Category: Uncategorized

Draft Age

I’m too old to go to war.  My draft card (1974) is in tatters, but still legible.  I remember going to register in downtown Cincinnati.  I knew that the war was almost over, and that I wasn’t going to Vietnam.  But I was still nervous:  this was a “rite of passage” that changed so many American men’s lives, including my father’s. To further assuage my concerns, my “draft number”, the lottery selection (drawn like a life and death game of bingo) was a “perfect” 343. (The highest number ever drafted was 195). But it really didn’t matter. Nobody in my year was going in the draft, or to Vietnam.  It was over.  The era of the “all volunteer” military began.

The card survived a swim to the bottom of the Cheat River (not my choice) and innumerable rain soaked track meets.   I finally “archived” it, carefully placed with other “treasures” of the past: original birth certificate (hand written in 1956), baptismal document (really),  a letter to Dad  from my Scoutmaster (about a good thing), passport and passport identity card, marriage “license”, and other stuff.  

No army wants me.  At sixty-eight, my body is “pre-owned” (read as “used”). There might be some mileage left, but it isn’t ready for combat.  My “obligation time” has long since passed.  But there are situations where I could see a return of the draft and compulsory military service for our young men AND women, the current Secretary of Defense to the contrary.

American Adventures

I am not interested in our Nation following in the footsteps of the famous American Generals, Hull and Harrison.   They both invaded Canada during the War of 1812.  Hull was driven back from Ontario by the British and then surrendered American Detroit without a fight.  Harrison won the battle of Thames River, in present day Ontario, defeated the combined Shawnee Confederation and British troops, and killed Tecumseh.  But the enlistment time for his men was almost up, so he returned to US territory.

Americans soon figured out that trade with Canada was better than war, and that Canadians weren’t interested in becoming Americans.   America set its sights West, instead of North.

And I’m not interested in another foreign “adventure” in Panama.  We’ve been involved there since we “guaranteed” their independence from Columbia, gaining the “right” to build the canal in 1903. (If that sounds like some kind of rogue CIA operation, encouraging a section of a nation to break away so we could build in it, it is.   Except, of course, there wasn’t a CIA in 1903).

US troops were in Panama from then until 1999, including a full-out invasion of the country in 1989.  That year, we captured their President, Manual Noriega.  We forced him out of the Roman Catholic Church Embassy by playing Highway to Hell, over and over at maximum volume.  He was tried and convicted of narcotics trafficking in a US Court, and held in Miami Federal Prison for seventeen years. 

Imperialism

Canada and Panama – we’ve “been there and done that”, “Got the T-shirt, and bought the post card”.  And the United States discovered that “wanting something and having something are often very different”.   Certainly being the “Bully of North America” isn’t worth spilling a single drop of Canadian, Panamanian, or most certainly American blood.  Don’t send our kids to fight for American imperialism.  19^th century Manifest Destiny is over:  America already goes from “sea to shining sea”.  We displaced the Native Americans and the Mexicans, and it was done by the 1870’s.  That time is past.

And now it’s Greenland. The President of the United States openly discusses (mutters, mulls-over, ruminates) on how the US would “get” Greenland, in spite of the will of the 60,000 people living there.  He wanted to send the Vice President of the United States and several other high ranking US officers to “visit” the place.  But the government there, a huge geographic island, said they weren’t welcome.   I don’t blame the Greenlanders.  If someone is trying to take over your home, you don’t usually invite them to dinner.

Melting Icecap

So instead, the “high level delegation” went to US Space Force Base Pituffik (pronounced “Bee-Doo-Feek”), on the far, nearly unpopulated Northwest corner of the Island, a thousand miles from the capital in Nuuk (“Nook”).  The people of Greenland, guided by Denmark, graciously allows the US to have that far flung base there, above the Arctic Circle.  During the height of the Cold War, over 10,000 US servicemen were stationed in Greenland, including a base buried in the Greenland icecap.  Now that’s dwindled to 150 shivering Space Force Guardians. The abandoned icecap base is melting.

 The Vice President gave a press conference (of course he had to bring in his own press) and spent a couple of hours.   He even “talked” to some Native Greenlanders.  Then he headed home.  The press got a couple of shots of the “blue ice” on the beach, breaking off from the nearly frozen Arctic Sea.  But the Sea isn’t not as nearly frozen as it should have been – that’s the point.

Canada, Panama, Greenland:  what do all of these things have in common?  They are (or will be) on commercial sea routes.  And Donald Trump is convinced that he is the next “Teddy Roosevelt”, protector of “America’s” sea trade.  Panama is obvious:  there is a canal there, one that Roosevelt was responsible for.  But what about Canada and Greenland?  

To understand, we have to be serious about climate change.   Our planet is warming (as John Wayne would say, “My fault, Your fault, Nobody’s fault” – that’s not the issue, though it is “our” fault).  A warming planet is causing the Arctic ice pack to break up.  What I learned as a child; that you could, with the right equipment and luck, walk from Canada to Russia across the ice; will be impossible.  

Northwest Passage

And there are those around Trump who see tremendous profit potential in being able to ship through the Arctic.  It’s the same “Northwest Passage” idea that brought Henry Hudson to the “new world” in the late 1500’s, looking for the shortcut from Europe to Asia.   That’s how we ended up with a river and a bay named after him.  He was probing west, to find a seaway through North America.  Now, with the ice breaking up earlier each year, there will be a corridor around the top of the world.  And just like the commercial aircraft that fly the “Great Circle” routes over the North Pole, ships might be able to get from Europe to Asia via North America quicker.

Greenland, Canada, the US (Alaska) and Russia are the main nations along the way.  Trump wants to control at least three of them.   (And there are also “rare earth” minerals, both in Canada, Greenland, and Alaska; another economic “boon” of a US takeover).

Teddy Roosevelt arranged “coaling stations” across the Pacific to fuel the steam ships of the “Great White Fleet” of the American Navy in the early 1900’s. Trump wants to snatch the way-stations along the new Northwest Passage.  60,000 Greenlanders and 40 million Canadians might not like it. But Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t so worried about Columbians, Hawaiians, Filipinos, or Pacific Islanders along that route either. 

Bully

There are other ways to get trade agreements, besides bullying.  Instead of threatening invasion (and that’s exactly what we are implying to the good folks in Greenland), Trump could do what he’s supposed to do best, make a deal.  And for those who cry out; “He’s just setting up a bargaining position”; I think back to Major, the bully on my playground in second grade. He failed school twice, but was successful at stealing lunch money.  He got my money a few times with “…an offer I couldn’t refuse”.  But in the end, the community of students and parents and teachers stood up to him, and he went “away”.

Trump is squandering American good will in the world, for a tenuous idea that Henry Hudson had centuries before.   He wants to be the next Teddy Roosevelt, using the might of America to force American desires on the world.  He is a bully, and so are we, the United States of America.  The world will have to answer to that.  I don’t want our kids to have to fight on the wrong side.

NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our weapon is surprise…surprise and fear…fear and surprise…. Our two weapons are fear and surprise…and ruthless efficiency…. Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and the ruthless efficiency…and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope…. Amongst our weapons…are fear, surprise, ruth… Amongst our weaponry…are such elements as fear… I’ll come in again – Monty Python 

The Issue

Atlantic Magazine Editor Jeff Goldberg has to worry now.  He was privy to an ongoing national security text conversation, held on a commercial (not government) text platform called Signal. We can all get that same app on our phones.  He was added to the “chat” by the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States, Mike Waltz.  It was all about an attack on Houthis in Yemen, and included when, how, and with what weaponry the attack would be launched.  

The issues:  how does a magazine editor accidently get added to a “chat” among the nation’s most important leaders, and why were national secrets revealed over a commercial “messaging” service?  Participating on the Signal “chat”:  the Vice President, the White House Chief of Staff and the National Security Advisor, the Directors of National Intelligence and of the CIA, the Secretaries of Defense and Treasury; and other American leaders.  And the secrets were:  the time, place, and specific weapons to be used in the attack, and direct criticism of the President by the Vice President.

The “Apology”

Goldberg carefully wrote his first article about the “chat” on Monday.  He left out direct “battle” information, and he kept named CIA operatives anonymous.  But instead of the White House answering with some kind of apology, or explanation; they launched an attack against Goldberg. They claimed, over and over again, that no “classified” information was on the chat.

So, Goldberg released the battle information today:  the military details of the attack, prior to and while the attack was actually in progress.  It was all from the “chat”, directly from the Secretary of Defense.  Goldberg, and anyone with access to the “chat” or the chat members private phones, knew when the bombs were falling, who was going to get hit, and what kind of bombs would hit them.

And we now know that Goldberg, sitting in a Safeway parking lot, wasn’t the only one in a vulnerable public place receiving this information.  The Vice President was driving around in Michigan, the Director of National Security was in Asia, and the US envoy to the Middle East was in Russia, and quite possibly, in the Kremlin itself.  They were all on the own, personal, private phones.

The Blame

The White House effort to smear Goldberg continues.  They aren’t dealing with the clear issues of poor security; using the “app” itself, including a civilian (a reporter) in the “chat”, and using personal phones vulnerable to hacks.  There’s no discussion about the danger that our military personnel (and our CIA covert operatives) might have been in.  Instead they continue to say how much they dislike Mr. Goldberg.  Mike Waltz, National Security Advisor, has taken responsibility for “inadvertently” adding Goldberg.  But, it’s one of those “take all the responsibility, but none of the blame”.  Waltz hinted that there might have been some subversion of his process by The Atlantic.

But what is the reality here?  Hopefully military operations are “secret”, at least, before they happen.  Hopefully, the National Security apparatus takes care of our “secrets”.  Surprise is a big step towards success in the military, and, even more importantly, protects the lives of the service members involved.  

So when all of those “chat” members claim that the details of the attack on the Houthis weren’t classified, they sound foolish.  If they weren’t classified, then our leaders are failures.  If they were classified, then, they were “cavalier” with the information, and therefore with the safety of our military.   Or, as Congressman Castro of Texas bluntly stated:  “This information was and is classified, and to say different is to lie to the American people.”

The FBI

So why should Jeff Goldberg be worried?  Because, regardless of the fact that all of the “principals” in the conversation said the information Goldberg revealed today was “not classified”, it clearly was.  And Goldberg, even though he was a private citizen who received the information without subversion or malice, revealed it to the public.

I’ve always had a great deal of respect for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.  They made an incredible turnaround from the pre 9-11 era.  They have protected the United States from almost all internal and external attacks.  But the Trump FBI  today is the FBI of retribution and revenge, led by Trump loyalists Kash Patel as Director, and Pam Bondi at Attorney General.  Their actions make it clear that they will do whatever is necessary to defend the Trump White House from all enemies, personal, private or public.  And what the law currently says really has little to do with how they will act.

Goldberg is relying on the US Supreme Court ruling in United States v New York Times; that a reporter who obtains classified information without committing a crime (someone hands it to them) can publish that information.  The Court case is better known as the Pentagon Papers case, when Daniel Ellsberg an employee of the Defense Department, gave the Times classified information.  They published it. Mike Waltz handed Goldberg the current information. Goldberg committed no crime, in fact, he was very surprised to be included in the “chat”.  And he published it, and after all of the “blowback”, published even more.

Pay-Back

But he should be ready for the dark-early morning knock on the door from the FBI.  Goldberg needs to wear his clothes to bed (they won’t give him a chance to change), and he needs to make sure the dogs are carefully put up at night.  Because there’s a better-than-even chance that there will be a five AM pounding on his door, a full SWAT team in the front yard, and a TV crew setup ready to record his arrest.  

It won’t be Monty Python’s comical “Spanish Inquisition”.  It will be a deadly serious, locked and loaded FBI arrest team.   And while it’s likely that Goldberg will be found innocent of any wrongdoing, the Trump Justice Department will exact their revenge for embarrassing the Administration.  The handcuffs, the locked and loaded automatic weapons, the “perp walk”, the “strip search”, will be punishment enough.  It will serve as a deterrent to the next reporter who finds another dangerous flaw of hubris; of cavalier attitudes towards our National security.  While no one might “expect the Spanish Inquisition”, Goldberg should certainly expect the FBI.

I know, I know, we aren’t supposed to quote Bill Cosby anymore.   But there is a classic Cosby story, decades old, that I can’t resist paraphrasing; so please forgive my cultural incorrectness.

 A doctor is doing surgery under local anesthesia.  The conversation among the surgical team seems normal: 

• Surgeon – Scalpel please, Nurse.
  • Scrub Nurse – Scalpel, Doctor
• • Surgeon – Sponge
• • Scrub Nurse  – Sponge
• • Surgeon – Forceps
• • Scrub Nurse – Forceps
• • Surgeon – Oops!!
• Patient (wide awake now) – What do you mean oops?  I know what I mean when I say oops!! What oops?

Secret Plans

With all the craziness going on in the United States in the past few weeks, you might have missed it.  Saturday, March 15^th, the Trump Administration launched a bombing attack on the Houthis militant group in Yemen.  At least 53 were killed in the strikes, including women and children.   It was the beginning of an ongoing campaign against the Houthis, who’ve been attacking American and European ships near the Southern end of the Suez Canal.  The Houthis are backed by Iran, and are opposed to the Yemeni government (they’re backed by Saudi Arabia).  They began their attacks on shipping in retaliation for the Israeli operations in Gaza.

You’d expect that the details for planning, executing and launching such an attack would be secret.   There’s lots of “government stuff” today that we could argue about being secret or not, things like kidnapping folks off the street and sending them to El Salvador.  But there is no argument here.  The detailed plans on the Houthis attack were, and should have been, highly classified.  Leaking details could be used to shoot down American aircraft, or somehow interfere with American operations.  There is nothing more sacrosanct then keeping our military as safe as possible.

Order 191

American history tells us what happens when secrets are revealed.   In the Civil War, the seemingly invincible Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by General Robert E Lee, won a string of victories from Seven Pines and Seven Days around Richmond, to Second Manassas near Washington in the summer of 1862.  Lee then took his army north, attacking into Maryland and hoped to skirt north and east to cut off the Union capital.  

Lee’s Special Order 191 listed the order of battle, which roads what parts of his army would take into Maryland, and all of his troop dispositions.   As sections of the Confederate forces moved through Maryland, Union troops tried to catch up.  A Union corporal found a copy of Order 191, wrapped around some cigars, in a field where the Confederates camped just days before.  The Corporal understood the importance of the plan, and it was soon in the hands of the highest Union commander, Commanding General George B McClellan.

Antietam

McClellan knew where Lee was, and where he was going.  More importantly, he knew that Lee’s Army was spread out in marching order, and not concentrated for battle.   If he could hit Lee “in the middle”, he would split the Army of Northern Virginia. McClellan could then defeat them piecemeal.  But, time was of the essence.  The Confederate “middle” was at a small town called Sharpsburg, on a creek called Antietam.

McClellan was nothing if not cautious, and failed to strike soon enough. Lee started to pull his forces together, and the battle at Antietam ensued.   It was the bloodiest combat of the Civil War up to that time.  But for a forced march of seventeen miles by  Confederate General AP Hill’s light corps,  who marched off the road and into battle without breaking stride; the Army of Northern Virginia, would have been destroyed. 

McClellan missed his chance, and the battle ended in a stalemate.   Lee withdrew back across the Potomac River to Virginia, and the Civil War went on for another two and a half years.  After the war, there was an attempt to find who lost Order 191.  Surviving Confederate generals all made their excuses.  General Longstreet said he ate his copy.  The story became the principal American example of both loss of security, and the ignominy of a General who failed to strike when the opportunity presented itself.  President Lincoln removed McClellan from command.

Get the App

We’ve all watched enough television to have a pretty good idea about that security today.   There are in-person meetings in “SCIFS”, rooms that are secure and checked for any kind of survelliance equipment. There are incredibly secure tele-communications equipment, with all sorts of technical means of keeping messages and conversations secure.  And then, there are methods that are just not secure.  

Most current communications “apps” don’t guarantee security.   Apple text keeps long strings of text discussions for years.  Messenger does the same, and can be copied and hacked.  What’s App supposedly disappears in seconds, which limits communication.  And Telegram, the app of choice for many Europeans, is supposedly full of Russian trolls. 

Signal is also a texting app, that brags about privacy:

  “Stories, images, texts and videos disappear after 24 hours.   Privacy settings keep you in charge of exactly who can see each Story”. 

Signal promises not to read your messages, or store them in any way.   And Signal promises: “No back doors, no data collection, no compromises”.   So if you want “secure messaging”, Signal may be your thing.

But it’s not up to the “gold standard” of US military level security.   Signal’s main security feature is that the messages disappear in 24 hours.  But if a phone is “hacked” while messages are sent, or if screen shots are taken, then the information is preserved in spite of the 24 hour lifespan.  And, of course, if a “third party” is made a part of the text group, then security is compromised from the beginning.

Principals Committee

In 2016, Donald Trump pilloried Hillary Clinton for using a private email service.   “What about the emails” became the knee jerk response to any criticism of Trump’s candidacy.  And it is true that Hillary had a private server, and some government emails went through that server.  It became one of those irritating issues that cost Clinton the Presidency by the narrowest of margins.

Yesterday, we heard that a Principal’s Committee of national leaders in the Trump Administration discussed the development and the details of the Houthi attack in a text group on Signal, called the “Houthis PC Small Group”.   We found out, because the text group included Jeff Goldberg, the editor of Atlantic Magazine.

Goldberg wasn’t supposed to be in the group. He was along with the Secretaries of Defense, State, Treasury, the Directors of National Intelligence, the CIA, the President’s Chief of Staff, the National Security Advisor, the Vice President, and others.   Like Longstreet eating Order 191, there will probably be an internal search to discover how Goldberg was included.  But there is a much greater point.

The Signal app is not military level secure.   Even if was, it’s not OUR security.  Signal is privately owned by “Moxie Marlinspike” and Brian Acton.  The phones using the app were “out and about”, in cars in Michigan, and in pockets on the street (addendum – one was in MOSCOW, RUSSIA)– all incredibly vulnerable to attack and hack operations.  And what is highly classified information, including the Vice President disagreeing with the President, and the “order of battle” for the attack, was out there for all to see.

Oops

And how did Goldberg get added?   Was it some nefarious act to somehow discredit The Atlantic, one of Trump’s greatest editorial critics?  Or was it just another error, another “oops” in the long chain of “oops” in this whole security adventure?

Or, is this just the hubris of the Trump Administration?   Government secure apps create records, classified records.  It’s part of what we expect of the government, to keep track of what was said and what was done.  And the folks around Trump, since even before the 2015 Presidential run, don’t like records.  Records turn into evidence, and evidence can be subpoenaed and used in trials.  Signal messages are gone after twenty-four hours, disappeared into the ether of our online world.  That is, except for the screen shots that Mr. Greenberg took to document his journey.

And, of course, this is the same President who kept National Security documents in the “golden restroom” at his Mara Lago home.   Why should we expect his underlings to have any higher standard of protection?  

What’s at risk?  The folks flying those planes against the Houthis, and the ships that launch the missiles and recover the planes.  Of course, none of those are as important as the ability of the National Security Advisor Waltz to send an emoji message of congratulations to his committee “friends”, I guess.

Oops.

Wordsmith

For almost my entire life, I have worked in “words”.  As a teacher, I used words to explain my subjects. One of the toughest parts of teaching was to discover that the “words” that I thought were clear, concise and simple; didn’t convey the message.  It was always obvious:  as I explained away, I could see there was no “lights on” in the students’ eyes.  They didn’t get it.  

And then I’d have to stop, sometimes literally, and think of another way to say the same thing.  I’d go on like that, trying some other approach, until the “lights” finally started to come on, or the bell rang, whichever came first.  Coaching was the same way.  I’d try to describe the physical action the athlete needed to make; to put into words they could use to visualize how to correct a flaw in the pole vault, or shot put, or sprint start.  Then there just wasn’t a “light” going on, there was absolute proof.  Either the kids did it, or they didn’t.  And if they didn’t, I’d find another visualization, another explanation.

Motor-Neuron Response

I ran into that with my own “athletic” issues the other day.  I tweaked my lower back in January, and my doctor and I decided that physical therapy would be the best option.  So there I am, a gray-haired, sixty-eight year old man in running shoes and shorts and a T-shirt, trying to follow the thirty-something therapist.  The best way for me to figure out the “exercise” was to relate it to some other (often ancient) athletic activity my “motor-neuron paths” still remembered.  So when I was laying on my back, lifting my right leg and my left arm then reversing in sequence, I had to figure how to manipulate it.  It was awkward, and I kept messing up.  I didn’t feel like the athlete, or athletic coach, of days of yore.  I felt like an old man.

It was the original movie, the Karate Kid, that got me through.  In one of the training scenes, “Daniel-son” was standing on one foot atop a beach erosion pole, with his other knee raised and his hands in the air:  the “crane” position. He then had to switch, jumping from one foot to the other, without falling off the pole.  It became the pivotal point of the movie, the final kick that won Daniel the county karate championship!  All I had to do was the horizontal “crane” position, with just one arm, then switch.  It worked.   Thank you once again, Mr. Miyagi. 

Politics

Words were also my “area of expertise” in politics.  In campaigns I was a good organizer and a lousy fund raiser, but what I really did was write.  From speeches to position papers, letters to three-sided brochures; I was the writer.  And, since it was politics, I had to write in the “voice” of my candidate or “boss”.  A speech I wrote is in the Congressional Record, delivered by my Congressman in the 1970’s.  I was very proud. That’s the good news.  The bad news:  it was introducing a bill to ban abortion nationwide:  “his voice” in my words.  

Yes, he was a Democrat.  No, in those days the Democratic Party contained both pro-choice and pro-life members.  It wasn’t the absolute “litmus test” of today. I could work for a pro-life Democrat and not agree with him.  It didn’t “betray” my moral views, or lose my “Democrat-ness”.  Things have changed in half a century.

So I try to be careful with words.  I am very much aware that in our current age of division, words are the “weapons of choice”.  It’s clear that what I write may go against what other’s believe.  I try, at least I think I try; not to use my words to attack personally, but to highlight the flaws politically, morally and historically.  I expect criticism, because I often talk about controversial subjects.

Values

And one of the “values” of my writing today is the same one I had in the classroom.  Maybe, in the depths of what I write, the “light goes on” for someone else.  We are so firmly entrenched in our “sides” that it’s difficult to think I’m going to change someone who; “I can see by your coat my friend you’re from the other side,” (Stephen Stills wrote that). But maybe they’ll at least see the value in the argument.  Maybe the “light” will be the sun peaking over the horizon on a cloudy day, or a view of Lincoln’s “dark and indefinite shore”.  That’s the hope.

But for some, maybe many today, there is no such hope.  Words have power. When an adult “grown-ass man” uses profanity to describe me, publicly, it probably time to move on.  It would be one thing, at least more “courageous”, to do so to my face (or directly to me on Facebook, in the keyboard version of face to face).  But to describe me to others as a “Liberal-#%@#”, using a profanity that even I don’t use, ever; well that’s enough.  

I’d have kicked him out of class, or off the team, for it.  But I hated doing that, it was tantamount to failing.  In our modern social-media world, anyone can say anything from behind the keyboard.  My usual standard is to take everything, until someone calls me “treasonous”.  But I’m not “taking” this one.  I kicked him out of class.  He’s off the team.  He’s deleted, defriended, blocked; across the broad spectrum of online communication.   I’ve given up.

And I’m sad about it.

Control the Issue

There is an old political trick:  if you can “name” the issue, you can “control” the issue.  The classic example is the ongoing American controversy over abortions.  One side is against abortion, the other is for it.  But that’s not how we talk about it.  Our arguments generally accept the language of one side:  “pro-life” folks are against abortion.  And while the other side tried to “control” the language by calling themselves “pro-choice”, in the end, if you’re not “pro-life”, why, then you must be “pro-death”.  And who wants to be “pro-death”?  That’s controlling the issue.

Here in Ohio we are in a battle to control academic minds.  Oh, we don’t name it that way.  But there is a segment of the state, well over-represented in the state legislature, that believes that public colleges are “bastions of liberal thought”.  

I just need to point out that if Ohio’s colleges are all so “liberal”, then how-come the voters of Ohio have acquiesced in a political system almost guaranteed to maintain the power of the MAGA-Republican party?  It’s like those local community members who claim that school teachers are “indoctrinating” their children in a “liberal – National Education Association” view of the world.  Indoctrinate students in a political view?  Teachers can’t even get kids to stop chewing gum in class, or turn in their homework.  If we could indoctrinate, we’d probably start there!

Diversity

But it’s a real issue for the state legislature.  There is a proposal, Senate Bill 1, that is now on the Governor’s desk for signature into law.  It “redefines” how public colleges (state schools) can teach.  And they use the “boogie man” of MAGA world, the magic three letters “DEI”.  The President of the United States and his billionaire buddies have made “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” the most terrible thing that ever happened in American history.  

Why in the world would we want America, a nation of immigrants from all parts of the world, to teach diversity?  Why in a Nation supposedly dedicated to equality, would we want greater representation of different gender, ethnic, and cultural groups?  And, why would we want folks from one of the different groups included with the others?

If you think about “DEI”, it’s really about America.  And the fight against “DEI” is about America as well.  MAGA’s greatest appeal is based on a reality:  the changing demographic of our population.  Donald Trump, Red MAGA Hats, anti-DEI laws or not; in the next fifteen years white people will no longer be a majority in the Nation.  It’s that statistical reality that fuels the MAGA movement, attracting white people, and particularly white men, to claim “victimhood” to “DEI”.  Changing America is taking away the advantage that white men had throughout our history.  And the way to fight that, to maintain the advantage, is to stop “DEI” and to export anyone they can who doesn’t “fit”.  That’s why Trump’s draconian and cruel immigration policies are so popular.  They aren’t deporting “white” people.

Appropriated Language

In Senate Bill 1, the MAGA-Republicans have even appropriated the language of their ideological opponents. 

On the academic side, each university must declare that its primary function is the “pursuit of knowledge” and “affirm and declare” that it will ensure full intellectual diversity. It must “demonstrate” intellectual diversity in all course approvals, general education courses, annual reviews, strategic goals for each department and student learning outcomes. (Ohio Capital Journal)

There’s the “magic word”, diversity.  But in the case of Senate Bill 1, diversity means that the intellectual message of the right must be included in every discussion.  So when a professor talks about climate change, they MUST include the views of those who ignore science and simply don’t believe in it.  And when they talk about the history of Black Americans, they must add in the Ku Klux Klan, because “there were good people on both sides”.  And if a law school professor actually might happen to venture into inherent racism in American law, say, the difference between punishments for crack use versus cocaine use; the old “boogie man” of “Critical Race Theory” will be thrown down like a gauntlet before a duel.

Intellectual Challenge

When I went to college, I got to learn from liberals and conservatives, Marxists and free marketeers, cutting edge scientists and staid elder statesmen.  That’s real diversity of thought.  And the best part, was that my young mind sponged it all in, and used the differing thoughts and philosophies to synthesize my own intellectual views.  It was challenging, and exciting, and sometimes frustrating.  But I got to see all sides.

Some of my professors were “controversial”.  But Senate bill 1 states:

A state institution must establish a system to respond to complaints about any administrator, faculty member, staff or student who interferes with the intellectual diversity of another.  So, in substance, students can file a complaint against a professor for addressing a controversial topic or stating a historic fact that students find infringing upon their intellectual diversity rights.

The bill defines “controversial belief or policy” as “any belief or policy that is the subject of political controversy, including issues such as climate policies, electoral politics, foreign policy, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, immigration policy, marriage, or abortion. (Ohio Capital Journal).

Infringe

In short, if the professor “infringes” on someone’s personal intellectual MAGA beliefs (something we used to call the “Socratic Method” of teaching), instead of accepting the challenge and defending their views, they become  “victims” and complain to the administration.  And since the MAGA-Republicans control the budget, that professor, like those students who protest against losing “DEI” programs, are out of luck; and out of school.

It’s Ohio.  Governor DeWine, just back from helping President Trump disband the Department of Education, will likely sign it.  And the great benefit of college; exposing students to differing intellectual ideas and beliefs, will be stifled.  Ohio State University and the other fifty public colleges and two-year institutions will carefully teach one party’s “line”, or risk losing all their funding.  It brings a whole new meaning to the cheer, “Go Bucks”!

That’s real indoctrination.

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Sirens

We are a Nation in crisis.  There’s lots of verbiage that often precedes that:  existential, Constitutional, generational, apocryphal, and so on and so forth.  As an “essayist” (I really don’t like the term “blogger”, and I don’t feel like I’ve earned the title of “author” or “writer”), it’s easy to fall into the trap of constantly “yelling from the mountaintop”.  It’s not that warning the world is wrong.  But, like the tornado sirens that go off every week, they lose their alarm function.  God help us if a tornado decides to strike at noon!

(Which reminds me:  we almost always did our school fire drills in the afternoon.  That way, a lot of our students were already gone for the day, and the weather was warmer. We seldom had fire drills in the morning, or before school started, or, heaven help us, at lunch.  Fires, like drills, had better be convenient!!  And we won’t talk about the Dean of Students (me) who watched the TV stations call off the Tornado Warnings, and sent kids out to get on the buses.  Funny, with all of those buses running, you can’t hear the wailing sirens just a few miles away!!!)

One of my readers (not often in agreement) called my recent effort, “just another of Marty’s doom and gloom” essays.  And while his analysis and mine seldom agree, there is a legitimate point.  It’s probably time to refrain from yelling  for a bit, otherwise I become just another part of the background noise; a tornado siren at noon on Wednesday.

Two Hour Tour

So here’s some good news.  The marooned astronauts finally made it back to earth.  Their “Two hour tour” (remember Gilligan’s Island?) went from ten days to ten months.  The news is full of retraining their balance mechanisms, and the fact that their eyeballs reshaped because of the lack of gravity.  But it’s all said in fun. The world (all sides) is happy their home, back on earth. 

And it was humorous to hear the media try to avoid naming their actual landing place.  The geographic identifier was:  off the coast of Florida, or, in the warm waters off the coast, or the friendly waters where they were welcomed by dolphins and the Space X recovery team.  No one dared say that they dropped into the GULF OF MEXICO (though CNN and probably Fox used the current, politically correct alternative choice – the newly minted Gulf of America). 

Crown Royal Apple

And, (this is political) I’m enjoying my Canadian friends reaction to the current American regime.  Canada is considered a friendly place of cold winters, cold beer, and flannel-plaid shirts  And there are the summers of almost endless daylight (and interminable black fly season – May through July!!).  

But there is a fighting spirit in Canadians.  After all, their national sport is hockey.  Fights in any other sport means ejection from the contest, fines and suspensions. In hockey it’s a couple of minutes of “time out”, like a five-year old, then back on the ice.   It shouldn’t be a surprise that Canadians are willing to match the US, tariff for tariff, and Crown Royal (it all comes from Canada) against Kentucky Bourbon.  Canadians are saying everything that 48% of Americans want to say – but won’t.

Hurt Feelings

Remember a few years ago when the folks really worried about the environment, and the “greenies”, were pushing electric cars.  Those vehicles were a solution to the massive problem of internal combustion engines, filling the sky with pollution and particularly carbon dioxide.  And the wealthier of the “greenies” put their money where their mouth was, and bought an electric car, usually, the “top of the line”, a Tesla. 

Then the owner, founder, chief operating officer and head bottle washer of Tesla decided that his bromance with Barack Obama and Joe Biden was over.  It really was all about a Biden invitation to the White House. Biden’s Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, called a summit of car manufacturers to talk about reducing pollution.  For what seems like an obvious reason, he didn’t invite Musk – the Tesla didn’t create air pollution.  But little Elon got all hurt and “salty” because he wasn’t invited to lord his car over the others.  Soon, he was backing Donald Trump.

Point of Attack

Tesla owners could handle Elon backing Trump, but they are struggling to stomach his actions after Trump took office.  After all, many of them were buying Tesla’s because of their green views about the environment, and probably have other more “progressive” ideas as well.  And here was Musk, the “point man” for reversing the progressive gains of the entire past century!

Tesla sales have crashed (almost as badly as their self-driving cars or the big Space-X rockets).  Tesla dealership are the ideal location for protests against Trump and Musk.  And some “activists” have taken to burning Tesla’s on the lots.  Now I don’t advocate that kind of violence.  Putting Tesla fires out is a tricky deal for our First Responders, what with the batteries and all.  But I do understand the sentiment.

Trump tried to intervene, turning the White House lawn into a Tesla showroom.  I was waiting for him to turn to the cameras and say, “We’re Dealing!!!!” (If you’re from Central Ohio, you know.  Everyone else: it’s the catch-phrase of the most successful car dealer in the area).  And Attorney General Pam Bondi has declared the burning Teslas is an act of “domestic terrorism”.  That’s kind of funny, until you realize that she’s the chief law enforcement officer for the United States.  And I’m sure FBI Director Kash Patel will volunteer from Las Vegas to open the investigation.  You can bet on it.

Who Killed JFK

And, finally, all of the Kennedy Assassination files have been released.  80,000 pages of unredacted information hit the public this week, and we were all poised to finally know what happened.  Were their shooters on the grassy knoll?  Did the magic bullet really turn “down and to the left” after exiting Kennedy’s neck?  Was Lee Harvey Oswald a KGB operative, a Cuban operative, a CIA operative, a Chicago Mafia operative; or really just a kook?

I’m waiting.  Dozens of news agencies and probably thousands of conspiracy theorists are digging through the volumes of information.  It’s been three days – and no one has any new answers.  We are back to the existential question of our lifetime:  was the Warren Commission really on the up and up?   Was Oswald a lone assassin, despite all of the rumors and speculation?

And the answer is:  nothing new here.  It’s just another distraction, while all of the “bad” stuff goes on, and on, and on…

So, that’s my “Happy News” for this week.  I’ll head back to the mountain top soon enough!!

Stripped and Shorn

It’s a scene out of pre-World War II Germany, or some dystopian movie about a failed American future.  Agents, dressed in black, seize people from their homes, their workplaces, some even just off the street.  They are taken to “detention centers”. (Isn’t it scary that aren’t called jails?  But jails imply courts and lawyers and rights – something these “detainees” are denied).  A few days later they are hustled on a bus, to an airport, and onto a chartered plane. 

Their destination:  a maximum security prison in El Salvador, far from their homes in the United States, or even their birthplaces in Venezuela.   They are stripped, x-rayed, searched and probed, their heads shaved, and given white t-shirts, socks, boxer shorts and sandals to wear.  Then they are placed in cells big enough for 140 inmates.  Propaganda movies of their rough treatment are carefully edited for full effect.  They are gone, disappeared:  in a foreign land with no sentence, no end of punishment, no lawyer or courts or questions.   It’s a “deal” by the deal-making Presidents; Trump fills the cells with “illegals”, Bukele of El Salvador gets $6 million.  It’s a bargain at $20,000 a piece.

Some of them, I’m sure, are very bad men.  Some, I’m sure, are members of Venezuelan gangs, and certainly up to no good in the United States.  And some are not.  They were all “convicted” by “gang sign”; tattooed ink that supposedly link them to criminal activity.   And it’s on that “evidence” that these men are sent to one of the worst prisons in the world, the “Devil’s Island” of our modern time.

The Revolution

When the fledgling United States was debating the Constitution, one of the biggest arguments was about what would  guarantee “rights” to the people of the United States.   After all, there was (and is) no “Bill of Rights” in English Common Law, no listing of the personal and criminal rights of the people.  It is simply based on the precedence of Court decisions.  Why would the new United States need more? 

The answer was in the very birth of the new Nation.  While the colonists demanded the “rights” of British citizens, the British felt no need to allow them.   After all, they were, “just colonists”, “Americans”, not British.  The affronts that make up the majority of the Declaration of Independence are all about those exclusions. Those are what brought about Revolution.

So the Constitution was written, with an acknowledged “political” deal to get it ratified.  The individual states would agree to the document, if (and only if), a “Bill of Rights” was added.   The British “fooled us once”, using an excuse to deny rights.  Americans would not be fooled again.  And so the first ten amendments were added to the Constitution almost immediately. 

(Actually there were twelve proposed. The first was “too technical” enumerating how many representatives in the House, and was not ratified.   And the second controlled the salary of Representatives and Senators. It was not approved with the other ten, but ultimately became the 27^th Amendment to the Constitution in 1992).  

Citizens or People

The Bill of Rights does not include the word “citizen”.  Instead, the rights are guaranteed to “the people” (of “We the people, of the United States” in the Preamble).   From the beginning citizenship was not a requirement to attain “rights”. You could be a “person” without being a citizen, as far as rights were concerned.  

What are those rights?  The right to practice religion, exercise and publish political speech, to assemble peaceably,  and to ask the government to fix problems.   People in the United States have a right to have a gun, and not have the military takeover property in times of peace.  They also have the right to privacy, to not have their persons or property searched and seized without probable cause.  

They have the right to life, liberty and property, only restricted through  “due process of law”.   The people have the right to a trial with legal representation, a jury of their peers, and to not be tried twice for the same crime (double jeopardy).  And they have the right to not be given cruel or unusual punishments.

It’s “the people”, not the citizens, that the Bill of Rights refers to.   And yet, for those 234 men whisked away literally in the dead of night, there was no “due process”, not even a right to a “writ of habeas corpus”. (“Habeas corpus” is the requirement that the government tell  in court, why someone is being held.  It is so important that its written into the main body of the Constitution itself, Article I, Section 9, Clause 2).

Legal or Illegal

The “legal” justification of the Trump Administration is that these are “illegals”; bad men who have “invaded” our country from Venezuela to commit crimes.   And now, they are swept away without any reference to their rights as “people” in the United States.  Are they all Venezuelan gang members?  Is it possible some are not?  Our government isn’t proving anything in court, we are simply to take the word of “Immigration Czar” Tom Hohman that these are “bad men”.  

What if there are some whose only offense was to come to the United States?   They are all “disappeared”, like the dissidents dropped from Argentinian Air Force planes over the ocean, or the Mexicans stolen off buses who end up buried in trenches in faraway fields.  These are the examples that OUR government, the United States of America, is following. And they are doing it in the name of the American people;  OUR name.

Not mine. 

Slippery Slope

Lutheran theologian Martin Niemoller wrote about the Nazi actions taking control of Germany:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak out for me.

• First ICE came for Mamhoud Kahllil, and I did not speak out, 
• Because I wasn’t Palestinian.
• Then ICE came for the Lebanese doctor, and the German engineer, and I did not speak out, because I wasn’t Lebanese, or German.
• Then ICE came for the Venezuelan “gang members”, and I did not speak out, 
• Because I wasn’t Venezuelan.

We are on a slippery slope.  

It’s clear where it ends.

What will “We the People” do to stop it?

Balance of Power

Back in “the day”, I taught my classes about the “checks and balances” in the US Constitution.   We discussed which branch; the Congress, the President, or the Courts, had the most power.  And we talked about the practical power of the President.  There is a single “mind” to determine what actions to take, versus the Congress, where at least half of the House and half of the Senate, 267 total legislators, must agree to move forward.  What Congress does have is the power of the “purse”.  They control how government money is spent.  As long as they have majorities, they can act.  The Executive might do anything, but if Congress won’t pay for it, then it won’t happen.

The ”power of the purse” still exists.   Congress can determine what money the government spends, and, through established law, how it is spent.  So it’s not like the Trump Administration, with their massive cuts and firings, is operating in a vacuum.  The United States Congress is tacitly agreeing with DOGE; the cuts, the firings, and the altered spending plans.  Congress isn’t standing up for the “power of the purse”, they willingly  are giving it to the President.

Powerless 

Why is Congress abandoning its main source of power?  First, the operating majority of both Houses of Congress are committed to the ideals of Project 2025, the “disestablishment of the administrative state”.   They are willing to allow extra-legal means, seemingly rogue actions by the Administration in violation of existing law, in order to rapidly achieve the goals of the 900 page report. (That’s the same report that candidate Trump didn’t know much about). 

Second, they are driven by fear; fear of being targets of Donald Trump.    I made a most disheartening discovery in the last fifteen years.  I thought that the leaders I disagreed with were still honorable with the best interest of the Nation at heart.  They really aren’t.  They are driven by simple political survival,  and are doing whatever is required to stay in office.  (Not all; Ohio’s Rob Portman is a great example of a Republican politician who “chose not to play”. He retired from the Senate). 

Speedbump

And third, many are driven by simple cash.   Not bribery necessarily, but the reality of modern campaigning.  The average winning House campaign cost $2 million in the 2020 election cycle (Good Party).  Senate campaigns are much, much more.  Sherrod Brown, Ohio’s former Senator, spent over $100 million campaigning over his last term in office. And he lost.  When Elon Musk offers millions either to a sitting legislator, or to their next challenger; it’s a very real threat.  The carrot is large, but the stick is even bigger.

So Congress abrogated its power to control executive actions.   And, frankly, the minority, my political party, hasn’t even managed to “get in the way”.  We aren’t even a speed bump on the road to Presidential domination.   It’s true that speed bumps regularly get run over,  but they do slow traffic down.  Last week, Senator Schumer determined to not even try.

Let Him Enforce It

 As far as the Courts are concerned, my students talked about their power over the other two branches as symbolic.   I often brought up the example of President Andrew Jackson, who determined to ignore a Supreme Court order that would have interrupted the “Indian Removal” (the “Trail of Tears” was part of that removal).  Legendary Chief Justice John Marshall led the Court in ruling against Jackson’s actions.  But Jackson famously retorted:  “John Marshall made his decision, let him enforce it”. 

US Courts have no “enforcement arm”.   The police, the Marshals, Agents, Officers, all work for the executive branch, at the behest of the President; not the Courts.  Andrew Jackson knew well that HE controlled the army that was marching the Cherokee to Oklahoma, not John Marshall.  And like Donald Trump today, Jackson was totally confident that the Congress was behind him.  Certainly the wealth in land sales that removing the Indians allowed, encouraged Congressional support .  

So the current President of the United States ignores Court decisions, defies Court orders, and literally laughs when defying Federal judges.   When a judge ordered Trump’s ICE to return hundreds of Venezuelans  from being deported to El Salvador; the planes still landed, and the prisoners transferred to El Salvadoran “care”.   Even the President of El Salvador was “in” on the joke, tweeting “oops – too late”.

When another Federal Judge ordered the reinstatement of USAID funds, the Trump Administration refused.  The same MAGA-Republicans chortled when their own “pet judge”, Federal District Judge Kacsmaryk in Amarillo, Texas, stopped one Biden initiative after another. They now claim; “A single judge in a single city cannot dictate the movement of a plane filled with foreign terrorists who have already been physically removed from U.S. soil,” (Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt).

Final Actions

All of this will end in the US Supreme Court.   And nothing is sure there.  Three of the Justices will stand for the Constitution.  Three or four will clearly follow the President.  The middle two or three will determine the future of our Democracy.  And even if they rule against Trump’s actions, there’s no guarantee he’ll obey.

If Trump doesn’t follow the Court, the only recourse is back to Congress.   A majority of the House, and two-thirds of the Senate would have to agree to impeach and remove him.  And that is as likely as Trump himself saying “I’ve gone too far”.  So what will happen to our country, our carefully balanced Constitutional Republic?  Do we survive until the election of 2028, or even the Congressional elections of 2026?  

When there is no balance, we are a boat listing to one side.   Disaster is just a single wave away.   We, the People of the United States, are in peril.

Lewis and Clark Middle

In the sixth grade at Lewis and Clark Middle School in  Meridian, Idaho, everyone is not “welcome” anymore (Today).    In Mrs. Inama’s class, the administration ordered her to take down two posters, the two banners above.   According to the administrators, the banners violate a district policy that requires, “…“banners to be content-neutral and conducive to a positive learning environment .”  Clearly, in the West Ada School District, welcoming and valuing everyone, regardless of the color of their hands or some other factors, is against District policy.

That’s how far our Nation has come, in such a short time.  Putting multi-racial hands together in a poster is now controversial.   And the fact that “everyone is welcome” simply isn’t true anymore.   To West Ada, and for a lot of the rest of the Nation, everyone is NOT welcome.  Or at least implying that they might be is now a “political controversy”.

And West Ada isn’t some tiny district in the mountains of Idaho.   It’s the school district of suburban Boise, with 40,000 students and seven high schools.  This ain’t the “hicks” in the middle of nowhere, this is modern, suburban, America.   West Ada is 77.75% white, 12.1% Latino, 5% multi-racial, 2% Asian-American, and 2% Black.  You might be able to guess who doesn’t feel particularly “welcome” here.

21^st Century Politics

The sixth graders at Lewis and Clark Middle are getting a lesson in the white-power, MAGA politics of the 21^st Century this year. They are learning that some in power in our society, don’t want them to see that, “All men are created equal”.  To the West Ada District, black hands and brown hands and white hands aren’t to be together.  In West Ada, equality is now; “not conducive to a positive learning environment”.  And they might lose their teacher, Mrs. Inama, in the process.

Do the Administrators of West Ada really think that their students shouldn’t  be; “welcome, important, accepted, respected, encourage, valued and equal?”  They probably do.   But those Administrators are dead-afraid that community members might call them a new dirty word: W#@E!!!!  It’s “woke” to say that kids are “equally respected”.  It’s “woke” to say that Black and Asian and multi-racial kids are “welcome”.  And it’s really, really, really “woke”, to think there might even be sixth graders becoming aware that they are not “the same” as all the others.  Science (that dreaded word) now identifies seventy-two versions of gender.  But I’m sure in the minds of many in West Ada, and the President of the United States, they can only think of two.

Be the Same

There also might be some sixth graders who are discovering their sexual preferences, completely separate from their gender identity.   That would place them somewhere on the eight-point “Kinsey Scale” of sexual orientation (from 1948, not so new).   Again, that’s not “acceptable” in our new order of 1950’s rigidity.  Gay kids, especially sixth graders:   OH, NO WAY are they acceptable!!

And then there’s the usual factors that divide any group of children:  economic background, intellectual, artistic, musical, athletic abilities; and all of the other things that make us different to each other.    When they come to school, they all want to know that all of the things that “make them, them” matter, and are accepted.  They also want to know that the teacher will see them as who they are, and treat them fairly.  (But, not necessarily equally.  If a teacher doesn’t somehow differentiate how they teach to the needs of the individual kids, it might be equal, but it won’t be fair).   But the message of West Ada is this:  be the same.

On the List

Sure, if Mrs. Inama is fired, it won’t be for her “beliefs”.  No one is fired for believing that kids should be secure in the classroom.    She’ll be fired for “INSUBORDINATION”, refusing to knuckle-under to the new change in our “political environment”.  She’s a fifth-year teacher, and she knows what’s right.  Veteran teachers will tell her to let this go, take the posters down, then close the door and teach the way she always did.  That’s the way to “weather” political turmoil.  But it’s hard for newer, “gooder” teachers to do that.  She wants to model for her kids what “good citizens” do: stand up for their beliefs. 

The veterans still model good citizenship in the classroom. But they’ve lost the willingness to fight the “admin” or the most vocal citizens of their community.  I guess the good folks in Meridian should ask:  what kind of teacher do they want their kids to have?  Maybe they should want someone who is willing to fight for their kids, even risk her job for them; all of them.

That teacher ought to be pretty high on the list.

Filibuster

Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, the Senate of the United States will determine whether to sign onto a House of Representatives mandated budget resolution, or not.   The Republican House majority passed the resolution they wanted, without any Democratic input or support, sent it to the Senate, and left town for two weeks.    If the resolution isn’t passed, the federal government will partially shut down.

But the Republicans in the Senate have a problem.   While they have a majority (technically three votes, plus a tiebreaking Vice President if needed), they don’t have the sixty votes needed to end a filibuster.  So it takes all fifty-three Republicans plus seven Democrats to actually get the budget resolution to a final majority vote. (Technically it’s eight Democrats.  One Republican, Rand Paul of Kentucky, is likely to vote against the resolution).

But Republicans aren’t giving an inch to the Democrats.   There’s no negotiations, no political give and take.  The Senate Republicans are jamming the House Republican’s bill down the Democrat’s throat, just like the House jammed it down the Senate’s throat..  So Democrats have a choice.  They can make a symbolic gesture:  give enough votes to get past the filibuster, then vote against the actual resolution.  That’s one of those, “I was for it before I was against it, votes”.  And that will allow the government to stay open, on totally Republican terms.

Price We Paid 

That will make the Democrats look complicit, weak and helpless. And it should.  The MAGA-Republicans have been shutting down the Government already.   Ask the thousands of government employees fired by the DOGE kids and Elon Musk.  Democrats have screamed, cursed, and cried; but done little to actually stop the Executive takeover of Congressional power.  

Or the Democrats could hold, and not give Republicans the votes they need to pass the House resolution.  And since the House is intentionally absent – then the government will partially shut down Friday at midnight.

The media is split.  Will the “fault” for the shutdown fall on the Republicans, with majorities in both the House and Senate and control of the White House, or will it fall on minority Senate Democrats who didn’t provide the seven votes.    The media might be split, but it seems pretty clear to me.  Republicans haven’t even asked a Democrat’s opinion about the resolution.  This isn’t give-and-take politics, this is brinksmanship:  vote for the resolution or take the blame.

Senate Democrats:  don’t fall for it.  It’s a Republican government, with a Republican majority.   If they choose not to allow for Democratic input, then it’s all on them.  Democrats have “one job”:  to stand up to the unconstitutional actions of the Republican President and his unelected friends.  And that one job requires them to exercise the only control they have left, the vote to maintain the filibuster in the Senate. 

This is the whole reason Democrats didn’t pass the Voting Rights Act, or the Abortion Rights Act, or all of the other reforms when the Democrats controlled the Senate, House, and Presidency just three years ago.   We didn’t because if Senate Democrats “broke” the filibuster, then Republicans would too.  That’s what we gave up for this one remaining power. 

Political Calculus

“Talking Heads” say voters in 2026 will blame someone for closing the government.  Surely, the biggest talking head of all, Donald Trump, will lay the blame on Democrats.  But in the end, it’s all in his hands (and Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune).  If they are interested in keeping the government open, they can negotiate with Senate Democrats.  If they’re not, then they own the shutdown, just like they owned all of the other ones.

So here’s my calculus.  The government shuts down, and Trump screams bloody murder, and the social security checks get slowed up and Federal money stops going to the states.   In the end, as Harry Truman said, “the buck stops here”, right at the President’s desk.  So let’s see if Trump, the supposed author (it was ghost-written) of the “Art of the Deal”, can actually make a deal.  He can deal with the Senate Democrats, or he can deal with being the President who failed the American people.

It’s on him.  And it’s on the Senate Democrats to hold firm.  We Americans, have sacrificed a lot for the “right” to do so.  

Make it worth it.

First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances

Basic Right

It is a basic tenet of American citizenship:  the First Amendment.   We summarize it simply; we Americans have “freedom of speech”.  That’s a direct quote from the Amendment by the way; “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech or of the press…”.  And we all have a basic understanding what that means.  Americans can think and say our politics view, without “the government” coming against us.  We don’t fear arrest for “bad-speak”.  But there are limits. It often takes the entire stretch of adolescence to understand that “free speech” doesn’t apply when talking to your parents, or your employer. We all tried it.

Our current understanding of the First Amendment took some figuring out.  The second President of the United States, John Adams, lived in a time almost as politically ugly as our own.   I mean, his Vice President, Thomas Jefferson said of Adams:

“(He’s) A blind, bald, crippled toothless man who is a hideous hermaphroditic character with neither the force and fitness of a man, not the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

Of course, Adam’s responded, calling Jefferson a:

 “…(M)ean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.”

 Adams and Jefferson had a conflicted relationship.   They were close at the writing of the Declaration in the 1770’s, and would become fast pen-pals after Jefferson left office in 1808.  But in the middle thirty years, they were arch-enemies.

Thin Skin

Not to continue insulting, but Adams was notoriously thin-skinned.  And when some of the insults came from new immigrants to the still-new United States, he did something about them.  Adams and his Federalist Congress authored the Alien and Sedition Acts.  They lengthened the time it took to earn US citizenship, and they restricted the “free speech” rights of those not yet citizens.  The Sedition Act went even farther, making it illegal for even citizens to criticize the President.  Some newspapers publishers were jailed.

This was all before Marbury v Madison (1803),  when the United States Supreme Court claimed the power of judicial review.  The Sedition Act, and most of the Alien Acts expired before they were ever tested in Court. Today, most scholars see that Presidential “muzzling” as unconstitutional, a violation of “free speech”.  That is, except for one exception, a part of the Alien Act which remains in our current laws.  It is codified as 50 U.S. Code § 21:  Restraint, Regulation and Removal.

50 US Code

It allows for any citizens above the age of fourteen of a foreign nation that has declared war on the United States, or incurred or invaded the US, “…shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies.”

That ancient (1798) law was used to detain British citizens in the War of 1812, and German citizens during World War I. And most infamously, it was the legal structure beneath Executive Order 9066 that established Japanese/American internment camps of World War II. (A brief reminder:  during World War II Japanese citizens, naturalized Americans born in Japan, and American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and put in “internment camps”.   That action was confirmed by the 1944 US Supreme Court in Korematsu v United States. It was only “rebuked” by the Court in 2018 in Trump v Hawaii.  It has never been directly overturned.)

Green Card

Which brings us literally, to the present.   This week, Mahmoud Khalil was arrested.  Khalil is a graduate student at Columbia University and a Palestinian citizen.  He is in the United States with a permanent visa, what is termed a “green card”.  That gives him the right to stay, work, and live in the United States.  And he planned on doing so, finishing up his graduate degree in engineering.  He is married, and his wife is eight months pregnant (her name has not been released). 

In general, permanent residents of the United States have most of the same “First Amendment” rights as citizens.  The only limitations are in campaign contributions:  only US citizens can donate to Federal political campaigns.  But the current Trump Administration has decided to reach back to John Adam’s Alien Act to arrest Khalil for his activities in support of the Palestinians during the protests at Columbia University last year. 

Fait d’Accompli

 They are correlating support for the Palestinian cause as support for the terrorist group Hamas.   Khalil was a spokesman for those Columbia students protesting the Israeli attacks on Gaza.   Trump has declared those protests “anti-Semitic”, and ordered that non-citizen participants be rounded up and deported.  They are now, “enemy aliens”.

Khalil was arrested, then whisked from Manhattan to an ICE holding center (jail) in Louisiana, far away from his wife, lawyers, and the Federal Courts of the Southern District of New York that have jurisdiction over his case.   Like many of the ICE actions under Trump, it’s clear that they aren’t interested in dealing with the “legality” of Court decisions.  If ICE can move fast enough, hiding detainees in far-away jails, then using military transports to dump them in some foreign country, they don’t have to “worry” what the Federal Courts have to say.  As the French that Adam’s disliked so much say, it’s a “fait d’acompli”. 

Nightmare Progression

Many of my “progressive” friends are split over what happened in the Middle East in the past year and a half.   The Hamas terrorist attack on October 7^th was outrageous and reprehensible.  But the Israel attack on the citizens of Gaza, regardless of whether they were Hamas or not, was equally, and in some eyes, even more, reprehensible.  It divided the Democratic Party, so much so that it may have cost America the Trump Presidency instead of Harris.  

But what’s happening to Khalil is a “Progressive” nightmare.  He did exactly what we thought was “protected” by the First Amendment,  that “…Americans can think and say our politics view, without ‘the government’ coming against us.”   Now, by a twist of a phrase, an arbitrary correlation by the White House, a permanent resident of the United States, a young man with a child on the way, is likely to be thrown out of our Nation.  What’s next?

Martin Niemoller, the German-Lutheran Pastor who stood against the Nazis, put it this way:

First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me,
And there was no one left to speak out for me.

They came for Khalil.

Experience

This essay doesn’t have much to do with politics, but a lot to do with America today.   As any consistent reader of “Our America” probably knows, I spent 36 years as a public school teacher and administrator, and 40 years as a coach (Cross Country, Wrestling and Track).  So I know “a little” about high school kids, and even “some” about sports and coaching at the high school level.

And for the last few years since I “retired”, I’ve become a working track and cross country official.   So I still spend a lot of time with high school, middle school and even collegiate athletes.  And, up front, I need to say that the vast, vast majority of those kids, from the middle schoolers trying to figure out what they’re doing to the national qualifying collegiates, are polite to me, and to each other.  In fact, in the pole vault where I do much of my officiating, it’s common practice to cheer on the opposing vaulters.  Even though there’s always a winner and loser, the bar becomes the common “opponent”.

Unbelievable

This month I’ve seen on media four different examples of incredibly poor sportsmanship.   One case, involved a nearby school.  Reynoldsburg boys basketball is a terrific program, one of the top contenders for the state title.  In a tough District match with Hilliard Bradley, a Reynoldsburg athlete “took a charge” from a Bradley kid coming up the court.  It wasn’t much of a charge, but the kid tried to made it look good for the officials.  The call wasn’t made.

So, the Reynoldsburg kid got back on his feet.   As the Bradley kid passed the ball, the Reynoldsburg boy made a fist and punched Bradley, straight to the groin.  The Bradley kid went down, and the officials, not fully seeing the play, called an intentional (but not flagrant) foul on Reynoldsburg.  It was only later when the TV coverage was reviewed, that everyone saw exactly what happened.

Throwing Balls and Punches

A second case of out of control high school athletics took place in Michigan.   The Benton Harbor team lost in tournament play to the team from Buchanan.  An Assistant Coach from the losing team was frustrated with the “poor” officiating, and  threw a basketball hitting the Referee in the head.  That was followed by full water bottles and later a clipboard.  The Referee went down, and had to be escorted from the court by local police officers. 

A third example was the case of a New Jersey wrestler, a three-time state champion.   His father, a former MMA fighter, didn’t like the behavior of opposing fans. He determined to go into their crowd and let them know. Not surprisingly, a fight broke out.  The wrestler himself looked up and saw his father in the melee, and ran up into the stands to join in.  He started punching kids, around but not directly involved with the fight his father was in.

Rule 4, Article 6, Section 1

(Track and Field – Unsportsmanlike Conduct)

And a fourth, and to me most amazing example of bad sportsmanship, was in a track meet.   Indoor track is often described by the phrase, “rubbing is racing”.  The confined quarters of a 200 meter track, and the banked turns, make it easy for runners to bump into each other.   In the final race of a meet in Virginia, the 4 x 400 relay, the third place girl came off of the turn, down the bank, to sweep past the second place girl.  Second place turned her relay baton into a weapon, and struck the passing runner in the head, twice, as she went by.  That  caused the passer to drop her baton, fall into the infield and ultimately have a concussion.

All four of the incidents are being “handled”.  Reynoldsburg suspended the offending player for the remainder of the season.  The Benton Harbor Assistant Coach was fired.   The wrestler was suspended from competition by the New Jersey High School Athletic Association for the rest of the season and charged with criminal assault. (But a local judge reinstated him, and he won a fourth state championship).  And the baton wielding third runner was disqualified.  Other actions are pending.

YouTube

So what does this say about high school athletics today?  Well first, we are in the age of video.   Everything, from high school girls 4×400’s to brawls in the stands, are out there for everyone to see (and link in essays like this).  We can watch it all, from the referee getting beaned by a basketball, to the punch to the groin.  And it’s not like all this hasn’t happened in the past.  I used to manage wrestling tournaments, and I personally broke up fathers fighting in the stands.  

But there does seem to be an “outbreak” of increased entitlement in our modern world.   We can blame it on politics, or YouTube, on the NFL or NBA or professional soccer where every foul is “wrong”.    And we certainly can argue whether a local judge should have the power to overrule that State Athletic Association.  But that’s not new either.  It happened here in Ohio back in 1979. 

The Lesson

But what I really think is going on is that we don’t teach kids how to lose.  I know, I know:  some parent is saying, “I don’t want my kid to know how to lose, I want my kid to be a WINNER”.   And as anyone on my teams will tell you, I want to win as well.  But it was also our responsibility as coaches to teach our kids to win and lose with “grace”.  If you win, there is no need to “grind it” into the losers faces.  They know, and there’s a scoreboard to prove it.  

And if you lose, the dry facts of the scoreboard are still there.  I taught my athletes to take responsibility for their own actions, and demonstrate class.  One of the hardest lessons was, after losing a hard-fought meet or match or game;  to go shake the winners hands.   We as coaches had to lead the way, no matter how “salty” we (too) felt about the outcome.  Our highest “rule”:  don’t embarrass ourselves, our program, or our school.  Maybe that lesson is getting lost in our “go for broke” and “never admit failure” society.

Kids are kids.  They will always make mistakes. Maybe that’s the most important part of being a kid.  The question is:  what lesson will they learn?

Postscript:

Saw this from Saturday in Western Pennsylvania- Meadville v Uniontown – here’s the linkhttps://www.erienewsnow.com/story/52521840/meadville-vs-uniontown-basketball-game-ends-in-brawl

Macho-Macho Man

The new Defense Secretary believes that the US military has lost its “Warrior Ethos”.   What does that mean?  Pete Hegseth thinks that our military has gone “soft”, worrying more about our societal issues like gender identity, race and ethnic diversity than being “Warriors”.   Our modern forces, where the ability to pilot a drone over Afghanistan from Virginia is as important as a High Altitude, Low Opening parachute jump over Korea, now “depends” on being a “Warrior” according to the Secretary.  (I’m humming the tune “Macho, Macho, Man” by the Village People in the background).

 Hegseth is waging a war on the US military, a war against the dreaded “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion”, better known by the initials “DEI”.   Hegseth seems convinced that racial and ethnic minorities, women, gay and transgendered soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Guardians (members of the Space Corps) are weakening our defenses.

So it’s no surprise that the two highest women in the US Defense establishment, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Franchetti and Commandant of the Coast Guard Admiral Fagan, were fired.   It also shouldn’t surprise anyone that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Brown was fired as well.  He’s Black, and he spoke out during the George Floyd controversy.

Old Confederates

What kind of “Warriors” is Hegseth looking for?   Is his military to be dominated by “good ol’ boys,” white men, who “know” how to fight?  How far is Hegseth willing to go?

Fort Bragg in North Carolina was named after the failed Confederate General Braxton Bragg.   For over a century, the military celebrated the Confederate “lost cause”, naming bases and facilities after generals in “gray”.  Recently, Fort Bragg was renamed by Congressional order, Fort Liberty.  But that offended Hegseth’s sense of Warrior Ethos (I guess he remembers Chickamauga, but forgets all of Bragg’s failures).  So he renamed Liberty back  to Bragg, with a “fig leaf” of pretending the name honors a World War II Silver Star recipient, Ronald Bragg.  

Firing the women and the Black man, reviving good ol’ Fort Bragg, started to right Hegseth’s world.   But to really build his “Warrior Ethos” military, he wants a thorough cleansing of the military image.  Posters of women and minorities in combat roles were ripped down throughout the country.  The words “gay” and “transgendered” were scrubbed from the military manuals and online materials.  He wants our Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines (and Guardians too) totally focused on being “Warriors”.  I guess that means they are supposed to be mostly White men, who like women – to Hegseth that clearly matters (ask the woman he “enjoyed”, or assaulted, in 2017).

Erasing History

So I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that the “thought police” of the civilian defense establishment, (kind of like the DOGE kids) reached out to change history.   The “thought police” are busy erasing the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, the courageous black men who broke the color barrier for fighter pilots in the US Army of World War II.  And while they’re “changing history”, they are attacking another fundamental fact of World War II.

 You see, one of the most famous aircraft in history has a “DEI” name:  the Enola Gay.  On August 6^th, 1945, a US B-29 bomber took off from Tinian Island, a speck in the Pacific Ocean.   It was piloted by Colonel Paul Tibbets, the commander of the 509^th Bomb Group.   The four engine aircraft was bound for Japan, to drop the first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy” on Hiroshima. 

Tibbets was well aware of the gravity of this action.  He even replaced the normal pilot of the B-29, taking direct control himself.   And he renamed the particular aircraft that would go down in world history after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.

We all know “the rest of the story”.  

Wrong Thoughts

But what is the Defense Secretary going to do?  Here, written in a flash of light and the instant death of thousands is his most hated word:  Gay.   Can there be anything more “macho” more “warrior”, than dropping an atom bomb?  But there it is, “Enola Gay” burned into American and World memory.   The “thought police” tried to scrub that too.  I hope there are good security guards at the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, DC.  There might be a “military operation”, maybe using Seal Team Six,  to break in and strike out the “Gay” painted on the nose of the still proud B-29.

There is no evidence that being a woman, or a gay man, or a transgendered person, impacts the modern military.  What it does effect, is the mind of a man who sees the military as only those “Warriors” on the battlefield as “manly men”.   It was wrong when Confederate admirers kept the US military segregated through World War II until President Truman forced the change in 1948.  

It was wrong when women were denied combat roles before the 1990’s, a wrong not righted fully until 2016.   And it was wrong when a soldier, sailor, or Marine had to hide their sexual preference, first completely, then under Clinton’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”, until 2011.  

And Pete Hegseth’s “Warrior Ethos” cleansing is wrong now.

Words

Words are important, to communicate ideas, and to persuade others.   The same word can have multiple pronunciations.  Is milk pronounced “mill-ka” or “mel-ka”? Me, I’m a “mel-ka” guy.  Or do you say “Toe-mah-toe” or “toe-may-toe”.   And there’s words with multiple meanings.   “Cool” means temperature if you’re talking about weather, or soup.  Cool means it’s good, or fun, or you like it, if you’re talking about new shoes or a car or the latest movie.  

To trend back to the subject at hand; there are also words with similar meanings.   We talk a lot about Democracy, the idea that the “people” are the ultimate authority in a country.  And then there are the hair-splitters, who will quickly point out that the United States isn’t a true Democracy, but a Republic, where representatives are chosen by a democratic voting process.  And there’s the compromisers who say that the United States is a Democratic Republic.  That way everyone is “right”.  It’s the dreaded “participation trophy” of political science.

Studying Mice

And there are words that have specific meanings, like waste and fraud.   Waste, at least in government, means that money is being spent for frivolous purposes.  We’d all agree that it’s a waste if a school principal spends $50,000 in furniture for his office.  It’s waste, but it’s probably not fraud.  

We can also “agree to disagree” on some forms of waste.   The current White House complains that the Biden Administration spent : $455,000 on “A Mouse Model to Test the Effects of Gender-affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Vaccine-induced Immune Responses”.  The Trump people claim they were trying to make “transgendered mice”.   That’s sounds pretty wasteful.

But click the link on the dollars.  Here’s what the actual study would do:

“There is a considerable gap in knowledge, however, surrounding the immunological responsiveness of transgender people, a population at considerably higher risk for HIV and other STIs. To address this gap, we propose to develop an animal model of feminizing hormone therapy to study the effects of estrogen/anti-testosterone therapy on HIV vaccine-induced immune responses.”

Policy Priority

Do transgendered people in transition respond to HIV vaccines the same way cisgendered people do?   How can that be studied without putting the transgendered folks at risk?   Immune responses of mice are similar to that of humans, so they are a safe “model” to test how those vaccines might work on real, live, humans.   To fit the “model” , those mice have to model transition.  

Now, you might make a “policy decision” that studies helping the transgendered are WRONG based on the belief we shouldn’t help the transgendered.   That’s similar to the decision that the Reagan Administration made to ignore AIDS for a long time, because they thought it was a “gay disease”.  But to argue that the study is a “waste” is disingenuous.  They weren’t studying how to make mice transgendered, that was neither the goal nor the outcome.  In more common terms, the Trump Administration lied to you.

FRAUD!!!

And the DOGE boys are telling America that they have discovered “FRAUD” in their exhaustive computer invasion of Federal agencies.  Fraud is a very specific term.   It means that money allocated for a specific purpose is being spent on something else, often to the benefit of undeserving individuals.  It’s FRAUD if the high school principal gets $50,000 for his office furniture, then  spends $15,000 on a desk and chair and pockets the rest.  

Certainly if someone is dead and still collecting Social Security there must be fraud somewhere.   And DOGE found exactly that, they thought.  Folks who looked like they were still eligible to collect Social Security, born in 1875.  They thought, that meant there are 150 year-old folks getting benefits, a very, very unlikely scenario (the oldest documented human was Jeanne Calment, who lived to 122).  So, whoever is getting that benefit is committing fraud.

Unless, of course, it’s not true.  

Place Holder

So when I go to Kroger’s and buy my favorite bottle of wine (Meomi, Pinot Noir presently), a high school kid running the check-out register asks for my identification.   The fact that my hair has gone white, and I’m clearly over the legal age of 21 doesn’t matter – the kid needs to see the ID.  So I give it to him.  He glances at it, then taps in a date on his register:  1/1/2004.  That’s the minimum birth date that is of “legal age” in the state of Ohio.  Is he committing fraud?  If I don’t correct him, am I?  On 1/1/2004 I was not only over twenty-one, I was rapidly approaching fifty.

1/1/2004 is just the “place-holder” for reaching the minimum age.  For every “legal alcohol” sold, a date is attached to show that ID was checked. It works.  

1/1/1875 is the Social Security place-holder for dead.  No one with my grandfather’s birthdate is getting Social Security. Though here’s an interesting trivia item: the last US Civil War pension was paid out by the Veterans Administration until 2020.   Irene Triplett was born in 1930.  Her father, Moses, was a Civil War veteran, and died eight years after her birth.  Irene was mentally disabled, and retained her father’s benefits until her death.

Ignorance

No fraud, no “fat cats” living on the pensions of long dead ancestors.  In fact, Social Security has a “fail-safe” mechanism, that stops payment to anyone at 115, just in case a death is missed. 1/1/1875 is just a placeholder like the 1/1/2004 typed into the Kroger cash register to signify legal age, this, a marker to note legal death.   That is, accept for Irene, who received a $73.13 a month Civil War pension until her death in 2020.  She was 90 years old.

The “fraud” here is the one committed out of intent or ignorance by the DOGE boys.  They aren’t necessarily stealing anything.   But they are telling Americans that waste and fraud exist when it’s a matter of policy priorities and, well, nineteen year-olds not understanding what a placeholder is in the “ancient” computer language of Cobol.

They’re the same age as the checkout kid at Kroger’s.   And here’s another word that should be applied to the DOGE boys and their boss:  hubris.

Norms

President Trump gave his “impromptu” State of the Union Address Tuesday night.  “Impromptu”, because traditionally the President doesn’t give a State of the Union in his first year in office.   After all, it’s only been a month and a half since he gave his Inaugural Address.  But, like most things involving the Trump Administration, there’s no tradition, no “norm” worth keeping (I guess).  

In the forty-five days Mr. Trump stomped on the Constitution so many times, that the Courts can’t keep up.  That’s a Trump legal strategy, by the way:  sue, delay, appeal, delay, obfuscate, delay, overwhelm; delay, and delay some more.   It’s how he managed to avoid two years of personal Federal prosecution.  It’s also how he still hasn’t paid the hundreds of millions of dollars he owes the State of New York. And, for now, he stole the “power of the purse” from the US Congress. He’s made it his own.  As a friend of mine says: even if the Courts disagree with Trump, it will take two years for them to catch up.  By then, it will be far too late, the damage done.

Shock and Awe

Through much of the “shock and awe” of Trump’s (and Musk’s) actions in the last forty-five days, Democrats have “sat back”.   We haven’t heard the leadership of the Democratic Party say a whole lot, or give alternatives to the renegade DOGE boys, or authoritarian ICE actions.  Rank and file Democrats are asking:  where are our leaders?  Who will stand up for us?  What can we do?

Perhaps some of the Democratic leadership are following the words of veteran campaign strategist James Carville.   He’s noted for his famous advice to Bill Clinton in 1992 when the campaign was struggling with the rumors of illicit sex activities:  “It’s the economy, stupid”.  That advice helped Clinton win the Presidency.  Carville today is essentially making this point: let Trump be Trump.  He and the Republican Congress will trip over their own two feet.  Let Trump make a mess of the economy with his tariffs and his shredded governing style.  Let the Republicans do it to themselves, then Democrats can pick up the pieces in 2026.

Speaking from the rank and file there are two problems with that.  First of all, many Democrats feel that democracy itself is at stake.   They don’t think that the election of 2026 is a “sure thing”, not for Democrats, and not even the physical act of counting votes.  Those Democrats think that the Carville strategy is based on “regular order”, on tradition, on those damn “norms”. They don’t think there’s any guarantee that “norms” will be followed. 

Like my friend said; many Democrats think that waiting for an election in two years will be far too late, the damage done.

Vacuum

And second, there appears to be a total vacuum in the Democratic leadership.  Harris is gone, and the Governors (Newsom, Whitmer, Moore, Pritzker, Walz, et al) are all too busy trying to navigate their multiple state crises caused by Trump’s actions.   Hakeem Jefferies, the Speaker-apparent (should Democrats regain the House), is laser-focused on legislation, not leadership of the greater Party.  And the “old guard”; Biden, the Obama’s, Pelosi; all seem to have ceded authority to the “next generation”, even if the leaders of that generation aren’t apparent.  

Some Democratic members of Congress recognized the emptiness.  They heard the call to action from their constituents,  and they tried to step up during the State of the Union.   Some cried out, calling to task Trump’s immeasurable number of lies and misstatements.  Representative Green of Texas went so far as to stand, yell, and shake his cane at the President, interrupting despite orders from the Speaker to “be seated”.  Mr. Green was ultimately escorted from the Chamber by the Sergeant at Arms.  

Other Democrats walked out, our held up placards with the word “False” written on them, kind of an old-school gymnastics  scoring thing (“10,8,10,4 – that was the Russian judge”).   But since the cameras didn’t cut away from the President, their actions failed to get much attention.  

Good Trouble

Still, on the media summary, many commentators decried the Democrats “breaking the decorum of the House”.  Meanwhile the President literally used an insulting term directly at one US Senator, and had no problem baiting Democrats and applauding his own sycophants.  It’s as if the norms and rules apply only to one side.  The MAGA side is given a full “pass”; because; well, that’s just what they do.   

If Democracy is on the line, then the rules, traditions, and norms are out.  We can’t wait for our leadership to determine a course, and we can’t hope that the Courts will save America.   In the end, we too must break the norms, and do what’s necessary to save our Constitution, and our Democracy.  As John Lewis liked to say, it’s time to get in some “good trouble”.   And if that means we break “decorum” – so be it.

Whoever, owing allegiance to the United States, levies war against them or adheres to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort within the United States or elsewhere, is guilty of treason… US Code Title 18, Chapter 115, Section 2381

The Prize

It’s hard not to feel “treasonous” today.  Treason, “(A)dhering to our enemies or giving them aid and comfort,” is the reality of our morning news.   We (not my President); we of the United States are formally and with malice aforethought, turning our back on democracy, and joining forces with dictators.  We (not my President) are spitting on and showing disdain; we are committing  dishonor, to the 46,000 Ukrainian troops who have already lost their lives fighting the Russian invasion of their nation. What’s happened? The United States, in the cowardly dark of night, “paused” military aid to Ukraine.

Why would we turn our back on what is clearly a black and white situation?  The worst reason in the world; the vanity of the President of the United States.  Donald Trump wants to “match” Barack Obama, to show that he’s “as good” a President as Obama was. And the 44^th President has something that Trump doesn’t have – a Nobel Peace Prize.  For Trump to get “the prize”, he has to have “a peace”.  And the only “peace” available is in the Russian-Ukraine War. 

It’s Personal

Trump has a “side” in that war, and it’s not the side of the United States of America. Instead, to Trump, it’s all personal.  For whatever reason (perhaps a later essay), Donald Trump is “beholden” to Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia.  It’s been true since he came down the “golden escalator” in 2015.  (And while we constantly hear other Republicans say that the first Trump Administration was tougher on Russia than anyone else, Trump’s own words betray his fealty to Putin).  

Donald Trump made it clear in his very direct diatribe against President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, that he holds a deep-seated grudge against him, personally.  Trump wants payback for Zelenskyy not making up dirt on Joe Biden in 2019.  And Trump blames Zelenskyy for his first impeachment trial in front of the United States Senate, another public humiliation in a long list.  

Today, Trump has little influence over Putin.  But he holds a cudgel over Ukraine, the power of the United States, and the ability of Ukraine to continue their battle.  So Trump’s using that cudgel to try to force Ukraine to “surrender” to Russia, giving up substantial portions of their nation.  And if Zelenskyy won’t do it, then Trump will do whatever he can to get the duly elected President of Ukraine removed from office.  Certainly there’s another Putin stooge in the wings, waiting to fulfill Russia’s goals.

A True Leader

Zelenskyy proved his mettle again and again.  He is, like Trump, a TV actor who became a politician.  But unlike Trump, Zelenskyy was forced to grow in the job.  He led his nation through the existential crisis of invasion.  He stood tall as the missiles fell in Kyiv, and orchestrated the defeat of the 17 mile thrust of Russian tanks to the capital.  

 And he has sustained his nation in the three year-long battle against Russian aggression.  Zelenskyy is a war leader, a symbol to his nation, eschewing suits and ties for the uniform of battle, as his nation has eschewed normal life to face a mortal enemy.   

And Trump can’t even tie his necktie correctly.

Democracy

I believe in democracy, both here in the United States and in the world.  I believe that Donald Trump is a threat to our American democracy.  His lack of concern for the Constitution, for the balance of power, for the personal privacy of American citizens, all mark a man willing to trade our “life, liberty and happiness” for personal power.  And Trump’s actions toward Ukraine betray his personal venality.  It’s ideological treason, truly adhering to the enemies of freedom, and giving them aid and comfort.  He’s doing it here, and he’s doing it in Ukraine.

The Trumpists will call me treasonous.  They will say I am denying the duly elected President of the United States his “well earned mandate”.  They will say it is I who is “fomenting insurrection” and “giving aid and comfort” to our enemies.  

I say he’s committing treason.  His supporters will say I am.  

So I will reference Patrick Henry, speaking out against the British Crown in the Virginia House of Burgesses, eleven years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence.   His fellow legislators cried out “treason, treason!!” And Henry said:

“If this be treason, make the most of it”.

Teenaged Games

When I was a teenager there weren’t video games.   Instead, some of my friends played board games.  A long night of Monopoly was the “standard”, stashing money under the board so no one knew exactly how you were doing.  Or when we got older and “cooler”, a penny-ante poker game (and even older came cigars).  But in my younger teens, my friends and I played  “political” board games.  Some friends were enamored with Risk, a “conquer the world” game of alliances, and double-crosses that could take weeks.  A few even played Chess, but you had to study to be good at that, and I didn’t want to spend the time.  

But there was Stratego (by Milton-Bradley), a conquest game resembling a cross between Checkers and Risk, where a roll of the dice could determine the fate of armies and battles.  It wasn’t an “all night” game, but it allowed for “tactical thinking” without committing to months of preparation. It was sort of like my commitment to Algebra II; I’d cram the night before the test, but I didn’t spend daily time worrying about it.  My grades were commensurate with the effort. 

America First

The board games of my youth are now in dusty boxes on high shelves in a closet.   Games of strategy today are on video, and much more “tactile”.  The player becomes the soldier on the line, living or dying in Call of Duty by their skill, wile, and luck.  And as an adult, I know we live in a world of “Risk”, where alliances are made and broken, and principle is often overcome by national or even personal interest.

I’ve already written about the changes in American policy brought on by Donald Trump (Zero-Sum).   The United States of America has made a dramatic about-face in our foreign view, from one of group protection and benefit, to a policy of bilateral negotiation.  Our new view is pretty simple:  what’s in it for us.  It’s a very short-term, Stratego view of world balance, one echoing the isolationism of the 1930’s (the original “America First”). We’ve gone from playing Chess or Risk, to playing Stratego.  A look at our twentieth century past demonstrates the potential consequences of the world’s greatest economy “going it alone”.  

But here we are.  And I’m watching a masterful “game player”.   He doesn’t have much money under the board, and he is, to quote the US President, playing from a weaker hand.  And the current strategic master is really a gifted amateur.  His name is Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

NATO and Russia

In the old world order of two months ago, Zelenskyy’s and Ukraine’s place was clear.   The old world order saw NATO, led by the United States, balancing the avowed intention of Russia to re-conquer the Russian “Empire”, the old Soviet Union.  It was well-established, the outgrowth of the alliances that stopped Fascism in World War II.  America wasn’t isolationist.  Instead the US led a world alliance to keep the Soviet Union, and later China, from expanding their empires, cloaked in the cover of the Communist ideals.  

When the Communists fell in the Soviet Union, there were briefly replaced by a democracy.   But the economic pressures of all of that “public wealth” (the definition of Communism) becoming private caused the rise of an oligarchs.  They were rich, and they were powerful, and they wanted control of the nation.  Vladimir Putin, a former KGB Colonel, rose to the top of the oligarchic pyramid.  He served those with money so well that he became one himself.  And now, anyone that stands against him takes that short step out of a 15^th floor window.  Or their plane explodes:  ask Yevgeny Prigozhin.

Biden’s Plan

Over the past couple decades, the Soviet threat, countered by NATO, became the Russian threat.  And Ukraine, while not a NATO member, became the perfect place to stop Russian expansionism.   Ukraine wanted to fight.  They offered up the blood of their young men, and their fertile fields of grain, as the battlefield in the ultimate war to stop Russia.  Putin made it clear, that this “Domino Theory” (reminiscent of the arguments to stay in the Vietnam War) was real.  Ukraine, Moldova, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland and the rest are on the block.

That was the “grand theory” of the Biden Administration.  They marshalled NATO to back Ukraine, supplying weapons from bullets to F-16’s; everything but the manpower itself to fight the war.   And Ukraine and Zelenskyy over three years, stood against the might of “Mother Russia”, giving better than they got, and hanging onto the vast majority of their Nation.  It was a “Risk” like plan:  use Ukraine to stop Russia, rather than the all-out war that an invasion of a NATO member would require.  Fight the smaller battle with Ukrainian lives sacrificed, rather than World War III.

And for Ukraine, it represented national survival.   They were getting what they wanted, a nation that was not under the yoke of Russian imperialism.  They made their trade:  lives for freedom.  Ukraine survived, and NATO and the United States benefitted.  That was Zelenskyy’s “deal”.

The Beat Down

That isn’t Trump’s view of the world at all.   He finds himself more “allied” with Putin’s Russia.  Trump, an oligarch himself, sees the ultimate power of the Russian leader as a “model”.  Trump doesn’t want to compromise with other (lesser, in his mind) NATO members.  He wants to do what Putin does; get the most for the United States, regardless of the impact.  It’s a Stratego like view, without the longer-term strategizing of Risk.  

What does Trump want?  He wants the mineral wealth of Ukraine, much of which is now under Russian control.   If he can’t get that from Zelenskyy, he’ll make a deal with Putin.  And, of course, Trump has a personal score to settle with Zelenskyy.  The Ukrainian dared to defy Trump’s demand for “dirt” on Joe Biden in 2019, the “perfect call” that got Trump impeached by Congress.  Trump can’t make Zelenskyy step out a fifteenth floor window (at least, not yet) but he can humiliate him, and cut Ukraine off.

No Bait in the Trap

So he lured Zelenskyy to Washington, dangling the hope of US support in exchange for Ukrainian mineral rights (or “rare earth” as Trump calls it).   Then, in the White House, Trump and Vice President Vance did what they always wanted to do.  They tried to humiliate the Ukrainian President, knowing he would probably “submit” because he needed the deal.  But there really wasn’t a deal on the table for the help Zelenskyy needed.  So he didn’t submit.

Instead, Zelenskyy stood up for himself and his Nation.   Isn’t that what you’d expect a national leader to do?  He called out the disrespect shown by Vance and Trump, and he demonstrated the consequence of their short-term, bilateral thinking.  He didn’t throw away a deal, because there wasn’t an acceptable deal on the table in the first place.  Trump wanted “rare earth” (old sixties band?) in exchange for vague assurances that didn’t put bullets in Ukrainian guns or protection in Ukrainian skies.  When Zelenskyy objected, Trump tossed the Ukrainian President out of the White House.

And then Zelenskyy flew to London, to meet with a majority of the NATO nations.   They not only gave him a hug (don’t we all need one) but they offered the assurances he needed to continue his nation’s life and death struggle with Russia.  The Europeans made the deal that made sense for them. They too are under the Russian threat and worrying about another global war fought on their home soil.  So they stuck with the “Biden plan”, even though the US was no longer part of it.

Risk not Stratego

Zelenskyy is playing Risk, not Stratego.   He’s trying to win long-term support to continue the battle for Ukrainian democracy.  For the right deal with the US, he would have given up his “rare earth”.  But there was no deal; so he went to someone else.  Now, Trump is left weaker.  NATO is not behind him.  And Russia has the minerals he wants.  So what is his next tactical move?   

Trump’s gaming is tactical, but not strategic. But he’s in a world with much longer-term consequences, and the Risk players are leaving him behind.   The outcome could be dire.  If Putin determines he can now move against Europe, they will have no choice but to respond, with or without US help, just as their grandfathers did in 1939.

 With Trump’s plan, so goes our Nation.  We seemed to be “doomed” to repeat the history of the 1930’s.  And we know what the outcome of that was. It was the defining moment of my parents’ generation:  World War II.

Here’s the next in the “Sunday Story Series” on Our America. No politics today, just another “tail” about dogs.

Lost Pet Recovery

There is an old political adage, explaining the problems of success:  “It’s like the dog who caught the car”.  The premise is that dogs chase cars, but if they were actually successful and caught one, they wouldn’t know what to do.  Today’s story  answers that question:  what really happens when a dog catches a car?

A lot of the dog stories in “Our America” come from our work with Lost Pet Recovery (LPR), a group of intrepid volunteers who find lost dogs and return them to their owners.  LPR gets requests for help from all over Ohio, Kentucky and even beyond.  Sometimes, we are able to “talk” folks through getting their own dogs back. Often, we supply equipment to help them out.  And sometimes, we go out ourselves to recover the dog, and return it to the owners.

So last weekend we were on a trip to “scout out” a husky mix that was a “hard case”, out in Preble County. Where’s Preble County?  It’s the last county before the Indiana border, starting just west of Dayton, Ohio, and reaching through the flat farmlands towards Richmond, Indiana.  In fact, the quickest way to the Husky’s last known Ohio location was to enter Indiana, turn off the interstate onto a state highway, then onto a local county road that recrossed the border.  

Easy Stuff

The “dog” folks in Preble already tried the “easy” stuff.  A box trap was placed near where the Husky was sheltering, and they hoped she would be drawn in by the “good smelling” bait.  But instead of attracting the dog, she went on a long “walk-a-bout”, over fifteen miles before returning to her original location.  The trap scared her off, so that technique was scratched off the list.

She was hanging out in a dairy barn, eating cow feed and cow remains.  And she found a soul-mate, the local farm dog that lived there.  They clearly were in a friendly relationship, so much so that any attempt to retrieve the Husky had to take into account what to do with the local dog.  Here’s how we know.

We were driving down the narrow country lane, just after crossing back into Ohio, checking out the “lay of the land”.  We passed the farmhouse where the dairy farmer and his family lived, then turned around in the next driveway to come back and look for the Husky.  Meanwhile ‘Ol Farm Dog determined that our truck, with a six-foot trap in the back, was a threat, if not to him and his family, definitely to his “friend” the Husky.  

THIS IS MY ROAD

We pulled back by the farm, and Ol’ Farm Dog came out on the road to greet us.  We went past the farm house, then turned around again in the dairy barn driveway.  This time it was “Mr. This is My Road”, and he was having none of it.  

He stood in the middle of the road, barking boldly at our offending vehicle.  When I tried to back up, Farm Dog followed along, right by the front bumper.  When I tried to turn to the side, he circled around to keep us centered in the road.  Then, when we lowered the windows to try to cajole him, he approached the door.  ‘Ol Farm Dog didn’t seem very “friendly”.  

The two young kids who live in the house just stood in the front yard watching the show.  We certainly weren’t the first car their dog had “caught”, and I expect they were enjoying our inept maneuvering.   I lowered the window (just enough) to give them a yell:  “Hey kid, could you come get your dog?”.  One responded “Just drive forward”.  

We were in a pickup truck, and the dog was so close to the front bumper that he was beneath our view.  I wasn’t moving forward:  how would it look if the LPR “Team” ran over a farm dog while trying to catch a lost dog?  I’d definitely lose my Lost Pet Recovery “membership card”, and besides, I don’t run over dogs.  So I inched forward. He barked even more furiously. ‘Ol Farm Dog wasn’t going to move.

Caught

He had us.  He caught the truck.  And he knew exactly what he was going to do.  Ol’ Farm Dog was going to keep us, right there, in front of the farmhouse, for as long as he damned well wanted to.

It was ironic and kind of funny.  Instead of trapping dogs, our LPR team was trapped.  But Don, the “boss” in the back seat wasn’t amused. He was furious, not with me (the driver), and not even with the dog.  He was furious that the farm owners would let their dog wander on the country lane, trying to catch cars.  And it wasn’t because it was interfering with our scouting.  There is only one inevitable result for a dog fixated on catching cars, trucks, and other vehicles.  In the end, one of those will catch him; another “farm dog” lost.  And our “Boss” didn’t think that was so funny.

I yelled at the kid again, “Come on, Man, come get your dog!”.  The older brother gestured to his younger sibling, and the kid meandered over to the road, jumping in front of the truck to chase his dog into the field.  He then hollered at us “Get Going!”.  The vaunted “LPR Team” now taking orders from a ten year-old.  

I pulled ahead, slowly.  I was trying to avoid flattening old farm dogs and young children.  Then Don said, “You better get going”.  He, ‘Ol Farm Dog, was racing across the field, a desperate move to keep ahead of us.  He didn’t want to lose his “catch”. 

Back Way Home

I punched it, and once we passed forty, the farm dog was left behind.  We spent the rest of the day trying to “spy out” the Husky, without success.  

Hours later, the quickest way back home was to take the county road to the highway, to the interstate in Indiana back to Ohio.  But I refused to go that way.  No more Mr. This Is My Road!!  I charted a course along the county roads, meandering our way across Ohio farmlands and through small towns until finally we got to the interstate.  More miles, more time, but anything was better than getting caught by an old farm dog again. 

Postscript 1:  The Husky is still at the farm.  The farmer’s wife has one of our trail cams in the dairy barn, and we know she’s there.  A team is headed back out soon.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

Postscript 2:  Finding and returning lost dogs isn’t cheap.  LPR is a volunteer organization (and a 501-C3 charity). We’ve found thousands of lost dogs.  Most went back to their owners, but some are strays that end up in our rescue. If you’d like to help financially – we welcome donations.  That’s how we keep going. Here’s how to support LPR:

• — The “donate” button on our Facebook page
• — Venmo @lostpetrecovery
• — PayPal Giving Fund at https://paypal.com/us/fundraiser/charity/2369747
• — PayPal donate@lostpetrecovery.org
• — CharityNavigator.org to be a monthly sustainer
• — Checks to Lost Pet Recovery, PO Box 16383, Columbus, OH 43216.

The Sunday Story Series

2021

• Riding the Dog  – 1/24/21
• Hiking with Jack – 1/31/21
• A Track Story – 2/7/21
• Ritual – 2/14/21
• Voyageur – 2/19/21
• A Dog Story – 2/25/21
• A Watkins Legend – 3/7/21
• Ghosts at Gettysburg – 3/14/21
• Lessons from the State Meet – 3/28/21
• More Lessons from the State – 4/4/21
• Stories from the Road – 4/11/21
• A Bear Wants You – 5/1/21
• My Teachers – 5/9/21
• Old Friends  – 5/23/21
• The Gift – 6/6/21
• Echoes of Mom – 6/20/21
• Stories of the Fourth – 7/3/21
• Running Memories – 7/25/21
• Lost Dog of Eldora – 8/1/21
• Dogs and Medals – 8/8/21
• The New Guy – 9/5/21
• Stories of 9-11 – 9/12/21
• The Interview – 9/26/21
• Night Moves – 10/3/21
• Funeral for a Friend – 10/11/21
• National Security – 10/24/21
• Boots on the Trail – 10/31/21
• Taking Care of Mom and Dad – 11/14./21
• Dogs Found and Lost – 11/21/21
• Watching Brian 12/12/21
• Stories from Shiloh – 12/19/21
• Team Trips – 12/26/21

2022

• Uphill, Both Ways  – 1/9/22
• Old Trophies – 1/30/22
• The Last Time – 2/7/22
• Olympic Miracles – 2/13/22
• Mind Numbing – 2/20/22
• Track Weather – 4/3/22
• What’s Missing – 4/11/22
• A Scouting Story – 4/17/22
• Waterproof Paper – 5/8/22
• Origin Stories – 5/22/22
• Origin Stories – Part Two 5/29/22
• Back at State – 6/5/22
• Out in the Country – 6/19/22
• Pataskala Downs – 7/4/22
• Car Stories I – 7/24/22
• Car Stories II  – 7/31/22
• Old Man Experience – 8/7/22
• Cross Country Camp – 8/14/22
• New to the Pack – 8/21/22
• Car Stories III – The Bus – 8/28/22
• A Day in the Life – 9/4/22
• Stupid Human Tricks – 9/18/22

2023

• Fair or Foul – 2/26/23
• Immigrant Story – 3/12/23
• Busy Season – 5/15/23
• Of Jeeps and Bucks – 5/28/23
• A Pole Vault Story  -6/11/23
• End of an Era – 6/25/23
• Paybacks – 7/2/23
• Graying in Pataskala – 7/17/23
• Being a Goat – 7/23/23
• Toy Truck – 8/20/23
• Medical Terms – 8/27/23
• Missing Margaritaville – 9/3/23
• The McGowan – 9/10/23
• Who’s Watching – 10/22/23
• The Saturday Before – 10/29/23
• A Tale of Turkey, and Dogs – 11/26/23
• Bruno’s Story – 12/3/23
• Out in the Country – 12/10/23
• Christmas Eve – 12/24/23

2024

• Rube Goldberg – 1/12/24
• Our Pataskala Kroger’s – 2/5/24
• A Sad, Sad, Dog – 2/11/24
• Singing in the Tornado – 3/3/24
• Your Safe Spot – 3/17/24
• Easter Dawn – 3/31/24
• Swarms – 4/14/24
• Lowest Common Denominator – 4/28/24
• Seniors – 5/12/24
• Season’s Over – 6/22/24
• Camp Morning – 6/30/24
• Jeeping – 7/7/24
• How Mondo Won the Gold and Started a Dog Fight (almost) – 8/6/24
• Fifty Years of the McGowan – 9/8/24
• A Walk in the Woods – 10/22/24
• Smokin – 12/6/24
• Coal for Christmas 12/16/24
• Provenance – 12/22/24

2025

• Lost and Found – 2/22/25
•  Catching Cars – 3/2/25

High School Coach

My high school coaching career began and ended with a “beat down”.  What is a “beat down”?   I was a young coach; twenty-five, perhaps too young to be a high school coach in charge of seventy-five young men, some only five years younger than me.  But I didn’t know that.  I just tried to do my job, coach my kids to success, and keep a lid on the craziness that is definitional for adolescent boys. 

 And I think I did a pretty good job.   But then, it was time for my “job evaluation”.  And when I walked into the Athletic Director’s office, it wasn’t just a “man to man” discussion.  There was the AD, and there was the Assistant Principal, and then there was the Principal, all on one side of the AD’s desk, fifty plus years of educational experience. And  there was twenty-five year old me on the other.

For the next two hours, even my successes were cited as failures.   For two hours, whatever I happened to say was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of my three bosses, all talking at once, all disputing my efforts. Somewhere in the middle of it all, I thought I should just get up and leave.  But then it dawned on me – if they were going to fire me, they’d just done that at the beginning.  They just wanted to have their say, their “pound of flesh”, to draw new lines of authority.   They really didn’t want me to change much, they just wanted to be able to say to someone, I don’t know who, that they “Put Marty in his place”.  When it all ended, they handed me a paper evaluation they rated my performance as “good”.  It was crazy.

Woman to Man

Once  I got over the emotion, punched a wall or two, and stopped packing my bags, I realized that I was still the Head Boys Track Coach at Watkins Memorial High School.   My “bosses” could report to whoever they needed to that I was “suitably chastised”.  And life, teaching, my coaching career all could go on, pretty much like it was before.  

That was in 1982.   Thirty-five years later, I retired as the Boys Track Coach at Watkins Memorial.  And a few months after, I was already an “ex-coach”.  Then the Athletic Director and I had a disagreement about some T-Shirts we were selling at the home Cross Country meet.  In the middle of that issue, we had a meeting.  I knew as soon as I came in her office, that this meeting wasn’t to solve anything – it was to be another “beat down”.  The AD, who had no problem criticizing the track program “woman to man” for the past year, now had “backup”.  

This time it was the AD and the Assistant Principal.  And this time, the AD said almost nothing.   It was the Assistant who decided she was “the voice” of the Administration.  And just like that day in June of 1982, there wasn’t any discussion.  There was just a “beat down”.  No one wanted to hear what I had to say.  They just wanted “their view” on the record.  They wanted to tell someone, some boss above them, that “Marty was suitably chastised”.  It didn’t last nearly as long as back in ’82.  There was really nothing on the table.  I was already packed, already gone.  I finished my commitments to Watkins Cross Country, and I was done.

A World-Class Beatdown

I still love Watkins Track and Cross Country, and that AD is long gone.  So I go back, now the old, gray-haired guy, that used to coach here.  It’s changed a lot.  I officiate, and help out the coaches when I can, and realize that “my day” at Watkins is over.

I hadn’t thought about all that for years.   That was, until I heard President Trump and Vice President Vance perform a “beat down” on national TV.  Their target was the President of a sovereign nation, who, until literally weeks ago, was America’s ally.  Volodymyr Zelenskyy is the President of Ukraine, a nation that has done nothing but honor itself in a three year war against the massive Russian Army.  Ukrainians have endured unthinkable assaults, from Russian missiles and drones, from Russian tanks and troops, and on Ukrainian civilians and even children.  Russia captured parts of Ukraine, then “exported” the children to Russia, renaming and reprogramming them to be “good Russian citizens”.

The United States and NATO have been stalwart allies of Ukraine.   We have enforced draconian sanctions on the Russian economy, and spent billions of dollars on Ukrainian defenses.  It has been Ukrainian blood heroically spilled to stop the Russian invasions, but it has been US and NATO weaponry that helped Ukraine hold against the Russian juggernaut.

Who’s in Charge

I guess that’s not what Donald Trump wants.   And so he and Ohio’s “finest”, Vice President JD Vance performed a “beat down” on Zelenskyy today, live on US television.  Trump shouted down Zelenskyy’s objections, and Vance had the unmitigated gall of claiming that President Zelenskyy was disrespecting the US President by not saying “thank you” enough.  As if rivers of Ukrainian blood aren’t enough of a sacrifice.  

In the end, hopefully, a deal will be reached;  access to Ukrainian mineral wealth traded for support, and the US remains a Ukrainian ally.  But you have to wonder:  who did Trump need to show that “Zelenskyy was put in his place”.  Who did Vance need to show that Zelenskyy was “suitably chastised”.  To what “higher boss” must Vance and Trump report to?  It’s not the American people – so what was the point of a world class “beat down” on world TV?

Who’s really in charge — another Vladimir?

The Debt

Let’s get one thing straight up front.  The Government of the United States of America owes $36 Trillion.  That’s a lot of money, and the “blame” for that debt is shared all around.  Republicans and Democrats, Presidents and Congresses, Conservatives, Neo-Conservatives, Moderates and Progressives; all have contributed to the “debt”.  

How big is it?  If every person in the United States “donated” $100,000; it would shrink the debt to $3.5 Trillion.  That’s what it was back in 1990.  And since the vast majority of Americans don’t have a “spare” $100,000 to donate (or pay in tax), that’s not likely to happen.

No Limits

And what does the “debt” do?  Well first, just like that credit card debt we carry month-to-month, owing a debt requires paying interest on it.  The US Government pays about $1 Trillion to “service” the debt annually.  To put that in some perspective, the Government spent a little less than $7 Trillion in the 2024 total budget, so about 14% of that budget goes to the debt.  And while we’re talking about credit cards, there is one big difference between the US Debt and our personal credit debt.  All of our cards have some limit, some top number that “max’s out” the card.  So there is a real limit (a really big limit) to how far in debt we can personally go.   

But there is no hard limit to the Government debt.  As long as we/they can borrow the money, the can increase the debt.  Last year the United States had a $6.75 Trillion budget, and an income of $4.92 Trillion.  So last year, the National Debt “only” increased by $1.77 Trillion.

And one last factoid:  the only way for the government to “not” increase the debt is to spend less than it brings in.  When politicians today say “we need to cut Federal spending by $2 Trillion”, what they are trying to do is balance the budget.  The last time that happened was in the 2001 budget (though the reality of 2001 was that spending exceeded income – remember 9-11?).  

Priorities

And that’s the point.  Our government makes choices to spend more and create more debt.  Those choices are the priorities of those differing governments.  Donald Trump’s first term as President increased the national debt by around $8 Trillion (that’s the dubious “record”).  A little less than half of that was for Covid relief, to stabilize the American economy.  The majority of the other half was because of Trump’s sponsored tax cut, mostly for the highest tax payers (the rich).  That was his priority.

On the other hand, Joe Biden, increased the debt of $4.3 Trillion.  $2.2 Trillion of that was for Covid relief.  The rest help finance the Infrastructure Act, the Chips Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.  Those were his priorities.

The Budget

So what’s happening with the budget argument in Congress today?  Republicans want to slash the budget, cutting $2 Trillion (the magic number) to balance.  Except for one little issue.  They also want to continue Trump’s tax cut for the highest tax payers (the rich).  So the $2 Trillion cut, will be closely matched by a $2 Trillion loss in government income.  If that happens, then, while the budget will be smaller, it will still contribute to the debt.  They’re “giving away” the savings.  That’s their priority.

A side note:  while there is a huge argument about the relative percentage  the “rich” pay versus the “regular folks”, the reality is that 20% of my income is still a whole lot less than 05% of Warren Buffet’s .  What most Progressive tax reformers argue, is that Buffet ought to pay 20%  equal to me or more.  But he doesn’t, and in Trump World, he will pay even less.

Savings?

And what about Elon Musk and the DOGE boys?  Aren’t they finding millions, even billions of dollars of savings?  If we cut USAID, a lot of our foreign spending, that’s $60 Billion a year, less than 1%.  If we cut the Department of Education, that would “save” $238 Billion a year, 4%. (Of course, a lot of that spending would have to be replaced by state and local money.  So a Federal cut will likely be made up in increased local taxes). If we fired Musk’s SpaceX, that would save another $6 Billion a year.

Add all of that up, and even if the DOGE boys find some real cuts – they are focused more on “re-prioritizing” government rather than saving money.  They are going after the “woke” programs; like USAID (hopefully not because it has letters “AIDS” in it) and Education (because of Title IX and the transgendered).  It’s supposed to be about money, but it’s more about “getting the Libs”.   

Real Money

The real money is in “entitlements”, promises the US Government made to citizens over the years.  The big three are Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Medicare costs about $1 Trillion a year.  And yes, Medicare was supposed to be paid by individuals in payments throughout their work careers.  But inflation, and “alternative uses” by Congress, means that fund isn’t near enough to cover the cost.  The same is true about Social Security ($1.5 Trillion).   Medicaid is a little less, about $560 Billion to the US Government. 

And what about the Defense Department?  Well that’s around $1.3 Trillion a year.  So there’s that, ripe for cuts, though Defense is a major “priority” to the Trump Administration.

It’s not an easy conversation.  It’s about balancing priorities.  But one thing needs to be clear.  The President and the Congress right now, are not cutting the debt.  They are simply shifting priorities away from most American citizens, and to the rich.  

Surprised?