We Have a New President But The Nightmare Isn't Over

Photo Credit: Sky News

On Saturday, November 7, just before Noon, four days after Election Day, after Pennsylvania’s votes put him over the 270 mark, the election was finally called by both the AP and CNN : Former Vice President Joe Biden beat out the incumbent, Donald Trump, to become President-Elect Joe Biden.

I don’t have to tell you that I was ecstatic. It appeared all week that this would be the outcome but with every passing day the doubts grew. Not that the count would be wrong but that the Trump regime would figure out a way to delegitimize the people’s choice.

As Ari Berman wrote on Twitter:

They gutted the Voting Rights Act. They sabotaged the Postal Service. They closed polling places, purged voter rolls, attacked mail voting, tried to throw out ballots. And yet voters turned out in record numbers to overcome these barriers & make their voices heard.

So here we are, sure it has happened, but on tenterhooks because the Big Baby in the White House refuses to accept that his tantrums haven’t worked and he’s on a time-out with no end date.

This morning we woke up to the news that Arizona has finally called it for Joe Biden. That puts him at 290 electoral votes, well over the 270 needed for a win. Five million more voters checked the box next to Joe’s name than they did for Trump. Top election officials said yesterday, “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history”. Yet Donald Trump refuses to concede and all but a handful of Republican Party leaders are unconscionably silent. If they’ve congratulated Joe Biden at all, they’ve done it secretly, passing the message along to a Democrat who then passes it along to Joe Biden.

The Republicans are miserable cowards, held captive by a man who is wholly unworthy, increasingly unhinged, and a danger to the security of the country. In refusing to acknowledge the inevitable they’ve prevented the Biden team from beginning the all-important transition to the presidency. Biden should be receiving daily intelligence briefings by now. He needs to know before he takes over just what in the world he’ll have to deal with. He’s being shut out and nobody can predict when or even if he’ll be let in.

This is the kind of third-world stuff tin pot dictators try to foist off on their country. We keep saying we’re not that country but where’s the proof? We’re looking more and more like it.

For all intents, Donald Trump has given up all pretense of leadership, wobbly and wacky as it was. He’s holed up in the White House, grieving, no doubt, and, if he has any sense at all, scared out of his mind. In two months he’ll lose the protection of the presidency and become a private citizen. Justice is waiting for him. So are his creditors. There appears to be nothing but ruination ahead. His bombast, his lies, may finally let him down.

He botched the coronavirus pandemic so badly we’re counting deaths in the hundreds of thousands, the cases in the multi-millions. Early in the year he bragged about being in complete control of the virus and he would never let anything bad happen. It happened and he refuses to take the blame.

But we expect this from Trump. He’s incorrigible. He’ll never change. The blame now is on the Republicans. They’ve had the power to control this scourge for the entire four years this obviously unfit pretender has been in office. They have the power to insist on getting intelligence briefings to President-Elect Biden. They have the power to legitimize the election and begin a smooth transition. They have the power to force Trump to concede. They could put into action their notorious unity — to a person — and end this travesty today.

Why won’t they? Is it their fear of losing their power? What good is that power if they refuse to use it for the good of the country? Are they hiding secrets? If so, do they really think they can hide them forever? Are they afraid of Trump’s rabid base? Do they know if they give in to them they become their base? They’ll have to pander to them forever.

Trump’s bad guys with the big guns are rallying at the National Mall in DC tomorrow — armed militias, white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, all gathering to scare the country into believing that their president has been wronged and the illegitimate Democrats are fomenting civil war. This is the climate Trump encourages. He lives for this.

So nobody believes the fairy tale that calm will be upon us on January 20. Nothing magical will happen, even if the Democrats should win the two Senate seats still up in the air in Georgia. The Biden administration, the Democrats, will still be fighting against Trump’s citizen troops, knowing that every win for them will further enrage a massive frothing crowd that will never believe their administration won fair and square.

I’m all for celebrating our victories, but I can’t yet celebrate a return to any kind of normalcy. Biden, et al, will inherit a mess. They know that. WE know that. And while they’re working to get a pandemic under control, to slow nature’s move toward destroying us, to force our weakened courts to practice justice, to create good paying jobs and rebuild a strong middle class, they’ll be fighting against those forces still convinced they can create a theocratic oligarchy, intent on keeping the masses controlled and subservient.

And through it all the specter of Donald Trump will haunt us. He’s not finished with us yet. This is our history now and it’s one for the books

(Cross-posted at Indelible Ink/Medium)

The Trump Regime's Fatal Flaw: They Don't Understand Americans

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December, 1941, I was four years old. Some of my earliest memories are as an activist child during wartime. We had entered World War II and my job was as Chief Tin Can Inspector. I washed cans and crushed them flat. I bought Savings Stamps at school and pasted them into albums to convert into War Bonds.

The war was a constant backdrop and my parents were among millions who took the war effort seriously. The propaganda of the day was heavily into duty and obligation — every American citizen was called into service. We couldn’t allow one man, one regime, to win his war against humanity.

It marked us, and we were never the same. Our country grew more and more precious as the war years went on. The more lives that were lost protecting us, the more we persevered — for them. And when the war was over and we grew strong again, our pride grew even stronger. We did it! We won!

Generations of us grew up believing we had an obligation to our country. When JFK said, in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, it wasn’t a demand, it was a reminder. This is what Americans do.

We’re in a different century now — 20 years into a different century — and if you cancel out the noise you’ll find the majority of Americans still believe in some sort of obligatory service. Our obligation is to keep our country strong, not by strong-arming the government, but by strengthening its core principles. By voting as if voting is a serious matter. By entering into public service, not as glory-seekers, but as true public servants. By working to ease the lives of those who are vulnerable and less fortunate. By recognizing that threats like global warming and raging pandemics are our burdens, our responsibility. Our survival is in our hands.

We are a nation of laws, of regulations, of justice and reckoning. We reject greed and corruption and frown on nepotism. We demand equality, we celebrate diversity, we recognize our enemies, both foreign and home-grown.

And if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering which rock I’ve just crawled out from under. This is not the America you’re seeing. Not even close.

But consider this:

Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential candidate, wasn’t even on the radar mere months ago. He was laughed at, vilified, virtually written off. He was ‘establishment’, an anachronism, an ancient workhorse destined to be put out to pasture. But, Rep. Jim Clyburn’s eloquent endorsement aside, maybe Biden’s victory was inevitable. Many of us listened to Clyburn’s call to decency, to obligation, to duty, and recognized his message as wholly, unequivocally American. 

This is who we are. We are Americans, first and foremost.

We’ve made grievous mistakes and haven’t always been proud of our actions, but the promise of the United States is ‘to form a more perfect union’. Nothing has changed. We’re still working at it, but we can’t do it by going backward. We have to move forward, but we have to win first.

The past four years will be seen as an anomaly, an experiment gone horribly wrong. We’ll learn from it, but the price, the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives lost to a pandemic ravaging through our country, largely due to government incompetence, is far too high. The experimentation has to stop. It didn’t work. We have to get back to our promised obligation —to build a strong government designed to take care of our citizens.

We will come out of this. Joe Biden has begun gathering a phalanx of experts who are already working on programs and plans so they can start on Day One in January. (Cohorts and novices need not apply.) They’re going to need cheerleaders, and that’s where we come in. 

The thing I remember most about my childhood during World War II is the optimism. 

Were my parents afraid? They must have been terrified. They lived through the Great Depression only to watch Hitler’s Nazism spread throughout historic European strongholds. One man held entire countries hostage; he bent them and broke them. How could it happen?

Then Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, and suddenly it was hitting too close to home. Between a mandatory draft and a concerted need to protect our shores, millions of young men and women signed up to serve our country. Everything changed. And, except for the few predictable slackers, scam artists, and profiteers, we changed, too.

We became our country’s biggest allies. We retooled our factories, gave up luxuries, rationed necessities, pulled on our caring cloaks, found we cared deeply, and went to work as one country against a common enemy.

We did that. For more than four years we did that.

And let nobody ever tell you we can’t do it again.

_______________

(Cross-posted at Medium/Indelible Ink)

My Years With Joe Biden: I Didn't Vote For Joe but I've Always Loved Him

AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez

We’re exactly two weeks away from the election of our lives and I’m getting nervous. I keep thinking I’ve said all I can say to convince everyone to vote for Joe Biden. Apparently I haven’t gotten through yet. Let me give it one more try.

Some of you may remember that I didn’t vote for Joe during the primaries, and wasn’t all that thrilled about him even being in the race. Then Rep. Jim Clyburn gave a speech in South Carolina and I changed my mind.

I’ve known Joe for a while now — not personally, of course, but I’ve been watching him for years. On January 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as our 44th president, I started my political blog, Ramona’s Voices. Over the years I’ve mentioned Joe Biden many times, and even devoted entire posts to him, including one post I wrote in 2012 called, ‘I Love Joe Biden. I Mean It. I LOVE Joe Biden’. (In case you had any doubt.) I wrote it after Joe stood before a group of military families who had lost loved ones and talked to them about the raw pain of grieving. I was crying as I wrote it, and maybe it shows.

Before that, in March, 2011, I wrote about him in my weekly feature, Friday Follies. (Included in case there are those who still think Biden is faking his pro-union stance.):

Did I ever tell you I LOVE Joe Biden? I do. Yes, he can be slightly wacky at times but in a good way. A cute way. He’s fluffy tough and the reason the word “gaffe” was invented. But the other day he spoke to union activists and every word was a keeper. Try parsing THIS, Faux News! Ha!

“You guys built the middle class,” said Biden in a virtual town hall conversation hosted by the AFL-CIO. “I would just emphasize what Hilda [Solis] said and say it slightly different: We don’t see the value of collective bargaining, we see the absolute positive necessity of collective bargaining. Let’s get something straight: The only people who have the capacity — organizational capacity and muscle — to keep, as they say, the barbarians from the gate, is organized labor. And make no mistake about it, the guys on the other team get it. They know if they cripple labor, the gate is open, man. The gate is wide open. And we know that too.”

In ‘Women, Gays, and Obama’s Ear’, Joe got taken to the woodshed for seeming to go against Obama. They called it a ‘gaffe’, of course, but couldn’t make anything stick. I wrote, Note to Joe: It’s far better to be gaffe-prone than to be mean-prone. So far, you’re okay, man. Because I thought what he did was admirable, and Obama could do worse than learn from it.

And in September, 2015, when we were waiting to see who was going to run for president in 2016, I wrote ‘Please, Joe, Don’t Run’. I did it for his own good. I wanted him to take care of himself.

But somewhere between Hillary’s loss to Trump and the beginning of the 2020 Democratic primary season, I lost interest in Joe Biden as president. I wanted a woman in the White House, and, thankfully, there were plenty of good women to choose from. Joe was so far down my list I barely remembered he was there. I voted for Elizabeth Warren and I was devastated when she couldn’t get to that place.

 Now we’re easing into the end of October and I’m thrilled that Joe Biden is the candidate. Yes, thrilled. As Trump spirals out of control, Biden is building the greatest coalition of good guys and experts I’ve ever seen. What it tells me is that if we can pull this election off, barring all roadblocks coming from the other side, we will have a central government that can be trusted to begin the rebuilding after so much destruction. They will work as if our lives depended on it.

‘Of the people, by the people, for the people’ will no longer be quaint wishful thinking, it’ll be the way we are. It wasn’t always the way we were, but if the Trump regime’s bulldozing of our government has taught us anything, it’s that we really don’t want such drastic relief from big government. We need big government, we know that now, but we have to make it better.

Except for a few holdouts, the Democrats are coming together as a formidable bloc, getting behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris for the top jobs and supporting and donating to the Democratic candidates down the ballot. Some of them are raising more campaign funds than they could ever even dream about. Every time Trump and his Republican cohorts do something awful in these final days, the funds roll in for the Democrats.

All signs point to a Biden win, but we Democrats are still shell-shocked over 2016. We tell ourselves we don’t dare jump the gun this time, and there’s some truth to that, but Donald Trump is a known entity now. He’s still a novice, still knows nothing about government, and it shows.

Trump has made some deadly decisions based on nothing more than how they’ll make him look. His mismanagement of the COVID pandemic has raised America’s death tolls to horrific levels not seen anywhere else in the world.

He has alienated everyone the world over, but thinks if he plays to his base everything will be all right. He doesn’t know it yet, but most of America has moved past him. As a leader he’s a disaster; as a chaos agent he thinks he’s not done yet. But the country has grown tired of his antics and Joe Biden looks like the necessary antidote. We’re watching the two of them in public and the differences couldn’t be more stark.

Joe Biden has to win but he has to win in a landslide. The Democrats have to win in a landslide. It looks imminent, but it’ll take each of us working to get out the vote. This may be our last chance to get it right.

(Cross-posted at Medium/Indelible Ink)

As Shitshows Go, Trump's Presidency Tops Them All

But that first debate was right up there.

Source: UPI

I pride myself on not watching political debates — I’ve never seen one yet that was an actual debate and not a choreographed linguistic wrestling match— but I watched Tuesday’s ‘debate’ between Donald Trump and Joe Biden just to see if Trump was going to show the country how presidential he could be when push came to shove.

A day or two before the debate Trump was asked what he was doing to prepare for it. When he said he didn’t have to prep, I knew he was planning to do exactly what he did, which is exactly what he does every time he gets before the cameras. There’s a specific script in his brain and he never deviates. I wrote this on Twitter:

Donald Trump announces he’s not prepping for the debate tonight. And why would he? It’ll be:

Insult Joe — check

Fake news — check

Blue states are bad — check

Great job on COVID — check

Stock mkt booming — check

I’m the greatest — check

I beat Hillary — check

I missed ‘Biden kept me from paying taxes’ and ‘Shout-out to Proud Boys’ — and I really didn’t see ‘Reduce Chris Wallace to frazzled Kindergarten teacher’ coming, but I fully expected Trump to dominate the night by attacking and interrupting and muttering and grimacing, all in place of any real policy discussions — which he clearly, woefully cannot do.

There was a president up on that stage but it wasn’t Donald Trump.

Trump loves the trappings, the power, the attention, the title, but when it comes to actual presidenting, that’s not his thing. (Remember during the campaign when he said he’d be choosing a veep who could run things since he’d be out there being Good Will Ambassador, rallying Americans to, I don’t know, be Americans? He was never going to take the job seriously.)

Joe Biden will make a far better president, and never was that more apparent than on Tuesday, when, for 90 minutes, Donald Trump couldn’t even play one, even after Joe showed him how to do it. Trump’s idea of presidential power is in building up his already gimongous ego, in demanding loyalty, in extracting revenge when he doesn’t get it. He’ll lie and deny and think he aced it. He’ll blame anyone but himself for the bad stuff but take full credit for anything good — even when it happened long before he was ‘president’.

Trump is a thug. Everything he does is thuggish and ugly. Except for his nail-biting sycophants and his dwindling MAGA followers, the country is sick to death of his antics. He’s done. He’s toast. But dammit, he’s still our problem. What are we going to do about him? It’s a question for justice now. Will he or won’t he get away with it?

As I watched him at what was supposed to pass for a debate, I saw a man who knows he’s already lost, and his performance, sickening as it was, took on new meaning. It was pathetic. A last hurrah. His empire is crumbling, he’s a laughing stock, there’s a chance he has put everyone around him, including his own children, in jeopardy by grabbing at power he never deserved, history will make mincemeat of him, and he’s furious.

That’s what we saw before us. We saw Trump’s raw fury on display, and he’s past caring. I’ve never seen anything like it. And, for the first time in months, I slept well. Come January 20, Donald Trump will no longer be president. He may still be our residual problem, but he’ll no longer have to power to hurt us.

That thought alone gives me peace.

Donald Trump Will Not Win

Insulting America isn't the way you do it, buddy.

I know what you’re thinking: Wasn’t I one of those people who thought Hillary couldn’t lose? Yup, I was. I seriously, sincerely couldn’t see how Donald Trump, that loathsome clown whose life was completely antithetical to the norms of common decency, that shady businessman without an ounce of knowledge about how government works, would EVER become America’s president.

Hahahahahahaha.

That was me. And probably you. And almost four years later we’re still shocked. I can’t go into how it happened. I don’t KNOW how it happened, and neither does anyone else. We’re all just guessing. But here we are, and Trump was, and is, far, far worse than we could ever have imagined. We imagined he would be as stubbornly stupid, as bombastic, as ridiculously full of himself as he turned out to be. What we didn’t count on was the Republican Party’s willing capitulation to a moron and a monster.

Trump, it turns out, was a dream come true for them. He didn’t CARE how they did it before. His job was to make the rich richer (including and especially him), and, by God, he did it.

His job, as he saw it — thanks to some friendly nudging from his pal, former KGB expert and president-for-life, Vladimir Putin — was to sow chaos and create division, and he did that.

His job (and he especially enjoyed this part ) was to bring the media to its knees in order to float above any criminal exposure or criticism — and the press rewarded him with some of the silliest whataboutism I’ve ever seen.

But along the way Trump has made some dreadful blunders. I mean, terrible. He’s a happy despot, momentarily, but he’s alienated every sane military, scientific, medical, social services, and educational expert in the country.

He has his fans and followers, and it’s true they’re louder and more obnoxious than the rest of us, but they’re not the majority. Every legitimate poll shows that far more Americans go against Trump's cockamamie decision than agree with them. Every one.

Pollsters are giving Joe Biden a bigger and bigger edge, and we’re a little more than a month from the election. (Okay. Remind me again about pollsters and Hillary Clinton and how that all went down, but (perfunctory cliché ahead) that was then and this is now.)

More than 200,000 COVID deaths, most of them completely avoidable but for Trump’s stubborn pretense that his giant brain is far superior to every scientist and epidemiologist in the land.

Kids in cages. They’re still crying, their parents are still crying, we’re still crying.

Attacks on women, minorities, the disabled, and the disenfranchised.

Name-calling and childish insults, laughable word-salad adlibs thrown in to speeches written by Stephen Miller, as if despots were still in vogue and this wasn’t America.

And now Trump, always so insanely inappropriate for the highest job in the land, has the chance to select a third Right Wing Supreme Court nominee and get her in place before the election.

And he's not done yet.

To the delight of his followers, and, let’s face it, the press, Trump is impishly pretending he might not leave office if Joe Biden should, by some slim off-chance, win. But he will leave, and we even know the date: January 20, 2021.

Donald Trump will not win this election. Joe Biden will.

Has Joe Biden made mistakes? Uh huh. Will he go on making mistakes? Uh huh. But, when it comes to mistakes, Joe is a piker compared to Donald. Trump holds the world’s record for the most hilarious, the most egregious mistakes ever made by a U.S president. Nobody comes even close. And if we’re lucky, nobody ever will again.

So I rest my case. Donald Trump should not, cannot, will not win this election. We’re going to make sure he doesn’t. Joe Biden will win in a landslide, the likes of which we’ve never seen. (Yes, I stole that from Donald.)

He will not steal our pride, our legacy, our heritage, our privileges, our rights.

He will not.

How to Write Opinions When You're At Your Wit's End

 Political writers are America’s witnesses to history. It’s up to us to tell this story

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

I don’t have to tell you we’re at a level of chaos most of us have never seen in our lifetimes. Every day it’s something new and dire and dangerous, and every day we have to set aside yesterday’s news to try and process this new thing that sickens us and scares us and makes us want to take to our beds.

Every day we watch people give up. They can’t take it anymore. They concede we’re doomed and that’s just the way it is. And who can blame them? It feels doom-like out there. Everything is going against us.

Here in the United States we’ve passed the 200,000 mark in deaths from the COVID-19 pandemic, with no end in sight.

The earth is roiling, showing her irritation at our recklessness, and she’s threatening to destroy humanity before we can do any more damage.

And, for the first time in America’s history, we’re dealing with a rogue government run by a demagogic flim-flam man who sees the presidency as the authoritarian power trip of his dreams, and is already threatening not to give it up.

And there’s more. Much, much more.

This is where the writers come in. We are the witnesses, the trained observers. We watch, we listen, we analyze, we record. It’s what we do. Those of us who write opinions knew going in we would never convince everyone. Our opinions aren’t necessarily everyone’s opinions, so — you might have noticed — we have a tendency to piss some people off.

But we slog on.

It’s our hearts that spur us on, and, because our hearts are flopping around on the outside for everyone to see, we make ourselves vulnerable. Deliberately. Why? Because we care so deeply about what we believe in we can’t keep it to ourselves. We see it as a duty to try and make readers understand. And we wonder why everyone doesn’t do it.

That’s where you come in, you writers out there who feel that same anxiety and don’t know how to express it. Do I need to say, ‘there’s nothing to fear but fear itself’? What are you afraid of, really? That your feelings will be hurt? They will be. That someone will make fun of you? Someone will. That you won’t get it right and might have to reassess? That could happen. But we need courage now, and before you can advocate for it, you have to feel it.

Our country needs us — every one of us — and our voices together will make a formidable blockade to the lies and propaganda threatening to destroy our message. We have the tools and the talent to make a difference in these next weeks before the election, but we have to get serious NOW.

Whatever you have to say doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be honest. Write from your heart and let your heart guide you. The country needs to know how we feel about the events unfolding before us. We’re not writing for the critics, we’re writing for the people.

As the owner/editor of Indelible Ink, I’ve taken steps to convert my creative non-fiction publication to all politics, all the time — at least until this all-important election is over. I’m looking for writers and I want you to consider getting your equally all-important voice out there. I’ll help you.

As I say in our Submission Guidelines:

We’ll be a political publication practicing the politics of hope, but with our eyes wide open. Be honest about your fears, your hopes, your ideas for a better future. Challenge us with your thoughts about better governing. Name names.

Talk about your own life, your childhood, your parents and your grandparents, if you’d like. Whatever is on your mind, whatever is keeping you awake at night, whatever is needing an outlet so you’re not screaming into pillows all day and all night.

Let’s build a fortress here made up of the ghosts of America’s past. Who are we? Where did we come from? How did we get to this place?

But you don't have to write for me. Writers everywhere are gathering in war rooms, ready to do battle. We can do it, we can spread the word, we can build a community and we can help each other.

We’re almost out of time. November is looming. We’re sending the call out to writers with the skills to help us witness, to chronicle not just the events but the feelings. We’ve never been here before. With Hera’s help we’ll never be here again.

This is a time like no other, and the noisemakers are winning. Our voices won’t get lost if there are enough of us sounding alarms, reminding Americans of our heritage, defending our need to build a country that reflects all of us, and not just some of us.

Opinion writing isn’t for everyone, but if you feel the calling, go with it. The need is great right now. If you have something to say, say it. As Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers, used to say: Speak your mind, even if your voice shakes.

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Ramona's Quotes for Posterity

I always wanted to be famous enough to have my quotes immortalized on sites like BrainyQuote or Quote Garden, those places you can go to grab someone else's quote to make it seem as if it's YOU who is that smart or clever or impossibly witty. I love those places! But time's running out and it looks like it's not going to happen. Unless I do something, my brilliant quotes will go unnoticed, unread, ungrabbed, lost for all eternity. I see now I'll have to do it myself.

Not long ago (but not soon enough) I wrote a short thing on Twitter and it seemed so awesome, I thought, Damn! That's quotable! So I saved it to a file. Then I began pasting other Tweets into that file, and soon I had a bunch of quotes I really, really liked. (Note that writers sometimes like things they've written. It's okay. If we didn't like enough of our own stuff we'd stop writing and we couldn't call ourselves writers.)

I had this file I called "Ramona's Quotes" and I kept adding to it, and every time I did I'd read it again and I'd say, sometimes out loud, "Who wrote that? That is so good!"

And here it is. I'll be adding to it from time to time, so don't think this is the end of it.  Feel free to share any of them but be sure to spell my name right. Okay?
(R-a-m-o-n-a G-r-i-g-g. Thank you.)

The media can mold any story, any campaign, any election. Don’t ever think they can’t. And don’t ever let up on calling them out when they ignore their obligations to bring us the truth. They are the witnesses, not the jury.

...

Democrats on Democrats: It’s like being on a battlefield with your allies, thinking the way to fight the enemy is to find fault with the guys fighting by your side. There! That’ll show ‘em!

...

Vote as if your country is in grave danger and you’ve seen the enemy. It can't hurt.

...

Every time one of Trump’s insiders waits until it’s convenient for them to spill the beans instead of doing the right thing the moment they have concerns, the message to the country is, be afraid, be very afraid. Courage comes when you have more to lose than to gain. (On John Kelly’s revelations on Trump, long after his testimony might have helped to take him down.)

...

Change your shame to pride and it’ll give you the energy to fight against this madness. It’s not our country I’m ashamed of or appalled by, it’s the leaders — and they’re always temporary. The only way we’ll change things is if we go in believing we’re worth the effort.

...

Trump’s sycophants and followers are afraid to admit it’s that bad. They’ll go to great lengths to defend Trump, against all evidence to the contrary for one reason only: Reality would mean they might be complicit.

...

The worst offenders are the ones who voted for Trump but have now disengaged and won’t talk politics because ‘it’s boring’ or they ‘can’t stand all that garbage’. It’s like walking away from their own hit-and-run. No matter how far they run or how much time passes, it will always be their problem.

...

I know words and I know ‘inhabitant’ is clearly not the same thing as ‘citizen’. The Census counts inhabitants. The law doesn’t require that only citizens should be counted. We want to know how many people live in this country for many reasons and none of them are political.

...

The worst thing that ever happened to the United States is our slide toward capitalism without tempering it with equal parts of socialism. We should know by now what a disaster it is to run an entire country as an oligarchy, but it looks like we really are slow learners.

...

Trump is Trump and always has been. He’s incorrigible, irredeemable, and only plays at being president. He should never have been given a moment of power. There, American press, now build on that. For god’s sake.

...

“Kids in cages”, “Black Lives Matter”, or “Women helping Women”, is like this: When my kids were growing to adulthood my rule was, whoever needs the most help at the moment gets the most attention. It doesn’t mean the others aren’t important or aren’t loved. 

And, bless them, they all understood.

...

Reagan’s reign was the beginning of the end of our middle class. It’s maddening that he’s treated like an American hero when his first and foremost legacy is the destruction of an economy that favored all classes, not just the upper class. Trickle-down was and is a scam.

...

Funny how ‘bigotry’ has so many meanings these days. It’s almost as if real bigots have no idea what that word means.

...

John Lewis set the tone. He won the day by peacefully protesting with words, with empathy, with courage, showing us how we can be fearless in our righteous battles, even when winning is a long way off. It was, after all, ‘good trouble’.

...

Democracies fall, not because wannabe dictators are out there — they’re always out there — but because there are enough citizens who are willing to pave the way for their particular brand of fascism. It’s those citizens who worry me the most.

...

We’re not just heading toward a totalitarian government, we’re in the midst of it. We have to first admit the extent of our powerlessness before we can figure out how to change it. They’ve won and they’ve put us all in extreme danger. We can’t pretend otherwise.

...

Whenever anyone says we have to stop being ‘partisan’ what they mean is ‘Democrats, give in’. The Republicans have no intention of working together. They drew the battle lines. Let the battle begin.

...

The press is still using polite language when the times require brutal honesty. Racists, misogynists, bigots, etc., don’t deserve to be treated as anything less than what they are. They are not society’s norm, they’re abominations.

...

(To be continued. I'm thinking, I'm thinking!)

Medicare and Obamacare: Same Old Story

(Note: When the fur was flying over the ACA (Obamacare) more than seven years ago, I found an early story about the fur flying over Medicare in 1966. I wrote about it for the late Alan Colmes and his website, Liberaland. This is the story as it was published at Alan.com, October 22, 2013.)

In the next town over from us the recycling station is in a huge semi-trailer.  You have to climb six narrow metal steps to get up into it, but there is an aisle you can walk down and there are huge open boxes in which to throw your stuff. 

The beauty of it is that while I’m dropping off my own recyclables, I can dig through the newspaper and magazine bins to see what’s there for the taking.  Through the years we’ve found some fascinating reading, some of it as current as yesterday, but last week we found a treasure trove:  Seventeen Consumer Reports magazines, ranging from1965 to 1980.

What struck me as I read through them was how much actual watchdogging went on within those pages and to what lengths they went to explain their findings. Page after page of small print, as if they actually anticipated that their readers would want to take the time to read it all. (No internet, no cable. I get it. But still. . .)

Back in June, 1966, their headline story was about the new Medicare law taking effect in July. The law was complicated.  Every aspect of health insurance, hospitalizations, physician and pharmacy services, and medical goods had to be considered.  Nothing like it had ever been done on such a large scale before. The Government was pouring an estimated $3 billion plus into it during the first year alone. Who would pay for what?  Who would gain the most?  Who would lose the most?  (Sound familiar?)

There were worries about overcrowding of existing facilities.  All of those sick folks who had never been eligible for insurance due to their pre-existing condition (old age) would now be bursting through the doors looking for a chance to live longer.

There were worries about elderly patients not wanting to leave their hospital beds, now that the money worries had been eased.  There were worries about relatives scheming to leave their kin in those happy places rather than to have to take care of them at home.

There were worries about understaffing.   They would need some 20,000 more doctors and more than 70,000 nurses, with a need for another 200,000 nurses by 1970.

But they were nothing compared to the worries keeping the insurance providers, the pharmaceutical companies, the heads of hospitals, and the Hippocratic doctors up at night.  The threat of socialized medicine was upon them.  This was it!

So let’s take a trip in the way-back machine–all the way back to the year 1961 when one Ronald Reagan agreed to make a 10 minute LP record sponsored by the AMA as part of Operation Coffee Cup, the supposed grass-roots plan to keep medicine out of the hands of the Government.

They called it “RONALD REAGAN speaks out against SOCIALIZED MEDICINE”.

This was the same Ronald Reagan who, as president, pretty much kept his paws off Medicare, that dread  portal to full-blown Socialism. I'm guessing the Heritage Foundation, much as they adore The Man, would just as soon forget the time The Best President in the Whole Wide World caved to the forces of the “politically popular” Medicare program and began talking up adding catastrophic acute care provisions for the elderly!

Such was the evolution of a hated, perennially doomed social program.  Which brings us to the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA start-up costs may well be expensive to the point of mind-boggle, but, just as with Medicare, it’s a plan that is essential and long overdue.  It’ll be full of jitters and glitches and adjustments, just as Medicare was. The full effect will be maddeningly slow, there will be a multitude of reasons to doubt it,  and the opponents–those same opponents who have spent years trying to kill Social Security and Medicare–will never give up. (Forbes is claiming the ACA website is crashing on purpose because “they” don’t want us to know how costly the plans really are. It’s also claiming a rise in insurance premiums by 99% for men and 62% for women–a claim already disputed and put to rest.)

But here’s the thing about the opposition:  When they showed their willingness to spend many millions on a Tea-Party-sanctioned hissy-fit against it that went nowhere and benefited no one, they lost any chance to have a voice in the discussion about essential, low-cost Government-sponsored health care.

It will happen, with or without them.  And years from now their cheering audiences will be shouting, “Hands off my Obamacare!”

When There's a Monster in Our Midst it Ain't About Tiddlywinks

Let's say there are two villages within yelling distance of each other. They almost never get along, what with cattle rustling and wife stealing and fence moving and all, but now there's a monster in their midst. Village Number Two hates the monster and is afraid of it but thinks it's best to go along with it against Village Number One because, you know, they did those THINGS.

Village Number One sees the writing on the wall or the smoke in the distance or something lost now to the mists of story, and calls on Village Number Two to join them in vanquishing the monster. Imagine their surprise when Village Number Two says, "Only if you admit you were wrong that time you took our Yahtzee table and turned it into a Tiddlywinks board. You know you did it!"

"Seriously?" says Village Number One. "We've got a monster breathing down on us and you want an apology??"

And Village Number Two, really incensed now, says, "And while we're at it, we don't like your village leaders. Get rid of them and put our guys in place or no deal."

So Village Number One, thinking only about the monster and not about hurt feelings, put a collective foot in mouth, and Hera help them, they laughed out loud at Village Number Two. They said, again, "Seriously?? There's a monster out there!"

Big mistake.  Village Number Two said, "Forget it, we're not helping you", and the monster, seeing his chance, ate Village Number One whole.

For a while, Village Number Two (a misnomer, since Village Number One no longer existed, but for the sake of clarity, since I'm not finished yet, let's still call them Number Two) kept a wobbly peace with the monster. The monster grew bigger while they grew smaller and, while some of the villagers stayed awake nights worrying about it, the others chastised them for being such downers when they still had sunsets to watch and cute kittens to giggle over, and so what if they couldn't get coffee or pineapples or couldn't afford whale oil for their lamps? It wasn't perfect but it wasn't sure death, either. 

But, as monsters are wont, this one demanded too much. The Number Twos couldn't keep up, couldn't make him happy, couldn't even feed themselves or keep roofs over their heads.

They decided they had to fight that thing.

It was a monster!

But they were only one small village. There was nobody else to help them. They never had a chance. The monster, disgusted with their constant whining, outraged over their inability to grow the size of their rallies, and realizing there was no more money to be made off of them, ate them whole.

The moral of the story is that if Village Number Two had only forgiven their differences and worked together with Village Number One they might have had enough resources to take on the monster, destroy him for good, and live relatively happily ever after. 

By the time they decided Village Number One wasn't so bad, the monster in their midst had taken matters into his own claws and there was no turning back.

If only they had understood that thing Lady Hillary had tried to teach them: 

It does, indeed, take a village.

(Cross-posted at Indelible Ink/Medium)

The Politics of Emotion

We’re scared, we’re confused, we’re enraged — and that’s the way they want it

AFP photo

This last week has been a doozy. An entire thesaurus of emotions bombard us every day, every night, and we’re at the point now where those of us who think, who care, who take the burdens of the world personally, are on sensory overload, dangerously close to imploding. Exploding. Doing ourselves no favors by feeling emotions so raw, so painful they render us, in the end, helpless.

The catalyst this time? Another Black man’s senseless death at the hands of the police — say his name: George Floyd— and it’s almost more than we can bear. The Minneapolis cop who killed him did it in front of us, in broad daylight, gloating, smiling for the cameras, his knee pressing harder against George’s neck as George pleaded for his life, called for his mother, said I CAN’T BREATHE.

Three other cops stood watch over the killing. According to witnesses, at least one of them helped to hold George down. The crowd around them pleaded for the cop to stop but he didn’t move, didn’t ease the pressure, didn’t consider the minutes it took for the life to seep out of George Floyd’s bones. There were nine of them. Nine minutes. Two of them were probably a waste of time. At seven minutes George was already beyond help.

As reports of George’s death began to surface, sorrow turned to rage. And rage turned to helplessness. It happened again. We couldn’t stop it. That portion of our nation who feels these things sat back and cried. Some of us did it in public, in front of the cameras, as we tried to grapple with emotions so out of control we couldn’t put words to them.

We watched as people who built their reputations on giving us the words that eased us, motivated us, energized us, fell apart before our eyes, reduced to weeping out of sheer frustration.

And Donald Trump, seeing us as pitiful, as vulnerable, as easy marks, grabbed at the chance to twist the knife and make it worse. The president-in-name-only didn’t rise to help a nation get through this, didn’t give the speech that would comfort or settle us or make us believe justice would be served. No, he took to Twitter and instigated. He teased, he taunted, he threatened. (“When looting starts, the shooting starts.”)

Inevitably, the outrage took over and the protests devolved to riots in the streets across the country. Stores looted and burned. Some would say emotions blew it all up; others saw it as rank opportunism. Whatever it was, fire lit the skies, entire buildings were reduced to rubble, and we were left to feel. What the hell is happening?

After a few days we were back to protesting for the right reasons — because George Floyd was dead and because black lives have to matter. Thousands of us marched peacefully, without incident, and the rest of us, watching from home, rejoiced at the numbers, at our unity, our solidarity, our humanity.

But Donald Trump wasn’t done with us. He spent the riot days hiding in a bunker beneath the White House. We got wind of it and we let off some steam by making fun of him. So he put on his “I’ll show them” face and upstaged us by marching a few hundred yards, in broad daylight, looking for all the world like a tinpot dictator, a coterie of sycophants marching a few steps behind him, along a route lined with armed guards, to St. John’s Episcopal Church, where rioters had done some damage, and where he then stood, unannounced (and unwelcome, it turns out), muttered a few unintelligible words, held a bible over his head, and walked back to the White House.

AFP/Brendan Smialowski

                                       

It took maybe 20 minutes, but in order for Trump to make that walk, the crowds lining that street had to first be dispersed. Nobody knew it was coming. Suddenly the police came from out of nowhere and began forcing the crowds away, pushing, shoving, spraying them with tear gas, spattering them with rubber bullets.

Those of us watching in real time at home were horrified. It made no sense. They were more than a half hour from curfew. They were protesting peaceably. They had the right to be there. And uniformed men in riot gear came at them as if they were mad, snarling dogs.

Our hearts were in our throats. We couldn’t believe what we were seeing. Was this it then? Was this the battle we’d long been afraid of? Would we now be fighting for our very lives?

No. It was just that Donald Trump wanted to make a show of walking those few yards because we made fun of him hiding in a bunker and because a damaged church made the perfect backdrop for his phony piety in these times of crisis.

Or something.

And we come away from this scared, confused, exhausted, wondering how many times we can go through this without just coming apart or just giving up. Knowing that’s what they want. They want us to come apart. They want us to give up.

And we can’t. When our emotions get the best of us we have to stop a moment and rewind. We owe it to ourselves. But quit? Can we? You know we can’t. Because this is who we are. And that’s who they are. And it’s either us or them.

(Cross-posted at Medium)

What Happened Between Joe Biden and Tara Reade?

Nobody really knows. And that’s the problem.

Photo: Liz Roll, FEMA. VP Biden consoling hurricane victim

I consider myself a feminist. I support the Me-Too Movement. I’ve written about women’s issues for decades. I was a charter Ms Magazine member, joining up before the first issue was even printed in 1972, and it was as if Betty Friedan’s book, The Feminine Mystique, was written just for me.

I hated what Bill Clinton did with Monica Lewinsky and I said so.

I hated what Anthony Weiner and so many other powerful men have done, sex-wise, and I’ve said so.

Still, much to the consternation of many of my friends, I defended Al Franken. (Full disclosure, no shame.)

I’ve spent most of my writing life looking for an honest man and constantly being disappointed. (Don’t even get me started on the Republicans.)

I worked hard to get Hillary Clinton elected in 2016, and I’m not over the trauma of the outcome yet. Before I kick off, I want to see a woman sitting at the Resolute Desk, owning the Oval Office. This year I wanted it to be Elizabeth Warren.

I voted for Warren in this year’s primary and hated how badly she lost her chance at the presidency. Joe Biden wasn’t even in the running for me. But, as I wrote after she dropped out, I’m going all out for Joe now.

There are things about Biden that bother me, but there were things that bothered me about each of the candidates, including Warren. That’s as it should be in a country where we still have free thought and are allowed our opinions. In a profession like politics — where ideas are a dime a dozen and purity is in short supply — a certain amount of tolerance is a necessity. The way we get things done is by working on them from the inside, not the outside.

We don’t fall in love with politicians. Giving full and absolute loyalty to a single person who may ultimately hold power over us is anathema to most Americans. Most of us look at people and issues with our eyes wide open and react based on their performance, not — I’m just going to say it — on their likability.

So about Joe Biden: Joe can be likable. Millions of Americans like him and those who know him well like him a lot. Still, he’s a public figure, so we’ve seen, too, that he can be silly, irritating, confused, and confusing. But we’re in troubled times now and what I see in a Biden presidency is the kind of calmness, experience, and sanity we’re craving. And — here’s where we may part ways — I see an innate sense of decency.

I’ve heard all of the reasons why Joe can’t be trusted with the presidency: Plagiarism, Centrism, Anita Hill, voting for wars and corporate livelihoods, riding on coattails, cozying up to the GOP, senility, flagrant linguistic sloppiness, goofiness, handsiness— and now sexual accusations.

The oppo stuff is typical — build a case against your rival by exaggerating the things that might make him look bad and ignore any good he’s done. But sexual accusations are something new. These we have to take seriously.

Which brings me to Joe Biden’s accuser, Tara Reade. I’ve read both sides and I don’t know what to believe. I should be able to concede that she believes Joe thrust his fingers into her vagina when she was interning for him in 1993, but I’m going to be honest here: I’m not even close to that point yet.

Most women I know — me included — want to believe every woman. We desperately want to make up for all the times women weren’t believed, and give full support to the women who aren’t believed. But the truth is, women have lied about being raped. We know it happens. Our gender does not prevent us from lying, even about something as serious as rape.

I went along with “Believe all women” for a time, because our goal was to make a point: There were too many men who got away with serial sexual abuse because for too long women were led to believe they couldn’t win by telling the truth. One by one, we watched big men fall — Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein — and the length and breadth of their abuse was stunning. It was as if they knew there was no chance the woman would be believed. And why would they worry? Women weren’t believed.

But this story has an odor to it. It didn’t come out until after Joe Biden became the presumptive nominee, and it’s being pushed hard by factions known to be hostile to Democrats and the Biden team. The latest, thrown out there as a ‘bombshell’, is that Tara Reade’s mother called into the Larry King Show in 1993 and told the whole story. Except she didn’t. The caller, an unidentified woman, complained that a certain nameless senator was causing unspecified problems for her unnamed daughter and she wanted to know who she could contact in the Senate to complain about it. That was the extent of it. There is video of the call.

In an article in the Intercept, disingenuously entitled, “New Evidence Supporting Tara Reade’s Allegations Against Joe Biden Emerges”, Ryan Grim manages to prove just the opposite — that there is no supporting evidence — then soldiers on, working up to the burden being on Joe Biden to prove his innocence:

In interviews with The Intercept, Reade also mentioned that her mother had made a phone call to “Larry King Live” on CNN, during which she made reference to her daughter’s experience on Capitol Hill. Reade told The Intercept that her mother called in asking for advice after Reade, then in her 20s, left Biden’s office. “I remember it being an anonymous call and her saying my daughter was sexually harassed and retaliated against and fired, where can she go for help? I was mortified,” Reade told me.

Later in the article, Grim shows clearly that the King Show transcript says no such thing.

Congressional records list August 1993 as Reade’s last month of employment with Biden’s Senate office, and, according to property records, Reade’s mother, Jeanette Altimus, was living in San Luis Obispo County. Here is the transcript of the beginning of the call:

KING: San Luis Obispo, California, hello.

CALLER: Yes, hello. I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.

KING: In other words, she had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?

CALLER: That’s true.

King’s panel of guests offered no suggestions, and instead the conversation veered into a discussion of whether any of the men on set would leak damaging personal information about a rival to the press.

There is nothing there that I can see. Still, it’s being used as proof that Biden has a lot to answer for. There are no Senate records showing that Reade filed a formal complaint; there is no evidence that the attack took place, no witnesses, yet the internet is awash with hashtags accusing the Democratic nominee of being a rapist.

I’ve thrown my full support behind Joe Biden for reasons I’ve already described and won’t go into again. I’ve made no bones about it on Facebook and on Twitter, and the response, not just from Republicans, but from purported Democrats as well, is wearying to say the least. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been shouted down after being told that I’m supporting a sexual predator.

So, as I defend his public record, or give the reasons why we have to go with Joe (to keep Trump from winning and to bring bona fide expertise into his administration), more often than not anything I have to say has no validity because “Joe Biden is a rapist”. End of story.

But it’s not the end of the story. The story is the accusation. That’s all we have. He’s the Democratic candidate for the presidency and there is an accusation of rape hanging over him. I don’t know whether or not it’s true. Nobody does except the two people involved, and they’re telling different stories.

Is it likely? I find it hard to believe, but anything is likely. Who would have believed Dr. Huxtable would be capable of truly sickening sexual assaults?

Rape accusations are, of necessity, highly sensitive. Physical evidence is rare, witnesses are even rarer, and the accusations can surface long after the alleged attack. Most often it’s the woman who has to do the proving.

I’m keenly aware of all of it, and my heart goes out to every woman faced with having to deal with the reactions to any accusation of a sexual nature. But the fact is, we just can’t destroy a reputation if there isn’t enough to go on. And right now there isn’t enough to go on.

________________________________

(Cross-posted at Medium)