Call Security...

     Bear with me since at times this may seem as a rant (yes, the temptation is to write it as "bare" with me, but this is not about a nudist colony).  No, I wasn't on the sidelines working as an unpaid air traffic controller, although in my earlier years I did glance at those "sample tests" books for becoming one (it only took a few questions to put that idea to rest).  But every now and then I tend to find my calm demeanor nearly pushed to the brink.  Not often, mind you, but sometimes.  It is at those moments (as my wife tells me) that I grow sarcastic, which is my version of showing anger.  It's a cowardly way, that of nipping and placing barbs, although I don't use the even more cowardly form of quickly adding, "I'm only kidding."  Even I hate that snidely way of giving a dig but not having the guts to acknowledge it.  Still, perhaps that curmudgeon side of me is popping out from behind the curtain more often as I age and near the end of writing these posts.  My goal was to write a thousand posts and now that I'm nearing the 860 mark, that end is drawing closer.  That is, if I make it that far.  Which brings me to Charley. 

 

     You likely haven' heard of Charley Reese, especially since he retired some 15 years ago.  He wrote for the Orlando Sentinel for over 49 years before finally making the decision to leave.  Here's a portion of his final column in that paper: Have you ever wondered why, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, we have deficits?  Have you ever wondered why, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, we have inflation and high taxes?  You and I don’t propose a federal budget.  The president does.  You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.  The House of Representatives does.  You and I don’t write the tax code.  Congress does.  You and I don’t set fiscal policy. Congress does.  You and I don’t control monetary policy.  The Federal Reserve Bank does.  One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one president and nine Supreme Court justices –545 human beings out of the 235 million [the population at the time he wrote this in 1984]– are directly, legally, morally and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country...I excluded all of the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason.  They have no legal authority.  They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman or a president to do one cotton-picking thing.  I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash.  The politician has the power to accept or reject it.  No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.  Don’t you see how the con game that is played on the people by the politicians?  Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault.  They cooperate in this common con regardless of party...The president can only propose a budget.  He cannot force the Congress to accept it.  The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating appropriations and taxes...When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.  If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.  If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red...There are no insoluble government problems.  Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take it.  Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exist disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,” “inflation” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.  Those 545 people and they alone are responsible.  They and they alone have the power.  They and they alone should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses — provided they have the gumption to manage their own employees.

      So the shutdown has ended, the second longest in our nation's history (the first was during Trump's first term).  To an outsider it would appear that the thought of people not making their flights to Thanksgiving dinner was more important that providing food benefits for 42 million people (one of my conservative friends insists that 27% of those people --which would amount to over 11 million people-- collect those funds fraudulently, although I'm not sure where he gets his data).  Trump and the Republicans didn't seem to care about either issue...thus 8 Democrats said that they would cross over IF the Republicans guaranteed that the furloughed federal workers would be given back pay and that they would not be fired (both provisions are already law but Trump threatened to ignore both laws and deny back pay along with firing them).  The trick worked and what was already law, became redundant law, perhaps with the threat to be broken again come January when the new budget funding runs out.  The defection by the 8 forced Speaker Mike Johnson to open the House after keeping it closed for 43 days, and swear in the newly-elected Democrat, Adelita Grijalva (earlier in the year, Johnson swore in 2 Republican representatives just days after they were elected in a special election, all while Congress was not in session, utilizing the "pro forma" allowance, something he elected not to use with this Democratic representative).  Said Grijalva on NBC: It has been 50 days since the people of Arizona’s 7th Congressional District elected me to represent them, 50 days that over 800,000 Arizonans have been left without access to the basic services that every constituent deserves.  This is an abuse of power.  One individual should not be able to unilaterally obstruct the swearing in of a duly elected member of Congress for political reasons.  She immediately signed the discharge petition to force a vote to release all of the Epstein files (a discharge petition locks in the signatures, so even if all of Congress somehow vanished, the petition would still stand and have to be honored).  During the rush to have all House members return, their alleged use of private jets (tax-payer funded) once again came up, wrote The Center Square.  One should note that Congress folk have voted to exempt themselves from any Freedom of Information requests, so perhaps we'll never know who did or didn't use such methods of transport...

     Now besides allegedly trying to forestall a vote on releasing the Epstein files, what exactly was in the fine print in this new budget (which was the rush to get House members back)?  PBS took a dive through the over 300 pages and noted a few additions that journalists were allowed to report on but perhaps not broadcast widely, such as the additional $203 million to provide for extra security for both House and Senate members (the Supreme Court justices got an extra $28 million of security protection)...in total over $300 million was added to provide extra security.  Wait, who's running scared?  And from what?  But what was also added was this: Senators can sue. Noticeably left out of both the summary and the explanatory statement for the legislative appropriations bill is Section 213 of the bill. (Pg. 52 of the text.)  This orders that any phone or other communication providers must tell a Senate office if prosecutors have asked for disclosure of Senate data.  And senators can sue for $500,000 if this does not happen, including retroactively to 2022.  In my own city, our current mayor felt that he was a shoe-in and did little to no campaigning, likely hoping that the mayoral filing date would go by unnoticed.  But one active council member did notice and got her filing into the office in time (just 10 days shy)...and won.  Two other Democratic mayors won rather easily here, despite extensive and expensive campaigning (about 10x the signage and placards, to my eyes).  Were the tides shifting?  Someone call security...

     Then came the piece in The New Yorker about several hotels who licensed the Trump name but are now taking down that signage and disassociating themselves from the Trump name due to a noticeable drop in occupancy.  For someone nearing 80, and feeling that both his physical and mental faculties might be feeling their age, that must have come as quite the blow.  Alas, I couldn't help but think that Trump may be picturing his body soon being mummified and laid in perpetual rest in a gold-lined coffin, on display for all (like Soviet Russia's Lenin) in the newly-adorned King Tut section of the almost-finished ballroom (King Tut was only 8 or 9 when he became Pharaoh, and ruled by age 11, so he would have fit right in with the Epstein files).  Or would his sons want Trump's ashes slotted into a million golf balls priced at just $1000 a piece (illuminated gold-leafed display box extra), netting them a cool extra billion dollars.  Worshippers could place their enshrined ball on a special shelf, while others (thinking Melania here) could swat hundreds of them off of the deck of a ship into the deep, deep blue.  Come to think of it, she may buy the entire lot...

    My far-right friends are used to me venturing off into these rants now and then, even as they do with their own onslaught writings now and then of corrupt dems and the never-to-be-forgotten and nearly immortal, Hillary.  But as you can read by the Charley Reese column (remember, this was written in 1984), little has changed with politics (or with my readers, for that matter).  Just as with life, the political waters ebb and flow like a river, overflowing at times then drying up during harder years; rocks tumble off cliffs and create rapids or blockages which are eventually worn down or swept away, and then all is quite for a bit until it repeats some years hence.  So whatever side you're on, it's good to let it out now and then, to clear out the emotional palette and start over, regardless of where you stand.  Picture it like the magazine Garden and Gun (what??)...who goes there?  Call security...

     Now I was going to go on and on about the meager soy bean order by China from US farmers of just 20 tons vs. the 158+ tons they expect to harvest this year (Trump denies this); or that Israel continues to block the entry of blankets and tents to those in Gaza, even as their winter approaches (Israel denies this report by the United Nations).  Did I mentiobed that Trump has formally asked for Netanyahu to be pardoned? (one should note that Netanyahu has not yet been convicted).  And then there's the jobless figures, although that disappointing data may soon be stopped as Trump continues to order data deleted, from medicine to weather to the environment.  And not just putting such data on hold, but deleting it.  Sort of like Trump ordering a museum in the Netherlands to take down the displays of 174 black US soldiers who were killed in WW II and are now buried there.  Or the desperate race against time to upgrade our electrical grid, and water distribution, and highways & bridges, much of it already underway from Biden's bipartisan-approved budget but for which Trump has placed signage taking credit for the work.  Added Bloomberg about what these elderly "leaders" are passing on to our grandchildren: Young Americans will now have to navigate a world where their country is as distrusted as it was valorized for much of the last century...Young people will have to methodically reverse every one of these actions and find new ways to accelerate the shift from fossil fuels [note from the NY Review, "JP Morgan is the top funder of fossil fuel industries in the world"].  “Debt is really too mild a word,” says Nicholas Stern, chair of the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.  “It’s a brutality against our children and grandchildren of huge proportions.  This is not alarmism, it is simply describing what the science is telling us.”  Yes, I debated mentioning all of that but what was the point?  Just as with the winds that swept mounds and mounds of yellow leaves scampering in all directions, I felt that politicians and politics itself were quite similar, a crowded cluster of aimless entities rushing about, scattering positions like passengers late for a flight, and turning another way with no destination in sight.

     So there's my curmudgeon summary, of sorts.  Instead, I end with a near-repeat of the last post as our warmth returned, so much so that our ski resorts are growing more and more worried that even their snowmaking efforts may not appease those early vacationers.  The elms and maples are finally letting go of their last traces of green as they withdraw their precious life sap deep into their trunks, cutting off the nutrient supply, its own government shutdown.  But the beauty remains, the leaves brightly contrasting with the graying skies, the tomatoes desperately trying to ripen before the inevitable (yes, I've managed to cover and help my tomatoes through the colder nights that pop in now and then), the piles of mulched leaves (now on my 6th round) getting ever smaller before they.vanish into the ground to provide both nutrients and shelter for those bugs and bees and small rodents escaping the cold.  It is such a welcome reminder to the occasional grouch in me, telling me to snap out of it, that there is so much more that matters, that it's never too late to help others, or to donate to a food bank or shelter, or to hand off a pizza gift certificate to an outreached hand (I often throw in a few laundry pods and a razor as well).  The small things make a difference.  There is more gold in one small patch of those leaves falling than there is in Trump's new bathroom.  And once again, nature's river keeps moving along.  Sing a song to Earth...

P.S. So that magazine...Garden and Gun?  One guess where the target audience is for this publication?  But thanks to bioGraphic and the California Academy of Science (who flagged an article in the magazine), I had to take a peek and again, found quite the diversity of pieces such as this piece on the revival of crocodiles (once endangered) vs. alligators (plentiful).  Which was which, sort of like separating those camels with one or two humps.  Here's part of what that article said: Crocodiles have longer, thinner snouts, and males can grow up to 6 meters (20 feet) long.  They live in salt and brackish water, thanks to salt-excreting glands in their tongues.  And compared to alligators and their global crocodilian cousins, American crocs are a shy bunch.  While the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has logged 487 unprovoked alligator attacks on humans since 1948, crocodiles have been implicated in just two—one of which involved a man swimming in waters teeming with crocodiles at 3 a.m.  Wait, swimming with a bunch of crocs?  Maybe we are growing less and less intelligent...