Category Archives: national news

national news

Entering a new era of campaigning

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has laid it on the line.

He is going to campaign for the presidency without any massive rallies. There will be none of those events with admirers crammed together, cheering themselves hoarse at pronouncements coming from their guy on the podium.

Donald Trump isn’t ready to make that pledge. Why? Because he prefers the campaign rallies where he is able to stand at a podium and deliver his incessant, incoherent riffs on this and/or that issue or perceived opponent.

I submit that the COVID-19 Pandemic Era has ushered in a new style of campaigning, with social media becoming even more prevalent than before.

Trump had that rally in Tulsa, Okla. He promised a huge crowd. It didn’t materialize. He had to take down an outdoor venue set up to handle an “overflow” crowd that never showed up. The sparse turnout angered Trump. It has created gossip about a campaign shakeup on the horizon.

Whatever. Biden’s view is that the age of big-time campaign rallies is over … at least while the nation fights the pandemic that so far is still running rampant from coast to coast to coast.

Just between you and me, we’ll be fighting this disease long after they count the presidential election ballots, which gives me hope that Biden’s strategy is the smart strategy.

There has been a lot of talk about the “new normal” arising from the pandemic. We’re wearing masks in public. We’re keeping our distance from strangers. We aren’t shaking hands when we meet friends. We aren’t embracing when we see loved ones.

Nor will we be standing shoulder-to-shoulder among crowds of strangers cheering the candidates of our choice.

To be frank, I am having trouble grasping how this will play out. I am still trying to fathom the notion of a “virtual” presidential nominating convention. Democrats will nominate Biden in a virtual event; Republicans will nominate Trump who will speak to a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., after the GOP gathering was moved from Charlotte, N.C., because the North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper wouldn’t clear the event out of fear of spreading the virus.

But … here we are. It’s a new day in a new era and with a new set of circumstances that are far beyond our ability to control at the moment. It has changed the way our politicians campaign for public office.

Given that I am slowly becoming a 21st-century man, I welcome the change with hope that it will produce new national leadership.

national news

Dear America: Happy birthday … hoping for a brighter day

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Dear America … on behalf of millions of others just like me I want to offer an apology.

I am sorry that the president of the United States couldn’t bring himself to say something worthy of the birthday you just celebrated.

Donald Trump stood before Mount Rushmore and then stood on the South Lawn of the White House and delivered two unforgettable speeches. We won’t remember them for the soaring rhetoric they should have contained. We will remember them for the raw anger, the division, the rage they planted.

This isn’t the way presidents usually commemorate your founding, but you knew that already. Presidents most commonly speak to our better angels, appealing to our sense of commonality, our quest to create a “more perfect Union.”

The Donald didn’t do that. He talked about angry mobs, the taking down of statues that “honor” traitors to the nation, generals who fought to overthrow the United States of America. He said those statues are part of “our history.” You bet they are. It is a history full of hate, of oppression, of enslavement of human beings. Donald Trump wants to preserve those monuments, keep them standing in public places. He is angry at those of us — fellow citizens — who protest them.

So he talked at length about that and about made-up assertions of the motives behind the demonstrations we have seen.

I am sorry he didn’t mention except in passing the pandemic that has afflicted so many thousands of American families. It has caused untold grief and misery. It has placed insurmountable burdens on heroic medical personnel. These Americans deserve our eternal gratitude but Trump didn’t see fit to offer it to them.

So, please accept my belated birthday wish along with this sincere hope for you, the nation I love with all my heart and the nation for which I went to war.

My hope is that we can deliver you a gift worthy of all that you represent. It would come in the form of a new president who is able to speak openly to our sense of decency and to, as Joe Biden has said, “restore our soul.”

America, I am forever grateful to have been born in this land. I pledge to do all I can to deliver this gift that you so richly deserve.

Here’s hoping for brighter days ahead.

national news

Hoping our national nightmare ends in four months

President Gerald Ford told us our “long national nightmare” ended the moment in August 1974 when his predecessor resigned from office and jetted off to oblivion.

I am hoping for a return of a similar moment when we get the ballots counted in November. My sincere hope is that Joseph R. Biden Jr. gets many more votes than Donald J. Trump Sr., that he wins a sufficient number of Electoral College votes to be elected president and that the incumbent will start packing up his belongings and jet off somewhere far away from the White House.

The process could get cumbersome if Trump decides to declare the election is “rigged” or that a foreign power “stole” it from the people of this country. The irony of such a declaration would be remarkable, to be sure, given what happened in 2016 when the Russians attacked our electoral system. Trump collected fewer actual votes than Hillary Clinton but garnered enough electoral votes to become president.

It’s been a disastrous run ever since. Trump can boast, brag and bloviate all he wants about what a “fantastic” job he’s done. He hasn’t. He has made a mess of our international alliances, torched every possible norm associated with the presidency, alienated the nation from the rest of the world and behaved like the first-class boor we all knew he was when he declared his candidacy.

There’s far more at stake than just the presidency. I want to see the Senate change hands, from Republican to Democratic control. I want to see a newly elected president work with lawmakers of both parties, something Biden has been able to do while serving in the Senate and then for two terms as vice president.

You see, we have received a real-time lesson in how the presidency is far too big a responsibility for someone who requires on-the-job training. What’s more, that someone at least needs to understand the necessity of learning about history, about government and about the limitations of power inherent in the office he inherited. Donald Trump has no interest in any of that. None!

I want a return to good government. Not necessarily big government. Just a government that works.

I hope we get it in just a little less than four months from now. I don’t want to wish my life away, but I also hope that time between now and Election Day goes quickly. I am weary of the chaos.

national news

‘Monuments’ to traitors need to come down

Donald Trump had a chance to offer words of unity, of common purpose, of a common love of country to a nation in the midst of crises.

He didn’t deliver.

Instead, he stoked racial animosity and sought once more to divide us between those those who want Trump re-elected and those of us who want someone else to become president of the United States.

Trump stood before Mount Rushmore and delivered an Independence Day speech full of the red meat his base eats up. He stood behind the statues and other monuments to Confederate generals, proclaiming they are part of our nation’s history. Sure they are, but it’s a history that shouldn’t be saluted and honored.

Donald Trump cannot unite a nation he was elected to lead. He is incapable of delivering on the unity theme even while we are celebrating the creation of this extraordinary nation we all love.

Yes, I believe Donald Trump loves the nation, but he wants it to be something it cannot be ever again. We are a land in the midst of fundamental change. Trump doesn’t acknowledge the change in our racial and ethnic composition. He is fighting back against that change and in the process is managing to alienate Americans against each other.

This is the how he chose to celebrate our nation’s independence? Sadly, yes.

He barely mentioned the crisis caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Uh, Mr. President, that’s a big deal. It has been all over the news of late. Tens of thousands of Americans have died and we’re being sickened at an increasing rate every single day. A wartime president, which Trump calls himself, must recognize the gravity of the crisis. This guy cannot or will not do it.

Sigh ...

An election is on the horizon. I am hoping with extreme caution that we can change our course and begin a new journey toward a common goal. It has been abundantly clear from the beginning of Donald Trump’s tenure as president that he is unable or unwilling to lead us in that direction.

national news

Trump concocting a weird plan to stay in office?

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I used to say of a man known in the Texas Panhandle as one of the region’s weirdest characters — the late Stanley Marsh 3 — that there was nothing beyond the realm of possibility where it concerned Stanley, that he was capable of doing practically anything.

I am left these days to think of Donald Trump in much the same way, that there is not a single thing beyond his quest to hold onto power, even if he were to lose an election.

A former Colorado U.S. senator has posited a notion that Trump might be concocting a stay-in-office plan even if he loses the election this November to Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Former Sen. Tim Wirth thinks Trump well might declare the election a fraud, rigged, fixed. That China interfered in order to defeat him. Thus, he would hold up the transition to a President-elect Biden. He could send the case to the Supreme Court. He would stall the election until Dec. 14, when the Electoral College would vote on who takes the oath of office in January 2021.

Were the court to toss out the election results, the matter would go to the House of Representatives, which then could — under the Constitution’s rules governing such a selection process — actually keep Trump in office for another four years.

Scary, yes? Damn right it is! It’s also not beyond the realm of the possible, given Trump’s addiction to power.

Oh, how I hope none of that takes place. However, with this narcissistic megalomaniac, anything is possible.

national news

Wishing it away won’t do the job

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I’ll be brief, Mr. President.

I just want to remind you — as if you should even need reminding — that wishing the COVID-19 pandemic will disappear won’t make it happen.

Nothing will make the pandemic vanish all by itself. We need presidential leadership that sends consistent messages to the people in the land. We need to develop a vaccine. We need to ensure that we test Americans who worry about catching the killer virus.

We need a whole lot more from you than we’re getting.

Most of all we need to hear a whole lot less of the mindless, brainless happy talk that foments the Big Lie about what a fantastic job your administration is doing.

Enough of the bullsh**, Mr. President!

International news, national news, political news

Putin isn’t on the ballot, however…

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Vladimir Putin just won’t go away.

The Russian president launched a campaign in 2016 — at the invitation of Donald Trump — to interfere in our presidential election. His aim was to disrupt our political discourse, to sow seeds of suspicion. He succeeded infamously.

Donald Trump benefitted from the Russian interference. The U.S. president hasn’t yet been willing to acknowledge the Russian dictator’s role in that political heist.

Now he’s at it again. He is injecting himself into the 2020 election, but in ways none of us saw coming.

We have these reports of Russians placing bounties on the lives of Americans fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. Trump is dismissing the media reporting. He calls it a hoax. He is angry at the reporting, but is silent about the subject of that reporting.

There he is, Vladimir Putin is injecting himself into the American political process. He isn’t on the ballot, but his presence on our political landscape seems to all but guarantee that part of our voters’ calculation on for whom we cast our ballots will include Vladimir Putin.

To be clear, my mind is made up. Still, Putin’s presence in our political discourse is maddening. He has wormed and wiggled his way into our processes. Putin can declare “mission accomplished” from his 2016 electoral interference. It’s not enough, though, for Putin merely to win that first round.

He is going to interfere yet again this year, along perhaps with China or Ukraine or any other nation that has an axe to grind with the U.S. political system.

To be clear, it is confusing in the extreme for me to grasp how the Russian bounty story is going to benefit Donald Trump. To that end, Putin’s continuing presence in our political process sends a seriously mixed message.

Still, the Russian brute is there. He is part of our political discussion.

If only he would just disappear. Forever.

military news, national news

Biden vows to read PDBs … hey, it’s a start!

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A reporter asked Joseph Biden how he would respond to reports that Russians had placed bounties on the heads of U.S. service personnel.

The former vice president’s response? He said he would “read the briefing material” that comes to his desk in the Oval Office.

That’s where it starts and ends. Donald Trump has denied knowing about the bounty intelligence matter. How so? He famously told us he doesn’t need to read the “daily presidential briefs” that intelligence officials compile for him each day. They’re boring and repetitive, he said … as I’m sure you remember.

Well, he should’ve looked at the Feb. 27 material that ended up on his desk, as it contained information about the bounty that Russian goons had placed on our soldiers’ lives.

Therein lies what looks like one of the many fundamental failings of the current president. It gives me hope that the next president — and I want it to be Joe Biden — will follow through and read the material that lands on the desk where the proverbial buck historically has stopped.

I also hope the presumptive Democratic nominee for POTUS — were he to learn of such an atrocity — would call the offending hostile power immediately to read the head of state the riot act and to threaten him or her with swift and severe punishment.

That quite clearly didn’t happen in this instance. It must never be allowed to continue.

national news

Immigrants, yes; also American patriots

The picture attached to this blog post is of three of my grandparents.

The woman on the left is my father’s mother, Katina; the gentleman is my mother’s father, George; the other woman is Mom’s mother, Diamondoula. I don’t know who snapped this photo; perhaps it was Dad’s father, John.

What do they have in common? For starters, they were immigrants. They came to this country from southeastern Europe. Dad’s parents came from southern Greece, while Mom’s parents came here from Turkey. They all were Greeks and proud of their heritage.

They had something else in common. They all loved the United States of America.

I want to honor them today to remind you about an immutable fact of this country: The U.S. of A. was built by immigrants. Whether they came her voluntarily, as my grandparents did, or were rounded up and transported here aboard slave ships, they all built this nation.

My grandparents were the proudest Americans you ever would want to know.

Dad’s parents brought seven children into the world, four of whom served in the military. Dad served in the Navy during World War II; one of his brothers fought for the Army during the Korean War, while his other brother saw Army duty in Europe between the Korean and Vietnam wars; one of his sisters served in the Navy. Mom’s parents produced three children; her two brothers both served in the military; one of them fought with Army Air Corps during World War II; the other served as an Army reserve colonel.

I want to salute my grandparents because they were Americans by choice. They forged a good life in this land. They honored the nation by flying the flag proudly. My maternal grandmother adored Presidents Roosevelt and Kennedy, keeping pictures of JFK in her home.

The current political discourse contains an unhealthy dose of anti-immigrant dogma. One of the president’s closest advisers is known to be anti-immigrant and has infused the president with the notion that we need a “merit-based” immigration policy that allows only those identified as potential high achievers into the country. Under that policy, none of my grandparents would have qualified … and the United States would have been made immeasurably poorer by their exclusion.

This weekend we’re going to honor the founding of this nation. We’ll celebrate it under a cloud brought to us by the pandemic. Still, we will honor our founders’ genius in crafting the framework that put together the world’s most indispensable nation.

I intend to honor — and recall with great fondness — the contributions that my grandparents made after arriving here from far away places.

They became the greatest of Americans … and played a major role in making America great.

national news

Less on Trump, more on Biden

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I have made a command decision regarding this blog.

As I have stated already, I intend to use this forum to do what I can to defeat Donald John Trump this coming November. To be candid, I am approaching the end of the line concerning my rage at this individual. I am running out of ways to express my anger and fear at the prospect of this moron getting another term in office.

So I want to start focusing more on Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democrats’ presumptive nominee.

If we’re going to defeat Trump, we’ll replace him with someone with different ideas, a different approach to the presidency, someone with a vast knowledge of the U.S. Constitution, someone with many years of experience serving the public.

I won’t turn totally away from trashing Donald Trump when opportunities present themselves; heaven knows Trump will provide them. I just intend to speak well of Joseph Biden rather than speaking only ill of Donald Trump.

There will be times when this blog will need to refer to Trump while saluting a policy pronouncement from the former vice president. If we’re going to make a choice — and I hope it is Joe Biden over Donald Trump — then it would serve me well to expose the reasons why Biden has earned my support at a time when the nation’s future is being imperiled by the Moron in Chief.