Posted inDonald Trump National politics Uncategorized

Oregon’s Covid vaccine problem shows how destructive Trump is

It's starting to feel a lot like The Handmaid's Tale, that gripping series about how the United States was taken over by religious zealots who forced women into being raped in order to have children at a time when infertility gripped the world. I came to The Handmaid's Tale late, but watched it every day until I was able to write about how the conclusion inspired resistance against Trump's autocracy. In the series, the only states who remained free of the zealotry were Alaska and Hawaii, if I remember correctly. I have the impression that the West Coast states also…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Wanted: Democrats with the guts to shut down the government on September 30

As painful as it is for me to say this, congressional Democrats bear a lot of resemblance to the pitiful Oregon State football team that lost a game to Fresno State yesterday it should have won. Unorganized. Mistake-prone. Divided. Listless. After recording the game and watching enough of it to realize how bad Oregon State was playing, I fast-forwarded my way through most of the rest of the game, because it was so painful to watch a team I wanted to win perform so poorly. This also is how I feel about the Democrats in the House and Senate. They…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Republican party no longer believes in individual and corporate freedom

There are many bizarre aspects to Trump's second term. One among many is this. The Republican Party used to be known for its commitment to limited government, unbridled capitalism, and individual liberty. No longer.  With Trump as president, today's Republican Party firmly supports massive government control, federal interference in business decisions, and unheard of constraints on the freedom of Americans. The party that feared black helicopters and jack-booted thugs when a Democrat occupied the White House is fine with them, now that Trump is the occupant.  I recall the uproar when Republicans claimed that the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, would…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

Why the $32.5 million economic benefit from Avelo Airlines is a screwy figure

Let's get this clear right off the bat. I'm not an economist. Heck, I've never even had a college economics class. But I've got a pretty good sense of when an economic sales job appears to be B.S., or to put it more delicately, taken with a grain of salt -- meaning, skeptically.  That's the feeling I have whenever I hear boosters of the Salem airport having commercial air service speak of the economic benefit to our city from having an airline fly in and out. Salem hasn't had any success in keeping an airline for more than a few…
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Posted in2024 election Joe Biden

After reading Original Sin, I’m even more irritated at Joe Biden

It took me a while to finish reading the tell-all book by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson, Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, It's Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice To Run Again. One reason is that the book brought back painful memories of the 2024 presidential election that resulted with Donald Trump beating Kamala Harris and earning another four years in the White House where he will have another opportunity to lead our country and the world down some dangerous paths. Sending the military into Democratic-leaning cities. Weaponizing the Justice Department against his political enemies. Trashing renewable energy and efforts to combat global…
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Posted in2026 election Donald Trump National politics

If Trump tries to rip my mail-in ballot out of my hands, he’ll get a nasty paper cut

Hopefully the title of this blog post doesn't earn me a visit from the Secret Service. Guys, this isn't a threat against the president; it's a warning to Trump that if he messes with the much-beloved universal mail-in voting we have here in Oregon for every election, this will generate bad karma for him, possibly including a well-deserved paper cut. Trump's threat yesterday to issue an executive order banning mail-in voting is toothless, because the Constitution makes the states responsible for elections. Any changes to state election laws would have to be approved by Congress. Good luck getting that through…
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Posted inDonald Trump International issues

Behold, my Ukraine war peace plan (Nobel prize, please)

President Trump wants a Nobel peace prize. Well, so do I. And I think my plan for negotiating an end to the war between Ukraine and Russia is better than Trump's. Of course, the bestowers of Nobel prizes would have to overlook the minor (in my view) problem that I have absolutely no contact with Ukraine or Russia, so I'll be conveying my plan to Zelensky and Putin via mental telepathy. If my plan is adopted in whole or in large part by the warring parties, that will prove to the Nobel prize committee that I am most deserving of…
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Posted inDonald Trump International issues

Trump humiliated by Putin at Alaska meeting about Ukraine

We have a horribly weak president. That's obvious to us here in the United States, since Trump only gives an illusion of strength when he's dealing with people and organizations subject to his presidential powers.  But today the whole world saw Trump humiliated by Russia's dictator, Vladimir Putin, because Putin knew how to use to his advantage Trump's eagerness to submit to men more powerful than he is. Even though Putin is 100% responsible for the war in Ukraine, having invaded the country for no reason other than Putin's desire to reconstitute the old Soviet Union, Trump agreed to Putin's…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Democratic response to Trump is almost as irritating as Trump himself

I'm an unhappy Democrat. I have lots of company. Currently I'm stuck between the proverbial rock and a hard place. I can't stand Trump and what he's doing. I also can't stand the Democratic Party and what it's doing. My irritation with the party I've been a member of since I was old enough to vote is manifesting in various ways. Whenever I get a text message from a Democratic politician asking for money to support some quixotic liberal cause, I quickly press "delete and report spam." If the text is from Kamala Harris or Hillary Clinton, I press even more…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Trump’s pick for Bureau of Labor Statistics head favors “feelings” over data

It was clear that something bad was in store for the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) when Trump fired the head of the agency after the BLS reported poor job creation numbers recently. That's Trump's style: fire the messenger when they report an accurate message that the Dictator in Chief doesn't like. Today the bad thing came into view. Trump has nominated an unqualified MAGA loyalist, E.J. Antoni, to be the next commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is unheard of, since the BLS is a nonpartisan agency that is known for producing world-class high quality statistics on…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

All I want for Christmas is a Democratic leader with a killer political instinct

It's tough being a Democrat these days. After being depressed over Kamala Harris' disappointing loss to Trump last November, there hasn't been much to raise my spirits on the national level. (Locally and statewide in Oregon, Democrats are faring better.) Just about every Democrat on the national stage either irritates me or fails to inspire me. I get countless,  more or less, text messages and emails every day urging me to contribute to some Democratic cause. I never read them before I delete them. Sure, I realize that Democrats have no power in Washington, D.C. They don't control the White…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Trump fires Bureau of Labor Statistics head because he didn’t like some statistics

In any other presidency, two things Trump did today would be so outrageous to both Democrats and Republicans, our representatives in Congress would waste little time protesting the president's actions. But with this presidency, it's just another day in the Office of Sleazy Goings-On for Trump's acolytes. Outrage #1 was Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a minimum-security camp in Texas from a regular federal prison in Florida. The move required a waiver of guidelines that prohibit prisoners convicted of serious crimes with more than ten years remaining on their sentence from being in such a camp, which doesn't have any…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City Council needs to forget about commercial air service in Salem

Wow. Travel Salem and other Chamber of Commerce types really have memory problems. It's only been a few weeks since Avelo Airlines announced it is pulling out of the Salem Airport as of August 10 after just a couple of years of sucking up hundreds of thousands of dollars of subsidies provided to the airline, along with benefiting from $2.4 million in airport improvements that came out of the same general fund that city officials claim is going broke, which is why voters were asked to approve a property tax increase to fund city services, which they did. Yet even…
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Posted inEnvironment National politics

Democrats need to take a stand for the natural world

We live in increasingly artificial times. The most obvious sign of this is the rise of Artificial Intelligence, A.I. While A.I. has a lot of potential to improve human life, the dangers are obvious: gosh, what could go wrong if Artificial Intelligence is in control of society's crucial elements -- the internet, power production, business, education, the military, politics? Answer: a lot. What's especially worrisome, stepping back and looking at our current situation more broadly, is how technology is separating us from the natural world. An article by Jill Lepore in the November 11, 2024 issue of The New Yorker,…
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Posted inInternational issues

Israel is purposely starving the people of Gaza. That’s a war crime.

I guess Israel has forgotten the lessons of the Holocaust, because a nation founded to protect the lives of innocent Jews has been wantonly killing innocent Palestinians since its war against Hamas began. Many thousands of those killed are women and children. They've been blown apart by bombs, shredded by bullets, and most horrifying of all to my mind, starved by uncaring Israeli leaders who have blocked almost all humanitarian aid from entering Gaza for several months. What kind of monsters stand by and watch children starving? The monsters in charge of Israel, who are extreme right-wing zealots unashamed to…
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Posted inJulie Hoy

Mayor Julie Hoy raises $12,100 even though she’s not facing reelection this year

I'm no fan of Salem's mayor, Julie Hoy. When she orchestrated the resignation of City Manager Keith Stahley this year in an unseemly manner, I filed a complaint with the Oregon Government Ethics Commission. Now the commission is investigating Hoy and the city councilors who appear to have been involved in prohibited "serial communications" that violate our state's public meetings law. I do give Hoy this underhanded bit of praise, though. She breaks new ground as Mayor. To my knowledge no other mayor of Salem has ever been investigated for a significant ethics violation. And information someone sent me shows…
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Posted inCity Council City of Salem

City leaders wrongly preventing councilors from attending neighborhood association meetings

Officials at the City of Salem -- city attorney, mayor, city manager, maybe others -- really need to take the story of Goldilocks to heart. Or the Buddhist middle way.  Because they've jumped from one extreme that got city officials in hot water (an ethics complaint that I filed, which currently is being investigated by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission), to the other extreme where those officials are putting on ice the ability of a city councilor to attend neighborhood association meetings in their ward. So because Mayor Julie Hoy and other members of the city council engaged in a…
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Posted inDonald Trump National politics

Trump’s war against science, including climate change, will be disastrous

Those of us opposed to Trump have lots of choices when it comes to his most dangerous actions. Mass deportations of law-abiding undocumented migrants. Tax breaks for the wealthy paid for by huge cuts to Medicaid. Slow-walking support for Ukraine. Mass firings of career federal employees. To name but a few. But in the long run, I suspect that historians of the future will look back and judge that Trump's most disastrous action in his second term was to engage in a war against science, notably including the science of climate change. The world has already surpassed the 1.5 C…
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Posted inChamber of Commerce City Council City of Salem

Avelo Airlines leaving Salem in August. My reaction: “I told you so”

To nobody's surprise except the City Council, Chamber of Commerce, and Travel Salem -- who assured citizens in 2023 that this time, really, you can count on it, an airline offering commercial service will remain at the Salem airport -- Avelo Airlines has announced that as of August 10 it will no longer have flights to and from our once-again airline'less city. Here's an excerpt from today's Salem Reporter story by Rachel Alexander and Mirandah Davis-Powell, "Avelo pulls out of Salem." Avelo Airlines is ending flights out of Salem in August, leaving the community again without a commercial operator after…
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Posted inInternational issues

Netanyahu has prolonged Gaza war to keep himself in power

I detest Israel in the same way that much of the world detests the United States. Not because I dislike the people of Israel. Not because I dislike the nation of Israel. Because Israel is being led by a despicable leader and a far-right government that is responsible for harming many innocent human beings. By carrying out what comes close to being the genocide of Palestinians living in Gaza -- destroying their homes, indiscriminate bombing of hospitals, denial of humanitarian aid, mass killings of noncombatants -- Israel has squandered the goodwill that was directed at the country after Hamas attacked…
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