Are we there yet?

 

" He who saves his Country does not violate any law" ~ Napoleon Bonaparte~ 

The president of the United States posted that quote on Saturday, February 15, 2025. I repeat: The president of the United States posted that quote on Saturday, February 15, 2025. 

Napoleon was a despot, who believed that his regime reflected the will of the people of France.

Are we there yet? 

I need your thoughts and feedback on this one.

*BTW, the image above is that of Benito Mussolini, not Napoleon Bonaparte or Donald J. Trump.  

  

Is DEI the new N word?

These are crazy times, field hands. The felon is now fully in charge, and prices have not gone down, there is looming economic chaos with his trade wars, and the FBI and other agencies charged with keeping us safe and holding criminals accountable, are being gutted because they hurt his feelings. Meanwhile, a feckless and weak democratic party does nothing but give us phony outrage talking points to stay relevant or in front of  news cameras. There are no calls for mobilization, no calls for mass protests, and no real plan to counter the oncoming fascism train that is going to doom us all. At least all of us who aren't in a cult, and who still believe in what America is supposed to stand for. 

This past week there were two tragic plane crashes, one right after the other. I am not blaming the felon for that, things happen, and it could have just as well happened when Biden was president. The thing is, though, the felon blamed the first tragic accident, which cost sixty -seven people their lives, on DEI. Think about that for a minute. Before the bodies were taken out of the cold Potomac River, or the families even had time to grieve, he was playing politics, and trying to score political points. He is truly a sick and demented individual. But we all knew that. Even the misguided people who voted for him had to have known that as well. 

Blaming the accident on DEI without any proof was such a trumpian thing to do. But you  have to understand, this is how he stokes his base, by blaming everything that goes wrong on DEI.  It's another scapegoating tactic that works well with the demographic he appeals to. These are the folks who blame their miserable positions in life on everyone else but themselves. Immigrants, blacks, transgendered people, and Gays. They are the ones making it hard for them to get ahead. Not the billionaires and Oligarchs who are only looking out for themselves, and taking advantage of every loophole to squeeze every penny out of the government and our pockets. These are the folks, by the way, who the felon is looking out for in his second term. Not the poor cult members who hold on to his every word and bow to all of his actions. It's DEI! Everything wrong with the government is because of DEI.  Let's cancel all those holidays that celebrate diversity, and let's scrub our history books of the achievements of black folks. That will make us feel better about ourselves. Sadly for them, it won't add one cent to their pocket, or reduce the cost of groceries or gas.   

The irony is, of course, that the felon has the most unqualified nominees to fill his cabinet positions in the history of the United States. Fox News hosts and television personalities who he views as telegenic will now hold some of the most powerful positions in government. His defense secretary is an alcoholic who has been credibly accused of sexual assault,  and he has zero qualifications for the job. Compare his credentials to the black man who was previously in his position, and you will see why black folks laugh when we hear the DEI refrain. We know it's just code words for n****r you don't deserve that job. It should go to a white man.  Don't even get me started on Tulsi Gabbard, the dog killer, who literally met with Assad and Putin and parroted their talking points at a time when they were committing all kinds of atrocities against their own people. Just today she said she is cool with putting children in Gitmo. Then there is RFK Jr., a vaccine skeptic who is in line to become, wait for it....health secretary! You can't make this stuff up. 

I called a friend from Philly to check on him after the recent plane crash in that city. He said he was fine, but he was really scared of what's to come. "Bro, something just feels off man" he said to me. "And I can't quite put my fingers on it. "  

I feel the same way, but unlike him, I know exactly what it is that's off: We elected a mad man to hold the highest office in the land for a second time. We didn't learn our lesson from the first time when a million Americans died because of his incompetence.  

Now, sadly,  he has more power, and less opposition. Not to mention four more years. That is, of course, if we make it that long. 

*Go Eagles*  

*Correction* Tulsi Gabbard was not the dog killer. That was Kristi Noem*

  

  

The Misinformation Machine.

 

 The level of insanity going on this country right now is mind blowing. On one side you have a cult spreading disinformation, lies, and wallowing in hate and grievance. (You would think they would be celebrating. The did, after all, win the damn election. Or so we were all led to believe.) On the other side of the political spectrum, you have a feckless Attorney General who is afraid of his own shadow, and a political party hell bent on taking a knife to a gun fight. 

 Donald trump now controls every aspect of the American media.  And the disinformation and lies will be taken to new heights with his new found power. The billionaire's boys club is making sure of it. Mark (I want to be more masculine) Zuckerberg, has announced that there will be no more fact checking on Facebook. He  actually went down to Mara-a- Lardo to kiss trump's ring, and beg for forgiveness for all of his past sins. And them he appeared on Joe Rogan's show to heap praise on the right, decry wokeism, and embrace toxic masculinity.  The owners of the Washington Post, and LA Times, have also declared their fealty to trump. This is a stunning development in a country that is supposed to value freedom of the press and journalistic independence. Don't even get me started on the South African who inherited his family's  diamond mine, came to America, and griffted his way into becoming the richest man on earth.  He has gone full replacement theory, and many believe that we actually elected him to be our president.  (Worth repeating: All you Negroes driving Teslas need to sell now! You look really silly driving a car from a company which is owned by a man who wants to replace you. ) And here is the crazy part: When he was going broke he begged for--- and got a bailout---- from the government of...wait for it...Barack Obama, a "Socialist" black man.  

 The torrent of misinformation around the tragic wildfires in Los Angeles has only served to shine a light on the problem. The people in MAGA world don't care about citizens in what they perceive as enemy territory, and there is already talk of trump declaring a federal takeover of the state when he takes office. Don't laugh, the guy wants to invade Canada and take Greenland by force, and the cult is on board.  Remember what I wrote about democrats in the first paragraph?  Yes, that part.  Whatever you thought was just too crazy to be true, is now very possible. 

  In a few days the felon will take office.  Prices will not go down, and our lives will not improve. But, true to form, he will be giving us one distraction after another to take our minds away from the things that REALLY matter in our lives.  His cult members will eat it all up and try to tell us how great America is again, and us normal folks will just shake our heads. Not only at the lunacy of the MAGA sheep, but at the willingness of the American press to play along. 

*To my family and friends in Los Angeles, please stay safe. You are in our thoughts.*  

Holiday cheer.

 Happy Holidays field hands!

Let's see what happens in the new year with this Elon Musk presidency. It should be very interesting.

If you voted against the con man and his crony, just sit back and enjoy the ride. MAGA wanted to "own the libs",  and now they will have their FAFO moment.   

Stay safe.

Transition train wreck.

The election is over and MAGA is still angry. I guess owning the libs was their only goal in life. For the life of me I can't understand where all this hate and angst is coming from. It's not like the democrats are crying foul and whining about the results. (Although, I must say, there was something mighty fishy about Elon and his behavior.) Dems won't be storming the halls of power, and crying stolen election for the next four years. They are totally fine with sitting back and watching Mr. trump make a fool of himself while he destroys the country for a second time. Just look at his cabinet picks so far. The man is clearly not a serious actor. 

Honestly, have you ever seen a bunch of less qualified people being selected to hold positions of power? How can these people cry DEI when they have all  these "failing up" characters being picked by trump to be a part of his team?  Pete Hegseth?! Seriously? Forget the fact that he is a scumbag and just a horrible human being, he is also clearly not qualified to do the job. The guy wrote a book about crushing the enemy, via an "American Crusade" for crying out loud! He writes about mocking, humiliating, and intimidating the American left (the enemy) and using the military to do it. The very military that Mr. trump picked him to lead. Yikes! And don't even get me started on Tulsi Gabbard. She has praised the Russians at every turn and is a huge fan of  Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator. Trump picked her to lead *checks notes* the intelligence department. I could go on, but you get the point. I'm not even going to get into Matt Gaetz, because, thankfully, his appointment was scuttled. Imagine a man being investigated for sex trafficking and having sex with a seventeen year old girl, being picked to lead the very agency that investigates such things. The guy should be sharing prison soap with Diddy, but he is a white male republican, so the same rules do not apply. 

Trump feels embolden to pick these clowns based on fealty and not qualifications. He believes that he had this resounding mandate from the American people. On further review, he did not. As more election results come in, we can see that his margins are getting smaller and smaller, and he did not win a majority of the popular vote. 49.87% is not going to cut it. He won by a a couple of hundred thousand votes across key swing states, and had those totals been different we would be looking at quite a different outcome. I was guilty of overstating the level of Mr. trump's victory myself (see my previous post), and I was wrong.  Sadly, like everything else with trump, perception became a false reality.    

But take heart Harris supporters, If you voted for her you should be pretty relieved and chill right now. Just sit back and enjoy the trump train roll off the tracks. The next four years will be one wreck after another. You will get to say I told you so when it's all said and done. 

Let's just hope , for all our sakes, that there will be someone left to say it to. 

*Pic courtesy of Reuters via Yahoo.  

Post- Mortem

 

~Paraphrasing Ali Velshi~ The most powerful person in America is not Donald J. Trump, it's you.

 These are tough times for progressives and democrats in America. There was a red wave this past week, and everyone in democratic circles are scratching their heads and trying to figure out why. Even the winners seemed a little shell shocked by the scope and magnitude of the outcome. 

I'm not, and if you are a student of American history, or if you pay attention to the psyche and mindset of the white majority population in America, you would not be either.

Frist, let's stop with all the talk about white working class and economic angst, and democrats not addressing their concerns. (James Carville, and Bernie Sanders, old white men themselves, will never get it.)  If you gave a lot of these white working class voters a million dollars, and in order to keep it they would have to have voted for Harris, your money would have been safe. They still wouldn't have done it. It has nothing to do with economics and everything to do with identity. Kamala's race and gender made it damn near impossible for her to win. Her opponent, at times, was acting like he wanted to lose, and he still beat her by a country mile. Performing fellatio on a mike at a rally, declaring that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, threatening political violence against his enemies, is not a winning message, but it worked for trump because it was never about the message. It was always about the people who are running. Plain and simple. 

As Americans we never like to hear this, because we like to think of ourselves as somehow being above bigotry and ignorance. We believe that this experiment in democracy is complete, and that we have created a perfect union. We have not. Take a look around you. Look who we are sending back to Washington. Not only Trump, but all of the slimy loathsome self-serving politicians who thrive in an environment of hate and division. Trump is the face of it, and he made it cool to hate without having to act like we are the haters. We channeled our hate through him. That's who we elected as our next president. A man who has spent his entire political life dividing people, and demonizing those who look different and who he perceives as being less than. This includes not only ordinary citizens, but military service members as well. The people who served in his administration and know him best told us who he is, and we still chose not to believe them. Why?  Because deep down most Americans ( I can say most now based on  the election results) know that we are no different than he is.

 I feel bad for black women who truly thought they had allies with white women. That their solidarity of sisterhood, united in their fight for reproductive freedoms, would be enough to beat the tyrant in waiting at the ballot box. It was not. At the end of the day, whiteness and fear of others comes first. Trump knew this, and he used it to his political advantage. 

A few years back a white women who worked for me told me that she might be coming into work a little later for a few days. She told me that she had to renew her parking privileges at a garage that was much closer to our place of work. And until then, she would have to rely on someone else to drop her off.  In the meantime, she couldn't park in a garage that was farther away. She just couldn't take the chance of walking a longer distance to work. Center City, Philadelphia (by all accounts the safest part of anywhere in the city), was just too dangerous for her. 

I thought about my former co-worker a lot during this election cycle. When those scary dark and ominous trump commercials of young brown men were running over and over, I knew that they would have their intended outcomes. Talking heads on cable television and political pundits were saying that there is no way Americans (especially suburban white women) would embrace Trump's message of fear and division. They were wrong. Harris and her message of joy, hope, and not going back, was never going to work with a majority population, whose fears and prejudices were a much more motivating factor in how they voted. 

I will let Elie Mystal's quotes close this post.

"America deserves everything is about to get. We had a chance to stand united against fascism, authoritarianism, racism, and bigotry, but we did not. We had a chance to create a better work for not just ourselves, but our sisters and brothers in at lease some of the communities most vulnerable to unchecked white rule, but we did not. We had a chance to pass down a better safer, and cleaner world to our children, but we did not. Instead, we chose Trump, JD Vance, and a few white South African billionaires who know a thing or two about instituting apartheid...America did this. America, through the process of a free and fair election, demanded this.. And America, as a collective, deserves to get what it wants."

These next four years will be interesting. And I will be hear for it. Hopefully, so will you. 

     

  

Three days and counting.

 

" I live in a crazy time" ~Anne Frank~ 

Just three days to go, and Americans are bracing for the election of a lifetime. It's hard to believe that Donald J. Trump could be elected as the 47th President of the Unites States, but here we are. 

I am not going to get into the litany of reasons why this man, a convicted felon, should never be seen anywhere near the White House again, I think that it is all well documented. (He should have been prosecuted and sitting in federal prison for what he did on January 6th.)  Although, I must say, that he is adding to that list every day.  The 1939 Nazi style convention in Madison Square Garden. The relentless attack on immigrants and people who are different. Openly bragging about his white skin, and mocking Kamala's ethnicity. Calling for the execution of Liz Cheney by firing squad, threatening mass deportations of people he doesn't think should be here.  Finally, and most importantly, not one single policy position that will make your life or mine any better. Not one. Oh wait...yeah, tariffs.

I am not going to  play pollster or prognosticator and dare try to guess the results on Tuesday. I'm bad at this stuff. I never thought that America would elect a black man with a funny name, and they did it. Twice. I never thought that someone like Donald Trump could be elected president, and he was.  So I honestly don't know what to expect. My gut instinct tells me that America will never elevate a black woman to the highest office in the land.  Heck, they wouldn't elect a white woman who was also more qualified for the position than Trump. The sexism is that strong. Throw race in the mix and you see where I am going. Most people who are voting for the felon will not be able to articulate a reason why. They will make all kinds of excuses for voting for him, and not one of them will make sense. They just know that Kamala is bad.  

I give Trump credit, he figured it out. His us against them fear mongering campaign is working because Americans are afraid of change.  The logic goes like this:  Trump might be a terrible human being who plays on our worst instincts, but at least he looks like us. He can't be that bad. He will protect us from the brown scary people who are trying to take our country from us. There is nothing he can say or do that will change that thinking in the minds of fifty percent of the voters in America. That man he shot on 5th Avenue had it coming.  When he says that he would like to be a dictator for life like his pals, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un,  the Wall Street Journal declares that he does not have the attention span to carry out his agenda, and then endorses him.  Republican politicians are on cable news shows every night translating what he meant when he literally said something else.  

This collective form of cognitive dissonance has infected a majority of white Americans.  Mr. Trump is hoping that it will be enough to place him in the most powerful position on earth once again.  He will be free to carry out project 2025, and play dictator while the sycophants around him feed his ego. Republicans will most likely control both houses, and the majority of the Supreme Court is made up of  obsequious hand-picked loyalist who have abandoned the rule of law for political reasons. 

This is what we might be facing come the morning of November 6th.  

Just know that whatever happens, I will be here. Maybe not as much as I would like, but I will still be posting when I can.    

Thank you field hands for always checking in with your comments and insights. 

Vote!        

Thirty One days!

 Oh chile! There has been a lot going on in these Divided States of America since my last post. 

I guess you all saw the Vice Presidential debate. The Ivy League Hillbilly was trying so hard to do an image makeover. Both men were so nice to each other that I thought they were going to hold hands and sing Kumbaya , My Lord at the end. The Hillbilly was trying his damnedest to  out nice the coach. It almost worked, too. Almost. With all due respect to folks like Abby Phillips who was having a meltdown over at CNN about the way the coached performed, the coach did just fine. Yeah I get that the Don Rickles face when the Hillbilly was telling lie after lie was a little off putting, but for the most part, the Coach held his own. CNN was shocked to see that the polls were split on how the two men performed.  I am not sure what they were expecting, but I digress. 

So the one and only thing that I want folks to take from the Vice Presidential debate is this: The Ivy  League Hillbilly refused to say that the felon lost the last election. Think about that for a minute. That alone should be disqualifying for him to hold the office of the second most powerful person on earth. And yet, that's exactly what happened. And now we are all left wondering what will happen if the felon losses a close election. Or worse, what if he wins? 

My heart goes out to the folks in North Carolina and parts of Georgia and Tennessee. This last storm was not a joke. Not so fun fact: It was heading right for us here in our little part of the world in North Georgia, and then it made a shift to the East.  There are a lot of nice things about living in the South. Hurricanes and tornadoes are not included.

The felon, true to form, was trying to make political hay out of this latest tragedy. He blamed the Bien administration for not doing enough for people in red states. Of course his lies were easily debunked by the governors of Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. This was all just projection on his part. Because, if you will recall, the felon himself tried to hold back federal relief from California after the deadly wildfires out there because they didn't vote for him. Think about that. The president of the United States withholding aid from fellow Americans for political reasons. And yet, that is just what the felon did when he was president.  There is no bottom with this guy. 

He is now calling for a day when law enforcement can do whatever the hell they want to rid our streets of crime. In other words, a Purge. Just like the movie.  And if you think it's too far fetched, think again. This is the guy who wanted to shoot protestors in Washington D.C. during the George Floyd protests. Nothing is too grotesque or repulsive for the felon, and he is sending all kinds of signals to let us know what's to come if he is given another shot at the White House. 

Meanwhile, it's still a fifty fifty race. That, to me, is the most shocking thing about this election season. After all we have seen and know about the felon, fifty percent of you are still willing to vote for him and put him back in office. Racism is a powerful thing. Credit to the felon for figuring it out. Half of you will surrender your freedoms as long as the person taking them away looks like you do. Germany 1933.

And as for you Negroes who think it's cool to be contrarians and vote MAGA because you didn't get enough attention when you were kids. You better start rethinking your position. I saw the images of that brother getting curb-stomped at a MAGA rally in Saginaw, Michigan, and like the rest of you in the black delegation, I said to myself: serves him right.  I am not sure why you all think that you are any different than those Haitian immigrants and brown people that the felon and Ivy League Hillbilly have been demonizing over the past few weeks. To them, we're all the same. Trust me on this one black MAGA, you're not special.  At the end of the day, you're just another n word to them. Just like all the rest of us. But as the old black aunties would say:  You keep doing you, boo.  

Vote! 

         

 

it's not so sunny in Philadelphia for the felon.

"They're eating the dogs, the cats!"  That was the former president of the United States parroting wacko right-wing talking points in his debate with Kamala Harris last night.  As Americans, we should all be embarrassed that we allowed this man to become the leader of the free world. The fact that his cult still do not realize that the emperor has no clothes is baffling to me. I mean I get it, they are not the best and brightest that America has to offer, but surely they have eyes and ears. Surely they see what the rest of us saw last night: A lunatic ranting and screaming lie after lie, while his opponent on the debate stage  beat him like a runaway slave.  (Figuratively speaking.)

The felon was complaining about the moderators to his base, and he tried to blame his cluelessness on the moderators who fact- checked him when he went off the rails. (Killing new born babies? WTF?)  He is now threatening to pull ABC's broadcast license if he ever becomes president again. Honestly, if that debate was on Newsmax the results would have been the same. Harris was on her game, and he did not see it coming.  Blaming the refs because your jump shot stinks is not the way to go. Donald, maybe next time you should prepare for the debate instead of running around in the right-wing echo chamber and surrounding yourself with sycophants and cult members. 

Neilson is reporting that sixty seven million people watched the felon make a fool of himself last night. And even though he is crying a river about how unfair ABC was to him, he had five more minutes to talk than Vice President Harris. Sadly for him, objectively speaking, he still got his ass kicked. 

The debate was in my hometown of Philly, so I am going to use a Rocky quote to end this post: " You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life".  But it ain't about how hard you hit. It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving".

The felon can't be moving that well today.  

 

 

The switch.

 

One of my favorite songs of all time is Copacabana by Barry Manilow. (Don't judge) Yes, I love Barry Manilow.  Anywhoo, there is a verse in that song that I keep thinking about every time I see the felon holding a presser or giving a speech. "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl, but that was thirty years ago when they used to have a show, now it's a disco, but not for Lola, still in the dress she used to wear faded feathers in her hair. She sits there so refined, and drinks herself half-blind. She lost her youth and she lost her Tony, now she's lost her mind."

The felon's shtick has gotten so old, that even some of his MAGA faithful are starting to be turned off. He is like that comedian with the same old cringy and grown-worthy jokes. They used to be funny to some people, but now nobody is laughing at them anymore. 

I was watching his press conference the other day, and dare I say it? I actually felt sorry for the felon. The lies, the desperation, it was all, in a word, cringeworthy. This Harris/Walz ticket has really thrown the felon and his people for a loop. The guy is clearly shook. Harris and Walz are sucking up all the oxygen, and are now, officially, the cool kids on the block. They drew twenty thousand people in Arizona last night, and it was one hundred degrees outside. Standing room only. Meanwhile, the felon is having a hard time finding enough people to fill a venue in...wait for it.. Bozeman, Montana. The same slurred speech, the same sloppy takes and lies. It has to be getting old, even for the MAGA cultists.  Now that he is officially the only really old guy in the race, it's putting the focus on his mental acuity and stamina. 

Speaking of guys in the race, Kamala has picked hers.   As someone who actually knows Josh Shapiro, (Yes, I'm name dropping) I was a bit disappointed. I mean who is this Walz fellow? But then I watched his speech at the Temple University rally in Philly, and I was like...good pick, Kamala. I tweeted this right after I watched him: Walz is that dude you meet at an airport bar, and you almost miss your flight because of him. Instant chemistry and likeability. As my sister would say: He is good people.

Not so much for the felon's VP pick. JD is scary, and, yes, weird. So much so, that even though you know it's probably not true, you almost want to believe that couch story. The thought of the vice president of the United States getting his rocks off on a Rooms To Go catalog is not something I ever want to think about again. Ever.

So we're off. The race is on to November. Expect it to get really ugly from here. The felon is trying to stay out of jail, and winning is the only hope that he has. The switch by the democrats has really thrown the felon for a loop. He was hoping for Uncle Joe, instead he got younger, darker, Kamala. The ugliness started already. The felon has already injected his racist birther like challenges to his opponent's racial identity.  And his post election plans are already in place to thwart the wishes of the American people by any means necessary. The Russians and Elon Musk will do everything in their powers to make sure that happens. What this all means is that if Kamala Harris wins, she better win by a lot.  If you think January 6th was bad, wait until you see what happens this time.

In Manilow's song,  Lola could only sit and drink herself half-blind. Not this aging lounge act. He will be doing a lot more than drinking and lamenting his losses. He will be kicking and screaming right to the bitter end.   

Shots fired.

 I have to be very careful with this post, because the next person I want to see in my Ring Doorbell camera is the Amazon delivery person with my tennis bag, and not a Secret Service agent.  

Anyway,  the felon is always comparing himself to Abraham Lincoln, and this past weekend he almost got his wish in ways that I am sure he did not want. For the record, I do not in any way condone political violence. I am a win at the ballot box, not by the bullet kind of guy. I do think it's ironic, though, that the man who has introduced a level of mean spiritedness never before seen in our politics is now the object of our pity.  Also ironic, is the fact that the shooter is not one of the people he likes to demonize, but a young man who looked just like all of his supporters in the crowd. He could have been one of their sons.   

My hero, Malcolm X, would have called Saturday's event in Butler, Pennsylvania, a chickens coming home to roost moment. I call it America's gun culture and politics of hatred and division coming together in a way that was inevitable.  It's sad that one of the felon's supporters had to lose his life. (As of me writing this post, he has still not reached out to personally offer his condolences to the man's family.)  

The felon was lucky this past Saturday. He has hinted that the experience has changed him. That's left to be seen. I suspect that he will be back to business as usual really soon. He will be back to sowing seeds of division, and demonizing all those who are not a part of the MAGA cult.  The cult is already fundraising off the tragic event, and  the felon was more concerned with getting a good picture of himself and making sure that his shoes (can't have the world seeing those lifts) were on in the aftermath of the tragedy. 

In closing, let us all hope that the rest of this political season will be a peaceful one. 

*Pic from AP images