Category Archives: politics

July 18, 2019 · 3:24 pm

Writing with Fire

The old saying goes, “If you play with fire, sooner or later you will get burned.”

But I am not playing. I am writing. With fire.

The criminal we elected president knows what I am talking about. He speaks at rallies with fire. Currently he is trying to demonize Representative Ilhan Omar and the Squad, the four freshman Congresswomen of color whom he said were unpatriotic, enemies of our democracy, and should go home to their countries filled with crime, poverty, and communism. Of course, the Congresswomen are all American Citizens. Three of them were born here. This is actually the country they are from. So, this is an example of the kind of verbal fire that needs to be put out with cold water. Preferably before some enraged Trumpist actually assassinates a member of the Squad. The fire he spews is destructive and evil.

But, truly, the way to fight fire is with fire. Firemen use a fire-break to interrupt the path of the fire. You can bulldoze or chop the wood in the way of the fire. Or you can burn it in the opposite direction. Many forest fires are ended in this way.

And I have been writing my fiction with fire. Controversial issues taken head on and given a clarity that burns brightly enough to leave burn marks on the psyche and write messages in ash on the heart of the reader. This is why beloved characters die in fictional stories and bad things happen to good people… to make a lasting scar or burn on the idea-collections in the readers’ brains.

I have in the past few novels written about sexual assault, attempted rape, murder, greed, brutality, excessive anger, and the current work-in-progress tackles suicide. And I battle these raging fires with positive fires set from empathy, community and familial love, preserverance, determination, and simple faith. I am trying to fight fire with a better fire, destructive fire replaced by zeal.

Okay. So, I’m an idiot, expressing foolish ideas with loopy metaphors. But I can make you think. And thinking is electrical fire in the brain. And I have been steadily pouring gas on that word-fire.

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May 1, 2019 · 3:54 pm

The Problem with Republicans

The biggest problem with Republicans is that really they’re Trumplickans.

They want to take us back in time to the “Good ol’ days” when men were men and women knew their place and minorities didn’t have a place… Yeah, um, the Southern United States of the ’30’s and the ’40’s. Jim Crow days. The “Man is the king of his castle” days. The days when no matter what crime or evil things they had done during the week, one hour sitting (and possibly sleeping) in a church pew on Sunday made it all better.

July 21, 2017

The second biggest problem is that, one way or another, all the positive points of the GOP have left the party one way or another. Eisenhower Republicans are no more. John McCain is no more. Most of the Republicans with any integrity left have simply picked up their toys and gone home to let the rest of us play rigged games with the Trumplickans.

February 8, 2017

They do whatever Trumpy tells ’em, no matter how bad it is for most of us and most of our families. Healthcare? Education? Infrastructure? Can’t afford those. They have other priorities for taxpayer money.

And it really is, “All about the money”.

And their only concern with law is when we break a law that gives them profits. No oversight, except over Democrats. No investigation, except into Democrats. Nobody is guilty of anything, except for Hillary… and maybe Obama.



And if anybody finds out the truth, well, they simply Barr the door.

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November 26, 2018 · 10:53 am

Dump the Trumpy Grump

This is the best Trump cartoon I have done of him so far, so I will use it multiple times.

The current President of the United States initially seemed to me to be a gift from the gods of comedy.  I figured it would be easy to make humorous blog posts about a clown who wears orange face paint, wears super-long red ties, and is more cartoonish behavior-wise than Yogi Bear.

But the Grumpy Trump leadership style is more depressing than even that of Rodeo Clown in Chief, George W. Bush, though Trump has managed to be accused of fewer war crimes by international tribunals.  He is so relentlessly inhuman in his every deed that you can’t use exaggeration humor against him.  The reality is too far over the top for that.  And you can’t rely on insult humor, because he does it so much more often himself than any comedian can,  and he really MEANS it.  He doesn’t tell or comprehend jokes unless it makes a good excuse to claim he was only joking.

One of the things he does that bothers me the most is the use of criminals in his cabinet and departments that do all the dirty work.

Sleepy McBoing-Boing, the HUD secretary seems to be in his job to screw things up for poor people who were barely hanging on and turn them into homeless people while he commits crimes to put an expensive dining table in the HUD office for his personal use.  “Let ’em eat cake,” right, Ben?

Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke, heads of the EPA and Department of the Interior are so busy spending Federal budget monies on personal uses that their departments are falling apart, and so the air we breath and the water we drink are now more at risk than they were under Obama, where it was a very real crisis having very real effects.

I think I am through posting criticisms about Trump.  Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers do so much better at skewering the pumpkinhead than I ever could, so look to them for actual political humor of the thoughtful kind.

The only thing I want from Trump now… Now that his tax cut has cost me extra money and his healthcare meddling has made the price of insulin out of my reach… Is for the whole thing to end.  He won’t resign.  You can’t expect Ebola Fever or brain tumors will go away on their own.  But it is so obvious that he has committed impeachable crimes that, for the good of us all, the Congress needs to get rid of him.  The Dark Lord with White Hair, Mike Pence, though deeply evil, would be better.

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November 2, 2018 · 4:29 pm

Toxic Politics

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Earlier this week I voted in the early voting for the midterm election.  I voted for Beto O’Rourke in hopes that he will cast enough sunshine on the Vampire Ted Cruz to turn the old smirking blood-sucker into dust. (You can see in the picture that Cruz smeared on a lot of sunscreen, but hopefully, he didn’t have enough time to slather it on thick enough to cover some of the worst things he is trying to cover up.)

I did, however, hear before the day was out that some people who voted straight-ticket Democratic ballots saw their results come out of the machine on the check screen as if they had voted for Cruz for senator.  How absolutely evil and vampire-like is that?

I desperately need Democrats to win at least the House of Representatives.  There has to be a check on Trumpism.  I am a diabetic retired schoolteacher who has gone bankrupt over healthcare expenses and can’t afford to go on insulin even before the Republican overlords finish hacking at and slaying Obamacare with its provisions to protect people with pre-existing conditions.  And it comes as no surprise to me that Republicans in Texas are willing to cheat to win elections.  Non-white and poor voters vastly outnumber the millionaire and billionaire white people who own and operate the State.  There is a need to cheat to hold on to power so the downtrodden don’t try to rise up and take back what they have a right to, and in the process possibly accidentally eat the rich people.

And Fearless Leader has adopted tactics that are alarming as well.  Not only has he promised to send 15,000 troops to the border with Mexico to fight a “caravan” of asylum seekers and put them into tent-city prison camps, but he has given them permission to shoot to kill if someone throws a rock at them, after a nine-year-old immigrant girl threw a rock at a soldier.  His autocratic tendencies are now in full view of the public, and the majority can see the parallels to Nazism, and 44% of Americans polled seem to like it.

Calling Republicans names and lamenting their rule is exhausting and probably pointless.  I fully accept that they probably do have the power to keep winning in spite of not representing the majority of the people of this country.  But I do what I have to in order to fight against toxic ideas.   I voted against them. I wrote a post that insults them.  And now I need to get back to the serious work of writing stuff that makes people laugh (okay, actually stuff that makes me laugh, and maybe a few other people too.)

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October 30, 2018 · 7:15 pm

I Did It!

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I never voted a straight ticket before.  And technically I still haven’t.  I voted for 15 Democrats and two Libertarians*.  This is my first time voting for zero Republicans,  I have voted in the past for Republicans like John Cornyn and Charles Grassley.  That was back when there were still moderate Republicans.  John and Chuck have both yielded to the dark side.  There were a couple of Republicans that might have tempted me, but they were both running unopposed, so zero Republicans this year.  Take that Sith Lord D’arth Donaldious.

*I do realize that most Libertarians are at least mildly insane.  But some of them actually support liberal education agendas, probably because they are not completely sane.

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October 7, 2018 · 7:55 pm

Zero Sum Living

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A new art project that will (hopefully) depict the negotiations of young love.

Human relationships do not work as a zero-sum game.  Let me take a moment to explain.  A zero-sum game is where one side wins, which means the other side has to lose.  In mathematical terms -1(the loser) + 1(the winner) = 0.  So, everyone who plays this game will either go all out to win or they will end up losing completely.  Faced with only those two outcomes, the game player is tempted to cheat.  Especially if the stakes are potentially life or death.  After all, in issues like the national debate over health care, the loser gets to die.

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This is, of course, what we have seen played out over the course of the last two weeks in the appointment to the Supreme Court of a radical right judge who was accused by a credible witness of a disqualifying action.  It is only a matter of the destruction of a judge’s career versus the defaming of a professional woman who was a teenage victim of attempted rape and sexual assault.  It is a very serious zero-sum game set up maliciously in order to achieve political power for the white male ruling elite.

This zero-sum game was won by the grinning evil cartoon mutant man-turtle over the minions of Mad-Looker Booker and the forces of “being right but never winning”.  The consequences are decades worth of malignant conservative rulings like the Citizens United Ruling and rulings about health care that take away things like protections for people like me with pre-existing conditions.  Losers get nothing.  And eventually, the winners have nothing to show for it because the sum is zero.

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The orange-faced Trumpinator was right when he predicted we would soon reach a point when we were tired of so much winning.  I am definitely tired of Trumpkins winning all the time, especially when they are so heartless in the way they bully and cheat.  The problems with the court would not be so severe if the Republicans hadn’t cheated on Justice Merrick Garland’s nomination and stolen that one from Obama to give to old Pumpkinhead.  And when it came time to let the FBI investigate the allegations brought up in the confirmation hearings, they cheated again by forcing the investigators to ignore so many corroborating witnesses.  You can’t find proof of something by not looking for the proof.  (Of course, they were obviously motivated to NOT find anything.)

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The solution comes from the fundamental principles of representative democracy being explained repeatedly on various news outlets by Ohio Governor John Kasich.  He has been pointing out that what we really need is bipartisanship in government.  All sides need to bargain it out so that everybody wins something and nobody wins everything.  Compromise is what the Congress is put in place to create.  The Supreme Court solution would have been to rescind the tainted nomination and find a candidate that could be broadly supported by both sides.

But in the current era of ruthless Republicans obliterating and overruling diminishing Democrats, non-toxic bipartisan solutions are not going to happen.  The two sides, the Neanderthals and their bonkable warclub targets, will continue to bash away at each other with their warclubs.  And the Neanderthals will continue to cheat.  And in the long run, everybody loses.  The overall sum, after all, is zero.

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September 2, 2018 · 9:29 pm

Strawberries For Breakfast

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Today’s post should probably be titled with “raspberries” rather than “strawberries” because of the alternative meaning of strawberries being a red abrasion or scrape instead of the double meaning I actually need.  But I had strawberries from Walmart to serve for breakfast, not raspberries, so that totally ruined the potential metaphor.

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I tend to like to watch the news while I cook breakfast for the kids.  Hence the need for raspberries.  I mean, the angry orangutan in charge of my news-related happiness or horror is on a real tear about now because he can feel the law and the news media zeroing in on every crime and criminal thought he has been playing with for decades, intending to prosecute both him and those who support him.  Like several of the speakers at Senator John McCain’s funeral, I have no need to directly blow raspberries at him.  The oblique and carefully worded ones will do fine.  But I do have nothing but raspberries for him.  The things he is doing to health care, education, the environment, and international relationships have either undone the good the government has previously done or made the made the matter much worse.

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Of course, the Pumpkinhead in Chief is not the only evil, bloodsucking monster in the news that makes me blow raspberries at the TV screen during breakfast.  I will specifically try to sort out my voter registration problems so that I can register a vote against Grandpa Munster… err… I mean, the Zodiac Killer… err… well, you know, that guy whose name I do not wish to invoke at the moment to protect my children and virgins everywhere.  It is a problem because I let my voter registration lapse as a Jehovah’s Witness, and now the State of Texas won’t let me renew it by mail.  I have to find the proper registration office to sit in for hours being glared at by Republican officials who see on the paperwork that I was a registered Democrat more than two decades ago.

I also blow raspberries at Republican hard-heartedness that still hasn’t reunited children with their immigrant asylum-seeking parents out of fear of letting too many brown people into their “white” country.  Raspberries also for conservatives that talk about Democrats being violent and chaotic people as they post threats of shooting deaths for liberals on social media.

I’m sure you have probably already concluded that having the TV on during breakfast makes for rather rootie-tootie-fruity breakfasts around our house.  And you wouldn’t be wrong.

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I also have raspberries to give the Chicago Cubs this time of year as they try to beat my Cardinals out of the playoffs once again.  They deserve lots of fruit.  Particularly pineapples thrown at their prissy blue helmets during late innings of games they are winning.

But, fear not.  My dietary health is safe for now.  I am getting fresh fruits.  I am fortified with vitamin C.  It happens that we are eating STRAWBERRIES, not raspberries for breakfast.  And strawberries are good for you, even if the morning news is not.

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July 27, 2018 · 6:02 pm

Political Pessimism

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I get tired of being the one whose blood is constantly sucked by vampires.  And I am not talking about actual blood so much as money I need to live.  Every time I turn around another corporate vampire is sticking a fang or a needle into my bank account to exsanguinate it more.  I owe more money than I can pay to the IRS.  I owe a huge gob of money to hospitals for the last two hospitalizations that struck my family.  And these are blood suckings that occurred after I went bankrupt at the end of 2017.  Why do I have these woes from things sucking on my neck?  Well, one thing that is staring me right in the face is how the current government, run by Republicans, is enabling corporate vampires who pump the economic blood out of middle class and working poor people like me and feed it into the gaping bloody maws of ever-engorging CEO’s,  fatbat investors, and wealthy one-percenters.

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You are not going to believe this, but I found an article that says Mitch McConnell is directly descended from Dracula.  You can see it for yourself at this link. So let me expand on this with a list of dire predictions for our economic health and wellbeing generated from my blood-deprived pessimist’s brain.

  • Even though it looks like the Trumpula Administration is about to implode from chaos overload due to porn stars and betrayals by lawyers, it is a very long-lived undead thing and will continue to survive.
  • Republicans will continue to suck trillions of dollars of our economic blood because they will win in a large way due to legal gerrymandering, voter suppression, and Russian assistance by hacking.  The minions of the vampire lords are many.  And at least a third of the American population is zombified to the point that no evil act committed by Trumpula will make them vote against him.
  • Midwestern farmers will all be driven out of business by Trumpula’s tariffs and trade wars with all their most important market countries.
  • The bread basket of the world will be turned into a toxic goo factory by Monsanto (noted vampire brand for GMO-based mind-controlling food substitutes).
  • We will all become mindless zombies and happily vote Trumpula into the presidency for life in 2020.
  • And then the whole world will gradually cook itself through un-combatted global warming into a lifeless orb fit only for the undead.

So there you have my rosy outlook on not only my economic future but that of everybody who is not currently a billionaire blood-sucking corporate vampire.  I say “rosy” only because red is the color of blood which is draining away from my bank account at this very moment.  I know it is an over-exaggerated conspiracy theory worthy of Alex Jones at his top-of-the-lungs shoutiest, but if Trumpula could become president, then any possible horror show could soon be coming to life.

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April 8, 2018 · 2:49 pm

Word Salad and Idea Casserole

In a world filled with interesting and engaging ideas, I get frustrated with the constant barrage of word salad on social media tossed at me by conservative friends.  As Trump seems to be coming closer and closer to ending his administration with his own chaotic behavior, those who supported him are tossing more and more flavorless lettuce and rotted vegetables in the mix.  I have to resist the urge to throw the same thing back at them.  I do not resist such salad-making well.  Witness my attempts to alter this stupid meme from a friend;

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I admit, I kinda barfed half-digested word salad all over this one.  I get tired of debating the issues only to be insulted like this and then accused of only insulting Trump and avoiding what they call the “Real Issues”, like Hillary giving a gazillion per cent of our uranium wealth to the Russians and Obama being the one guilty of colluding with Russians.

But, enough of that.  It is time to make something healthier out of words and ideas.  I have a lot of things on my mind, and I want to get a lot of them said before I die.  So let me make some idea casserole, cooking a whole lot of very different ideas into one multivitamin dish.

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  • Trump, for all the damage he’s done, will end up being good for us if we can just survive his administration to the end.  Scar tissue is always tougher than the surrounding flesh when the wound heals.  Repairing the damage he has done will leave us stronger, wiser, and more able to cope with the root causes of the Trump phenomenon.
  • My friends and family who supported the whole Trump mess primarily to hurt people whom they feel are smarter than them and so more stuck-up and self-important than them, will eventually get back to leading more productive lives than they did before.  And they will continue not to credit the ones who actually made that happen the way they didn’t credit Obama for healing the blunders of Bush.
  • I will get back to writing gentler, non-political-type humor novels.

  • I have my novel Superchicken half-way through the final edit to publish it on Amazon Kindle.  You can see I have been playing with cover ideas.  I plan to write Sing Sad Songs next.  Also I have two more novel ideas that I will add to this casserole as separate ingredients.  And I have The Bicycle Wheel Genius, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, and The Baby Werewolf finished and ready to edit as well.
  • Here’s new idea number one; The Boy Who Lived Forever is a fantasy novel about Icarus Jones coming to stay with the Jones family of Norwall.  He has survived a house fire that killed his parents and now must evade the dragon that pursues him while trying to figure out what is wrong with him health-wise.  Could he be dying?  Or did he survive the fire because he somehow can’t die?
  • Here’s new idea number two; Kingdoms Under the Earth is a fantasy novel about Blueberry Bates, a troubled young girl, falling seriously ill, and the measures her boyfriend, Mike Murphy, and her friends have to take in a realm made of magic and fever dreams to save her.

The truth is I really can’t do anything about politics and government beyond expressing my beliefs and voting my conscience.  I need to concentrate on telling stories.  It is the one thing that still gives my life meaning through the pain, illness, and suffering.  I am not dead yet.  And, not being dead, I need to be writing.

 

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April 5, 2018 · 3:36 pm

Today’s Tabula Rasa

Make no mistake about it.  I am quite capable of waking up in the morning with nothing at all in my head, no ideas, no words, no plans, no dreams…  I can be the most idiotically stupid witless twit when my brain is thoroughly drained.  But that is not the natural state of any man, and certainly not of someone like me who has lived for more than sixty years with a totally fermented head.

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So suppose I woke up this morning without remembering anything at all that I have learned about the world.  What would I do?  What would I write?  What would I think?

I think the first thing I might do if I didn’t remember anything at all about the world I find myself in, I might turn on the TV to find out what is happening, or watch cartoons, I can’t be sure I would know which should come first, if I even remember how to turn a TV on, or what a TV is…

But when I turn on the TV and look at what is really happening, and assuming I can tell the difference between Donald Trump and Donald Duck… Oh! Gonga!  My gawd!  How could it be this bad?

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Donald Duck is president.  And he gets totally angry and quacks on Twitter with that infamously hard-to-understand word-mangle of his, delivered while jumping in place and swinging his fists at the air around him.

A basset hound with a nose for clues has been tracking his every movement.  And that basset hound is a former FBI chief.  He’s very good at accurately sniffing out duck trails.

And then there is a lying and evil Keebler elf at the head of the justice department who is pursuing marijuana crimes relentlessly because he hates black people and wants to put them into the for-profit prisons he owns even though the rest of the country is deciding to legalize marijuana.

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This totally evil elf, it turns out, has been talking to Porky Kislyack, Russian spymaster pig about campaign collusion even though he swore to Senator Frankenberry in his confirmation hearing that he was guilty of nothing… that he could recall.  Hopefully the basset hound has his evil elf scent too.

And the racism and evil doesn’t end there.  Gasper the Unfriendly Ghost is still hanging out with the president, feeding him just the right duck food to create dyspeptic outrage in his duck belly.  Gasper will then spur Donald Duck on to quack more about border walls and guarding our southern border because too many Speedy Gonzaleses is a brown mouse problem in the closets of our country.  We can’t have too many queso-eaters here.

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Gasper the Unfriendly Ghost

And so, if I were to wake up with a Tabula Rasa, a truly empty head, and watched morning cartoons… or news… or whatever the heck that stuff on morning TV is…  I would be left wondering what I was going to do about it.  The options?  Certainly I probably need to vote this year.  Or I could bang myself on the side of the head with a brick and possibly knock all this stuff out of my head again, re-establishing the emptiness in my stupid head.

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