Ideas, Opinions, Genealogy, and Book Reviews
Where are the pesos? This ‘build a wall on the southern border and Mexico will pay’ promise was made as Donald Trump announced his campaign for President in 2016.
I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.
The book is Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny by Edward J. Watts
I became interested in Mortal Republic because the founding fathers of the United States had many of the ideas of the Roman Republic in mind when they wrote the Constitution. I would like to thank Netgalley for the chance to read this. This is a paperback edition of a book published about 2 years ago.
Continue reading “Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny”
It is well known that President Trump has had a problem with the truth. Lies, misrepresentations and alternative facts have been apparent for a long time.
A fact checker put the number of lies and misrepresentations at over 20,000 since the beginning of his term and that was the number over a month ago . I’m not sure how many more lies and misrepresentations have passed his lips in recent weeks. We can argue over the exact number in this term but it is clear it is a big number.
Continue reading “Lies about the great economy”
President Harry Truman said “The buck stops here”
What did he mean by this?
Continue reading “The buck stops here.”
Former President Barack Obama warned us of what could happen if Donald Trump was reelected. As I remember many of his speeches that we’ve heard have been more optimistic about the future of America. This was darker but still offered the hope that we would turn the current President out of office before he could continue his assault on democracy to the point where the damage was reversible.
It was an important warning about the importance of voting in the upcoming election. Read the transcript or watch the video.
Vote, it is very important this year.
Thanks to our President and his mismanagement of the COVID-19 crisis millions of Americans are in great financial difficulty and quite often do not even have food to eat. In addition there are over 150,000 of us dead. I’ll not speak about them today, the hungry living will be my topic – Food for the Living.
As I’ve often mentioned: It did not have to be this bad.
Continue reading “Food for the living”
A bit over 2 months ago the House passed their corona virus relief bill (H.R.6800 – The Heroes Act) It was passed May 15, 2020 to help our county beyond the action taken earlier. This post specifically the unemployment benefits to help people when have lost the jobs in the Trump-Covid economy which are set to empire at the end of July.
Of course the Senate Republicans have done next to nothing since May 15 to address this problem. Except the occasional complaint about unemployment benefits being too high.
Continue reading “Ridiculous Republican corona virus relief plan”
Is it time to talk about defunding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)? It seems to be a needed function so we are not talking about a full defunding. It has been frequently misused by the Trump administration, often in violation of the law.
So what is the remedy?. It seems if President Trump is able order DHS to gas peaceful protests in American cities, imprison and torture child, and other outrages, DHS may have much more money than needed to provide it needed functions. Should the budget be decreased (a partial defunding)? Or would it be better to add additional safe guards or perhaps reorganize the department? Or maybe the easiest thing is just getting a new President or a Congress willing and able to stand up to the president when he does this type to thing?
There is a good article online about this id you would like to read more-
What should we do?
President Trump and other Republicans want to overturn the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This seem especially worrisome since Republicans have not offered an alternative. Consequences for quite a few American were mentioned in my previous post (Repeal ACA now and maybe replace later ).
In addition to the 20-23 million Americans who would lose their medical insurance mentioned in that post there are other consequences. Under the ACA, Medicaid was expanded to include more low income people if the state agreed. These people would become uninsured.
Continue reading “Consequences if Republicans overturn the Affordable Care Act”
In a series of great moves, President Trump seems to be trying to make the current pandemic worse for all Americans, especially middle class and poor Americans.
Millions are unemployed and over 140,000 Americans are dead. It did not have to be this bad.
Continue reading “Making the COVID-19 pandemic worse”
A very good book and unexpectedly so. I thank Netgalley and BooksGoSocial for the privilege of reading Dominant Trait: A Story of Social and Genetic Inequality by Michael Abramson. The book is now available as both Kindle and paperback editions.
Continue reading “Dominant Trait by Michael Abramson”
Back on March 15 President Trump (aka @realDonaldTrump ) tweeted “The USA was never set up for this, just look at the catastrophe of the H1N1 Swine Flu (Biden in charge, 17,000 people lost, very late response time), but it soon will be.”
Remember those days when 17,000 seems like such a big number. The message of the tweet was clearly that where Obama and Biden failed to save us in that pandemic, and President Trump would save us in this one. He would prepare the USA to fight the pandemic and certainly have a smaller number of deaths.
Continue reading “March Tweet on H1N1, July update on COVID-19”
“Defund the police” is seen in protests but widely, and often purposely, misunderstood. I had written about this earlier but ran across an interesting article that may give some more useful information relevant to the “Defund the police” slogan which widely misunderstood.
So what is actually meant by this and how is it misunderstood?
Admiral James Stavridis, writing in Time, penned an informative article entitled What Police Can Learn From the Military About the Effectiveness of Soft Power.
Read how the military experience of Admiral Stavridis adds to this important debate.
I’m a bit behind in my reading. I’m reading an issue to Time magazine that has been sitting on my coffee table for at least 2 weeks. There were a number of interesting articles about the state of American society but I want to discuss one of those articles today. I think there is at least one more that I will write about later.
Trench Lawfare: Inside the Battles to Save Democracy From the Trump Administration by Molly Ball starts like this but you really should read all of it.
Despite the rising death toll in Georgia the governor is doubling down on his previous policies of laxity and not allowing localities to be stricter in trying to limit deaths from COVID-19.
Continue reading “Masks Matter”