What’s It Gonna Be?

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The Supreme Court ain’t so supreme, of late.

Maybe it has always benefited from a certain undeserved mystique- its members aren’t gods, after all, just human beings tasked with important work. Justices over the years have produced many landmark decisions seemingly based on a sincere and fair treatment of testimony and applicable law, even charting new ground from time to time, especially when it comes to human rights and bodily autonomy.

Lately, though, there seems to be some backsliding. More suspicion, more doubt, more finger pointing in the direction of a hand-picked conservative majority on a mission to, oh, I don’t know, tighten things up, bring us back to a “better” place that pleases straight, white Christians everywhere.

In the midst of the Trump mess, the court seems to not want to stick its neck out and abide by the 14th Amendment provision of forbidding insurrectionists from running for office. Though he hasn’t been accused yet, many know what Trump did and who and what he really is, and how dangerous he has become.

So maybe it comes down to how closely the court adheres to the letter of the law, along with its efforts to reel in the temptation to react to certain public sentiment, and to what many are seeing with their own eyes: Trump running roughshod over, and even making a mockery of certain norms that have long served as guardrails.

Sometimes it looks like nothing can be done to make him go away.

Long Past Time to Say Goodbye*

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Thanks for the memories?

What kind of things is he remembering? The self-enrichment? The bridges burned? All the self-congratulatory rallies and Executive Orders and power trips? All the patronizing awards bestowed by suck-ups and coattail grabbers? All the paths of destruction blazed in the name of making America “great” again?

Is this one of your last ploys, Donald? Another play to win over voters long enough to discard them? An appeal to whatever sympathy anyone can still summon for you (it can’t be much, anymore)?

You deserve no sympathy.

You’ve had your fifteen minutes and now it is time for you to go, you small-minded, useless, lying, selfish son of a bitch.

Dear America: don’t give in to this smarmy appeal to sympathy. Seventy-seven million of us voted for him so he could finish what he started, which was to tear us apart. Two years in, and some damage has been done. But on Tuesday, we must make it as plain as possible to Trump and anyone who still stands with him that the America they envision is actually a slice of hell on earth, and we won’t stand for it.

*and good riddance

Mysterious, right now

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Daily writing prompt
What are your thoughts about cryptocurrency?
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The stumbling block for me has been getting my head around it. Understanding how it works, and if what ultimately draws it into mainstream use is as simple as enough of us giving it credence and validity. At the moment, it feels like the instruction manual would be as thick as a New York City telephone book– if those still exist.

What makes it legitimate and valuable? What would make it a legitimate standard for financial transactions? What I gather from its use of blockchain is that there is a certain security involving transactions, which I believe is intended to give potential users peace of mind.

It’s more ethereal than a credit card, and devoid of substance and the tactile pleasure of coins and paper money, perhaps appearing to some as the brainchild of someone who’s put together the next elaborate scheme.

And it seems as though it would be out of reach financially for many, but maybe that’s part of what I’m not understanding. What gives it its value and purchasing power?

With a serious entry into this arena, like Ethereum, I know that much effort is being put into user-friendliness, so that an end user, an average consumer, could use it with the same ease and convenience as cash or credit. Still, the question looms regarding the necessity of such a seemingly steep learning curve, of simply understanding how this works and if it has staying power.

Trust Issues

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Who will be the military personnel and/or law enforcement who will go to polling places to intimidate—and who knows what else—because they’re just “following orders?”

What are we going to see unfold between now and Tuesday? Chances are that we will see evidence of Donald Trump’s desperation. The machinery will be ramped up and we will witness things most of us never imagined we’d witness in this country.

I saw a video clip last night from a YouTube pundit who implored us to ask a very basic question: Who’s benefitting now? Not “Who’s to blame?” but Who is benefitting from the insanity we’ve been forced to deal with for the past 10 years? There is only one answer that makes sense, that should be obvious. It’s not us, not the general public, so who’s left but Donald Trump and his hangers-on?

They’ve made billions, they’ve razed and pillaged, and we’re stuck with the fallout of the empty-souled skullduggery and incompetence and grift and deceit and emptying of the coffers. Right under our noses. In our faces.

What are we gonna do about it?

Start by voting out every Republican on Tuesday, even if they’re starting to see the light. Until very recently (how convenient?), they refused to even question the damage being done. They are all guilty by association, riding coattails, complicit in their silence or maybe having a hand in this rampage that’s now lasted a decade!!

Yes– even when he was out of office. We must be mindful of the monumental level of distraction, and that Donald Trump is just the tip of an iceberg of nefarious intent and ill will toward America.

Damn the torpedoes. It’s long past time to say No More.

It Won’t End

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Here’s a piece of the ugliness and frustration and confusion that has marked this election cycle and the decade since Donald Trump emerged from his fortress of gilded toilets: the Senate race in Alaska is now a front-page story because of the alleged shenanigans of aids to Democratic candidate Mary Peltola.

The NY Times broke the story and now the Washington Post is following up with what sounds to be a more robust assessment of wrongdoing on the part of the Peltola camp.

Trouble is, the Republican Governor is commenting as if the Democrats are obviously guilty, saying that they will do anything to win (wow, talk about calling the kettle black), basically insinuating that it’s an open-and-shut case of Democrats trying to sow confusion.

The Peltola camp response is denial and a predictable defensiveness, though if it is true, shame on them. Way to shoot yourselves in the foot and hand the bad guys more ammunition.

In any event, now we can add this to the list of things that may or may not be true and emerge as news stories simply to muddy the waters and serve as another distraction…

… along with an apparent concern that many Alaskan voters don’t know the meaning of the word “incumbent.”

The Waters Are Too Easily Muddied

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Enough already. The saturation point has long been reached and surpassed. Political advertising is a curse, a bunion, a migraine headache, a toothache, a hernia, and a hangnail all rolled into one big shitburger.

The darkness, the graininess, the exaggeration, the low road taken all the time. And the filthy excess of Elon Musk and the roughly half-billion dollars he’s contributed to Republican causes. Doesn’t this raise red flags for anyone—that one person can have so much potential influence over an election season? And what are his motivations?

My sincere hope is that all his money won’t amount to a hill of beans of support for the candidates he’s pushing. I want to believe that all the money in the world can’t compromise principles, that voters are awakening to the gross underestimation of our own intelligence, and that we can no longer be bought with cheap, over-the-top, insulting and manipulative drivel.

Ugh, I guess we’ll soon find out if that’s the case.

Life

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Daily writing prompt
What’s one thing you own that holds deep sentimental value?
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I’ve been ruminating over this and can’t come up with anything except photos and video clips.

I can’t think of one material possession that means anything to me, other than its usefulness as a pair of shoes or a jacket or a tool. I don’t get misty-eyed when I talk about the 12-year-old Camry I drive.

What I do value is the Shutterfly compilation I made of pictures from my trip to Israel, and the Aura frame we have with what has become a running history of the lives of our children and grandchildren, and some of the events we’ve attended and places we’ve been.

That’s about it, I think.

Ill-advised

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It’s 7:03 AM and the sun has not yet risen. It’s still pretty dark, and it has me questioning the push to make Daylight Saving Time a year-round thing.

Of course, Donald Trump is an advocate, not sure why. He likely hasn’t done his homework on this, but if some major donor thinks it’s a good idea, then he’ll be all for it. And he does like making decrees.

Just mentioning this because if we didn’t have the change back to Standard Time coming up this Sunday morning, kids in this neck of the woods would eventually be struggling to get out of bed and navigating the trip to school and sitting in class, and it would be dark outside until 8:30 in the morning.

And looking ahead, who needs an extra hour of daylight when the temperature is 110?

Anxiety

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the worst travel experience you’ve ever had?
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I can’t recall ever having a nightmarish experience while flying, though there has been the occasional delay or gate change and walk-run to catch a connecting flight. So I’ll have to go with the numerous times we’ve run into back-ups as we drive between Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Often times we decide to go through Connecticut and that is often where we run into trouble.

The traffic is heavy at various spots along I-84, so slow-downs come with the territory. We know they’re coming but we often just deal with them and rationalize that we’re getting great gas mileage. Still, it’s quite frustrating, so from time to time we’ll take the Taconic Parkway in New York and go out of our way, up to I-90, which adds a good half, three quarters of an hour to the trip but mostly avoids the stress of congestion and crazy drivers who always seem to be in a hurry to get somewhere.

There was one other excursion that ended up being a bit more of an adventure than we might have liked. We had recently been married and were driving from the coast of Maine over to the Franconia Notch region of New Hampshire, on Columbus Day weekend. I underestimated the time it would take to do so, we couldn’t find an empty hotel or motel room, so we ended up sleeping in the back of our pick-up in a rest area outside Concord, NH.

I forgot about that one until just now. We’re still married.

Not this time

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One thing that is totally unacceptable is if potential voters decide their ballots don’t matter and enough of them stay away from the polls to allow this Republican nightmare to continue.

I sometimes wonder if part of the Trumpian/Russian/Chinese/Heritage Foundation strategy isn’t to flood the various media with inflated and exaggerated reports of the potential for a blue wave, so that voters will mistakenly think things are in the bag and get complacent. I guess many TV networks are guilty of this as well.

We just can’t let that happen.