Tag Archives: politics

And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, September 21, 2025, one day before the official start of autumn. For those of you who are interested – and I know most of you aren’t – today marked the funeral and public memorial marking the canonization of far-right activist Charlie Kirk in Glendale, Arizona. The doddering president has been shown delivering remarks on the occasion of this spectacle, but I generally had no intention of listening to him. I’m more interested in an online article from Ok! by its staff entitled “Donald Trump Falls Asleep at Charlie Kirk’s Funeral and Memorial Service as Health Concerns Mount: Photo.”

The article mentions that the president was seen dozing off during the service in Arizona. After Kirk was shot and killed on September 10, Dump shared the news on “Truth” Social. I won’t repeat what the most un-Christian commander in chief posted on his media platform about how wonderful the late Kirk was.

Now it has been reported that the killer of Kirk, Tyler Robinson, often clashed with his father over their opposing views, his mother said. When Charlie’s Utah Valley University event came up, Tyler reportedly called it “stupid” and said Kirk “spreads too much hate.”

In the meantime, this is hardly the first time Dump was caught taking forty winks. Recently, the former reality star was observed napping during the U.S. Open finals, sparking a new round of questions about his condition.

Two clinical psychologists – John Gartner and Harry Segal – now claim the signs point to something more serious, with Chump showing physical and linguistic symptoms of “early dementia.” And who recalls that it was discovered that former President Ronald Reagan was suffering from the same ailment during his second term? And that his “Just say, no” wife, Nancy Reagan, was actually running the country for him? I wonder who is doing it in the case of this loathsome individual; it’s certainly not Melanoma, his wife. It’s probably Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff who is as just as loathsome as his boss.

And who can forget the many times Chump was caught dozing during his one criminal trial conducted here in New York? Back in July, cameras caught him struggling to stay awake as his team rolled out a new health-tracking system at the White House. Later that month, critics nicknamed him “Sleepy Don” after he seemed ready to nod off during an energy and AI summit in Pittsburgh.

ll I have to say about this matter is how the media would pounce on former President Joe Biden if he had ever done the same thing as Chump in public, no less. This guy appears to be suffering, actually, from early onset dementia in real time and our legacy news outlets somehow are shying away from reporting on it! This is not good for America.

Well, that wraps it up for me for the next three days. Tomorrow night marks the start of Rosh Hashanah and we’re either hosting our friend “Patricia” here at our apartment – only if the elevator is restored to its former glory during the day – or we’re going to Patricia’s place, toting all the food that Elliot prepared for the occasion.

On Tuesday, we head out to Cherry Hill to spend the holiday with “Harold” and his family. Since we just returned from an almost-two-week overseas trip, we’re staying only until Wednesday. And we also don’t want to leave Atticus for much longer than a day or so.

So for those of my readers who celebrate this event, let me wish you “L’shana tova”; may you all be inscribed in the Book of Life for another year. I will either return here on Wednesday or on Thursday. It depends on when we come back from New Jersey and on my mental and physical state.

And so it went!

Ooh, my very first AI-generated image! Good heavens!

And So It Goes

Today is Saturday, September 20, 2025. The extent of this current regime’s corruption seemingly knows no bounds as it has been reported today by news media that White House border “czar” Tom Homan accepted $50,000 in bribes from undercover FBI agents, but that this felon’s partisan-inclined Department of Justice just shut down the entire case claiming the matter was fueled by the “deep state,” which is anything that is actually critical of the Orange Buffoon in the White House. An article online for MSNBC entitled “Tom Homan was investigated for accepting $50,000 from undercover FBI agents. Trump’s DOJ shut it down,” by Carol Leonnig and Ken Dilanian explores this newest scandal set to engulf the current administration.

According to credible sources, it appears that Homan was recorded by the FBI accepting $50,000 in cash after indicating he could help the agents who were posing as business executives win government contracts in a second Chump administration, according to multiple people familiar with the probe and internal documents reviewed by MSNBC.

The FBI and the Justice Department planned to wait to see whether Homan would deliver on his alleged promise once he became the nation’s top immigration official. But the case indefinitely stalled after Dump became president again in January, according to six sources familiar with the matter. In recent weeks, Dump appointees officially closed the investigation, after FBI Director Kash Patel requested a status update on the probe, two of the people said.

Undercover FBI agents posing as contractors communicated and met several times last summer with a business colleague who introduced them to Homan, and with Homan himself, who indicated he would facilitate securing contracts for them in exchange for money once he was in office, according to documents and the people familiar with the case.

On September 20, 2024, with hidden cameras recording the scene at a meeting spot in Texas, Homan accepted $50,000 in bills, according to an internal summary of the case and sources.

No further investigative steps were taken by FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors in the final months of 2024, the people said, and were expected to keep monitoring Homan to determine if he landed an official role and would make good on steering contracts in a future Dump administration.

At the time when Homan was caught in the FBI sting, he was president and owner of a private consulting business that said it could help companies in the border security industry win government contracts.

At the National Conservatism Conference in July 2024, Homan promised he would run the biggest deportation operation this country has ever seen if Dump returns to the White House in January – which he did, of course.

Several FBI and Justice officials believed that they had a strong case against Homan for conspiracy to commit bribery based on recording him accepting cash and his apparent promise to assist with contracts, according to four people familiar with the probe. But he was not charged since he was not a public official then and Dump was not president at the time he accepted money in the FBI’s undercover sting, so his actions didn’t clearly fit under a standard bribery charge.

When asked about these potential charges against Homan, legal experts said that a person who promises to influence federal contracts when they become a public official can’t be charged under the federal bribery statutes until they are named or appointed to such a post. Now that Homan has ascended to the immigration throne, he could find himself in hot water with the feds if he reaffirms his promise or communicates in some way about his plan to deliver on his agreement. Only time will tell. However, now that Patel and the Justice Department are in the pocket of Dump, it doesn’t seem likely that an independent investigation of Homan would ever be facilitated anytime soon. This won’t be the first time that a presidential cabinet contained accused miscreants, but this is the only one in which an entire cabinet is practically composed of them.

The good news emanating from the Jimmy Kimmel debacle is that the Disney Corporation (the backers behind ABC the station that let Kimmel go because of an allegedly anti-Charlie Kirk remark, which was ridiculous altogether) has lost $3.5 billion in just days. This was posted on my Instagram feed. It appears that people are canceling Disney cruises, Disney vacations, and even their subscription to the Disney channel. Sheesh, and I just took a Disney cruise in July. This flagrant attack on free speech must be fought with every ounce of our being.

Today Elliot and I enjoyed the company of two of our Austin Street Diner breakfasters at “Rachel’s” house right here in Forest Hills. She invited three of us to her lovely apartment on Yellowstone Boulevard for lunch at 12. She served us lox, bagels, chicken and egg salad, and coffee. The other person at this get-together was “”Hannah.” We stayed for almost three hours. There was a lot of jollity and some heavy baring of family secrets at the dinner table. Before leaving, we said we’d have everyone over to our place to reciprocate.

Earlier, we were visited by “Ernest,” the tech expert who came to look at the nonfunctioning television set in the living room. I tried to call him two days ago but couldn’t connect for some reason, so I went into Foodtown where he works and asked if I could leave him a message. I subsequently learned that his cell phone dropped out of his pants on the subway and was snatched by some petty thief. So my calls were just going to voicemail initially.

So Earnest entered the apartment right before we intended to leave for Rachel’s house, which was close to 11. He stayed for several minutes to gauge the situation. He claimed that the problem stemmed from faulty wiring and he said he would return to take the TV and come back with proper wiring. Thus far, he hasn’t returned. He did say he was going to other peoples’ houses in the evening, so I should just wait and see.

I now just received a message from Ernest in which he stated he is stuck in traffic and will come instead on Monday. I hope the elevator will be operating later that day. Also we won’t be home on Tuesday since we’re driving down to my friend “Harold’s” house to stay for Rosh Hashanah. I hope he can complete the job in one day, but I won’t be that optimistic that he could. This might take several days.

Have a good Sunday.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Friday, September 19, 2025. Boy, was I overjoyed that we missed the political news emanating out of this country the time we were in Copenhagen and Israel, even though we heard some snippets of the carnival of fascism swirling in this country during the present moment on BBC World News in Copenhagen. The family member we were staying with in Tel Aviv had no CNN, so we didn’t watch the news at all, but we certainly heard the news about far-right activist Charlie Kirk’s assassination while we were in Copenhagen, I believe. (I believe it happened on September 10; we were leaving Copenhagen for Israel that day.) The reaction over Kirk’s death was swift and unrelenting on the far right; the buffoon of a president talked way out of turn and condemned the “far left radicals” for Kirk’s murder, but if he had just waited until a damn suspect was taken into custody, he would have learned the gunman was not from the left at all; he was a registered Republican, as his grandmother told news outlets. This is what this “divider in chief” does so well: he divides the country into “radical lefties” and proper far righters, which he deems more American than those who espouse those policies considered too “woke” for Dump’s factions to ever wish for.

What has resulted from the death of Dump’s 31-year-old extremist friend who deserves no accolades other than that he shouldn’t have been shot for espousing such hateful opinions under the rubric of free speech is the repercussions of what Little Donnie has exacted in the wake of this event, which was to strong-arm ABC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air for allegedly spouting anti-Kirk views on his show, which was not even the case at all. He never criticized Kirk directly for his views; he criticized MAGA for embracing Kirk’s death as a political stunt and claiming incorrectly that it was carried out by someone on the far left, which had already been disproved. For this, he was taken off the air! How ridiculous! Has anyone ever mentioned that Fox News itself should be taken off the air for espousing lies, damn lies, and more lies to the gullible American public? This station has done more irreparable damage to the American psyche ever since it came on the air, and it still is allowed to flourish, despite an almost 1-billion settlement against it for spouting lies about the 2020 election. And Kimmel is taken off for one inoffensive comment that was deemed too sensitive for the toddler in chief’s ears. In a stunning move that should serve as a wake-up call for all Americans that our First Amendment rights are now directly under attack by this fascistic administration, the Jimmy Kimmel show was put on an indefinite preemption by ABC.

It was Nexstar that owns dozens of ABC affiliates who applied pressure to the network to remove Kimmel from his late-night show. This move by Dump and his awful minions to suppress free speech should send a deep shudder through every American who cherishes the notion of free speech in this country. We are not a dictatorship – yet. But this blatant abuse of power on behalf of this authoritarian president must be dealt with severely – either with immediate lawsuits filed by Kimmel himself or by boycotting ABC itself by all people who denounce this decision by this regime. I have also been made aware that people should boycott Disney, even, since it owns ABC now. I haven’t been to a Disney property in years and I have no intention of going to one in the near future anyway.

Podcaster Aaron Parnas writes about this disturbing trend with the firing of Kimmel thusly: “If this becomes the norm, no figure in the public eye, regardless of political leaning, is safe from being pulled ‘indefinitely’ when their words displease powerful stakeholders. Beyond Kimmel, the deeper danger lies in the chilling effect this sets for all media figures, entertainers, and journalists. If the cost of expressing opinions – however clumsy or controversial – is corporate cancellation, the incentive will shift from speaking truth to power toward speaking nothing at all.” The world of 1984 will rule over this country like Big Brother reigned over that fictional land created by George Orwell.

We cannot let this thin-skinned baby get his way here. Now is the time to resist. As Parnas concludes a piece he wrote, “Today it is Jimmy Kimmel. Tomorrow, it could be any voice that dares to step outside the lines drawn by those in power.”

We are in deep doodoo, my friends, and we must make ourselves aware of how bad the situation is developing in this country and fight it. Or we won’t have a country anymore!

Despite this warning, please have a good weekend.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Thursday, August 4, 2025. There couldn’t have been a more explosive Senate hearing than today when Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. the secretary of the Health and Human Services (HHS) agency was grilled by both Democrats and Republicans for being so incompetent in his role as the purveyor of this country’s health. An online MSNBC article by Brandy Zadrozny entitled “Senators tear into RFK Jr. over vaccine restrictions in explosive hearing” outlines some of the salient points that came out in today’s hearing.

Amid many calls to resign and accusations that he is a danger to Americans’ health, Kennedy struggled to defend himself against these most accurate allegations. The hearing spanned about three hours in front of the Senate Finance Committee in which both sides of the aisle accused the health and human services secretary of lying to senators during his confirmation hearings (Duh!) and harming public health by restricting access to vaccines. The only thing he could do just like Demented Don was to lash out, accusing senators of misleading the public and allegations of corruption.

This hearing marked itself as the harshest congressional oversight of any Cabinet official since the start of Demented Don’s second term in January. I say it’s about time that those lawmakers have found a spine here. One after the other, both Republicans and Democrats peppered the abnormally tan “black sheep” of the Kennedy clan with questions over his chaotic leadership of the Department of Health and Services, including his firing of the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC), his anti-vaccine record and rhetoric, and his ongoing attacks on disease-fighting treatments.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed into the conspiracy theorist of a secretary by noting that Kennedy’s new recommendations for COVID vaccines have limited their availability at pharmacies in many states. She outright accused Kennedy of lying to the committee during his nomination hearings, breaking his promises not to restrict access to vaccines.

She fumed, “Last November, you said, ‘If vaccines are working for somebody, I’m not going to take them away.'” But just last week, she noted, “You announced the Covid-19 vaccine is no longer available for healthy people under 65.” So you be the judge here: Didn’t Kennedy just lie here about having the COVID vaccine available to all people, despite their age? Hell yes, I’ll answer. The brain-devoured secretary has been caught in a momentous lie.

At one point during the heated exchange, Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, became quite exasperated during his questioning – at one point asking Kennedy to tell him how many Americans had died of COVID. The clueless secretary responded, “I don’t know.” He should have known that the pandemic has killed more than 1 million people in the United States – a figure that Kennedy has baselessly disputed.

Then Warner exhorted, “The secretary of health and human services doesn’t know how many Americans have died from Covid, doesn’t know if the vaccine helped prevent any deaths, and you are sitting as secretary of health and human services. His voice rising, Warner postulated, “How can you be that ignorant?”

During the contentious hearing, Kennedy acknowledged he had rejected the expertise of veteran CDC officials. When asked who at the CDC he does rely on for vaccine expertise, here Kennedy should just have said voodoo experts. Instead of just acknowledging how cuckoo he really is, Kennedy named William Thompson – a longtime CDC scientist who once claimed the agency had withheld data linking vaccines to autism and who was the central figure in the 2016 anti-vaccine documentary Vaxxed. Oh, that “expert”!

At one time, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, told Kennedy, “Every single day, there’s been an action that endangers the health and wellness of American families. He accused Kennedy of elevating conspiracy theorists, crackpots, and grifters to make life-or-death decisions about the health care of the American people.

Even a key Senate repugnican, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a doctor and chairman of the Senate health committee who had stupidly voted for Kennedy’s confirmation, joined with blistering questions of his own.

Cassidy accurately pointed out the inconsistencies inherent in Kennedy’s support for Dump’s Operation Warp Speed, the first-term program that delivered COVID vaccines to Americans, and Kennedy’s recent statements saying those vaccines have caused widespread injuries and deaths. Cassidy charged, “I would say, effectively, we’re denying people vaccines.” Of this, Kennedy stated incorrectly, “You’re wrong.”

Well, now that the hearings are over, where do you think this leaves us with Kennedy being the head of HHS? Let’s hope he has enough common sense to know that lawmakers and the American people hate him and want him gone. Do you think he got the hint today?

I’ve been a little coy with you in not mentioning my plans for travel tomorrow. I just didn’t want anyone to say, “Oh, there he goes again!” Anyway, Elliot and I are traveling to Copenhagen, Denmark, tomorrow for about four days and then we’re flying to Israel to see Elliot and my family in Tel Aviv. Here we stay about five days. Everyone has warned us about traveling to the Middle East in light of the ongoing conflict, but we have no intention of traveling anywhere in the country. We intend to stay with Elliot’s cousins in a suburb of Tel Aviv the whole time. Therefore, we return – hopefully – on September 17. See you when we get back.

Until we meet again! Farvel which is Danish for goodbye.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Wednesday, September 3, 2025. Today the news was all Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, as a powerful group of former Epstein victims demanded accountability against the backdrop of the U.S. Capitol for other adults, probably including the sitting president, who enabled the deceased financier’s sexual abuse and stated they would release their own “client list,” considering this fucking administration has not done anything to that effect ever since the Orange Turd got into office once more.

This event serves as the focal point of a Miami Herald article in the Daily News by Emily Goodin and Julie K. Brown entitled “Epstein victims say they will compile their own ‘client list.'”

Lisa Phillips, an Epstein victim who hosts a podcast that chronicles stories of sex abuse survivors, said, “We know the names.” She added, “Now, together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know were regularly in the Epstein world.”

The rally preceded a press conference, held by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), with Epstein lawyers and victims as the two congressmen push for the U.S. Justice Department to release all of the information from its investigations into the disgraced financier.

These events occurred in the wake of Epstein’s unholy accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who appears to be pressing for a pardon from the convicted felon to commute her 20-year prison sentence.

Standing alongside Massie and Khanna was the surprising figure of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the progenitor of many crazy conspiracy theories, who said she would be very happy to work with Epstein’s survivors to make the list public. She said at the press conference, “It’s a scary thing to name names, but I will tell you, I’m not afraid to name names. So if they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor, and I’ll say every damn name.” Very ballsy from a ballsy woman!

The two lawmakers who organized the press conference, Massie and Khanna, could be using today’s event as a form of public pressure to press Congress to release the files already. It’s unclear, of course, how quickly Senate repugnicans will want to bring the matter to the floor and whether the convicted felon – whose name could possibly be contained in those files – would sign it!

Thus far, no new information from the case has emerged, further enraging those people personally connected to the case, especially Epstein’s adult victims who were abused as preteens. The Justice Department has only turned over its first tranche of files to the Oversight Committee, but Democrats said they contained mostly old information. No date for the next delivery has been announced.

Dump has suffered severe backlash in this matter for his abrupt about-face regarding the issue after his bimbo of an attorney general suddenly proclaimed there was no list and the files would remain sealed. I do hope this issue destroys him. Something has to!

Today marked a day of once-powerless women speaking out against power and privilege and Congress – and the country – must pay attention to them!

As you know, I was away from this venue yesterday since I attended my gay men’s reading club at 6:30 with my newest friend, “Harry.”

The number of guys present at last evening’s meeting was truly astounding: I estimated there were 60 of us literature lovers there, since a few of the latecomers had to sit on top of the platform in back of the cluster of chairs up front. This was new to me; no one had to sit up there ever before until yesterday.

The topic of discussion was Thomas Grattan’s 2024 novel, In Tongues. Not surprisingly, we took up the entire 90 minutes in assessing the book’s effectiveness. I even raised my voice several times in opposition to it. I was not much in favor of the book, if you need to know. Many of the other attendees were in agreement with me, even though there were some defenders of the book as well.

After the discussion, a small knot of us walked to Julius’s Bar. I actually ordered a cranberry juice, while Harry ordered a beer.

I got home around 10:30.

Since today is Wednesday, I drove to my comic bookstore on Metropolitan Avenue to pick up three comics, but I was unable to have breakfast in my usual Dominican coffee shop because every booth was occupied by someone there. This has never happened; I couldn’t ponder why this was so. Did a tourist bus just discharge all of these people at the door of Buen Sabor Latino Restaurant? I didn’t stay very long; I went to the Chinese bakery around the corner to have a Swiss cheese sandwich on a roll.

It’s late; so good night.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Monday, September 1, 2025, a new month and the unofficial end of summer. As this is the Labor Day weekend, a disturbing but all too predictable article in The US Sun appeared online which detailed the raft of violence that occurred in the country. Entitled “Sixteen dead & dozens hurt in Labor Day violence with at least 52 shot in Chicago alone as Trump sets sights on city,” Arshi Quershi reports on the unceasing victims of gun violence that were taken by lawful and unlawful firearms.

Gunfire erupted then in multiple cities, with Chicago suffering the worst toll – 52 shot, seven fatally, since Friday night.

The holiday carnage began on Friday night when a 25-year-old woman was found shot to death inside an apartment just before midnight in South Shore, Chicago. She was hit twice in the abdomen and once in the left leg. Another woman inside was also wounded.

Just hours later on Saturday morning, two men were standing outside in East Garfield Park when a dark SUV pulled up and a gunman opened fire. Two men, aged 29 and 32, were shot, according to ABC affiliate WLS-TV.

The 29-year-old man was shot multiple times and died at Mount Sinai Hospital.

That evening, a 43-year-old woman in Altgeld Gardens was ambushed by five males who unleashed a fuselage of bullets. She later died in the hospital.

In Bronzville, seven people were wounded late on Saturday when a gunman opened fire at a large gathering in a terrifying mass shooting.

Early on Sunday, a 33-year-old man was killed during an argument in the Englewood neighborhood after being shot in the head.

And several mass shootings followed, despite officials’ insistence the city does not need Dump’s help.

Chicago was not the only U.S. city to be rocked by violence over the final weekend of summer.

Atlanta police say a man in his 50s was killed after a fight between a woman’s current and former boyfriend turned deadly.

Officers said the suspect, believed to be the current boyfriend, fled the scene, ABC affiliate WSB-TV reported.

Cincinnati was the setting for three young people being the victims of gun violence in Mt. Washington, Ohio, before the gunman turned the weapon on himself.

Hours later, a woman was found shot in the head in Millvale and declared dead at the scene.

An 11-year-old boy was shot in Houston after playing a “ding dong ditch” prank as he rang doorbells and ran away. This young victim, sadly, learned the hard way that doing this trick is a far more dangerous stunt in 2025 when everyone, especially in Texas, is armed.

On the West Coast, two men died after shots rang out at Don Knabe Regional Park in Cerritos, Los Angeles, early Sunday.

The two victims were rushed to a nearby hospital but did not survive their injuries, CBS News reported.

Further east, three men, aged 35, 37, and 41 were shot outside a building in New York just after 3:30 a.m. on Sunday. This shooting has a more optimistic outcome: all three were rushed to Bellevue Hospital and are expected to recover.

In Nashville, North Carolina, police confirmed one person died Sunday after being found with multiple gunshot wounds inside a home.

The Dump regime’s crime crackdown in D.C. has included aggressive street sweeps and gun confiscations, with city and federal authorities taking around 150 weapons off the street since the Orange Turd declared a public safety emergency nearly three weeks ago.

The Orange Ogre has renewed threats to send federal agents and National Guard troops to Chicago, prompting a swift response from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson.

Pritzker called the plan “unprecedented and unwarranted” and “illegal, unconstitutional, un-American.”

Mayor Johnson signed an executive order, the “Protecting Chicago Initiative,” to affirm city police authority and block cooperation with federal operations.

Johnson warned that deploying the National Guard could inflame tensions and emphasized the city would pursue all legal avenues to protect residents’ rights.

it’s too early to tell what will happen in these cities, mainly blue, where the reigning autocrat wants to deploy his own secret police to allegedly fight crime. Little does he know that most crime is up in red rather than blue states, but this idiot will never send the National Guard to Alabama or Mississippi anytime soon.

Related to this article on senseless gun violence occurring over this holiday weekend is an online opinion written by Thom Hartmann on how to end this national nightmare of ceaseless gun violence. His piece is entitled “The one thing that will end this national nightmare,” and it is a very thoughtful assessment of what is needed to finally end this repetitive cycle of bullets being fired into innumerable victims.

Hartmann takes us back to the brutal murder of Emmett Till that had its 70th anniversary on Thursday, August 28. This week also brought us another mass school shooting, this time in Minneapolis, with two children dead and 17 people in the hospital.

After the recent shooting in Minneapolis, Hartmann rapped a “pathetic” Republican congressman who claimed that the slaughter wan’t facilitated by guns but by “mental illness, including radical gender ideology.” This is totally pathetic, in my opinion too.

Hartmann writes about the issue, “This is a phenomenon as systemic and unique to the United States today as Jim Crow was in the 1950s.” He feels that the gun control movement needs to learn from the Civil Rights movement.

If you don’t recall, Emmett Till was kidnapped by two Mississippi white men on August 28, 1955, brutally tortured, murdered, and his mangled body thrown into the Tallahatchie River. This being the Deep South, the white men who did it, and the white woman who set it off with a terrible lie, were never brought to justice at all.

Till’s mother, Mamie Bradley, made the extraordinary brave decision to show her child’s mutilated face with an open-coffin funeral in their hometown, Chicago.

What invigorated the dormant Civil Rights movement was a picture that ran in Jet magazine that showed the mutilated face of Emmett Till. That picture made real the horrors of white violence against Black people in America for those who were unfamiliar, or just unwilling, to confront it.

Fast forward to our own ensnarement of gun violence with the innumerable school shootings starting with Columbine in 1999 and continuing up to the present day. Hartmann believes that Americans must see the horrors of gun violence in pictures like the ones that accompanied Till’s funeral in 1955.

It would be a controversial challenge, Hartmann agrees, but he feels that pictures convey an unmistakable reality that words cannot. He hopes that parents of children murdered in a school shooting may make the same decision as Mamie Bradley Till did in 1955. He feels it’s about time for America to confront the reality of gun violence in order to take bold measures to ameliorate it once and for all. He feels that the media are too squeamish when it comes to printing actual gunshot photos of children murdered in school killings. Of course, there has to be a Mamie Bradley in the form of a parent, spouse, or other relation who is willing to allow the photos of their loved one to be used in this way.

Comparing this country’s perpetual inaction over this issue to other countries, Hartmann points to Tasmania, Australia, where a gunman using an AR-15-style weapon to shoot up a public square resulted in multiple people dead. While the mainstream media generally didn’t publish photos from the massacre, they were still widely circulated.

As a result, the Australian public was so repulsed that within a year semiautomatic weapons in civilian hands were outlawed altogether, as strict gun control measures were put into place, and a gun-buyback program went into effect that voluntarily took over 700,000 weapons out of circulation.

In the first years after the laws took effect, firearms-related deaths in Australia fell well over 40 percent, with suicides dropping by 77 percent. There have been only two mass killings in the 29 years since.

Here Hartmann writes, “The year 1996 was Australia’s Emmett Till moment. America needs ours.”

I agree wholeheartedly. We finally need this if we want to see gun violence receding in this gun-toting country.

Anyway, the weekend was quite a whirlwind of activity. We were supposed to have driven to “Ralph” and “Sandy’s” house on Saturday, but we had to wait for our new Whirlpool refrigerator to arrive and to be installed that afternoon. We bought the appliance on Friday and contracted to have it delivered the next day. However, I expected it to be delivered in the morning, but I got a text on my phone saying the item would be at our door between 12:15 and 3:15. The refrigerator came around 2:05. It was installed within 45 minutes or so.

We didn’t get launched, so to speak, until about 3:40 or so, and we didn’t arrive until about 6 or so. We spent the rest of the evening indoors with our hospitable hosts with Sandy providing us with her excellent, home-cooked lasagna and a salad for dinner. A friend named “Mary” arrived a little later with dessert, a fruit tart. We all sat in the dining room and schmoozed.

After Mary left, we stayed up a little longer, trying to watch a Kirk Douglas film on TCM: The Heroes of Telemark, but I was nodding off, so we went inside to our room and to bed.

The next day, we woke up around 9:30 to have knishes that we brought from Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery, on East Houston Street, and fruit salad, plus bagels. We waited until about 11:45 to drive to Sellersville, Pennsylvania, to attend my best friend of 60 years’ standing retirement party at the Washington House Restaurant, on North Main Street. We made great time, arriving before 1, when it was scheduled.

All in all, the party was lovely. There were, maybe, 25 to 30 guests, many of whom I didn’t know, except for “Harold'”s immediate family consisting of wife, son, daughter, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter. Harold made an at-times humorous speech recounting his employment history as someone interested in the music field for many years of his life and how he met his current employers, the husband-and-wife couple who own the theater that has employed Harold for close to 21 years. I didn’t know all of the details of his vocational journey here and I was happy to learn them that day. I sat with his daughter, son, and family, so I enjoyed smooching with all of them at the table.

The food consisted of a first course, mixed green salad; a second course, a choice of falafel wrap, oriechette pasta, or seared Atlantic salmon (I chose this entree); and dessert consisting of fresh fruit or chocolate chip cookie sundae. Which one do you think I chose here?

Maybe after a little over 2 and a half hours, we made our exit. Now it was time to drive back to Forest Hills. That was quite a long drive, considering how long it took. Of course, you do have to count the hour or so it took us to have dinner on the road to the overall commute, which was close to 4 hours. We encountered traffic leading to the George Washington Bridge. I think we got home after 8.

Tomorrow I will be attending my gay men’s reading club to discuss Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues. I missed August’s meeting since I couldn’t get the book in time. Thus I will miss my blog tomorrow night then, especially if we all go to Julius’s Bar for refreshments afterward.

Hope to see you on Wednesday. Oops, I just remembered we’re seeing our adopted “nieces,” “Esther” and “Rene” on Wednesday for dinner, so I don’t know if I will write one then either. I do think, however, we won’t have a long night with them since Esther still works. She’s only 27.

Have a good Tuesday.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Friday, August 29, 2025. Out of a show of support, Elliot and I attended an invitation-only screening of our polymath friend “Ralph”s film which was a filmic recreation of his Dictator for a Day musical that played off-off Broadway last October – before the election. The showing was supposed to have begun at 6:30, but it was delayed a full hour. There were supposed to have been about 50 people at this event, but I was informed there were only about 35 people instead. I had no idea that the screening was planned to take place in someone’s huge loft apartment on Canal Street, right near the Holland Tunnel. It was truly a schlep to get to our destination, but we had all the time in the world, since we left much earlier to spend some time in historic Chinatown and have dinner there.

As the film finally rolled at 7:30, the audience was treated to a pastiche of skits, musical numbers, dancing, all over about 85 minutes, and all on the gaffes and foibles of the 45th president. The Dump impersonator, J-L Cauvin, really outshone as the dimwitted president; I can’t name the other cast members since we didn’t really receive a program of any sort. I do know that some of the other performers were probably friends of Ralph. There was one who did a very good impersonation of Columbo the detective from television, but here I thought the segment was superfluous and could have been cut. But I’m no critic. There was even a Bernie Sanders impersonator who had two numbers; his latter routine could have also been pared down a bit, I think. However, after listening to some of the songs now, many things that have played out during Chump’s second term were forecasted in these songs. Remember, this played originally in October, a month before the election.

Right after the film, three cast members appeared up front to take questions from the audience. At this point, Elliot darted out to go home. I waited until the bitter end, which was about 9:30. Someone asked J-L Cauvin the question I would have asked him, which was when did he originate his Trump impersonation and how long has he been doing it. Now I can’t recall the answer. It was a long day. I have checked him out and he does have videos on YouTube, so if you’re intrigued, check him out yourself.

Of course, when Ralph wrote this skewering of Dump during his first term, he never envisioned him actually winning on Election Day. He spoke about this in remarks he made to the audience before the film was shown. He thought he would just go away, which was what everyone in the room probably thought too. Boy, were we wrong!

This is news you don’t want to hear, but there is a huge nationwide spike in COVID cases and emergency room visits as Labor Day nears. This is not very good news, considering that the head of the Health and Human Services agency is a lunatic, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is the most unqualified of Dump’s lackeys in his cabinet. There is an online article from Axios on this issue entitled “CDC warns of huge COVID spike amid internal turmoil,” by Herb Scribner.

This dire warning comes as the federal health agency struggles with its own internal chaos and the ramifications of a new COVID vaccine policy.

If you haven’t followed developments within the Centers for Disease Control and Protection (CDC) lately, there have been walkouts and resignations fostered by the stupid head himself, Kennedy, who just terminated the CDC director just weeks after she was sworn in, Susan Monarez. On Thursday, dozens of staff members and leaders at the CDC rallied in support of departing colleagues.

In an email Wednesday, a CDC spokesperson told Axios, “COVID-19 activity is increasing in most areas of the country.” He added, “Emergency department visits for COVID-19 are low but increasing” for all age groups.

Five states thus far have driven that increase: Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arkansas, and Louisiana. These states have a positivity rate of 15 percent to 19.9 percent.

The CDC’s warning comes as Kennedy announced new recommendations for the coronavirus vaccine.

I seriously hope that Democrats push for this idiot’s termination from the very agency that is responsible for saving lives in this country. There is no room for a vaccine denier in the highest pinnacle of this agency. Kennedy is no doctor, no medical professional of any kind, just a privileged member of an old-guard political clan whose family members have practically disowned him. If anyone deserves the boot before people die on this orange asshole’s watch, just like during the first pandemic, it’s Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. We might just be closer to a second pandemic than anyone thinks! Heaven forbid, but the warnings are there, and when this happens, this will be a total disaster!

Today’s adventure took us to a general appliance store in my old neighborhood to purchase a new refrigerator. Yes, a new refrigerator! For only about two days, we noticed that items in the appliance were not cold. We played with raising the coolant numbers in the refrigerator, but nothing happened. Today we called the store where we bought it and a spokesperson recommended a repair person to come to our apartment. And he did! Unfortunately, he declared the 15-year-old silver Amana dead and not worth repairing. Something about a hole in the back letting freon out. That it was expensive to repair the appliance, given its advanced age. Thus we drove as quickly as we could to Len Harris Appliances and ordered another similar refrigerator. This one is now a Whirlpool. Luckily for us, we were promised delivery and installation tomorrow. However, we intended to drive to Ralph and Sandy’s house in Easton, Pennsylvania, to have a sleepover with them before driving to Sellersville, Pennsylvania, to attend a retirement party for “Harold,” my childhood friend from the Bronx. Now we have to wait for the appliance to be delivered and installed before doing this.

As I just reported then, today is my last blog before Sunday or, even, Monday. I don’t know when we’ll get back on Sunday, so I might just pass on writing my blog if we come home late that day.

By the way, there are protests planned for Monday, Labor Day, to demonstrate against the authoritarian policies of this autocrat. I have participated in at least three protests against this administration but have sadly missed a few because of scheduling conflicts. I haven’t even considered going to this one if it is even going to be held in New York.

It’s hard to believe I’m writing have a good Labor Day weekend, but here I am doing just that.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Wednesday, August 27, 2025. The school year hasn’t even truly begun yet, and today, we have a shooting in Minneapolis that has left two children dead and nearly 20 other people injured, while the suspect is deceased from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, according to local officials. This tragic story is reported in an online MSNBC article entitled “Two children dead, 17 injured in shooting at a Catholic school in Minneapolis,.” by Erum Salam.

The name of the school is the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis where two innocents, ages 8 and 10, were killed where they sat in the pews during Mass, police said. Seventeen others were injured – 14 of whom are children, including two who are in critical condition.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said, “All remaining victims are expected to survive.” But that report is little consolation to the families who lost their loved ones to perennial gun violence today.

The shooter was identified as a 23-year-old whose name I will not print here. It seems as if this troubled young man produced a manifesto and had posted videos online referencing suicide and “extremely violent thoughts and ideas,” according to law enforcement officials. These sources said the assailant left behind an apology to her family and a handwritten sketch of a church’s layout, thought it wasn’t apparent that the sketch was of the school she struck.

The Minneapolis police chief said at a news conference that the assailant wore black clothing and was armed with legally purchased weapons, including a rifle, shotgun, and pistol. She fired dozens of rounds through windows as she targeted her innocent victims for no apparent reason.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called the attack “an act of evil,” and said he is “so deeply saddened, and I’m so sorry to the families I know who are suffering right now.”

Today’s shooting is the most recent of several notable violent incidents in the Minneapolis area this year. In June, Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, were killed in what officials have described as a politically motivated attack at their home. This attack also resulted in the death of the couple’s golden retriever.

This latest assault on innocence by a gun-loving person who showed signs of mental duress (the shooter was identified as a trans woman, which will cause such an uproar in MAGA world that it will drown out any kind of empathy for the victims of this suicide-prone assailant) just highlights the urgent need to address bringing up an assault rifle ban in Congress. Of course, now that we have a dotard in the White House, this won’t happen when lawmakers come back after their none-too-deserved recess over the summer! It’s average Americans who need to press their legislators to pass sensible gun control legislation in the fall. And to give anyone running for office a litmus test on this subject.

Because of the serious nature of what happened today, I will suspend writing about my day. Who needs to hear my bullshit anyway?

All of these families have been impacted forever by this one evil incident! No one should expect to send their children to any school to be shot! No one! What is fucking wrong with this country? We just revel in gun violence and that’s a fucking, crying shame! There are more guns here than people. Ponder that raw fact, people!

It’s time to fucking do something about this!

Tomorrow I will not be writing my blog because I will be attending our artistic friend “Ralph’s” movie based on his satiric musical skewering the current occupant of the White House called Dictator for a Day which was turned down by Amazon Prime because of the fucking censorship going down in this country because of our sitting dictator. But I will not write where this event is happening for fear that some Dump law enforcement guy is keeping notes on this event because it criticizes the president to no end! We all know this guy has a sense of humor up his ass!

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Monday, August 25, 2025. In a hard-hitting online article for Daily Take, Thom Hartmann writes “The Great American Betrayal: Trump’s War on Ordinary People,” in which he outlines how Dump always never fulfills his promises to the American public and how he has egregiously betrayed the very base who has traditionally supported him.

Hartmann provides us a short history lesson in saying how the old Confederacy was launched. He writes that it was built on rightwing oligarchy and racism, while the Democratic Party abandoned the Klan and the Lost Cause in the 1960s, it was the Republican Party that picked up the mantle. And it was this madman who was ideally suited to lead the new GOP movement since he was a lifelong racist, notwithstanding his weak avowals of denying it.

“Trump exclusively serves whoever pays the biggest bribes, either in cash, 747s, or votes, who today are mostly big, monopolistic businesses, the morbidly rich, foreign dictators, so-called ‘Christian’ hustlers, and the Republican base of male white supremacist racists.”

One undeniable reason for Dump’s popularity is “Trump-loving white racists continue to vote for the Party because he’s working so hard to disempower women and Black people while pushing brown people out of the country or throwing them into concentration camps.”

In the meantime, in the service of their rich donors, Chump and his repugnican toadies have:

  • “Fired over 8,000 Social security workers, throwing the agency into chaos so that peoples’ experience working with them will be frustrating to the point where privatization will be accepted as the only option left.
  • Killed off research into mRNA vaccines that were showing great promise to prevent and even cure cancer, among other diseases.
  • Ruined America’s “soft power” around the world by shutting down USAID, leading to the death of millions, mostly in Africa, while China and Russia pick up our former allies.
  • Betrayed our democratic ally Ukraine by withholding new weapons for eight months now while sucking up to Putin and now openly taking the dictator’s side.
  • Embraced autocratic and dictatorial regimes around the world while dissing our democratic allies in Europe, Asia, India, Australia, South and Central America.
  • Politicized our military, something George Washington warned loudly against and every president since Jefferson has done his best to avoid.
  • Corrupted our courts and prosecutors by appointing unqualified Fox ‘News’ personalities and others, including people credibly accused of sexual assault, taking bribes, and engaging in a coup attempt.
  • Ignored due process requirements in U.S. law and the Constitution when it comes to brown-skinned immigrants.
  • Corrupted America’s reputation as a beacon of democracy for the rest of the world.
  • Intimidated media, law firms, and corporate leaders into going along with creep fascism while demanding from them bribes and tribute to the Trump Crime Family.
  • Pitted Americans against each other while whipping up hysteria around race and religion.
  • Put masked, armed thugs on the streets of America to terrorize people and turn the country into a police state.”

And this is not the whole list. Is this roster of transgressions committed on the part of this president long enough for you?

Hartmann then muses out loud as to what it will “take for average people to wake up to how badly they’ve been screwed by Trump and his bizarre crew of lickspittles.”

Hartmann then speculates that it will take a global recession created by this idiot that will eventually turn everyone against the Orange Ogre. He writes that Dump’s incoherent – and clearly unconstitutional – proclamation of a phony “economic emergency” to commandeer from Congress the power to impose tariffs is already slowing our economy, increasing unemployment, and jacking up inflation.

Let’s finally “wake up,” as California Governor Gavin Newsom warned just a while ago to the creeping fascism taking over in this country as Donald Dump tramples over everything heretofore held sacred in this country.

I now have to find Atticus who is hiding somewhere.

And so it went!

And So It Goes

Today is Sunday, August 24, 2025. The era of Dump vengeance has just begun with the toddler in chief openly going after his political enemies, and the first one on his retribution list is former White House national security adviser John Bolton. An online MSNBC article by Steve Benen explores the hypocrisy of Dump going after Bolton for precisely the same reason that the president himself was almost prosecuted for years ago and that was the taking of classified documents. The article is entitled “FBI searches home of former national security adviser John Bolton, a frequent Trump critic.”

Benen writes, “It’s extraordinary to see the FBI target a prominent presidential critic, suspecting him of the same wrongdoing that led to a Trump criminal indictment.”

It’s Dump who got the ball rolling with Bolton nine days ago when he published an online item in which he condemned Bolton as a “fired loser” and a “really dumb” person. Never mind that this little man is just projecting here as always. He knows he himself is a fired loser for losing the 2020 presidential election and is dumb as a rock. Earlier this week, the president added that Bolton is “stupid” and standing in the way of the peace process in Ukraine.

But this campaign is not just limited to juvenile name calling or online insults. In January, Dump canceled Bolton’s Secret Service protection detail, which Joe Biden had approved after the FBI discovered evidence of an Iranian assassination plot. Around the same time, the repugnican also revoked Bolton’s security clearance.

Now the escalation has reached new heights, with the FBI on Friday raiding Bolton’s Bethesda, Maryland, home as part of a “national security investigation in search of classified records.”

To put it mildly, the two men have not been on good terms since Bolton “bolted” the White House. After serving at the president’s side for a year and a half, Bolton warned the public, among other things, that Dump is “unfit to be president.” Of course, the juvenile in chief has responded to his condemnations with an endless stream of insults and complaints about his former aide because he touched a nerve in the thin-skinned president.

Another contretemps involved the release of Bolton’s 2020 book which was very critical of Dump’s presidency. Team Dump lawyers went to court in the hopes of derailing its publication. That effort failed, and the book allegedly became a bestseller.

Three months later, Chump’s Justice Department opened a criminal investigation into whether Bolton disclosed classified information when he published his memoir.

As of now, there have been no public disclosures about the nature of the new allegations, and the author has no idea whether or not Bolton improperly stored classified records in his home.

However, Benen does say it’s “short of extraordinary to see the FBI, led by a hyperpartisan Trump loyalist [FBI head Kash Patel], search the home of a prominent presidential critic – suspecting him of the same wrongdoing that led to one of Trump’s criminal indictments.” Which, of course, were never prosecuted in a court of law!

I strongly believe that the American people will grow weary of this retribution campaign as Dump goes after such personal foes like Adam Schiff, Liz Cheney, Miles Taylor et al., especially when the economy tanks as a result of his ridiculous meddling in it with the imposition of tariffs. As Democratic political consultant and author James Carville has said, “It’s the economy, stupid!” and that will hopefully be the nail in Dump’s coffin.

Wow! It’s another week ahead of us. This weekend was a perfect summer weekend. Today Elliot and I spent a few hours with our good friend “Deborah” in Brooklyn near Grand Army Plaza where we had brunch at a nice French bistro called Olivier’s and then sat in Prospect Park for a little while.

Have a good week.

And so it went!