Tag Archives: No KIngs Day protests

A Lamentation for my Country

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Grief and fear, apathy and outrage, cynicism and hope, resignation and bewilderment all boil together in an iron cauldron hanging by weak chains above a nation on fire. No sharp, clean Sword of Damocles either. Just a rusty cauldron full of boiling toxic slop. Metaphors of lamentation, these terrible words.

Nearly half of my fellow citizens who voted in the November 2024 Presidential Elections voted for MAGA cult leaders Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and their acolytes. The Far, Far Right thus completed its hijacking of the Republican GOP. This odd MAGA movement, a decentralized yet loyal movement that’s an odd mix of mafia familial mindsets, fascism, libertarianism, and Christian nationalism, has kicked out the “regular” Republicans of Lincoln and Reagan. MAGA gave the dirty boot to both he TradCons and the NeoCons. They forced out common sense, pro-business, low tax, pro-strong defense (but not necessarily pro-war) blocs. They antagonized Evangelical and Mormon Christian blocs. All the anti-Trumper GOP factions ridiculed and dismissed the old school Republicans as RINOs, Republicans In Name Only. Those RINOS were so dismayed and felt so abused by the Trump cult many of them held their noses and voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as well as for other Democrats in the 2024 Elections. Many choose not to vote at all, at least not for president.

Evidence has emerged one of the primary reasons Trump legally won election this time is the Republican push to disenfranchise nearly 4 million Americans of their voting rights in the so-called Battleground States. Most of this disenfranchisement was allegedly over “stupid stuff’’ such as misspelled names and addresses, sloppy writing with illegible signatures, people moving without timely notification of address changes, fear for their safety, and confusion with various misunderstandings among those for whom English wasn’t yet their primary language. This strategic push targeted poorer people, often of color, with less education. Migrants were also among those targeted, even legal immigrants. This push is nothing more than ugly voter suppression. Voter suppression is a direct and dire threat to any democratic republic. Continue reading →

Post-Election Blues: Eye of the Storm?

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Look what came true and what didn’t. The five points below were written the day after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in a bitter and bizarre election campaign in the eleventh month of 2024, set aside, and rediscovered sitting unfinished in a file not quite two years later:

  1. Most of what and who we voted for in local and state elections passed/won, and that’ll have a greater daily impact on us anyway. More than the overarching rule of Donald J. Trump in his second term.
  2. Trump’s win in both the popular and EC or Electoral College votes, while not at all anything close to a landslide, is nevertheless clear & decisive in a free, fair, and secure election. That means our system, however in need of reform, still works. It worked well enough the once imminent threat of mass violence and civil war among us Americans has quickly receded. The Right sees the system work so a rebellion isn’t necessary, and the Left is too stunned at its loss of power to do anything violent. These are good things.
  3. Any attempt to actually go beyond rhetoric to set up a real dictatorship takes time, and will be vigorously contested in the courts, by both the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community, and state, territorial, and local governments as well as by Congress.
  4. Trump is an isolationist. He won’t go to war with Russia and China,  but he will allow them and others to do whatever they want. Which means a nuclear world war is ironically less likely now, but the US will likely be forced to intervene once again down the road somewhere.
  5. We are still a very divided nation; tho not necessarily in the way we all thought we were.

As a reminder, those words were written on Wednesday 6 November 2024, the day after the Election. And nearly a year later on Tuesday 30 Sept 2025: OMG! How WRONG I was, LOL! How WRONG! Continue reading →