Now that Maurene Comey, who prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein, has been fired by Epstein's best friend (Donald Trump), I hope she writes a roman a clef. The main characters could be American President Amos Hilter, a convicted sex abuser, and his best friend, Junior Epcot, child pornographer. Having read many government files, Comey should be able to create believable fiction (with some help from AI).
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For 24 years I've been a member of a discussion group that meets at the senior center. We lost a member this week. She was 89 and seemed in good health until she stroked out.
We listen to old people talk.
Among our members we have a woman who set a world record in swimming, a gay Mexican-American, an Episcopal priest, a trial attorney, a former Hollywood child actor, a geologist and city planner, an English professor emeritus and several others. About half are women.
I think democracy's basic problem is that to win an election, you often have to win your share of the stupid vote. You can't do that with logic or issues. They don't register with stupid voters.
July 5 is a day for me to think about Walter Bligh. He grew up about a block from me in Compton, the only child of my aunt and uncle.
Walter was fifteen years older than I was. He's a shadowy memory now, shot down by the Japanese somewhere over Borneo.
I remember him.
At the onset of the war, black people could not vote in half the nation. No women held office. We interned Japanese Americans. Anti-Semitism was open and powerful. Yet women, people of color and Jews joined the military. They risked their lives for what small stake they had in a vigorous system that had already invented Hollywood, the light bulb, the airplane, the telephone. They must have felt the flaws, but they unashamedly fought for what they had and hoped to have.
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Donald Trump admires Andrew Jackson, an ignorant, uncontrollable, murderous cracker.
(My great-grandfather moved from Kentucky to California to escape the McCoys.)
Anyway, when several senators disagreed with him, Andrew Jackson threatened to cut off their ears.
Jackson got into a gunfight with Senator Thomas Hart Benton. He killed Charles Dickinson in a duel. As a general he ordered more of his own men executed than George Washington. He executed two British citizens, including a man who had actually been sentenced to one year in prison. Jackson found that insufficient.
He killed hundreds of American Indians, and he deported entire tribes from their own country.
To match Jackson, Trump will have to deport the Navajo Nation to prisons in Africa.
Lately The Press Democrat, MAGA and President Trump have taken up the cause of phonics, calling for phonics to be mandated in public schools.
There are many ways to learn how to read, and most of them work with someone. People differ in how they learn.
Maybe how you learn to read should not be a political issue. But for MAGA it already is.
When our children were small, my wife did not know how the schools on Long Island taught reading. Rather than take a chance on bad methodology, she and I taught our children to read when they were between three and four. No problem. It took about five minutes a day for three months. When young, children absorb language.
After the first of our children entered kindergarten, reading on a third grade level, her teacher told us, "Yes, she can read, but you taught her the wrong way."
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Years ago I volunteered to help immigrants learn English, which is how I met part of a Mexican American family. The mother and father became American citizens. Their two sons were born here in Santa Rosa.
The parents work like sled dogs. They now own their own house.
The older son has been through the local school system, earned excellent grades and played better soccer. He's now enrolled at the junior college, taking classes to qualify as a fire fighter. He works part-time at Home Depot.
ICE is now raiding Home Depots and arresting everyone Hispanic. So this young man with brown skin may be grabbed by four or five large Ice agents, who will beat him to the ground, mace him, cuff him, beat him again and then throw his body into a van and disappear him. He will be charged with attacking an ICE official.
That happens every day now.
Because the young man actually is a citizen, he might be let go after a month or two.
I'm really thinking about myself, though. I'm old and blue-eyed, safe enough. Safe as a good German in Hitler's era.
I woke from my nap to the news that King Donald the Draft Dodger had bombed Iraq or Iran or Ireland, one of those countries staffed with foreigners. Congress did not authorize a war, but kings do as they please.
Netanyahu has made Israel a pariah state, and America's presidents, Biden and Trump, have followed him into infamy, dragging us in their wake.
Maybe this is a joke.
"The leaders of Iran, Israel and the United States walk into a bar. . . ."
The L.A. Dodgers recently refused to let ICE enter the parking lot at Dodger Stadium.
If we want to keep our partly-representative government, we must be a giant movement that will not obey. Like the Dodgers, we have to act, to disobey.
To oppose disrespect and brutality, I might have to test minor laws and, if necessary, take the penalty.
A king is only a king when you obey him.
