Not even close to a landslide

I’ve been tinkering with numbers off and on since the election, but I wasn’t sure what I was trying to find. Now I know. While Donald Trump won the election and a fairly large margin in the Electoral College, the popular vote was far from the “landslide” he has been claiming.

What follows is the reason why the Electoral College must be abolished if our right to vote means anything at all.

In the United States in 2024 there were 245 million people eligible to vote. That means they were over age 18 and not felons or undocumented immigrants. Of that total, 37% or 90 million potential voters did not cast ballots on November 5. In fact, 77 million of them were not even registered to vote despite being eligible.

I have to wonder what they were thinking, if they were thinking at all. Our right to vote is one of the more sacred privileges of being an American. (At least it used to be before Trump came along.) To not exercise that right is, well, I just don’t understand. More on that later.

Here are some more statistics you may find interesting. (Some numbers are rounded off.)

                  

Number registered to vote: 168 million

Registered but not voting: 13 million

% Registered who voted: 92%

% Registered not voting: 7%

                                                        

Total number who voted: 155 million

Voted for Trump: 77 million

Voted for Harris: 75 million

Difference: 2 million

                                                        

Number of eligible voters: 245 million

% Voted for Trump: 31.43%

% Voted for Harris: 30.61%

Difference: 0.82%

                                                        

Number of registered voters: 168 million          

% Voted for Trump: 45.83%

% Voted for Harris: 44.64%

Difference: 1.19%

                                                        

Number of actual voters: 155 million 

% Voted for Trump: 49.7%

% Voted for Harris: 48.4%

Difference: 1.3%

 

To recap:

* Among actual voters, Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris by only 1.3%. In no universe is that a landslide. It's little more than one rock rolling down a hill.

* Neither candidate reached 50% among registered voters with Trump winning by only 1.2%.

* The margin was even closer among all eligible voters, with Trump winning by only 0.82%.

* More than one-third of all eligible voters (37%) did not vote. Nearly a third of them (31%) did not even register to vote, meaning that 77 million people not only failed to vote in the most important election of our lifetime, but they also failed to even try.

* The only “landslide” if you want to consider it as such came in the Electoral College, where Trump got 58% of the ballots compared to Harris’s 42%. A lot of those votes came from states with more farm animals than people.

Clearly, the Electoral College does not reflect the voice of the American people, and that is why it needs to be abolished. That is, if the incoming administration doesn’t throw out the entire Constitution and rule that “we have our leader” so voting is no longer required.

We'll have four years to answer that question.

The NIL is more than cheeseburgers and movie night

I just read about a University of Florida linebacker who issued some demands regarding his NIL payment from the school. Among them, he wanted $45,000 a month. That’s a monthly “stipend” for an outside linebacker who, I suspect, nobody outside the state of Florida or various recruiting services has ever heard about.

Florida said “no” and showed him the way to the Transfer Portal.

Meanwhile, Marshall University was forced to opt out of its bowl game this year because 30-some players entered the portal when their coach took another job. They didn’t have enough returning players with game experience to play a bowl game.

And West Virginia’s best defensive player hit the portal, too, which is bad because the defense wasn’t very good to begin with. (He did say he might change his mind and return.)

So NIL and the Transfer Portal are now the way of the world in college athletics. I, for one, am not amused.

First, I want to talk about the Transfer Portal. In the past, college coaches were allowed to switch jobs at will with no penalty attached, while players who transferred schools had to sit out one year. The portal allows players to transfer to a new school every year and to play immediately thereafter. That seems only fair, except for two things: (1) the portal is already open for this year before teams have played in their bowls, and players are already leaving, and (2) players are allowed to transfer more than once. Some players find themselves on four different rosters during a four-year college career. Coaches don’t know from year-to-year which players they will have in the future.

On the NIL front, big money schools have big money budgets that smaller schools simply cannot match. Ohio State and the University of Oregon, for example, have NIL budgets in the $20 million ballpark, according to Nebraska Athletic Director Troy Dannen. Nebraska’s budget of less than $10 million places the Big 10 school at a competitive disadvantage, he believes.

Here are a few other facts:

* In 2023, the University of Texas's nonprofit NIL collective, Texas One Fund, raised nearly $10.5 million and spent more than $13.3 million. The collective distributed about $11.7 million to UT athletes.

* The average Power Five school spent an estimated $9,815,217 on NIL in 2023-24, about 66% of which went to football players. Another 24% was allocated to men's basketball.

* In 2023, the Walk of Champions' budget for NIL payments to student athletes at Alabama was $5,700,000. The estimated revenue sharing cap for Alabama in 2025 is $20,500,000.

* Getting back to Florida, the school DOES lead the nation in the number of NIL deals brokered with 498 deals since March 2021. Texas was the next closest school with 367 deals. Florida plans to spend more than $13 million this year to improve their roster and make them competitive again in the Southeastern Conference. 

* The $45,000 demanded by the Florida linebacker would have paid him $540,000 over 12 months or $225,000 during the five-month football season from August through December.

So what’s wrong with this picture? 

NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) came about because the NCAA and colleges were profiting by marketing their best players for awards, endorsements and such, without any compensation paid to the players themselves. It’s understandable that the players would be upset by being denied a slice of the pie.

But the pie has become bigger than most of us could imagine, and now millions of dollars are being paid to the top athletes in the country, according to ESPN and other internet sources. Colorado QB Shedeur Sanders, son of his coach Deion Sanders, reportedly benefits to the tune of $4.7 million, and all of the top 20 recipients are receiving at least $1 million in NIL funds.

That makes it difficult for schools like WVU and Marshall to compete. In the Big 12 Conference, for example, West Virginia ($5.5 million) ranks eighth out of 16 teams in NIL money, good for only 44th best in the country. That means that 43 other schools have more NIL money to buy the best players. In my book, that’s a competitive disadvantage.

Not much is reported about Marshall’s NIL budget, which falls around the middle of the Sun Belt schools, but in 2023, the football coach offered Ohio State’s $20 million players “all-you-can-eat” at Tudor’s Biscuit World to transfer. The offer made the news, but didn’t net a lot of players.

So the Transfer Portal and NIL are problems which are damaging college football, in my opinion. But take heart, sports fans I think I have found solutions to both problems.

First, assuming the NCAA won’t do away with the Transfer Portal on my say-so alone, at least they could keep it closed until after the football bowl games and before spring practice begins. That way, teams could compete in bowls with a full or nearly-full complement of players, and coaches could start spring practice knowing which players they still have.

And second, put a cap on NIL spending so the big schools and the ones funded by Nike or oil money or some other billionaires can’t buy all of the best players. I don’t know what a reasonable cap would be, but someone smarter than I am should be able to figure that out.

These days, watching live streams of sporting events, I see a lot of TV commercials in which former WVU center Zach Frazier and Marshall basketball player Meredith Maier promote a regional convenience store. It’s okay with me if they are getting paid for their appearances (I assume they are), and I wouldn’t even mind if they got free slushies and a candy bar or two. But that’s far removed from the millions being doled out nationwide.  

Several years ago, before NIL, someone proposed making payments to college student-athletes, many of whom came from disadvantaged backgrounds and needed a little financial help beyond their scholarship awards. At the time, that meant stipends of a few bucks so they could buy a cheeseburger or go to the movies or take a date to dinner. Clearly, that’s not what NIL has become. Now, a top college football player makes enough in NIL money to buy his own hamburger franchise, star in a Hollywood movie and drive his date to dinner in a Lamborghini.

But have you noticed the price of eggs?

It’s who we are; it's who we’ve always been

Since November, when a racist, xenophobic, misogynistic conman liar felon was elected to a second term in the White House, groups of mostly white people have argued that “this is not who we are.”

Sadly, I believe they are wrong. 

Not only is this “who we are,” it’s who we’ve always been. From Christopher Columbus to Black Lives Matter to Project 2025, America has a record of racism that was prominent at various times in our history, was sometimes lurking in the shadows and is now out in the open, free to inflict its vile prejudices and bigotry upon its black, brown, Asian, Jewish, Native American and Muslim victims.

History is filled with countless examples, many of which we were never taught in schools, as I recall. I’ve compiled the following list, mainly off the top of my head and with help from History.com and other internet sites. I’m sure there are many more examples that could be included, but if I listed everything you’d be reading all afternoon.

Christopher Columbus

We can start in 1492, when Columbus sailed the ocean blue. It’s as good a place as any. To many of us, Columbus is a hero who discovered America, which in fact he did not. He is lesser known for his treatment of the indigenous people he encountered throughout his voyages, his use of violence and slavery, the forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity and the introduction of a host of new diseases that killed off native people in the Americas.

On his first day in the New World, Columbus ordered six of the natives to be seized, writing in his journal that he believed they would be good servants. Columbus sent thousands of peaceful “Indians” from the island of Hispaniola to Spain to be sold, but many died en route. His reward for this behavior: A national U.S. holiday and his name on a Canadian province, a country in South America, cities all across America, a river and the home district of our capital city. 

Slave Trade

Over the period called the “Atlantic Slave Trade,” from approximately 1526 to 1867, some 12.5 million captured men, women and children were put on ships in Africa, and 10.7 million arrived in the Americas. The vast majority went to the West Indies and Brazil, where they died quickly. Demographic conditions were highly favorable in the American colonies, with less disease, more food, some medical care and lighter work loads than prevailed in the sugar fields.

Long story short, slavery continued in the colonies until 1863, when President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. This executive order changed the legal status of three million enslaved people in designated areas of the country from "slave" to "free."

However, there was more to racial discrimination than slavery. The roots can be found in the U.S. Constitution, which declared that enslaved people would be counted as three-fifths of a person when determining a state's population for representation in Congress, and the fact that many of our founding fathers were white slave owners themselves. 

In 1865, the 13th Amendment officially outlawed slavery in the United States, but racism was alive and well. Slave-holding states responded by enacting Jim Crow laws under which voting rights, employment opportunities and education were denied to African Americans. And, of course, Jim Crow brought us segregation, which lasted until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Manifest Destiny and the Trail of Tears 

Racism and bigotry have not been limited to black African slaves. Native Americans, who occupied North America for thousands of years before white settlers, have also been victims of brutality and discrimination.

Dating to 1845, Manifest Destiny is the idea that the United States "is destined by God to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the entire North American continent." The philosophy drove 19th-century territorial expansion and was used to justify the forced removal of Native Americans and other groups from their homes. Some of them were killed. 

The Trail of Tears was a forced relocation of 100,000 Native Americans from their homelands in the eastern United States to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) between 1830 and 1850. The Trail of Tears was part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, which aimed to create a buffer zone between the U.S. and European holdings, and to allow for westward expansion. Thousands of the natives died along the way. 

Jews, Muslims and the Japanese

Anti-semitism is hostility to, prejudice toward or discrimination against Jews. This form of racism isn’t new, and it isn’t any less prevalent today than at any time in history. The best-known example is the murder of six million Jews in Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945. Known as the “Holocaust,” the state-sponsored persecution and mass murder came to its “Final Solution” during World War II, with concentration camps used as mass killing centers. 

At the start of World War II, in 1939, the United States refused to allow more than 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany to disembark from a German ship. The refugees – denied entry first in Cuba and then again in the United States – were forced to return to Europe, where some countries accepted the refugees. However, 254 of the 908 passengers who returned to Europe are known to have died in the Holocaust.

Also during World War II, in response to the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States forcibly incarcerated 120,000 Japanese-American citizens in 10 "relocation centers" or "internment camps.” The stated reason was to curb potential espionage by citizens who might be loyal to Japan. Internees lived in army-style barracks with little privacy, sharing restrooms and eating facilities. Most internees remained in the camps for three years or more.

Finally, one of Donald Trump’s first official acts as president was the execution of a Muslim ban, which blocked immigration from certain Muslim countries believed to harbor terrorists. In recent years, anti-Muslim sentiment has spiked. Existing and proposed mosque sites across the country have been targeted for vandalism and other criminal acts, and there have been efforts to block or deny necessary zoning permits for the construction and expansion of other facilities.

I could go on, but I suspect you get the point. And if you don’t, I’m afraid I can’t help you.

This is a factual account of racism and bigotry in the United States, starting, in fact, before there even was a United States and continuing to present day. Maybe you should google some of it. Then take a look at Project 2025, the roadmap for Trump’s second term as president, and you’ll see that the prejudice has been broadened to include gay people, same-sex couples, mixed-race marriages, gender identity, immigrants – even women. 

Racism and bigotry have always existed in this country and they still exist today. You cannot say, truthfully, that "it's not who we are." I have personally witnessed racism against black and Jewish friends in the recent past, so I know what I say is true.

Sadly, your children will not be learning in school about systemic racism because the party in power will block that information from their curriculum. They believe – against evidence to the contrary – that white people are the true targets of discrimination and need to be protected from feelings of guilt and shame. But while they don’t want you to know about their ancestry, today’s practitioners are easy to spot. Just look for the red hats, the gold sneakers and the confederate and Nazi flags.

And trucks. They like really big trucks.

Who votes for Trump?

In my opinion, this is who votes for Donald Trump: 

1. Bad people.

2. Stupid people.

3. People who are inherently neither bad nor stupid but have been manipulated by lies, propaganda and misinformation into believing a false narrative and an alternate version of reality. 

Group 1 is simply bad people. We always knew they were out there somewhere, but the Trump presidency has uncovered millions of them who had been hiding under rocks. This group consists of racists, homophobes, xenophobes, misogynists, Nazis, white supremacists, conspiracy theorists, election deniers, pathological liars, grifters, thieves, greedy money changers, dangerously crazy people and abusers of children, women and animals. This group, in my opinion, has always existed but has been invited into the open to foment hatred, violence and insurrection by Donald Trump and his regime.  

They either don’t know right from wrong or simply don’t care.

I don’t want to be friends with these people. I don’t want to try and reason with them or argue with them or show them the error of their ways. That’s a waste of time. I don’t want them to be members of my family, move in next door to me or have contact with my children. I won’t patronize their businesses and I won’t answer the door if they ring. 

This group, I believe, is so badly broken it cannot ever be fixed.      

Group 2 is people generously defined as the “poorly educated” who vote in elections without knowing anything about American history, the U.S. Constitution, the three branches of government or how American democracy works. Some of them are legitimately stupid, it’s true, having dropped out of high school with the I.Q. of table salt, but this group goes much deeper than that. It includes people who consistently vote against their own self-interest, either knowingly or otherwise, because they are obsessed with one particular issue at the exclusion of all others, and are influenced by the wrong set of so-called “facts.” 

These are people who voted against Hillary Clinton because of those pesky emails, or her perceived role in Benghazi, or her husband’s extramarital affairs, and not because of her domestic or foreign policy objectives. They were prepared to vote against Joe Biden because he was old or because his son committed a crime or because he spends his weekends at the beach, and not because of his infrastructure bill or his growing economy or his goal to reduce student debt. And they’ll vote against Kamala Harris because she laughs funny or is a woman or has Asian blood or failed to prosecute one bad guy in California or because of concepts her father taught students at Stanford, and not because she proposes a long list of policies and procedures that will benefit middle- and lower-class Americans and require the wealthy to pay their fair share.

Instead, in each case, these “low education” voters support a man who proposes to take away their health care, privatize their Medicare, cut their Social Security, eliminate critical government services, strip Americans of their basic rights, mass-deport millions of migrants who are productive workers for American businesses, pull out of NATO and abandon Ukraine to benefit Russia, reverse efforts to combat climate change and declare himself to be a dictator in the mold of Adolph Hitler. And that’s just off the top of my head.

One example of Group 2 voters is an organization of school teachers who banded together a few years ago to lobby against and ultimately defeat a bad piece of legislation. Then – in the very next election – they voted the same incumbent legislators right back into office so they could bring it all up again.        

This group is damaged, but might be fixable if its one-issue voting causes it to suffer greatly in other areas or it experiences some kind of epiphany … but I doubt that will happen, even in the best of times. I hope I’m wrong.     

And then there’s Group 3, which includes people who have the capacity to be good people with basic or better intelligence who simply lack the ability, the desire, the interest or the incentive to break free from the blanket of deceit that surrounds them and go out to find the truth. 

These people clearly lack the curiosity gene. They don’t go looking for information that could make their lives better, but are willing to accept the information that is fed to them which might be making it worse. They ignore the probability that what they think and do could be wrong while other people could be right. Or else they just don’t care. For them, it is what it is, and never what it could be.

I know some of these people and I don’t dislike them – not really – but I do question their judgment (or lack thereof), and it makes me angry that they seem to know right from wrong but take the wrong road anyway. I would be happy to sit down with these people and give them reasons why they should come over to my side, but I know I’ll never get the chance. They’d have to turn off network “news” and stop reading Facebook posts and social media rants, but mainly, I don’t think they want to hear what I have to say.

Group 3, you see, believes in the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” The problem is, they don’t see anything broken, so there’s nothing there to be fixed. It will just stay broken, I guess.

Vote blue.

It’s time for a better active shooter protocol

In 1999, two 12th-grade students walked into Columbine High School in Colorado and murdered 12 students and a teacher before killing themselves. The so-called “Columbine massacre” was the deadliest mass shooting at a K-12 school in U.S. history, and was the first such school shooting to draw nationwide attention. 

While Columbine rocked the nation, it was the Sandy Hook massacre on December 14, 2012, that broke my heart.

On that date, a heavily armed 20-year-old man walked into the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school and murdered six teachers and 20 children between the ages of 6 and 7 years old. Using a high-powered assault rifle, he didn’t just kill people. He shredded the bodies of little children attending the first and second grades. Some of them were shot multiple times.

Think of your own children when they were 6 or 7 years old and imagine them bleeding and shot full of holes. I can barely envision the carnage.

Afterward, when the photos of the victims were posted online, I cried. I cried for Daniel Barden, who had a habit of sitting next to a special needs girl to “make sure she was OK.” When she would lose her glasses, Daniel would find them for her.

I cried for Jesse Lewis, a 6-year-old who used his last few minutes on earth yelling to his friends to run. It’s said that he saved many lives.

And I cried the hardest for Grace Audrey McDonnell, the art student who “saw beauty in everything,” her family said, “and was fortunate to have found her passion early in life.” For her, there was no “later in life,” and her sweet, smiling face touched my heart. It still does, and when I see it even today I still want to cry. 

I have chosen Grace to be the image of Sandy Hook that I keep in my mind. Say the words “Sandy Hook” or “Newtown” and I see her face. I made it a point to remember her name instead of the name of the shooter, who deserves no attention for his killing spree and certainly no measure of fame.

The thing about Sandy Hook is this: It was supposed to be the last straw. Seeing the faces of those beautiful little children, my wife and I agreed that unlike all of the others, this school shooting would change the world. It would change the way people viewed school shootings, change the way we looked at people who were potential threats and report the ones we saw, and most of all, change our antiquated gun laws that have their roots in a Constitutional amendment ratified in 1791, when the most common firearms were flintlock muskets and pistols which could only fire one shot at a time. 

It was said that a well-trained infantryman in the militia, using a slow-loading musket, could fire four rounds per minute. Today, the U.S. considers a well-regulated militia to include anybody at any age who gets his hands on a gun, including assault rifles capable of firing 60 rounds per minute and even more with a bump stock attached.

The deadliest mass shooting at an elementary school in U.S. history, Sandy Hook did inspire changes. It re-started the debate about gun control in the United States, including proposals for universal background checks and for new laws banning the sale and manufacture of semi-automatic firearms and magazines with more than ten rounds of ammunition.

From Wikipedia: On January 16, 2013, President Obama created a gun violence task force, to be headed by Vice President Joe Biden. He signed 23 executive orders and proposed 12 congressional actions regarding gun control. His proposals included universal background checks on firearms purchases, an assault weapons ban, and a high-capacity magazine ban limiting capacity to 10 cartridges.

On the same date, New York became the first U.S. state to act after the shooting when it enacted the Secure Ammunition and Firearms Enforcement (SAFE) Act. Other states passed a variety of gun control measures over the following year, but guided by the NRA, 10 other states passed laws that relaxed gun restrictions.

The best hope for significant action came with legislation introduced in the first session of the 113th Congress, which included the Assault Weapons Ban of 2013 and the Manchin-Toomey Amendment, a bi-partisan bill that would have expanded criminal background checks to include all sales between private parties with limited exceptions. But it all came crashing down when both bills were defeated in the Senate on April 17, 2013, and the school gun deaths continued.

Now for some sobering facts:

* Far from being the last school shooting in America, Sandy Hook became just another check box on a growing list. Since Columbine in 1999, there have been 416 school shootings, according to the Washington Post, affecting 382,000 American children. Not all of them have been killed, of course, but all of them have experienced the trauma of an active shooter in their schools.

* Starting with Columbine, 83 victims were killed in school shootings from 1999-2014 when Sandy Hook added 26 to the count. In total, including Columbine, there have been 146 people killed in school shootings, according to several sources (listed below).

* None of this includes the hundreds of people injured, or those incidents in which guns were taken into schools but nobody was killed.

On Wednesday of this week, a 14-year-old student walked into Appalachee High School in Winder, Georgia, and shot 13 people, four of whom died. Two teachers and two children went to school that day and never returned home. Nine others went to school and left in ambulances headed for local hospitals. They didn’t go home after school either.

Afterward, a law enforcement person stood at a microphone to praise his rapid responders and inform us that the school’s active shooter protocol had “worked.” I’m sorry, but it did not. In the world where I live, you cannot claim that your active shooter protocol worked when 13 shooting victims did not return home after school, and four never will. 

Your protocol only “works” if it prevents anybody from being shot. Twenty-five years after Columbine and 12 years after Sandy Hook, people with guns are still killing our children. Maybe it’s your active shooter protocol that needs a little work.

                           *  *  *

Statistical sources: The K-12 School Shooting Database, The Violence Project Mass Shooter Database, Mother Jones Mass Shooting Database (through 2023) and Education Week’s 2024 School Shooting Tracker, updated to include Winder, Georgia.

You probably won’t hear this on Fox News

I bought a box of tall kitchen garbage bags yesterday and paid the same price that I paid last October, but something made me take note of the quantity. I discovered that I only got 110 bags yesterday compared with 120 in the same size box a year ago. Same price, same packaging, fewer bags. Most people wouldn't even notice.

Before anyone tries to blame this on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, this is NOT the result of inflation, although the practice does have a name. While it’s true that companies may be raising their prices on many consumer items, they have also employed a more covert tactic known as "shrinkflation" — offering a smaller quantity at the same or similar price, so when you break down the cost per unit, the newer items are actually more expensive.

The trash bags are just one example. You’re probably getting fewer potato chips in your bag, or your candy bar may be smaller. I recently bought a carton of ice cream that used to come in half-gallon (2-quart) containers, but has been shrinkflated to 1.5 quarts. 

And have you bought a 5-pound bag of sugar recently? No, you haven't. It's now a 4-pound bag. 

I could go on, but I’ll turn this over to Edgar Dworsky, a consumer educator who has been cataloging examples of shrinkflation for several years, and obviously knows a lot more about it than I do. He was interviewed on the subject by Marketplace.com last year and suggested that the practice is somewhat dubious. "I think shrinkflation is a nasty way to pass on a price increase," he said. "It’s just a sneaky practice (employed by) manufacturers."

You’ll recall that a lot of companies took advantage of the COVID pandemic to raise the prices of various consumer goods, often attributing the price hikes to (real or imagined) worker shortages or supply chain issues at the time. Remember trying to find toilet paper in 2020-21? Now that the pandemic has slacked off a bit, many companies may be reluctant to lower their prices, content to maintain their higher profits through other pricing or quantity manipulation.

That gives politicians and right-wing pundits an easy target to characterize all price increases as “inflation” and blame it all on the Democratic administration, but there is more to the story than the partisan hackery that you’ll probably hear on Fox News.    

There is also "skimpflation" that occurs when a manufacturer "reformulates a product using cheaper ingredients or less of the good ingredients,” Dworsky said. One producer of a butter substitute, for example, reduced its contents from 64% oil to 39% oil to cut costs, but consumers noticed the difference and posted negative reviews on the company’s website. The company apologized, claiming it changed the formula to “make it spread more easily.” 

“They were trying to fatten their bottom line by using less oil, which is very expensive now,” Dworsky said, “but they heard the outcry, and now on store shelves we’re starting to see the old 64% come back” just as inconspicuously as it went away.

Dworsky acknowledged that there are sometimes good reasons for companies to increase prices, which he called a “fact of life.” Higher prices on raw materials, supply and demand, labor contracts, transportation costs, taxes and competition are just a few of the reasons. It’s only a trigger issue if it’s done in a sneaky way, he said. And it’s true that food, among other consumer products, is more costly now than it was a few years ago. Before COVID, I used to spend around $150-200 on a typical grocery order. Yesterday my total was $304.

So now, just for fun, I’m going to pay closer attention to the quantities and prices of the products I buy, especially at the supermarket. Maybe you’ll want to do the same. We can make a game of it.

Meanwhile, Dworsky says he can accept that prices are higher for many consumer goods, but there is one grocery item that, if manipulated, could send him over the edge. “That’s if I open a carton of eggs and there’s only 11,” he said.

Read more here: https://www.marketplace.org

                                                                       *   *   *

Marketplace is a public media outlet that produces broadcast shows, podcasts, digital reporting and more. Marketplace is committed to covering business and the economy in ways that everyone can understand, not just those on Wall Street. Its mission is to raise the economic intelligence of the country by sharing economic perspectives and realities relevant to all communities — especially those who often go unrepresented in financial news​.

Cats or no cats, you can still have a stake in America

I find it frightening and a little bizarre that James Donald David JD Bowman Hamel Vance – the Republican nominee for vice president of the United States – pretends to know who does and who does not “have a stake in America,” and couldn’t wait to get behind a microphone so he could enlighten us.

In case you missed it, in his most famous stupid statement to date, he tried to shame Kamala Harris by declaring that “childless cat ladies” are miserable with their lives because they didn’t have children, which means they “don’t have a stake in America.”

Well as it turns out, I happen to know quite a few childless cat ladies, and I won’t pretend to speak for them, because they’re already doing that quite strongly with no help from me. But the fact that an adult male with a published novel and a Yale law degree would make such a dunderheaded statement out loud in public defies all belief. It remains to be seen how many voters he lost for himself and Donald Trump with an asinine statement such as that, but I’m betting it’s in the tens if not hundreds of thousands.

Now, to the point. If you boil down the 2024 presidential campaign to its fundamental elements, it becomes a contest between every citizen who believes that he or she should “have a stake” in America (and the Democratic Party that supports them) against the Republican Party that wants to eliminate, minimize, imprison, impoverish, disenfranchise or deport every citizen that doesn’t share its Christo-fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian beliefs.

It really is that simple. Do we have a stake in America or do we not? 

If we think we do, then JD Vance’s feeble attempt to weed out and eliminate large segments of the population because they chose not to produce children may be one of the 10 most absurd, ill-considered and moronic statements ever uttered by a candidate for high office. Statements such as this make Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin look like rocket scientists … and he’s only been the nominee for 10 days.

Obviously, I am not a childless woman (although I did marry one) and we don’t have any cats (but we did in the past), but don’t you dare tell me I don’t have a stake in America. I have been voting in every election since 1968 and I have very strong beliefs about this country and the freedoms it is supposed to grant to its citizens.

For example:

* I’m not gay but I have friends who are, and I care about their future.

* I’m not in a same-sex marriage but I have friends who are, and I care about their future.

* No one I know is planning to have an abortion any time soon, but it’s not up to me to decide whether they do or not.

* I’m not black or brown, but I have friends who are, and I care about their future.

* I’m alive because of Social Security and Medicare and I intend to keep them both.

* I’m not particularly religious but I was raised in a church and I know good from bad and right from wrong. I don’t need anyone to try to impose their beliefs on me or exclude the beliefs of my friends.

* I have grandchildren and great grandchildren in school, and I care about what and how they are being taught.

* I will probably be dead before Florida is under water because of global climate change, but I care about the people who will be alive then – if there are any left.

* And for the life of me I don’t know how any decent person, or even someone with the slightest hint of morality, can be opposed to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), which is just a way of saying we are all humans equally entitled to be who we are, love who we love, do what we do within the law and live our lives to the fullest. 

What could possibly be wrong with that?

So in conclusion, let me say that it’s not just childless cat women who JD Vance has insulted with his idiotic campaign rhetoric; it’s every American who Vance sees as somehow inferior to himself. Well, let me tell you, James Jim JD, there are millions of us out here who have been insulted, and we read your message loud and clear. We'll deliver our message on November 5.

(By the way, Mr. Vance, how many children have you delivered into the world? If the answer is zero, using your logic, I’d question your true stake in America.)

Besides hot dogs, beer and fireworks, does anybody remember why we’re here?

Today is Independence Day, when Americans celebrate their separation from England some 248 years ago. Ironically, recent events in the United States have triggered an odd suggestion -- that we might be better off rejoining the United Kingdom in the years ahead.

It seems to me that people across the pond have made significant progress in the decades since we declared our freedom from the crown while we, on the other hand, have begun a steady descent toward theocratic hell. More on that in a minute.

It’s also ironic that today is Election Day in Britain, and while a conservative wave is sweeping America under the hand of the Republican Party and the Supreme Court of Appeals, the center-left Labour Party is poised to retake the U.K. government from the Conservatives in what many are predicting will be a landslide.

All of which makes me think of the idiotic way we conduct our elections in the United States.  

Our election process – from the date candidates start to announce until the actual election – easily lasts at least two or three years if not longer. Billions of dollars are thrown around, thousands of promises are made, hundreds of lies are told and misinformation abounds. Even the Russians and the Chinese like to get involved.  

The campaigns are so long that a lot of people are simply worn down by the time Election Day arrives, and a third to half of all eligible voters don’t even bother to cast a ballot.

In the U.K., by comparison, the time frame between a prime minister calling for a general election and the actual vote is only six weeks. (Our campaign started in 2022, give or take, and still has 19 weeks to go.)

Limits are established on how much money can be spent in a given campaign. That sum is generally somewhere south of $2 million, and parties can be fined for breaching the limit.

Another difference is the role religion plays in politics. Here, voters are increasingly being steered toward a christo-fascist, white supremacist, authoritarian theocracy not unlike the one we fought the Revolutionary War to escape.

Meanwhile, in Britain, today’s politicians are fond of saying, “We don’t do god.” No mainstream British politician is likely to mention the word “god” in a political speech or during a campaign. Ironically, religion in general is kept apart from U.K. politics the way it was supposed to be separated here.

(It’s worth noting that religious belief is declining in the U.K., particularly among younger generations. Just under half (49%) of Britons surveyed in 2022 said they believed in God.)

In America, meanwhile, those who seek to assume power plan to impose their fundamentalist Christian religion on every citizen and child – regardless of whether it aligns with our individual beliefs. Schools will become churches, one god will be worshipped and all other religions be damned.

The British are also amazed at the age of candidates in the United States. The two candidates for president are 78 and 81, while the British prime minister is 44 and his chief rival is only 61.

Finally, the British tend to stay away from the so-called “cultural issues” prominent in American politics. That’s because in the U.K., abortion is legal, gun ownership is rare and heavily restricted and gay marriage is uncontested. There you have it. Problems solved.

In summary, they won’t be celebrating Independence Day in Britain today, but they are voting for a government, and it probably won’t be lost on many Britons that their democracy seems to be doing fine, thank you very much, while ours is teetering on the edge of a cliff. The irony and juxtaposition are truly hard to understand.   

So happy Fourth of July, American friends. It’s okay to celebrate our independence as we always do, but this year, maybe we should take a few minutes to look to the U.K. and other democracies around the world and try to remember what that means, because sadly, it appears that many of us have forgotten.

Now, pass me another hot dog, please. And where did you put the beer?  

Where are the surrogates? Where is the energy? Where is the DNC?

The Republican Party went deep into the rings of hell to develop Project 2025, or whatever it’s called, to inspire its base, map out its future and scare the bejeezus out of the liberal left. They basically admit they want to convert the United States into a fascio-christian dictatorship that will gain power in the November election and hold onto it until the end of time.

Then they allowed pieces of it to seep into the so-called mainstream media which – although they would deny it – is still so consumed by ratings that it is treating Donald Trump as a semi-normal presidential candidate instead of the felonious and highly disturbed narcissistic madman he really is.

Now, after rolling out an 81-year-old man with a bad cold and laryngitis to debate the loud, obnoxious reality show star hopped up on Adderall and pathologically incapable of telling the truth, the Democrats seem willing to throw in the towel more than four months before the general election.

All I can say to that is WTAF?

It’s June, ladies and gentlemen. We don’t vote until November. There are 130 days between now and Election Day. Instead of weeping and moaning about poor Joe’s subpar performance in one presidential debate, the Democratic Party needs to get up off its ass and start a serious campaign for the office. It’s way past time they got started, but they need to do it today.  

Where is THEIR plan for 2025? Has anyone seen it? Or read it? Or heard about it? What does it say?

Where are the surrogates to help support President Biden in key states around the country? Where are the Obamas? Kamala? Cory Booker? Gavin Newsom? The Clintons? Bernie? Schumer? Buttigieg? Schiff? Beto? Klobuchar? I could go on and on. Where are these people and what are they doing to help?

And where is the frigging energy? The party is acting like they were the first team to be eliminated from The Amazing Race.

For the record, I hate Donald Trump with the force of a thousand suns. One of my last wishes as an old man is to live longer than he does so I will know when he’s unalive. But I will give him credit for one thing: He can conjure up plenty of energy when he wants to insult or bully an opponent, and that energy was on display last night. He hasn’t forgotten how to play the role of the reality show mogul who pretended to be the world’s greatest businessman while firing lesser humans who crossed his path.

And he has learned how to speak to his followers during a debate. Other than accepting credit for a massive tax cut and the defeat of Roe v. Wade, I don’t think anything he said was the truth, but he planted a lot of spurious seeds into some weaker minds … and that’s all he needed to do.

So back to the Democrat Party. I used to be a Democrat but changed my registration to Independent when it became obvious they had become too timid, too hesitant, too reluctant and too nice to get the big things done, even when they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House. (I still vote with them, but I don’t want to be known as one.)

Now, however, they even seem reluctant to get behind their chosen candidate and fight for victory in the most important presidential election of our lives.

So no, it is not time to ask Joe Biden to step down. No, it is not time to find another candidate who would be starting over from Square One. No, it is not time to cut and run or hide under the blanket of retreat.

Yes, it’s time to pull out all the stops and band together to support Joe Biden for these last 130 days until November 5. Yes, he’s 81 and he can’t do it all by himself. And yes, the party needs to step out of the shadows and into the sunlight where it can be seen by the voters who count.

Otherwise, we’ll be left with the unthinkable, and I’m trying not to think about that.

Even little adventures count for something

I never climbed Mount Everest, jumped out of an airplane, played music in Carnegie Hall or backpacked through Europe. My adventures were smaller than that. Much smaller. But they were adventures all the same, so before I get too old and stupid to remember, here’s the true story of one of them:

In March of 1971, Fairmont State’s men’s basketball team won the West Virginia Conference Tournament and a trip to the NAIA Championships in Kansas City, Mo. On the night of the first round game, against Texas Southern, I was in Fluharty’s Bar (now long gone) with a crowd of fraternity brothers listening to the game on the radio and getting somewhat drunk.

“If we win this game,” one of the inebriated brothers declared, “we’re all going to Kansas City.” Everyone agreed, and we all ordered another round.

As luck would have it, Fairmont won the game on a last-second tip-in by Ed Lemon to advance to the second round, but when the time came for all of us to leave for Missouri, everyone found an excuse not to go. Everyone, that is, except for me and two other guys. “I’ll drive,” I said, being the only one with a car, and off we went to pack for the trip.

I should mention that my car at the time was a 1955 Buick Special that had previously been involved in a head-on collision. It had a crumpled fender on the driver’s side, a dented door and a headlight tied on with speaker wire. When I went home to pack my clothes, my father told me I couldn’t go, but later gave in when I reminded him I was 21 years old. “You’ll never make it in that car,” he told me. “You'll get as far as Columbus, Ohio, if you’re lucky. Then sell the car for the price of a bus ticket and come on back home.”

There was also a problem that none of us had enough spending money for a trip out of town. I had only a few dollars in the bank. There were no ATMs in 1971, so around midnight, we woke up a fraternity brother who managed a restaurant and talked him into opening the place to cash our checks. And off into the darkness we flew.

In Ohio, we encountered a blizzard. My windshield wipers collected so much snow they stopped working, so we had to pound on the glass to make them move. We hit better weather around Indianapolis, I think, and cruised on down I-70, reaching St. Louis in the middle of the lunch rush. Choosing to drive through the city instead of around it (big mistake), we were trapped in the middle of five or six lanes of cars traveling faster than my Buick wanted to go, but we had to keep up or be trampled by the vehicles behind us. It scared the you-know-what out of me.

We made it out alive and 16 hours after leaving home, we pulled into Kansas City. It was 4:00 in the afternoon and we had only a few hours to find a hotel. Being short on funds, we found a single room to share and an all-you-can-eat buffet nearby, saving our money for basketball tickets.

One of the guys with me was an all-conference football player at Fairmont State. One afternoon his football coach saw us getting out of my battered Buick in a parking lot and nearly lost his mind. “You’re not going back to Fairmont in that,” he told his star player. I’ll put you on a plane.” My friend thanked him but declined the offer.

So anyhow, we stayed in Kansas City for four days. Lots of other stuff happened, but I’ll cut to the reason we were there. We watched Fairmont win two games to make the Final Four before losing in the semi-final round and the consolation game. Late Saturday night, we piled back into the crippled black car and headed for home.

Not long into the trip, on U.S. 40 – one of those straight, long and flat Midwestern highways – I fell asleep in the eastbound lanes and woke up headed the wrong way on the westbound side. I have no idea how long I was asleep. Could have been five seconds or five minutes – I’ll never know. Fortunately, we were going straight and no one was coming the other way.

A little while later, police stopped us in Fairmont, Illinois, of all places, but let us go after checking out the car. We weren’t the droids they were looking for.

Hours later, somewhere around Wheeling, I saw a white light flash past my window. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the headlight, which finally came loose after 1,700 miles and 34 hours on the road. We eventually pulled into Fairmont and went straight to a bar. (Of course we did.) I believe I had $1 left in my pocket – just enough for a couple of beers to celebrate our safe return.

We were greeted as conquering heroes by all of the guys who were going to Kansas City until they weren’t, and they all gathered around to hear the story I have just told to you. Weeks later, I bought a mismatched fender and a headlight frame at a junkyard, painted the fender with a spray can and drove that car for several more years.

Why, you must be wondering, am I telling this story today? Well, I heard the Eagles song “Ol’ 55” a little while ago and it brought back memories of this great adventure. Well, maybe it wasn’t a great adventure or even a pretty good one, but it was my adventure and I haven’t had that many. This is one I can remember in great detail.

So thanks for reading this far. I'll leave you with these words:

Well my time went so quickly
I went lickety-splitly out to my old '55
As I drove away slowly, feeling so holy
God knows, I was feeling alive
And now the sun's coming up
I'm riding with Lady Luck, freeway cars and trucks
Stars beginning to fade – Tom Waits / Eagles

Skip the salad; save a dog or cat

My wife and I recently bought take-out lunch from one of Fairmont’s restaurants. The cost for two people was $23 and change. Out of curiosity, I checked the menus of some of the city’s other restaurants to see what certain food items cost. Here’s some of what I found:

One Caesar salad typically costs $13 or more. Add chicken and it’s $16.

A burger combo meal for one with a side order of nuggets is $15.

One large pizza can run from $15 to $17.

Now consider that for $17 a year – not quite a buck and a half a month – our taxes would have helped to support the Humane Society of Marion County, which had requested the minimal increase through a proposed levy placed on the May 14 primary election ballot.

Let me say that again. My wife and I would have seen our taxes increased by $16.97 a year to save the lives of the hundreds of unwanted, discarded, lost or abused animals that find their way to the county’s no-kill animal shelter every year. The three-year levy would have raised approximately $1.5 million to help pay for the staffing and maintenance of the shelter and the care of the animals it houses.

I say “would have” because unfortunately, the levy failed to achieve the 60% “yes” vote needed for passage. It lost by 237 votes.

So now I’m trying to understand why a levy of this nature failed, especially considering the good it would have done at such a minimal cost to taxpayers. For one thing, I suspect that the average citizens who voted against the levy – or the 68% of county voters who didn’t even bother to cast a ballot – don’t know much about the Humane Society or why it is so important for this community. I doubt that they know about the discarded, abandoned and abused animals that are reported in this county on an almost weekly basis, the number of which is somewhat frightening and extremely sad.

Consider this: In our area in just one week this month, the Humane Society took in a male dog that was found running loose, with his head in a plastic cone so small it was slicing into his neck. The dog was rescued by a Good Samaritan and referred to a veterinarian for ongoing treatment that will cost well into the hundreds of dollars. Meanwhile, Pet Helpers – the county’s other rescue organization – collected a small terrier that was dumped alone in a remote area to fend for itself, and another female dog with a broken leg and a dislocated pelvis that was found in the woods tied to a tree. Two surgeries on this animal will likely cost thousands of dollars, which must be paid by generous donor volunteers.

(For the record, Pet Helpers was not included in the proposed levy, but their rescue efforts alongside the Humane Society help to illustrate the magnitude of the pet problem in Marion County.) 

Maybe, had they known about these animals, a few more voters would have colored in the “yes” circle on their ballots.

Or how about this? The Humane Society houses upwards of 30-some dogs at any given time and as many as 70-75 cats that have been surrendered by their owners or rounded up by Animal Control. These animals have to be fed, housed and exercised every day, and many times require costly treatment by a veterinarian. The Humane Society recently moved into a new building with more space to house all of these animals, but fund-raisers and donations are insufficient to pay down the debt on the building and still cover the cost of additional staff and supplies to care for the animals.

That’s why the levy was proposed.

I, for one, had no idea that the levy would be voted down. It seemed like a good idea to me, and my wife and I votes “yes.” We were somewhat stunned to discover the following morning that it had failed. I have since discovered that even though it failed to pass in the primary, the levy may well be brought back and placed on the ballot for the November general election. “That was always the plan,” a volunteer told me, “just in case it didn’t pass the primary.”

Between now and November, the Humane Society will need to get approval from the County Commission to place the levy on the general election ballot, but that is not expected to be a problem. Then, it will be up to the Humane Society and its supporters to spread the word that the benefits of the levy far outweigh its costs. The typical homeowner in Marion County would be taxed an additional 1.2 cents per $100 (or $14.40 a year) on the assessed value of owner-occupied property, plus a couple of additional dollars for his or her vehicles. The tax would be even less if the homeowner qualifies for the Homestead Tax Exemption.

Taxpayers who own businesses, vehicles, rental property or vacant lands would pay a little more depending on how many businesses or vehicles they own. Still, the rate is only 2.4 cents per $100 of assessed valuation per year.

Bottom line: We need this levy in Marion County to help manage the abandoned and abused pet population. The Humane Society is a no-kill shelter and sometimes all of its cages are filled. The organization conducts a number of fund-raisers and solicits donations to help cover its costs, but that’s not nearly enough.

My wife and I are frequent donors but we’re not able to provide large sums of money. It will take all of us in Marion County to pitch in to help by voting for the levy next fall. The cost would be minimal for any single taxpayer, but the combined income would be significant. To pay the additional taxes, I suggest that everybody skip just one Caesar salad or $23 lunch next year and use the money to support the Humane Society instead.

The discarded animals of Marion County would thank you for it if they could.

Where are we headed now, Mr. Peabody?

In a back room at the West Virginia Legislature, a Republican lawmaker offered up this idea: “If we could just invent some kind of round device, we could attach a couple of them to a cart and make it much easier to pull. We need a committee to explore this idea. I’ll have my staff draft the bill.”

That didn’t really happen, of course, but the way the Republican super-majority is dragging the state backward, revisiting the invention of the wheel doesn’t seem all that far-fetched. I checked in on our esteemed lawmakers this week to see what they've been up to and sadly, I was not amused by what I found.   

Intelligent design

The Senate has passed a bill that would allow intelligent design to be discussed as a “scientific theory” in West Virginia public schools. Under Senate Bill 280, classroom teachers will be free to discuss various scientific theories about how the universe came to exist, including that well-known scientific theory called the Book of Genesis. Proponents believe that intelligent design is a scientific theory based on undefined “evidence” they say can be found in the biological world. Actual scientists who are not religious zealots call it “pseudo-scientific” and say intelligent design is “not testable” through recognized scientific methods.

In God We Trust

If that’s not theocratic enough for you, the Senate has also passed SB 152, requiring that framed signs or posters bearing the motto “In God We Trust” be prominently displayed in all classrooms in every public school or higher learning institution in the state. Similar laws have been passed in states such as Louisiana and Texas, which of course should be used as models for our great state.

Never mind that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids such obvious examples of state sponsored religion, or that this bill, if passed, will never stand up to the inevitable court challenge. Just know that the Legislature thinks it has sidestepped the Constitution by specifying that these signs must be provided or purchased from private donations. Good luck with that one, your holinesses.

(For the record, Senator Mike Caputo, D-Marion, one of only three Democrats in the 34-member Senate, asked how many classrooms would be involved, noting, “That’s gotta be thousands.” He didn’t get an answer.)

Baby Olivia

On the anti-abortion front, the Senate Education Committee has advanced a bill that will require schools to show students in eighth and tenth grades a three-minute video called “Meet Baby Olivia,” produced by an anti-abortion organization, which begins with an animation of sperm fertilizing an egg as a narrator says, “This is the moment that life begins.” To implement this requirement, Senate Bill 468 has identified a new course it calls “human growth and development” that must be added to the public and charter school curriculums beginning next year.

SB 468 would also require students to view a “high-definition ultrasound video, at least three minutes in duration, showing the development of the brain, heart, sex organs and other vital organs in early fetal development.” If that’s not frightening enough for you, an early version of the bill had suggested that students view the videos as early as third grade.

School choice

New programs related to “school choice” would require the state to spend millions more in the coming year while directing money away from public schools where it is needed and into private education. The state treasurer’s office estimated that an additional $27 million will be necessary for the Hope Scholarship program, which provides financial support for students pursuing their education outside the public school system, because more students are lining up for the program than estimates had indicated. (Hey, it’s free money. Why not get in the line?)

And Governor Jim Justice has advocated for another $5 million in seed money to help start new charter schools. A charter school receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It operates outside the established rules for accountability, but is considered a public school because it could lose its charter if it fails to produce results.

Patricia Rucker, chairwoman of the Senate’s School Choice Committee, said the Hope Scholarship is needed because “public school students for some reason are not getting what they need from the public schools so they are withdrawing and getting education somewhere else. The state funding follows them wherever they go.” (She failed to mention that in 2023, more than $300,000 in Hope Scholarship money followed students to private schools or homeschools located in other states that border West Virginia.)

The Hope Scholarship, launched in 2021, pays out roughly $4,400 per student in taxpayer money for private education that would otherwise go to public schools. Last year, more than 2,300 students were awarded the scholarship funds.

Coal tax credit

Moving on, in keeping with their policy of raping the state’s budget, legislators have approved a bill that would allow coal companies to claim tax credits that will reduce their severance tax liability, which is important to keep coal alive here in the nation’s Extraction State. In some twisted way that defies understanding, the House of Delegates Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has managed to disguise this tax break for the coal industry by linking it to some kind of roadway projects approved by the Department of Transportation. See if you can figure that one out. I don’t think I can.

Windmill tax

At the same time, the Senate’s energy committee has approved a bill to change tax policy for wind power projects, effectively discouraging wind-related investments in the state. I mean, we can’t give tax breaks to the coal barons without sticking it to those windmill-loving Libs, now can we?

Senate Bill 231would increase taxable property valuations and property tax assessments for wind power projects while stripping away their taxable designation as “pollution control facilities.” If the bill becomes law, every tower with a wind turbine attached will be considered real property as long as the tower is “affixed to the ground.” Apparently, it won’t apply to wind turbines that are floating freely in space.

For the record, the Republicans hold a 31-3 advantage in the Senate and an 89-11 majority in the House, so any chance of blocking these bills seems to border on impossible. And please note, these are just bills that came to my attention this week. I have no idea what other evil these Trumpaloons are cooking up.  

Gee, Mr. Peabody. Why would these people want to do these things?

Because they can, Sherman. Simply because they can.