local news

Ticking has begun on montrosity

That ticking sound you might hear if you’re driving along US 380 in Princeton could be the sound of the clock winding down on a project that has been stalled for more than a year.

It is a huge “luxury apartment” complex of buildings next to Wal-Mart that has gone fallow. The city’s code compliance department is preparing an analysis of the project to determine whether it is out of compliance. My guess? It damn sure is.

According to the Princeton Herald: The notice from a city building official called the apartments a “substandard structure, constitution public nuisance and hazard to public health, safety and welfare.”

The notice also said, “the substandard, dilapidated structure(s) on the property needs to be vacated, secured, repaired and brought into compliance, removed or demolished.”

The developer who got into a big-time snit with the contractor — who walked off the job — had until June 16 to bring the site into compliance. He didn’t make the grade.

Now well might be the next step, which would be to take action to remove this massive eyesore from our line of sight.

That is all right with me.

Mother Nature has pummeled the half-built apartment complex with wind, rain, hail, extreme heat and extreme cold., Many of the interior structures likely are damaged beyond repair.

I happen to believe it is time for the complex to come down!

national news

POTUS falls short

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My hope leading up to President Biden’s 22-minute interview with ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos was that Biden would hit it so damn far out of the park that we never would discuss whether he was “up to the job” of being president.

He whiffed.

Three or four times, Stephanopoulos asked Biden if he would consent to an independent test of his mental acuity. He declined to say “yes” or “no.” He said something about being “tested every day” while he continues to function as president.

Biden’s frightening debate performance prompted the interview. It was intended to dispel concerns about the president’s ability to do the job. Do I share those concerns? Not necessarily.

I do share the concern that the international chatter about the debate performance is damaging his re-election effort against a guy who has no business running for office …. let alone standing in position potentially to wrest it from the individual who defeated him four years ago.

We are entering uncharted waters, gang.

Joe Biden

Biden on the hot seat

All of us are entitled to change our mind on important matters … correct? Therefore, I am going to announce to you a shift in my thought process on the difficulty that President Biden is facing.

I have declared my desire that Biden stay in office, that he not back down, that he not forgo a re-election campaign. My commitment to that stance is beginning to waver.

The president is facing the kind of pressure to pull out that none of us has witnessed. He stumbled badly this past week in the debate with Donald Trump. He sounded confused. He looked even worse, appearing at times as if he couldn’t remember what he had just said or the latest lie that flew out of Trump’s overfed pie hole.

I am not going to wander down the alley that suggests that Biden has lost his snap that he should suspend his campaign and hand the effort over to a young gun.

That is his decision to make. Only the president can know if he is up to the task. I believe he is, but I am peering at him through a far-away prism. My thought at this moment is that if he makes that decision to pull out that I will support him.

Uncategorized

Stiffen the rules to run

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The next amendment to the Constitution should involve updating requirements to run for president. There are only 3 requirements, and at the time of its writing, that seemed logical. We no longer live in a world full of logical people; and it is illogical that a convicted felon should be allowed to run for office. We need people of good virtue and character. Donny boy offers neither, nor do his adamant supporters, as they have lost their once good character and virtues to a cult leader. But the founders never expected the country would face such a ridiculous crisis.

What you have just read didn’t come from my laptop. It came from an individual who reads this blog and who, by and large, endorses whatever point of view I manage to spew out there. I appreciate his support.

What this gentleman proposes is to stiffen the requirements for seeking high public office. He’s right that there is nothing in the Constitution that requires a candidate for POTUS to be free of criminal charges … let alone convictions.

This guy might be onto something, the more I think about it.

Indeed, the only thing that could keep Donald Trump from serving — God forbid — would be if he is sent to prison.

It’s not too much to ask to reserve the presidency and other high offices only for the best among us to run for them. When you think for just a moment about it, does the “best of us” include just those who haven’t been convicted of a felony?

I believe we could cast our net even farther than a felony conviction. I get that such a change might impinge on the notion that “anybody can be elected president.” Well, eliminating convicted felons from the candidate pool still leaves us with a huge field of hopefuls.

national news

Fourth of July = more poignant

Quite naturally, we are now getting ready to celebrate the birth of our great nation while wondering and, yes, worrying about its future.

An election is coming up. Donald Trump reportedly is leading the two-man race for the White House. His campaign theme is a muddled mess, but millions of us have determined that one thing Trump wants to do is dismantle the democratic tradition that grants this country its greatness.

We had better pay attention to what might be transpiring in real time. Donald Trump plans to sic the Justice Department on his political foes. He will demand blind loyalty among those who serve him if hell freezes over and is elected POTUS. He said he would be a dictator on the opening day of his administration.

The nation’s founders, wherever they are, must be spinning in their graves.

Trump plans to cozy up to dictators, morons he calls “very strong leaders.” He is making broad promises he cannot possibly keep and is spouting lies he knows to be false.

Let us salute the wisdom our founders demonstrated in creating this nation. Their creation wasn’t perfect, but we have sought to improve through all those amendments to our Constitution, The founders knew that perfection was impossible to achieve, given their stated aim to form a “more perfect Union.”

Joe Biden

Stop the armchair diagnoses!

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Everyone’s a doctor, a scientist, someone with inside knowledge on what makes total strangers tick.

You hear it especially when a prominent individual is forced to answer questions about his or her mental acuity. The most prominent person on Earth, President Biden, is facing those questions these days. He endured that hideous debate performance the other evening and now is being pressured to drop out of his race for re-election to the presidency.

Biden says he ain’t going to do it. He says he plans to soldier on. He says only he can defeat Donald J. Trump, which he did four years ago. A whole host of things now work in his favor: Trump’s convictions on felony counts; the nation’s economic revival; Trump’s continuing blather about The Big Lie; Biden’s ability to rally international support against the immoral Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Then the 81-year-old president stumbled badly in that debate against the consummate liar.

I’ll lay out my bias for you. Biden is not diminished to where he cannot do the job to which we elected him. Trump is patently unfit at any level one can imagine for the job he seeks. I base my assertions about Biden on what I have witnessed, albeit from a distance. I concluded long before he won the 2016 election that Trump’s professional experience and his personal proclivities render him unfit for public office.

I am going to hang with the president until he decides all by himself whether he wants to keep fighting for his job … and fighting for you and me.

national news

What is going on with POTUS?

What in the ever-lovin’ world have we come to in this country, debating whether to replace an incumbent president of the United States in the middle of his re-election campaign?

I have to ask this rhetorical question: Is President Biden the first incumbent ever to stumble and bumble his way through a televised debate? He isn’t!

Therefore, I am going to stick — for now — to my earlier thought that Democrats need to back off the dump-Biden bandwagon. The president’s family wants him to stay in the race, So do many Democrats, I am one American patriot who wants Biden to hang tough and to prepare for the next scheduled debate planned for September against Donald Trump.

Let’s understand something that needs attention at this moment. Replacing a presidential nominee who already has garnered enough convention delegates to win the nomination is a prescription for chaos. The delegates already are committed. Where they would do if Biden is thrown over is anyone’s guess.

Do I believe he can do the job? Yes I do, Give him the opportunity to prove he still is up to the task to which we elected him.

national news

Trump: luckiest pol … ever!

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Donald J. Trump is vying for the unofficial title of luckiest politician of all time.

Ponder this for a moment. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in early 2016 and President Obama sought to nominate Merrick Garland to the SCOTUS vacancy. The Senate’s premier obstructionist, GOP leader Mitch McConnell, intervened, saying that Obama didn’t have the right to nominate anyone in an election year. McConnell blocked Garland’s nomination hoping that Trump would win in 2016. Trump won in what will go down as the greatest political fluke in US history.

Then the new POTUS named three justices to the court.

Together, along with three other right-wing justices, they have determined that POTJSes have immunity against prosecution for crimes committed while performing their official duties. Trump already has been convicted of 34 felony counts, but that doesn’t stop him from running again.

Trial judges down the line are now hamstrung by the high court’s immunity ruling, possibly enabling Trump to run out the clock and hope — and man, this pains me to write this — that he wins the 2024 election … which would doom any chance of any conviction on any of the remaining trials.

That the presumptive GOP nominee is even in a position to win the next election baffles me beyond all measure. It is stunning in the extreme. This guy is without question the most immoral reprobate ever to seek high political office.

Yet there he is, riding this god-awful wave of good luck possibly right back into the White House, the one place on Earth where he never should be seen again.

Go … figure!

legal news

SCOTUS trashes another established notion

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Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has laid waste to another established legal tenet, let us look briefly at what might lie ahead.

The court, ruling 6 to 3, has decided that presidents do have presumed immunity from prosecution if they commit wrongdoing while sitting in the office. The court let stand the notion that a president can be prosecuted for acts he committed after he leaves office.

We all thought that “no one is above the law.” Well … that’s not quite true. It means, in this matter specifically, that Donald Trump was within legal authority to provoke the Jan. 6 onslaught on the Capitol and then do nothing to stop it while mobsters assaulted the cops, crashed through windows, defecated on the floor of our Capitol and threatened to execute the VP if he didn’t obey Trump’s command to overturn the result of the 2020 election … which Trump lost to Joe Biden!

Does this mean, therefore, that Joe Biden could send a special forces sniper team to assassinate his opponents before he leaves office? Of. course not … except that the court ruled that illegal acts might be protected.

When I served in the US Army long ago, I was told that we didn’t have to obey unlawful orders. We were instructed to resist them. Vice President Mike Pence received what to my mind was an unlawful order from Trump to “do the right thing” by stopping the certification of the 2020 election result. Pence has said all along he didn’t have the authority to act.

He followed the law and the US Constitution. Trump should be tried for issuing that order. SCOTUS, again in my view, got this ruling wrong.

legal news

No one is above the law? Pfffttt!

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If you thought for a nanosecond — as I did — that “no one is above the law,” then what we have received today from the U.S. Supreme Court is a decision that dispels such foolishness.

The court, ruling 6 to 3, has decided that Donald J. Trump is granted “presumptive immunity” from prosecution for acts committed while he was still in office. That includes pressuring Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

The six votes all came from Republican-appointed justices; the three dissenting justices all were selected by Democratic presidents. Who knew … right?

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. According to The Hill: Roberts wrote that whenever the president and vice president are discussing official responsibilities, they are engaging in official conduct — and, presiding over the certification of the 2020 presidential election results is a constitutional and statutory duty of the vice president.

“The indictment’s allegations that Trump attempted to pressure the Vice President to take particular acts in connection with his role at the certification proceeding thus involve official conduct, and Trump is at least presumptively immune from prosecution for such conduct,” Roberts wrote.

The indictments of Trump presumed what Attorney General Merrick Garland has preached, that “no one is above the law.” Not true, according to the SCOTUS. The court’s logic applies even to discussion that involve knowingly conspiring to break the law.

SCOTUS did kick some of the indictments back to a lower court. More delay is coming up. The case involving the Jan. 6 assault on the government likely won’t go to trial until after the election.

Then, if — God forbid! — Trump wins, well … you know how that ends.

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