The Next Thing

     Well, it is done.  Kavanaugh is confirmed and there is really not a lot we can do right now. So, let’s take some deep breaths and get ready for the next phase, the mid-terms next month. The next big step is to be sure you are registered to vote. You have until Tuesday to be able to vote in this election, so if you aren’t registered, get it done tomorrow. If you are registered check this site to be sure your name has not been purged: https://www.vote.org/am-i-registered-to-vote/ . I check mine weekly to be sure. I am also going to vote early as soon as early voting is opened here.

     Now I’m going to vent a little. Do NOT let the gaslighting get to you. We knew we didn’t have a chance of stopping this, but did we sit on our hands and complain? NO! Well, I did complain, but I was not sitting on my hands. I have been very moved by the way we fought – together- against the GOP, for what we believe in. The protestors have been awesome. Not since this disgusting administration began have any of our protests turned violent, even when outsiders tried. That would have worked against us.

     Senator Grassly was wrong to refer to our protesters as mobs and our protests as mob rule. He was inconvenienced for sure, but our protestors were expressing our very real resistance to what is happening in our government today, and that is absolutely our right. That constitution he and McConnell like to refer to so much gives us that right. They are the party majority, but they represent all of us. The fact is WE are the representatives of the majority of the citizenship. We did no damage. We harmed no one. We made noise and we made our opinions known. That is the way of our country and we want to keep it that way. If they were governing as they should be, they would be listening to us.

     We knew we didn’t like Kavanaugh from the beginning and they knew we wouldn’t too. He doesn’t represent our values. That is usually the way with any Justice appointment. He was selected to cause as much friction between the parties as possible. We obliged. The GOP made it as much worse as possible. They decided the nominee must be rushed through the process, so he can sit on the court when it next convenes, an artificial deadline. They withheld almost all of his paperwork which is not the normal process. What they did provide was not given to the Democratic Senators until a few hours before the hearing was to begin. Completely unheard of.

     He was caught in 30 lies under oath as he testified to the committee. His answers were vague and often misleading or outright deceptive. It left me wondering what they were trying to hide. Their protestations did nothing to allay those feelings. We knew all the republicans were going to vote to confirm him and since the rules had recently been changed, there were not enough Democrats to win the vote. It did not stop our Senators from voicing their objections as was their right.

     And then the letter surfaced.

We do not need to be divided. Diane Feinstein did what she thought she should do, and I stand behind her. She said she didn’t leak it to the media and I believe that. I would really like for all of us to support her, for the strength of the party. I can’t make myself believe that Grassly would have kept it confidential if had seen it. He would immediately have begun to destroy it in all ways he could. It may be that whoever did leak it, did so at the time it was leaked to cause a delay in the process. Maybe not. The process should not have been fast-tracked in the first place.

     I do NOT think the GOP afforded Dr. Blasey-Ford every courtesy they could have. They afforded her what they had to and did it all grudgingly. They complained the entire time and kept the narrative going that the Democrats had disrespected Dr. Blasey-Ford. That is gaslighting. It is not true, and we should all be saying as much as often as need be.

     Then Kavanaugh gave what I think was a rehearsed and orchestrated testimony, designed to highlight his distress and camouflage his guilt behind his righteous indignation. He did not answer questions forthright nor honestly, he  misrepresented the law and was extremely disrespectful to the Democratic Senators who were questioning him. He set the scene for creating himself as the victim. I did not believe him then and I believe him less after all the other information came forward. I did not find him in the least bit credible.  Again, I asked, what is he hiding?

     The republicans’ attempt at respect for Dr. Blasey-Ford fell far short in my opinion, regardless of their repeated claims.  I found McConnell’s wording in his statement to the conservatist group, “We’re going to ram this through,” to be purposefully harsh in light of the national conversation that were on-going on the accusations of rape.

     The FBI investigation was so limited in scope and length as to prevent them from interviewing all the potential witnesses who voluntarily came forward with information that could have corroborated Dr. Blasey-Ford’s memories. Supposedly this was under the orders from the White House. The president denies it. I don’t believe him. What are they hiding?

     As is their way, the republicans try to blame Senator Feinstein and Michael Avenati and the protestors. They have solidified around the narrative that men are now victims, they are in mortal danger of being unjustly accused, trying to swing the sentiment away from victims of rape and sexual aggression. They repeat it. They repeat it several times in every speech or interview. This is the new way. This is gaslighting. This is becoming their reality. It is not. It is not so. It is not true. It is gaslighting. See it. Recognize it. Point it out. Do not let it become normal. This did NOT hinge on her word alone. It hinged on her word and her memories and her examination by her therapist along with all the knowledge that has been amassed by professionals who deal with rape victims on a daily basis. It was more than her word against his. Do NOT let them convince you otherwise.

     So, now we have to focus. We have to concentrate our energy on the up-coming election. Do what you can. Do what you’re good at. Get the message out. We are going to vote. They are going to make it as difficult as possible. Throughout many of the southern states they have closed 45 of 49 polling stations in districts where incomes are low and the population is more black than white. Help these people get to the polls. We have to vote and we have to vote blue or we may never get another election.

Time For A Change

There is much more to the Kavanaugh appointment than what we are focused on at this moment. The things we all know and are trying not to mention are basically that the all-powerful republicans are blackout-drunk with the idea that they can change the Supreme Court into a tool of their own with this appointment and the Democrats are not in favor of that. We can acknowledge this and look at the rest of the situation.

It did not start with Dr. Blasey-Ford. It began with the resignation of Justice Kennedy, whose son had once worked with Jared Kushner, well timed to kick off a rushed nomination so the seat could be filled before the next term. With this goal in mind, the republicans have thrown out all existing rules of order that do not advance their own needs. Of course, they had already changed the rules when President Obama had the nerve to nominate a replacement for Justice Scalia with 14 months left in his term and they threatened to leave the seat open for another four years if Hillary won the election. Fortunately for them, they had the assistance of Vladimire Putin in stealing the election, something they are all still terrified of being proven.

With a majority in the Senate and a vice grip on their party members, they were confident that Kavanaugh would be confirmed on their own terms and their own ramped up schedule. In order to speed up the confirmation hearings, they held back 90% of his papers from the committee, without even trying to hide what they were doing. Why should they? They have a majority and cannot be stopped. More than 40,000 pages were delivered to committee members the evening before the hearings were to begin. Rules of order were ignored when it benefitted the GOP, because they could.

As the president has been quite vocal and very definite about appointing a Justice that will end Roe versus Wade and one that is very lenient on Presidential Privilege and executive pardoning power, no one on the committee was allowed to question him about his personal views on those issues.

In spite of these limitations, Democrats were able to give Kavanaugh room to perjure himself when questioned about his knowledge of communications stolen from the Democrats, producing a communication from Kavanaugh himself who referenced his friend, the mole in the democrat’s offices. All-in-all Kavanaugh was evasive and memory impaired, as he answered to questions from the Democrats amid the shouts from the protestors who made their appearances daily.

Now Christine Blasey-Ford has come forward with the very credible accusation that Kavanaugh aggressively tried to rape her at a party when they were in high school and Senator Grassley is in the unfortunate position of having to recognize this challenge. They have, of course, denied it vigorously, bringing back memories of the Anita Hill hearings when Clarence Thomas was nominated and then became the least qualified Supreme Court Justice to ever be seated on the highest court in the land.

Dr. Ford’s accusation has set off a firestorm of protests from Democrats and from women all over the country. Even though a few of the republican men and many of the women originally expressed their feelings that it would be tragic to seat a person who had attempted rape, the party quickly got them back in line and their empathy and consciences were suppressed and replaced with outrage at the attack on Kavanaugh’s sterling reputation.

The party’s transparently anemic attempts to accommodate Dr. Ford’s testimony has shone a spotlight on the Good Old Boy tactics known so well to so many of the gray haired, old, white men who will be questioning Dr. Ford next week. Even though she has taken a lie detector test and is willing to share the results, Kavanaugh sees no need to do the same. The same Senator who applauded the request to reopen Clarence Thomas’s background check have refused to request that Kavanaugh’s be reopened. They will not subpoena Kavanaugh’s friend who Ford says was in the room when the event happened (he has written quite a bit about the blackout drinking he and Kavanaugh did back in those days, but doesn’t want to testify). They will not allow Ford to bring her own witnesses who will attest to her statements at the time of the alleged attack. They still intend to confirm Kavanaugh regardless of her testimony on Thursday of next week.

The twitter president managed to stay silent until last night and this morning when he expressed his doubts about her truthfulness, much like he has denied the 19 known accusations against himself. 

This is a travesty of the highest order and should be condemned by every woman in this country! It is time to put this king of misogyny away for good. Victims of sexual aggression, both male and female, report a small percentage of these crimes and the reason for that is just what we are watching today. These victims are revictimized again and again when they come forward, not only by having to publicly relive the assault, but because the process itself is tantamount to an assault.

This committee hearing setting raises the ante even more. There is not even a pretense of looking for the truth. All the republicans want to do is to demoralize her and confirm him, regardless of his lack of integrity. Alas, I find a deplorable lack of integrity in the republican leadership altogether. If they push this confirmation through without a proper hearing after a thorough investigation, they should all lose their seats, starting with those in jeopardy in November. Ladies vote them out!

This Is Not Normal

In quick succession over the past two weeks we have been hit with Omarosa’s tell-all book, “Unhinged” followed by excerpts from Bob Woodward’s book “Fear,” and then the New York Time op-ed. All of these as well as Michael Wolf’s “Fire and Fury” paint a disturbing picture of what goes on in today’s White House. 

That, of course has unleashed volumes of denials, confirmations, accusations and presidential tweets.

The fact is, there is nothing in any of those writings that we haven’t heard or read or even suspected before, except for the admission that there are people who watch over our president and sometimes intervene before he does something disastrous. We knew that too. That doesn’t make it less frightening.

I am glad Gary Cohn was there to take that paper off the president’s desk that would have removed us from the trade agreement with South Korea or the one pertaining to the trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.  I am glad that one of the generals looks things over and stops the actions that will start World War III or nixes the plan to assassinate Hassad. I am glad that dozens of other things have been stopped. But terror is a cold splash in my face as I wonder what has not been derailed that we aren’t aware of, because I do not believe anyone is telling us the whole truth. We get surprises far too often for comfort.

I want to know which people thought it would be a good thing to separate children from parents seeking asylum in the US and deport the parents to “send a message” to other asylum seekers. This was not oversight or a failure to prepare as we originally thought. This was purposeful and cruel and creates a list of problems and questions. Why would they want to take in thousands of unaccompanied minors to become wards of the State, to be cared for at government expense,indefinitely, instead allowing the parents the opportunity to work and contribute to their support while their claims are reviewed? Who benefits from this?

I wonder if there is one cabal or multiple cabals that work concurrently. Might they eventually become competitive or even confrontational and turn into something far different?

This is not normal. This is not good. This is not right.

Even more chilling is the knowledge of the reason these people feel it is necessary to manipulate the president. “He has attention deficit,” someone says. He can’t stay focused on a report, a meeting, a problem or a discussion for more than a few minutes. He has the capabilities of a 5^th grader. He operates entirely on impulse and can forget within a day or two, what was important to him two days earlier. Or, I would assume, what might be important to the running of this country. He is incapable of making good decisions, based on history and facts.

This seems extremely dangerous to me. He has been given great power and he is without the tempering qualities we usually expect from other people. If he is an intellectual 5^th grader, he is an emotional toddler, completely lacking the social filters of empathy and integrity. Whether he is trying to deliver a message of sympathy or get around the rules and regulations in place to safeguard the ethics of his office, he blunders, without a hint of understanding. He uses the justice system, his presidential powers and even the military to exact retribution for real or imagined slights from others and to reward his supporters.

We already know that trump cannot tell the truth, maybe can’t even identify the truth. When he lies, whether it is by mistake, exaggeration, lack of research or on purpose, it becomes part of the job descriptions of the entire staff to double down on that misinformation or explain it away in the most unbelievable fashion. I know this, regardless of what his followers and his lackeys say, because I watch most of the press conferences and most of his speeches, in-spite-of how painful it is, so I will know if a reporter is taking a sentence out of context and creating an entirely incorrect narrative. They are not. They don’t have to. Spokesman Matt Schlap suggests the solution is simply to not fact check him on anything.  I disagree.

I know the travel ban that wasn’t a ban, that was enacted without a plan or preparation, was a ban on Muslims. I know this because he (Donald J. Trump) announced on national TV that he was going to stop all Muslims from entering this country until he could figure out what’s going on. You remember, that don’t you? So, it doesn’t really matter how many times he had the order written and rewritten to include countries with different cultures and religions. We heard what he intended to do, and he tried to do it. That is truth.

I know that he has selected his picks for Federal Judges and Justices because they favor overturning Roe vs Wade and because they support big business needs over the needs of the individual. We don’t have to ask the nominees because Trump has already told us. As an added balm to our irritation, they each tell us they are not planning to do either one. Why would they have to do this if the threat were not real?

I know how he feels about Hispanics, because he told us first thing what he thinks of them, not that he’s really all that sure exactly which nationalities are Hispanic.  We know he is racists, because we hear him make racist remarks or rude remarks to and about people with brown or black skin. He was sued for racial discrimination when he and his father would not rent an apartment to a black woman. He equates brown skinned people defending themselves from white people, with white people committing unprovoked violence on people with brown skin. It isn’t the same.

I know he has an unnatural need to please Vladimir Putin, because he cannot ever, under any circumstances, condemn Putin’s actions or words, even when they are contradicted by our own intelligence and the intelligence of our allies. I know because of the lilt in his voice when he makes those senseless statements.

I know he is a liar, because I listen to what he says. I listen to his correction or lack of one. I fact check the fact checkers. I do my research and I pay attention to what is happening each day and I know when he lies. 

I then watch the press conferences and hear the press secretary compound his lies.

Even when he puts his words in writing and tweets them out, the staff ends up having to try and disclaim them. That’s not what he said. We are spinning his words to mean something different.  He really meant to say … something else. Those too are lies. Those especially, are lies, because they are constructed out of the need to disguise the truth we all hear. They are designed to make us believe we don’t hear or see what we just heard and saw. This is gaslighting.

This is not normal.

He was not prepared for the demands of this office. He has surrounded himself with others who were/are equally unprepared and unknowing. He rejected most the experienced people and let them go. He does not understand the difference between running the government and running a corporation or a money laundering scam. His objective has never been to take care of the country. It has always been to benefit himself first and his family next and his current allies third.

I have great fear about how he handles crises. The fact that he refuses to even acknowledge the actual facts about an event and will not learn from his mistakes will not make us a better nation. It can be deadly. Will he declare war, invade a country based on what he hears on FOX/News? What will happen if Russia attacks us or one of our allies? Well we have seen what happened with the attacks on the election processes all over the world. Nothing of significance. How will he handle the storms on the East Coast? Will he declare an emergency only for the states that support him and his party? Will we have other Puerto Rico’s to work through?

I have not forgotten Steve Bannon announcing to the Republican Convention that the plan is to deconstruct the current Republican party and then the government. Are we going to just sit quietly and allow it to be done?

I consider us to be in a very dangerous place right now. We don’t have an effective leader and we aren’t sure who is guiding him or what their focus is. We cannot believe what the president says or the official word from the White House. We can’t trust that the best thing for the country is being done and we can’t feel that we are being protected from our enemies.

A lie is a lie. Reality is not what he tells us. Now that Manafort is talking to Mueller and trump has much to worry about, he is not tweeting. Does this mean he is being contained, some way? How? What if he slips away from whoever his keeper is today? 

This is not normal. This is not okay.

Have You Been Conned?

     The so-called president of the United States is a bigot, a many faceted bigot. One of those facets is racism.  Make no mistake about it, he is a racist. He was raised by a Nazi sympathizer and a racist to be a racist. He has a long record of discrimination toward people of color among other things. It is part of his belief that he is superior to everyone else.

     He is also a con-man. He wants you to think he is what he is not, so he cons you.  He tells you he has made a lot of money. He has not. He has taken a lot of money from others and used it as if it was his. He is a con-man. He wants you to think he is a good businessman so he tells you he is. He is not. Almost every business he has been involved with has gone bankrupt. He is a con-man.

     If he wanted your vote, he spoke to you in your vernacular, saying what you wanted to hear.  White supremacists knew he was racists, but many others did not. They wanted to hear that he was in their corner. He is a con-man. I don’t think everyone who voted for him is racists, but if you are supporting him now, you need to re-evaluate. Con-men are liars, expansive liars. He is a liar and he has surrounded himself with liars to perpetuate the lies he tells us daily

     We can all probably agree that we need to revisit our immigration policies. We should do that on a regular basis to keep abreast of changing needs on our side as well as needs on all the other sides. But it is not good for any side, except the white supremacists, to base our policies on race alone. Ideally, immigration should benefit everyone.

      If disadvantaged people can come here for solace and assistance, they can learn and give back to our community and perhaps take their education and reinvest it in their own country. That doesn’t diminish our land. That doesn’t diminish us. It provides us with an alliance.

      The policies he and his confederates have put forward for immigration reform are transparently racially biased. Their explanations of the policies are and have been thinly disguised to staunch the flow of people with dark into this country. Read the mandates of the white supremacists. You can find them on-line, because they are now so emboldened they don’t try to blend in anymore.

     The president is so ingenuous as to periodically forget himself and blurt out a truth about his feelings toward the races. He then, simply denies it and has his staff deny it and distract from it. He doesn’t even worry about it because he know his real base wants him to be racist. So if you are still supporting him, I suggest you take another look. If you aren’t a racist and you support a racist, you might have been conned.

What Would Your Grandmother Say?

In many instances, the best lessons are passed down from generation to generation. That is especially true when talking about interacting with others. What would your grandmother say? I have invoked this question in meetings where we were trying to decide how to modify or improve our product. It is surprising how many grown men would, after the shock wore off, say the same thing.

Right now congress is wrestling with a major tax reform bill and they are rushing to get it done before the end of the year, without Democrat support, and in spite of the possibility of causing great harm to a majority of the citizens for which they work.  What would your grandmother say? Mine would say, “If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.”

There is probably not a person in the country who does not think the deficit should be reduced and step number one is to stop spending more than we take in. Right there is a point on which we can all agree. Right now, we are working with a skewed system. It is not balanced, and it appears that fairness is not even on the table.

This tax bill that has been designed to reward the largest donors to the republican party is enormously unpopular with the majority of the population. It has been rushed. It has not been adequately vetted and there are a large number of economists with impeccable reputations that say it will inflate the deficit and hurt the economy.

It is the desperate measure, thrown down by a desperate legislature that has completely lost the ability to work across the aisle. They no longer even pretend to try. They think they can’t accomplish anything unless they hold all the cards and they can accept no evidence that does not support their pre-conceived idea.

This bill should have been built by a committee of equal numbers of Democrats and republicans. It should have included input from economists, historians, and experts from a large range of business and financial institutions. It should take enough time to evaluate the information available and it should have as its aim, what is best for the country. The country is comprised of all of us, not some of us, not a few of us, not just the wealthy.

This bill needs to be tabled and begun again with a different end-goal. Kill it now before it destroys our economy, our healthcare system and the very democracy on which we depend.

Thank You Alabama

I want to say a big “Thank You” to Alabama for showing up at the polls last night. This is a huge victory for us, and by “us” I mean many different things. Politically speaking, I believe we need more than one strong party and I really think we would function better as a nation with three strong, hard-working, reliable parties committed to the good of the country. We are diverse. We have different perspectives. We need input from and action for us all. For that reason, it has distressed me to watch the decline of the Republican Party and the weakening of the Democratic Party.

It has stressed the very fabric of our nation and tried our democracy as nothing before has. This was painfully obvious when our president insisted on stating his position on the election in Alabama. “We can’t have another liberal Democrat in the Senate,” he stated. At this time, Republicans still have a majority in the Senate, the House, a Republican President and they are quickly populating the courts with conservative judges.

This blocks the checks and balances that have made this government work for us in the past. And still he would rather stack that deck higher, even at the expense of seating a Senator that is accused of heinous actions, that has twice been removed from the Alabama Supreme Court for refusing to follow the laws he swore to uphold. He would rather have seated a man unfit for the office who is a republican, than to have to work through legislation, letting the process play out as it was designed to. That is against the fundamental workings of the government and is a danger to democracy itself.

We need representation of the people (you and me) that works for all of us. Right now, big money is in control and “the people” are suffering because the reigning party has too much control and their agenda favors big money over a strong and vibrant population. The victory for Democrats in Alabama added to the other recent victories around the country is a step in the right direction.

It is also a victory for the values of the citizens of this country. Donald Trump’s presidential campaign completely destroyed any semblance decency as he mowed everyone out of his way. Lies have now become the normal conversation of every day. Russia interfered with the election more aggressively than ever before and employed mind bending tactics that influenced voters and clouded the issues, so that no one had a clear view of what was happening. I don’t believe the majority of our citizens are horrid, bigoted and hate-filled. I do believe that many are struggling and fearful and many of those have been targeted for exploitation and that this swayed their votes. These very people are going to be devastated by the current Republican agenda.

The people that voted for Roy Moore did not vote for him because he is accused of mishandling young girls, but they did vote for him in spite of it and this is distressing. Quite frankly, it is not surprising. It has been accepted for a very long time that women and girls are held to a different standard from men and boys. Not anymore. This is a victory for those of who value respect for and from others around us. Regardless of our political views, our religious beliefs, our sex and sexual orientation, our culture or the color of our skin, our economic strata, our mental or physical health state, we have the right to be treated with respect in this country.

We have the right to expect the truth from our representatives. We have the right to be recognized as equal in our needs and our opinions. We have the right to vote and to have our vote count. We have the right to know what is happening in our government, local, state and federal. We have the right to feel safe with our representatives.

This was a victory for women and women’s rights and a victory for the resisters of the Republican agenda. We have fought hard for a year against an administration that is admittedly trying to dissemble our government process and destroy democracy. We have fought against legislation that will cause harm and hardship for our citizens. We have fought against discriminatory practices that harm our friends and neighbors. We have fought to keep America robust, vital, welcoming and strong. This victory belongs to all of us.

So, thank you, Alabama for not giving in and giving up. Thank you to the Republicans who have made some difficult decisions in the past few months and done the right thing. We may have differing opinions and differing views, but as long as we ALL work FOR the good of the country, we will be able to work together. Carry on.

November 29, 2017

Yesterday evening, I answered the phone to hear a robo message from the city. It was dark already, there were no weather alerts and for the first time since I was in elementary school in the 50s, my breath froze in my chest, as I waited for the warning. Were we about to be hit with a nuclear attack? For the first time in more than 60 years, I knew that it was a possibility. North Korea proved yesterday they have the ability to put an armed missile on the continental United States.

We don’t have air raid sirens here. We have tornado sirens, but they are different. Tornados are savage and can wreck anything in their path, but they cannot destroy the earth and leave it barren and uninhabitable. We can clean up and pick up the pieces after a tornado. We can’t do that after a nuclear attack.

Yesterday evening the warning was to alert us to a burn ban in our county. I could breathe again, share the warning and go to sleep last night. But it is different now. I will never receive another message from our city warning system without feeling the clench of fear that there may not be a tomorrow.