Once again, when the facts are against you, hold up a shiny object

So this happened this morning:

(1) I shared a Facebook post about Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy’s financial entanglement with Donald Trump and his sudden decision to retire under Trump’s presidency.

(2) One of the local Trumpeteers deflected away from any connection between Kennedy, his son and Donald Trump by claiming that Kennedy was retiring only because of his age.

(3) “Don't be stupid,” I replied. “Does corruption have to slap you in the face before you know it's there?”

(4) “Stupid?” the Trumpeteer said. “The man has been an impeccable voice of reason for 30 years on SUPCO. He’s 81 and wants to retire with a GOP President and GOP Senate in place so his conservative spot will be preserved. ‘Stupid.’ Name-calling: the last chance of the far left.”

Now I don’t plan to engage this individual any further, because my system can only tolerate a small dose of alternative reality this early in the day, but if I did want to take him on, here is what I would write:

If what you say is true, then Justice Kennedy had plenty of time to reflect on his family’s connections to Donald Trump and to recuse himself from any decision where his life outside the courtroom could have influenced his decisions inside it.

I used to be a journalist. My co-workers and I tried to maintain high ethical standards so that we never gave the appearance of bias. For example, I registered to vote as an Independent so no one could ever accuse me of political party prejudice. If we went to lunch for an interview, I refused to let you pay for mine, even though no reporter I ever knew could be bribed with a chef’s salad. A friend once returned a cheap coffee mug given to him by a radio station he had mentioned in a story.

The point is, we went above and beyond to avoid the appearance of impropriety, which, as the saying goes, can often be worse than the impropriety itself.

You made the claim that Justice Kennedy was “an impeccable voice of reason for 30 years” on the highest court in the land, which suggests he was reasonably intelligent. If he was smart enough to be what you say, then surely he was smart enough to see the possible impropriety of his involvement with Donald Trump and that of his son. If not, then he was either corrupt, extremely naïve or…let me see how to phrase this…stupid.

Which is where this conversation started.

For the record, I’ve had more than my fill of Trump apologists who are only too happy to overlook the immorality, impropriety, ethical vacancy, scandalous behavior and criminal activity of the man, his family and his sycophants, some of whom are very good at waving the shiny silver ball to distract us from the truth. I believe I’ve held my own with some of the best of them, so I’m certainly in no mood to deal with rookies like this guy, whose opinions seem to have been written by Sean Hannity and that female stalker judge who camped out in the woods behind Hillary Clinton’s house.

Maybe it's time for him to put down the remote and step outside for a breath of fresh air.

Come to think of it, maybe all of us should do that once in a while.

And by the way, did you just defend Donald Trump while accusing me of name-calling? Did you seriously put that in writing? Hypocrisy much?  

When your heart hurts and you don’t know what to do, a writer writes

In September 1982, I interviewed for an editing job at the Hagerstown Morning Herald. I got into the hiring process late and the editor, Dave Elliott, already had a solid candidate in mind. But after meeting me, Dave said he wanted to hire both of us and asked me if I had ever written any sports.

I had.

I had covered high school football and basketball games and one WVU football game at other newspapers where I worked, so Dave sent me to interview with the Sports Editor, Darrell Kepler, who wasn’t expecting me and was stunned when Dave asked him to interrupt his busy day to meet with me. Long story short, Dave hired both of us and I became a sports writer along with Darrell, Doug Dull and Tony Mulieri.

Al Weinberg was hired to be the Wire Editor – the job for which I had interviewed – and we all became fast friends almost immediately. Four months later, another Wire Editor resigned and I took the job I was originally intended for. I did it almost reluctantly, because I really liked writing sports. Eventually, I was promoted to City Editor, but my time as a sports writer is what enabled me to join the Herald staff, where I met a guy named John McNamara.

“Johnny Mac,” as we called him, was hired about a year after me, if I recall correctly, and joined the sports staff with Doug and the others. He came from Washington or some place in Maryland where they call pizza “za” and are rabid fans of Terrapin athletics and the metro-area pro teams. He fit in perfectly with the Herald sports department, where I can say honestly, if not modestly, there were no “dumb jocks.”

Like everyone else I worked with, John was highly intelligent, extremely talented and very funny. He had a deep, made-for-broadcast voice, a sharp wit and a depth of knowledge that extended way beyond the goal posts or the three-point line. He was also a damn fine basketball player.

I only worked at the Herald for three years, but they were three of the best years of my life. I knew that from Day One when three old-timers took the new guy to dinner and we hit it off immediately. I’ve made a lot of work friends over my career who remained my friends after I left those jobs, but there is no finer group of people on the planet than the Hagerstown crew.

We considered ourselves the second-best newspaper in Maryland after the Baltimore Sun and our standards were very high. We worked long, hard hours in the newsroom and washed them down with beer from the Antietam Tavern across the street. Because of the hours we worked – before noon to after midnight many days – we became a kind of closed loop, which is to say we spent a lot of time together.

It was probably the only job I ever had where everybody who worked there liked everybody else without qualification. I can say that honestly. To say we were like family is a cliché, but hey, we wouldn’t have clichés if we weren’t supposed to use them, so there’s that. I am proud of the professionalism we applied to a stressful job, and after work, our “fun-o-meter” was off the charts.

  

I left Hagerstown to return to West Virginia – mainly so I could be closer to my two young children and to share my father’s final days – but Hagerstown never left me and never will. I was deeply saddened when Darrell Kepler died several years ago, and others I knew then have also passed on to whatever comes next. Now, Johnny Mac has been murdered for no apparent reason – at least no reason that makes sense to me – and I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.

I don’t have a lot of funny stories to tell about John – others were closer to him than I was – but we were friends all the same. I do remember Saturday morning pickup basketball games with the sports guys and dinners with John and his wife Andrea at some Italian restaurant whose name I have long ago forgotten. I think the last time I saw him was at a mutual friend’s wedding in Nemacolin Woodlands, where we stood outside on a stone patio and talked about his book.

My head is still too cloudy to recall a lot of what we said and did back then, and my heart hurts knowing that no one will ever see John again. The world is a lesser place because of his loss. It doesn't seem real that I turned on my TV set yesterday a few minutes after 4 p.m. and saw a crawler about a mass shooting at a newspaper in Annapolis, or that I ran to my computer immediately and at 4:13 p.m., sent a Facebook message to John McNamara asking simply, “Hey man…are you OK?”

The question still hangs there, as I never got a reply. I even called his office phone but, of course, no one answered it.

I wrote yesterday that John was a good guy, and that’s a world-class understatement, but the shock of what happened at the Capital Gazette has apparently numbed me from using more appropriate words. I assume they will come in time. For now, I just want to thank John McNamara for being my friend. His death has shaken me badly but also brought back memories of our mutual friends who now get together only on Facebook – Doug Dull, Al Weinberg, Cathy Mentzer, Bob Fleenor, Bob LaMendola, Donna Bertazzoni, Dave Elliott, Liz Douglas Medcalf, Diana and Keith Snider, Robin Straley, John League, Diane Fries Pryor and anyone else who I forgot.

That’s all I can say right now. It’s hard to type through the tears and the words just don’t come as easily as they should. I just want to say that I was proud to be a journalist, and I was honored to work with people like John McNamara who elevated the profession with his skill and his love for the work.

I’ll miss you, Johnny Mac. And that’s really all I can say.

When the huddled masses are innocent children stuck inside a cage

[Click the highlighted links for source information.]

For several days I’ve been trying to gather enough thoughts to write about the travesty taking place along our southern border, but it’s hard for right-thinking individuals to grasp the magnitude of an administration policy that incarcerates young children without their parents in a country where they probably don’t speak the language and have no concept of what’s being done to them.

I don’t care what party you belong to or who you support politically or what you believe morally or philosophically, you would have to agree that this abhorrent practice is wrong. In fact, it is so far beyond wrong that I’m not sure there’s even a word for it yet. And if you somehow don’t agree that this is wrong, then I’d suggest you have your own children dragged off crying and screaming to the nearest dog kennel where they would be thrown into cages and left there indefinitely by guardians who aren’t allowed to touch them or hug them or comfort them in any way.

If that doesn’t make you see the light, then you’re not fit to share the same air that decent people breathe.

In case you arrived late, here are a few facts:

* In early February 2017, just days after President Trump took office, his administration began weighing what was called “the nuclear option” to discourage immigrants from unlawfully entering the country. Under the policy, according to The New York Times, “Children would be separated from their parents if the families had been apprehended entering the country illegally…in order to deter more movement along this terribly dangerous network.”

To emphasize, that happened during February into March 2017...more than 15 months before it caught the media’s attention.

“Advocates inside the administration, most prominently Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s senior policy adviser, never gave up on the idea,” The Times continued. “Last month, facing a sharp uptick in illegal border crossings, Mr. Trump ordered a new effort to criminally prosecute anyone who crossed the border unlawfully – with few exceptions for parents traveling with their minor children.”

Miller, the white supremacist neo-Nazi who is the chief policy adviser to our faux president, called it “a simple decision” to enforce a zero tolerance policy at the border, the message being that “no one is exempt from immigration law.”

A little background on Stephen Miller:

* The 2007 Duke University graduate began polishing his white supremacist ideals in college, where he wrote conservative columns for the school newspaper and became well-known for defending white Duke lacrosse players accused of raping a black exotic dancer – even before all of the facts of the case were known. The basis for his position was, apparently, that the players were white and the dancer was not and therefore they must be innocent.

* He once called Maya Angelou a “racial paranoid” and helped Richard Spencer, another Duke graduate, raise funds for an anti-immigration organization of which they were both members. Spencer would later become an important figure in the white supremacist movement and president of the National Policy Institute, and is famous for coining the term "alt-right."

* After college, Miller worked as a press secretary for nut-job Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and later for an Alabama senator and future attorney general named (wait for it)…Jeff Sessions, commandant of Trump’s (and Miller’s) new no tolerance border policy.

There’s more, but you can google him for the full story.

Back to the policy, this immoral practice of separating children from parents had been going on for a few weeks when images started to appear of a small child crying while her mother was frisked and, later, children housed in chain-link cages inside an abandoned Texas Walmart. Asked about the policy, Trump originally blamed the Democrats and said, like everything else wrong with this country, it must have been Obama’s fault.

Subsequently, Press Secretary Sarah the Prevaricator Sanders first denied that the zero tolerance dictum was a new policy and claimed it was existing law. Then, both she and AG Sessions quoted the Bible to justify the enforcement of a law that actually doesn’t exist.  

But wait! A day or so later, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security admitted that 1,995 minors were separated from their families at the southern border between April 19 and the end of May of this year under the administration's “relatively new zero tolerance policy.” This is the same new policy that the White House had openly denied.

Next, DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen walked back the comment on June 17, saying, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” That was a apparently a lie, because a day later she defended the practice and claimed that the children who had been separated from their families were being well cared for, although she admitted she didn’t know where they are.

So to recap: One day we “do not separate families at the border” and a day later the children who have been separated from their parents “are being well cared for.” This all prompted no less than William Kristol, the very conservative political analyst and editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, to tweet:

Trump: The Democrats made us do it.

Stephen Miller: It's our policy to do it.

Sec. Nielsen: We're not doing it.

Or, as I'd put it, for an administration that lies about everything all of the time, these people really aren't very good at it.

Now, Trump says it’s up to Congress to fix the problem and the Democrats are “obstructing” that effort, but ask yourself this: How hard would it be for Trump to pick up a phone, call House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate President Mitch McConnell and tell them to get this done. In case you’ve been in a coma for a few years, you know that the Republicans control both houses of Congress, so getting this problem fixed should be one of the easiest things Trump has ever done.

Instead, he’d rather tweet nonsense and whine about Democrats and Obama and anything else that crosses his mind except for a real solution to a very serious issue.

In conclusion, I still can’t fully grasp the magnitude of what the United States of America is doing to innocent children, most of whom came here with their parents to escape deplorable conditions in their home countries and to seek safety in the country that is guarded by the Statue of Liberty. They are the very definition of the people described on the base of Lady Liberty -- the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

It boggles the mind the way they are being treated, and it makes me want to cry.

This much I know. Until recently, I believed that of all the evil things Donald Trump has done, the one that should have automatically disqualified him to be president was his mocking of a disabled reporter who was on the campaign trail doing his job. Now, I’m convinced that that episode -- disgusting as it was -- comes in a distant second to the government-sanctioned child abuse taking place under Trump’s watch in Texas and other border states.

This not only disqualifies Trump as our president, in my mind, but as a human being as well. Anyone who continues to support him and, god forbid, votes for him again should be rocketed into space with no return vehicle or set adrift without food or water on a raft in the middle of the ocean.

I also hope that with this national disgrace hanging from their necks, Republicans in Congress will soon find themselves without a job while sanity returns to America. As I always say, elections have consequences.

That time we spent millions trying to ‘clean’ coal while ignoring energy sector growth

In his latest newsletter, my district's congressman, Rep. David McKinley (R-1st), touts his support for more "clean coal" research.

“This week,” he wrote, “we secured critical funding for clean coal research and development as part of the 2019 appropriations bill that was passed by the House. America, and the entire world, will be reliant on fossil energy for years to come. Research will help us to be a leader in innovation, developing technologies that allow us to utilize our resources more cleanly and efficiently. Not only were we able to block attempts to cut this critical funding, we were able to increase it by $58 million.”

I sent him the following email in response:

This country has been researching “clean coal” technology since I was a newspaper reporter in the 1970s, and probably long before that, yet coal is still not “clean.”

Here's an idea: Instead of blowing more millions of dollars on useless research into the “clean” burning of environment-killing fossil fuels, why not take a few of those mountaintops that were blown away by strip mining and install some windmills and solar panels up there.

You know...mountaintops? Where the sun shines and the wind blows?

Have you looked at the statistics on jobs in the coal industry versus jobs in the alternative fuels field? Coal jobs down, wind and solar jobs up. It's clear that you're backing the wrong horse.

I eagerly await his reply.

Meanwhile, the third annual U.S. Energy and Employment Report, a comprehensive look at energy jobs in America, shows that “clean energy is the driving force behind job growth in this sector,” according to the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

“These jobs – like installing utility-scale solar energy projects, operating windmills, and manufacturing energy efficient equipment and appliances – pay more on average than the national median and are located all across the country from the coasts to rural communities and in the Rust Belt,” the NRDC said.

The latest report shows the country had nearly 3.2 million Americans working in wind, solar, energy efficiency and other clean energy jobs in 2017, outnumbering fossil fuel jobs by a factor of 3 to 1.

“The report is further reaffirmation that political leaders looking for ways to stimulate the economy should back policies that grow the clean energy sector, which also can help solve other problems in their communities by reducing unemployment, lowering harmful power plant emissions, and improving public health,” the NRDC said.

A different chart using data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows energy sector power generation employment in 2016 as follows:

Click to enlarge

Solar – 373,807

Wind – 101,738

Coal – 86,035

Natural gas – 52,125

And that was two years ago. As stated above, the trends show fossil fuel jobs declining even further and alternative fuels employment on the rise. Of course, these are only facts trying to break through the smog of the current administration’s fact-free environment. Facts like these don’t exist in faux-president Donald Trump’s alternate game-show reality.  

Or in the minds of Rep. David McKinley and other West Virginia politicians who believe the only way to be elected in these hills is to bend a knee at the feet of the all-powerful coal barons who have raped this state virtually since its inception. Heaven forbid any of them would look beyond our faded past to see the future that could lie ahead.

After all, we’ve never done it that way before. Why in hell should we start to do it now?

This week on ‘Celebrity Apprentice Presidency…’

Hello again, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of “The Celebrity Apprentice Presidency.”

This week’s special guest stars include Kim Kardashian, who will meet with faux-president Donald J. Trump to discuss a pardon for some woman no one has ever heard of, and Dennis Rodman, the sociopathic former professional basketball player who will accompany Trump as he meets with Kim Jong-un to discuss North Korea’s nuclear weapons arsenal and ultimately the fate of the planet.

And what a show we have!

The Kardashian meeting will get us off and running as the big ass from Hollywood meets with the Big Ass from New York to seek a pardon for some woman who was unjustly imprisoned for life for a non-violent drug offense. People are saying she was sent to Washington by her nut-bag husband who is trying to keep himself and his wife relevant in the entertainment world while their popularity and ratings continue to fade.

She will ask Trump to pardon this singular drug-dealing Tennessee grandmother while totally ignoring the fact that tens of thousands of other Americans – mostly people of color – have been sentenced to similar prison time for lesser drug offenses but have the misfortune of not knowing any celebrities who could help to get them released.

But hey, this is reality TV, not reality reality. A first-time faux-president can only do so much on Mondays through Thursdays between the hours of “Fox and Friends” and “Hannity.”

Next, we’ll watch as Rodman goes with Trump to Singapore to try and negotiate a deal to denuclearize North Korea. The ultimate goal, of course, is to help Trump win both an Emmy Award and a Nobel Peace Prize to hang on a gold-encrusted wall at Mar-a-Lago.

About our guests:

* Kardashian is a Hollywood socialite who managed to make herself famous just for being famous. No one would have ever heard of her if her father Robert hadn’t been a friend of O.J. Simpson’s, and who probably concealed evidence that helped the former football star get acquitted for murdering his ex-wife. Daughter Kim first gained media attention as a friend of another no-talent Hollywood gadabout, Paris Hilton, but received wider notice in 2007 when a sex tape with her former boyfriend went viral. Later that year, she and her family began to appear in their own reality TV series, “Keeping Up with the Kardashians,” in which their social life somehow became a subject of national interest.

We’re not sure when she became an expert in the intricacies and procedures involved in presidential pardon protocol, but when did that matter, anyway?

* Rodman, you’ll remember, failed in an attempt to commit suicide in 1993 before reinventing himself as a "bad boy" in professional basketball, where he became notorious for numerous controversial antics. He repeatedly dyed his hair in artificial colors, had many piercings and tattoos and regularly disrupted games by clashing with opposing players and officials. He famously wore a wedding dress to promote his 1996 autobiography Bad As I Wanna Be.

He is also a retired professional wrestler and actor, once winning the Celebrity Championship Wrestling Tournament and starring in his own reality TV show, “The Rodman World Tour.” He starred in two movies which were so bad they netted him a triple Razzie Award, and won $222,000 as the 2004 “Celebrity Mole.” He has also been arrested numerous times for such offenses as domestic abuse, drunk driving and hit-and-run.

All of this makes him highly qualified to fill in for our depleted State Department to help negotiate with a homicidal madman who controls nuclear missiles and poses a threat to his neighbors, the western United States and the rest of the civilized world. After all, the Korean Kim and Rodman are best buds.

Yes, friends, it’s stars like these who Trump is now soliciting for domestic and foreign policy advice and a boost in his television ratings. Be sure to keep watching as his popularity index climbs and more and more star-studded guests are invited to the Oval Office to make critical policy decisions that affect all Americans. After all, it’s ratings that count, and who is better at drawing ratings than Kim Kardashian and Dennis Rodman?

Only one man can make that claim, and his name is Donald J. Trump.

The environmental red line approaches

Four years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned us what would happen if we continued to rely on fossil fuels for our energy -- something now being heavily promoted by EPA Director Scott Pruitt and the Trump administration.

The IPCC stated that if we were to burn more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves, we would cross an environmental “red line” by the year 2040, resulting in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on.

And if we were to burn ALL of our available fossil fuels, the IPCC said, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable outdoors.

Let me repeat that. Parts of our planet would become uninhabitable out of doors.

The IPCC is a non-partisan research organization set up under the United Nations to provide an objective, scientific view of world climate change and its political and economic impacts. It relies on thousands of scientists and other experts who volunteer without pay to write and review reports about the state of the environment.

In other words, they don't benefit financially from their research. They do it for the welfare of the planet

So let's do the math. The year 2040 is not some unreachable date far out in the future. It's only 22 years from now. I’ll be dead by then in all probability but my children will be roughly my age now and my grandchildren will be younger than my children are today.

That means that for everyone who has young children or grandchildren, this is not a joke or some cruel liberal hoax. This is the future. Think about that the next time someone asks you to vote on the leaders of our government.