Tag Archives: Joe Biden

national news

Trump sows fear in election system

Donald J. Trump’s strategy against Joseph R. Biden is coming into sharper focus each day.

He wants to sow seeds of doubt and fear in the very election system that produced the Greatest Electoral Fluke of All Time in 2016.

He says if Biden wins it will be because the 2020 election will be “rigged.” There you have it, ladies and gentlemen of each county in America. Your work isn’t worth a damn, according to Donald Trump.

These folks all swear an oath to protect and defend the same Constitution that the president swore an oath to protect. They do so at the local election level. They are county clerks and their deputies. They work diligently to ensure free, fair and secure elections.

Trump says a Biden victory — which I consider a blessed event — will be tainted by whom or what? He doesn’t say. Just that it’ll be “rigged.” Recall he said the same thing in 2016 in advance of that election, suggesting that Hillary Clinton was seeking to rig the result. She wasn’t. The result turned into one of the biggest Electoral College shockers in any of our lifetimes.

Trump has ripped another page out of that same playbook by suggesting Joe Biden is seeking to rig an election. In truth, as I see it, Trump is the one who is seeking to rig it. He wants to suppress voter turnout by suppressing mail-in balloting. Intelligence officials already have warned that Russians are working to interfere in the 2020 race just as they did in 2016; they want Trump to win. Why? Trump won’t speak ill of his pal Vladimir Putin.

Donald Trump is trading on fear and loathing in a time when the nation needs unity, comity and a search for common ground. Trump won’t acknowledge what it painfully obvious, that Americans are continuing to die from the COVID crisis. Why is that? Because of Trump’s incompetence. It’s as crystal clear as that.

Trump is mounting a major diversion in seeking to cast doubt on the electoral process that is unfolding.

He is a disgrace.

national news

Hoping to unpack all the lies

This is likely an unreasonable expectation, but I will express it anyway.

It is my hope, at least, that those who want to see Donald Trump defeated for re-election can unpack all the lies he has told during his brief time in politics and expose the man who told them as a fraud who is unfit for the office he occupies.

Take it away, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

Trump no doubt will pile a load of more lies onto his huge pile of prevarication tonight when he speaks to the faithful scattered on the White House lawn. The location of his partisan speech, of course, creates a whole other set of ethical — and maybe legal — concerns.

I have chosen to look away from Trump tonight when he accepts the Republican presidential nomination. He lies incessantly and relentlessly. The GOP convention has ignored the multiple crises that are enveloping the nation: the coronavirus pandemic, the Black Lives Matter rebellion, climate change, the Gulf Coast hurricane.

Trump will tell us it’s all going just swell. It ain’t.

He will lie repeatedly tonight. He will seek to portray Joe Biden as a tool of the far left, which of course is utter nonsense.

I expect there to be some serious examination of the lies Trump has told and will tell again and again. I have no hope of persuading the committed cultists who have bought into the baloney that Trump dispenses.

It’s those undecided voters, or fence-straddlers who need to be persuaded that the nation cannot afford another four years of this individual’s lying.

There is just so much to unpack, to reveal, to expose. Good grief. It might be too much for the voting public to consume.

I do want to see this effort unfold that seeks to reveal finally the fraudulent nature of this man’s political existence.

I turn it over to you, Vice President Biden and Sen. Harris.

religious news

‘No religious test … ‘

How many times do I have to remind religious zealots about what Article VI of the U.S. Constitution says about how “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States”?

Don’t answer that. I’ll keep saying it for as long as it takes.

While skimming through the TV channels this evening I ventured onto a news channel and listened to a former football coach say that Joe Biden is a “Catholic in name only.” Lou Holtz, the former Notre Dame coach, was speaking on behalf of Donald Trump but then decided he knows what is in the heart of Joe Biden.

Yep, Coach Holtz went far beyond the Xs and Os of drawing a football play and straight into territory where he doesn’t belong.

Donald Trump has declared that Biden is “anti-God” and “anti-Bible.” The practicing Catholic would destroy our faith, according to a president who has no relationship with any religious faith.

I am going to circle back to what the Constitution instructs us. It is a secular document written by men who took great pains to keep religion far away from the government they were creating. Article VI is as crystal clear as it gets. No candidate for public office should be required to adhere to any religious faith.

Biden doesn’t run away from his Catholicism. He flaunts it. He carries Rosary beads. He smears ash on his forehead to commemorate Ash Wednesday every spring. He is free to do that. He would be free to not do it as well.

The Constitution doesn’t require us to attend any house of worship. If it did, well, Donald Trump wouldn’t qualify as a presidential candidate. You know what I mean?

So, for Lou Holtz to step into a religious thicket by hurling an epithet at a man of faith is reprehensible. Stick to talking football, coach. Take a look, too, at what the Constitution’s Article VI instructs us.

national news

Bipartisan chops serve Biden well

Jeff Flake once served in the U.S. Senate. He is a Republican and reportedly a self-proclaimed proud “conservative” Republican at that.

He is going to support Democrat Joe Biden’s bid to become president of the United States.

Former Sen. Flake is not alone among Republicans who are backing the former vice president in his bid to unseat Donald Trump from the White House.

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a former House member, spoke at the Democratic National Convention. So did former GOP Rep. Susan Molinari and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. They all are principled Republicans who believe that the president is unfit for office. They want him defeated.

It’s a bit of overstatement to declare that Joe Biden is uniquely qualified by virtue of his many friends on the Republican side of the chasm that splits the parties. Other politicians have been able to reach across the aisle when the need arose. Presidents Bush 41 and 43 did so, as did President Clinton, President Johnson and President Reagan. President Obama had limited success in that regard, but he did have Vice President Biden at his side to pave the way on occasion.

I mention this because it appears to me that Biden well might be able to harvest a good bit of GOP support as he continues his campaign against Donald Trump. We all have noticed occasional cracks in the GOP armor, with Sen. Mitt Romney being openly critical of Trump, as have Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. Of course we cannot know how they will vote when the time comes. The Constitution allows Americans to vote in secret. Indeed, I often find it intrusive even to ask a politician how they intend to vote. These decisions ought to be intensely personal.

I remain committed to the notion that good government requires bipartisan compromise and the constant search for common ground. Joe Biden’s lengthy public service career is full of examples of how he has sought commonality with politicians with whom he disagrees. Such a record would serve him — and the nation — well if he becomes president of the United States.

Joe Biden’s bipartisan street cred is beyond dispute, which makes him — among many reasons too numerous to count — preferable to the incumbent in this presidential election.

national news

From dark to light

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Joe Biden vows to lead us from the darkness into the light. He says Donald Trump has steered the nation into the proverbial darkness through his incompetence, incoherence and lack of empathy.

Donald Trump says Joe Biden’s policies will result in a loss of guns, God, freedom … and maybe even our very lives.

Who’s version do you prefer? Well, I am all in with Joe Biden. I did manage to watch a lot of this past week’s Democratic National Convention. I could take only one night of the RNC, so my comments about the GOP convention will be based on that first night.

I heard a dark and foreboding tale coming from the likes of Don Jr., his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle and assorted other fans/toadies/lackeys of the president, all of whom told bald-faced lies about the character of the individual they are facing in the upcoming presidential election.

They are trying to paint Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris with the far-left progressive/socialist paint brush.

What about them? Let’s see: Biden was elected to the Senate in 1972; he made friends with Republicans and Democrats; he served as chair or ranking member on the Judiciary and Foreign Relations committees; he crafted legislation that protected women and sought to toughen federal laws against certain crimes. He also endorsed the Defense of Marriage Act, which chaps progressives’ hides. He was in a position to lead efforts to take away our guns, but didn’t do it. Nor did he do anything that diminished the role of religion in people’s lives.

As vice president, he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, he led the fight against the Ebola pandemic and sought greater accountability from government agencies.

Man, that’s scary stuff.

What about Sen. Harris? She was a career prosecutor. She served as California attorney general before being elected to the Senate in 2016. A prosecutor and an AG? Does that speak to a career aimed at disarming Americans or taking God out of our homes?

The RNC no doubt is going to paint Biden and Harris as monstrous cretins. They’re both well-educated, seasoned in the mechanics of government and are battle-tested.

I’ll get to this God matter in a blog post in the near future. For now I want merely to challenge the assertion that Joe Biden is beholden to far-left ideologues. Indeed, for Donald Trump to suggest any sort of fealty to ideology — given his own penchant for tilting toward right-wing TV talking heads — is laughable on its face.

Except that I ain’t laughing. Neither should anyone else.

national news

Biden a ‘far lefty’? Huh?

Stop it, Mr. President. You’re killin’ me!

You’re now trying to paint Joe Biden as some sort of squishy far-left, socialist-leaning, open-borders guy who will take our guns from us and appoint wacky loons to the federal judiciary.

Forgive the candor, Mr. President … but I think you’re off your rocker.

The first signs of the kind of campaign you are going to wage against the former vice president are coming into sharper focus now that the Republican National Convention has commenced.

I don’t listen to you when you speak on my TV. If I don’t turn the TV off I’ll mute the volume, given that you have nothing — not a single damn thing — to say that I want to hear.

However, the media report what you say and I do read media reports. They say you’re accusing Biden — an establishment Democrat if there ever was one — of adhering to some far-left idiocy.

I think of all the things you have accused Biden of supporting, I laugh the hardest at the open-borders assertion. Jumpin’ jiminy, Mr. POTUS, no reasonable American wants to throw open our borders. Indeed, the term “open borders” implies no enforcement of immigration laws, no intercepting of undocumented immigrants. Has the former VP ever said anything that suggests such nonsense? Umm. Let me think. No. He hasn’t.

Yet you keep yapping that he wants open borders. That he’s now a tool of the far left.

You seek to denigrate Biden the way you did to Hillary Clinton. The former vice president is trading on his decency, on his compassion, on the very virtues that you lack. That will be his staunchest defense against the scurrilous attacks you are going to launch against him.

So, I cannot wish you “luck” in your effort to defame a decent — and knowledgeable — political foe. I will turn away from you whenever you spout that nonsense and I intend fully to call attention to the lies you spew whenever they fly out of your mouth.

See you in the funny papers, Mr. President.

national news

Wanting to respect POTUS

(AP Photo/Evan Vucci)

I am not proud to admit what I am about to admit … but here it comes.

I detest feeling as I do whenever Donald Trump shows his face on my TV screen. Accordingly, it is my sincere hope that we can — and will — elect a president who doesn’t turn me off the way the current president does.

Joe Biden has spoken at length and quite eloquently about the need to restore decency to the presidency. He wants to infuse the office with a sense of compassion that has been missing for about, oh, the past three-plus years.

Thus, when I see Donald Trump on my TV screen, my first impulse is to turn away. I no longer want to hear anything he has to say. I don’t trust him to tell me the truth. I figure when a politician loses my trust in his or her truthfulness then there is utterly no point in devoting a moment of my attention to anything he says.

I want to trust the president to tell me the truth. I want that individual — and I do hope it is Joe Biden after the next election in November — to speak candidly and honestly to me.

The Republican National Convention today nominated Trump for a second term as president. That’s the RNC’s call.

I am not going to listen to Donald Trump. My mind is made up. To be candid, Trump lost me the moment he declared his presidential candidacy in June 2015. I had harbored plenty of hope that some legitimate Republicans would defeat him in the GOP primary. I retained the hope that Hillary Clinton would defeat him in the general election.

Silly me.

I am left now to hope for the moment when respect returns to the presidency.

national news

Let’s await the ‘phony’ and ‘fraud’

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Mitt Romney told the nation midway through the 2016 presidential campaign all about Donald John Trump.

The 2012 Republican presidential nominee spelled it out in a 17-minute speech. He said Donald Trump is a “phony” and a “fraud.” Yet the 2016 GOP nominee won that year’s presidential election by offering phony promises and running on a fraudulent background.

Trump is going to try to sell a nation once more on the phony, fraudulent past and seek to persuade Americans that what they have seen and heard is part of some mysterious Deep State “fake news” media conspiracy.

The Republican National Convention will unfold Monday in Charlotte, N.C. It will be a virtual event just as the Democratic Convention turned out to be.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden awaits the nomination of Donald Trump, who is going to tell the nation that life is good on his watch, that his administration is conquering the coronavirus pandemic, that the economy is just swell, that the United States enjoys the respect of the rest of the world and that he is protecting our troops who are waging war against international terrorists.

It’ll all be lies. He will lie and lie again and again.

The most astonishing aspect of his lying will be that about 40 percent of voting public will believe every lie he tells.

Donald Trump’s fraudulent term as president has been brought into the sharpest relief possible.

The economic collapse caused by the pandemic has wiped out every bit of job growth we have experienced over the past decade. Our troops face additional threats abroad because of the bounties that Russians are paying to Taliban terrorists for every American they kill on battlefields in Afghanistan. The pandemic itself is continuing to sicken and kill Americans daily. Most of the rest of the industrialized world has contained the virus and world leaders now look at Americans with pity.

Get ready for the convention/clown show that will unfold in Charlotte. I will grit my teeth and recall that Mitt Romney pegged Donald Trump perfectly when he warned us of what we would get were he ever elected president.

If only all of us had paid attention.

national news

Words of wisdom

I want to share the following message on my blog. It comes from a well-known actor/director/social activist. He makes his case for voting for Joe Biden for president of the United States.

Take a look at it. It’s a nicely crafted essay. I’m out:

“I have a lot of vivid memories of growing up in Los Angeles in the 1940s, but one in particular keeps coming back to me today, in these troubled times. I remember sitting with my parents — actually, my parents were sitting; I was lying on the floor, the way kids do — and listening to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt talking to us over the radio. He was talking to the nation, of course, not just to us, but it sure felt that way. He was personal and informal, like he was right there in our living room.
I was too young to follow much of what he was saying — something about World War II. But what I did understand was that this was a man who cared about our well-being. I felt calmed by his voice. It was a voice of authority and, at the same time, empathy. Americans were facing a common enemy — fascism — and FDR gave us the sense that we were all in it together. Even kids like me had a role to play: participating in paper drives, collecting scrap metal, doing whatever we could do. That’s what it was like to have a president with a strong moral compass. It guided him, gave him direction, and helped him point the nation toward a better future.
Maybe this strikes you as simple nostalgia. I’ve got a touch of that, sure (who doesn’t right now?). But I’m too focused on the future to sit around pining for the old days. For me, the power of FDR’s example is what it says about the kind of leadership America needs — and can have again, if we choose it.
But one thing is clear: Instead of a moral compass in the Oval Office, there’s a moral vacuum. Instead of a president who says we’re all in it together, we have a president who’s in it for himself. Instead of words that uplift and unite, we hear words that inflame and divide. When someone retweets (and then deletes) a video of a supporter shouting “white power” or calls journalists “enemies of the state,” when he turns a lifesaving mask against contagion into a weapon in a culture war, when he orders the police and the military to tear gas peaceful protestors so he can wave a Bible at the cameras, he sacrifices — again and again — any claim to moral authority.
Another four years of this would degrade our country beyond repair. The toll it’s taking is almost biblical: fires and floods, a literal plague upon the land, an eruption of hatred that’s being summoned and harnessed, by a leader with no conscience or shame. Four more years would accelerate our slide toward autocracy. It would be taken as free license to punish more so-called “traitors” and wage more petty vendettas — with the full weight of the Justice Department behind them. Four more years would mean open season on our environmental laws. The assault has been ongoing — it started with abandoning the historic agreement that the world made in Paris to combat climate change, and continued, just last month, with using the pandemic as cover to let industries pollute as they see fit. Four more years would bring untold damage to our planet — our home.
America is still a world power. But in the past four years, it has lost its place as a world leader. A second term would embolden enemies and further weaken our standing with our friends.
When and how did the United States of America become the Divided States of America? Polarization, of course, has deep roots and many sources. President Donald Trump didn’t create all of our divisions as Americans. But he has found every fault line in America and wrenched them wide open.
Without a moral compass in the Oval Office, our country is dangerously adrift. But this November, we can choose another direction. This November, unity and empathy are on the ballot. Experience and intelligence are on the ballot. Joe Biden is on the ballot, and I’m confident he will bring these qualities back to White House.
I don’t make a practice of publicly announcing my vote. But this election year is different. And I believe Biden was made for this moment. Biden leads with his heart. I don’t mean that in a soft and sentimental way. I’m talking about a fierce compassion — the kind that fuels him, that drives him to fight against racial and economic injustice, that won’t let him rest while people are struggling.
As FDR showed, empathy and ethics are not signs of weakness. They’re signs of strength. I think Americans are coming back to that view. Despite Trump — despite his daily efforts to divide us — I see much of the country beginning to reunite again, the way it did when I was a kid. You can see it in the peaceful protests of the past several weeks — Americans of all races and classes coming together to fight against racism. You can see it the ways that communities are pulling together in the face of this pandemic, even if the White House has left them to fend for themselves.
These acts of compassion and kindness make our country stronger. This November, we have a chance to make it stronger still — by choosing a president who is consistent with our values, and whose moral compass points toward justice.”
– Robert Redford, July 8, 2020
national news

How to watch the RNC?

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It pains me greatly to ask this, but I must.

How in the world am I going to watch the Republican National Convention after having my spirits lifted from the Democratic National Convention?

The RNC is set to nominate the most loathsome individual I have seen in my lifetime to the office of president. They anointed Donald Trump their party’s nominee in 2016 and then he surprised practically every political pundit/analyst/observer on Earth by actually winning the election.

He is likely to deliver the same hideous sort of speech late in the week when he accepts the nomination a second time. The speakers will seek to paint this individual as something he most certainly is not: a statesman, a leader. He is nothing of the sort.

Indeed, when Democratic nominee Joe Biden pledged on Thursday to be a “president for all Americans,” my mind drifted immediately to the horror being brought at this moment to our friends and family members in California. Fires are threatening lives up and down the state.

Where is Donald Trump’s expression of support? When has he said he would devote all federal help possible to assist those Americans? Trump does not see himself, in my view, as their president. He is president only to the base that stands with him and his ghastly pronouncements.

I’ve never had to deal with this immense gulf between candidates of opposing parties competing for the presidency. To be candid, it makes me quite uncomfortable.

In 2008 and again in 2012, I watched the RNC with considerable interest as the GOP nominated, respectively, two fine men with stellar records of public service: the late John McCain and Mitt Romney.

In 2000 and 2004, I was able to watch the RNC nominate George W. Bush.

It is remarkable, indeed, to think that President Bush and Gov. Romney, two of the GOP’s three most recent nominees will not take part in this year’s virtual convention. Sen. McCain, were he around, certainly would want to stay far away from any political event having to do with Donald Trump.

I’ll suck it up and watch at least part of the RNC that’s coming up. However, I might have to clear the room of any objects I could throw at my TV.