Donald Trump Tag

14 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

We're back and ready to roll! The Postal Service is the nation’s second largest civilian employer (after Walmart—another story), employing 633,108 personnel. It would rank 44th on the 2019 Fortune 500 list if it was considered a private company – which it decidedly is not: it is the only government agency mandated as a service — it's not the postal business, after all. As a government agency, it has a legal obligation to provide all the various aspects of universal service. It also has special privileges, including sovereign immunity, eminent domain powers, powers to negotiate postal treaties with foreign nations, and an exclusive legal right to deliver first class and third class mail. The Postal Inspection Service, USPIS, is one of the oldest law enforcement agencies in the nation. Founded by Benjamin Franklin during the Second Continental Congress in August 1775, its mission is to protect the Postal Service, its employees...

04 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Unintended consequences of an action or event are inherently shocking. They do sometimes offer hints, warnings, clues so subtle as to make sense only after the fact. But mostly they can’t be predicted–unless they were so obvious they could have been predicted, so naturally were ignored.

27 Apr

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
It's acknowledged by many now that the women who constitute only 7 percent of world leaders did a notably different and excellent job of preparing their countries for the coronavirus pandemic and of coping with it as the full force has hit.

11 Nov

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
In the ancient Greek story, Cassandra could see into the future. She saw and prophesied doom for Troy but the Trojans called her an alarmist and no believed her, because after all who likes doom in their future? What if, we might ask, Cassandra had been prophesying Troy’s eventual victory? They still would not have believed her, because she was a woman and therefore prone to naïveté and sentimental optimism.

14 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

Okay. So we’ve learned to be alert about Trump’s creativity when it comes to diversionary tactics. To get himself out of a corner, he will do anything, including initiate a war—sacrificing American casualties and, in the case of the Kurds, the lives of allies who’d fought beside GIs against the so-called "Islamic state" caliphate. We’ve learned we need to peer behind the scenes to look for or surmise what’s really going on, which is inevitably nefarious in Trump world. So here are a few things to keep an eye on, especially now, as his lawyers realize they need to lawyer up themselves with lawyers, his minions begin to topple like bowling pins, and the vise tightens around him. Some people say that after the House impeaches him, as begins to look inevitable, the GOP-controlled Senate might actually convict him, despite previous assumptions; the polls are sinking him as if by...

07 Oct

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
At last we can proclaim a sentence so many Americans have been waiting for: the majority of registered voters—not just registered Democratic voters but all registered voters—now believe that Donald Trump should be impeached.

16 Sep

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized
Back from hiatus! I confess that over the summer, I considered making this blog a Trump-free zone, since we're all so fatigued by hearing him, about him, about his policies and their disastrous effects. But that would be neither responsible nor possible, unless we were proverbial ostriches.

17 Jun

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

I became so incandescent yet inarticulate with rage on hearing Trump say flat-out, whether from arrogance or ignorance or both, that of course he would accept foreign interference in U.S. elections if that would permit him to retain power, that rather than stammer any comment in tongue-tied fury I thought it preferable to rely on my betters. Here are two startlingly applicable examples of my betters holding forth with their highly relevant views. The first is George Washington. The Framers were particularly and justifiably worried about foreign intervention into the fledgling nation, so that was not only the subject of the now-famous-because-so-violated-by-Trump Emoluments Clause in the Constitution but it also took up a substantial proportion of Washington’s great Farewell Address. Here is a small excerpt: As avenues to foreign influence in innumerable ways, . . . attachments are particularly alarming to the truly enlightened and independent patriot. How many opportunities do...

13 May

Posted at 06:00h in Uncategorized

“The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers.” You might recognize that line, from Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, as famous, but its meaning has been roundly debated. Some scholars insist that the speaker, a ne’er-do-well character aptly named Dick the Butcher, is serious because he detests lawyers, since they are virtuous defenders of justice. Other scholars insist just as loudly that because the scene is one of Shakespeare's comic-relief guttersnipe-street-people scenes, the remark is spat out as a laugh line aimed at corrupt lawyers and their high fees. Me, I think Will was, as usual, slaying two meanings with a single line. That would work today, too. On the one hand, more than 700 and still counting former Federal prosecutors have signed an open letter stating that had the acts committed by Donald J. Trump as outlined in the Mueller Report been committed by any other American citizen, that...