Tag Archives: MAGA

national news, political news

Charley Kirk Day? Are they serious …?

Did I hear this correctly, that congressional Republicans are lining up for an effort to create a national holiday honoring the memory of a man slain because he espoused right-wing nut-job policies and supported the agenda put forth by the MAGA moron in chief, Donald Trump?

I believe I did hear it. Yep. GOP members of Congress want to create Charlie Kirk Day. A national holiday, yes? This can’t possibly be serious. But wait! The GOP is no longer a serious political party. It is the mouthpiece for the MAGA movement led by Trump and his sycophants.

One of them was Kirk, a 31-year-old conservative influencer. Kirk was speaking the other day at a rally at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, when a nitwit with a rifle shot him in the neck. Kirk died almost immediately.

Yes, it was a shock. Yes, I condemn political violence. Yes, it was a political assassination. And yes, Kirk leaves behind a wife and two small children, which alone is enough to cause great sadness and sympathy.

He is no martyr. He blustered some highly offensive policies, such as saying that Black Americans aren’t as smart as white Americans. He wanted to deport all immigrants. He was anti-gay, anti-transgender. He spewed hate at every event where he was featured.

To elevate this young man’s memory to a level reserved for the likes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and presidents of the United States (starting with George Washington and Abraham Lincoln) insults the intelligence of rank-and-file Americans, not to mention the memories of those truly great men.

I am sad that Charlie Kirk died in such a violent manner. I won’t ever justify the actions of the idiot who’s in custody and faces a death sentence if he’s convicted of aggravated murder.

But … c’mon folks! Settle down with this national commemoration nonsense!

crime news

Pray this isn’t the new normal

Let’s bow our heads in prayer for a moment, and pray that the death of a right-wing activist by someone seemingly upset with what he said doesn’t become the new normal in this still-great nation of ours.

Charlie Kirk is dead from a gunshot fired by someone who took aim from a rooftop and fired a single shot into Kirk’s neck. Kirk was a young and ardent fan of Donald Trump and a spokesman for the MAGA movement. His views were repugnant to many of us who heard them.

But one individual, reportedly a male, took matters far too seriously. Kirk is gone. Trump wants to give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he has ordered flags to fly at half staff. Is all of this too much? Yes. It is.

However, what also was far too much was the violence that ended Kirk’s short life. I am going to pray that we haven’t evolved into a nation where people can pick up a gun, aim it at a political figure we don’t like and then blow that figure away … because he or she says something we find disagreeable.

I am hoping that Donald Trump will speak to the nation about this tragedy. I want him to find the words somewhere that will dispel the intensity of people’s feelings toward those with whom we disagree.

Short of that, I will keep praying for the soul of our nation.

crime news, political news

If only he would say this

Here is a draft of what I would hope comes from the mouth of Donald J. Trump in the wake of the shooting death of Trumpster and MAGA spokesman Charlie Kirk, who was gunned down today at a rally at Utah Valley University.

Bear in mind that there is no way Trump would say these things, but I want to get it off my chest. You also might recognize a Trumpian statement in this hypothetical speech text.

***

Good evening, my fellow Americans.

Melania I are shocked and dismayed at the senseless shooting of Charlie Kirk, a young man who was a staunch supporter of mine and a leader of what is the world’s premier political movement … MAGA.

I want to take a moment to take my measure of blame for the violence that took Kirk’s life. Yes, I am going to do something I don’t normally do. Take blame for a profoundly sad event. I realize that the rhetoric I have stated and that which has come from my supporters have contributed to the intense mistrust among Americans. I have wrongly labeled political foes as “enemies.” I regret using that kind of language.

My expressions of regret won’t solve this difficulty by itself. We need to understand that the nation was founded by a group of dissenters, men who fled Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries to escape repression and create a government founded on the principles of individual liberty.

Let’s dial back the overheated rhetoric as we seek to make our points. Perhaps then we can understand each other, listen to others’ points of view and engage in vigorous — but civil — political discourse.

***

Will the president of the United States ever say such a thing out loud in a public venue? Never in a million years.

crime news

‘A political assassination …’

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, obviously shaken by what had just happened at Utah Valley University, called the event what it is: “This clearly was a political assassination.”

The victim is Charlie Kirk, a dedicated supporter of Donald J. Trump and a leader of the MAGA movement that gives Trump its unquesitioned support. Kirk was conducting an old-school style pep rally at UVU when a shot rang out. A bullet struck Kirk in the neck, killing him virtually instantly.

The nation is shocked. We are stunned. Every former president, Democrats and the lone Republican, have condemned the murder. They and the nation are extending their prayers and support to Kirk’s family, including his wife and two young children.

Kirk was just 31 years of age.

It is not too early to ask this question out loud: Have we become a nation where one’s disagreement with a leading political figure results in this kind of senseless violence?

Is Kirk’s death a symptom of a greater disease infecting the body politic across the land? It’s one thing for members of Congress to argue incessantly with each other, hurling personal insults across the aisle. This event today at Utah Valley University takes this kind of reaction to a whole different and despicable level.

The FBI had arrested a person of interest. Agents interviewed this person and then released him or her.

Others have said as much, but I want to echo what they are saying. It is that we cannot normalize acts of terrorism as political speech. What happened today was a despicable crime targeted at someone who had a clear political agenda. The individual who committed this heinous act needs to be brought to the fullest extent of punishment that justice allows.

Gov. Cox made this point, too, in making his statement about the tragedy: “Utah still has the death penalty.”

media news

Why Epstein matters

I have sought to come to grips with why the media continue to report on Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged relationship with Donald J. Trump. I have figured out why this story matters.

It matters because it could tell us about the relationships that the president of the United States kept not many years before he won election to the White House.

Epstein, of course, is dead, having hanged himself in a jail cell in New York City. His former girlfriend/accomplice is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex traffricking of underage girls.

The story revolves around the “Epstein files” and what they contain pertaning to Trump’s friendship with the hideous sex trafficker and child molester.

Do I think Trump took part in these hideous activities? No, I do not. Whether he did or didn’t, though, is not the point of finding out what’s in those files. What the public ought to know is this: Did the man who would run for POTUS hang around the seediest man alive and was he actually friends with an individual who he might have known to be the animal we know him to be?

Therein lies the media interest in this matter. It also cuts to the heart of why Democrats and some right-wing MAGA Republicans want this information released to the public. Trump calls it all a “hoax,” meaning he believes all those known victims of Epstein are liars. How does this individual look in the mirror after denigrating victims of sex crimes?

Don’t answer that. I know. He does it because he has zero conscience.

The conscience-free president of the United States finds himself in a tightening circle of evidence that he knew Epstein far more intimately than he’s letting on.

Do you remember when Sen. Barack Obama got pilloried because his preacher once cursed the United States over its slavery policy? Obama, who was running for president in 2008, issued a public statement rebuking the preacher — a longtime friend of his — and then quit attending the man’s church.

I can find no sign of such contrition coming from Trump. He blames the victims for fomenting a “Democrat hoax.” Meanwhile, the questions keep mounting and the public is beginning to ask: Did we really elect to the presidency an individual who would cozy up to scum such as this?

That’s why this story matters.

crime news

Epstein getting last laugh

Wherever he is roasting in hell where he belongs, Jeffrey Epstein must be laughing his sorry ass off at the tribulation that continues to dog his former pal Donald J. Trump.

I have to admit to enjoying the squirm and the wiggle Trump is employing to wriggle free of the connection he had with the serial child molester, sex trafficker and all-round despicable piece of dog dookey that was Epstein.

This scandal won’t go away for as long as Republicans maintain control of Congress and for as long as Trump hangs his hat in the Oval Office.

Trump won’t win any court battles. Congressional Democrats and a growing number of MAGA Republicans will keep the heat turned up demanding full release of those Epstein files that could reveal the extent of the friendship between the sex trafficker and the future president of the United States of America.

Am I worried that it will inhibit Trump’s ability to do his job? Not one damn bit. He isn’t doing a damn thing as it stands!

political news, State news

Get a grip, Texas Democrats

Texas Democrats need to get hold of themselves and stop all this wishful thinking about whether they’re on the verge of breaking the Republican visegrip on electoral public office.

I keep getting text messages from this and/or that candidate — real and potential — for any statewide office. They keep demanding money from me. I don’t have it to give. When the beseech me, they tell me their polling shows them leading their Republican foes. Uh huh, sure thing.

Colin Allred said the same thing in 2024,  but then lost to the Cruz Missile — aka Sen. Ted Cruz — by double digits. Allred, a former Dallas congressman, got stars in his eyes because Beto O’Rourke damn near beat Cruz six years earlier, losing to Cancun Ted by 2 or 3 percentage points.

Now we have another MAGA darling, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, rearing his ugly puss from the crowd, He leads Sen. John Cornyn in GOP primary polling by about 5 points. What does that mean for Democrats? It means, as near as I can tell, that they’re going to have find a new strategy to deploy if they have any hope of prying the GOP jaws off this statewide office. Democrats last won a Senate election in 1988, when Lloyd Bentsen was re-elected while losing as the VP candidate on the national Democratic ticket led by Massachusetts Gov. Mike Dukakis.

I want the Democrats to break through. I want Texas to become a competitive place where candidates from both major parties can argue their differences clearly, cleanly, passionately and without fear.

At the moment, it appears to this blogger and longtime observer of Texas politics that the GOP is being choked by the MAGA morons who continue to swallow the swill served by the nation’s chief Republican In Name Only, Donald J. Trump.

I’ll just add one more observation. Trump once said before he became an actual politician that were he to run he would do so as a Republican, because Republicans were the more gullible Americans he would need to persuade to follow him down some path to oblivion.

Trump was right!

media news

Double down on news boycott?

Time for an acknowledgment, which is that my declaration some months ago that I was commencing a boycott of political news on TV is beginning to lessen … just a bit.

However, even though I keep the TV on to listen to the political news only with one of my ears, I am consdering a doubling down on that earlier declaration. I mean, even though I am paying partial attention to the machinations of D.C., Austin and even the local news, it is tiring to hear the same thing repeatedly.

I am waiting for a grand revelation. A “Eureka!” moment when someone tells me something no one else has reported. I want an intrepid reporter to deliver the scoop for the ages on what no one else on Earth knows about Donald Trump, or any of his sycophants.

Print journalism reached its high-water mark in the 1970s when two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, were given license to ferret out the truth behind the Watergate scandal. They were so successful that the “gate” terminology has become a suffix for any scandal that boils up … you know, Russiagate, Hegseth-womanizergate, whatever.

The media have been sufficiently demonized by Donald Trump and his moronic MAGA minions that even tried-and-true shoe-leather reporting is now deemed suspect, of peddling “fake news.”

It’s not fake. It’s real. But the media seem reluctant to sic the reporter hounds loose to tell us the full truth. Instead, we get a mere regurgitation of what we know already.

I haven’t yet decided to fire up my news boycott. I might do it. I am going to wait a bit longer and hope someone can produce the next scoop for the ages.

crime news

Trump nationalizes DC cops? Really … ?

Let’s stroll for a moment down a memory lane filled with frightening images and unprecedented presidential dereliction of duty.

Jan. 6, 2021 signaled the start of an insurrection against the federal government. Thousands of Americans stormed the Capitol Building that day, smashed through the windows of our government, battled DC and Capitol police, threatened the life of Vice President Mike Pence, defecated on the floor of the building, injured officers who were trying to protect Congress members … and Donald Trump didn’t lift a finger to halt it.

This weekend, Trump decided that crime had gotten so out of control in DC that it was time to nationalize the city’s police force, call up the National Guard to patrol the streets and issue arrest warrants. Was the weekend a horrendous one? No. It wasn’t. It was a typical time in the nation’s capital city.

Trump’s latest gambit is just one more dubious attempt to divert attention from the growing scandal involving the late Jeffrey Epstein, those files with all those names in them and whether Trump should release the files for public review to let us determine whether there’s anything incriminating about the POTUS.

Trump is a madman who is looking and sounding like a desperate individual looking for any and all methods to keep the law at bay.

If the numbskull in chief is going to insist on nationalizing the DC police force and deputizing the National Guard to make arrests, he’ll have to come clean with tangible evidence of a crime wave that he says is overtaking the nation’s capital city.

local news

Diversity being tested

My family — immediate and extended — is a diverse lot, comprising “yellow dog Democrats” and “rock-ribbed MAGA Republicans.” So, I cannot say they influenced my own world view, as I have charted my own path over the course of my 75-plus years on this Earth.

One of my family members, who considers herself to be a mainstream, social and fiscal conservative Republican, has just informed me that, in her view, “Texas is really screwing the Democrats.” How so? In her mind, it’s the midstream reapportionment debacle unfolding in Austin that just gets her motor running.

My aunt is a kind and serious woman. She is not prone to latch onto cults the way many in both political parties seem prone to do on occasion. Therefore, the target of her anger is the MAGA cult that has attached itself to Donald Trump’s world view, such as it is. Trump has singled out Texas, with its strong GOP ties, to help him solidify the slim Republican majority in the U.S. House. He declares the Legislature, which is meeting in special session, can redraw five strong Democratic House districts into five GOP districts.

Trump wants to disenfranchise minority voters who are represented in Congress by representatives who reflect their views. We can’t have that, Trump has said.

The guy’s a maniac! And a dimwitted one at that! If he can piss off a reasonable Republican such as the member of my family I have just illustrated in this brief post, imagine how many others out there might be willing to rebel against the elected officials who are so damn willing to crater to this dipshit’s cravings.