Constitution. For that hope to become a reality, some false gods—read Republicans—are going to have to topple. And it may take every American to make that happen.

As the Congress moves forward with impeachment proceedings, I am baffled by the Republicans and the cult followers who defend Mr. trump. It seems to clear to me that the House Committee, under Adam Schiff, has proven his culpability beyond a doubt. His defenders have no defense so they resort to empty arguments, like ignoring the will of the people who elected trump. As Stephen King points out, he lost the popular vote by some three million and is only president because of the antiquated electoral college, which King likened to a one-mule wagon in an age of jet transport.

Because they have no solid defense, Republicans resort to several empty arguments, among them the accusation that the impeachment proceedings are illegal, a witch hunt, a politically motivated attempt to remove the president. The proceedings, however, are following the dictates of the Constitution and are, far from a witch hunt, a legal proceeding. As someone pointed out this morning, trump is not being impeached because most Americans hate him—he’s being impeached because he has violated his oath of office and abused the power of his office. Whether or not obstruction of justice is part of the final articles of impeachment remains to be seen, but he is also clearly guilty of it. But it is not hate—being booed at a ball game is hate.

If the Senate votes to acquit, as they may well—another thing that boggles my mind—we will have no recourse except the voting booth, and a fervent prayer that the elections are not so corrupted as to sweep trump and his henchmen into office for another term.

Another thing that is not mentioned on either side of the aisle but seems increasingly clear to all who will recognize it: the president’s mental state is rapidly deteriorating, a judgment confirmed by mental health professionals. But that’s a whole other bag of worms.

I guess this is where hope comes in—hope backed by faith and supported by the actions of every American. Time to be proactive.

Forgive me for breaking the rules. I don’t do it often. Usually I am Pollyanna.