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The U.S. Is Bombing Yemen Because...Why, Again?

3/30/2025

Here's a quick quiz for you:
Where is Yemen?
Why are we bombing Yemen?
Who exactly are the Houthis and why are they our enemy?
Anybody know the answers?
I didn't, exactly. Like most of the country (I'm guessing), those questions weren't even on my radar until a few days ago when the SignalGate scandal broke after our country's top intelligence, security and military leaders and the Vice President used Signal, an unsecured phone app, to chat about - and leak about - secret plans for a bombing attack on Yemen (See previous post).
But after the initial question of How the heck could those guys be so dumb and careless?, I found myself wondering...But wait? Why exactly are we bombing Yemen? And where exactly is Yemen? Somewhere in the Middle East, I know, but where? Somewhere around Egypt, right? Or is it somewhere around Saudi Arabia? And who exactly are the Houthis? And why, exactly, are we trying to kill them all?
And so  I dove into trying to unravel and understand why the United States is bombing Yemen.
  After much trawling of the news sources,  here's what I've been able to more or less detangle:
1. Where is Yemen?
  Yemen, mountainous and war-torn, its people starving, it's economy, infrastructure, and food supply devastated by a decade of civil war so that it's now among the world's poorest countries, is located next to Saudi Arabia and Oman, two of the world's riches countries.

2. Who are the Houthis?
The Houthis are a Yemeni Islamist military rebel group formed in the 1990's for the purpose of overthrowing what they claimed was a corrupt puppet government whose strings were being pulled by Saudi Arabia. Over the years the Houthis were involved in civil unrest and government opposition and in the early 2000's the Houthis declared enmity with Israel and, because of our support of Israel, the United States.
In 2014 a coalition of Houthis and other Yemeni opposition groups succeeded in taking control of their country's government. However this coup was not the end of unrest or government dysfunction in Yemen, but rather the start of a civil war.
In 2015 Saudi Arabia joined the side of the ousted Yemeni leaders and launched a series of air strikes and other military interventions against the Iran-backed Houthis. And so began the Yemeni civil war that has been widely considered to be in fact an Iran-Saudi Arabia proxy war. Except that it's been the Yemeni civilians who've suffered, starved, and died.
3. Why Are We Bombing Yemen?
A few weeks after the October 7, 2023 Hamas invasion of Israel and the kidnapping of 250 Israelis and the subsequent death and destruction that Israel rained down on Gaza in retaliation, the Houthis, in a retaliation of their own, began launching missiles at merchant vessels in the Red Sea.

The Houthis vowed that the attacks against ships in the Red Sea would continue until Israel ceased their attacks on Gaza. This caused significant disruption of the global maritime commerce that cut from the Mediterranean sea through the Suez Canal to the Red Sea to Southeast Asia and vice versa.

In January of 2024 The United States and Great Britain began bombing raids on Yemen with the purpose of hitting Houthi targets, the stated goal being that the bombing would stop the Houthis from attacking commercial vessels in the Red Sea and return maritime freedom to that waterway.
However, it appears that all the bombing has accomplished so far has been to instill in the Yemeni population, whose suffering has worsened with the bombings, a hatred of Americans.
Nonetheless, in the months since his return to the office of President of the United States, Donald Trump has greatly escalated the American bombings of Yemen. In fact, Trump blames the Biden administration for not wiping out the Houthis by not bombing Yemen enough.
Meanwhile, the Europeans have for the most part gotten used to rerouting their commercial vessels around the horn of Africa, finding that in the long run it's more economical than risking an attack while cutting through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and that it's not worth getting involved militarily,

...leaving the military operations to the U.S. even though, according the information leaked by JD Vance, only 3% of U.S. trade ran through the Suez Canal/Red Sea route anyway.

And some of the Houthi missile strikes against ships have caused massive environmentally godawful oil spills in the Red Sea.
And Iran keeps arming the Houthis.
And Israel keeps killing the Gazans.
And the United States keeps arming Israel.
And the Houthis care about power; Iran cares about power via the Houthis; the U.S. cares about power, shipping lanes, empowering Israel, and de-powering Iran; and Europe doesn't much care about the whole mess anymore.
And nobody cares about the Yemenis.

Which brings us back to the original question: Why are we bombing Yemen, again?

But what's the message? And to who?

References:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/03/27/yemen-leaked-chat-vance-trump-waltz-bombing/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/27/world/middleeast/houthis-yemen-us-strikes-reality.html

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67614911

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3WJ-C2gpDA

https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/yemen-war-anniversary-hope-end-suffering

https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/yemen/overview

https://gfmag.com/data/richest-countries-in-the-world/

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Donald Trump: Secret U.S. War Plans Leaked? Eh, No Big Deal. An Unflattering Painting Of Me Hung On A Wall? HEADS WILL ROLL!

3/25/2025

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Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves - Donald Trump

I suppose there's no arguing with Donald Trump that nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves. But Donald Trump really flipped out - as by now we've come to expect him to do - in person and on his Truth Social website over what he felt was a bad painting of himself hanging in the Colorado State Capitol:

Of course, as we've also come to expect of Donald Trump, his facts are false. It was not Colorado Governor Jared Polis who put the painting of Donald Trump. Nor, as Trump appears to be asserting in his post, was it Governor Polis who put up the portraits of all the other Presidents that hang in the Colorado State Capitol.
It so happens that inside the Colorado Capitol building there is a collection of presidential portraits known as the Gallery of Presidents.

Funding for the paintings comes from private donations collected by a Colorado citizens' group who then commission the paintings. However, after Donald Trump was elected, not a single donation came to the group for a Trump portrait, and by 2018 the space above his name plate was still empty.
One time a member of a progressive activists' group snuck in a portrait of Vladimir Putin and put it on display beneath the empty spot where a President Trump portrait should have hung.

The prank embarrassed and angered Republicans and emphasized the fact that Donald Trump was the only President who did not have a portrait hung in the Colorado Gallery of Presidents. And so Colorado Republican State Senator Kevin Grantham started a GoFundMe to raise the $10,000 needed for a portrait of Trump.
The Republicans commissioned artist Sarah Boardman, who painted the portrait of Barak Obama that Donald Trump griped looked so much better than his,

...which, of course, it did.

But then, an artist can only work with the material she's got, right?
But here's the thing: that picture of Donald Trump has been hanging in the Colorado State Capitol Gallery of Presidents since 2019. Trump apparently somehow discovered its existence a few days ago. And, according to Kevin Grantham, and contrary to what Trump claims, there have been no complaints about the picture. People are not angry about it. People have other things to worry about in their lives. It's only Trump who has blown a gasket over his portrait. The same gasket he should have blown when he learned that his Secretary of Defense, National Security Director, Director of National Intelligence, CIA Director, Secretary of State, and Vice President not only discussed on Signal, an unsecured phone chat app, secret plans for a bombing attack on Yemen that should have been discussed nowhere other than in a person in a secured war room, but that the editor of The Atlantic magazine was included in the chat group.
And so now the whole world now gets to see it all, from the misgivings of Trump's military and intelligence team about carrying out the bombing at all, about their fears that the American public wouldn't buy why the bombing was necessary, about its real purpose being to send a message (but not to whom), about how to keep the public distracted by pushing the "Biden failed" message, about how to shake down Europe and Egypt after the bombing, about how these men, leaders of the strongest, richest country on the planet, congratulated themselves using kicky little emojis after bombing more buildings and killing more people in a tiny, starving, war-torn country that most Americans, if they've even heard of it, have no idea where it was or why we should be bombing it.
Here are some of the highlights (or rather lowlights) of the chat:

Did President Donald Trump, so bent out of shape over his portrait in the Colorado Gallery of Presidents, care that his top military and intelligence leaders managed to leak such sensitive material that not only could have sunk his bombing mission and caused the death of American pilots, but has caused an international scandal and made it appear that the United States is being run by a pack of incompetent dunderheads?
Eh, not really. Initially Trump made a few quips about technology not being perfect, about how good his Director of Intelligence is, about how almost nobody reads The Atlantic, anyway. He even brushed aside the whole incident with a joke, reposting a bon mot from a satiric online site called The Babylon Bee on his Truth Social page (though mayhaps not realizing that The Babylon Bee is satire):

But anyway, as for the bad painting of himself, Trump's Republican minions have, of course, already hopped to it to remove it from the Colorado State Capitol and they are raising money to commission a new painting that will hopefully be pleasing to Donald J. Trump.
In a functional Presidential administration the bad painting would be ignored and the bad cabinet removed. But a functional, capable Presidential administration is not what We Most of the People voted for. What they voted for was President Vanity Fair. And now that's what we have.

References:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html

https://time.com/7271040/trump-portrait-colorado-state-capitol-polis-grantham-boardman-history-factcheck/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/24/trump-colorado-portrait-polis-capitol/82637703007/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/donald-trump-s-baffling-response-to-group-chat-leak-raises-eyebrows-best-technology/ar-AA1BE66j

https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-trump-hegseth-atlantic-230718a984911dd8663d59edbcb86f2a

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html

https://apnews.com/article/war-plans-trump-hegseth-atlantic-230718a984911dd8663d59edbcb86f2a

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/no-adult-supervision-concern-escalates-as-trump-increasingly-appears-out-of-touch-opinion/ar-AA1BMEMQ?cvid=6cbf3a98abce4e75b284b42f2533957a&ei=37

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Donald Trump Has Endangered The U.S. Baby Formula Supply

3/21/2025

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Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon:
"Equal And Opposite Reactions"   http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
   "Hail Mary"    https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
"Tropical Depression"       https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY

Donald Trump Has Endangered The U.S. Baby Formula Supply

 I first read about it two days ago on a Facebook post.

However I don't pay much attention to Facebook news, especially of the sensationalistic variety, unless it's referenced from a credible source.
And then yesterday I found that same alarming news from a highly credible source:

I then looked around the internet and found several more news articles on the subject of the risk to our food supply, most alarmingly infant formula, now that Donald Trump, in support of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency,

... is cutting jobs and funds in the Food and Drug Administration's food safety division.
Among the cuts is a critical food safety committee that addresses microbial hazards in the food supply, including the bacteria that can live in powdered baby formula.
Or rather, that food safety committee used to address those hazards, until the recent email the scientists on the committee received stating, "Further work on your report and recommendations will be prohibited."
Meanwhile Health and Human Services Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr., supposed safe guardian of our country's food supply,

...has started a government initiative called "Operation Stork Speed" to remove what he believes are unhealthy additives and "toxins" in baby formula. Except that from now on the far greater danger to baby formula will not be additives or toxins but the presence of undetected bacteria.
So R.F.K. Jr. is, in effect, making a great public ballyhoo over the ingredients in baby formula while ignoring the real and potentially deadly problem of the presence of dangerous bacteria.
All this is not to say that the rest of the American population will be any safer from food borne illness than formula-fed babies. The committee on meat and poultry inspection has also been dissolved along with the committee on microbial safety. And while in fact more food safety inspectors are at this moment needed in this country, Trump's F.D.A. budget cuts will mean even fewer inspectors.
Furthermore, scientists in the F.D.A. have been barred from using their government credit cards which, according the New York Times article, has slowed their investigation of the listeria bacterium in certain foods and "stopped some testing of grocery items for hazardous bacteria and monitoring of shellfish and food packaging," and "funding loss could slow the important work of taking bad food out of stores."
And so it appears that an unsafe food supply and more food-borne illness is on the horizon for us all, thanks to Donald Trump and Elon Musk. We should all be worried sick and mad as hell. Especially for the babies.

References
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/19/health/food-safety-trump-fda-cutbacks-deadly-outbreaks.html

https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2025/03/food-safety-leaders-express-concerns-about-recent-cuts-in-fda-workforce/

https://www.foodandwine.com/trump-administration-eliminates-usda-food-safety-committees-11693025

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The Day Nothing Was Working

3/18/2025

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The Day Nothing Was Working

It was just about a week and a half ago, in fact it was Saturday evening, March 8, that I took in the state of my domicile and cried out, "@#$%! Nothing is working!"
All right, that was mayhaps a bit of dramatic exaggeration on my part. Most things in my house were, in fact working. Except for the dryer,

...the refrigerator door,

...the WIFI,

...and the three new toilets we'd had installed earlier that day.

At the time it felt like a lot, though.
Everything didn't fall apart at once. Things kind of stopped functioning incrementally.
The first thing to go was our 15-year-old dryer. It crossed over the bridge of no return on Thursday, February 27. Though we got online and ordered a new one tout de suite, we were notified that it would be several weeks before our new dryer would arrive.
And so we went into what I christened Little House on the Prairie mode and started hanging laundry all around the house.

On the days when it was sunny and not too cold we hung the laundry out on our backyard clothesline. One day when it was too cold we hung some towels out anyway and when we took them down they were stiff as boards and frozen together where we'd clothespinned them to each other.

A few days later the refrigerator door broke. That is to say, the magnetic door-length strip that allows the door to close broke loose from the door.

Now the door won't close unless one carefully guides the strip by hand into the slot that grabs it shut. As this note on the refrigerator now reminds us to do.

On Thursday, March 6, our WIFI went out. Then it came back on. Then it went back out. And mostly stayed out. Tom called our internet provider Breezeline to see if there were internet outages in our area. The representative he spoke to assured him that all the internet connections in our area were functioning just fine. The helpful rep said he'd try clearing the flaps - or something like that - on our internet and that should take care of our problem.
Which it did. For a little while. But by the next day our WIFI had returned to on-again-off-again mode. Tom again called Breezeline and this time was told that the problem was our modem and that we needed to buy a new one with more bandwidth. Which explanation Tom found a weence sketchy (Me, I'd of probably bought just about any explanation anybody gave me, me being about as tech-savvy as a mushroom).
However, we had to put our WIFI woes on hold as the following day, Saturday, March 8, the plumber was coming to install the three new elongated, easy-clean water-saving state-of-the art American Standard toilets we'd bought to replace our old toilets.

By the end of the day we had three new cool-looking toilets in our bathrooms that hurt to sit on. It was definitely that ultra-thin, ultra-hard, ultra-flat toilet seat. It was quite stylish-looking and punishing.

We figured that new seats, those thick, soft, cushy ones, would fix the problem. So I zipped out to Meijer's, where there was a fine assortment of toilet seats,

...and I found just what we needed.

So I bought three at $32.99 a pop.

Soon my mate was at work taking off one of the old seats,

...only to find that the new one didn't fit. This high brow toilet that we'd bought was apparently too sui generis to accept a universal toilet seat bolt and would only tolerate being topped with its own sui generis seat. Which I couldn't tolerate sitting on and with which every toilet in the house was now topped.
That realization was the moment I had my existential mini-meltdown: "@#$%! Nothing is working!"
"I'll call the plumber," said my mate calmingly. "Maybe he'll have an idea on what we should do."
"Okay," I sighed. "And I'll call Randy about the internet." I'd recovered from my momentary meltdown and was now ready to take the next step in fixing a situation after whining.
"And then I'll go online and see if I can find a repair part for the refrigerator door," said Tom.
"And I'll go hang another load of wet laundry," I said.
The following morning, Sunday morning, our dedicated plumber returned and, wonder of wonder, miracle of miracles, he was able to do some fancy drilling, converting, and adapting that made the soft, cushy toilet seats fit like a dream and solved our toilet seat crisis.

That afternoon our nephew Randy, an IT wizard, came over and informed us that the Breezline guy was full of hoggy, that we didn't need a new modem, just a modem reset (whatever that means), which he forthwith effectuated,

...and now our WIFI works like a charm.
The new magnetic strip for the refrigerator door arrived. (And Tom will no doubt get around to installing it soon).

And our new dryer is arriving tomorrow. Though, in truth, our current laundry situation has kind of grown on me. It's actually nice having the laundry hanging in the family room. It gives the room a pleasant, balmy humidity and a nice, clean, homey smell.
I may stay in Little House on the Prairie mode for a while yet.

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Making America Sober Again?

3/15/2025

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Making America Sober Again?

These are times that not only try men's and women's souls,

...but surely drive us to drink. I don't drink, but some days even I want to lose myself in the bottom of a bottle. (Though I usually end up settling for an old-movie binge).
But now, just when Americans most need a drink to steady their fraught nerves, the very cause of our national case of nerves,

...is throwing a wrench in the availability of alcohol to everyday Americans.
It started with Donald Trump imposing 25% or so tariffs on just about everything imported from just about anywhere in the world. For those who are still a weence foggy on what exactly a tariff is, it's a tax that a government imposes on imported goods. Exporters pass along the cost of the tariff by jacking up the price of their goods and therefore passing the expense onto the companies receiving their goods, who in turn jack up their prices to kick the expense of the tariff onto the consumers, who are the ones who ultimate pay for the tariffs. Make sense? Yeah, not to me, either. But in short: Trump imposes the tariffs, we pay the people pay for them.
(BTW, back in 1929 a couple of Republican legislators, Reed Smoot and Willis C. Hawley, introduced a bill that became the Smoot-Hawley Tariff when President Herbert Hoover signed it into law. It started with the U.S. slapping tariffs on foreign imports, which caused other countries to retaliate against American tariffs with tariffs of their own, and the next thing you know there's a trade war leading to that world wide catastrophic economic downturn known as The Great Depression).

But anyway, Donald Trump decided to imposed tariffs bigly (as he would say) on foreign imports because―well, I don't know why, exactly; seems it was just something else he wanted to do along with all the other attention-grabbing status quo-wrecking he's been doing. Europe then threatened to retaliate by imposing a 50% tariff on American whiskey, Europeans and Canadians apparently liking their Kentucky bourbon. However, many Europeans and Canadians, in a show of patriotic unity, are now boycotting American alcohol altogether while their liquor dealers are opting to keep it off their shelves.

Donald Trump's next shot in escalating this trade war that he started will be, he vows, slamming a 200% tariff on all alcohol products from the European Union. Which means that all the European beers, wines, and whiskeys that Americans love,
their Stellas and Heinekens,

...their Guinnesses and Jamesons,

...their Beaujolais and champagnes,

...their chiantis and proseccos,

...will cost Americans three times what they now cost. That is to say, a $15 bottle of wine will cost a whopping $45.
In response, American liquor dealers are predicting that Americans will have to cut back or cut out their purchases of foreign alcohol and some have said that they'll stop ordering products from overseas altogether.
The thing is, though, Americans drink a lot of imported alcohol, especially wine. Most of the wine we (we, meaning not me) drink comes from Italy and France, and can only be produced in Italy and France because we don't have the grapes or the climate.
Of course, the U.S. has its own wineries, but Trump's mass deportation of undocumented immigrants is threatening to devastate the American wine industry by taking away the migrant workers who pick the grapes.

And so, no grape harvesters, no wine.
Oh, and then there's tequila, that comes from Mexico,

...that has been hit by Trump with a 25% tariff. Tequila, which can only be produced in specific parts of Mexico where the blue agave plant grows, is the base for the margarita, the most popular cocktail in the U.S.

And then there's the 25% tariff that Trump has imposed on imported aluminum, which is putting a hurt on American beer producers, as this will up the price of beer cans to the point of possibly bankrupting smaller microbreweries.

And then, there are the American whiskey and bourbon distilleries, which are already feeling the pain - debilitating, according to the U.S. spirits industry - from the European and Canadian boycotts of their product, and some of whom fear they might not survive the fallout of Donald Trump's trade war.

The upshot of all this is that, if the European Union opts to retaliate against Trump's tariffs with its promised 50% tariff on American alcohol and Trump subsequently detonates his 200% tariff on European alcohol, the United States is on the cusp of a major trade war and a major alcohol shortage. There simply won't be nearly enough booze available for Americans. Which might usher in an unexpected (and unwanted) Golden Age of American Sobriety.
Or maybe just a return to bath tub gin.

References:
https://thehill.com/homenews/5193466-what-alcohol-would-cost-more-under-200-trump-tariff/

https://apnews.com/article/trump-tariffs-wine-spirits-200-alcohol-dabead2d0e0fad64dc5e6250293ef016

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/business/spirits-bourbon-tariffs/index.html

https://www.newsnationnow.com/politics/alcohol-cost-more-200-percent-trump-tariff/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/upscale-napa-valley-wineries-fear-trumps-migrant-raids-could-end-them/ar-AA1y4j1G

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-spirits-industry-warns-of-debilitating-retaliatory-whiskey-tariffs-from-europe/ar-AA1AM9SI

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The Paradox Of Donald Trump And The Mean Non-Tipper

3/11/2025

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The Paradox Of Donald Trump And The Mean Non-Tipper

I expect by now most of the world has heard the story of the woman, a former Century 21 real estate agent, who took her family to a Mexican restaurant, ran up a bill for $87.84, then instead of leaving a tip left a jaw-droppingly mean note.

The server for whom the mean tipless note was left is an American citizen of Latino heritage named Ricardo. He works two jobs to make ends meet. He is well-liked by his co-workers and has a good customer service history.
The drama that subsequently unfolded was rife with unintended consequences, among which were one of the restaurant staff posting the crude receipt on Facebook, and the mean, non-tipping note-writer being not only publicly castigated big time, but also, as one social media wit put it, “deported” from Century 21.

As it turns out, the restaurant where this incident took place is here in Columbus, Ohio,

...about ten minutes from where I live. The mean diner lives in an upscale Columbus suburb. (Which I guess goes to prove that upscale doesn't go hand in hand with class).
But if one takes a moment to deconstruct the woman's note, there is something manifest in its contents that seems to go beyond her dissatisfaction with her dining experience. In fact, it remains unclear what, specifically, she was dissatisfied with: Slow service? That she couldn't use two coupons because of the restaurant's one-coupon-per-table policy? Those possibilities have been tossed around by the restaurant staff.
But I believe there's one thing - make that two things - that are pretty clear from the message that the woman left on her receipt: one, that she is - or at least was at the moment she left that note - an intensely angry person, a dynamite stick full of anger; and two, that it wasn't a what that lit her fuse, but a who.
The anger in the woman's note wasn't directed towards the service she received; it was directed towards the server on a personal level: You suck. I hope Trump deports you (followed by three exclamation points). And therein lies the message within her angry message: You are Latino. You are not one of us, you are one of them. It gives me satisfaction to demean you and deprive you of compensation for your service. You are the kind that Trump deports.
The key word here, of course, is "Trump." with his painting of Latino immigrants as rapists, murderers and criminals, with his push to strip away citizenship of those born in the United states of non-citizen parents, Donald Trump has by his own overblown and uncouth behavior set a tone in this country of meanness and incivility that has given people - or rather, some people - permission in their minds to do what that woman did to the worker in the Mexican restaurant.
But there's a paradox in this story. The American people elected Donald Trump as President, twice, giving by their vote implicit approval of his angry, resentful, insulting, in-your-face bullying. In truth, the woman in the restaurant was merely acting out the kind of mean racist behavior that the President of the United States, who won Ohio by a whopping 11 points, condones and exhibits every day.
And yet, after the story broke of the woman's meanness towards the server of Latino heritage, Ohioans were outraged by her behavior and rushed to support both the restaurant and the server. People felt so badly about how Ricardo was treated that a Go Fund Me was started to restore his lost tip on the $87.84 bill. Here's how much was raised:

I guess the happy, heart-warming, paradoxical ending to this story shows that most people, even those who will vote for a hate-monger like Donald Trump, aren't themselves hateful, have good hearts, and don't like to see others hurt. And I can't help hope that for the mean non-tipper this experience ends with a heart-changing epiphany. And maybe even leads to some kind of a happy ending, for her, too.

References:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/realtor-fired-after-leaving-hateful-message-instead-of-tip-on-restaurant-receipt/ar-AA1AgbE8

https://www.dispatch.com/story/entertainment/dining/2025/03/03/cazuelas-mexican-restaurant-targeted-by-racist-comment-from-customer/81163999007/

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Need To Do Something? Write A Letter To Your Senators And Representatives.

3/6/2025

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Need To Do Something? Write A Letter To Your Senators And Representatives.

The following is the content of a letter - a real, live letter on paper with an
envelope and stamp - that I wrote and sent the other day to my Ohio Senators.
That is to say, my sister wrote up the template for the letter that she sent to her Congressional representative and told me to go ahead and use it and share it with anyone else who'd like to write a letter but would appreciate having a sample letter to use.
Actually, I personalized my sister's original letter - for example I added that my husband was retired military and that I worked as a Department of Defense civilian. I also added the paragraph about Alaska being only 53 miles from Russia. You can feel free to personalize the letter or change it anyway you'd like, or use it as is. (Except for my introduction, of course, and you'll want to address the letter to your own Senators and/or Representative. And be sure to add your address, phone number and email below your signature).
Anyway, here's my letter:

The Honorable Jon Husted
SR-198 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510

March 3, 2025

Dear Senator Husted,
My name is Patti Liszkay, I am a constituent of yours. My husband is a retired lieutenant colonel who served active duty in Germany and in the U.S. Army reserves stateside. I am a former Department of Defense civilian who also worked alongside our troops in Germany.

I am writing to you to express my concern over President Trump's unwillingness to support President Zelensky and pressuring him to surrender the freedom of his people to Russia. This is cruel and un-American behavior that is prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people. We should not be partnering with Putin to facilitate Russia's occupation of Ukraine.

We need to defend democracy and stand with our European allies in
support of Ukraine. If we side with Russia it will open the door for Putin to
continue to expand his domination throughout Europe. Is Poland next?

And don’t forget, Alaska is only 53 miles across the Bering Strait from Russia.

Thank you for your consideration, Senator Husted. Please send me a reply to let me know where you stand in support of Ukraine.

Sincerely,

(signed)

Patti Liszkay
(Address, telephone number and email)

Again, feel free to use this letter to write to your Senators and/or Representative. Or compose and send your own letter. It'll do you good.

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What if Russia Invaded The U.S.?

3/3/2025

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Couldn't possibly happen, right? After all, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pointed out the other day during his visit to the White House in one of the rare moments when he wasn't being noodged to death by Donald Trump and JD Vance (note the Trump-Vance color coordinated outfits),

...while Secretary of State Marco Rubio sat there on the sofa looking like he wanted to go home,

...anyway, as President Zelensky pointed out, we here in the United States have a nice ocean between us and Russia.
Except that, at its narrowest point at the Bering Strait, that nice ocean is only 53 miles wide.

And as we all learned (hopefully) in history class, the territory that is today Alaska used to part of Russia until the United States purchased this piece of land from Russia in 1867.

So think about it: Is it so totally outside the realm of possibility that Vladimir Putin, now being in his megalomania Russian Empire mode, might not decide that he wants Alaska back, that Alaska actually belongs to Russia? Is it impossible to believe that he might decide to send bombers and troops across that 53-mile stretch of sea between Russia and the U.S. to get back "Russian" territory? Could that never happen? Especially since our President has totally let down our country's guard against Putin's imperialist ambition?
But, then, maybe Russia invading American territory is totally outside the realm of possibility. Maybe it's not possible that Russia could take Alaska.
But imagine for a moment that it were possible and that Russia did invade the United States the way it invaded Ukraine and managed to seize Alaska by military force. Would we Americans be willing to let Russia have Alaska for the sake of "peace?"
Or imagine that Russia succeeded in bringing war to our lower 48. Imagine that after three horrible years of war Russia had seized and occupied 20% of our country, as it has seized 20% of Ukraine. Would we be willing to allow Russia to keep that 20% of our country in order to have "peace?" Who among us would want to live in the "peaceful" Russian-occupied territory?
Of course, what this is all just an imaginary scenario, but here's my point: Even those Americans who don't care about the suffering of the Ukrainians,

...or want our country involved in their defense and protection should at least have some understanding of their plight and their situation and of why, even after three cruel years of war they'd rather keep fighting for their freedom than surrender to Russian "peace."
We should all understand this. Even if it couldn't possibly happen to us. Could it?

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Donald Trump Has Endangered The U.S. Baby Formula Supply

The Day Nothing Was Working

Making America Sober Again?

The Paradox Of Donald Trump And The Mean Non-Tipper

Need To Do Something? Write A Letter To Your Senators And Representatives.