Tag Archives: 2020 election

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No signs or bumper stickers

I had hoped since I became a “civilian” who had retired from daily print journalism that I could place a bumper sticker on my vehicle and a sign in my front yard proclaiming my support for a presidential candidate.

Then I took on a freelance gig writing for a weekly newspaper company. So … my “civilian” days are over for the time being.

There’s another concern that I am a bit reluctant to divulge, but I will anyhow. It’s a concern over whether my stated preference for the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket for president/vice president would attract vandals.

We happen to live in Trump Country, which is home to some extremely zealous admirers of the current president of the United States. I don’t begrudge them their zeal on behalf of their guy. I do begrudge how some of them might react to the other part of the country that favors the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

The last bumper sticker I put on my vehicle was in 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy ran for president. I wasn’t old enough to vote then, but I wanted my friends and neighbors in Oregon to know I wanted RFK to be elected president that year.

Fate, tragically, intervened.

I went into the Army that year. I came out in 1970. I enrolled in college and became involved in the 1972 campaign of George McGovern. I didn’t display a bumper sticker.

Then I went to work for newspapers. I stayed the course for nearly 37 years. During that time I adhered to the mostly unwritten rule that I shouldn’t reveal my political bias with a bumper sticker or a yard sign. Reporters are supposed to present the image of political neutrality.

So here we are, much farther down a long and winding road. I will honor the unwritten neutrality rule that reporters should follow for as long as I am reporting on the community to which I am assigned.

These are extremely contentious times, too. So I will protect my motor vehicle or my home from being damaged by those who disagree with my choice for president and vice president.

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Biden hits back … hard!

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Joseph R. Biden Jr. today emerged from his Wilmington, Del., basement and delivered what I believe could become a theme in his attempt to unseat Donald Trump from the presidency of the United States.

His message, in summary, is that the violence we are witnessing in some communities are not the product of a future Biden administration; it happening now, in real time, during the Trump administration.

And yet Trump and his fellow Republicans are seeking to portray Democratic presidential nominee Biden as a grim reminder of what might happen if he is elected president in November.

Biden stepped onto the stage in Pittsburgh today and said, in effect: What the hell are you talking about? The nation today is unsafe and it’s happening on Donald Trump’s watch!

Well, this is the kind of response that Biden will need to deliver as the presidential campaign heads toward its final sprint.

Trump wants to change the narrative from the pandemic, which he is ignoring while it continues to kill about 1,000 Americans daily. He wants us to talk instead about protests that, sadly, have turned into riots. But … wait! It’s happening now! Donald Trump vowed to protect Americans. Is he doing it? No. He is doing nothing of the sort! Nor is he doing anything to correct the economic collapse that has wiped out all the jobs created in the past decade.

I am the very last person on Earth to give a professional politician any campaign advice. I just sit out here in the Peanut Gallery, wringing my hands while worrying if the candidate I prefer is able to persuade enough of my countrymen and women that he is the one we should elect to the nation’s highest office.

What I heard today from Joe Biden suggests to me that the guy I want — that would be Biden — is up to the task at hand.

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Go away, 2020

I want to enthusiastically endorse the notion expressed in this social media post that showed up on my Facebook feed today.

This year has sucked … out loud!

The pandemic, the violence, the unrest, the racial tension, the widening political divide in the nation.

We have lost 180,000-plus Americans to the pandemic. Many thousands of those folks died alone. Their loved ones couldn’t hold their hands as they slipped into the great beyond. The nurses, doctors, technicians have been pushed into the role of surrogate “loved ones” replacing those who were blocked from sitting with Mom, Dad, Wife, Husband, Brother, Sister, Daughter, Son.

The pandemic has destroyed weddings, school graduations and, yes, funerals.

Then there have been the African-American men who died at the hands of rogue police officers. They have been shot, suffocated and otherwise harassed. The Black Lives Matter movement has erupted.

Yep, 2020 should become a curse word.

What can redeem this hideous year? I’ll tell you what would do it for me: a presidential election that turns out the correct way.

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‘You won’t be safe … ‘

Vice President Mike Pence issued a stern warning to Republicans who believe Donald Trump deserves to be re-elected president of the United States.

“You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Pence intoned with all the seriousness and gravity he could muster at the GOP convention this week.

But wait! How safe are many Americans today … in Donald Trump’s America? Not very. Especially if you’re black and you are unfortunate enough to get into an argument with a police officer. What about the concern for those Americans, Mr. VPOTUS and Mr. POTUS?

Well, Pence isn’t wading into that thicket. He chooses instead to follow Trump’s lead, suggesting that the “suburbs” will come under attack by inner-city residents who move into the ‘burbs to escape the criminals who do damage to all Americans.

Hey, it’s a race thing. We all know the game that Trump and Pence are playing. They want to suggest that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party nominees, are going to loose the criminal element on society. They will go soft on criminals, they will throw open our borders to illegal immigrants, they will seek to dismember the Second Amendment and disarm Americans.

It’s all a bunch of horse dookey. You know it as well as I know it. Yet Trump and Pence would have us buy into the crap they’re peddling that Trump’s America is a safe haven set to be overtaken by hordes of criminals if Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are elected president and vice president.

The plain truth is that Donald Trump’s America ain’t so great at this moment. We’re fighting that pandemic, which has killed 182,000 Americans with more to fall victim. Racial unrest has reached a boiling point and Trump is doing not a damn thing to soothe our nation.

That isn’t how Trump is portraying the state of play in the U.S. of A. He tells lies about what he has allegedly has done to curb the pandemic and all he has done for African-Americans.

What’s more, he paints a grim picture of what life will be like if he gets booted from the presidency. I am one American patriot who believes that occurrence will be cause for joy.

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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.

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Trump Shop is open

What you see here likely is part of a “chain” of such “shops” scattered hither and yon throughout Texas and other supposedly Donald Trump-leaning states leading up to the 2020 presidential election.

With apologies for the composition of the photo — which I shot while sitting at a street light at the Intersection of U.S. Highway 380 and Bridgefarmer Road on the outskirts of Princeton, Texas — this is a Donald Trump campaign kiosk.

I figure there will be others of them popping up in Collin County, Denton County, Tarrant County and perhaps even in Dallas County.

I’ll have more to say about this kiosk later after I visit with the folks who man it during the heat of the day. It’s 100-plus degrees, zooming to a heat index reading of about 110. I won’t venture out again today … maybe later when it “cools” to around 95.

I learned a thing or two when I attended the Trump rally this past year at the American Airlines Center arena in downtown Dallas. One of those things is that the rank-and-file Trump supporters — at least those with whom I had some conversation — are fine folks. I didn’t run into any rabid knuckle-draggers. With that established I am going to presume that the folks running the Trump Shop just down the highway from our neighborhood fall into the “nice folks” category of Trumpkins.

I do want to ask them this simple set of questions: How can they continue to support a guy who denigrates prisoners of war, mocks people with handicaps, calls Nazis and Ku Klux Klansmen “very fine people,” and uses tear gas on U.S. citizens who are mounting peaceful protests.

I will do my very best to keep the derision out of my voice. I also hope they do their very best to answer the questions honestly and politely.

I’ll get back to you … maybe soon.

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Mind made up: going to vote early

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I will vote early, but certainly not often, which would be corrupt, yes?

My wife and I have talked about whether we should vote early in this election cycle. We both have decided that, by golly, yes we will.

It gives me the nervous jerks to admit such a thing. I have written often over many years about my aversion to early voting in elections when I can vote on Election Day. This year, under certain circumstances, we have decided we’re going to avoid the crowd and vote early at a polling place to be announced soon by Collin County election officials. My concern centers on the fear that the candidate who gets my vote might mess up between the time I cast the ballot and when they count the ballots.

The coronavirus pandemic has frightened me sufficiently to forgo my usual Election Day routine.

I am not sure whether we’ll have vote by mail in Texas. Our state attorney general, Republican Ken Paxton, is vowing to resist voting in that fashion. He has swilled the Donald Trump Kool-Aid that makes him think all-mail voting is corrupt. It isn’t.

If Texas is not going to allow voting by mail, then I intend to vote early to ensure that my ballot gets logged in and that my wife and I can have our voices heard on who we want elected president of the United States.

Spoiler alert: It ain’t Donald J. Trump! It will be Joseph R. Biden Jr.!

The president is seeking to undermine the integrity and efficiency of our state and local election systems. He keeps harping on the specious and phony threat of corruption.

Our household intends to vote early to protect ourselves against exposure to the killer virus from a big Election Day crowd. I don’t expect Texas to join those states that have used all-mail voting with great success. We do a good job in Texas, though, in conducting early voting.

So … early voting will have to do.

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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
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Most important … ever?

(AP Photo/John Minchillo)

We hear it every presidential election cycle, about how “this election is the most important in our lifetime … or in the past century … or in the history of our glorious republic.”

Take your pick. It’s one or some or all of them, right?

Well, I happen to think the election we’re about to conduct might qualify as the most important election ever. As in ever in the history of the great nation we love and cherish!

Donald J. Trump became president by trading on voters’ unhappiness with the “status quo,” whatever that meant. What the nation got has been a lesson in chaos, confusion, incompetence, disloyalty and an obsession with hostile dictators at the expense of our national intelligence community.

Who would think they ever would hear a president trash his predecessors’ records in the White House while extolling the “love letters” he receives from a murderous Marxist dictator? Moreover, who would have thought that another dictator would stand accused of paying bounties on the lives of American service personnel and our commander in chief would refuse to punish him; the president has betrayed the oath he took to protect the men and women he sends into battle.

Joseph Biden stands poised — I hope! — to remove Donald Trump from the White House, a place he never should have been allowed to enter, let alone as president of the United States.

I have tried to make a singular point about Donald Trump, which is that this individual’s entire adult life — all of if! — has been focused solely on enriching Trump. Public service has been totally foreign to him. We now are witnessing the consequences of what I have sought to tell readers of this blog. He doesn’t comprehend the public service aspect of his job.

As President Barack Obama noted in his speech Wednesday night, Trump views his office as a “transactional” endeavor, meaning that he would enact public policy in exchange for favorable treatment.

That is not good government. It is not in keeping with public service at any level, let alone at the highest level possible.

Yes, we are faced with a monumental election in just a few weeks. Americans who were fed up with the status quo now have learned what they got. They got a president who doesn’t know what he’s doing, he doesn’t care to learn anything about the office he occupies or the limits built into it.

We need to rid ourselves of a president who is endangering the very democratic principles he took an oath to protect.

Is this the most important election we’ll ever decide? It looks like the real thing to me.

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For the first time: fear!

Jeff Malet/Newscom via ZUMA Press)

You know how the cliche goes … that there’s a first time for everything.

We are coming up on the 13th presidential election that I will have had the privilege to cast my vote. For the first time in my voting life, and this is no hyperbole, I am genuinely afraid what a potential electoral outcome might produce.

Yes, fear has set in. I am among those Democratic-leaning voters who is petrified at the prospect of Donald John Trump getting another four years in the White House, another four years to further the cause of authoritarian rule, another term in office to dismantle what we have come know as our representative democracy.

I don’t want to put too fine a point on it, but this election is truly — categorically and without a shred of doubt — the most consequential election in my lifetime.

I have cast votes in 12 previous elections. The most of recent election, of course, gave us Donald Trump. I supported Hillary Clinton. I will declare my support for her forever and with pride in doing so. However, as loathsome as Trump was in 2016 and as much damage many of us foresaw then, damn few American quite expected the wreckage that this guy would bring to the revered and exalted office of the presidency.

It’s not that we weren’t forewarned. We were. Trump took office reportedly never expecting to win the election, which likely explains the utter and absolute lack of preparation for the awesome job of governing a great nation.

Former President Obama laid it out there Wednesday night. Trump has not risen to the challenge because he “can’t,” Obama said.

It is no overstatement that my hope for a Biden victory on Nov. 3 comes with the hope that the former vice president — with more than four decades of governing experience under his belt — can restore our national honor, our soul, the sense that we are a nation full of compassionate, empathetic citizens.

Absent that and if Trump snatches a second stunning victory from the jaws of defeat, well … I don’t know what will become of us. Or our beloved nation.

I never before been this frightened.