I’ve never shared an entry from my personal diary before, but today I got up and read the newspaper and discovered:
On November 8, 1923, Adolf Hitler launched his first attempt at seizing power in Germany with a failed coup in Munich that came to be known as the “Beer-Hall Putsch” (AP).
Beer Hall Putsch. Photo credit, History.com
In 2016, Republican Donald Trump was elected America’s 45th president, defeating Democrat Hillary Clinton in an astonishing victory for a celebrity businessman and political novice. Republicans kept their majorities in the Senate and House (AP).
And now this sad Trumple-Thin-Skin, a dictator-wannabe with a failed coup attempt of his own under an extra-large belt is now throwing a third hat into the ring after losing his first two elections by a combined eleven million votes in order to avoid further prosecution, claiming such a step toward justice would be purely “political”.
If you look at the situation democratically, the writing’s on the wall.
One year ago: A U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection issued subpoenas to six more associates of former President Donald Trump who were involved in his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election (AP).
AP PHOTO / JOSE LUIS MAGANA
Diary Entry / 8 November 22
Election Day. Full moon. The fate of our nation will be determined today.
That’s been said many times in the past. But today, it’s especially true.
"The risk is that an election denier serving as a state official could try to manipulate the results in 2024 so that their preferred candidate wins — even if they don't receive the most votes," said States United Action head Joanna Lydgate (MSN).
This is the second nail in democracy’s coffin. When the Supreme Court voted in 2015 to allow corporations, foreign or domestic, to pour unlimited funds into any politician’s campaign chest, well.
The corpse began to stiffen.
In a written statement, President Obama said the high court had "given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics." He called it a "major victory" for Wall Street, health insurance companies and other interests which would diminish the influence of Americans who give small donations (Fox News)
If the Republicans carry the House of Representatives today and begin to lionize integrity and brain-challenged folks like Jim Jordan, Rosemary Taylor-Greene, and Lauren Bobert, well.
The Fourth Reich is well underway.
Poking a stick into your wife’s womb and overthrowing elections are just the warm-ups.
A few years later these immigrants didn’t want to work so hard — and they loved the cash that free labor cotton raked in — so they enslaved 10.7 million fellow human beings. A team of these slaves built the White House and Capitol building under the immigrants’ lash.
Now they are upset because a few of the slaves’ offspring act like animals.
Lately, these immigrants are slithering into public schools and mutilating school children they fear will one-day act as if they were animals and outnumber them.
Fast forward to today.
White supremacists — the seed of these same immigrants who sucked down the generous natives’ food supply, enslaved fellow humans, and now slaughter school children — nearly finished the job by stabbing Capitol policemen in their heads with American flag poles and grinding democracy into the dirt with a gigantic Big Lie.
Mission almost accomplished.
Only one more insurrection and white supremacists will be free to build chimneys and eliminate all those who believe the sky is blue and water is wet.
Only one more insurrection to go and we’re all in immigrant cockroach autocratic anti-Christ heaven.
Where immigrant cockroaches have nothing left to fear, nothing left to hate, nothing left to shoot, no one left to slaughter, no one left to beat, and nothing left to eat. Except:
Have you ever noticed how everything is political now? Even Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head. So let’s focus on what’s important! Plastic! Tater heads!
Dee Dee Ramone Potato Head bt Nacho Tamez and Leo Kambayashi of Media Bullys
Mr. Tater Head.
He’s in the news.
Mr. Tater Head.Mrs. Tater Head
She’s political.
Mrs. Tater Head.Doesn’t matter
How many died
Of the Covid.It’s Mr. Tater Head.
He’s the Man.
He’s political.So let's focus
On what’s important:
Plastic Tater Heads.Mr. Tater Head.
Lost his sex.
He’s a eunuch now. Mrs. Tater Head
Lost all her parts.
She is barren now.Baby Taters
Come from somewhere.
From the plastic patch?Mr. Tater Head.
He’s lost his sex.
He’s a eunuch now. So let's focus
On what’s important:
Plastic Tater Heads.
Where are we now?Where has America gone?Where are we now?Is this the swan song?Where have the morals gone?Taught from above?Where are the morals now?Where are truth and love?Where are the Christians now?Since lies are King?Where are the Christians now?Does money mean everything?Where are the brains now?That death and ignorance reign?Where are the brains now?They took the chump train.They took the chump train.
They took the chump train.
They took the chump train.
Like many of you, I spent the morning chatting with friends around the nation, self-secluded folks holding their friends’ welfare in their hearts as the latest plague descends.
Life-long friends in Nevada. Colorado. Minnesota. Illinois. And they’re all saying the same things:
This pandemic will change the way we live going forward.
My buddy in Reno is a medical doctor (psychiatry) and believes we are a virus, ourselves. This is not a new idea:
I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals.
Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not.
You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus.
Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet.
You’re a plague.
-- Agent Smith (Matrix, 1999)
During our conversation, it occurred to me that humans have taught this viral concept to their offspring throughout the ages:
Unsurprising, if God is truly Omnipotent. One of our Methodist ministers over the years, Larry Owsley, tells this wonderful story.
He’s a pretty bright guy, and was an advanced reader for his age when he climbed up into his grandmother’s lap and asked:
Can God do anything?
Oh yes, he can do anything, she said.
Can God seed the universe using comets containing DNA particles?
Her face turned red. She thought for a moment. Then said:
No, he certainly cannot do that!
My wife and I have avoided the fray, but we’ve heard about runs on toilet paper, guns, and especially ammunition. Do you think all our bullets are produced in the U.S.? That would be a logical assumption, but it’s a global business.
Send Lawyers Guns and Money …
The mayor of Champaign, Illinois recently signed an executive order banning alcohol and gun sales.
Back when Obama was first elected, I happened to be in a gun/vacuum-cleaner store — customers called it The Suck and Shoot — and the owner, a short fat man, climbed up on the counter and screamed: “Get your guns now! This bastard is taking your guns! Better get your guns now!”
I live in East Tennessee, and that wasn’t surprising. Having grown up in the Midwestern gun culture myself, I was not alarmed to see racks of machine-guns (semi-autos easily reconfigured) lining Mahoney’s Outfitters when I first moved to town. Dan Mahoney, an Irish tenor with a beautiful voice, has soloed in our church choir for decades. He doesn’t have to stand on the counter and scream.
Whether we buy into the idea that humans are a virus or not doesn’t matter.
What matters is how we react to the situation.
Call your friends. Call your loved ones. Call the elderly in your church, parish, synagogue, or mosque. Let them know you are thinking of them, that you care.
My friends in Colorado and Nevada have millennial children nearly the same age as my own. We know their characters. This is their chance to shine, and we know how they’ll act.
There are a lot of good eggs in that petri dish.
Let’s pray they outnumber the grabbers, grifters, and scoundrels always emerging from the viral slime in troubled times.
People would laugh and throw disgusting objects at you for inserting blatant — although natural — irony into fiction.
The Republican Plan
Trash talkersblocked every good thing President Obama tried to do for eight years, and beyond, regardless of how their obstruction negatively impacted the poor, the sick, the disenfranchised.
***
Obama picked Janet Yellen to lead the nation out of the an economic depression caused primarily by greed, which the present Orange Tweeter drinks with a ladle.
Regulations continue to die by the handfuls as we drive the economy right back into the 2008 hole hedge fund managers drove us into, a hole now ready for a second suck since we’ve already forgotten the purpose those regulations had in the first place.
Janet Yellen, first female federal reserve director and the leader of the rebound, lost her title to a Trump appointee despite the fact that previous presidents — who exhibited realpatriotism — retained successful federal reserve chairman regardless of party. She’s declining her seat on the reserve now that a sacred white male wears the crown. If it ain’t broke, Trump’s bound to fix it.
Trash talkers assailed Michele Obama because she’s healthy and eats well, yanking veggies from school cafeterias in a fit of misplaced revenge — who needs health care? — while their corpulent spawn returned to the trough, happily sucking pizza and inhaling grease to their diseased hearts’ content. At least they can’t talk trash with their mouths full.
The Plan
Trash talkers so lazy and greedy they couldn’t drive to their fabulous oaisis, paying Amtrak to haul their sorry butts over to the Greenbrier, lying just a day’s drive from Washington, all transportation and lavish opulence foisted onto the backs of Everyman tax payers.
— from the Greenbrier website
Enter trash truck.
Note: it was nice to see Republican office holders attempting to revive (unionized?) trash truck employees forking over payroll taxes for fully-subsidized Congressional health care and luxury trips.
This writer salutes all manual laborers across America run over by the government train in uncountable ways each and every day, just as I mourn those lost in the tragedy.
Which is one more reason this monstrous irony requires a spotlight.
***
You have to hand it to the Grand Old Popinjays.
They’re organized.
Democrats remain rudderless because they lack a true leader.
Democratic Congressmen make “suggestions.”
Here's how weak Democrats are at the root level: one of the first things President Obama did after his inauguration was speak to all the school children of America. At the time I taught black and Hispanic high schoolers, so I projected the speech on the big screen and said when it was over:
"I know it's not a level playing field yet, but this has to be encouraging."
After a short pause, one of the black males in the back yelled in reply:
"He ain't black!"
Say what?
***
The reason Republicans dominate? They have a simple plan and they are entirely unified around it.
Destroy anything Obama ever did.
(Regardless of the needs of fellow citizens).
It’s something small, and completely contrary to their own perception of patriotism, but at least it’s a semblance of organization, a mighty weapon in the face of none.
Our current health care mess is more a political debacle than a substantial challenge to the intellect when it comes to solvency.
Morally?
We can do better by providing excellent health care to allAmericans while lowering the overall cost, though it may slightly burden the wealthy and middle-class folks in order to reach the prize of truly affordable health care for all.
In the 90’s I taught at a local community college and one of my students – who was abused as a child and neither fully-supported nor fully-educated – struggled her entire life with health issues, racking up hundreds of thousands of tax-payer-swallowed medical bills over the course of her too-short life.
Multiply this situation by millions – many citizens are now hooked on opiates – and one can see how this particular demographic could force a single-payer Medicare expansion into near-future reality.
While I was researching this article, it was obvious that
the “facts” coming from sites linked – in one way or another – to private insurance companies were quite different from those emanating from neutral sources.
The insurance-linked information sites apprised the cost at $32 trillion while the neutral sites announced it would actually lower costs. The truth often lies at the midpoint, a hefty sum indeed. But our current direction, and the soon-to-be-announced Obamacare Lite are simply untenable.
Limiting Congressional health-care benefits to their own
plan for the rest of us would be a start. But don’t expect a sitting Congressman to write that bill. And now Republicans are replicating the major mistake Obama committed in his first term, which was to push a secret backroom inviable bill into law while briefly holding the majority and babbling they’d better pass it first so “you can see what’s in it” later.
Hello?
Fast forward to today and it turns out that the ACA is actually a step above what the current Trumpcare plan offers the truly needy, a plan that boils down to “the rich get richer”.
Imagine that.
An alternate path – leading away from the debacle of Obamacare/ Trumpcare – is fairly simple and workable: expand Medicare using a single payer plan while dropping Medicaid altogether.
“So what is single-payer health care? Essentially it involves expanding the present Medicare system to cover everyone and eliminating private insurance (with the claimed accompanying savings of hundreds of billions of dollars).
"Additional features would include the absence of means testing, no concern for pre-existing conditions, the restoration of independent doctors and hospitals who negotiate with Medicare and would be chosen freely by consumers and one public agency processing and paying bills.
“Because it would be unneeded with this system in place, the present Medicaid program for the indigent and its associated administrative costs would be eliminated. Proponents suggest that costs could be contained and quality maintained through more efficient review by the single insurer. Costs would be financed through a progressive income tax.”
Sounds good, aye? Well, unless you’re a millionaire and break in to a cold sweat at the clause “costs would be financed through a progressive income tax”.
Like me, you’re probably reading between the lines here.When “eliminating private insurance” pops out, one’s mind – if the slightest bit of pragmatism is embedded there – questions the odds of cash actually drying up in the UnitedHealth, Kaiser, Humana, Aetna, and Cigna Rivers.
“In the 2012 election cycle, the insurance industry contributed a record $58.7 million to federal parties and candidates as well as outside spending groups. Of the nearly $55 million that went to parties and candidates, 68 percent went to Republicans, who have long been the recipients of most of this category's giving.”
Imagine that.
Admittedly, private insurance companies may suffer at first with a single-payer plan, but people with cash would buy supplemental insurance beyond Medicare basics and sustain the industry; jobs would shift to government positions aimed at administrating the new system and would therefore mitigate unemployment.
With the GOP in power, we’ll likely get Obamacare Light if they can scrape up the Senate votes, which fattens the coffers of the already-wealthy while neglecting the truly needy.
However, the worm may turn in 2018, and if a new Congress actually functions, we’ll be able to bring down costs and increase quality with a single-payer Medicare expansion while simultaneously closing the income gap.
A moral victory, indeed, if we hang tough and remain vigilant a few months while champagne flows from above and the neglected search for cake in the green dumpster marked US HEALTHCARE.
The polarization of America continues at a rapid pace, but we weren’t always at each other’s throats.
Following WWII, soldiers of both political parties returned home to marry, buy homes, spawn babies, and pursue careers. My great uncle William Plum grew up dirt poor in Minnesota where his large family regularly snared deer and headshot rabbits to survive the Great Depression before losing their farm.
Uncle Bill joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, reached officer status, and returned to take advantage of the G.I. Bill and earned a Ph.D. in physics – at the University of Missouri – before joining the fledgling NASA program. Showing promise, he was assigned to the team building the lunar rover. Here’s a picture of Astronaut Charles Duke standing next to Plum Crater with the lunar rover and earth in the background.
Plum Crater
I have no idea of Uncle Bill’s political leanings. It doesn’t matter; we’re proud of him.
***
Soldiers returning from battle worked together and built America into the greatest nation in history.
They socialized, drank, attended church together, and cared for each other’s families.
There were setbacks (The Cold War, McCarthyism), but centrist America held firm.
Soldiers covered each other’s six during the war; they realized the value of compromise.
Republicans backed LBJ and pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1965 into law despite little help from the Democrats, who later voted in large numbers for George Wallace, though he represented the American Independent Party. Reagan Democrats shoehorned The Gipper into the Oval Office.
Fast forward to 2017.
Congress is totally dysfunctional – each side refusing to employ compromise and address the growing needs of its representative constituency – while the majority of voters remain solidly in the middle, holding fast to traditional values.
The far right / far left have morphed into close-minded self-aggrandized (nearly) identical twins of dysfunction … forming a virtual rope of the proverbial dog’s tail, now shaking the whole animal into paralysis.
These combined extremes embody The Two-Tailed American Taliban.
I can already hear the bitching: Lee led the pro-slavery South!
True.
But here are other facts about Robert E. Lee you may not know.
First, he was offered the Generalship of the Army of the Potomac by Abraham Lincoln because he was a faithful Federal officer, the best in the land.
After wringing his hands for a few days, Lee concluded he could not destroy his native state. Then he worked his way up to leadership of The Army of Virginia with brains and audacity on the field. He treated everyone – black and white alike – with respect. There is a case to be made that Lee was to Davis what Rommel was to Hitler.
Secondly, he exhibited grace and forgiveness after the war. “Before and during the War Between the States I was a Virginian. After the war I became an American“.
Richmond’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was the only religious institution left standing in the Capital of the Confederacy following the national conflagration. One Sunday at the beginning of peace, Lee sat in the pews at the end of a service, waiting for communion.
At that moment the large double doors flung open and a black vagrant appeared in the portal. When the man walked to the front and kneeled at the altar, an audible gasp filled the room.
He stood up, let his reputation be damned, walked to the altar, knelt, then prayed beside the freed Negro shoulder-to-shoulder, announcing to the world its need for grace and forgiveness.
This is the man whose statue needs to be ripped asunder?
Never-mind the descendents of 600,000 Union soldiers who fought to end slavery. My relatives Michael and Jonathan Batdorf from Neponset, Illinois ended up in Andersonville after their capture at the battle of Lookout Mountain. Michael’s grave marker is #4618. Thirty-thousand-one-hundred-ninety-two Union soldiers died inside Confederate prisons during the war.
They don’t count.
Similarly, far-right-wing-alt-conservative-nationalists don blinders.
For example, our local state representative panders to Bible thumpers and gun enthusiasts. The remainder of his constituents count for nothing.
Micah Van Huss’s idea of legislation is allowing parents to carry guns to soccer games, defunding diversity grants, establishing the Bible as the Official State Book, granting college students the right to pull pistols on campus, and allowing the ownership of pet skunks.
Furthermore, modern American far-right-wingers want to eradicate public education, ignore climate change, openly grab women’s genitals and toss pregnant women back into back alley coat hanger abortions.
They want to send hard-working tax-paying Catholic conservative Hispanics back to Mexico after dumping American corn on their market, stealing their agricultural livelihood, and forcing them to migrate to keep their families alive.
Modern far right-wingers want to imprison millions – mostly black males – for using street drugs … while simultaneously chomping opiates … and renaming the WAR ON DRUGS … now that it’s a white problem … “a terrible disease”.
Therefore it is incumbent upon the majority – those of us still banking on commonsense and unity of purpose – to ignore this vicious intertwined tail, bob it, or outvote it.
Voting in large numbers — and bringing our majority to bear — is the only practical choice.
Extremists of both colors appear deaf to fact and blind to logic and run almost entirely on emotion and news slanted to their personal preference.
The majority of sensible Americans retaining principled integrity and common purpose cannot afford one more election thrown to either extremity of the Two-Tailed American Taliban.
Voting is a chore, but it beats the hell out of Civil War. We need to cover each other’s six once again.
