Have I got some resolutions for you…

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions because they’re redundant. I try to start every day of every year thinking I’m going to do the right thing. It just doesn’t always work.

What I AM going to offer here are some resolutions for everybody else. In other words, if you’re going to be around me in 2017, here are some things I hope you will do or avoid:

(1) First off, don’t tell me we need more instant replay in sports. Instant replay is the anti-christ. It was bad enough when replay turned basketball into a two-and-a-half-hour review-a-thon and football into four hours of men in striped shirts trying to determine what constitutes a catch, but now they’ve gone and effed up baseball, too, as if baseball wasn’t slow enough already.

My opinion is that replay officials do nothing but kill momentum and slow down games while getting it wrong approximately 50% of the time. If anybody is going to be wrong half the time, I’d prefer that it be the officials on the field. At least they’re in the stadium and not in some room hundreds of miles away looking at a questionable camera angle and with undetermined depth of field. Besides, we all get it wrong some of the time.

(2) Next, don’t call here and try to sell me anything. I mean nothing. Nada. Zero. Zilch. I know how to buy stuff and I’m pretty good at it. If I wanted it badly enough and could afford it, I own it already. I’m not donating to your cause, either. I worked for a non-profit foundation for years and I’m well-versed in the process of donating to causes. I think I can handle it without any help.

(3) And don’t ever call me at 7 o’clock in the morning. If you’re sitting in a call center in Bangladesh, for heaven’s sake buy yourself a world map or set your smart phone for my time zone. Also, don’t tell me in your thick Asian accent that your name is Charlie or Michael or Steve. I’m not buying that for one minute. I won’t hold it against you if you tell me your name is Sumon, Asif or Nazir…but I’m still not interested in what you’re selling.  

(4) Next, if you plan to do work for me, know that I am not going to make a final payment until the work is completed and a day or two has gone by for me to inspect the work. If that doesn’t work for you, don’t bother showing up. Of course, most of you don’t show up, anyway. (You know who you are.) You know what they say: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, or three times or four, shame on me. I may be a slow learner, but I’ve got it now. Capisci?

Now for the really important stuff:

(5) Don’t ever tell me to “get over” the fact that Donald Trump will be president of the United States. I will not lie down for that and I will not bend over for that. I DO NOT want to hear that from anybody. Ever. Again. Period.

I have already promised I would not say, “He’s not my president,” because sadly, he will be. That’s the way our system works and I can’t change it. I’ll be quick to add, however, that he is the most vile, reprehensible, childish and dangerous subhuman who has ever occupied the position, and I refuse to “normalize” him or his complete lack of moral fiber just because 61 million lazy, confused, misled or stupid people voted him into office.

He may be my president by law, but the people who voted for him ARE NOT MY PEERS or my friends. They are people I’d rather not know.

(6) Finally, you should resolve to educate yourself throughout the year. I don’t care how smart you are or how high your I,Q., there are things you will need to know. The internet has made more information available to more people than ever before, but you have to be involved enough to go there, get it, read it, absorb it and sort it out from the fake news and slanted pseudo-sites that twist everything into a partisan knot.

As one example, just yesterday I read a comment from a seemingly well-educated woman who conflated the relationship among the Clinton Foundation, government corruption and a business park in Haiti. I didn’t really know what she was talking about so I looked it up. Bottom line: the words “corruption” and “Haiti” might have belonged in the same sentence but the Clinton connection was one of Donald Trump’s unchallenged campaign lies.

I may live long enough for one more presidential election or maybe two. My resolution for everyone else is to please become an educated voter during the next four years and exercise your right to vote when the time comes around. Despite what this past election seemed to show, intelligence is not a bad thing. Those people who perpetually vote against their own self-interest could use a little bit of it or at least should apply the amount they do have.

In a few days we are going to send a childish, shallow, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness to the White House with 3 million fewer votes than his opponent received in an election during which 40-some percent of us didn’t even bother to vote.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work.

So, Mr. Phelps, those are your resolutions if you choose to accept them. I’ll be watching to see how you do. Meanwhile, this essay will self-destruct in 3…2…1… or maybe not.

Happy New Year.

Donald J. Trump, the alt-President, on cyber security

"On January 21, I will issue an executive order barring all Cybers from entering our country. Cybers who are here illegally will be deported and those who have committed crimes will be googled, internetted and world wide webbed.

"We will build a big, beautiful wall to keep the Cybers out and we will make Cyberia pay for it.

We will have the best cyber security. This I will tell you.

"I will also instruct our military to begin building a Star Wars-style cyber defense system to prevent attacks from cyber space. Ivanka says we'll call it Control Alt Delete."

‘Fell Swooping’ our way to prosperity

I have a friend who, back in the '70s, devised a method of solving problems that I think has practical applications today. He called his technique “Fell Swooping.”

My friend would take two completely unrelated problems and find one simple solution that solved them both in one fell swoop. Unfortunately, time and age have conspired to make me forget any of his specific Fell Swoops, but I always kept the concept in the back of my mind, and now I have a way to apply it to modern-day problems.

Problem 1 – There are a lot of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia.

Problem 2 – You can’t get a plumber to do small jobs and nobody wants to inspect your air conditioner.

Tens of thousands of coal mine jobs have been eliminated in this state because of a variety of reasons. Meanwhile, I can’t find a plumber who’ll fix a simple leak because they are all working full-time for big money on area housing projects.

I’m supposed to have annual spring and fall inspections of my heat pump but that guy doesn’t show up, either. My electrician got too old to work and the guy who painted my family room retired.

I did find exterior house painters who showed up when they felt like it but they screwed up part of the job and won’t come back to fix it. Plus they promised to stain my deck after they finished another job. I’m still waiting.

A guy came to replace some grouting on my chimney, got part-way through the job and disappeared. The ladder is still laying in my yard where he left it. I guess I’ll have to go move it now.

I had another contractor come by to discuss adding shake shingles to the front of my house (to cover up the sloppy paint job) but he never called back with an estimate. Same with the guy who was going to install flooring in my dining room.

Are you getting the picture? If not, I could keep going.

So here’s the “Fell Swoop.” Instead of waiting around for Donald Trump to get your mining job back, how about some of you miners become plumbers, carpenters, painters, HVAC repairmen, masons, electricians and flooring installers. I guarantee you there’s a demand for this kind of work but very few people actually doing it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the mean annual income for a plumber is $55,000 a year and a master plumber can make around $200,000 annually. Here are some other mean annual salaries, according to the BLS:

Interior painter, $40,000

Carpet, flooring and tile installer, $43,000

Drywall installer, $45,000

Carpenter, $47,000

Brick mason, $52,000

Electrician, $56,000

By comparison, the mean annual salary for a mining machine operator is only $50,000.

Keep in mind that “mean annual income” is the same as average income, obtained by dividing the total aggregate income of a group by the number of people in that group. That means for example that some plumbers earn more than $55,000 and some earn less. If I were going to be a plumber in an area where they are desperately needed, I believe I’d apply the law of supply and demand and charge more than the average rate.

So there you have it – two problems solved with one solution. Miners get jobs with decent pay and I get a plumber to fix my sink. Plus, the state’s economy gets the benefit of more people working, buying goods and services, paying taxes and improving quality of life.

Come to think of it, that was actually three problems solved with one solution. Call it “Fell Swooping” on steroids.

Am I good or what?

King Coal is dead, long live the king (Part 2)

Part 1 of this essay pointed out a lot of positives that would come about if coal mining came alive again in West Virginia, including jobs for laid-off workers, revitalization of small towns where miners and their families live and tax revenue to benefit all of the people in the state.

Mountaintop mining

On the negative side are the environmental consequences of increased coal production, including air and water pollution and the practice of stripping away tops of mountains to get to the coal underneath. There are many issues but here are a few:

One of the more controversial techniques employed by the coal industry is “mountaintop removal,” in which the tops of mountains are blown away using explosives. As a result, the landscape is changed significantly and streams may be covered with rock and dirt. The water draining from these filled valleys may contain pollutants that can harm aquatic wildlife downstream and find their way into sources of drinking water.

Blasting at mountaintop removal sites also expels dust and fly-rock into the air, which can disturb or settle onto private property nearby. This dust may contain sulfur compounds which corrode structures and pose a health hazard.

To be fair, mountaintop removal sites by law must be reclaimed after mining is complete, but in fact, reclamation has traditionally focused on stabilizing rock formations and controlling for erosion, and not on the reforestation of the affected area. Seldom do reclaimed mine sites look anything like what was there before.

Underground mining has its own set of problems, although not considered to be as much of an environmental hazard. In underground mining, methane gas must be vented out of mines to make them a safe place to work. Methane is one of the greenhouse gases which trap and hold heat in the atmosphere, which ultimately leads to global warming.

Acid mine drainage

Acidic water can drain from abandoned underground mines into rivers and streams, and the ground above mine tunnels can even collapse – a condition called mine subsidence – destroying anything built above the mine. The town of Fairmont in the vicinity of First, Second and Third streets is a case study in mine subsidence.

  

Historically, most of the coal mined in West Virginia was burned to generate electricity, which produces emissions that include sulfur dioxide, which contributes to acid rain and respiratory illnesses; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog and respiratory illnesses; particulates, which contribute to smog, haze, respiratory illnesses and lung disease; carbon dioxide, which is the primary greenhouse gas emission produced from the burning of fossil fuels; mercury and other heavy metals, which have been linked to both neurological and developmental damage in humans and other animals; and fly ash and bottom ash residue which must be captured by pollution control devices.

That’s why the Clean Air Act and its subsequent amendments have been enacted and why President Obama sought to strengthen environmental regulations to protect people’s health and minimize the contribution of fossil fuels to global climate change. The net effect did, in fact, result in the loss of some coal jobs and the label “war on coal” that essentially turned West Virginia from a blue state to red, but one man's "war on coal" is another man's fight to protect the planet.

Realistically, President Obama’s EPA regulations became only the latest chapter in the long history of coal mining that has been written over the past 100 years. Power companies have spent billions of dollars on technology to reduce coal plant emissions, and billions more would be required to meet more stringent environmental rules.

The cheaper alternative has been to close coal plants and convert to cleaner and less expensive natural gas, especially gas from shale rock like the Marcellus seam through West Virginia.

By any reasonable standard, the trend has been steadily downward for the coal industry which makes it easy for outsiders to suggest two things: the state desperately needs to diversify its economy and those coal jobs – lost since 1920 – are just not coming back.

It will be interesting to see what President Trump and Governor Justice can do in light of their campaign promises. The odds are against them, but then neither one of them was ever supposed to get elected, so there’s that.

King Coal is dead, long live the king (Part 1)

Stand on a street corner in most West Virginia towns and shout “the coal industry is dead” and you can start a pretty good argument. You would be right that since 1920, coal mine employment has declined drastically in the state until today there aren’t enough miners to fill a small college football stadium. That’s a period of nearly 100 years.

Look at a graph of mining employment and you’ll question the intelligence of anybody who thinks those jobs are coming back. Chances are if they haven’t needed you in the last 96 years they probably don’t need you now. Mechanization, a decline in the amount of coal remaining, a shift toward more productive mines out west and the emergence of cheaper, cleaner natural gas are among the contributing factors, but ask any miner who’s to blame for him losing his job and he’ll tell you it was President Obama’s “war on coal.”

I know of people who used to be miners who have been laid off for several years. Their fathers and grandfathers were probably miners and it may go back farther than that. When they were working, they could make $90,000 to $100,000 a year with seniority and overtime, and there are few jobs in West Virginia that can provide that kind of paycheck, especially for people who may not have finished high school and never went to college.

The problem is, their current salary is $0, so you can do the math. A guy who made $100,000 four years ago and $0 for each of the past three years actually has an average annual salary of $25,000. If he doesn’t work for another year, it will drop to $20,000 and then to $16,666 so on. Yet, a lot of these guys won’t take another job that pays $25,000 a year because someone told them their mining jobs are coming back.

   

Revitalization of the coal industry would mean a lot to the unemployed miners who could go back to work to support themselves and their families, and if you have any empathy at all for people fighting through hard times then you have to consider that a good thing. A significant increase in coal production would put money in miners’ pockets which they would spend at stores and businesses in fading West Virginia communities that really need the cash.

It would also increase the amount of coal severance taxes and payroll taxes and other taxes paid into the state treasury which theoretically should benefit me and my family (and all other West Virginians) through the funding of better roads and schools and police protection and other services, even though no one in my family has ever worked in the coal industry.

I just don’t see that happening.

You can blame Obama and new environmental regulations for what’s happened to the coal industry, but he has only been president for eight years. The Clean Air Act was signed by President Richard Nixon way back in 1970, and if there actually was a “war on coal,” it probably started then.

You’d have to be blind or not paying attention to have missed the fact that coal mine employment in this state has declined from 800,000 at its peak to 14,000 now. Politics being what it is, I fully expect Governor-elect Jim Justice – who owns coal mines – to hire a few people as soon as he takes office and for Donald Trump to take credit for it.

But do I expect the coal industry to come back to life here? No, not when coal companies are laying off workers and stripping retired miners of their pensions and other benefits, and when electric utilities are shuttering aging coal plants and investing in natural gas.

Don’t take my word for it. Call up Murray Energy and ask when they plan to recall those tens of thousands of miners. Call Appalachian Power or FirstEnergy and ask when they plan to reopen coal-fired power plants. I suspect you’ll get a different answer than what Trump is out there selling.

Next in Part 2: The environmental consequences of increased coal production.

Health care Catch 22: You can’t buy it until you don’t need it

I once had a problem with my shoulder that required treatment with a nerve stimulation unit, called a TENS. My doctor wrote a prescription so I could get a TENS unit from a medical supply company and do the treatment at home.

The cost of the unit was just over $400 and my insurance would have covered the cost – but only if I first went to physical therapy to have treatment on the problem.

So I went to physical therapy, which the insurance company paid for, and it fixed the problem. I was then authorized to buy the TENS unit, but I didn’t need it any longer because I had the physical therapy which had been required so I could buy the TENS but which fixed the problem instead.

Am I the only one who thinks this doesn’t make sense?

What’s more, the physical therapy lasted for several weeks and cost the insurance company a lot more than the $400 they refused to pay for the TENS unit. And what do you think the physical therapist did during treatment? She administered nerve stimulation using a TENS unit.

If all of that isn’t ridiculous enough, I could have bought the same TENS unit online for about $100 and covered the cost myself, cutting out the insurance company altogether. It’s the same unit that the medical supply company sells for $400, with the difference in price being the insurance company markup. The medical supply company told me it isn’t allowed to sell the unit for the lower price because it would get in trouble with the insurance company.

So if you go through medical channels, it costs $400 for a $100 item that is already marked up so the seller can make a profit. Somebody gets an additional $300, which I suspect is the added cost that medical care providers charge to offset the cost of treating people who don’t have health insurance. Or maybe they just charge that much because they can.

Bottom line: I didn’t buy a TENS unit, the therapist fixed my shoulder and the insurance company paid out more money than it would have paid if it had just given me the damn TENS unit when I asked for it.

Who says we need health care reform?

How long have transgender people been using public restrooms? How about forever?

I don’t understand the controversy about transgender people using public restrooms, considering that it has been going on forever and most of us didn’t even know it. I’ll get to that in a minute, but first, consider this:

* A woman goes into a women’s restroom. She has female parts so she uses a stall. She’s in there alone so no one watches her.

* A transgender woman goes into a women’s restroom. She has male parts but there are no urinals so she uses a stall. She’s in there alone so no one watches her.

* A transgender man goes into a men’s restroom. He has female parts so he uses a stall. He’s in there alone so no one watches him.

I don’t see the problem here.

* On the other hand, a man goes into a men’s restroom. He has male parts so he uses a urinal -- maybe one in a whole line of urinals -- where everyone could watch him if they wanted to. Why is no one complaining about this?

-   -   -

OK, so the first transgender person I remember being aware of was Richard Raskind, the American ophthalmologist who had some success as a professional tennis player until 1975, when he underwent male-to-female sex reassignment surgery and became Renée Richards. Richards was then denied entry as a woman into the 1976 U.S. Open by the United States Tennis Association. Eventually, the New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor in a 1977 decision in support of transsexual rights.

I got curious about the history of transgender individuals so I used the google to find more information, and what do you know? It turns out there have been transgender people, well, forever. They didn’t start to exist with Dr. Raskind or when Bruce Jenner recently switched sides.

In the earliest ages, transgender people not only existed but were thought to possess special wisdom that other people did not. Google offers way too many examples of transgender culture in various civilizations to try to post them all here (the Romans, for example, embraced both transgender and homosexual relationships), but feel free to look it up yourself.

The point is, there have always been transgender people and they have had access to public restrooms for as long as there have been public restrooms. None of us who are not transgender can say how many times we have shared a public restroom, and that’s a fact. Think about how many times you have used the restroom in a busy airport, at a football game with 75,000 other people, in a movie theater, restaurant or bar or anywhere else, for that matter.

What are the odds that you have NEVER shared a restroom with a transgender person?

Now, how many times have you (or your children) been molested in one?

The idea that someone wants to molest your children in a public toilet with other people around and you waiting right outside the door just doesn’t make sense. I’d be more concerned about my child walking home from school alone, or playing on a crowded playground or even in your own home with a babysitter…like your weird uncle Cletus.

So I ask again, what’s the problem here? What are the odds that transgender people are lurking in public restrooms just waiting for you or your family? Why is this an issue and why now? 

And what the hell is wrong with North Carolina? 

Hi everybody,

My name is Lucy Lu. No, I wasn't named for that actress Lucy Liu (my mom and dad know how to spell). My name used to be Lucinda but when I was adopted, my forever family changed it to Lucy and kept the "Lu" part of my former name.

My dad is the guy who writes this blog. I hope you like it.

He's got a few more essays written but he's taking a break to enjoy the holidays. He may even get some more ideas. As you can see, I'm in the Christmas spirit, too, so I asked if I could get on the shieldWALL to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

My dad said I could, and so I just did (heh heh heh). Bye for now.

Love,

Lucy

Tonight on Fox: Tune in to watch that clueless president and his whacky cabinet tackle global warming

So there I was, taking a few days off from the shieldWALL when I had an epiphany.

Donald Trump isn’t picking a cabinet, he’s casting a reality show. It’s the true-life story of an unqualified reality TV star who runs for president of the United States as a joke and accidentally gets elected. Using the only thing he knows – how to produce television ratings – Trump has his president-elect character proceed to appoint cabinet secretaries and top advisors who are also unqualified for their jobs.

I can hear the dinner table conversation now. “I’m telling you, Ivanka, this will be fantastic TV. This guy doesn’t know anything about government, so he appoints a bunch of other people who don’t know anything and then each week a new problem arises and no one knows what to do about it.

“It will be like F Troop was with bumbling soldiers and bumbling Indians, only we’ll have real bumbling politicians and bumbling advisors and it will be set in present day. We’ll have the bumbling media try to cover the stories and the bumbling public will eat it up.

“This will be a laugh riot, Ivanka. It’s going to be great. If we can get it on between Pawn Stars and Duck Dynasty we’ll get ratings like you won’t believe. Our ratings will be so great we’ll get tired of great ratings.”

The casting call goes out.

Trump finds a guy who hates the EPA and has sued them several times to play the role of EPA director.

He finds another stupid former Texas governor who wants to abolish the Department of Energy – when he can even remember the name of it – to head that department.

He finds the woman behind Amway to run public schools, even though she hates public education.

And on and on down the list.

Back in Trump Tower, he tells his wife, “The best thing is, we can produce this show right here in New York, like we did The Apprentice. There’s no need for us to go to Washington or any of those other places the president goes, like that Camp Whatever up in the woods with its log huts and picnic tables and outhouses and trees.”

I can hear Melania tell him, “Dat ees goot, dahlink. I vahnt to stay here. Leetle Barron von Trumpenstein von’t have to change from hees school and zee shoppink ees much more better here.”

The show will debut at 12 noon (11 a.m. central) on Friday, January 20 on a Fox station near you, brought to you by Exxon-Mobil, Goldman-Sachs, Amway, Breitbart News, the RT (Russian Television) and the companies of Trump International.

It will not be shown in California.

Who says you can’t say “Merry Christmas?”

Some funny things happen around Christmastime.

* There’s the annual argument over whether Christmas is a religious holiday marked by manger scenes and “We Three Kings,” or a secular observance starring Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman.

* There’s Bill O’Reilly, the Irish Catholic, declaring a “war on Christmas” because some people prefer to use the greeting “happy holidays.” Chances are, if O’Reilly was a Buddhist, a Muslim, a Zoroastrian, a Druid or a Jew, he’d understand…but then he’d lose viewership and ratings from his devotees who eat up the pretend Christmas war with a cup of egg nog and a spoon.

* There’s Megyn Kelly – generally regarded as one of the more intelligent pseudo-journalists on Fox News – proclaiming what “everybody” knows…that both Santa Claus and Jesus were white people. So far she hasn’t designated a color for the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Paul Bunyan or the giant that lives above the beanstalk.

* There was Starbucks brewing up a ruckus last year by introducing a plain red Christmas cup, signaling to some conspiracy theorists that the company hates Jesus. Never mind that the “traditional symbols” they were criticized for abandoning included snowflakes, reindeer, bells, ornaments and the like and not pictures of Jesus, Mary and Joseph or the three wise men.

(Go back and read Paragraph #2 to understand the hypocrisy of this complaint.)

* Then there’s Walmart putting out its Christmas decorations before Halloween and my pharmacy starting to sell Valentine’s Day candy two weeks before Christmas. I guess I should be accustomed to this by now, but I’d be hoping for candy that was a little more fresh.

* In my neighborhood, a lot of people set up outdoor lighting displays but no one wants to be the first to turn them on, so I took the burden off my neighbors and lit ours up this year on the Sunday before Thanksgiving. That was the day my children and grandchildren came by to help put the decorations on our Christmas tree, so it seemed like an appropriate time.

And that brings me around to the reason for this essay.

I love this time of the year. I love our Christmas tree and the fake holly, M&M lights and stockings that adorn the railing beside my steps and the colored lights around my bay window and my wife’s Charlie Brown tree and the Christmas music on the stereo.

Mostly I love buying and wrapping gifts for other people, spending Christmas Eve with my family and seeing the faces of everybody when they open their presents from Santa and the rest. Some in my family go to church and some don’t, but we’re all well aware of the reason for the holiday and we see no reason why the religious and secular Christmases can’t co-exist.

I appreciate that people have their differences, but I say “Merry Christmas” to everybody because, well, because I just do. No one has complained so far.

So with that, shieldWALL is going to take some time off and enjoy the holidays. Thanks for taking time to read it and thanks for all of your comments. I hope you’ll miss me just enough that you’ll be happy when I return.

Until then, Merry Christmas to all. I hope your holiday is filled with love, happiness, joy and lots of fun. And egg nog. I really love egg nog.

Trump Voter Post-Election Survey

Demographic Information

What is your age?

(1) Over 50

(2) Old

(3) I ain’t gotta tell

What is your race?

(1) White

(2) Caucasian

(3) European-American

What high school did you attend last?

What grade did you drop out from?

Don’t you wish you could have gone to college?

(1) Couldn’t afford it

(2) I ain’t no pretty boy

(3) Ah hell no

What local Klan chapter do you belong to?

What NASCAR number do you have on your truck windows?

Politics Questions

Did you get Social Security or Medicare benefits before the Republicans took them away?

Did you qualify for overtime before the Republicans took it away?

Did your kids attend public schools before Trump’s education secretary shut them down?

Did your town have clean drinking water before the EPA was abolished? Do you miss it?

When you were hospitalized for typhoid from drinking contaminated water, did you wish you still had that health insurance that Trump took away?

Do you live near a nuclear power plant?

If yes, are you sorry they disbanded the Department of Energy?

Remember that movie "The China Syndrome"?

Can you feel that vibration under your house?

How fast can you run 10 miles?

Did you ever chant “lock her up” at a Trump rally?

Did you know he was only saying that to get your vote?

Did you ever chant “build that wall” at a Trump rally?

Did you know he was only saying that to get your vote?

Did you ever shout “drain the swamp” at a Trump rally?

Did you know he was only saying that to get your vote?

Do you have any children of military age?

How do they feel about going to war with Iran? Syria? Mexico? North Korea? China?

Do you have any children who work for minimum wage?

How do they feel about having their pay reduced?

How will they feel when they are replaced by robots?

Overall, why are you glad you voted for Trump? (Circle all that apply)

(1) Damn glad we kept that crooked bitch out of the White House.

(2) Fuggin’ A, baby. We’re makin’ America great again.

(3) The media lies about everything; Trump tells it like it is.

(4) I’m keepin’ my guns alright.

(5) His wife looks soooo classy and dignified in them nudie pitchers.

(6) It’s all Obama’s fault.

Bonus Questions

We sure did nail Hillary’s ass on that whole email thing, didn’t we Buddy?

(And don’t even get me started on Bengazi.) 

Let’s get this (multiple) party started

There was talk during the recent election about the Republican Party splitting apart. That’s died down now that the candidate they loved to hate has won them the White House, but the idea still has merit.

If you look closely at the Republicans there are actually three parties – the Establishment GOP, the Tea Party Obstructionists and the anti-establishment Trumpeteers.

The Democrats, meanwhile, had a hard time deciding whether they were Clintonian Centrists or Bernie Sanders Socialists, and settled on dragging Hillary Clinton too far to her left, where she seemed to be uncomfortable. It clearly didn’t work out for them this time.

Then there were the Libertarians and the Green Party, so that if each was considered separately, you’d have at least seven distinct political parties with their own identities, goals, values, platforms and agendas. I’m an Independent who doesn’t identify with either the Republicans or the Democrats, so I’d be totally in favor of this.

Imagine if all seven parties nominated candidates in future elections. You’d throw out the Electoral College and the candidate with the most votes would win. Period. In this past election, for example, the seven candidates might have been Jeb Bush, Establishment GOP; Ted Cruz, Tea Party; Donald Trump, Trumpeteers; Bernie Sanders, Liberal Democrats; Hillary Clinton, Centrist Party; Gary Johnson, Libertarians; and Jill Stein, Greens.

I don’t know who would have been elected out of that group, but voting for Jill Stein would not necessarily have hurt Clinton while benefitting Trump. Bush and Cruz would have given Republicans someone other than Trump to vote for, cutting into his total. Bernie Sanders would have stayed in the race against the other six and might very well have been the president-elect.

If all seven parties sent representatives to Congress, all Americans would have a chance to be represented by somebody who shared their political philosophy, and the two parties we have now that don’t play well together probably would lack the votes to obstruct legislation, shut down the government or create the gridlock that has plagued our country for years.

In such a coalition Congress, it would become less important which party the president represented, because he or she would have to work with a legislature comprised of seven sets of representatives. It would force the parties to cooperate, form alliances that might change from issue to issue, compromise on big-ticket legislation and actually get things done for the country instead of the party.

And oh, by the way, we’d need term limits, too.

So the way I see it, it’s time to get this (multiple) party started. We just came through the worst election in the history of this country, so there’s no better time to make a change. C’mon, who’s with me?

Somewhere a village is missing its idiot…and it’s not me

A Facebook poster once told me I was an idiot because I advocated for stricter gun control. He pointed out that he had “an inalienable (sic) right endowed by god to carry a gun” and that it was stated in the Constitution.

And he said I was the idiot.

For anyone out there who may be confused – like him – please allow this idiot to explain the difference between the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration of Independence came first on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia. Most of it is a list of grievances against the King of England which, its authors said, justified the independence of the United States and asserted certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution.

It includes this well-known sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Declaration of Independence DOES NOT mention the right to carry a gun among those unalienable rights, and it most certainly was not written by god.

The U.S. Constitution became effective next on March 4, 1789. It begins as follows:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..."

It delineates the framework of our national government, including the separation of powers; the rights and responsibilities of state governments and of the states in relationship to the federal government; and the procedure subsequently used by the states to ratify it.

It doesn’t guarantee unalienable anything, per se.

After it was adopted, the framers discovered they had left a few things out, so in 1791, James Madison wrote the first 10 amendments to the Constitution called the Bill of Rights that list specific prohibitions on governmental power. The second of those amendments states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

OK, so the Second Amendment gives us certain rights regarding the ownership of guns but DOES NOT claim any of these rights to be “unalienable,” and, again, the amendment was not written by god. It was written by a bunch of old white men who had something in mind when they wrote it, but the debate over what they really meant is still going on today.

Some people think it applies to everybody and that unregistered gun ownership is absolute, while others believe it applies only to regulated "militia" like, say, the active military or the National Guard.

Of course, people with high school degrees who post messages on Facebook are probably in the best position to interpret the founders, don’t you think?  Me? I’m only an idiot, so what do I really know?

We can still pray in school, privately, to our particular god

On more than one occasion (such as yesterday) I have engaged in debate over the beliefs that America was founded as a Christian nation and that there is only one true god.

I believe both propositions are wrong.

I’ll take the second one first. It is undeniable that there are many more gods than one worshiped by people around the world. There are at least 14 religions worth mentioning, including Baha'i, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Druidism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, Wicca and Zoroastrianism. Add Satanism if you wish.

Each one has its own god or gods that people worship and its own set of beliefs, and each one is just as sacred to its followers as any of the others. 

As to the first point, I think people confuse the establishment of the earliest colonies in America with the eventual founding of the republic. In his book, The Founding Fathers and the Place of Religion in America, Frank Lambert points out that the Puritans and Pilgrims who came here in the 1600s to escape religious persecution did, indeed, intend to organize a Christian nation, and did so for a time within their own colonies.

However, when George Washington was sworn in as the first president of the Unites States 150 or so years later, he took an oath to “preserve, protect and defend” a Constitution that made no reference to any god or divine providence, citing “the people of the United States” as its sole authority.

“Instead of building a Christian Commonwealth, the supreme law of the land established a secular state,” Lambert wrote. This is backed up by the opening clause of the first Constitutional amendment which clearly states, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Regarding school prayer specifically, in 1962, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Engel v. Vitale that “any kind of prayer, composed by public school districts, even nondenominational prayer, is unconstitutional government sponsorship of religion.” Several subsequent Supreme Court rulings (see list below) have upheld and expanded the separation of church and state.

The issue is bound to come up again before long because Betsy DeVos, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education, is said to favor returning prayer to the schools. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know this: No court to my knowledge has ever ruled that any student, teacher, administrator, janitor, bus driver, cafeteria worker or visiting family member cannot pray in school as often as he or she likes, regardless of religious affiliation, as long as it’s done privately, the prayer being a solemn missive between the individual and god.

Isn’t that what prayer is supposed to be? So why should the whole class get to listen? 

*   *   *

To see a list of Supreme Court decisions, click on the following link, go to the Contents box and click on the entry at 1.5 "Religion in Public Education."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_the_First_Amendment#Prayer_in_public_schools

For more on the history of religion in America, click the link below to read an interesting article from Smithsonian Magazine.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/americas-true-history-of-religious-tolerance-61312684/

The dumbing down of America; I blame the ducks

Disclaimer: Somebody else wrote the following paragraph, or something like it, on the Huffington Post (link below). I agree with it 100%, so I’m stealing it.

I can’t say what started the dumbing down of America, but I think it may have peaked about the time the History Channel s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d history to include “Swamp People” and “Pawn Stars,” and when A&E stopped broadcasting opera, classical music concerts and other notable arts and entertainment and went all in for “Duck Dynasty.”

*   *   *

I used to call this the “redneckification” of America, but that made me an elitist, apparently. I don’t think you can live in West Virginia and call anyone a redneck without taking serious abuse. Besides, the Trump election proved that people whose necks weren’t all that red could still vote against their own self-interest and qualify for the ADDA – the Association of Dumbed Down Americans.

We used to make fun of rednecks or hicks or hillbillies or whatever you want to call them, even though one group of hillbillies made it out to Beverly Hills and became famous. “Green Acres” was one of my favorite TV shows. Who can ever forget old Mr. Haney, loveable Eb, Sam Drucker, stuttering Hank Kimball or the Monroe brothers, Alf and Ralph?

Those shows were really funny…and that’s my point. We looked down on a subculture and mocked it for our own enjoyment and it made us laugh, in part because we weren’t like them. We were better than them, or so we thought.

Today that subculture is deciding presidential elections and it isn’t funny anymore. If Mr. Haney, Sam Drucker, Hank Kimball and the rest were real people, they'd have voted for Donald Trump this year.

Walk into a Walmart and you can be overwhelmed by Duck Dynasty games, clothing, furniture, bobbleheads, chia heads, cigars, toys, dolls, duck calls, water bottles, mugs, Halloween faces, lunch boxes, guns and flags to fly out of your car window. There’s even Duck Dynasty Duck Tape. Honest.

I'd be curious to know how many Hillary Clinton supporters buy that stuff.

We have normalized the redneck culture that we used to make fun of by expanding its place in our music, our entertainment, our merchandise options and our lifestyle in general. That would be harmless enough if it didn’t coincide with the dumbing down of our electorate, but it does, and that’s the scary part. I think the two are linked.

We’re now supposed to normalize the Trump presidency with its white supremacy, disregard for the truth and a basket of Deplorables who enthusiastically voted for candidates who are going to turn around and screw them over in every way possible for at least the next four years. If we normalize Trump, that means we have already normalized low information voting and voting against ourselves.

What else can you call that except the dumbing down of America? Don't be surprised if one day soon the Statue of Liberty jumps down off that platform and walks on back to France.

Click this link to read a story that told us last August what was going to happening on November 8.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rosenblum/donald-trump-is-going-to_b_11637008.html

Hey look, the world’s passing by and we’re missing it

Here’s an idea: Let’s all agree to stop getting our news exclusively from political commentators on 24-hour cable news.

I’m not saying you can’t tune in to get their take on a given issue, but political commentary is not entirely news. It’s the opinion of someone with a political agenda, a point of view, a primary bias and a secondary motivation to fill your head with things that may not even be true.

One of my favorite examples is the commentator who once suggested that there were poor people trying to sign up for the Affordable Care Act while waiting for an ambulance during a medical emergency. The commentator claimed these people kept hitting the “refresh” button on the Obamacare sign-up page so they could get the ambulance to come.

If you believe something like that, you’re what they call a “low-information voter.”

(Actually, if you believe that, you’re an idiot.)

The reason they refer to some people as low information voters is because they are. Too many people have stopped thinking for themselves and started allowing ideologues and spinmeisters to do their thinking for them.

“Just give me the talking points so I don’t have to read. Tell me what you think I need to know.”

Thanks to the Internet, there is more information available to people today than ever before, but that’s both a blessing and a curse, as we learned when a gunman went into a Washington pizza joint to kill people because of a fake news story about Hillary Clinton.

In order to use the Internet intelligently, you have to sort through the opinion and philosophy, drive around all of the fake news and propaganda sites and actually dig down deep enough to find the actual facts. Even then, you sometimes have to use your instincts and your common sense to decide if something is true.

And pay attention to dates. I see stuff all the time that is a year or two old and gets regurgitated because someone didn’t check the publication date.

I don’t know the exact date when we stopped thinking for ourselves or making reasoned decisions based on fact, or when being intelligent became a bad thing, but I know that it did and it’s one of the reasons for much of the decline in this country. No one can expect voters to make educated choices if half of the people refuse to educate themselves.

Life in a fact-free zone: Will we ever have truth again?

The America I grew up in has been damaged forever. A large segment of the population now lives in a fact-free zone where lies don't matter, the truth is whatever you want it to be and anybody who tells you different is either a “libtard,” a Communist or just plain stupid.

There is no buffer between those who believe the news media and those who don't, or between legitimate news sources and phony web sites, or between extremist web sites like Occupy Democrats on the left -- which exaggerates stories with blockbuster headlines it can't prove -- and Breitbart on the right, which simply makes stuff up as it goes along.

The dumbing down of America is nearly complete. It's now a bad thing to be intelligent. That makes you "an elitist," or “part of the rigged system,” or my favorite, “low information.”  How’s that for irony?

After a campaign built on lies, I’m convinced that no Liberal will ever again believe anything that comes from the Right, and vice versa. I don’t see any chance that Congress will set aside party loyalty and actually work to improve our country. And I don’t see any media voice or other moderator with the credibility to be believed when they try to point this out. 

I do see surrogates for the president-elect of the United States saying “there are no facts” and “lies are not lies if you don’t know the truth.”

I do see media outlets letting them get away with it while trying to “normalize” the Trump presidency.

I do see people who habitually vote against their own self-interest because they are either too lazy or too disinterested or, yes, too stupid to know what their own best interests are and who is best qualified to serve them.

That’s why, for example, people who live on Social Security and Medicare will vote for Republicans who want to take those things away. It’s why West Virginians voted in a Republican Legislature that turned around and screwed the voters in every way possible...and then re-elected them two years later.

I have an even harder time explaining the 42% of eligible voters who don’t bother to vote at all.

I suppose this country can survive this turmoil – at least until climate change puts us all under water – but I’m not totally convinced. We wouldn’t be the first great civilization to fail. I’m especially worried about the kind of country our children will have and their children after that.

As for me, well, I’ll be dead in a few years, so it doesn’t much matter. In the meantime, you can find me here, watching the wheels go ‘round and expressing my opinions and hoping that I can help change things or that somebody can prove me wrong.

What happens when the ‘good old days’ weren’t all that good?

I was born in 1950 and came of age in the ’60s, as they say. I’ve heard all of the jokes about “if you remember the ’60s then you weren’t really there,” but I WAS there and I DO remember some things, and it wasn’t always the “good old days.”

Here are some photos from that time period (click to enlarge):

People who were around then will no doubt remember the typical American family that we saw portrayed on television: handsome, affluent working dad, prim and proper stay-at-home mom with pies in the oven, two perfect children with nice clothes and good grades who hung out weekends at the sock hop and weren’t on the corner selling crack cocaine.

There was probably even a big, fluffy, lovable dog named Patches or Scratches or Jiffy or Sniffy or Fido, Rover or Spot.

Was anything missing from those images? How about African American families, homosexuals, bi-racial couples, immigrants, Muslims in hijabs, Jews, Hindus, working women, single mothers, transgender men and women…?

No, you didn't see them in the 1950s or early 1960s.

According to The American Myth of the 1950s, “If you were not a white Christian male during this time period, you were most likely discriminated against.”

One of the images above shows African Americans standing in line front of a billboard proclaiming the “Great American Way.” I’m not sure what they were standing in line for in that photo, but it probably wasn’t tickets to a Broadway play.

When I was born there were four black players in Major League Baseball. West Virginia University didn’t enroll its first two African American football players until I was 13 years old in 1963. A lot of Americans voted against JFK for president in 1960 because he was a Catholic. No one talked about Hispanics, homosexuals or transgenders at all. It was as if they didn’t exist, which of course they did.

Most families had only one car back then because women didn’t work outside the home. Our house had a single-car garage, like every other house on our street. When I was born, women could not serve as jurors in federal court (not until 1957) or in courtrooms in 32 states. It wasn’t until 1973 – when I was 23 years old, married and a father – that women could serve on juries in all 50 states.

I could go on and on, but here’s the question: When we make America great again, which time period are we going back to, because if it’s the ‘50s or ‘60s, I’d just as soon pass.

To be clear, I don’t actually KNOW that Donald Trump wants to take us back to 1950. (Well, not exactly.) What I DO know is that he has nominated cabinet secretaries and key advisors who oppose the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public education, the minimum wage, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act, organized labor  and subsidized health care...and that’s just off the top of my head.

There’s no way these people are going to move this country forward when they oppose everything we’ve achieved so far in my lifetime. So to summarize, I don’t know exactly which point in the past we are headed for, but I know that any step backward is traveling in the wrong direction. If I start seeing drinking fountains labeled “WHITES ONLY” or commercials with women baking cookies, I’m going to get real concerned.

And don’t even get me started on gay marriage and restrooms for transgender children and adults. I’ve got another whole article about that. Stay tuned…

When the oceans rise high enough, will they still deny climate change?

Some of them were angry

At the way the earth was abused

By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power

And they struggled to protect her from them

Only to be confused

By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour.
                                                  – Jackson Browne, “Before the Deluge”

* * *

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a scientific body under the auspices of the United Nations, set up in 1988 at the request of more than 120 member governments to provide an objective, scientific view of world climate change and its political and economic impacts.

It is not a basement full of crazy leftist global warming whackadoos trying to scare us all into building windmills, as some would have you believe.

You can google it for more information, but for now, just know this:

The IPCC does not carry out its own research but instead relies on thousands of scientists and other experts who volunteer without pay to write and review reports about the state of the environment.

Two years ago, the IPCC warned against the dangers of continued reliance on fossil fuels. It stated that if we burn more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we will cross an environmental “red line” by the year 2040 that will result in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on.

If we burn all of our available fossil fuels, the IPCC said, humans will find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors.

Did you hear that? UNINHABITABLE OUTDOORS.

When I read that it jolted me out of my chair. The year 2040 is not some unreachable date far out in the future. It's only 24 years from now. My children will be roughly my age now and my two youngest grandchildren will only be in their 30s.

That’s why it’s unacceptable that Donald Trump is nominating a pro-fossil fuels anti-regulation climate science denier to head the Environmental Protection Agency. [Fox…I place you in charge of the henhouse.] By nominating Scott Pruitt to run the EPA, Trump is doubling down on his determination to overturn President Obama’s climate change initiatives and preparing to dismantle much of the EPA itself.

Ken Cook, head of the Environmental Working Group, a Washington research and advocacy organization, says, “It’s a safe assumption that Pruitt could be the most hostile EPA administrator toward clean air and safe drinking water in history.”

Just for the record, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1970 and signed by that well-known left wing progressive Richard M. Nixon. Two years later, Nixon signed the Clean Water Act. If there ever was a “war on coal,” it started then, with regulations designed to mitigate the effects of industrial waste and the consumption of fossil fuels on the environment.

We’ve come a long way since 1972 but we’re nowhere near the end of the environmental journey. I suggest you use the google to find out what the environment was like before the passage of those bills, because we could find ourselves back there very soon if this nomination is allowed to stand.

We should all contact our senators and tell them we oppose the nomination of Scott Pruitt to head the EPA. For that matter, I'd oppose him to be in charge of a lemonade stand on my block. I'd wonder about the quality of the water he had used. 

https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-air-act

https://www.epa.gov/laws-regulations/summary-clean-water-act

Since I preach about politics, can I get a tax exemption too?

I don’t think American churches should automatically qualify for tax-exempt status, and maybe they shouldn’t have it at all. I mean, to begin with, what is a church?

Is it a little country chapel with a steeple and 12 parishioners where the pastor and his wife live in the clapboard house next door, she plays the piano, types the weekly bulletin and cleans while he performs maintenance on the building, visits the sick, conducts weddings and funerals and drives the church bus?

Or is it the megachurch with 10,000 or more members, its own TV and radio networks, a gold-plated parsonage with a fleet of jets and staff of dozens where the minister has a political agenda and goes on CNN to support presidential candidates and earns a 7- or 8-figure salary every year?

Or is it me, sitting here in my office writing political essays and social commentaries? My wife says I’m always preaching to the choir, so I think that could make me a church.

Historically, both sides of the taxation debate have used separation of church and state, freedom of speech and freedom of religion to make their points. Advocates of tax exemption say that requiring churches to pay taxes would endanger the free expression of religion.

Opponents argue that it’s actually the tax exemption itself that violates church and state, and that a tax break for churches forces all American taxpayers to support religion, even if they oppose some or all religious doctrines.

The Johnson Amendment to the U.S. Tax Code says a pastor who talks about candidates from the pulpit in light of scripture might forfeit his tax-exempt status, but it is never enforced. The Supreme Court has upheld tax exemption for churches, but the decision was handed down in 1970. Churches have gotten much bigger and much more politically active since then.

So it’s a dilemma. I don’t know how you enforce the Johnson Amendment without wiretapping every church in America to see who’s preaching politics and who isn’t. It’s pretty easy to see when the minister goes on Fox News to support Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, but what if it’s the pastor of the small country church?

The only solution, then, must be to tax all churches. Anything else would seem to be either unenforceable, unconstitutional or at the very least, unfair.

My Social Security benefits belong to me, Mr. Ryan, so please keep your greedy hands off

I had my first job when I was 10 years old or so. That means I have worked full or part-time for roughly 56 years. I earned every penny of my Social Security benefits, and I want Paul Ryan to keep his greedy hands off of them.

And don’t mess with my Medicare, either.

Like many kids I started out as a newspaper carrier. I delivered both the West-Virginian and the Pittsburgh Press with two canvas bags slung across my chest like crossed bandoleros. The newspapers weighed more than I did. Around the same time, I sold seeds from a catalog door-to-door, and when I was a little older and could be trusted not to run over my own feet, I mowed lawns for a real estate agency.

I had my first real job at 15, working for 62 1/2 cents an hour as a stock boy and “go-fer” at a small family market, and when I turned 16 and got my driver’s license, I moved up to delivery driver for a pharmacy making a whole $1 an hour. In college I worked at a supermarket, a shoe store and Sears in the Middletown Mall.

My family wasn’t dirt poor but we sure weren’t wealthy, either, so I had to work if I expected to have money for hamburgers, cigarettes and gas.

I quit working this year after 40 years as a journalist, a public relations manager and a freelance communications consultant, so I’m officially retired. My wife and I collect Social Security that helps keep us in groceries, utilities and gasoline for the cars, but it’s not easy when 25% of our total net income goes to cover health insurance premiums… which gets me back to the point. 

• Twenty million Americans are on Obamacare, including my wife who is not old enough for Medicare, 
• Another 54 million (like me) receive Medicare benefits, 
• And about 66 million Americans receive Social Security benefits. We are two of them.

I keep reading how Paul Ryan and his Republican cronies want to “privatize” these programs so they can cut government spending and use the savings to lower taxes for the rich – some of whom have never worked a day in their lives.

First off, I don’t know why the Republican leadership would want to piss off 74 million voters by taking away their income and health insurance. That’s millions more people than voted for either Clinton or Trump this year. More important, I don’t know where Paul Ryan or anybody else thinks they derive the moral authority to take these benefits away from me – especially Social Security which is MY MONEY that I paid into the fund most of my life.

So, Paul…may I call you Paul? I have a few questions. 

• What makes you think you can steal this money from me and my wife to benefit your wealthy friends? 
• Did you get this idea from Rush Limbaugh, or did you read it in some Ayn Rand novel?
• Surely you didn't think this up all by yourself?
• As for you and your 1% pals, how much money do you think they need? 
• Is there ever such a thing as “rich enough?” 
• If you’re already rich, does it make you feel good to steal money from the poor and middle class, or is that how you got rich in the first place?

I don't know why you're so obsessed with this, Paul. Can’t you find something important to worry about, like how our country is falling apart, our environment is going to hell, we have children who don’t have enough to eat, we have military entanglements all around the world and the fact that you helped put a crazy man in the White House?

I’d think that would be enough for you, Paul, but apparently you want to add raping and pillaging America’s poor and middle class to your 2017 political agenda. 

Frankly, Paul, I don’t know how you can sleep. 

You can’t ‘normalize’ something that is this abnormal

In the movie “Young Frankenstein,” Igor is sent by Dr. Frankenstein to the Brain Bank to retrieve the brain of a brilliant scientist to be implanted into the creature the doctor is building, but Igor drops it and it shatters, so he takes instead a brain labeled ABNORMAL. He thinks it’s a name…A. B. Normal.

In the movie, this is pretty funny; in real life, not so much.

In the real world, the news media is Dr. Frankenstein. Instead of planting an abnormal brain in a monster’s head, they have helped a man who already had an abnormal brain to emerge as the monster who will soon be president of the United States.

And now, to cover up their mistake, they are collectively trying to “normalize” him, but I refuse to play along because it can’t be done, and I don’t think the media should try.

Whether you voted for him or not, Donald J. Trump is a shallow, vacuous, narcissistic, misogynistic, xenophobic, racist con man tax evading sexual predator who’s also a pathological liar with dangerous, Fascist-inspired ideas and a probable mental illness. He has admitted to sexual assault and at one time was facing court proceedings related to alleged rape, fraud and bribery.

Did you see "normal" in there anywhere?

He doesn’t know the first thing about government, American or world history or international affairs and doesn’t seem to want to learn, because he thinks he has “a good brain” and already knows more about [ insert subject here ] than the [ insert experts here ] do.

I suspect his “good brain” came off the same shelf that A. B. Normal’s did.

When Barack Obama was elected, I cut ties with an organization whose president declared, “Obama is not my president,” so I vowed never to say that about Trump. He IS going to be my president because he was elected and because this is where I live.

However, I refuse to “normalize” him because he’s not normal, and having him and his daughters in the White House will not be normal, and appointing crazy people to cabinet positions is not normal, and making racism acceptable is not normal, and making a profit from the presidency is not normal.

None of this is normal and it never will be, so please, for the love of whatever god you worship, please stop trying to normalize this man. Instead, we need to watch him very closely, look behind the stupid, childish tweets to what’s really going on, and make sure that everybody else knows what’s happening.

Trump apparently has no world view – at least none that lasts more than a few hours – but his close advisers do and it’s frighteningly un-American. These people have to be stopped. This country is better than this. We are normal.

At least, I thought we were.