Long National Nightmare
By Hank Silverberg
It is a day most of us who lived through it will never forget. On August 8th, 1974, Richard Nixon, America's embattled President, resigned.
The Watergate scandal had dominated the news for two years and even Nixon, as dishonest and morally corrupt as he was, had the political acumen to see the writing on the wall: either quit, or be removed from office by the Senate after an impeachment trial.
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| Ford pardoning Nixon, 1974, Courtesy, Ford Library. |
I have been thinking about that day lately. This year's election is just a week or so away, and America is in the midst of another national nightmare with Donald J. Trump's name on it.
Ever since he walked down that escalator at Trump tower in June of 2015, we have been having a bad dream.
Trump has castrated the Republican party.
He has snuggled up with authoritarian leaders in Russia, China and North Korea.
He has looked the other way from incidents like the deadly Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally, encouraging white supremacists to openly talk about race war and insurrection.
He has set the effort to save the planet back a decade by withdrawing from the Paris Climate Change Accord and eviscerating many environmental protection laws.
And, worst of all, he has showed a lack of compassion or any kind of competent action during the pandemic. That has lead to the deaths of 230,000 Americans (and counting), and destroyed our economy.
He has had some accomplices like Senators McConnell, Graham and Cruz among others, who seem at a loss on how to deal with him and in the process have sold their souls to the Devil.
The good news is that there is an election coming up. More than 50 million Americans have already cast their vote early which is more than a third of the electorate and a record for early voting. Thousands more will likely do so this week, and still millions more will head to the polls, hopefully with masks on their faces, on November 3rd.
I have heard from and talked to people who still support Trump, though I fail to understand why.
Joe Biden admittingly is not the "perfect" candidate, but when is anyone EVER perfect? To attack him as a "career politician" as Trump did in last week's debate, is nonsense. Biden has given a good portion of his working life to service to our country, and that is a good thing.
Example: this tweet was circulating a lot this past weekend. It's from a year ago, in October of 2019, when Biden held no elected office, when there was no Covid-19 and no pandemic.
Again, this tweet was from LAST October. It was a prophetic warning that everyone, including Trump, ignored.
Look back a bit, before Trump was elected.
While Trump was defrauding students at the failed "Trump University," Biden was in the trenches working on health care and preventing Climate Change.
While Trump was bankrupting casinos and bilking his vendors, Biden was working either as Vice President or in the Senate helping to find a cure for cancer.
Go back further. While Trump was messing around with porn stars, cheating on his wives and harassing women, Biden was rushing home on the train to take care of his children.
I could go on, but you have heard most of this before.
I don't think I will ever understand why someone would vote for Trump, the con-man, Trump the misogynists or Trump the tax cheat. But they are just making the wrong decision.
In contrast, if you don't vote at all you have lost your right to complain about anything that happens in the political arena for the next four years.
There have been predictions we may see voter turnout as high as
That number was down to only 53.6% in 1976, the first election after the Watergate scandal.
In 2000, in a close election (Bush/Gore) that went to the Supreme Court, only 50.5% of those old enough to vote went to the polls,
The number was up again to 57.1% in 2008 when Barack Obama's candidacy brought in thousands of new voters, but it's been down in the low 50's in the two presidential elections that followed.
Let's hope we reach 60% or higher this year. The early voting has gotten us off to a good start.
(The link below will take you to my source which is more detailed.)
If you vote for Trump you are making the wrong decision. If you don't vote at all --no matter what the reason-- it's a foolish decision.
It took two years to get rid of Nixon after Watergate. We have suffered through Trump for more than four years. Those years frankly make Watergate look like child's play in comparison.
I am looking forward to noon on January 20th, 2021, when hopefully our latest "long national nightmare" will finally be over.
Speaking of right wing extremists!
If you live in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin or Oregon, then you should be worried more than anyone else about those right-wing militias we have been warned about. The FBI has already indicated that white supremacists, militias and other right-wing extremists are the biggest threat right now to our freedom and safety, despite all the rantings from the President about left-wing groups like ANTIFA or BLM.
A new report by the ALCED (The Armed Conflict & Event Data Project) and Militia Watch includes a map of potential hot spots for militia-style activities. It shows states that have had militia recruitment drives and training and right-wing extremist groups which have cultivated relationships with law enforcement. It also shows substantial engagements in anti-coronavirus lock-down protests.
The report comes out as the risk for political violence around the election and results increases. The activities could include, among other things, voter intimidation before the election or armed protests if President Trump loses the election.
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| (Source:ACLED |
Along those same lines, a new study of on-line propaganda centering around the election has showed growing racist and anti-Semitic messages on Facebook and private channels on Telegram a cloud based instant messaging system.
The Anti-Defamation League, which keeps a close watch on such propaganda, says they collected 3,317 posts from 11 Facebook pages and 44,244 from 23 public Facebook groups that included hateful content about Blacks and Jews.
Example: of the 333,325 Telegram messages they collected, 26% mentioned Black people in derogatory terms, and 57% of those related to Jewish Americans contained derogatory language.
On Facebook, a more popular service, one in every 150 posts traced had hateful comments on Blacks, and one in every 300 had derogatory comments towards Jews.
The impact of this is hard to analyze. It's unclear how many of these comments come from actual people or from agents of foreign governments trying to divide us. Russia , China and Iran have been been tagged as provocateur's in such instances. But it is clear social media is playing a major role in the growing hostility and the increased boldness of militia groups and other extremists.
https://www.adl.org/resources/reports/computational-propaganda-and-the-2020-election
More trouble for Social Security:
The reasons for the new prediction are obvious. Millions of people are out of work, meaning they are not paying into the trust fund.
So the solutions to the shortfall may be nasty. Higher payroll taxes, more severe benefit cuts, and more stressful and expensive retirement planning for those not yet collecting Social Security. The worse the pandemic fueled recession gets, the worse the prognosis. It's been reported many times that the trust fund, which was not supposed to be used for anything but Social Security, was raided repeatedly by Congress in the 1990's to pay for other spending decisions or help replace funding lost from tax cuts that benefited mostly higher earners. Al Gore tried to warn us in 2000 with his "lockbox". The Republicans made fun of the term and ignored his warning.
If the fund runs dry, it will leave millions of senior citizens in financial distress and break a promise made to the American people when Social Security INSURANCE was created almost a hundred years ago.
UPDATE: Attack on the Killer Hornets:
The war is on in Washington State where scientists have discovered
After weeks of searching, the scientists say they have attacked the nest of the Asian giant hornet in Blaine, just north of Seattle near the Canadian border. Crews wearing thick protective suits spent part of this past weekend using powerful vacuum cleaners to suck the insects out of the cavity of a large tree. The crew also had to wear face shields because the hornets can use their six millimeter stingers to spit painful venom into the workers eyes.
The hornets, which can be two inches long, are an invasive species native to Asia, and are a huge threat to local honeybees which they have been killing. The humble North American bumblebee is vital for pollination of crops used for food by humans. Honeybees are vital for the growth of apples, pears, almonds, pumpkins, cucumbers, blueberries and many other foods They also pollinate alfalfa, which is forage for beef and diary cows. So this "killer hornet" is a big deal.
The local bee population in the United States is already under siege by pesticides, mites and the loss of their food supply and habitat.
(Your suggestions and comments are welcome)
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