Taking the day off for some Guitar Therapy.

How to get rid of the President of the United States, Volume 2

The confetti had barely reached the ground on Donald Trump’s inauguration day when two organizations began plotting his impeachment.  

According to the Washington Post, “The organizers behind the campaign, Free Speech for People and RootsAction, are hinging their case on Trump’s continued ownership of a luxury hotel and golf course business while in office. Ethics experts have warned that his financial holdings could potentially lead to constitutional violations and undermine public faith in his decision-making” while allowing foreign governments to buy favor from the White House.

There have been other impeachment rumors swirling around the White House ever since Trump won the election in November, but it’s too soon to know whether any of them will ever come to fruition. If they do, here is what would happen:

* The U.S. Constitution provides the mechanism to impeach a sitting president as well as a vice president, federal judges and other federal officials. The Constitution sets specific grounds for impeachment that include “treason, bribery and other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

* The Constitution defines treason as follows: “Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.”

* The Constitution does not define bribery, but it is a crime that has long existed in English and American common law. Bribery occurs when someone gives money or gifts to an elected official to influence the official’s behavior in office.

* The charge of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is far less clear. Historically it has been considered to cover misconduct such as perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming and refusal to obey a lawful order. According to the Constitutional Rights Foundation, “offenses by officials also include ordinary crimes, but perhaps with different standards of proof and punishment than for non-officials, on the grounds that more is expected of officials by their oaths of office.”

The impeachment process begins in the House of Representatives and follows several steps:

(1) First, the House Judiciary Committee holds hearings on the issues brought forth and, if necessary, prepares articles of impeachment. These are the charges against the official, basically comparable to an indictment in a criminal court.

(2) If a majority of the committee votes to approve the articles, they are forwarded to the full House for debate and subsequent vote. If a majority of the House votes to impeach the official on one or more articles, the official must then stand trial in the U.S. Senate.

(3) The case is transferred to the Senate to hold hearings -- the "trial." A two-thirds vote of the full Senate is required for the official to be removed from office. If that occurs, the official is automatically removed from office and could be forbidden from holding governmental office again.

It’s important to note that the impeachment process is political in nature, not criminal. Congress has no power to impose criminal penalties on impeached officials, although criminal courts could try to punish officials if they have committed crimes.

In our history, three presidents have been impeached but none has been removed from office.

Andrew Johnson (1868)

Johnson’s impeachment was an outgrowth of a dispute between him and Congress over post-Civil War reconstruction. The House's primary charge was that Johnson violated the Tenure of Office Act by firing Edwin M. Stanton as Secretary of War and replacing him with General Ulysses S. Grant. The charges were not viewed as “high crimes and misdemeanors” worthy of removing Johnson from office.

Richard M. Nixon (1974)

Nixon’s impeachment stemmed from the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up by the president and his staff. Nixon was charged with obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress for defying requests to produce documents. He resigned the presidency before the whole House voted on the articles of impeachment.

Bill Clinton (1998)

Bill Clinton was impeached on two charges – perjury and obstruction of justice – arising out of his extramarital affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and his testimony about the affair during a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against him by Paula Jones. Clinton was subsequently acquitted of these charges by the Senate on February 12, 1999. Two other impeachment articles – a second perjury charge and a charge of abuse of power – failed in the House.

Will Donald J. Trump really become the fourth president to be impeached? Only time will tell. However, on Monday night, he fired an acting attorney general who refused to obey what she deemed to be an unlawful order, bringing back memories of Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973. If he wanted to be impeached, it would be hard for Trump to get off to a better start.

  

The Constitutional Rights Foundation is a non-profit, non-partisan, community-based organization whose mission is to instill in our nation's youth a deeper understanding of citizenship through values expressed in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights and to educate young people to become active and responsible participants in our society.

How to get rid of the President of the United States, Volume 1

The day that Donald Trump took the oath of office and assumed the duties of President of the United States, the campaign to impeach him began, according to the Washington Post. It is based on the belief that Trump was in violation of the U.S. Constitution from Day 1 by failing to divest himself of business properties that could be leveraged by foreign governments to buy favor from the White House.

Most likely it will be a while before anybody really tries to impeach Trump, if they ever do, but impeachment is only one of two ways the president could be removed from office. More on impeachment in shieldWALL tomorrow.

The other way is to argue successfully that he is insane or otherwise incapable of discharging his duties as president. In that case, the 25^th Amendment to the Constitution spells out a somewhat redundant procedure for removing the president and replacing him with his VP.

Under Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment, a president can be removed from office if the vice president and a majority of the cabinet officers – or other such body as Congress may provide – declare in writing that the president is unable to serve. This declaration must be delivered to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives, after which the vice president would immediately assume the office as acting president.

Then the president would have to vacate the office, right?

Not so fast.

If that were to happen, the president could basically appeal and suspend the decision by declaring in writing to the same legislative leaders that he or she suffered no such inability and therefore was fit to reclaim the powers and duties of his office.

But wait! There’s one more step.

If the president appealed, the vice president and his backers would have four days to (wait for it) deliver to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President was indeed unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, no matter what he or she said.

At that point, the dog and pony show would trot on over to Congress, which must then decide once and for all whether the president is competent or not. Congress would have 21 days to make its determination.

A two-thirds vote of both houses would be required to decide that the president was unfit to serve and to turn the job over to the vice president. Otherwise, the president would resume his office and would no doubt tweet something about “the failing Congress” being weak, adding, “I won the vote bigly. Charges against me totally false. Never happened.”

And then, to get rid of him, he would have to be impeached.

Tomorrow: Impeachment, the other white meat

I'd like to know how many of the "pro-lifers" in this photo support the deportation of immigrant children, refuse to accept refugees, support the death penalty as punishment for crimes and oppose euthanasia which allows terminally ill people to end their suffering with dignified, and compassionate death.

Are those not issues that involve someone's "life?"

To white people, whiteness is the American default

I want to make a confession. I hope Steve Bannon is listening.

I’m a white guy who grew up white in white neighborhoods and went to elementary schools that were almost exclusively white. I can remember only one student in my school who was African American. Other than her, my only association with black people during those years was the woman who cleaned our house.

(Why our lower-middle-class family even had a housekeeper is still a mystery to me.)

My introduction to African Americans really began in junior high school when the white schools were consolidated with “the one where the black kids go.” I remember striking up a friendship with a black guy named Mike on the first day of school, and we remained friends throughout high school before going our separate ways.

I later worked in a supermarket with a racially diverse group of college-age clerks, cashiers and “carry out boys,” several of whom were African Americans. One of my best friends from that time, a guy named Phil, was black, although I admit that we didn’t socialize outside of work. I’m still friends with another guy whose name is Greg,

The point I’m trying to make is that I don’t believe I was ever a racist, but when I sit and think about it, I suppose I could have been if I had taken a slightly different path.

I have known some full-blown racists in my lifetime and I never really understood why they were the way they were. I have looked for an explanation and one factor keeps popping up: We take on the views of people around us, so let’s start there.

My parents were good, decent, church-going people. They cared about others and went out of their way to do good things. They were scout leaders and youth group counselors and good friends to their friends. They were not racists.

Still, I remember hearing them use an expression about “[somebody] in the wood pile,” and they had a name for Brazil nuts that I won’t repeat. I suspect they got those sayings from their parents and the people around them, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t pick it up from them, at least for a while. One step in the wrong direction.

When I was still pretty young, my friends and I used to chant “eenie meenie miney mo” to choose up teams for games we were playing, and I’m ashamed to tell you who we caught by the toe back then. So yeah, up to a certain age I did take on the vocabulary of those around me. Take one more step.

Fortunately for me, taking on the words of racists did not evolve into taking on the views. I mean, somewhere along the line I had an awakening if you will, or at least developed awareness that using those words was wrong. I took the path that led away from the views and attitudes that accompanied an unfortunate choice of words. Steps in the right direction.  

The fact that you could walk away from it told me there must be more to racism than just hanging with the wrong crowd, and it had to start a long time before it reached my generation.

A psychologist writing for the Huffington Post explained that racism stems from thinking of oneself as being different from other people. “Racists see others as being less than themselves,” she wrote. “You have to think about where those attitudes began and how they developed. Was it environmental? Was it upbringing? Was the person born that way? So, there’s the age-old debate about nature versus nurture here.”

I get that part. If you grow up in an environment where people think that white people are superior to people of color, you might begin to believe it yourself, and that belief gets reinforced by the social environment you live in, including the schools you attend, your church, your families, your neighbors, and so on.

That further explains the “how” of racism but it still doesn’t answer the question of “why?”

Next, I looked at “It Stops With Me” (ISWM), an anti-racism campaign of the Australian Human Rights Commission, which went a few steps further. ISWM says “it's normal to want to spend time with people that have the same interests, background, culture and language” that we have, which “creates a sense of belonging that is really important.”  They could have added, “…and are the same color.”

ISWM says people by nature are quick to judge, often assigning labels to people which become stereotypes for those of different racial backgrounds. We also tend to blame others for our problems, especially people who look or talk differently than we do, ISWM says.

The downside of all of this is that over time, spending time only with people like ourselves often leads to thinking one group is better than others. To avoid that eventuality and defeat the standard stereotypes, ISWM says, “We should get to know people from different racial backgrounds and find out how much [we] have in common.”

So, to recap, racism begins with the belief that one group is better than another, leads us to hang with people who are alike, judge people who are not in our group and blame them for our problems. This has been perfectly illustrated in the age of Trump, Brexit and a wave of nationalism, where mostly white voters believe that “other people” are taking their jobs, depriving them of their sovereignty, threatening their security and living on government handouts that somehow harm everybody else.

Columnist and author Tom Scocca wrote, “White people don’t like to believe that they practice identity politics. The defining part of being white in America is the assumption that, as a white person, you are a regular, individual human being. Other demographic groups set themselves apart, to pursue their distinctive identities and interests and agendas. Whiteness, to white people, is the American default.”

That still doesn’t tell me why people are racists, and I still don't understand, but it does lead me to one conclusion: White people need to get out more. There seems to be a whole world around us and we’re missing it while huddling together under the Stars and Stripes, singing “God Bless America” and chanting “America First.” The problem is, when you do that, it’s no longer the real America.  

Did you get all that, Steve Bannon?

No, probably not.

*  *  *

Source material:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/10/social-psychology-racism_n_7688910.html

https://itstopswithme.humanrights.gov.au

Trump “finds” his 3,000,000 illegal ballots in 3…2…1…

Heaven help us all.

Alternative President Donald J. Trump has stumbled upon a "voter fraud" app called VoteStand where voters could use Twitter to report election irregularities, such as "machine jammed" or "sister voted absentee but was still in book" or "someone wore shirt with slogan on it inside polling place."

I scrolled through dozens of these tweets today but could not find a single instance of voter fraud. Three things were apparent, however:

(1) There was no way to know if any of these tweets was true. They were just what someone claimed to have seen during the election. Curiously, people using the app were not required to report their name, only the town in which they voted. In this era of alternative facts and fake news, this could be real...or not.

(2) Even if you accept that every one of them was true, none that I read indicated that anyone voted illegally. They were just reports of irregularities that did not involve the actual casting of ballots.

(3) And, even if you assume that some people did vote illegally, there was no indication of which candidate they voted for.

Nevertheless, I’m predicting that Donald “I Could Never Have Lost the Popular Vote” Trump will come out with a report in a day or so that says more than 3,000,000 illegal votes were cast and every single one of them went to Hillary.

This morning, he tweeted this:

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump  Look forward to seeing final results of VoteStand. Gregg Phillips and crew say at least 3,000,000 votes were illegal. We must do better!

Phillips, a former Health and Human Services Commission executive from Texas and the founder of VoteStand, has declined to provide proof to the media of illegal voting, saying he will instead "release all methodologies, data and analysis directly to the public." My bet is, he'll release some kind of report to Trump who will then tweet it to the entire world.

Meanwhile, the following is a random sample of consecutive tweets copied directly from VoteStand’s Twitter account an hour or so ago (note the absence of names). You can judge for yourself what it shows.

North Bethesda, MD: Democrat sample ballots visible on check-in table.

Sumner, IA: Took the paper ballot machine three times to read my ballot today in Iowa. Third time was the charm. Hope it worked.

Massapequa Park, NY: Voter finds sister's name in registry not reflected as having voted absentee despite ballot already being cast.

Los Angeles, CA: "The place where I voted in the primaries did not have my name in the voter book this time. Had to vote provisional."

Tucson, AZ: "Tucson poll workers telling a Hispanic woman (my wife) that she would be deported if she voted for Trump."

Saint Petersburg, FL: Ballot containers arrived without proper serial numbers, packaging.

Virginia Beach, VA: Poll workers reportedly told voter they had neglected to ask for #VoterID all morning when asking why she wasn't carded.

Euclid, OH: "Woman signing poll book caught that her 15 year old son had ended up in the book."

Philadelphia, PA: "WARD 36 district 48 electioneering right outside of the location."

Troy, NY: Optical ballot scanner jammed on voter's ballot.

New York, NY: "Woman handing out information in the polling station line for 'alternative candidates'." #Electioneering

Oakland, CA: Voter asked if she was a @realDonaldTrump supporter after specifically requesting an English "I Voted" sticker. None available.

Rockville, MD: Poll worker mistake leads voter to cast a provisional ballot.

Santa Monica, CA: "Multiple people" seen wearing partisan clothing, accessories in polling place.

Chicago, IL: Voter tells clerk they've ID'd the wrong voter in registry. "He passed away months ago."

Arlington, TX: "Precinct 1627. Lady helping with turning in ballot was looking at everyone's ballot, even if they didn't ask for help."

San Lorenzo, CA: Voter demands that optical scanner be fixed on site, refuses to leave ballot in a bag for later counting.

And on and on and on it goes…

Who knew that dead voters were all Democrats?

If you work in an office or anywhere there are other people around, I suggest you start a company pool. Collect $5 from every worker and have them select the date on which Alternative President Donald Trump stops claiming he won the popular vote.

Someone might get lucky soon and win a pot of money, but there is also a risk that he will never stop saying that at least once a day and no one will ever win the cash.

Just yesterday – in Day 6 of his presidency – Trump told ABC News that dead people, illegal aliens and dual registrants kept him from beating Hillary Clinton in the popular vote count. I can’t tell if he truly believes this or not, but it makes him look crazy all the same.

Here’s part of the interview:

TRUMP: You have people who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states—you have people registered in two states. They’re registered in New York and in New Jersey, and they vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion.

DAVID MUIR of ABC News: When you say "in your opinion" and "millions of illegal votes," that is something that is extremely fundamental to our functioning democracy, a fair and free election. Now, what you have presented so far has been debunked. It has been called false…

TRUMP: Take a look at the Pew reports…

MUIR: I called the author of the Pew report last night and he told me that they found no evidence of voter fraud.

TRUMP: Really? Then why did he write the report?

MUIR: He said, "No evidence of voter fraud."

TRUMP: Excuse me. Then why did he write the report? He’s groveling. You know, I always talk about the reporters that grovel when they want to write something that you want to hear but not necessarily millions of people want to hear, or have to hear.

Does that sound like someone who is fully in command of his faculties?

If you’re still not convinced, here’s the craziest part:

TRUMP: I will say this – of those votes cast, none of them come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of them come to me. But when you look at the people that are registered, dead, illegal, and two states, and some cases maybe three states? We have a lot to look into.

*   *   *

Let that sink in for a minute... There is widespread voter fraud in Trump’s America – maybe as many as five million illegal voters – and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON. What are the odds?

To put this whole dead voter nonsense into perspective, my mother died in 2004 in West Virginia and no one from my family called the County Clerk’s office to report it. A month later, however, her death certificate arrived at the elections office and she was purged from the voter rolls. No one ever tried to vote using my dead mother’s name. Even if that hadn’t happened, she would have been purged after missing two presidential elections.

I lived in Pennsylvania 13 years ago and when I moved, I didn’t call the Board of Elections, so for a short period of time I may have been registered in more than one state. Under the Pennsylvania Voter Registration Act, however, I would have automatically become “inactive” on the registration list if I didn't vote for five consecutive years, and purged completely if I didn’t vote in either of the next two Federal Elections. I did neither.

Before that, I lived in Maryland, which dropped me as a voter some time after I moved. They couldn't say exactly when, but if that hadn't happened, they would have purged my name automatically after I failed to vote in four presidential elections. I called there today and, guess what? I was no longer registered to vote in Maryland.

I will admit that theoretically, in 2008, I might have been able to vote in West Virginia, driven up to Butler County, Pa., and tried to vote there and then slid on over to Washington County, Md., and attempted to vote a third time. It wouldn’t have worked, however, because if I recall correctly, they ask for your address when you vote to make sure you're in the right precinct, and the people who bought our houses were living at our previous addresses.

It is a fact that between the years 2004 and 2008, there were some dead voters who cast ballots in Maryland, according to the watchdog group Election Integrity. Total number of dead voters statewide during those five years: 2.

I don’t know what Trump is trying to accomplish with this latest crusade about voter fraud but two possibilities come to mind. One is that his narcissistic personality disorder will never allow him to accept that he received fewer votes than Crooked Hillary Clinton.

The second, more ominous possibility, is that he will use an “investigation” into voter fraud as an excuse to push more stringent voter ID laws in battleground states so that by the time he’s up for re-election, there won’t be enough African American, Latino or student voters left to keep blue states blue.

Most likely, both possibilities are true.

A letter to the people who may have forgotten who they represent

January 24, 2017

Dear Senator Somebody and Congressman Whoever:

My wife and I are living in fear every day, and we’re looking to you for help.

A little background: People who are not wealthy have to make financial decisions in their lives based on established norms. For example, if I choose to retire or am otherwise unable to work, would I be able to afford food, lodging, heat and light, medications to treat my illnesses and health insurance to cover my medical care?

These are basic necessities, not extravagances. This scenario does not consider money for vacations, luxury purchases, major home repairs or even new cars to replace ones I currently own that are 14 and 18 years old, respectively.

My wife and I made such decisions based on these established norms:

* In retirement, we would receive Social Security benefits that we had been paying to the government all of our working lives. This was our money that was promised to us when we reached the age of eligibility, and it certainly seemed reasonable to factor it into our budget.

* At age 65, we would each be eligible for Medicare to cover our medical expenses. Until that time, my wife, who is 63, would be eligible for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act by paying a reasonable premium subsidized by the federal government.

We were comfortable with this lifestyle and willing to sacrifice vacations, new cars and expensive extras for the relative safety and security of our simple lives. We didn’t need to be wealthy to be happy.

Now we live in fear because the Republican-controlled Congress wants to take away our health insurance under the ACA and, reportedly, is targeting our Medicare and Social Security benefits as well. 

How can you, as a human being, allow this to happen to honest, decent, law-abiding citizens whose only “crimes” are living to a certain age and not being in perfect health?

Why would you or any member of Congress who expects to ever be re-elected want to destroy the lives of tens of millions of Americans who were told they could depend on Social Security and Medicare in their retirement years?

Do you think we sent you to Congress to take away our livelihood? Is your party platform really more important to you than what’s good for your country or the people who live in it? Are you that deep in the pockets of your special interest donors or do you just not care?

I sincerely implore you to think beyond yourself and the greedy agenda of Congressional Leadership and vote your conscience for the people who put you in office. Do not vote to repeal the ACA without a suitable replacement and do not take Medicare and Social Security away from the people who earned it and who depend on it for their very lives.

Show us you haven't forgotten how representative government works.

Sincerely,

Scott Shields

Citizen and voter

Lies, falsehoods and things that are not true

Whenever feasible, shieldWALL will attempt to keep track of the most obvious lies emanating from the Trump administration. Day 2 on Saturday proved to be a gold mine for a start.

Day 2 - Saturday, January 21, 2017

Donald Trump

1.  A million and a half people attended my inauguration. (Truth: Probably closer to 250,000 and not more than 600,000.)
2. The media lied when it claimed there was a feud between me and the U.S. intelligence agencies but “the exact opposite” was true. (Trump’s own Twitter history shows this to be a lie.)
3. TV ratings for the inauguration were millions more than for Obama. (This is not true for Obama in 2009 or even for Reagan in 1981.)
4. The rain didn’t fall during my speech but started when I was finished. (The opposite is true; amazingly he even lies about rain.

Sean Spicer

1. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period – both in person and around the globe.” (It was not even close.)
2. Washington’s Metro system had greater ridership than it did for Obama’s 2013 inauguration.  (His numbers were all incorrect and there were more for Obama.)
3. “This was the first time in our nation’s history that floor coverings have been used to protect the grass on the Mall. That had the effect of highlighting any areas where people were not standing, while in years past the grass eliminated this visual.” (Not true; ground covering was also used in 2013.)
4. Fencing and magnetometers kept crowd away from certain areas, unlike in past years. (False. The Secret Service said security measures were largely unchanged this year.)

I don’t know what 'truth' is any more

Throughout his campaign, Donald Trump told hundreds if not thousands of lies and passed them off as truth. Then, when Hillary Clinton told the truth, he wrote her off as a liar. At first it was pretty easy to tell the lies from the truth because we had fact checkers to tell us what was real.

Soon, however, the Trump campaign got the idea to claim that fact checkers were liars, too, and then Trump surrogate Scottie Nell Hughes made her famous statement that “there are no facts” any longer. The implication of that statement was clear: If there are no facts, we don’t need fact checkers, so pay no attention to what they say.

That evolved into “fake news” – which is another whole story in and of itself – and now we have advanced to the latest and greatest administration spin – the concept of “alternative facts.”

Did you think you saw a small crowd at the inauguration? Did you see it with your own eyes? No, sorry, but you didn’t see that. What you saw was an alternative fact.

Did Press Secretary Sean Spicer lie about the crowd being “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration?” No, he didn’t lie about that. He just used an alternative fact.

Did the administration lie about ridership on the Metro being greater than any previous inauguration, when it really wasn’t? Not a lie. Alternative fact.

The size of the women’s marches? Alternative facts.

Attendance at the Thursday night concert? Alternative fact.

How about those photographs of the inauguration that show vast areas in front of the capitol with few if any people, unlike past inaugurations where those areas were completely filled? Alternative facts.

Spicer “explained” that there was a white covering on the Mall to protect the grass, which “accentuated empty spaces” in photos of the crowd, but he still claimed there were more people there. (Apparently, they were all white people dressed in all white clothing that blended into the white tarps and made them invisible.)  Or else it was an alternative fact.

On Saturday, Trump met with the CIA, which he inexplicably believed was part of the military. He patted himself on the back a few times, told how many times he was on the cover of Time Magazine and went on his way after telling a few lies of his own. He claimed that his crowd “looked like a million, a million and a half people.”

To be fair, maybe it did look that way to the world’s biggest narcissist, but best estimates put the crowd at 250,000. They had almost that many protesters in New York, and many more than that in Los Angeles…but those are only alternative facts.  

Even our vice president had to lie when he introduced Trump to the CIA. “I’ve never met anyone who is a greater strategic thinker,” Mike Pence said. That’s either a lie or Pence needs to meet more people. I doubt that’s true of a man who can’t hold a thought long enough to finish a sentence, and who can’t advocate a policy position for more than one day at a time.  

Now, today, I’m reading tweets and news stories and Facebook posts from both sides of the divide and I still don’t know what’s true.

On Saturday, I heard someone proudly say that women were marching and demonstrating on all seven continents. I thought she misspoke and jokingly said I was waiting to see footage of the march in Antarctica. Lo and behold, what pops up but a photo of men and women on a boat holding anti-Trump signs, supposedly in the waters off Antarctica.

Was that real or not? I don’t know. How would I know?

I read a tweet, supposedly from Trump, that everyone who receives anything from the federal government is going to be drug tested. That would include the millions of us on Medicare and Social Security and food stamp recipients, for example, but also every member of Congress, all of Trump’s appointees, every soldier and every government employee. Could that be true?

It’s not likely, but how would you know? The question isn’t how you could ever expect to accomplish something like that; the question is did Trump actually say it? I don’t know.   

Then I read that Trump told the CIA he wants to use nukes against ISIS. I watched his speech to them twice and I never heard him say that. Did I miss it? Was it before the actual speech began or in the corridor on his way out? Did he even say this? Is it true or not? I. Don’t. Know.

In fact, I don’t know who to believe about anything now. How can we have a president who may never tell the truth again, backed up by a Press Secretary who lies openly and a spokesperson, Kellyanne Conjob, who says lies are actually “alternative facts?” How can we rely on the news media who today called Spicer’s lies “falsehoods” and misleading statements instead of what they really were.

I no longer know what constitutes “truth.” I don’t even know if truth still exists. Maybe in this alternative reality, with our alternative president and his alternative staff, all we have left is alternative facts.

Who is left to tell us what is really true?

Advance copy of Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address

Wow! What a crowd! Can you believe this crowd? Is this a record? This has to be a record. I’m hearing there are seventy million people here. Do I get the best crowds or what?

(Applause break – allow 3 minutes)

Last night we had a great concert over at the, uh, Lincoln statue thingie. Country star Keith Toby was there. I love Keith. Isn’t he great? I have all of his cassette tapes. We also had “Three Back Doors,” one of Melania’s favorites. One of the highlights, we had the winners of the Fuggnuckle, Arkansas, “You’ve Got Talent” competition, Clete and Wanda DePlorable and their singing dog, Basket. Some are saying it was the best concert ever.

As you know I just took the oath of office on a treasured family Bible that I bought yesterday at Bibles ‘r Us, and that makes me officially the President in Chief of the United States. Isn’t that great? So great. When I announced I was running for president nobody gave me a chance. The polls were against me. The news media was against me. It was all rigged against me, but now we know that was all fake news.

I beat 17 other Republicans including Lyin’ Ted Cruz, Low-Energy Jeb Bush, Little Marco, Pathological Ben Carson, Ferret Face Fiorina and Lonely Lindsay Graham by winning every primary by a yuge number of votes. I beat them all and I beat them all bigly.

Then I ran against Crooked Hillary and nobody gave me a chance against her, either, but I won in a gigantic landslide. I got the highest number of votes in the history of voting when you take out all of the voter fraud plus California. I could have won bigger if I wanted to. That I can tell you.

Now I’m the president and I plan to get started running the country from Trump Tower first thing Monday, right after I finish with my morning tweets.

You know what we’re going to do, right? We’re going to build that wall and Mexico will either pay for it now, reimburse us sooner, reimburse us later or tell us where we can hang our hat. We’ll have a plan for that later.

We’re going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something much better. We’re going to have insurance for everybody… but it won’t be universal health care. We’ll have a plan for that later, too.

We’re going to defeat ISIS because we’ll have the best generals. They’ll have a plan for that later.

We’re going to take credit for bringing back thousands of jobs that were already coming here. We’re extorting that from company presidents and CEOs as we speak.

And we’re going to make American great again. We’ll have a plan for that later as well.

Well, it looks like that’s all we have time for today. I never like to read anything longer than one page, so I’m going to have to cut it off right here. If there’s anything else I think you need to know, I’ll tweet it to you since the news media has been barred from ever covering me again.

So thanks again to my supporters, including all of the people who voted for me because they mistakenly thought I was telling the truth, my partner James Comey, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, my best bro’ "Putie" and the entire staff over at the Moscow Ritz Carlton who never admitted that anybody rained on my parade. You people were golden, I’m telling you. The check to pay for your continued silence is in the mail.

If Trump can claim all new jobs, Obama should get credit for decline in blimp accidents

To avoid being swept up in a Donald Trump Twitter storm, companies are preemptively (or retroactively) announcing U.S. job creation plans. They’re afraid that Trump will include their name in a negative tweet, spawning a public relations crisis and forcing their stock price into the toilet.

Seriously, friends, is extortion the best way to “make America great again?”

Just recently, Trump went after Toyota and Ford for making cars in Mexico, GM for not being American enough, Boeing and Lockheed for the cost of airplanes and drug companies for high prices. In virtually every case, the company’s stock price dropped like an anvil off the roof, costing the company millions or billions in market value.

That’s why companies are coming out of the woodwork now to announce positive jobs news to ward off a Twitter attack, and Trump is taking credit for all of it. The problem is, most of these announcements were originally made months or years ago.

For example:

* GM is promising 1,500 jobs, an announcement that actually dates back to 2014.

* Walmart is throwing in 10,000 jobs, but wait…this is standard yearly procedure for a company that also announced it has closed 269 under-performing stores and cut thousands of jobs.

* Hyundai vaguely promises “thousands” and Bayer said it would keep 9,000 jobs and add 3,000, but only if the government approves its merger with Monsanto.

* Sprint's 50,000 jobs were part of a previously announced commitment by its parent company to expand business in the U.S. It was not a deal made with Trump.

It’s not exactly “fake news,” as Trump likes to say, but neither is it the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. These announcements would never stand up in court.

It makes me think that President Obama should take to Twitter during his final two days in office and take credit for things that happened during his administration that he had nothing to do with. Here are some suggestions:

“World War II is still over thanks to my generals. Proof that our policies worked.”

“No outbreaks of polio since Obama elected. Record numbers cured.”

“Alaska and Hawaii excel as states, thanks to my decision to let them stay.”

“Population hits all-time high because of birth of new babies.”

“Sam’s Garage in Bugknuckle, Ark. adds second mechanic. Area’s jobs growth soaring.”

“Rate of horrific dirigible disasters in New Jersey drops dramatically.”

 “Sinking of the Titanic a thing of the past thanks to melting polar icebergs.”

“Cubs finally win World Series, thank Obama for being from Chicago.”

“After 8 years, sky is still blue and water is still wet.”

Somebody shook a tree and three stories fell out

I was searching for my next subject this week when three stories came across the Facebook news feed and basically wrote the essay for me.

* First, I read that the Ringling Bros. circus is closing down after more than 100 years in operation.

* Next, someone posted a photo of a sad looking dog and asked if I would protect it from harm.

 

* And finally, today, I see that a gorilla born in a zoo has died after 60 years in captivity.

Let me say first of all that I love animals. I care more for animals than for most of the people I have met in my lifetime. No animal has ever lied to me, cheated me, stolen from me, insulted me, defrauded me, discriminated against me or my friends, dumped me, physically or verbally abused me or threatened me with a knife…like some people I know.

I don’t hunt or fish because I couldn’t kill anything that runs in a forest or swims in a lake. I admit I have gone to zoos in both Pittsburgh and Washington but I didn’t like it, even though the animals seemed to have something resembling a natural habitat.

I don’t remember ever going to a circus.

I happily gave away a fish tank that cost a thousand dollars. When we owned it, I felt sorry for the fish. (I don’t believe a fake ceramic shipwreck or plastic plants remind tropical fish of home.) I can’t stand to see those colorful bettas swimming around in a glass not big enough for a good shot of whiskey, and I won’t go into a pet shop because I don’t like seeing animals in cages.     

I almost drove off a cliff once trying to avoid hitting an opossum that was frozen in the middle of the road. Sadly, I ran over it anyway.

Finally, I WILL NOT watch that ASPCA commercial about abused animals that comes on TV late at night and seems to last for 10 minutes. I switch the channel until I’m sure it’s gone off.  

You may be wondering what all this has to do with those three stories I mentioned up top. Well, to me, all of it (except the opossum) constitutes the abuse of animals that didn’t ask to be killed for sport or captured and put on display for our amusement. I assume that most of them would prefer living out their lives in their natural environment.

Ringling Brothers came under fire for years over its treatment of animals. The Humane Society called it unacceptable "to cart wild animals from city to city and have them perform silly yet coercive stunts.” After mounting criticism from other animal rights groups, Ringling eventually phased out its elephant acts entirely.

In Ohio, the first gorilla born in a zoo and the matriarch of the Columbus Zoo’s famous gorilla family, died in her sleep at 60 years of age. “Colo” was the oldest gorilla on record and exceeded her normal life expectancy by more than two decades. The story said Colo “celebrated” her historic 60th birthday surrounded by thousands of fans and with birthday wishes coming from around the world. I just had to wonder how she liked spending six decades in captivity, or if she even cared. I guess none of her “fans” ever bothered to ask.

I suppose this commentary will offend some people and make some people mad, especially hunters, fishermen, zoo and circus lovers and everyone who’s ever been to Sea World. (Don’t even get me started on Shamu.)

But don’t despair. It’s only my opinion. You might not like it or agree with it, but I’m not trying to change your mind and you're not likely to change mine, either. I just feel better for having written it and for having the freedom to publish it in a blog for others to read…

…freedom that captive animals never had.

How can you run the country when your pants are on fire?

I remember telling my young daughters they should always tell the truth. It was one of those father-daughter exchanges where wisdom is passed along from one generation to the next. “One of the worst things you can ever do is lie,” I remember saying, “because once you become known as a liar, no one will ever know if what you’re saying is true.”

Donald Trump passed that threshold more than a year ago. He has told hundreds of lies – possibly thousands – since starting his campaign for president and he continues to lie on an almost daily basis. There appears to be no end to his lies. Therefore, I don’t think I’ll be able to believe anything he says ever again.

Trump says, “We’re building a wall. Mexico will pay for it.”  I’ll believe that when I see it.

“I have a plan to defeat ISIS.” Oh really? Did it come to you in military school? Or maybe while you were defrauding students at your fake university, filing bankruptcy papers for a failed casino or grabbing someone’s pussy?”   

And just today, “Insurance for everybody.” Oh, right. OK. Have you run this past Paul Ryan yet?

It isn’t just the fact that he lies that concerns me. All politicians lie, I believe, or at least spin the truth their way. I worked in public relations for 20 years so I know something about spin. What troubles me is how he can lie about something that is so easily fact-checked and doesn’t seem to care. His campaign has come out against fact checking and even has its own definition of “facts.”   

The classic example was his complaint about the debate schedule last fall:

“I’ll tell you what I don’t like. It’s against two NFL games. I got a letter from the NFL saying, ‘This is ridiculous.’”  All it took was one phone call to the NFL to determine that no such letter was ever sent.

 I could go on and on indefinitely, but here, in no particular order, are some of my favorites:

“Americans don't care at all” about his tax returns.

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

“There was serious voter fraud in [insert name of state here].”

“I won the second debate with Hillary Clinton in a landslide in every poll."

"Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape they've ever been in before. Ever. Ever. Ever."

“Ted Cruz’s father was with Lee Harvey Oswald before the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.”

“All the dress shops in DC are sold out” for his inauguration.

“We’ve sent people to Hawaii to check on Obama’s birth certificate and you can’t believe what they’re finding.”

“I don't know anything about David Duke."

“Crime statistics show blacks kill 81 percent of white homicide victims.”

“I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering" as the World Trade Center collapsed.

“The Mexican government ... they send the bad ones over.”

“The people that went to school with (Barack Obama), they never saw him, they don't know who he is.”

Trump winery is the “largest winery on the East Coast.” 

“Upstate New York I poll higher than anybody ever.”

In addition, Trump keeps taking credit for jobs he didn’t create (multiple lies).

Trump “was not aware” that Intelligence chiefs had briefed him on Russia’s alleged blackmail dossier, even though FBI Director Comey met with him face-to-face.

And finally, John Lewis, an American hero and veteran of more than 50 years of dedication to the cause of civil rights, is all “talk talk talk and no action. Sad.”

Of course, none of those quotes above is true, and there are far too many more to list here. (Just google “Trump’s lies” for numerous lists.) The point is, when Donald Trump is president, he will have daily responsibilities that even he can’t fathom until he actually sits in the Big Boy Chair.

He’ll be in a position where he must talk to the American people about the state of the country, the economy, jobs, taxes, world events, international affairs, wars, climate change, our allies, our enemies, nuclear weapons, Russian spying and myriad other pressing issues facing this nation of ours…

...and I won’t believe a single word he says.

On his best day, Donald Trump isn’t fit to hold John Lewis’s coat

Congressman John Lewis should spend more time on fixing and helping his district, which is in horrible shape and falling apart (not to mention crime infested) rather than falsely complaining about the election results. All talk, talk, talk - no action or results. Sad! – Tweet from Donald J. Trump, January 14, 2017

This installment of the shieldWALL will be shorter than most. I just want to say “out loud” that in my opinion, Congressman John Lewis is 20 times the American that our alt-President is and 100 times the man.

Insulting him during a Twitter rant is one of the worst things Trump has done. It also shows that Trump knows nothing about the country he is about to lead.

John Lewis has devoted a lifetime to the cause of civil rights. He was a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington, and he was on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, when 600 peaceful protesters were savagely beaten by police while marching to win voting rights in the state.

John Lewis is an American hero. He has been fighting for civil rights for more than 50 years, and even today, while the Republican Party is inventing ways to disenfranchise as many African American voters as possible, John Lewis is still defending the right of all Americans to vote.

By comparison, Donald Trump’s claim to fame is inheriting millions from his father and using it to build a shady financial empire while making and losing a fortune several times over. Besides that, if anybody is guilty of “talk, talk, talk,” it would be him.

Sadly, I can’t stop Donald Trump from becoming our president on Friday, but I can offer him some advice: Put down the blackberry and open a few books. Try to learn a little history about this country where we live before taking a seat in its most important chair.

And for heaven’s sake stop mocking our American heroes. They’re the people who actually can make this country great.

Media’s down one score in First Amendment Bowl

Newt Gingrich, that standard bearer for high moral values in America, thinks alt-President Donald Trump should “suspend” CNN reporter Jim Acosta, who had the courage to go toe-to-toe with Trump during a press conference on January 11.

Sean Spicer, incoming press secretary, was happy to pile on, claiming that Acosta verbally attacked the President of the United States.

I believe it’s time for the news media to band together and stand up to the incoming president before it’s too late. The media is already down one score in this battle for the First Amendment and can’t afford to get further behind an obnoxious bully standing behind the world’s greatest bully pulpit.

"In baseball, hockey, basketball, if certain players behave inappropriately, you kick them out of the game," Gingrich told his errand boy Sean Hannity on the Fox News Channel. "I think the way Acosta behaved for CNN, have him suspended for 60 days. Send someone else," Gingrich said.

Other reporters should be sent a message there are limits, he continued. "When you get beyond those limits, you ain't going to be there. They shouldn't put up with this. It's bad for the country."

First off, are you freakin’ kidding me? For the past year and a half, Donald J. Trump has verbally assaulted virtually anybody within the sound of his voice. That includes Mexicans, Muslims, African Americans, women, members of the military, a Gold Star mother, the news media, Congress, the intelligence community, peaceful protesters, Wall Street, liberals, Democrats, President Obama, Michelle Obama, anyone named Clinton and the 17 other Republicans who ran for president.

And he has the balls to be offended now when someone does it to him?

Second, here’s some breaking news for Sean Spicer – Trump is not the President of the United States for another five days.

If you saw the news conference, you know that Trump opened up by calling out CNN for reporting “fake news,” and then refused to recognize Acosta when he tried to ask a question. This is setting a dangerous precedent under which Trump will never have to answer a question he doesn’t like. He’ll just “suspend” reporters one at a time until there is no one left to make him accountable for the decisions he makes as president.

He’s not even in office yet and Trump is already taking the First Amendment and grinding it up under his heel, and the worst part is, the media is letting him get away with it. For my money, I don’t know why the rest of the reporters in the room didn’t get up and walk out the second that Trump shook his finger in Acosta’s face and said, “I’m not going to give you a question.”

Trump is nothing if not a creation of the news media. He’s the monster to their Dr. Frankenstein. They built him in the lab during the long campaign by giving him hours of free air time to ramble on at rallies unedited and uncut, and then appeared shocked when their monster got loose and started pillaging the countryside and killing sheep.

I’d suggest the reporters who cover Trump need to get organized, find a way to cover each other’s backs and stop trying to “normalize” the alt-president. He may love to discredit the media, but he’d be nothing without them. The reporters who cover the White House are going to have to stand together or they are all going to fall separately until there is nothing left but Twitter rants from Trump’s golden realm.

A strategy so simple it seemed stupid…until it worked

Somewhere in the blinding goldness of Trump Tower, sometime in the last few years, someone sat down and devised a plan to make a crazy man the next president of the United States.

I don’t know who, specifically, came up with the strategy, but it was impeccable in its simplicity. It was built on two fundamental tenets:

(1)  If you look like a buffoon while saying something outrageous every day you will dominate the 24-hour news cycle, and

(2)  If you immediately and successfully discredit the news media as being dishonest, you can eliminate the only entity that could challenge you and hold you to account for your blathering nonsense.

In other words, if there was no snow, you wouldn’t need a snowplow. If there were no roadblocks, you could travel the open road. If there was no one to say, with credibility, that “you can’t do that,” then you could do that whenever you wanted, and the more you did it, the more they’d say you couldn’t, and that meant you'd get even more publicity for doing it and for being “unconventional” at a time when the conventional was wildly unpopular.

You could lie and get away with it because when the other party called you a liar it was “just politics,” and when the media called you a liar, you just turned it around and said it was the media that was telling the lies. Before they could go to air or print with reality, you could use the immediacy of Twitter to distort the facts your way. That’s called “getting ahead of the story” and Trump (or somebody) found a way to use it to perfection. 

It was a plan so simple that it appeared stupid at first, which proved to be the perfect way to play to the stupidity of the disaffected American electorate.

Too harsh?

I don’t think so. You can call it what you want – voter apathy, disinterest, laziness or confusion – but in my book, going to the voting booth unprepared and electing an unstable narcissist to the most powerful job in the world can only be described as stupidity.   

As I have stated here several times, in my opinion, Donald J. Trump is a shallow, childish, 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. What part of that screams out “leader of the free world?”

He is also one week from becoming our next president, and if he hasn’t done anything yet to scare the living hell out of you then you really are stupid or you haven’t been paying attention. Just this week, he continued down a path where he questions the loyalty, competence and credibility of the American intelligence agencies while blindly accepting any statement that comes out of Russia as the absolute truth.

This is Russia, where you disagree with the government and you disappear. Forever.

At the same time, he held a press conference that wasn’t really a press conference because he started off by declaring that the latest news is “fake news” and is therefore not to be trusted or worthy of comment (see tenet #2 above). The event was more accurately a platform for his lawyer to tell us how he is going to separate himself from his business empire without actually separating himself from his business empire.

To top it off, with millions of lawyers in America, he trotted out one who works for the “Russia Law Firm of the Year" for 2016. Are you kidding me? He’s rubbing our noses in Russian excrement.

The campaign is now almost complete. Trump is almost the president of the United States and his basket of deplorable cabinet selections has almost been confirmed and the puppet strings that Russia tied on him years ago are still firmly in place.

But none of that matters any longer because in one week we’ll be living in Trump World, where real is fake and fake is real, lies are truth and truth is lies, down is up and up is…well, there really is no “up” that I can see unless someone finds a way to wake us up from this really bad dream.

Living fat and happy (pass the donuts please)

According to multiple internet sources, West Virginia ranks second in the nation in obesity. That’s second from the bottom – not the second best. We’re also in the bottom 10 on the list of healthiest states.

I can’t speak for the rest of West Virginia, but in Fairmont, that shouldn’t come as a shock. Go into a Fairmont supermarket and try to find low-fat products or any of a number of other healthy foods. I wish you the best of luck.

Computers in most retail stores allow them to keep a running inventory and re-stock the products that their customers buy most. Apparently, either the stores are inexplicably ignoring customer demand or the population of Fairmont is happily overweight, because the choices for healthy products are severely limited.

My wife and I moved here from the greater Pittsburgh area. In addition to a wide variety of food and grocery products, our Giant Eagle supermarket there had a restaurant, dry cleaner, post office, bank, full-service deli, sushi bar, florist and day care center with cable TV all in one place. If it had offered beds, we could have lived there.

When we moved back here 12 years ago, there was talk of a “renaissance” taking place in Fairmont. We didn’t realize we’d have to re-live the Dark Ages first.

We didn’t expect to find Bloomingdale’s here or have breakfast at Tiffany’s, but is one decent supermarket too much to ask? I do the grocery shopping and I have to bounce back and forth between Shop ’n Save and Food Lion because neither store sells everything I want. Fortunately, they’re only a mile or two apart.

Some people I know shop at Walmart for groceries, but I refuse to do that. I hate everything about Walmart, the way it comes into a town and kills off all the local businesses, so I only go there if it’s absolutely critical.

I read the local paper every day and it amuses me that our local leaders are always talking about Fairmont’s “growth.” If watching the banks play musical chairs with abandoned buildings qualifies as growth, then I guess we’re growing.

We ARE getting some new hospital facilities out by the connector, presumably to treat all of us who are grossly overweight. Meanwhile, we are eagerly awaiting the construction of our first Sheetz convenience store and celebrating the opening of a brand new donut shop.

Yeah, Sheetz sandwiches and donuts… that’s bound to help with our obesity problem.

If it walks like a Russian and hacks like a Russian…

I can’t get past this whole Russia business.

I mean, it’s not bad enough that every U.S. intelligence agency says the Russians interfered in our presidential election, but now it comes out that the Russians may have been dangling blackmail-ready info over Trump’s head for months while communicating with him and/or his team of advisers.

CNN, among others, reported yesterday that both President Obama and alt-President Trump have been briefed on this damaging new report, but like virtually everything else involving Russia, Trump refuses to acknowledge that any of it is true.

First he sent out his designated truth manipulator Kellyanne Conjob to claim that Trump “was not aware of” the latest briefing. What does that even mean? Did he get the briefing but sleep through it? Did he ignore it because he was too busy tweeting about Meryl Streep? Or was he unable to read it because was he blinded by the glare from all of those gold furnishings inside the Tower of Trump?

Later, he shot out a tweet claiming he was the victim of a political witch hunt (and he has the perfect witch to prove it), and then today during his fake news conference he said it was all fake news. To make matters worse, his confirmation of this fake-ness came from…wait for it…the Russians themselves.

“Vat? You tink dat vee interfereski in ‘lexshun? Nyet!”  

That may sound funny but it’s no joke. As loyal, patriotic, tax-paying American citizens we have a right to know why the alt-president of the United States – just 9 days from his inauguration – refuses to believe what his own intelligence agencies are telling him but absolutely believes what he hears from a known U.S. adversary that has no obligation or motivation to tell him the truth.

Seriously, he has been given a mountain of evidence that Russia is the perpetrator of this crime. Did he really expect them to come out today and admit what they’ve done to help get him elected? When did Vladimir Putin become the teller of truth?

And as for Trump himself, well, he hasn’t told the truth since the day he descended the golden escalator. I didn’t believe him then and I don’t believe him now. I don’t know how long his presidency will last, but frankly, two hours will be too long for me.

I’m not in the intelligence business, but I know one thing: If it looks like a Russian and hacks like a Russian, it’s probably a Russian. I’d suggest to Trump that he either get ahead of this with some “true truth” or get out while he can. This is likely to get worse before it gets better, and I don’t think it will end well for him.

For some people, the line is always busy

I live in a small town in West Virginia, population around 19,000. It’s not New York or Washington. It’s not even Peoria or Pocatello or Kalamazoo. We had a large glass factory once but it closed in 1982, and several coal mines have also closed. As far as commerce is concerned, Walmart is the big attraction.

In other words, there’s not a whole lot going on here day to day, so it makes me wonder: Why are people always talking on the phone?

It’s against the law in West Virginia to talk or text on a mobile phone while driving a car, although hands-free devices are allowed. It became a primary offense in 2013, meaning cops can pull you over for doing it and give you a ticket. Before that, they could only cite you if you were caught while doing something else, like driving your car into a tree or over a cliff.

Yesterday afternoon, I was almost run over in the Walmart parking lot by a woman driving a car, backing blindly out of a parking space and talking on the phone. After she almost hit me, she smiled, mouthed the word “sorry” and kept right on talking as she drove away.

BREAKING NEWS: People are not obeying this law.

Before this new law took effect, I used to walk three miles a day. Sometimes I’d play a little game. I’d count 20 cars driving past me me on the street and mentally record how many of the drivers were talking on the phone. Want to guess what I observed?

(Waiting…)

I observed that approximately one of every five drivers who passed me on the street was talking on a mobile phone. That’s 20% or four of every 20. It didn’t matter what time of day I took my walk. This was happening in the morning, afternoon and evening, weekdays and weekends all the same, on Main Street and in residential neighborhoods.

Once, while walking along in broad daylight on a sunny day, I had to jump into my neighbor’s yard to avoid being hit from behind by a woman in a white SUV who was so busy talking on the phone she didn’t even see me. Never did.

So again I wonder: Who is everybody talking to?

I know that some people have jobs where 8 or 10 hours aren’t enough to complete a day’s work so it carries over into drive time going to and from the office. My boss used to really piss me off because he’d call me almost every day while I was driving home and expect me to take notes. I’d have to pull over when I could, or hang up and call him back.

That still doesn’t explain why some people seem compelled to do it all… day… long. Nobody works that many hours – especially not in this town, where a lot of people don’t even have jobs any more.

I’ll be in the supermarket and half of the people in there are on the phone the whole time they’re shopping. I’ll be outside in the yard and hear someone talking, look up and it’s the mail carrier who talks constantly while delivering the mail. He’ll hand me my bills, nod, and keep on talking. 

Are other people’s lives so interesting that they have to call somebody at all times from wherever they are and talk about it all day? Do they have that many friends? I have friends, too, but I don’t call any of them every day, and never from the supermarket. Or maybe there’s something going on that I should know about and I’m the only one who didn’t get the memo.

If you know something, please pass it on.

My family and I witnessed a bad accident on the interstate a couple of summers ago. We were about one car removed from being involved, and I had to hit the brakes and pull off the road quickly to keep from hitting one of the cars. Had I been talking on a cell phone at the time, I'm not sure I could have avoided the wreck.

I know I’m getting old and technology is starting to kick my ass, but I do carry my iPhone with me everywhere I go. I have Twitter and Facebook and some other apps. I send and receive text messages and play games waiting for doctor’s appointments. I’ve even been known to call my wife from the supermarket to ask a question about the shopping list.

But I won’t do it while driving and I firmly believe that mobile phones should be wired so they won’t work from the driver’s side of a moving vehicle. I also want to know who thought it was a good idea to put video screens in cars. Even if the driver can’t see them, it has to be a distraction.

When I was a little kid, according to my parents, I rode all the way to Florida standing up behind the front seat repeating “how many more miles to Flow-dee?” over and over again. If I can make it to Florida without watching “Moana” or “Finding Dory,” other people’s children can do it too.

That's all I have today. I'm hanging up now. Good-bye.

We don’t need more oil; we need more common sense

Every time I hear a politician say we need to extract more oil from offshore wells near our beaches or from the ground under our national parks, I flash back to things I’ve seen that convince me that’s not true.

For example: 

* In Fairmont we have a Dollar Store and a Big Lots located less than 100 yards apart. I have watched people come out of the Dollar Store, start their cars and drive across the parking lot to Big Lots. That’s probably a one-minute walk.

* When I lived in Cranberry Township, Pa., I saw parents drive their SUVs one block to the school bus stop in front of my house, sit in their cars with the motors running for 5, 10, 20 minutes until the bus arrived, and then drive one block back home.

* I know of kids who drive to school every day from three blocks away just to show off that they have a car. In fact, even I did that when I was in college. I had to use a fake address to get a parking pass because I lived too close to qualify for one. (I was young and stupid then.)

I could go on and on and on.

My point is, I don’t think we need more oil; what we need is more common sense. A little respect for the environment wouldn’t hurt, either.

I don’t know how many millions of gallons of gasoline and oil are wasted every year by people doing what I just described – and worse – but I’m sure it doesn’t just happen where I live. There are way too many examples of waste to list here, and it’s got to be happening everywhere, so multiply my experiences by 320 million.  

Waste isn’t the only problem. We had an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 because we were drilling there for oil to refine into gasoline. The Deepwater Horizon accident spilled 130 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, and a lot of it found its way onto the beaches of our southern states. Cost of that spill including cleanup and reparations is now estimated at $62 billion.

Prior to that, the worst environmental disaster had been the crash of the Exxon Valdez off the coast of Alaska in 1989. An estimated 11 to 38 million gallons went into the water there, with costs exceeding $7 billion.  

Google turned up 29 significant oil spills affecting the United States since 1962 and two others in 1930 and 1910. The actual loss from some of these accidents was never calculated, but by my count, the accidents on this list collectively dispersed several hundred million gallons of oil or gasoline into the environment.

With this much waste and loss, do we really need to “drill baby drill?”

Now we have a president-elect who has promised to suck every last drop, ton or cubic foot of fossil fuel out of the earth and a designated Secretary of State who just retired as CEO of Exxon-Mobil. Why do I get the feeling this won’t end well?

     

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an objective scientific body set up under the auspices of the United Nations, has warned that if we consume more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we will cross an environmental “red line” by 2040 that will result in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels, etc.

If we were to consume ALL of our fossil fuel reserves, the panel says, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors.

The Conservatives who are now running our government are in favor of conserving a lot of things, such as their own taxes and wealth, but they won’t do anything to conserve our most important asset – a clean and healthy environment. If they truly want to conserve something, I suggest they park their greed by the side of the road and start conserving planet earth.