Walmart Folds Again

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

Walmart, the world's largest retailer with total annual sales in excess of $500 billion, is headquartered in the modest rural city of Bentonville, Arkansas (pop. 50,000).  The corporation has an outsized presence across rural America where its stores tend to quickly become the social hubs of most small communities.  Walmart stores are where Americans go to shop and to catch up with their neighbors.   Many of America's small town "values" are shaped and polished in the aisles of its Walmart stores.

Walmart's highly conservative founding family, and still its majority stockholders, the Waltons of Bentonville, cast their cold and callous shadow across much of the country as they struggle to snuff out competition and while keeping wages and benefits at the lowest levels possible, yet all the while posing as good ol' boys who earned their place at the head of America's economic table through hard work and fair dealing.

The Waltons no longer run Walmart on a day-to-day basis.   The corporation has a large board of directors who bring in professionals to guide the company, a group of people who try to manage things in a way befitting the largest retailer in the world.  There is a rub, however, when it comes to running an international endeavor whose roots are firmly dug into the stony soil of rural Arkansas.

Last July, for example, when Walmart management decided that it would be prudent, for several good reasons, to implement a mandatory mask policy in all of its stores, a tornado of public outrage ripped through its customer base before the policy could be implemented.  That open hostility, undoubtedly coupled with firm nudging from the Waltons, resulted in a quick change of procedure.  The stores would still have a policy requiring masks, but employees would not enforce the policy.   The company would presumably have some liability protection because it had told customers to wear masks, and the customers would have the outlaw high of knowing there were deliberately flouting a store policy and getting away with it.

Walmart had folded like a Walmart card table.

This week the management again stirred up a hornet's nest among its rural shoppers when it decreed that because of the possibility of domestic turmoil as a result of next week's election, all stores would remove guns and ammunition from public display.  (People could still buy guns and ammo, but those items would not be within grabbing distance.)  After some intense public grumbling that was no doubt stirred by the gun lobby and words of concern from some of the Waltons, the corporate management backed off of that edict as well and announced today that guns and ammo would remain in full public view during whatever happened after the election.

People might need more guns in a hurry, and Walmart best not get in their way!

Another day, another Walmart card table hits the floor.

It's hard to behave like a legitimate international corporation when your immediate world view is of the quick stops and fast food joints along Sam Walton Boulevard in Bentonville, Arkansas!

Some Thoughts on Masks

by Pa Rock

Concerned Citizen

Being a senior citizen, I have multiple doctors including a general practitioner who manages my primary care and several specialists who test, diagnose, prescribe, and report back to my GP.   My healthcare is a team effort, and I have gone to great pains over the past several years to assemble a group of doctors whose care and opinions I respect.

Several weeks ago my primary care doctor made the front page of the local newspaper when he went before the city council and proposed  a city-wide mask-wearing ordinance.  After much discussion and an impassioned plea from the articulate young physician, the council voted four to three to ignore the good doctor's advice and continue on with the policy of masks being voluntary.

I sent the doctor a card thanking him for his effort in the matter.

A couple of weeks after that I had an appointment with my doctor and after we got all of my medical stuff out of the way, our talk turned to the pandemic.  The physician still had a fire in his belly over the council's rejection of his request, and rattled on about people "exercising their freedom" not to wear masks were putting everyone in the community at risk.

He was preaching to the choir.

The big push not to wear masks has, of course, been coming from the White House.   Fox News, the media arm of the GOP and the White Hosue, has been needling Democrats for months about wearing masks.  One of the networks vacuous blondes, a person named Tomi Lahren, took a cheap shot a Biden in early October saying that he "might as well carry a purse with that mask."  Trump has also thrown a lot of ridicule Biden's way for wearing a mask.

Trump and the GOP have not only stoked controversy about wearing masks, they have also been actively inciting the radical fringes of the party to protest state efforts to mandate social distancing and the use of masks - as well as stoking anger about closed segments of the economy.  The dangers of that strategy were made apparent when it was revealed that a group of domestic terrorists had been plotting to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan over her policies to contain the spread of COVID - a plot that dovetailed into the GOP's angry rants against measures designed to protect the health of the general public.

Of course, things calmed for a bit as Trump and Melania were diagnosed with COVID, and Trump was hospitalized for four days, but now he is out and appears to be sliding back into his boisterous disregard of the pandemic.  He is once again holding large rallies where many of the participants decline to wear masks and where social distancing is not possible.

And now the third wave is upon us - and things are getting worse.   But still the noise of the deniers persists.  

Yesterday Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, took a shot at Biden and the Democrats with this tweet:

"Biden starts his rally with thanking 'everyone' for wearing masks and social distancing.

So starting with an appeal to fear.

Great message, Joe."

And that snide remark burned at me for awhile - and then I thought about my valiant doctor and decided that I needed to respond - and here is my Twitter-sized reply: 

"Jenna Ellis, people who wear masks help to protect others.  I appreciate their consideration.  People who discourage wearing masks through humiliation and ridicule place others in danger.  I regret their disrespect for human life."

This afternoon I will go to town and buy a few groceries.  It will be the first time that I have even been in my car in four days.  We do not have a delivery service in my area, and there is no curbside pickup, so I will be properly dressed and masked.    

I take this stuff seriously - and shame on Donald Trump and the GOP for their continuing efforts to put the lives of Americans at risk.   Their attacks on public safety procedures increase the danger for all of us!

I like Presidents who respect my health and personal safety.

Trump Puts Husbands Back to Work

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump has a deep understanding of how American families function.  It is apparently one that he developed by binge-watching 1950's sitcoms.

Trump grew up far removed from the households of ordinary Americans, but that fact does not preclude him from knowing their makeup and how they operate.  Trump, after all, has a big brain and he is much smarter than the rest of us.    He knows, based on a careful examination of "Father Knows Best" and "Leave It to Beaver," that ordinary American families are white (of course) and are composed of a father in a suit who goes off to work each day, a well-dressed mother who keeps house and manages the little crises caused by the kids, and two or three children.  He also knows that these good, white American families live outside of the cities in places called "suburbs."

Trump's advisers have carefully explained to him that suburban housewives do more than just spend their days dusting and deciding what to wear to bridge parties, they also vote - and recently their votes have become more and more important in determining the outcomes of big elections.

This past Tuesday while speaking to a large group of individuals in Lansing, Michigan, a group that contained many suburban women, Trump reached out in an effort to secure the votes of those women.  He told them what he knew they wanted to hear - that his administration was getting their husbands back to work!

Glory be!  Their troubles were over . . . if they had husbands, and if those husbands had jobs to go back to, and if those jobs were good enough to sustain an entire family's needs.  Every American "housewife" whose pre-pandemic lives resembled those of Margaret Anderson or June Cleaver would soon be back to a happy routine of caring for their loved ones and clutching their pearls when little problems arose.   

Put a Handmaid on the Supreme Court and suddenly the whole world is right again!

Of course Donald Trump's view of suburban life is badly skewed.  Those rosy depictions of the 1950's weren't even accurate back then - when many women were already in the workplace, and they are certainly not anywhere near accurate today.    If a contemporary family is fortunate enough to have two adults, and many don't, both of those adults have to work and sometimes even hold multiple jobs.   We live and struggle in an economy where most of the money has been pulled to the top, beyond the grasp of those who really need it, and workers must work crazy-long hours just to survive.

So Donald Trump telling suburban housewives that his administration has sent their husbands back to work is just so much smoke up their skirts - and they all know it.  What Donald Turmp really told suburban housewives this week in Lansing was that he does not have a clue what their lives are like - and that is the message they need to ponder as they go to the polls.

American families need real jobs - ones that offer security, advancement, decent pay, and retirement - and they need a comprehensive healthcare system that is not tied to employment.  But it's especially hard to meet the needs of the working classes when our nation's leaders remain steadfastly focused on the desires of the rich.  Voters need to ponder that, too, as they go to the polls next week.

Survival was not simple in the 1950's, and it's sure as hell is not simple today - and any fool who believes that one paycheck is all that a family needs to survive is probably simple himself!

Chillin' in Omaha

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump, the narcissist, is a person focused on getting his own needs met and doesn't give a damn - literally - about the needs of anyone else.   

Trump's me-first-and-only-me attitude was highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic where he downplayed the severity of the crisis to the American people by telling us initially that it was little more than a political hoax that would soon disappear - and then as the crisis began to expanding exponentially, he sloughed off its significance by calmly noting that "It is what it is."  

The pandemic did become a bit more urgent to Trump when he, himself, came down with the disease last month and he spent four days in a luxury suite at the military's premier hospital.   Once that personal crisis had passed, Trump was right back holding rallies and political events which routinely put others at risk - though he seemed to show more caution regarding his own health.

Last night Trump held one of his big rallies at an airfield near Omaha, Nebraska.  Many of the attendees had to park more than three miles away, and the Trump campaign hired buses to bring them to the field where Trump spoke.   A reporter on the scene estimated that more that 6,000 people were present.  Law enforcement and campaign officials said they thought the crowd was more in the neighborhood of 10,000, and Trump, ever the exaggerator, said during the speech that 29,000 people were there.

Whatever the number, it was a lot of people, and it was cold (31 degrees f.), and some attendees were not dressed appropriately for the weather.   

Donald Trump, ever the windbag s well as the exaggerator,, spoke for nearly an hour before finally wrapping it up and leaving the outdoor stage shortly before 9:00 p.m.  As he got aboard the roast-toasty Air Force One for a comfortable flight to his hotel in Vegas, the people who had been bused his speech were shivering and beginning to get concerned about their buses - buses which hadn't shown to take them back to their cars.  

There was a lot of confusion and bewilderment as the wait for the buses began to stretch into hours, and some people began walking the three miles to the parking lot.  Others hunkered down and kept waiting.  Apparently there was insufficient number of buses on hand, and those buses that were waiting in the parking lot had trouble making it back to the airfield due to traffic and walkers on the single-lane roadway.  City buses were called in to help with the situation.  

It was a colossal planning failure, a failure which must belong in large measure to the Trump campaign and the local GOP, whether they acknowledge any ownership of the catastrophe or not.

After a couple of hours the buses finally started arriving, and many people were headed to their cars by midnight.  The final group reportedly got on the buses at 12:40 a.m., or around four hours after Trump ended his performance.  (Or five hours after the outdoor speech began.)

Last night there were reports that seven people at the Trump event had to be taken to local hospitals.  There were also accounts of police at the scene passing out blankets and letting elderly people get warm inside of their patrol cars.  Police reports indicated that some attendees were showing sigs of hypothermia, including fatigue and confusion.  

It had been a very hard night for the crowd in Omaha, but not for Donald Trump.  He would be on the ground in Vegas before many of his Nebraska supporters even reached their homes.  

Donald Trump was fine, and as for the folks who had been left behind in Omaha . . .  well, it is what it is.

Boise Longpig Hunting Club

by Pa Rock
Reader 

Recently while rooting around for something new to read,  a book that would draw my attention away from the depressing national political situation while not overtaxing my tired old brain, I came across a blurb promoting a book with the curious title "Boise Longpig Hunting Club" by Nick Kolakowski, an author with whom I was completely unfamiliar.   The cover art was just as intriguing as the title, with a diagram of a man whose body had been segmented with lines and titles of cuts of meat, a diagram similar to one a butcher might use.

Drawing on my background as a long-term reader of detective and mystery fiction, I took those two clues, the title and the cover art, and deduced that this book probably had something to do with the hunting of human beings (longpigs) for sport.  The blurb that I read advised that the central character was a bounty hunter, and that much of the story centered around weaponry and killing.

Not being a weapons person, and not having been exposed to that type of "literature" since reading a couple of Mack Bolan "Executioner" novels forty (or fifty?) years ago, I decided that "Boise Longpig Hunting Club" might be just the type of mindless, escapist literature that I was seeking.

I ended up getting more than I bargained for.

As the title indicates, this book is set in rural - and very scenic - Idaho.   The main character, Jake Halligan, is an Iraq war veteran who experienced way too much horror in his multiple combat tours, and, of course, much of what he experienced in Iraq still resides within him.  Jake had been married to Janine, and they have a young daughter, Kelly.  As this story unfolds Jake and Janine are trying to resurrect their marriage, and Kelly is out-the picture spending time with Jake's mother.

Jake works as a bounty hunter, an occupation that dovetails nicely with his intense interest in guns and his physical abilities.  But even with his military background and his ability to shoot and fight, Jake is not the most interesting person in his family.  That honor goes to his older sister, Frankie, a fearsome arms dealer who is not very particular about who she sells weapons to or who she kills.  In an early scene in this book, Frankie dispatches a fellow criminal (who had stolen guns from her little brother) to hell with a hand-held rocket launcher.

The triggering incidents in this tale are the shooting deaths of two people, a young man who is found shot to death in a convenience store, and a young woman dead from a single gunshot wound who is found stuffed in Jake Halligan's gun safe.  At that point Jake, his ex-wife Janine, and sister Frankie start trying to sort things out, and, in the process they become targets in a very fast-paced game of survival.  Before all of the dust settles, there is an abundance of bullets, bombs, bloodshed - and even one very pissed-off rattlesnake!

Okay, the story was definitely escapist, telling a tale that I basically expected with tight writing and quick descriptions - mostly of Idaho scenery and violent outcomes.  I did find some things that surprised me, however.  Nick Kolakowski isn't a lifetime denizen of Idaho wallowing in the only world he has ever known.  The writer is a New York City resident who has visited Idaho and has friends there.  He was viewing the locale as an outsider, a person with a cultivated social conscience, but one who definitely knows the terrain and culture where his characters exist.

Early in the book Kolakowski briefly discusses the rural equivalent to "gentrification" which he sees as encroaching on the scenic countryside, often at the expense of families who have lived there for generations.  Rich people are pushing in, buying up land with magnificent views, and building "McMansions" which they use to insulate themselves from the poverty and lifestyles of their neighbors.  The neighbors will eventually collapse under the weight of the poverty and the drugs that they use to insulate themselves from the pain of the never-ending poverty.

Kolakowski takes readers into one of these  McMansions where Jake and Janine have been invited for drinks.  Jake notices the expensive security system (to protect the owners from their poor neighbors), the expensive and lightly used accouterments  - including an orange Dyson vacuum cleaner parked in a hallway "like a dead droid" undoubtedly so that it would be observed and appreciated like the obligatory paintings and art displayed throughout the show house.   In the large attached garage where he was taken to appreciate the owner's mint muscle car from the 1960's, Jake saw a polished cement floor with no oil stains, and three expensive tool boxes.   Everything the insecure owners needed to show their wealth was on prominent display.

The author also verbalizes through Jake his dislike of politicians who seek to rob from the poor in order to fund "sweet tax cuts for the rich."  He went on "It's amazing how our elected representatives give us new reasons to hate them every year."

If you like seeing corrupt cops - and tattooed Aryan criminals - and the politically and financially privileged get theirs, then this book will probably leave you hugging a warm fuzzy feeling - as it did me - despite all of the blood and carnage.  It is redneck, backwoods savagery coated with a thin shellac of human decency.  The world is a rotten place, but with Jake Halligan on the case, some good may survive.

Nick Kolakowski did a nice job of creating a bounty hunter with a conscience.  I suspect that as the series grows, I will check in on Jake Halligan again.

Monday's Poetry: Justice Breyer's Tribute to Ruth Bader Ginsburg

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator 

US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just thirty-eight days ago, and while the United States Senate has managed to do almost no substantive business in nearly a year, that august body did set several land-sped records in getting the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett before the full Senate where it will be rubber-stamped by the GOP majority this evening.

This will be Donald Trump's third dump on the Supreme Court.  He began his term by filling the seat of Justice Antonin Scalia who died early in Barack Obama's last year in office.  Obama nominated a highly qualified replacement, Judge Merrick Garland, to replace Scalia, but Senate Majority Leader McConnell refused to act on the nomination for ten full months - holding it open so that the incoming President could name the replacement.

Trump's first nomination, that of Justice Neil Gorsuch,  has been widely viewed as stolen from the Democratic Party.

Two year's into his presidency, Justice Anthony Kennedy surprised many by suddenly retiring from the Supreme Court.  Interestingly, Kennedy's son was an officer with Deutsch Bank and had approved large loans for the Trump organization when no other banks would step forward to help the Trump family wade through their financial swamp.  Some politicians and media analysts at the time questioned Kennedy's sudden decision to retire from the Court, and some speculated that the Trump family had information on the Justice's son that played into the retirement decision.

Trump's second nomination, that of Brett Kavanaugh,  has been questioned as a bit too convenient and something which bears investigation.  Justice Kavanaugh also had some substantial personal debt that seems to have disappeared as his nomination to the Court was announced.

And now the third nomination is in play, the one to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who passed away on September 18th.  McConnell had stalled on filling Scalia's open seat for more than ten months with the reasoning the the incoming President should be the one to name the new Justice.  He and Trump quickly dropped that pretense when Justice Ginsburg died, and they moved quickly to fill it.   Trump, in fact, nominated Amy Coney Barrett to take Ginsburg's seat before the deceased Justice was even buried.

Amy Coney Barrett is a strong conservative voice whose past opinions in her very short tenure as a federal judge (three years) seem to be rooted in her strong Catholic background.   Her views that are known are in stark contrast to the much more progressive leanings of Justice Ginsburg.  Judge Barrett, in fact, went on record when Justice Scalia died and McConnell refused to move on an Obama nomination as saying that when the new justice would alter the balance of power in the court, it should be made by the incoming President.

But that was then, and this is now.  Those old standards of behavior are irrelevant when the shoe is safely on the other foot.

So as of today more than sixty million Americans have already voted, and the official Election Day itself is in eight days - but the US Senate - which unbelievably "worked" this past weekend on Saturday and Sunday to speed Barrett's nomination toward a final vote, will meet in special session tonight and narrowly approve Amy Coney Barrett to take Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat on the Supreme Court.

Trump's third nomination was another steal - from the president who will be elected next week.

Justice Stephen Breyer drafted this short poem regarding his good friend, Ruth Bader Ginsburg:

I heard of Ruth's death while I was reciting the Mourrner's Kaddish at the Rosh Hashanah service.  I thought:

a great Justice;

a woman of valor,

a rock of righteousness;

and my good, good friend.

The world is a better place for her having lived in it.

And so is her family;

her friends;

the legal community;

and the nation.

Judge Barrett has some mighty big shoes to fill.  Let us hope and pray that she has the ability and the willingness to look past her personal beliefs and practices and stand up for the rights of all Americans.

Pence May Be Spreading More than the Gospel of Trump

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Franklin D. Roosevelt, the longest-serving President of the United States, had a total of three Vice Presidents during the slightly more than twelve years that he was in office.  The first was John Nance Garner, a Texan and former Speaker of the US House of Representatives who went by the nickname "Cactus Jack."  Nance was as prickly as his nickname implied and was not bashful about giving his opinion on things.  He served eight years as Vice President and during that time developed quite an opinion on the value of that job.   Cactus Jack Nance opined quite publicly that the office of Vice President of the United States was not worth "a bucket of warm piss!"

But times have apparently changed since John Nance Garner served a mere heartbeat from the presidency. Now instead of being the equivalent of a pail of urine, the vice-presidency in considered to be "essential."  Who would have guessed?

Yesterday five aides to current Vice President Mike Pence tested positive for the coronavirus.  One of the Pence aides with the positive diagnosis was Marc Short, the Vice President's chief of staff.  Another was Marty Obst, Pence's senior political adviser.

Pence, who in one of his few public duties for Trump served as the head of the Coronavirus Task Force, knows the drill.  The aides must quarantine - and so should he - at least until it can be determined whether he is infected or not.  That would include more than just a quick negative test or two.  The Vice President should step back from his official and campaign duties for a few days until the disease has had time to incubate and make itself known.   (Tests are not always accurate, and people who are asymptomatic, like Pence, can still be infected and spread the disease even though they are showing no signs of infection.)

But Pence is in the middle of a tight campaign and he does not have time to follow rules.  He has political rallies to attend, rallies where he will remove his mask and speak to hundreds and even thousands of cheering supporters, many of whom will not be wearing masks out of some blind loyalty to the Trump-Pence fiction that the pandemic is not really all that much of a health risk.  (Almost unbelievably, there are still Trump supporters who regard the entire pandemic experience as a "hoax," completely disregarding the 225,000 dead Americans or the fact that Trump and his wife each were diagnosed with the disease and Trump spent four days in the hospital as a result.)

Last week a couple of Kamala Harris's staff members also tested positive for the coronavirus, and she wisely withdrew from her campaign obligations until she could safely return to the campaign trail.  Senator Harris was focused on saving lives - while Mike Pence seems to be more concerned with saving his political hide.

Maybe I'm out-of-step with social norms, but I tend to have more respect for candidates who recognize my health and safety concerns and react accordingly.   Any dimwit who feels that he has to feed his own ego or keep his erratic boss happy by placing thousands of others at risk does not deserve to hold a public trust like the vice-presidency of the United States.

Mike Pence needs to do more than just mindlessly spread the Gospel of Trump.   He needs to forthrightly stand for the health and safety of Americans and let the hot air of his boss blow on by.   Anything less just affirms Cactus Jack Garner's description of the job that Mike Pence is so desperate to keep.

You pose a risk to your fellow citizens, Mikey.  Stay home and phone it in for a few days.

Massive Turnout of Early Voters Reported

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

A little over 47 million people were able to cast early ballots in the 2016 US Presidential election.  Today, still ten days out from the 2020 presidential election, more than 54 million votes have been cast in the US presidential election race - and the lines to vote, at least in some states - appear to just keep getting longer and more determined!

My own absentee ballot arrived in the mail on September 23rd of this year.  I marked it in the privacy and security of my home, and turned it into my county election officials the following day - September 24th - one month ago today.  At that time only a couple of million votes had been cast for President nationwide, but in the ensuing month there has been an avalanche of voting across the entire country.  As of today, in fact, votes totaling more than 40% of all of those cast in the 2016 election have already been cast in the current election.

The current population of persons aged eighteen and over in the United States is 257 million, and of those  about 240 million are eligible to vote this year.   (128,838,342 Americans voted for President in 2016, or 60.1% of the total eligible voters that year.)  The highest voter turnout in a presidential election over the past half century was in 2008 when Obama beat McCain.  That election saw 61.65% of eligible voters going to the polls.  If the current rapid pace of early voting continues in this election cycle, that record is certain to fall.

Professor Michael McDonald of the US Elections Project is predicting that as much as 65% of the eligible population may vote this year - or around 150 million voters.   The group FiveThirtyEight is predicting that the number of actual voters might reach 154 million - based on its own polls of voter enthusiasm and other data.

Donald Trump, a man who has complained long and bitterly about voting by mail while falsely claiming that it leads to "massive" voter fraud, is now encouraging his supporters to use vote-by-mail, especially in the critical swing state of Florida.   Trump who generally votes by mail himself, was planning to vote in person in Palm Beach County, Florida, today where some toady election official will no doubt whisk him around any inconvenient lines of voters.

This is Saturday, and while Trump probably stopped off to vote while on his way to the golf course, I congratulate him nevertheless on taking time out from his busy schedule to participate in democracy,  It's reassuring to know that he takes the right to vote so seriously, particularly after he and his colleagues in the GOP have worked so tirelessly to deny that same right to so many others.

And I would also like to give a tip-of-the-hat to another Floridian, David Hogg, a 20-year-old survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida.   Young Mr. Hogg has gone on to become a crusader against the gun lobby as well as a proponent of young people voting.    The voter registration efforts of David Hogg and his friends could very well be the determining factor in this year's election.

Well, THEIR work - and MY vote - of course!  

Be a part of history - cast your VOTE in this extremely important election - and the sooner you do so, the better!    Git 'er done!

The Trial of The Chicago 7

by Pa Rock
Student of History

A couple of nights ago I watched the new Netflix production of "The Trial of The Chicago 7,"  a fierce and provocative examination of a significant chapter of the 1960's counterculture movement in America.  The film, which was written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, told the story of the courtroom trial of eight individuals who were accused by the United States government of  plotting riots and mayhem at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Various reviews of this new production suggest that Mr. Sorkin may have embellished the facts or arranged them in a particular manner in order to add drama to his version of events, but speaking as someone who lived through those turbulent and newsworthy times, the story told by Aaron Sorkin has a strong ring of truth to it.

When the Democrats met in Chicago in August of 1968 to officially select their presidential candidate, the party's leader, President Lyndon Johnson, had withdrawn his name from consideration the previous spring, and one other major candidate, Senator Bobby Kennedy, had been assassinated during the summer.  Civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, had also been assassinated that spring.  Senator Eugene McCarthy remained in the running representing the party's left flank and was openly outspoken against our country's on-going involvement in the Vietnam War.    Most people assumed that when the the political turmoil settled, the party would give its nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey - which it did.  (LBJ may have removed himself from the race, but he still had a firm control on the party machinery and the delegates.)

Very few within the mainstream of the Democratic Party wanted to see turmoil at the convention because they feared that would help the election chances of the GOP candidate for president, Richard Nixon.  Richard J. Daley, the Democratic political boss of Illinois as well as the Mayor of Chicago, made it a matter of personal pride to keep dissent and war protesters away from the convention site.  Daley's city bureaucrats denied permits for groups to use Chicago public parks for rallying points or to be out on the streets conducting parades or protests.  When war protesters showed up despite not having any valid permits, Daley's police met them with strident and sometimes deadly force.

That August as Democrats tried to meet and nominate Humphrey, there were massive demonstrations and protests in the streets of Chicago - much of which degenerated into rioting.  The war in Vietnam was the focus of most of the protesting.

President Johnson had his administration look into the rioting that occurred, and his attorney general, Ramsey Clark, eventually determined that the "riots" had been precipitated by activities of the Chicago Police Department, and Johnson's government declined to take further action.

But Richard Nixon won the election that fall, and a new national government came to power in January.  Nixon's in-coming attorney general, John Mitchell, was an arch-conservative and a polar opposite to the liberal Ramsey Clark, and Mitchell was determined to have a show trial in Chicago, a trial in which young student activists and war protesters would be pummeled in the press as anti-American while being tightly linked to elements of the Democratic Party.

And it was at that point when the story crafted by Aaron Sorkin basically began - with Mitchell interviewing a couple of young government prosecutors whom he had selected to manage the government's case.

Eight young men were originally brought to trial in Federal Court in Chicago:  Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis of the national college group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin of the more outspoken and outlandish Yippee movement, David Dellinger, John Froines, and Lee Weiner.  The group also contained Bobby Seale, a founder of the Black Panther Party.  Seale claimed to have had  no connection to the other seven and said that he had only been on the ground in Chicago a total of four hours during the tumultuous week of the convention.  Seale, at least according to the film, said that the government had included him in the group in order to provide an angry young black man for the jury to focus on.  

Nationally known defense attorney William Kunstler represented the seven white defendants, and Bobby Seale, who said that his attorney could not be present in the courtroom due to illness, dismissed his court-appointed attorney and tried repeatedly to represent himself, something that the judge, an old conservative reprobate named Julius Hoffman, refused to permit.   Bobby Seale's case was eventually declared a mistrial after Judge Hoffman had him bound, gagged, and chained to his chair for several days while in court.  The judge insisted that Bobby Seale serve prison time for numerous contempt citations related to the trial, but the prison sentence was later dismissed.

In the end, the federal government was not able to prove the conspiracy charges against the remaining seven defendants, but five (everyone except Froines and Weiner) were convicted of crossing state lines in order to incite rioting.  Those convictions were later overturned on appeal and the government declined to try the defendants again.

It took several months to bring the actual trial to a close, and Aaron Sorkin reportedly worked on bringing his version of the trial to fruition for nearly a decade.  The final film product involved a cast and crew numbering in the hundreds - and there were an astounding 38 producers (of various ranks) listed on the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB) page for the film!

Several actors in the film deserve special mention.   Sacha Baron Cohen was Abbie Hoffman to his very core, an absolute perfect casting.   When Cohen's Hoffman wasn't needling Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abby) in court, he was entertaining the press and local pols around Chicago in the evenings doing stand-up comedy routines about the trial.  And while Cohen captured the essence of the purposefully outrageous Abby Hoffman, Eddie Redmayne also seemed to ground his charcter, SDS leader Tom Hayden, in the reality of what was happening at that pivotal point in history.  Hoffman was playing to the cameras, while Hayden was playing to the court.

Michael Keaton gave a strong performance as Ramsey Clark - and another actor that I thought turned in an exceptional performance was Joseph Gordon-Levitt who portrayed Richard Schultz, the chief government prosecutor.   Throughout the ordeal of the trial, Gordon-Levitt was able to show a streak of humanity, one that was repulsed by the way in which his case was being rigged by agents of the government against the defense.

For those who would like to learn about life in 1960's America, "The Trial of The Chicago 7" does a good job of capturing the rage and the spirit of the time.  And while Aaron Sorkin's version of events may not be a word-for-word accurate retelling of those times, overall the film manages to transport us back to Nixon's America and Daley's Chicago and let us feel what life was like as the most turbulent decade in American history was closing out.

It also provides a bit of foreshadowing to Trump's America in 2020.

This film is well worth experiencing, if for no other reason than it shows how quickly darkness begins to creep in when the torch of freedom is lowered.

Santa Claus Does Aldi's

by Pa Rock
Local Yokel

My youngest son, Tim, is a writer - and one who has been successful to the point that he has actually made money from his writing and created work that will live on long after he is gone.   As I have mentioned in this space numerous times in the past, Tim has been the primary screenwriter on two full-length motion pictures, The Brass Teapot and Lost Child, both of which have received some national acclaim and been featured on multiple streaming sites.

On Tuesday of this week I noticed that The Brass Teapot was again streaming on Amazon Prime under their heading of "recently added" films, and I pushed out an announcement of that fact to several dozen people on my personal email list.  (The Brass Teapot is a comedy built around a moral dilemma, and it is based on a short story that Tim wrote and published several years ago.  The movie was filmed in 2011 and premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in 2012 where it was purchased for distribution by Mark Cuban's Magnolia Pictures.)

Because I had not communicated with many of the individuals on my email list in quite some time, I decided to also use that email to catch up on what little personal news I had been accumulating.  I mentioned that I hadn't had a haircut since the pandemic began in February, and that now I have shoulder-length white hair.  I also informed the group that I had broken my right arm in late May and had been unable to shave over the summer, leading to the creation of my first ever beard, a thick affair - also white - which, after my arm finally began healing, I decided to keep, at least for the time-being.   I further noted that one of my doctors had recently told me that I was beginning to look like Santa Claus.  

Yesterday afternoon I dressed up nicely - for me - in a pair of paint-spattered white shorts, a green and yellow "Portland, Oregon" tee-shirt, and sandals with socks - and headed into town to go grocery shopping.  When I arrived at Aldi's I put on my black mask (which served to highlight the white beard more than it did to hide it), pulled a fresh disinfectant wipe out of the plastic canister that is always with me, and headed into the store to do my shopping as quickly as possible.  

(Aldi's has a policy requiring everyone in the store - customers and employees - to wear masks, but they do not stop those who push their way in without masks and endanger those of us who follow rules and try to behave in a responsible manner.)

As I was pushing my cart around the store and concentrating on finding the things on my list, an older woman, about my age, who was also wearing a mask, stepped up to me and said, "I just want you to know how much it pleases me to see that Santa Claus wears a mask when he's out in public!"

That's a true story!

I thanked her, burped a chirpy "ho, ho, ho," and smiled beneath my mask the rest of the time I was in the store!

I may have some fun with my new look, at least for awhile, but don't expect to see me climbing down any chimneys!  

Trump's Secret Chinese Bank Account

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Donald Trump has been denigrating China for several years now.  He began by claiming that the Chinese government had been an unfair trading partner with the United States and moved to rectify the trade imbalance by imposing a series of tariffs of Chinese products that were coming into the US - except those products that were being imported by businesses headed by his daughter.   What Trump's move actually did, though, was raise prices on Chinese goods sold in the United States - higher prices that had to be paid by American consumers, and gave the Chinese government an excuse to raise tariffs on  American products and agricultural commodities heading to China, a move that bankrupted some American businesses and farming operations.  

Trump's "trade war" with China was a venture that the United States quickly lost.

Early this year when the coronavirus pandemic germinated in China and began spreading around the globe, Trump initially praised the Chinese quick response to the situation, but as numbers of cases in the United States began rising rapidly, instead of rolling up his sleeves and getting to work on leading the country through the crisis, Trump decided that a better response would be to get our country focused on casting blame in lieu of taking measures to limit the spread of the disease - and China was his obvious target.  Not only did the virus originate there, but the Chinese people were of a different racial stock which should help to keep his racist political base inflamed.

And lately Trump has even been trying to tie the Biden family to China, implying that there were some secret cash connections between the Bidens and China - and that those ties would be sinister in nature, especially when compared to the Trump family business dealings with Russia, a country that Trump seemed to go to great lengths to avoid displeasing.

The Trump drumbeat was that Russia was our friend, and China definitely was not.

So it was surprising when the New York Times reported yesterday that the Trump Organization, which is wholly owned by Donald John Trump, has a heretofore secret bank account in China.  The account is apparently controlled by the hotel component of the Trump Organization.   A lawyer for the Trump companies said that the account had been set up to handle some business efforts that the company was involved in before Trump took office as president of the US, and that it was also used to pay local Chinese taxes.  The attorney said that the account contained only a few thousand dollars, but records indicate that it was used to pay out $188,561 in taxes to China between 2013 and 2015.  That amount in taxes would indicate that Trump had significant business dealings with China during that period of time.

The $188,561 that Trump paid in taxes to China is also considerably more than the taxes he paid to the US government during that same period of time.

And, the existence of the Chinese bank account was not reported on Trump's public financial disclosures that he filed  when he ran for office -  disclosures that he said were more revealing about his actual worth than his tax returns would have been.

The New York Times current examination of recently unearthed Trump tax documents also revealed bank accounts in Ireland and the United Kingdom that were not listed in Trump's public financial disclosures.  Those accounts were reportedly related to Trump's golf resorts.

Donald Trump is suggesting that Joe Biden has some sinister money connection to China, an assertion that he seems to have fabricated.    But Trump apparently has his own money connection to China - and instead of being forthcoming, he chose to hide it.

Americans need and deserve to know about the financial obligations of our leaders.  With whom do they have financial ties, and to whom are they beholden?   Anyone running for a statewide or national office - to include applicants for federal judgeships - should provide at least their ten most recent tax returns, national and state, and a full financial disclosure.   

Anything less places the security of our nation at risk. 

Raging Trump Flings his Poop at the Voters

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

Somehow the United States of America has managed to amass the highest positive COVID caseload of any country in the world, and even though the US has less than five percent of the world's total population, our country has reported more than twenty percent of the world's COVID deaths.   Despite months of trying to obscure and cover-up the truth about the pandemic, the facts about how the worldwide catastrophe managed to get such a firm hold in the United States are finally starting to come to light.  

It turns out that the US response to the pandemic has been poorly managed since the first reports of the looming crisis began appearing this past January.   Donald Trump told journalist Bob Woodward - on tape - that he first learned about the crisis in January but did not inform the American public because he did not want to alarm them.  And when the word finally got out anyway and the first cases here were being reported, Trump assured the public that the problem would be short-lived and would likely disappear within a couple of weeks.

And again, he knew better.

Not only is Donald Trump someone who seldom steps forward to take the actual lead in anything, he NEVER assumes responsibility for problems.  Anything that goes wrong in Trump's world is ALWAYS the responsibility of someone else.  Trump is never, nor has he ever been, the person who is ultimately responsible for bad news.

Some of Donald Trump's reluctance to tell America about the approaching catastrophe was his fear that it would wreck the stock market.  Trump believes in numbers, ratings, ways of scoring things numerically.  The stock market had gone up during his reign - as it had throughout the entire Obama administration of eight years, and he did not want anything to bring those numbers down.  Another fear that he had was that people would blame the numbers of COVID infections and deaths of him - and he did not want to be attached to those negative numbers.

At first he chose to set up a working group in the White House, one headed by the very expendable Vice President Pence, to manage the crisis and to communicate with the public.  That group would serve to deflect blame away from Trump.  However, Pence's daily briefings soon became so important to the nation that Trump rushed in and took them over to draw all of that attention to himself.  He changed th gist of the briefings from medical information to a stew of self-praise that began sounding like campaign infomercials.  Eventually as the press and public became more critical of what he had to say, the briefings stopped.

Trump also tried to inject nationalism and race into the situation by emphasizing again and again that COVID was actually a "Chinese" virus because China was the country of its origin.   But despite the roots of the pandemic, it was becoming more and more obvious to many Americans that the United States was doing less to protect against the virus that any of the other industrialized nations.

Trump turned his attention to trying to reopen the economy, a strategy that included bullying Democratic governors who were committed to commonsense practices aimed at keeping their people safe.  Trump pushed for states to reopen their businesses and their schools, and he stirred up angry and armed citizenry to intimidate politicians into following his ill-fated guidance.

As the states began reopening in compliance with Trump's pressure, COVID cases once again started to rise, and some states began re-instituting public safety measures that angered Trump.  And as that was happening, the election season was also heating up.  The Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, prudently wore a mask and socially-distanced when he was in public, while Trump started holding his large, basically unmasked public rallies.  Trump never missed a chance to make fun of Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, for wearing masks, and he portrayed himself as someone who was not fearful of a case of the "sniffles."

Then, of course, the normally unmasked Donald and Melania Trump were both diagnosed with COVID-19, a condition which sent the elderly Trump to the hospital for four days.  After he got out, Trump quickly resumed his rallies at a frenzied pace in order to play catch-up with Biden in the race for the White House.

Now Donald Trump is lashing out in several directions as he tries to regain control of campaign that he once assumed would be an easy victory - and COVID is proving to be a major obstacle in his pursuit of a second term.   220,000 Americans have died from the disease, the rate of infection is growing in a majority of the states, and many fear that we are just in the early days of a significant autumn spike in cases.  Even Trump has had the disease, so it is not imaginary or a government ruse as some of his supporters once seemed to believe.

The virus is real, the number of infections and deaths are on the rise, and Trump's poll numbers are falling - due in large part to the COVID crisis that will not go away.  So what does he do?

Trump falls back to his standard position of marginalizing the problem and trying to blame others.   This week Trump went on the attack against an American physician who has done more to alert the public to the dangers of the coronavirus and COVID-19 than anyone else in government.  The desperate politician called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, a "disaster'" and lumped him in with a group of medical experts who he referred to as "idiots."

In reality Dr. Fauci is a very knowledgable and highly respected public servant who has worked for six presidential administrations - and he polls better than Trump!  Newsman Dan Rather noted on Twitter:

"You have to live in an echo chamber the size of a walnut to think that attacking Dr. Fauci is good electoral politics."

And then, before that wad of venom was dry, Trump pivoted to his favorite target, the media, and took a shot at CNN.  Trump argues that America is "tired" of hearing about COVID, so he blames the messenger.  On Monday at a rally in Prescott, Arizona, Trump lashed out at the national news service by saying:

"They are (the people) getting tired of the pandemic, aren't they?  You turn on CNN, that's all they cover.   COVID, COVID, pandemic, COVID, COVID, COVID.   You know why?  They're trying to talk everybody out of voting.  People aren't buying it, CNN.  You dumb bastards."

The reality is, of course, that the Republican Party, the Party of Trump, has been busy in various courts of law trying to block people from voting, partly because voting will help to tell the tale of who the public really blames for the widespread prevalence of the pandemic in the United States - and that is a tale that Donald John Trump does not want told.

So Dr. Fauci is a "disaster," CNN is a collection of "dumb bastards," and Donald Trump is having a rage in his cage and flinging his poop at the voters!

America deserves better than Donald Trump!

The Death of a Little Red Hen

by Pa Rock
Farmer in Autumn

I am currently in my seventh year of puttering about my retirement farm - Rock's Roost - and still finding plenty to keep me occupied.   This year the big project has been the renovation of the pond, a hole in the ground that has been basically dry - or little more that a big puddle - for the time that I have lived here.  The previous owner brought in a man with a grader who pushed dirt around for a week or so and widened the hole considerably, but it still would not hold water.  This past year my son and. I - mostly my son - had a large stump removed from the center of what should have been a pond, and then brought in many bags of pulverized clay (a substance called "bentonite") to spread about the hole.  

A nice small pond has developed and it held a water throughout the summer.  This fall Nick added more bentonite to the edges of the pond in an attempt to expand it even further, and this morning it is raining so hopefully we.will see if his efforts have been productive.  Nick has put a few fish in the pond, and they seem to be surviving, and a small colony of frogs have appeared.  Normal pond vegetation is also starting to flourish.

Another farm enterprise, however, has not been very successful.  I bought baby chicks soon after arriving at The Roost and for awhile was successful at producing enough eggs for me, my relatives, and even the gang at Wednesday Night Pinochle.  But soon predators were drawn toward the girls in the coop, and the chickens began disappearing.  Over the years I have added to the flock, but the predators kept getting worse.  This spring I tried one more time, but the new birds were wiped out in two consecutive nights of predator attacks.

I had two smart chickens that have survived on their own for several years - a little Rhode Island Red hen and her big, handsome red rooster.   I would carefully close them into the coop each night, and they would roost of the rafters, and then in the morning, just before daylight, I would go out and open the coop so that they could be out on the ground as the sun was coming up.

This week I noticed the little hen was behaving oddly and tending to stay close to the coop even during the day.  Then, a few nights ago she quit roosting on the rafters and chose instead to sleep on a wooden shelf in the coop.   On Saturday morning I found her non-responsive on her shelf, and she died a short time later.

And now my entire poultry population has been reduced to one extremely lonely old red rooster - and he probably won't make it for long on his own.  If he is still here in the spring I will go to the weekly swap meet and find him a girlfriend, but until then it's going to be a long, lonely winter.

This is Monday, and I would have posted a poem in honor of the little red hen - I called her "Henny Penny" - but in scanning what was available on the internet, I discovered that I had already used all of the better poems about deceased chickens.  Dead birds seem to have become one of the constants of farm life.

Another farm constant is change.  Perhaps next fall we will be frying catfish that were caught in our pond. My son, the one who has been working so diligently on the pond, is also a great fisherman!

Donnie Trump Continues his Attacks on US Military

by Pa Rock
Veteran

Like his father and grandfather before him, Donald John Trump couldn't be bothered to wear the uniform of his country.  Donnie didn't just not serve, he actively worked at not serving.  According to his niece, Mary Trump, he and his family hired someone to take the SATs for him so that he could get into college during the Vietnam War years, and when he eventually became a likely target of the draft his family found a doctor who provided a highly questionable medical excuse to avoid being drafted.  Poor Donnie had bone spurs in his feet, a condition that, if true, would still be with him today - something that would make his nearly constant golfing quite painful.

But just "not serving" was not enough for Donnie.  The smiling rich boy was raised to believe that he was superior to all others, and that included those who were not as smart as he was when it came to avoiding military service.   Those young people who were drafted, and even those who jumped up and enlisted, were obviously no match for a playboy like Donnie Trump, and he remained quick to disparage them for not being his equal.

One Vietnam veteran whom Donnie famously ridiculed was Navy pilot John McCain, who, like Donnie Bone Spurs, was also a fortunate son of privilege.  But McCain, the son and grandson of Navy admirals, did his part and was flying combat missions over Vietnam while Donnie was home working on his golf game.  McCain was subsequently shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese and spent five years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton as a prisoner of war.  Trump would, years later, ridicule McCain saying that he was only a war hero because he had been captured - and he (Trump) preferred people who were not captured.

In November of 2018 Donald Trump and his extensive entourage had flown to Paris on the taxpayers' dime so that Trump could take part, along with many other world leaders, in a memorial honoring the fallen of World War I at a cemetery in France - a cemetery where many US war dead were buried.  But on the morning of the actual ceremony a rain set in over central France, and Donnie decided to skip the ceremony and stay in his hotel room, a move many credited with his desire to protect his high maintenance hair.  All of the other world leaders who had gathered for the event went to the cemetery without the prima donna US leader.

This summer it was widely reported that the Russian government had placed cash bounties with the Taliban on the lives of US military members serving in Afghanistan.  Trump, as well as most of the rest of the Republican Party, chose to ignore those reports and not raise the matter in discussions and official meetings with members of the Russian government.  

Some in the US military were beginning to figure out that Donald Trump might not have a firm handle on what it means to be the Commander-in-Chief of the US Military.

Then last month The Atlantic reported that Trump had called US troops who died in battle "suckers" and "losers," which flashed back to his disparaging remarks about McCain only being a hero because he had been captured - and the fact that a light rain had kept Trump from attending ceremony for the Allied war dead in France.   And before the remarks in The Atlantic had time to dissipate, Trump angered some in the Pentagon when he accused the Defense Department of making decisions to send troops into combat to appease defense contractors.

Just a few days ago Donald Trump suggested that he might have caught the coronavirus from a group of Gold Star families who visited the White House on September 29th.  (Gold Star families are immediate family members of military members who have been killed in action.)  His suggestion sent shockwaves through the community of Gold Star families as well as their friends and supporters within the nations's active duty military.

And this week Donnie Johnnie took one more cheap shot at the US military.   He retweeted a claim by the whack-job conspiracy group, QAnon, which claimed that Osama bin Laden was not killed during the attack on his compound by Navy SEALS nine years ago, and that the  story of his demise at the hands of SEAL Team Six was just a film stunt in which a body-double had actually been killed instead of Bin Laden.   Robert O'Neill, a former Navy SEAL who claims to have fired the shot that killed the world's most wanted terrorist, was not amused.  O'Neill, a former Trump supporter, is emphatic in his insistence that Osama bin Laden died by gunfire in Pakistan in 2011 - regardless of what QAnon or Donald Trump might want us to believe for political reasons.

Donald Trump may hug the flag and salute Marine One when there are cameras about, but he is also feeding into a long line of  nonsense and noise about the military that is making some of its members and supporters nervous.  Is the United States military the front-line of our defense, or is it just a cheap foil for Donald Trump's political machinations?

It is beginning to look as though a man who couldn't be bothered to serve his nation in uniform also can't be bothered to be its Commander-in-Chief.

When someone tells you who they are - believe them the first time!

Hotter than Hell in Phoenix!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

My last home on the road before returning to Missouri to retire in 2014 was in the western suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona, an enclave of several million people that sits smack-dab in the middle of a desert.  Parts of Arizona are picturesque, like Sedona and Jerome, and others, like Flagstaff and Tucson, are more obliging in terms of climate, but Phoenix is just a hot patch of desert.

Phoenix lacks elevation, something that would provide the inhabitants with a break from the overbearing heat.  In fact, the city sits in a hole - something the folks in the Chamber of Commerce refer to as a valley - as in "The Valley of the Sun."  And damned if it isn't!  The sun is so intense - and regular - in and around Phoenix that former governor Janet Napolitano once joked that when it rained in Phoenix it made the front page of the local newspaper - except she really wasn't joking!  Rain and dust storms are both very newsworthy in Phoenix.

This past Wednesday I heard a report on the radio which said that Phoenix had just beaten its old record for the most days in a single year with temperatures over 100 degrees.  The old record of 143 days with temperatures above 100 degrees was set in 1989.  Wednesday marked the 144th day that the temperature had topped the century mark in Phoenix in 2020 -  and the next day, Thursday, the temperature reached 102 degrees marking new records for both the string of days above 100 degrees as well was for the hottest temperature on record for that particular day - beating the old record of 101 degrees that was set in 1991.

I remember June as being the absolute worst month to be in Phoenix.  The last June that I was in residence there, June of 2013, there was a week - about the third week if I remember correctly - when the temperature was above 120 degrees every day.  I had a friend visiting from Okinawa that week, and he commented, "My God, Rock, how can you live like this!"  The secret to survival was, of course, to run from one air-conditioned building to another.  It was so hot that June that some flights had to be cancelled at Sky Harbor Airport because the asphalt on the runways was melting!   True story!

But this summer was hotter.

This July was officially the hottest July on record in Phoenix - and the hottest month on record in the city.  But the next month, August,  soon became the hottest month on record in Phoenix, and the hottest August ever!  And, not surprisingly, this summer also proved to be the hottest summer on record in the Valley of the Sun.

And there were other honors:   The summer of 2020 produced the most 90-degree nights in the city.  The temperature never dropped below 90 degrees on twenty-eight nights, trouncing the old record of fifteen such nights in 2003 and 2013.  Phoenix had more 110-degree days (fifty) than the previous record of thirty-three in 2011, and the city also set a record for days above 115 degrees.  Several "hottest day" records were set over the summer.  And, to frost that sticky cake, the city of Phoenix also had a record number of excessive heat warnings issued over the course of the summer - forty-three in all - far more than in any other year.

In analyzing this continuing heat situation in Phoenix, scientists note that a combination of a weather pattern conducive to heat, urbanization, and long-term, human-caused climate change all played a role in Phoenix's historically hot summer.  And, as the amount of concrete and asphalt on the floor of the Valley of the Sun keeps spreading, and as greenhouse gases continue to accumulate, the climate crisis in and around Phoenix is likely to get worse.  

There is one other factor that may be at play around Phoenix as well.  My buddy, Desert Pete, likes to tell of the time a few years ago when he was looking for a place to bury his mule out in the Sonora Desert just west of Phoenix.  He finally found a spot that appealed to him and proceeded to shovel a hole into the sandy desert floor.  Pete said that he was less than two feet down when he his a cast iron barrier.  He tried digging around it, but the "danged thing" (Pete's words) went on forever.  And it was hot!  Pete reasoned that he had just struck the ceiling of one of the main furnace rooms of Hell.  

And Desert Pete would never lie - but I might!

Regardless of the causes, it looks as though the hot times in Phoenix are destined to continue - at least for the foreseeable future.  

(And for my friends still living in Phoenix and running from one air-conditioned building to another, know this:  there are currently three nice houses for sale on my street here in southern Missouri, each with lush green grass and beautiful tall trees - and each priced at what a small brown hovel with no yard would cost  in Phoenix!)

Just sayin' . . . 

QAnon and Trump's Peanut

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

(Disclaimer:   Having already voted in next month's election and not feeling a compulsive need to suffer even more election rhetoric, I did not watch either of the dueling presidential town halls last night - but I am currently enjoying the new season of "Schitt's Creek" on Netflix.)

While not having personally watched either town hall last night, I did take time this morning to scan the reviews.  It looks as though the Biden performance on ABC garnered about three times as many views as the Trump show on NBC.  Trump regards ratings as paramount, so a loss to Biden in that realm has to hurt.   Most of what I read this morning gave Biden credit for being the most calm and focused of the two, a feat undoubtedly made much easier by the fact that he did not have Trump pig-snorting over him every time he spoke.  Trump, on the other hand, got credit for still being the most volatile and combative of the two.  

Biden spoke of policies and plans for returning America to some semblance of normalcy after four years of turmoil under the Trump administration.  He is still being needled by the press to state whether he would try to add members (what the Republicans call "packing") to the Supreme Court to counter the imbalance that has been imposed by Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump over the past four years of their own court-packing, but Biden continues to sidestep that issue and says the he will have something to say on the matter once the Barrett nomination is disposed of - but before the election.

Trump, who hit a wall in the first debate when he refused to renounce white supremacists, suffered another unforced error last night when he refused to renounce the crackpot QAnon conspiracy theory.  The following description of QAnon was lifted from Wikipedia:

"QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory.  It alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against President Donald Trump, who is battling against the cabal.  The theory also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as "The Storm," when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested.  No part of the theory is based on fact."

And yet Donald Trump cannot bring himself to renounce it.

So far the most notable people who have been arrested on charges related to trafficking minors for sex have been Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislane Maxwell - both of whom were friends of Donald Trump!

Trump also made news in last night's town hall when he admitted that he did in fact have outstanding loans totaling more than $400 million, an amount that he described as both "minuscule" and a "peanut."  Trump has previously denied all of the tax stories released by the New York Times two weeks ago, stories which highlighted $421 million in debt to some unnamed lender - but last night he changed his strategy on dealing with the story and acknowledged the debt.  He also said that he would reveal the name of the lender who owned that debt to the American public - and then promptly failed to do so.

So with just eighteen days to go until the most important election of my lifetime, Joe Biden is playing canasta with a fulll deck, Donald Trump is rampaging through a game of Texas Hold 'Em with less than a full deck, and the lovable oddballs from "Schitt's Creek" are awash in quirky personal issues as they try to put together for a big, fat, gay wedding - an affair that Justice Thomas and Judge Barrett would both undoubtedly rule against if they had any jurisdiction in Canada!

And I have a room at the Rosebud Motel and don't plan on emerging until things make more sense!

Places to Go and People to See!

by Pa Rock
Eternal Tourist

One of my retirement goals was to travel more, and with the exception of this, the Year of the Plague, I have managed to make at least a couple of trips a year that require getting on a plane and flying somewhere.  But this year, of course, things have been different.  In fact, since the news of the pandemic broke in early March, the only traveling that I have done is to visit doctors located in various cities in south-central Missouri and north-central Arkansas.  Springfield, Missouri, one hundred miles to the east, is the farthest that I have been from my little farm since Donald Trump made his famous prediction that the plague would run its course in a couple of weeks.

I always try to go to Oregon to see my grandchildren at least twice I year.  I fly into Portland, one of the finest cities in America, where I rent a car and then drive the sixty or so miles to Salem, the state's capital, where my grandchildren and their parents live.    I am usually in Salem two or three nights and then drive back to Portland and spend one additional night there before getting on a plane and coming back home.  The flight from Kansas City to Portland - and back - covers basically an old wagon route that was once known as "The Oregon Trail."

I quit my day job at Luke Air Force Base near Phoenix at the beginning of March in 2014 and moved to my little farm in the Ozarks.  I had bought the house and small acreage the summer before, and it had been sitting empty ever since and was sorely in need of some tender loving care.  During the first few months that I was there I managed to get unpacked, organize my life around what was occurring in my new community, and get in an order for a few dozen baby chicks.  

In May my grandson, Boone - who had just completed his freshman year at the local high school - and I got in my car and went on a long road trip to see his cousins in Oregon.  We had a grand time and saw many of the sights that his Dad had seen when our family took a similar trip in the mid-1980's.  We visited a music museum at a college in South Dakota, and also saw other attractions in that state including the Corn Palace, Wall Drug, and the Badlands, Mount Rushmore. and even walked the streets of Deadwood.  We also drove through Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming,  and saw much of the Columbia River ("Roll On Columbia, Roll On") while driving across northern Oregon.  At one point we crossed the Columbia and drove into the state of Washington just to say we had been there.

On the way home we drove along the Oregon Pacific coast, had a nice meal at a seaside cafe, drove into the California Redwoods and on through Bigfoot country of north-central California.  We also saw Reno, Nevada - the Biggest Little City in the World - and drove along the Bonneville Salt Flats.  Eventually we made our way back to Kansas City and then home to West Plains, successfully concluding a road trip of nearly three weeks.

And from then on when I got the bug to go see my grandchildren in Oregon, I always flew!

In addition to those regular trips to Oregon, I have also visited Cuba (a week in 2016), Alaska (a cruise in 2017), and Hawaii (a vacation in 2108), as well as several trips to beautiful San Diego where I go occasionally to catch up with my very active Aunt Mary - who, although in her mid-nineties - still drives herself throughout all of the hustle-bustle traffic of Southern California.

This past spring my sister, cousin, and I were planning a family-reunion type of trip to Nantucket, Massachusetts, a place where several of our ancestors once lived, but that event had to be cancelled due to the pandemic.

My last notable trip anywhere was a year ago this month when I flew to Oregon for a visit with the grandchildren, and then flew from there to San Diego where I reconnected with my friend Valerie who lives and works in Hawaii, and also with Aunt Mary and her beautiful blonde California daughters, Janet and Linda.  Little did I realize when I got off of that plane from San Diego to Kansas City that it would be God-knows-when before I would be able to get back on another!

And so I sit in West Plains, Missouri, staring out my front window as the birds flit through the feeders and the dead leaves blow across the landscape foretelling of the coming winter, with no hope of going anywhere soon.   I will not get back on a plane until the pandemic is under control, and several of my doctors have told me that will be at least another full year away.

But I hate being a victim of restricted travel, and lately I have found myself daydreaming about making another road trip to Oregon - maybe in the spring, or early summer after most of the snow in the Rockies has melted.  This time Rosie can be my co-pilot - she loves long drives in the car, and God knows what she could find to chase in Yellowstone or Glacier Park!  

We'll see what the future brings - but it is unlikely that I will just sit at home and watch the world blow by for another year.

Pa Rock has places to go and people to see!

The Singularity Revisited

by Pa Rock
Burgeoning Futurist

Yesterday evening as I was wading the Amazon searching for a particular book, I came across a blurb that mentioned "The Singularity."   With each passing year I seem to forget more than I learn, so it was with some astonishment that I realized that not only had I once been exposed to that particular term sometime in the distant past, but that I also seemed to remember what it meant.

If memory served, "the singularity" referred to a time in the not too distant future when machines would be able to program and control themselves, without benefit of human assistance.  I had read a magazine article on the subject sometime during the two years that I was working on Okinawa (2010-2012), and not long after I was counseling a young serviceman who was reading a book on the subject of "the singularity," and we spent some time talking about all that he was learning on the topic.

This morning I dug back through The Ramble and discovered that I had even posted a piece on the blog about the futurist concept on February 12, 2011.  That brief posting discussed the concept of artificial intelligence and noted that scholars were predicting that by the year 2045 technology will have reached a point where machines will be able to begin programming themselves and pursuing their own agendas.  At that point there will literally be knowledge explosions as machines increase their speed and accuracy based on their own inputs, and humans will begin becoming more and more irrelevant.  

Humans will have set the stage for solving all of the world's problems through unleashed technology - and/or humans, chief among the world's problems, will have brought about their own demise.

In doing more review on the topic this morning, I learned that the theory that machines will soon be able to program and control themselves in still accepted as valid, and that the anticipated date for this ascension of technology over humanity is still thought to be around 2045.  

It's doubtful that I will be around for this quantum leap into the abyss of the unknown, but all of my grandchildren should be.

And Pa Rock wishes them relevance in that brave new world - and luck!

If I Ran the Democratic Party

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

I live in Missouri, very rural southern Missouri, a state and a region that the National Democratic Party has ceded to Donald Trump.  Neither Joe Biden nor Kamala Harris will spend much time in Missouri, if any, and they certainly won't wander down to the Ozarks where I live.   For that matter, Donald Trump and Mike Pence will not be roaming my neighborhood either because they know that they will carry the area handily - so why bother?

The election is three weeks from today, and it is playing out exactly like the ill-fated election of 2016.  The candidates are focused on only a handful of states and have written of much of the country where they consider the outcomes to be foregone conclusions.  The political number-crunchers have already divided the states up into three neat groups:  those that are decidedly pro-Trump, those that are pro-Biden, and those few that could go either way - and it is that third group, the ones that could go either way, where the candidates will actually campaign and spend their time and cash.

The presidential candidates and their teams for focused on putting together wins in enough states to reach the magic number of 270 in the Electoral College.  They are concerned with winning very specific states - they are not concerned with the total number of "popular" votes that the candidates receive, because "popular" or individual votes do not win US presidential elections.

So if they know that a particular candidate - Trump, for instance, will carry a particular state - Missouri, for instance, there is no reason to spend any money there.  Yes, if Biden and Harris spent more money in Missouri, they would garner more votes, but not enough to win the state - so why bother?

It's a defeatist attitude and serves only to place artificial ceilings on the amount of votes that the candidates receive.

Several years ago when Howard Dean was Chairman of the Democratic Party he promoted a "fifty-state" strategy where the party committed to actually fighting for every state.  The party's current leader, Tom Perez, has foregone Dean's strategy and is focused on a more sterile and scientific approach to winning just the right combination of states to carry the vote in the Electoral College.

If I were chairman of the Democratic National Committee, I would put some effort into driving up the popular vote as a way of adding political weight to the outcome.  Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote and the presidency in the last election, but he lost the popular vote by nearly three million - a fact that has dogged him for four years and has given many the confidence to speak out against his presidency as something less that completely legitimate.

The Democratic Party has an abundance of "stars" who are either being seriously under-utilized in this election - or not utilized at all.  These well known individuals could be out knocking on doors and speaking at local events in an effort to swell the popular vote.

There is no one breathing air in the United States today who knows more about Arkansas than Bill Clinton.  Yes, Trump will carry Arkansas, and carry it handily, but Clinton spending a couple of weeks walking the hills and hollows of his boyhood could cut into Trump's Arkansas vote - probably fairly significantly.  And Biden will carry New York, but Hillary and Chelsea Clinton could increase his popular vote New York by attending and even hosting some Democratic Party events between now and the election.

The Clinton family has done quite well for itself with assistance from the Democratic Party, and now would be the time for some payback.

If Missouri's former senator, Claire McCaskill, was of a mind to, she could storm back into the state in full campaign mode and really cut into Trump's numbers in the large urban areas and the central part of the state around Rolla and Jefferson City.   Former Governor Bob Holden could return to his roots in impoverished south-central Missouri and pull votes from Trump, and the Carnahan family could also pry votes from the big orange menace in the Rolla area.   Even with all of that Trump would probably still carry the state and win its electoral votes - but his actual win would be less impressive with diminished numbers.

Social media is littered with celebrities who spend great amounts of time spouting anti-Trump snippets.   Why couldn't they be utilized by the Democratic Party to go out into America's neighborhoods and speak directly to real people about the candidates and the issues?

If there was a full and sustained push to increase the popular vote for the Democratic candidates across the country, it would add momentum and enthusiasm to the national campaign, momentum that would slip across state lines, and in the process it might even turn some state losses into victories.

And it would sure as hell make more people feel as though they were a real part of the process!

Olive Is Nine - and Doing Mighty Fine!

by Pa Rock
Proud Grandpa

Olive Noel Macy, the oldest of my two beautiful granddaughters, is turning nine-years-old today.  Olive lives with her parents and little brother, Sully, in a small town in Kansas that is very near Kansas City.  

Olive is officially a third-grader, although since last spring most of her schooling has taken place at home in front of a computer.  She and so many others had their classroom learning interrupted last March when the pandemic began sweeping across the land and most schools sent their students home to learn virtually with computers.  Olive may have been more fortunate than some of her classmates because her parents are very tech-savvy and have an assortment of devices that are hooked to the internet.

In her spare time Olive studies acting - also over the internet.  She is fortunate in that endeavor as well because her father writes movies and will one day undoubtedly pen a part that will be just perfect for her!

I know that in the past year Olive has enjoyed her family tradition of going to see the play, "A Christmas Carol," at the Kansas City Rep, and that she has been on family trips to south Texas to visit with her great-grandparents and to rural Mississippi for a camping vacation.  She and her family were also able to stop at my house briefly on their way back from Mississippi.  But other than those getaways, Olive and her brother have pretty much been homebound.

Pa Rock hopes that things will return to normal during this year.  Being stuck at home is no fun - especially when you are nine and bursting to get outside and romp and stomp and enjoy life!

Happy birthday, Sweetie!  I hope you get many nice prezzies and have a wonderful day!

Pa Rock will see you soon!

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Since posting this piece about Olive's birthday this morning, I have received an important news bulletin.  As of today, Olive is back at her real school sitting in a real third grade classroom with other real students. It is their first day of actual school for the school year!

I hope you had a wonderful first day back at school, Olive!

Bring Out Your Dead!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist 

Tomorrow may be Columbus Day, a federal holiday, but that will not stop the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate from meeting in special session to rush through a nomination to the United States Supreme Court.  With just over three weeks remaining until the November election, an election which could turn Donald Trump out of office and restore control of the Senate to Democrats,  the Republicans are in full-on panic mode to get the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett before the full Senate so that she can be confirmed before their tenuous hold on power unravels.

The Republican strategy is to push ahead with the confirmation process - which begins with tomorrow's Judiciary Committee hearings - full steam ahead, and conversely, the Democrats will be looking for ways to slow or stall the process.

Amy Coney Barrett's nomination is the third that Trump has been able to make to the high court.  The first was made available with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia more than ten months before Barack Obama left office.  The GOP Senate, headed by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, stole that nomination from the Democrats by refusing to move on the nomination of Merrick Garland, the judge Obama nominated to succeed Scalia.  The GOP rationalized that since Obama was in his final year in office, the seat should be filled by the in-coming president.

This year, of course, when Justice Ruth Boded Ginsburg passed away just six weeks before the November election, the Republicans broke land-speed records for moving to replace her, casting aside the rationale that they had carefully crafted to keep President Obama from appointing Scalia's successor.

The quick appointment of Judge Amy Coney Barrett was a dirty political maneuver, and for it to succeed things had to happen precisely and quickly.  Trump had to made a fast appointment, and he did (before Justice Ginsburg was even buried!) - and the Judiciary Committee had to meet and give Amy Coney Barrett a perfunctory hearing - which will start tomorrow and in all likelihood last just four days.

And tomorrow is a federal holiday - and the nation is in the middle of a deadly pandemic - and two members of the 22-member committee have tested positive for the deadly virus - and several others are refusing to be tested - and the show will start tomorrow morning regardless.

A week ago yesterday, on September 26th, Donald Trump held a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House in order to officially introduce Judge Coney Barrett as his nominee for the Supreme Court. Many GOP politicians attended that event, including several GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.  Less than a week later Trump announced that he and his wife had contracted coronavirus, and other prominent politicians began announcing that they were also infected.  It soon became apparent that the Rose Garden ceremony for Coney Barrett had been a "super spreader" event that was connected at least thirty-seven positive cases.

The coronavirus and its resultant disease, COVID-19, have been shown to be extremely dangerous for elderly people.  The two oldest members of the senate, Dianne Feinstein and Chuck Grassley, both 87, sit on the Judiciary Committee.  Also of the 22 members (12 Republicans and 10 Democrats), nine are over the age of sixty-five.

The two members of the committee who happened to be at Trump's Rose Garden event and have already tested positive for coronavirus are Mike Lee of Utah and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.   Several Democrats, including Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee Kamala Harris (also a member of the Judiciary Committee), are calling for the entire committee to be tested, and yesterday GOP Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a committee member, added her voice to those advocating for testing of committee members.

But a test for alll members might reveal something that could slow down the breakneck process to move Judge Coney Barrett's nomination to the Senate floor - and Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, is not about to let that happen.  Graham, who was sitting down front in the second row of the Rose Garden event (but wearing a mask), is himself refusing to be tested - as is ancient Chuck Grassley.

The youngest member of the current Senate, 40-year-old Josh Hawley of Missouri, a Republican, is also a member of the Judiciary Committee.  He, too, was at the Rose Garden event sitting on the second row.  Hawley was not wearing a mask during Trump's super spreader party.

Yes, some of the old farts sitting on the Judiciary Committee may be infected - and two, in fact, definitely are - and others may get sick, and it's even possible that some could die - but none of that is as important as getting another conservative on the Supreme Court.  With any luck at all the new Court could fulfill the conservative wet dream of the past half-century of reversing the Roe v. Wade decision which allowed women some control over their own bodies, and the new court might also deal a death blow to the Affordable Care Act and relieve more than twenty million Americans of their health insurance.

Taking health care away from millions of working poor in the midst of a deadly global pandemic!    It just can't get any better than that!  No wonder Lindsey Graham can't quit grinning!

The Republicans are still in charge!

Bring out your dead!

Bring out your dead!