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The Message In The Flag

11/23/2024

It was a beautiful fall day in the neighborhood q few days ago when I went out for my daily morning walk, and so I couldn't resist snapping some pictures along the way.

There's one lovely, bucolic street about a mile away from where I live that's part of my usual walking route.

On this street there's a house in front of which flies the American flag. I don't know who lives in the house with this flag, but I always felt that they must be of the conservative persuasion. I felt this in spite of the fact that around where I live the flag is flown by a good number of folks of varying political views.

In fact, we fly the American flag on our house,

...along with several other flags.

(I've heard my house referred to around the 'hood as "the house with the flags").
But, in spite of the fact that in our locality flag-flying is a more or less bipartisan activity, I'd taken a notion that the flyer of this particular flag likely leaned to the right politicly because...well...it was a big flag. A big flag on a long pole attached to the mailbox post by the curb, and it faced inwards towards the sidewalk and fluttered so close to the sidewalk that it was in the direct line of vision and almost in the path of the passers-by.
And then attached to the mailbox post beneath the flag was a spotlight positioned so that when lit it would shine on the flag, which indicated that this flag flew 24/7, proper respect for the flag requiring that it be taken in at sunset unless illuminated at night like so:

...as this flag obviously would be at night.
Such was my rationale for assuming what I assumed about the political bent of the flag's owner.
On the day that I was walking and snapping my pictures, I reached the spot where, as usual, I discerned from a distance the big sidewalk flag.

But as I approached the flag I noticed this time something unusual: it was being flown upside down.

Now, historically, flying the American flag upside down dates back to at least the 1700's, when a ship flying a flag upside down was a signal of extreme distress, an urgent call for immediate help because the ship is sinking.

In modern times an upside down American flag has been flown as a declaration of the belief that it is our country that is in dire sinking straits, as it was used during the Vietnam War protests in the 1960's,

...and, most recently, by supporters of Donald Trump who carried upside down flags to protest his criminal felony conviction last summer.

And now here in my neighborhood in front of a residence whose occupants I had taken to be staunch flag-flying conservatives - aka Donald Trump supporters - was this prodigious flag being flown upside down. But why, pray, days after Trump's decisive election to the Presidency of the United States, would a flag-flying Trump supporter be signaling their distress for the state of our nation?
Perhaps the real message in that upside down flag was that someone like myself needs to examine some of her preconceived notions.

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Oh, Joy, Another Sex Offender

11/17/2024

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Question: Who would want to hire a sex offender?

Answer: Why, another sex offender, of course.

Donald Trump was found legally liable in civil court of sexual assault and also by his own crude admission, as when he famously bragged about his predilection for grabbing women sexually. And now that he on the cusp of becoming once again the most powerful man in the world, Trump is fast settling into his comfort zone with his Cabinet picks.
There's accused child sex trafficker and lewd photography afficionado Matt Gaetz who is slated to become Trump's Attorney General.

And there's Fox news contributor Pete Hegseth, here showing off some of his white supremacist tattoos on his chest,

...and arm.

Hegseth is accused of sexually assaulting one of the attendees at a Republican Women's conference in 2017, whom he later paid off to stay quiet about it. This is the man who Trump has nominated to be head of the U.S. Department of Defense.
And there's Robert F. Kennedy Jr., denier of the benefits of vaccines and of fluoride in preventing tooth decay in children, but advocate of having children drink unpasteurized milk.

Trump has chosen him as head of the Department of Health and Human Services and under whose jurisdiction will fall the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy was recently accused by his children's nanny of groping and molesting her when she worked for his family several decades ago. RFK Jr.'s response to her accusation was:
"I am not a church boy... I had a very, very rambunctious youth...I have so many skeletons in my closet...I'm not going to comment on the details."
When asked if more women might come forward with accusations against him of sexual assault, Kennedy's response was, "We'll see what happens."
A very Trumpian response if ever there was one.
With several sex offenders padding his Cabinet - and, who knows? Mayhaps there will be more to come - Donald Trump and his pervy bros will doubtless feel quite comfortable with each other in their new digs.
Women maybe not so much.

References
https://www.yahoo.com/news/secretary-defense-nominee-pete-hegseth-111016670.html

https://apnews.com/article/hegseth-sexual-assault-allegations-trump-defense-secretary-677b2df5859a338feac4714c60ef369d

https://people.com/rfk-jr-questioned-sexual-assault-allegations-8677221

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A Criminal And Two Sex Offenders Walk Into The U.S. Government...

11/14/2024

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A Criminal And Two Sex Offenders Walk Into The U.S. Government...

By now we know all we need to know - and for some of us, 'way more than wish we knew - about the next President, Donald Trump.

Everybody knows, for example, that Trump is a convicted criminal and a sex offender,* which sort of makes him two entities in one.

Not that the majority of American voters care, obviously.
Which might mean that, having put a sex offender in the White House, a majority of Americans may also not care that Trump just nominated a fellow sex offender, Florida Congressional Representative Matt Gaetz,

...for the job of Attorney General.
Here's what we know about Matt Gaetz:
Though he is Trump's pick to become Attorney General, the person who will be head of the United States Department of Justice and will be the chief legal advisor to the President, after law school 42-year-old Matt Gaetz had about two years experience practicing law before he left the field to run for Congress.
And though as Attorney General he will be the chief Federal law enforcement officer in the land, Matt Gaetz was accused by the Department of Justice (which as Attorney General he will now head) of child sex trafficking and statutory rape of a 17-year-old girl. Gaetz was ultimately not charged, though his close associate and fellow party animal, Joel Greenberg, was charged and convicted of those same child sex crimes.
But the U.S. House Ethics Committee took up where the Justice Department left off, and Matt Gaetz was under Congressional investigation for child sex abuse, illegal drug use, spending campaign funds on himself, accepting improper gifts, and passing lewd pictures and videos around the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, among other charges.
The House Ethics report on Matt Gaetz was due to be released tomorrow, actually; but then yesterday Gaetz resigned from the House when Donald Trump nominated him for Attorney General. And so Republican House Speaker and self-proclaimed paragon of Christian morality Mike Johnson,

...announced that the investigation on Gaetz was over and the House report would not be released.
As one would expect, Matt Gaetz is staunchly pro-life. At a speech for Turning Point, a conservative action organization,

...Matt Gaetz said of women who march for abortion rights:
“(They) are just disgusting. Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb. These people are odious from the inside out. They’re like 5′2″, 350 pounds, and they’re like, ‘Give me my abortions or I’ll get up and march and protest.' A few of them need to get up and march — they need to get up and march for like an hour a day. Swing those arms, get the blood pumpin’, maybe mix in a salad.”
So that's Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump's nominee for U.S. Attorney General, in a nut shell.
Which, of course, begs the question: What does happen when a criminal and two sex offenders walk into the government?

(Sigh). I guess all we know for sure is that they walk away from their crimes scott-free.

*As determined in the civil sex assault case brought against him by E. Jean Carroll, to whom he was sentenced to pay $83.3 million in punitive damages. (But which he probably won't end up paying, anyway. Donald Trump never pays, right?).

References
https://www.newsweek.com/matt-gaetz-law-career-attorney-general-1985422

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/14/us/politics/matt-gaetz-investigations-explainer.html

https://www.yahoo.com/news/sexual-misconduct-allegations-matt-gaetz-214152269.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

https://www.yahoo.com/news/matt-gaetz-women-look-thumb-012346149.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall

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A Coming Revenge Tour?

11/12/2024

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I had decided to take a break from blogging about the election results, politics, and he-who-must-not-be-named-but-whose-initials-are-D.T.
After all, the majority of my fellow Americans had voted - fairly and squarely - for what they wanted fixed in this country - mainly the economy and immigration - and who they wanted to fix it, and so that was that. Besides, if that many Americans were now optimistic about our country's future, I figured I should try to be, too. Or at least sit back a while and see how things shake out.
And so enough already, I was going to give political discourse a rest. I was determined that for the time being I'd choose my blog subject matter from among the infinite variety of other interesting and noteworthy phenomena that fill our world.
That was my intention. But then yesterday morning I started going through the news and saw this:

...and this:

...and these headlines and photos from the New York Times:

Which is how I learned that according to sources who've been close to Donald Trump, it's not a question of if when he gets back into the Oval Office he will carry out the revenge tour of which he talked incessantly during his campaign; it's a question of who he will succeed in getting and how harshly will he be able to punish them.
Among the targets on his wish-to-destroy list are Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi and the Obamas, but the thinking is that those people are simply too big for him to pursue. However some of Trump's allies are chomping at the bit to see vengeance carried out against others who crossed him, such as special counsel Jack Smith, who was investigating Trump's theft of Federal records and who Trump said should be thrown out of the country by the U.S. government.

There's also New York Attorney General Letitia James, who prosecuted a 355 million dollar fraud case against Trump and for which he's demanded that she now be prosecuted,

...along with Justice Arthur Engoron, who tired that case and Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who prosecuted Trump in the Stormy Daniels hush money case and won 34 felony counts against him.

He's called for his critic Liz Cheney to be tried by a military tribunal,

...and he said that General Mark Milley, his former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, should be tried for treason and deserved to be executed. General Milley has called Trump a fascist to the core and the most dangerous man in America.

Also on Donald Trump's retribution list are Former FBI Director James Comey, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and U.S. Capitol Police Lieutenant Michael Byrd, among others. There are over 100 people in all he has threatened to punish.
As always, Donald Trump is once again surrounded by a cadre of minions and consiglieri who are lining up to go after his perceived enemies and do his filthy work for him. Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio,

...has already announced he would launch a criminal investigation of Jack Smith.
Conservative mouth Mike Davis, who is under consideration to be Trump's Attorney General,

...wrote this of Donald Trump's perceived enemies on social media site X :

Davis also once threatened Letitia James to stop her case against Donald Trump:

And this is the vulgar little nematode who may well become the next Attorney General of the United States and will hold in his fist the United States Justice Department and the power to destroy whoever he wishes. And this is how he dared to address the woman who is the Attorney General of New York.
All of this for me begs a question.
Surely some of Donald Trump's most fervent disciples will be thrilled to see anyone who displeased him suffer. But I wonder about the rest of those who voted for him because they believed he would solve immigration and boost the economy: how will those voters feel when they see innocent citizens dragged before Donald Trump's tribunals, when they read about people's lives publicly ruined for speaking out or for doing their jobs? Will those voters mind? Will they say, never mind, having Donald Trump for President is worth it? Or will they even care at all?

References
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/trump-enemies-prosecution.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/06/trump-retribution-enemy-list-00187725

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This Is My County: Thoughts After The 2024 Election

11/7/2024

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This is my country, where a majority of the population voted into power a 78-year-old criminal convicted on 32 felonies and charged with theft of federal records, election fraud, and election interference, among other charges.

My fellow Americans resounding handed the Presidency of the United States to a man who tried to overthrow the last election and orchestrated the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol.

This septuagenarian who's close to eighty and who talks incessantly about himself and his grievances, who spouts vile nonsense, lies, or violent rhetoric every time he opens his mouth and who is in league with foreign dictators and domestic white supremacists; this power-crazy old man who has threatened to use the Presidency and the Justice Department to bring vengeance against those who've crossed him; this immoral, filthy old man with a history of gross sex abuse; this is the person a majority of Americans chose to be President of the United States.
They chose him over a competent, capable, experienced woman of color who was part of the administration that rescued the country from potential economic disaster from the COVID epidemic, oversaw record job creation, passed the badly needed infrastructure bill, passed the CHIPS act to boost U.S. production of semiconductors, and created a meaningful immigration bill that could have been passed in the next administration.
However, Americans have instead voted in a vile tyrant supposedly for his cotton candy promises to bring down the prices of groceries and everything else to what they were five years ago before the pandemic hit. Educated Americans, well-off Americans, good, bright Americans who should know better, my neighbors, my relatives, all these people voted into the White House a foul old criminal who should be in prison. And who may well transform our democracy into an autocracy.
And this is my country. Which has me wondering: what in the world country do I live in, anyway?

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Tomorrow Is The Election. I Did What I Could.

11/4/2024

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Tomorrow, November 5, 2024, is the day of reconning for this country. Tomorrow at this time we may not yet know who will be the next President - or Dictator - of the United States,

...but we'll be closer to knowing.
And we'll be closer to the possible chaos Donald Trump has threatened to rain down on our country if he loses or the chaos he's promised if he wins. Still, I, for one, would prefer to face the former outcome than the latter.
Like many thousands of my fellow Americans, I've done what I could to prevent Donald Trump and his clique of consiglieri from winning the election.
I canvassed on Saturdays for Kamala Harris and the down ballot Ohio Democrats,

...and for Issue 1, backed by a group called Citizens Not Politicians, which calls for a bipartisan group of citizens to redesign the unjustly gerrymandered congressional and state legislative map of Ohio.
Here's my son Tommy, who spent many of his weekends for the past few months campaigning for Citizens Not Politicians.

My mate and I filled our yard with signs to show that there was a bandwagon to be jumped on,

...and I picked up signs and delivered them neighbors who wanted them.

My daughter and I even did a bit of undercover campaigning, leaving "literature" in ladies' rooms around town.

And I prayed. I realize that this may not be the most effective action to arrive at my desired outcome, considering that there are at least as many people praying for Donald Trump to win as for Kamala Harris; there are probably even many more folks praying for a Trump victory, since Trump appears to have most of the Christian Evangelical vote sewn up. But I prayed anyway.
I spent this evening at my precinct voting site helping my fellow poll workers set up for tomorrow.

I'm going to be a machine judge.

My job will be to escort the voters to the voting machines. Our day will start at 5:30am and end sometime after 8:30pm when all the machines and ballots are packed up for return to the Franklin County Board of Elections. I’m glad I’ll be busy all day tomorrow working. And praying.

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Good Karma At LAX

11/3/2024

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Did you ever do something as an adult that made you really feel like a grown up? Maybe something you never imagined you could do, but then you womaned up (or manned up) and did it and afterwards you felt like throwing up your hands and shouting, Look at me! I did a thing! I'm a real grown-up!

I had such an experience last week on my last day in Los Angeles (see previous post, www.ailantha.com/blog/patience-pays-sometimes).
It was Monday morning after the family-and-friend event for which I'd come to LA. Though I'd be leaving the following day, the other guests staying at my host's house were now heading back to the various and sundry points on the map from which they'd come. Some left by car, others Ubered to the airport. One of the guests had been graciously offered a ride to LAX - as the airport is locally referred to - by a seasoned L.A. driver and had graciously accepted.
However at the very moment the ride to the airport was required things got a weence topsy-turvy at the house and the person who was going to give the ride was needed for a more urgent issue. As it turned out I, with my rental car (see previous post) was now the only one in the house with wheels. Hence the lot fell to me to give the traveler their ride to the airport. And the thought of doing so made my hair stand on end.
Now, it's not that I've never driven anywhere in the Los Angeles environs. I've driven around Hollywood,

...once even tackled the notorious 405 freeway,

...and I can tool around the South Bay area like ringing a bell.

But none of those places is LAX, the busiest airport in the whole USA. (Okay, second busiest after Atlanta). And the truth is, though I'll normally drive wherever is expected of me, I'm always happy to let someone else take the wheel. Because, in truth, the passenger seat is my comfort zone. But when I was asked to drive deep into the kishkes of the Los Angeles International Airport, here's what flashed into my mind as to what I'd be up against:

Now, let me say, I was not required to do this LAX drop off. I could have said what I was thinking, which was OH, HECKS, NO! And the person needing the ride would have gladly called an Uber. But, alas, as great as was my fear of facing my fear, I had even more fear of being seen as the wimp that I am. Dread of being seen as a wimp has been a motivating factor for me on more (many more) than one occasion. And this was to be another of those occasions.
So I sucked in my breath, girded my psychological loins, whistled a happy tune and headed out with my passenger (who had no idea of the mortal fear I was also transporting) to LAX.
I made it into the airport. And, perhaps because I had steeled myself for the airport being the nine fiery rings of hell all rolled into one, it wasn't nearly as bad as I had feared.
Not that it was all that good, either. Initially I felt as if as if I were piece in a moving chess game, the goal of which was to switch lanes.

I decided to keep my distance and let anybody who needed a space in my lane have it;

...because it occurred to me that chances were that eventually I was going to need to change lanes, too, and you can never stock up on too much karma.
As it turned, out I needed to collect on some of that karma soon enough when I needed to get myself over to the Departures lane,

...where once I made it over I was set, realizing that one needed only to stay in this lane, passing by the numerous terminals,

...until one arrived at one's terminal of destination, which in the case of my passenger was Terminal 4. I started singing to myself the words of Leo Bloom from the musical "The Producers:" I can do it!

Karmic payback again arrived when I needed to pull up to the drop off curb and someone pulled out of a space - which I gave them room to pull out of - which allowed me to pull in. I left off my passenger and was jubilant.
Until this behemoth pulled up right in front of me.

Another vehicle pulled in close behind me, two lanes of traffic whizzed by me, and my hopes of getting out of this place before the next millennium began slowly sinking. As previously pointed out, I am no fearless rocket girl behind the wheel.
But then, glory be, karma came through again, this time most spectacularly, when the car behind me - apparently manned (or womaned, I didn't notice which) by a much more virtuostic hot-rodder than myself - zipped out into the traffic fray at the same moment that a driver in the traffic lane stopped to give me enough time to back out and pull out front of them (so that they could pull into my space. Karma sometimes hands out double gifts).
I needed karma to deliver one more time: this was when I needed to pull left to get into to the Century Boulevard lane.

And karma did deliver, though after that last lane change I figured I had zeroed out my karma account.
By the time I made it back to the house all was calm again and I was asked how it went at the airport.
"Oh, fine," I replied as nonchalantly as can be and feeling very brave and grown up - and sweaty - indeed.

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The Message In The Flag

Oh, Joy, Another Sex Offender

A Criminal And Two Sex Offenders Walk Into The U.S. Government...

​​A Criminal And Two Sex Offenders Walk Into The U.S. Government...

A Coming Revenge Tour?

This Is My County: Thoughts After The 2024 Election

Tomorrow Is The Election. I Did What I Could.

Good Karma At LAX

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A Criminal And Two Sex Offenders Walk Into The U.S. Government...