Body language

That time when the John McCain tribute came in second

Every day of my life it becomes harder and harder to grasp the depth and expansiveness of racism in this country and the degree to which racists have been emboldened by faux-president Donald Trump.

I have known for years that a U.S. Senate office building was named the Russell Building, but I never knew or cared to learn who Russell was until John McCain died, and an effort was put forth to rename the building after him. It seemed like a no-brainer until today, when I heard that some Republicans are pushing back on the idea.

Why in the hell would they do that, you ask?

Because Richard Russell, for whom the building is named, was a white supremacist and a southern segregationist who got his name on a federal building mainly because he stuck around long enough to become the senior member of the Senate. Russell was a Democrat, but in 2018, the Republicans who control the government can’t afford to offend the present-day racists who voted them into office or the chief executive who can destroy their careers with one or two well-timed tweets.

To many of them, taking Russell’s name off the Senate office building is akin to pulling down the rebel flag or hauling away the statues of Confederate war heroes that appear like dandelions across the South, and we all saw how well that went down in Charlottesville, Virginia. Maybe the name could be changed after the next election, when spineless Republicans find out if they get to keep their jobs, but certainly not before.

It seems to me that John McCain deserves better than that.     

For the record, Richard Russell was governor of Georgia from 1931 to 1933 before serving in the Senate from 1933 to 1971. According to Wikipedia, he was “a founder and leader of the conservative coalition that dominated Congress from 1937 to 1963,” and at his death was the most senior member of the Senate.

“Russell supported racial segregation and co-authored the Southern Manifesto with (South Carolina Senator) Strom Thurmond,” the article says. “Russell and 17 fellow Democratic and Republican Senators blocked the passage of civil rights legislation via the filibuster. After Russell's protégé, President Lyndon B. Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law, Russell led a Southern boycott of the 1964 Democratic National Convention.”

So now at least part of the debate has become clear: Russell was a racist. After the 2016 election, racists from Tampa to Tacoma started coming out from under their hoods, waving Confederate flags, chanting at Donald Trump pep rallies and demanding a government that will purify the American population.

Today, of course, racism is alive and well and living comfortably inside the White House or within its reach. That it exists was never a shock to me. I’ve always known that racism was alive. I guess I’m still surprised and saddened, however, to learn that it’s doing quite this well.

Election fraud and packing the court, Version 2.0

Now that our Republi-cratic governor has appointed two conservative Republicans to fill open seats on the West Virginia Supreme Court, I feel a need to repost an essay I wrote a short time ago.

Before I do, let me point out that Governor Jim Justice – a man misnamed if ever a politician was – made no attempt to hide his political bias when he made the appointments, ignoring such trivial matters as judicial experience, honesty, integrity and respect for the rule of law, instead stating openly and without shame that “both of these appointees are true conservatives…(who) we need to restore trust to our highest court.”

Never mind that one of his appointees, U.S. Rep. Evan Jenkins, didn’t even have an active law license when he applied for the job after losing his primary campaign for the U.S. Senate.

You can read all about the judicial scandal in this state in this article by Mother Jones or this one by West Virginia Public Broadcasting. In the meantime, I invite you to read the following article by me, which discusses what I consider to be the unethical and immoral party hopping two-step that cursed us with Governor Justice in the first place.

(First posted on the shieldWALL on August 12, 2018.)  

*     *     *

We need a few new laws in West Virginia.

Here’s the first one: If a candidate runs for governor as a member of one political party – and gets elected primarily because he claims to represent the platform of that party – it shall be illegal for him to change party affiliation for at least four years. Further, said governor shall be held accountable for his actions during those four years and subject to a recall referendum by voters if he strays demonstrably from the platform that the voters chose.

There shall also be penalties for violating this new law. For example, if any governor – let’s call him, say, Jim Justice – campaigns and is elected as a Democrat and then switches parties before the ink is dry on his first proclamation, he shall be arrested for election fraud and bound over for trial in a West Virginia circuit court. I mean, what could be more fraudulent than intentionally and maliciously misleading voters into thinking you will support their agenda, then turning your back on them as soon as you have collected their votes?  

What’s even worse, our new Republi-cratic governor has gone all-in for the pseudo-Republican faux-president of the United States, so much so that he’s now trying to out-stupid and out-dictator Donald Trump, as if that were even possible. Want proof?

On Saturday, it was reported that rising prices for construction materials as a result of tariffs instituted by Trump are threatening to derail major road projects in the state. A Wheeling bridge project, for one, is now estimated to cost $100 million more because of the tariff-inflated cost of steel.

Let me say that again: The project is now one hundred million dollars over budget.

When House of Delegates Minority Leader Tim Miley sent a letter to Governor Justice warning him about the effect of Trump’s tariffs, Justice replied with a Trump Administration talking point. The exchange went like this:

Miley: “If the trend continues, this will greatly limit the number of projects that can be completed with funding through the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ program. I sincerely hope that the public was not misled on the costs and number of the projects that the state will be able to complete….”

Justice: “Steel price or steel tariffs, they could have possibly hurt West Virginia and they could hurt in certain ways. However, the overall net gain in the end will be unbelievable for this country. Our president, all he wants to have happen is fair play.”

In other words, “Trump good, tariffs good, make American great and let the people of West Virginia pay the price.” I don’t believe a Democratic governor who actually was a Democrat would stake out a similar position.

If that isn’t bad enough for you, during the same news conference Justice came perilously close to endorsing Trump’s “fake news” fantasy and his “enemy of the people” criticism of the press when he accused the Charleston Gazette-Mail of driving people away from West Virginia by printing “negative” stories about him and the state.

He called an opinion piece written by one of the newspaper’s editors “garbage,” and attacked the author of the column directly. Pointing to the “very very tip” of his little fingernail, Justice said, “I would tell you that I have cared for, done more, and loved more for the state of West Virginia and its people than this guy will do in his lifetime.”

Does that mean that Justice thinks the writer is an “enemy of the people” of West Virginia? You can be the judge.

Politicizing tragic deaths: The Right versus the Left

In July 2015, a 32-year-old woman named Kate Steinle was killed in San Francisco’s Embarcadero district when a bullet was discharged from a handgun, struck the pavement some distance from where she was standing, ricocheted off the ground and traveled 78 feet before striking her in the back.

The gun was in the hand of Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, an undocumented immigrant who claimed that the gun fired accidentally after he picked it up – wrapped in cloth – from under a bench where he was sitting.

In 2017, after five days of deliberations, Zarate was acquitted by a jury of all murder and manslaughter charges but was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm.

In that same year, Heather Heyer, also 32, was struck and killed by a vehicle driven by an alleged white supremacist neo-Nazi while peacefully protesting against a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The 20-year-old driver of the car, James Alex Fields Jr., was charged with hit and run first-degree murder and multiple counts of federal hate crimes after witnesses say he intentionally drove his Dodge Challenger at high speed into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters, killing Heyer and injuring 28 other people.

He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting a November trial.

Both deaths are tragic, and I will never attempt to diminish them in any way, because their families have lost loved ones under sudden and shocking circumstances and are left to suffer pain that will never go away. In that regard, both deaths are equally sad while very much the same. What’s different is the way they have been – and still are being – treated by the hard right and the mainstream media.

You see, Kate Steinle is back in the news this week because another woman was murdered in Iowa by another Mexican immigrant. Cristhian Rivera, 24, was arrested for killing University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts, who had been missing for several weeks. 

Steinle’s death – and now Tibbetts’s – have become rallying cries from faux-president Donald Trump and his supporters in their demand for more border security, changes to our immigration practices, a crackdown on immigrants seeking legal asylum, the separation of children from their immigrant parents and Trump’s ridiculous demand for a multi-billion-dollar wall along our southern border.

Trump sees immigration as his strongest issue heading into the November mid-term election, and any death involving an undocumented immigrant translates into votes from his loyal base.

As if to put an exclamation point on the preceding paragraphs, I flipped on Fox News last night out of curiosity, just to see what Sean Hannity was moaning about in the wake of several courtroom scandals involving Trump, and the first two words I heard were “Kate Steinle.”

More than three years after her death, the Right Wing politicians and their media propagandists continue to weaponize Steinle’s name to mock and degrade their political opponents in the same way they still froth at the mouth over Hillary Clinton’s emails. With no solid platform to campaign on, and a president linked to a basket full of deplorable activities, they use emotional issues like the accidental death of a pretty young white woman and the shooter’s immigration status to feed red meat to Republican voters.

Meanwhile, Heather Heyer was killed by a “legal” American citizen who intended to cause harm to innocent people with opposing political beliefs, but no one is talking about her. Why is that, do you suppose?

Is it because the man who killed her is white and didn’t come from Mexico, or because he was one of those “very fine people” described by Trump who showed up to carry torches and chant racist and anti-Semitic slogans at the Charlottesville rally? You make the call.

And now we have Mollie Tibbetts, whose alleged killer is another one of those damned Mexican criminals who are streaming across our border to rape, pillage, plunder and murder our women, according to the faux-president of the United States. The suspect’s lawyer says he is working in this country legally, but those who want to exploit Tibbetts’s death are having none of that.

I guess the truth will come out eventually…or at least some version of the truth.

At any rate, you can expect to hear a lot more about Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts as we roll along toward the November election, even though Steinle's death was an accident and the Tibbetts family has asked the media not to use her death for political gain. That won’t stop the Hannitys and the Carlsons and the Ingrahams and the Trumps of the world from throwing those names around like campaign slogans, nor will it stop Trumpaloons from chanting “Build the Wall” at upcoming pep rallies in red states around the country.

Do not expect to hear the name Heather Heyer mentioned in those conversations, nor the names of any of the dozens of people of color who have been gunned down by white people for the crime of BWB – breathing while black. The fact that we don’t even know most of their names should tell us all something, and it’s not something good. It makes me want to take a symbolic knee. 

So since no one else will do it, I will say Heather’s name here in this space: Heather Heyer. Heather Heyer. Heather Heyer. I say it not to weaponize her name to sell my political agenda, but just because I refuse to forget it, and because you probably won’t hear it anywhere else...and because Heather deserves better than that.

When is a ‘perjury trap’ not really a trap? When you have something to hide

Today I want to talk about “perjury traps.”

First, here’s my simple thesis: If you knowingly tell a lie under oath to protect yourself or others from prosecution for a crime then you have committed perjury, but if you and another person simply have a different recollection about a person, place or thing, without malice or intent, you’re guilty only of having a different opinion, and two people having conflicting opinions does not rise to the level of a federal crime.

When two people disagree on something, we often call that a “he said/he said” situation and it’s difficult to determine who is correct. It also doesn’t prove that either party is lying or, in this case, committing perjury. They simply disagree.

Now, here’s my exception: If you are known to be a pathological liar who has publicly told more than 4,200 documented lies in the past two years and continues on a regular basis to tell different versions of the same story – all to protect yourself from legal or political liability and harm – and you sit down with a prosecutor and tell stories that conflict with each other and with all other available evidence, you’re probably guilty of perjury.

But have you been perjury-trapped? Or are you just a guilty narcissist with a dictator complex who refuses to acknowledge that you have committed a string of federal crimes and are inherently incapable of telling the truth for five full minutes in a row?

Let’s explore.

I have a good friend who has been my friend since first grade more than 60 years ago. We share a lot of the same beliefs and opinions and have lived complementary if not parallel lives. We went to high school and college together, double-dated on occasion, have common friends, attended hundreds of sporting events, played music together in a couple of “garage” bands and continue to hang out to this day. In other words, we have 60-plus years of shared memories.

As old friends do, we sometimes get together over a cold beer or three and talk about the good old days. Sometimes we both remember something silly we did and laugh about it together, but other times we remember the story differently. He thinks it was raining and I say it was dry. He thinks it was Saturday and I believe it was Thursday night. He thinks we went left and I think we went right, so to speak.

So with our long, shared history, if you put us in front of a grand jury and we were asked to recall the time, date, place and particulars of a certain event, and our stories differed somewhat in detail, is one of us a liar? Did someone commit perjury? Clearly we did not. We just remembered things differently.

Then again, as far as I know, neither of us has ever conspired with a foreign adversary to manipulate a presidential election.

I could go on and on about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony – ask any cop or lawyer about that – or even about that game where people get in a circle and whisper a story from person to person until it comes out completely different at the end, but the point is simple. If you tell a story that may not be true, even though you truly believe it is, you’re not necessarily a liar or a perjurer. You may just be a guy with a foggy memory.

And if you are the faux-president of the United States, sworn to uphold the Constitution and protect American citizens, and you’re asked to tell your story to a federal prosecutor, you’re supposed to sit for the interview, even though you may remember a few facts differently than someone else, since we all know that can happen to anyone at any time because we’re all just flawed human beings.

That is, you’re supposed to sit for the interview in the interest of justice and the rule of law unless you’ve spent the past two years concealing the fact that you’re a federal felon who has racked up an impressive series of criminal violations, raped the U.S. Constitution and attempted to kick our democracy to the curb while replacing it with autocratic rule, as if our free and independent nation were, say, a shady New York real estate business or some other financial scam.

In that case, you’d have a lot to hide, so you’d probably want to duck out of your moral obligation to serve the people by ginning up terms like “perjury trap” to avoid giving evidence and to make it seem like the good guys are actually the bad guys and they are out to get you with malice in their hearts and blood coming out of their eyes (or wherever). The world is an unfair place, you believe, and you alone can fix it.

As long as you can avoid stepping into those imaginary traps.

A brief look at this week’s truth, facts and the reality of Rudy World

If you’ve been listening to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani recently, your head is probably threatening to spin itself right off of your neck. It’s just a matter of time before you start chanting in tongues, flying above your bed and spitting out pea soup like the girl in “The Exorcist.”

Rudy has been on TV just about every day, trying to make his case for why faux-president Donald Trump will / won’t / may / may not / should / shouldn’t / could / or couldn’t testify before Special Counsel Robert Mueller in his probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Rudy’s comments on various TV shows have been contradictory and confusing at best, like when he talks about an infamous meeting that Donald Trump Jr. and other campaign officials had with Russian operatives in Trump Tower in June of 2016. Every day it seems, Rudy tells a different story about who said what to whom and where they said it and when and why...and Rudy’s accounts rarely square with what the faux-president himself has proclaimed in the past.  

That said, however, after painstaking investigation and careful analysis, I think I’ve finally got that Trump Tower meeting all figured out. It goes something like this:

* Donald Trump Jr. took a meeting with a Russian agent in 2016 to discuss the adoption of Russian children, except that he didn’t know she was a Russian, even though the meeting was called to discuss Russian adoptions, because you always want to discuss Russian adoptions with people who aren’t Russian…and whose non-Russian-sounding name is Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya, which Rudy says Junior knew was her name at the time.

But wait!

* The administration was forced to later admit that they really met because the non-Russian agent with the non-Russian name of Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya was promising to provide the Trump campaign with dirt on his opponent, Hillary Clinton, which is really just “opposition research” that campaigns do all of the time, except it would be illegal to get it from an agent of a foreign government, but not if that agent was a non-Russian who didn’t represent a foreign government where people have names like Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya.

* It also came out that the Russian adoption story was just a cover so the non-Russian agent named Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya could meet with the Trump campaign to discuss getting dirt on Hillary Clinton, but that was still okay because Trump Junior still didn’t know she was a Russian, even though her name is Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya.

(I think there must be a lot of Irish-Americans and French Canadians with the same last name.)

* Because he didn’t know the non-Russian named Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya was actually a Russian, there was no collusion when Trump Junior agreed to meet her to discuss the adoption of Russian children (wink wink, nod nod) because he thought she was just a non-Russian with a Russian-sounding name like Natalia Vladimirovna Veselnitskaya who just happened to know something about the adoption of Russian children, many of whom apparently could provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

(Who knew the Russians were teaching the art of opposition research to so many of their orphaned children?)

So you see? In Trump’s America, where some facts are “alternative facts,” you “shouldn’t believe what you see and hear” and “truth is not the truth,” this all makes perfect sense. But don't take my word for it. Just wait for Rudy Giuliani to appear on a TV set near you, where he will no doubt be walking back his latest clarification and clarifying his latest version of the truth.

I’m sure he’ll be around with another non-Russian story any time now, and with that, I think my work here is finished.

Election fraud, animal torture and wrecks on the interstate

We need a few new laws in West Virginia.

Here’s the first one: If a candidate runs for governor as a member of one political party – and gets elected primarily because he claims to represent the platform of that party – it shall be illegal for him to change party affiliation for at least four years. Further, said governor shall be held accountable for his actions during those four years and subject to a recall referendum by voters if he strays demonstrably from the platform that the voters chose.

There shall also be penalties for violating this new law. For example, if any governor – let’s call him, say, Jim Justice – campaigns and is elected as a Democrat and then switches parties before the ink is dry on his first proclamation, he shall be arrested for election fraud and bound over for trial in a West Virginia circuit court. I mean, what could be more fraudulent than intentionally and maliciously misleading voters into thinking you will support their agenda, then turning your back on them as soon as you have collected their votes?   

What’s even worse, our new Republi-Cratic governor has gone all-in for the pseudo-Republican faux-president of the United States, so much so that he’s now trying to out-stupid and out-dictator Donald Trump, as if that were even possible. Want proof?

On Saturday, it was reported that rising prices for construction materials as a result of tariffs instituted by Trump are threatening to derail major road projects in the state. A Wheeling bridge project, for one, is now estimated to cost $100 million more because of the tariff-inflated cost of steel.

Let me say that again: The project is now one hundred million dollars over budget.

When House of Delegates Minority Leader Tim Miley sent a letter to Governor Justice warning him about the effect of Trump’s tariffs, Justice replied with a Trump Administration talking point. The exchange went like this:

Miley: “If the trend continues, this will greatly limit the number of projects that can be completed with funding through the ‘Roads to Prosperity’ program. I sincerely hope that the public was not misled on the costs and number of the projects that the state will be able to complete….”

Justice: “Steel price or steel tariffs, they could have possibly hurt West Virginia and they could hurt in certain ways. However, the overall net gain in the end will be unbelievable for this country. Our president, all he wants to have happen is fair play.”

In other words, “Trump good, tariffs good, make American great and let the people of West Virginia pay the price.” I don’t believe a Democratic governor who actually was a Democrat would stake out a similar position.

If that isn’t bad enough for you, during the same news conference Justice came perilously close to endorsing Trump’s “fake news” fantasy and his “enemy of the people” criticism of the press when he accused the Charleston Gazette-Mail of driving people away from West Virginia by printing “negative” stories about him and the state.

He called an opinion piece written by one of the newspaper’s editors “garbage,” and attacked the author of the column directly. Pointing to the “very very tip” of his little fingernail, Justice said, “I would tell you that I have cared for, done more, and loved more for the state of West Virginia and its people than this guy will do in his lifetime.”

Does that mean that Justice thinks the writer is an “enemy of the people” of West Virginia? You can be the judge.

Here’s another law that needs changed: A Marion County man was arrested last week for misdemeanor animal cruelty after stuffing his blind, aging dog into a cooler bag, weighting it down with books and throwing it into a ditch behind an abandoned power plant. The dog would have died if the bag hadn’t been spotted by a good Samaritan walking his own dog in the area.

Winston

The good news is, the dog – now named Winston – was immediately taken to the Marion County Humane Society, where he is recovering from the ordeal and a fund has been started to pay for cataract surgery to help restore some of his sight.

The bad news is, the animal cruelty charge “is not considered a felony because he did not put the dog in the bag for his own amusement, he did not mutilate the dog and the dog did not die,” officials said. In other words, terrorizing an old, blind dog by zipping it into a small bag, throwing it over a hill and leaving it to starve to death does not constitute torture under state law.

As it stands, the misdemeanor charge could carry a sentence of up to six months in jail and a fine between $300 and $2,000...but rarely do offenders serve jail time in these cases. And that’s why this law needs to be changed to make any kind of animal abuse that rises to this level of torture a felony punishable by substantial jail time and a hefty fine.

I would advocate for poking out the offender’s eyeballs and hoisting him off the New River Gorge Bridge in a suitcase, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.

And finally: We need to lower the speed limit on Interstate 79 to either 55 or 60 miles an hour. We need to do this immediately, because there’s an accident on that roadway virtually every day (there were two big ones yesterday alone) and I’m told by police who patrol the road that careless driving at excessive speed is the principal cause of these accidents. Also, for some reason, motorists have lost the ability to control a vehicle when it rains.

I drove I-79 from Fairmont to Morgantown and back every day for seven years, and later from Morgantown to Fairmont and back for 11 years, so I spent 18 years of my working life commuting in one direction or the other on the 11-mile stretch of interstate between the two towns. I did it in rain, snow, sleet, fog and wind and I never saw but a handful of wrecks in all of that time. Plus, traffic was much lighter than it is today.

Like most motorists, I drove 10 miles over the speed limit – meaning I went 65 m.p.h. for most of that time – in the belief that the police will “give you” those 10 for free. But now, with the speed limit set at 70, most people are driving 80 (or faster) and the number of wrecks is off the charts. If you set your cruise control at 70 and drive along I-79, cars will pass you like you’re standing still.

So here’s the new law: If 70 is deemed to be the safe speed, and if drivers generally “cheat” above the limit by 10 m.p.h., we need to reduce the established speed limit to 60. Then everyone will go 70 anyway and that’s where we wanted them to be in the first place. Problem solved.

Of course, it still doesn’t fix the problem of people who can’t drive when it rains. I’d suggest that more stringent driver’s tests are required with refresher exams every two-to-five years, and follow-up testing on rainy and snowy days wouldn’t be a bad idea, either.

Seriously, am I the only one who thinks about these things?

Blue wave or raindrops in a thunderstorm?

If you’re a Liberal in America – and I am – it’s time to face up to reality. And I have.

The fact is, a very large segment of the country doesn’t espouse the same beliefs as people on the far left. There is no large bloc of voters who call themselves “Socialists,” which is still a dirty word to millions of people, and it’s certainly true geographically. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this map from the last election. Do you see a blue wave there, or do you see a handful of blue raindrops splashed amid a torrential red thunderstorm?

Click to enlarge

I’m not saying a blue wave isn’t coming in the November mid-term election. I sincerely hope it is, but I remember “expert” predictions that Hillary Clinton would win the 2016 election in a landslide, and I went to bed November 8 thinking there could be Democrats in the White House for the rest of my lifetime, only to wake up to the horror of Donald Trump.

Blue wave? I’ll believe it when I see it.

I keep hearing about all of the “gains” Democrats are making in our election landscape, but coming in second in a series of special elections is called “losing,” not winning, and in politics, as in sports, the winners advance and the losers go home. Coming close to winning a House seat in Ohio doesn’t get you a place at the table. It’s the red guy who will join the majority in Washington and eat with the big dogs while the blue guy can only come back and try again a few months later.

My fear is that a string of these losses and close calls will not serve to energize the Democratic and Independent voters it will take to put the Blue Team back in charge of Congress, but instead could actually demoralize them into staying home – once again – on Election Day. This is especially true in light of the troubling fact that any time a Democrat has a chance to win a red district, the most unpopular president in modern history shows up for one of his unhinged “look at me” anti-media pep rallies and the Republican holds on to win.

That’s what they call the “Bully Pulpit” that sitting presidents enjoy, and we’ve never had a bigger bully employing it than the one we have right now.    

A lot of people think the problem goes back to the Electoral College, a Constitutional provision written by our founding fathers in the late 18^th Century when it took days to get from the Carolinas to Washington on horseback and there was no effective method of mass communication. The Electoral College was created in part because the founders believed that ordinary citizens spread across a vast continent – without cell phones, Google or even radio and TV – would lack sufficient information to make an intelligent choice for president and vice president, and thus the job should fall to more highly educated electors from every state.

Little did they know that as late as 2016, about half of all Americans who voted would become disciples of Facebook, Instagram, Russian troll bots, the Fox News network and a pathological liar spreading conspiracy theories and propaganda via Twitter, and therefore would still lack sufficient information to make an intelligent choice for president and vice president.

As you know, the Electoral College enables a presidential candidate who receives a lesser number of popular votes to win an election by accumulating the right number of electoral votes in a handful of so-called “swing” states. For example, if, say, an unqualified real estate mogul with no knowledge of government could carry a bunch of historically conservative heartland states and then find a way to also win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania by a razor thin margin – a margin smaller than the number of votes cast for Green Party candidate Jill Stein – he could ascend to the White House over a better, more popular and more qualified opponent.

Yeah, that actually happened in 2016.

So the answer is to abolish the Electoral College, right?

To do that, you would need a Constitutional amendment passed by two-thirds of the House of Representatives and two-thirds of the Senate and ratified by three-fourths of the states. For the likelihood of this happening, please refer to the 2016 election map shown above.

Aside from the unlikely scenario that such an amendment could even get through Congress, consider the logistics behind it. Whatever party is in the White House would have gotten there because their candidate won the Electoral College. That’s hardly an incentive to change the Constitution.

Also, there are disparities built into our system of government that might have made sense back in 1787 but are hard to reconcile today. For example:       

    

* California has nearly 40 million people and operates the world’s fifth largest economy, recently surpassing the United Kingdom and trailing only the U.S., China, Japan and Germany. California represents 12% of the population and 16% of the nation’s job growth, yet it sends only two U.S. senators to Washington.

* By comparison, Wyoming has a population of 574,000 and also gets two senators. The same is true of South Dakota, population 878,000; North Dakota, 755,000; and Alaska, 738,000. Even Montana, with slightly more than 1 million people, elects two senators even though it has barely half as many people as West Virginia and far fewer than Greater Pittsburgh.

I’ll do the math for you. Wyoming, the two Dakotas, Alaska and Montana have a combined population of 4 million, or one-tenth that of California, yet combine for 10 Senate seats to California’s two. When it comes time to count Senate votes, five deep red states are 5X greater than one very blue one, and states like California, New York and Illinois are effectively neutralized by the scarlet waves of grain.

True, everything I just wrote here would become moot if the American electorate would (1) make an effort to educate itself on the issues, (2) put partisanship away in favor of patriotism, (3) take the time to show up and vote and (4) cast aside those single-issue social ballot traps and vote in their own best interest.

When that day arrives, I promise to come back here and admit that everything I wrote was absolutely wrong…but not one minute before that time. Until then, you'll be holding your breath, right? 

O’Reilly, Trump could learn a lot from LeBron

Reading Donald Trump’s Twitter rant about LeBron James this past week reminds me of the time a couple of years ago when Bill O’Reilly – remember Bill O’Reilly? – put forth the proposition that poor people were to blame for their own poverty, and that all they had to do to lift themselves out of their sorrowful state was to “get themselves educated.”

His theory was that every poor person should simply go to school, make good grades, enroll in the college of his or her own choice, earn a marketable degree and slide quickly and easily into a good-paying job somewhere in America where, presumably, an adequate supply of such jobs is perpetually available.

I remember wondering at the time, “Gee, why didn’t I think of that?”

I assume that under the O’Reilly Plan, the inner-city single working mother with four kids from absentee fathers should quit her three jobs immediately and move her family to northern California, where she could enroll as an undergrad at Stanford University to study aerospace engineering. I mean, what could be easier than that?

This idea was offered, of course, before Bill O’Reilly was forced to give up his $18.5-million-a-year job at Fox News when it was revealed that he was a serial sexual abuser who cost his network $13 million in payoffs to a collection of women who charged him with sexual harassment and other inappropriate behavior.

I don’t know what O’Reilly is doing now – and I don’t care enough to google him to find out – but I assume he still believes that poor black and brown people are either too lazy or too stupid to lift themselves up from the depths of despair to enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in the good old white privileged, Christian-worshipping, Republican-controlled country we used to call the United States of America.

I also don’t know how many people could have gone to college on the $18.5 mill that Fox paid this pompous, arrogant, racist blowhard, or the $13 million they spent to buy off his accusers, but I don’t remember hearing that O’Reilly with his $85 million estimated net worth or Fox News with all of its millions had ever volunteered to help.

Which brings me to LeBron James and Donald John Trump.

According to Wikipedia, LeBron Raymone James Sr. was born in 1984 in Akron, Ohio, to a 16-year-old mother and a father with an extensive criminal record who was little more than a casual boyfriend of hers. Life was difficult for him and his family, which moved from apartment to apartment in the seedier neighborhoods of Akron while his mother, Gloria, struggled to find steady work.

“Realizing that her son would be better off in a more stable family environment,” the story goes, Gloria allowed LeBron to move in with the family of a local youth football coach who introduced him to basketball when he was nine years old. He eventually enrolled in St. Vincent–St. Mary High School, a predominantly white private Catholic school, where he established himself as NBA-ready at the ridiculous age of 17.

You can google him to read a lot more about his life, but know that LeBron James is considered to be the best basketball player in the world right now, and is regarded by many as the greatest player of all time. This coming year, his first with the Los Angeles Lakers, James will earn a reported salary of $35.65 million.

Know also that he’s not keeping it all for himself.

Last week, James made headlines around the world when he opened an elementary school in his hometown of Akron geared toward at-risk kids who are suffering the same kind of struggles that James himself faced as a child. The “I Promise” school will provide 240 third- and fourth-grade students with free tuition; free uniforms; free breakfast, lunch and snacks; free transportation within two miles; a free bicycle and helmet (LeBron used one to get around as a kid); access to a food pantry for their family; guaranteed tuition for all graduates to the University of Akron; and job placement services for parents of the children plus help acquiring GEDs for those who need one.

For this phenomenal act of kindness and generosity, James drew the attention of one Donald J. Trump, the faux-president of the United States, but instead of acknowledging James for his humanitarian gift or offering him some kind of award, Trump instead insulted the African-American basketball star in a Twitter rant following an interview he did with Don Lemon, another successful black man, on CNN:

Lebron James was just interviewed by the dumbest man on television, Don Lemon. He made Lebron look smart, which isn’t easy to do. I like Mike!

A comment like that from the man who occupies the Oval Office is so moronic, so childish, so petulant and so immature it almost makes Bill O’Reilly look smart. (I said almost.) A lot of memes and social media comments have been posted since Trump’s tweet and I won’t recount them all, but here are a few of my favorites:

“Donald Trump would need a heart and brain transplant to become half the man that LeBron James is.”

“One man puts kids in cages; the other one puts them in school.”

“Trump should STFU and go back to tweeting about the Electoral College, because a fight with LeBron James is a fight he cannot win.”

And, finally, “Lebron James invested over $100 million to send students to a university. Donald Trump had to pay $25 million for ripping off university students.”

I want to add one additional, somewhat-related thought:

A couple of years ago, I was sitting in the bleachers waiting for the start of a basketball game between Fairmont State and West Liberty universities. Fairmont State’s team at the time was composed of both black and white players, but most of the regulars were black while West Liberty’s players were almost exclusively white.

During warm-ups, a white man I didn’t know sidled over to me uninvited to comment on the whiteness of West Liberty’s team. “Yes,” I responded, “they’re pretty white.” His comeback was, “And they’re intelligent, too.”

Now I’d like to believe he wasn’t suggesting that Fairmont’s African-American players were dumb, but somehow I can’t talk myself into that, especially after the bigoted white American president who inherited his wealth tweeted a similar sentiment about a highly successful television news anchor and possibly the greatest professional basketball player of all time, both of whom were smart enough to rise to the top of their professions after overcoming adversity in their personal lives.

Trump and O’Reilly could learn a lesson from those two guys. If they wanted to. Which they don't.

When you want that thing but they don’t make it anymore

Some time ago I was in line to check out at CVS and was standing beside a display of electronic gizmos when I came across an iPhone charging cable that lights up. It looks like a striped green snake and when you’re charging your phone, little lights go dancing through it like green fireflies racing in single file.

When the lights stop moving and the cord goes dark, your phone is charged. It’s fast and efficient and you don’t have to keep checking your phone to know when it reaches 100%.

Recently, I decided to buy another one, seeing as how we have two iPhones that sometimes need charged at the same time, so I went back to CVS to buy a new cable and was told, “We don’t have those anymore.” So I went to another CVS across town, but they didn’t have them either. “I don’t think we sell those now,” I was told.

I moved on to Big Lots, where I was dismayed to find no lighted phone charging cables at all. However, since I was already there, I went back to the lawn and garden section to buy some wicker chairs I had seen there previously to replace our rusty wrought iron deck furniture, but alas, they only had one remaining chair. “No,” I was told, “we won’t be getting any more of them.”

So it was on to Busy Beaver, where they had stacks and stacks of wicker patio chairs, but when I tried to buy four, I was told they only came in sets and I had to buy a table, too. I didn’t see any tables there and I didn’t want a table anyway, so I moved on, coming home a broken man with neither a lighted iPhone charging cord nor a set of wicker chairs.

I can now state unequivocally that not being able to buy what you want is becoming a disturbing trend.

You see, a few weeks earlier, I needed some plastic fencing. I had several sections I bought a few years ago but needed several more. I went everywhere looking for it, but no one around here sells it any longer. Not even Lowe’s, where I bought the original fencing.  

A friend of mine bought some small tables to go with his porch furniture, but when he went back to buy another one, well, guess what?

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the point.

Now I’m not anti-progress, but it makes me wonder why any company would stop making good, solid products that people bought in the past and may actually want to buy more of in the future. Don’t they want to keep making money? I mean, think about the original Ford Mustang. How many millions of people bought one when it first came out in 1964? I was only 14 then so obviously I didn’t get one, but maybe I’d want one today.

Could I buy it? No. Why not? They don’t make it any longer.

It also makes it difficult for people who advocate for buying locally and thwarts those of us who try to support our hometown businesses. When stores in our town don’t have what we want – or have stopped selling something we bought there in the past – it forces us to patronize the two businesses that do still offer such products where I live.

One is named Walmart, and I try to avoid that place like the plague whenever I can.

The other one is called Amazon.com.

That’s why, sadly, after striking out at every local store that used to sell this or that, I ended up holding my nose and buying four new patio chairs from Sam Walton’s giant neighborhood-killing mega-mart, which was more than happy to sell me four chairs without an accompanying table.

Then I came home and ordered two lighted phone charging cables from Amazon.com. With my Prime membership, I’ll have them delivered tomorrow totally free of charge...and right to my front door.

Here comes that government religion thing again

I've been reading this week about a lawsuit filed against Parkersburg (W.Va.) City Council, contending that Council’s recitation of “The Lord's Prayer” before its meetings is unconstitutional.

I want to say first off that I don't care if you pray or not, and if you do, I don't care who or what you pray to. Pray to God, pray to Allah, pray to Vishnu, pray to a ham sandwich or pray to a ceramic cat. That's your right and your choice and I encourage you to follow your beliefs.

I ask only that you keep it to yourself.

As for me, I practice my own kind of religion. I try hard to follow a set of rules, principles, guidelines, policies and beliefs designed to make me a decent, honest, caring person who strives to do the right thing while respecting the rights of others to live their lives as they see fit. After all, isn’t that what religion is supposed to be?

Sometimes I make mistakes and I have done things I’d like to forget, but I’ll stack up my morality against anybody who attends a Donald Trump rally, chants “traitor” and “enemy of the people” at a news reporter and then turns around to grant a “mulligan” to their vacuous racist con man president every time he violates the law, ignores the Constitution or shatters one of their 10 Christian commandments.

But I digress.

Getting back to Parkersburg, I don't know why any government meeting has to start with a prayer. I suppose we’ve been doing that since the Puritans set up camp at Plymouth Rock in 1620 – or some other such event took place – and we continue to do it (mainly out of habit, I suspect) despite court rulings that suggest it violates the separation of church and state.

In my mind, any town council members are free to seek divine guidance if they think they need it before issuing building permits or authorizing a new sewer line or placing a 4-way stop sign at the intersection of 17^th and Main. I just want them to do it on their own time. Otherwise, by asking meeting attendees to stand while they recite, “Our father, who art in Heaven…,” they legitimize the people who are standing while singling out for ridicule any people who don't believe as they do and choose to remain in their seats.

Take a knee, anyone?

If government officials feel the need to stand up before a meeting, let them do it out in the corridor. They can stand, stretch, jump, jog in place or perform the “downward facing dog,” for all I care. Then come inside, rap the gavel and get on with the people’s business. That would be all of the people, including Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Wiccans and Atheists alike.

That way, no one gets to stand up with the “chosen” who pray to a Christian god and no one gets left behind while holding tight to their own personal beliefs.