Category: Racism & Bigotry

A blog post I never dreamed I’d have to write   

I’m embarrassed to be sharing old news today.

I’m even more embarrassed about the old news I’m blogging about today.

I learned a few days ago that CIVICUS Monitor, a global civil society alliance of local, national, regional, and international organization that monitors civil liberties in 198 countries, placed the United States of America on its Watchlist on March 10, 2025.

The Watchlist released on that date added Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan, Serbia, and the United States of America.

That beacon of freedom, that shining city on a hill, the United States of America is on a Watchlist for a “narrowing” of civil liberties.

Let that sink in for a few minutes.

No, let that sink in for a few days.

Photo by John Cardamone on Unsplash

What is the CIVICUS Monitor?

The CIVICUS Monitor website (https://monitor.civicus.org/) states, “The Watchlist draws attention to countries where there is a serious decline in respect for civic space, based on an assessment by CIVICUS Monitor research findings, our research partners and consultations with activists on the ground.”

Here is what the website (https://monitor.civicus.org/watchlist-march-2025/) reports about the United States of America, just as of March 10, 2025:

“The United States of America (USA) has been added to our Watchlist as the country faces increasing undue restrictions on civic freedoms under President Donald Trump’s second term. Gross abuses of executive power raise serious concerns over the freedoms of peaceful assembly, expression and association.

Following his inauguration on 20 January 2025, Donald Trump has issued at least 125 executive orders, dismantling federal policies with profound implications for human rights and the rule of law. Some of these orders have eliminated federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes, falsely framing them as discriminatory, and have introduced measures targeting undocumented migrants and transgender and non-conforming people.

“Since mid-January, many civil society organisations, both in the US and abroad, have been forced to terminate or scale back essential human rights and humanitarian programmes due to growing uncertainty caused by the arbitrary suspension of foreign aid and a broad freeze on federal funding. The lack of clear guidelines has sparked legal challenges at the national level.

“The administration has taken steps to dismantle the US Agency for International Development (USAID), a decades-old institution, and laid off thousands of its employees. It has also withdrawn from the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the UN Human Rights Council, exited the Paris Climate Agreement, rejected the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals, and announced sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC), targeting its personnel as well as individuals and entities that cooperate with it. These actions could further undermine global efforts for climate justice, human rights, and civic freedoms.

“These measures come amid a broader potential curb on the freedom of association. On 21 November 2024, the US House of Representatives passed a bill allowing the Treasury Department to revoke the tax-exempt status of non-profits it deems to be supporting terrorism, without due process guarantees. This would grant the executive branch sweeping authority to financially cripple civil society organisations based on broad and vague criteria.

“The sustained onslaught on peaceful pro-Palestine solidarity at university campuses has seen students and faculty members increasingly subjected to harsh sanctions without justification. On 30 January 2025, President Donald Trump,signed an executive order purportedly aimed at combating antisemitism, which calls for the cancellation of visas and the deportation of non-citizen college students and others who have participated in pro-Palestinian protests. On the same day, reports alleged that a far-right group was compiling a list of pro-Palestine protesters for potential deportation.

“Authorities have also targeted climate justice activists protesting the Mountain Valley Pipeline project in Virginia and financial institutions supporting fossil fuel expansion. Another concern is the growing role of private corporations in suppressing environmental activism. Two key developments exemplify this: the USD 300 million lawsuit against Greenpeace by the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline; and research exposing the fossil fuel industry’s role in driving the proliferation of anti-protest laws.

“The first months of 2025 have seen an alarming legislative push in multiple states, further threatening restrictions on the freedom of peaceful assembly. At least 12 state-level bills introduced between January and February 2025 would impose new restrictions on protests. Notably, bills in Indiana (SB 286), Iowa (HF 25), Missouri (HB 601), New York (S 723), and North Dakota (HB 1240) seek to criminalise the use of masks during protests. They could also expose protesters to heightened surveillance technologies and intimidation tactics, as evidenced by the doxing attempts over the past year against pro-Palestine protesters.

“Meanwhile, Minnesota’s new bill (SF 1363) introduces new civil and criminal liabilities for those supporting protesters who engage peacefully in demonstrations on a critical public service facility, pipelines or other utility property. These restrictions show a broader trend since 2017 of escalating constraints on protests and could trigger a new wave of repression against those expressing dissenting views.

“There are also serious concerns about freedom of expression and access to information, particularly for journalists covering politically sensitive issues. On 11 February 2025, two journalists from the Associated Press (AP) were banned access to White House-related press briefings due to the agency’s editorial policy to continue to refer to the Gulf of Mexico by its internationally recognised denomination rather than the presidentially decreed “Gulf of America.” AP filed a lawsuit against administration officials, but a federal judge denied the agency’s request for the immediate restoration of full access to presidential events for its journalists, ruling that access to the president is at his discretion and not a constitutional right.

“Moreover, on 25 February, the White House press secretary announced that the administration will decide which media outlets can access the presidential press pool. These recent decisions raised concerns about unprecedented restrictions on public access to independent reporting on government affairs.”

What’s next?

CIVICUS Monitor will closely track developments in the United States of America, while calling on the United States Government “to do everything in their power to end the ongoing crackdowns immediately and ensure that perpetrators are held to account.”

What you can do

If you have information on civil liberty injustices in the United States of America, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy, Pakistan, or Serbia, you can send that information to monitor@civicus.org.

You can also make sure your US Senators and US Representative are aware of this. Ask them if this is a list they are proud for our country to be on. Ask them what they are going to do about it. Ask them when they are going to start holding the “perpetrators” accountable.

Photo by Chela B. on Unsplash

Until my next blog post tomorrow

Stop reading that novel!

Act on this now!

Spread the word. Contact your elected officials, not just in Washington, DC, but your state elected officials. Tell them to apply pressure in Washington.

That’s my plea to you today. This is your assignment this week.

Janet

“No less than 20,000 officers”

I had another blog post not only written, but scheduled to go live at 5:00 this morning. But it will have to wait until tomorrow.

At 11:30 last night, I learned that President Trump issued a Proclamation on Friday, May 9, 2025, titled “Establishing Project Homecoming.”

What a sweet-sounding name, but don’t be fooled. It’s not about a homecoming. It’s about a homegoing, or a “get-out-of-our-country-going.”

Some Americans will love this, but it makes me sick, and not just due to the obvious grammatical error.

Establishing Project Homecoming: A Proclamation, May 9, 2025

If you wish to read the entire proclamation, and I hope you will, you can find it on the White House website: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/05/establishing-project-homecoming/.

Aside from the inflammatory introductory remarks about our country being invaded by illegal aliens, the most troubling part is Section 3(b):

“No later than 60 days after the date of this proclamation, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall supplement existing enforcement and removal operations by deputizing and contracting with State and local law enforcement officers, former Federal officers, officers and personnel within other Federal agencies, and other individuals to increase the enforcement and removal operations force of the Department of Homeland Security by no less than 20,000 officers in order to conduct an intensive campaign to remove illegal aliens who have failed to depart voluntarily.”

“and other individuals” – That leaves the door open to just about anyone. As if the ICE officers we have already seen on video act like they have ever read the US Constitution or anything else.

What we have seen so far is men wearing sunglasses just above their masks. They appear to have no identification or warrants. They ride in unmarked vehicles. They show up in large numbers to arrest one individual. They slam the individual to the ground, face down, hand cuff/zip tie them, and shove them into the what sometimes resembles a SWAT armored vehicle. They drive off to an undisclosed location, leaving the person’s family members wondering where they are and what to do about it.

If animals were being treated like this, animal rights groups would be all over it. These are people, though, not animals.

Now, in addition to the 80,000 officers Homeland Security already has, they want “to increase the enforcement and removal operations force of the Department of Homeland Security by no less than 20,000 officers” by July 8.

How many more people will be picked up by mistake? How many more people will be shipped to a prison in a country not their own due to an “administrative error” or some such lame excuse?

I’m at a loss for words to convey how sick and frightening this is, and I am not an illegal alien.

I don’t recognize the United States of America. I don’t recognize the brutality with which the Trump Administration is attacking immigrants, freedom of speech, due process, education, libraries, museums, scientists, medical researchers, the environment, federal employees, farmers, and small businesses reliant on imported goods and materials.

This scorched earth approach to every facet of our government and economy doesn’t make sense to me…  but I guess that’s what you get when you put a businessman in the White House.

If you voted for Trump, did you realize you were voting for a police state?

Hurricane Helene Update

As of Friday, 56 roads in North Carolina were still closed due to Hurricane Helen. That count includes five US highways, five state highways, and 46 state roads.

There is nothing new about the I-40 or Blue Ridge Parkway reconstruction project.

The nonprofit Orchard at Altapass opened this weekend! It is on a six-mile stretch of the Blue Ridge Parkway that is open near Little Switzerland. Put it on your itinerary. Hurricane Helene wiped out 400 of their apple trees, but they still have 2,500 and need people to support them this year.

The Hazard Mitigation Grant Program is underway in counties affected by Hurricane Helene. Under the program, as I understand it, property owners apply for consideration for acquisition, elevation, or land stabilization. Their property is evaluated for whichever category the owner prefers.

It is an effort to give homeowners the opportunity to secure their homes to mitigate damage from a future storm or to sell their land to be left vacant so there won’t be a structure there to be damaged or washed away if another major storm occurs. FEMA provides 75% of the funds and the State provides the remaining 25%. More than 400 property owners in five NC counties have submitted applications according to an online report by Karen Zatkulak of WLOS in Asheville on May 7. (I was not able to easily current statistics for the other 22 counties and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians/Qualla Boundary that sustained damage from the hurricane.)

A new machine manufactured by Tigercat is operating in Haywood County, NC to convert wood into biocarbon. Since Hurricane Helene, an abundance of trees are lying on the ground over hundreds of square miles in western NC.

Twenty tons of wood debris can be reduced to 2,000 tons of biochar, which is “a carbon fertilizer that can revitalize soil and conserve water for long periods. The amount already made is now going to local farmers who lost their land during Hurricane Helene,” according to an online WLOS report by Ed DiOrio on May 6.

Until my next blog post, tomorrow

Read what you can

Get your news from reliable sources.

Don’t stop paying attention. Our country and our way of life hang in the balance.

Please overlook any errors. Writing a blog post at 1:00 a.m. is never a good idea. I couldn’t find an appropriate image to illustrate this post. All the officers in the free law enforcement photos online are identified as “Police” on their uniforms and their vehicles say, “Police.” I couldn’t find any free photos of masked men riding around in unmarked vehicles arresting people.

Janet

How’s that Salmonella infection working for you?

Due to my ongoing internet service problems after underground cables were ripped up just up the road from my house, I will schedule this post for 5:00 a.m. on Thursday, May 1, 2025, and hope it goes out! More repairs are to be made tomorrow, so I don’t know when I’ll have internet service. I’m sending it without any photographs. Just trying to get it scheduled while I can. Please overlook my typos!

There is a lot going on in the Trump Administration. Some of it is proudly proclaimed on live TV. Some of it is announced with the President surrounded by colorful charts or a map of the Gulf of Mexico on a tripod. (Yes, I will continue to call it by it’s rightful and historical name, even though Trump gave each of his Cabinet members a “Gulf of America” baseball cap at yesterday’s Cabinet meeting.)

Some things… I dare say most of them… are done quietly. I try to highlight as many of them as possible on my little blog. I bet some of the items that made my list today flew under your radar.

  • The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) has made the decision to withdraw a rule that would have finally set real limits on salmonella levels in raw poultry. Three years of work on this rule that could have prevented more than 160,000 infections every year was simply trashed. Salmonella makes 1.35 million Americans sick every year and kills 420 of them. This rule that the USDA just scrapped would have required poultry companies to test for the most dangerous Salmonella strains. Profits over public health It’s enough to make me want to become a vegan. Apparently, the USDA did not get the memo saying that the US Department of Health and Human Resources has a new motto: “Make America Healthy Again.”

  • President Trump’s pick for US Surgeon General, Dr. Jannette Nesheiwat has been described by the president as “a double board-certified medical doctor,” and a “proud graduate of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.” However, it seems now that she did a residency at the University of Arkansas, but she got her medical degree from the American University of the Caribbean School of Medicine in St. Maarten. Her LinkedIn account does not mention the school in the Caribbean. She might be highly-qualified, but it would be nice if the Trump Administration would vet its nominees for such positions of responsibility.

  • The Miami Herald is reporting that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has built a two-story plexiglass “tent” in Krome, Florida to house 400 detainees. US Representative Frederica Wilson was taken on a tour last week, three weeks after she had requested to be shown the facility. The report says there are 200 cots on each floor, temporary bathrooms and a TV room. Since she smelled fresh paint on her visit, Rep. Wilson said her next visit will be unannounced so she can see for herself what the conditions really are. She indicated that what she was shown on her tour did not match what she has been hearing about the facility. A plexiglass “tent”? I can’t quite picture that.

  • The Miami Herald newspaper reported that a mother was deported to Cuba, leaving her US citizen husband and their one-year-old daughter who was still breastfeeding behind in Tampa, Florida. What about this makes America great? Absolutely nothing.

  • The wife and children of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who the US Government admitted was shipped off to a prison in El Salvador by mistake, have had to go into hiding at an undisclosed location because that same US Government made their home address public! Can’t someone make this incompetence on steroids stop? My hunch is that the individual who made Mrs. Abrego Garcia’s home address public would not want their own address made public.

  • Trump is considering eliminating the 988 Suicide Prevention Hotline for LGBTQ+ Youth. The hotline has fielded 1.3 million calls since it was launched by the Biden Administration in July 2022. I’m left to conclude that it is being eliminated because it doesn’t turn a profit. With all these business people running the government now, they have no concept of doing anything just for the good of the people. Besides, this Administration has made it clear that they don’t recognize LGBTQ+ people as being human beings. They’ve never tried to hide their disdain for individuals who do not fit the mold of white and straight.

  • I read that the soon-to-be-proposed “big, beautiful budget” from the Trump Administration is going to eliminate the Narcan grant program, although the CDC has evidence that there was a 24% decrease in drug overdose deaths in the year ending last September, partly due to Narcan being distributed to first responders through the program. We’ll never know all the minute details of the budget bill, even after it is approved by Congress. It’s too massive, but many American families know that Narcan being available to first responders has saved lives.

  • Calling US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s new TV and radio ads telling immigrants not to come to America “propaganda,” and the President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico is taking steps to ban the TV and radio ads in her country.

  • CNN is reporting that the Trump Administration is considering sending South American and Central American asylum seekers to Libya and Rwanda. I honestly cannot believe I’m having to type those words. I cannot believe this is seriously being considered. Anyone in the White House considering this is evil personified.

  • At his Cabinet meeting on April 30, Trump said that the current economic downturn is Joe Biden’s fault and the continued economic woes we will see in the next three months are also Joe Biden’s fault. He also in a roundabout way said that children aren’t going to have as many toys and the toys they get are going to be more expensive. The example he gave was that instead of having 30 dolls, a child might only have two dolls and those two dolls are going to cost a couple of dollars more. Trump seemed to be the last person in the country to figure that out. Only an out-of-touch billionaire President would speak in terms of a child having 30 dolls. There are some children in the US that would love to have just one doll. And, of course, it’s not just dolls or other toys that aren’t going to be available in the coming months.

  • On Wednesday afternoon, April 30, the executive in charge of the Port of Los Angeles told CNN that imports coming into his port are down 45% and very soon dock workers and truck drivers will not have much work to do, while the President was announcing at his Cabinet meeting that “cargo ships are making U-turns” in the Pacific Ocean to head back to China to pick up merchandise. Why would anyone believe Trump?

  • The Trump Administration launched an investigation of the University of California at Berkeley on April 25. The US Department of Education will examine all the foreign money the university has received in the last ten years. The Beast reported in May 2023 that UC-Berkeley had not reported $220 million it received from the Chinese government to build a joint Tsinghua-Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (TBSI). TBSI opened in Shenzhen, China in 2014, but UC-Berkeley says it is no longer affiliated with it. Maybe UC-Berkeley’s foreign receipts do need to be looked at, but it seems like just another Trump attack on a public university. Time will tell.

  • Not giving us an evening to rest, on Monday night Trump floated the idea of using US military personnel for domestic crime prevention. In the aftermath of Hurricane Hugo in Charlotte, North Carolina in September 1989, I appreciated the National Guard personnel who directed traffic at major intersections for days until electricity could be restored, but I do not relish the thoughts of the normalizing of seeing military personnel on our streets to fight domestic crime. Besides being an extremely un-American concept, I don’t believe that is the highest and best use of soldiers, sailors, and US Marines. It remains to be seen what Trump will say his plan is. More importantly, it remains to be seen what the true intent and true objective is. If history tells us anything, it tells us that the promise and the delivery by the Trump Administration have very little in common.

  • On Sunday, April 27, Trump got on social media and told Republicans to have protesters removed from their town hall meetings and “not treat them nicely.” So much for the First Amendment to the US Constitution!

  • Citing “senior Wall Street execs with ties to the White House, Fox Business senior correspondent Charles Gasparino reported on X on April 24 that President Trump’s people are giving insider tips to Wall Street executives about trade deals in progress. In particular, one being worked out with India. When asked about this, Gasparino indicated that US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s office made no comment but did not deny the truth of the report. If this report is true, it doesn’t sound legal to me. If not illegal, it should be.

  • Trump has removed former US Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff (who is Jewish) from the board overseeing the United States Holocaust Museum. He also removed four other people who were placed on the board by President Biden. That is the President’s prerogative, but it is highly unusual. He says he will only have people on the board who “support Israel.” This is just one more case of Trump conflating things like facts and purposes of museums or other public entities. He and many Americans continue to confuse antisemitism with anti-Israel. It is possible for someone to be against the actions of the government of Israel as a country while not being antisemitic. One is a political entity – a government – and the other is a religion. The political state of Israel created after World War II is not the same as the references to Israel in the Bible! The state of Israel in 2025 is a government that is forcing starvation of the children in Gaza by not permitting international food aid into Gaza. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what Benjamin Netanyahu is doing. No wonder he and Trump are friends.

  • Finally, an “honest” politician. In a live interview on CNN on Wednesday, April 30, Republican US Representative Randy Fine of Florida said, “I’m here to fight Democrats.” We knew that most the members of Congress like to talk about “reaching across the aisle, “working with my friends across the aisle,” and such platitudes when we know they have no desire to talk to their peers from the other political party. It was surprising to hear a Republican Congressman admit on live TV that he sees his purpose as a member of the US Congress “to fight against Democrats.” When there is no desire or incentive to compromise or try to work together for the good of the country in a time when there is an authoritarian in the White House, we are in a bad place.

Do you remember that war in Ukraine that Trump was going to end in one day? Do you remember how he was going to bring prices down? Do you remember how we were going to get tired of winning?

Most of us are tired 102 days into the second Trump Administration, but I don’t know anyone who is tired of winning.

By the way, Trump has not only denigrated Cabinet meetings into nothing but a Kum Ba Yah moment when every US Department Secretary has to praise him and tell him how wonderful everything is today in the United States, but now he literally rewards them with ridiculous baseball caps proclaiming that the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America.

It looks like a parent handing out birthday favors to the children at a birthday party.

Isn’t it wonderful that we have “a businessman” in the White House? There is such an air of decorum at the Cabinet meetings!

Until my next blog post tomorrow

I hope you have a good book to read and time to read it.

I hope you have not lost hope in America even though my almost daily blog posts lately have given you little about which to be hopeful.

Don’t forget the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet, a disgruntled political science major

13 additional questionable actions by the Trump Administration

Are you as tired of hearing this stuff as I am? That’s part of their plan. Just wear us out and wear us down. They want us to get so tired of being bombarded every day by more Executive Orders and lies that we will eventually tune it out.

We are faced with pure evil in America today.

I’m tired, but I’m not tuning any of it out. The following list is in no particular order.

  • Virtually every family has been touched by Alzheimer’s Disease. There were 35 research centers in the US that were studying Alzheimer’s Disease, many of them conducting drug trials. The Trump Administration stopped the funding for 14 of the 35. Some of them ran out of money three weeks ago. Let that sink in… drug trials for Alzheimer’s Disease suddenly stopped. If you voted for Donald Trump, this is what you voted for and I think it’s time for you admit it. I think it is time for all y’all who voted for him to tell him to stop. To stop everything he is doing. Every single thing. You put him in the White House, and you have the power to remove him from the White House. All you have to do is flood the White House and the offices of your Republican Senators and Representatives with phone calls, emails, and letters. Y’all are the ones with the power to stop every bit of this. Don’t say you didn’t vote for “this.” Yes, you did. You knew you were voting for a convicted felon who lies about everything. You knew he had no empathy for anyone, and if ending the funding for Alzheimer’s research doesn’t prove that, I don’t know what would.
Photo of a woman working in a medical laboratory
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
  • Continued assault on universities. CBS reported on April 23 that President Trump signed an executive order to change the college accreditation process so colleges are accredited based on “results,” with the president wondering aloud about looking into the math capabilities of students admitted to Harvard University and Yale University. In his campaign in 2024, he said the accreditation organizations were “dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” He, of course, never offered any evidence to back that up. The problem is… the accreditation of institutions of higher education is, by law, controlled by third-party entities and not the federal government – much less the US President. The report quoted White Houe staff secretary Will Scharf as saying that Trump thinks the accrediting entities are focused on “woke ideology” instead of results. This Executive Order affects law schools and graduate program as well. First, Trump tried blackmailing universities by threatening to end their federal funding if they continued to admit students based on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). That worked at Columbia University, but it didn’t work at Harvard or Princeton. Next, he said he would weaponize the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) that all international students must process through in order to be admitted to a college or university in the US. Now, he’s threatening all colleges and universities by saying he will take control of the accrediting entities. Attacking the intellectual freedoms of colleges and universities is right out of the fascist playbook. If you voted for Trump, you voted for this. If you didn’t know he was going to attack institutions of higher education, you didn’t read Project 2025.
Photographs of university students having a serious discussion
Photo by Antenna on Unsplash
  • On Friday, April 25, US District Court Judge Terry A. Doughty in Monroe, Louisiana, issued an order for a hearing to be held at 9:00 a.m. CT at the Federal Courthouse in Monroe regarding “In the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.” The two-year-old daughter of a woman was deported to Honduras after the child’s father’s lawyer informed the US Department of Justice that the child was a US citizen. Judge Doughty stated, “The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her. But the Court doesn’t know that.” At 1:06pm CT, the Court was informed that a phone call to the mother could not be placed “because she (and presumably VML) [the child’s initial’s in Court documents] had just been released in Honduras.” ABC News reported that the child “was initially detained with her undocumented mother at a routine immigration check-in in New Orleans earlier this week. My first question is, Why couldn’t the US Government postpone the mother’s deportation until a judge could hear the facts in the case? My second question is, At what age does the US Government believe it is okay to deport an American citizen?  My third question is, Will the US Government only deport American citizens who are minors, or should all of us be ready to be snatched up and shipped off to another country at any time?
Photo of a child in the dark inside of an airplane peering out the window
Photo by kian on Unsplash
  • In a similar case, a mother and her two minor children were deported to Honduras. Her four-year-old daughter who was deported is being treated in the US for Stage 4 metastatic cancer. The child was deported without access to her medications or medical care. I defy anyone to tell me what about that makes “America Great Again.” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” whose official job title is White Houe Executive Associate Director of Enforcement and Removal Operations (his business card must have to be the size of a poster!), maintains that this mother wanted her children to be deported with her. Of course, a mother does not want to be separated from her children. Of course, a mother does not want to be separated from her child who is going through cancer treatment. BUT… this case could have been handled in a more humane way. From everything I’ve heard and read, there was no pressing need for that mother and her children to be deported on April 25, 2025. The mother was not a dangerous criminal. The mother had merely missed an appointment with immigration officials due to circumstances beyond her control. If the case could have been reviewed by a US District judge, I’m sure a postponement in deportation could have been worked out. But when deportation planes take off in the hours before daylight and deportees are detained in isolation without access to legal counsel, the court system is eliminated from the process.

  • In 2021, President Joe Biden issued a proclamation making the traditional Columbus Day holiday in October also Indigenous Peoples Day. Finally, the indigenous peoples in the US were getting a little bit of respect and recognition. On April 27, 2025, Trump made clear his disdain for indigenous peoples as he said we will no longer have Indigenous Peoples Day. He delighted in announcing that he is restoring Columbus Day as just Columbus Day. The point of his doing this can only be interpreted as a punch in the gut to every person in this country who has indigenous DNA. There is absolutely nothing constructive that can come out of this.
Bilungual “Welcome to Cherokee” sign in Cherkee, North Carolina
  • Last Thursday, Trump claimed that gasoline was down to $1.98 per gallon “in some states.” Of course, he couldn’t name which states because it wasn’t true. According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), no state had an average price below $2.70 per gallon, and the national average price is $3.17. Why can’t he just tell the truth? Plus, Americans aren’t going to get any sympathy from the people in England or Scotland for our $3 to $4 petrol.
Photo of a sign displaying gasoline prices, including $3.59 per gallon for regular unleaded.
Photo by Thomas McKinnon on Unsplash
  • Last Thursday, Trump said that grocery prices have come down. According to the Consumer Price Index, grocery prices in March were 0.49% higher than in February, the biggest month-to-month jump since October 2022. Average grocer prices in March 2025 were up 2.41% over March 2024, the biggest year-over-year increase since August 2023. What can’t he just tell the truth?
Photograph of fresh citrus produce at a market
Photo by David Trinks on Unsplash
  • Last Tuesday, Trump said, “as you know, the cost of eggs has come down like 93, 94% since we took office.” On Thursday, he said eggs prices had dropped by 87%. Actually, the average price of a dozen large Grade A eggs in January was $4.95. If the price had dropped by 93 or 94% since January 20, eggs should be selling now for less than 38 cents-a-dozen. The average price nationally in March was $6.23 per dozen. I paid $4.96 last Wednesday, which is about what I’ve been paying for a couple of months because I’m fortunate to live in a major egg-producing state. Why can’t Trump just tell the truth? Plus, the reason the price of eggs skyrocketed this winter was because chicken flocks were hit with the bird flu and infected flocks had to be slaughtered. It was a crisis of supply and demand, but the Trump Administration has maintained from the beginning that (1) chickens were unnecessarily slaughtered or (2) they have completely ignored the fact that there is a bird flu and chickens were slaughtered. It was convenient to just blame the Biden Administration for the price of eggs.
Photo of a pile of brown eggs
  • Last Thursday, the US Department of Justice stopped the funding of more than 350 grants for such things as hot-lines for drug addicts to call for help, programs for violence prevention and juvenile justice, crime victims, and the fight against opioid abuse. The reason? To protect Americans against “toxic DEI policies.”
Photo of a red telephone receiver lying off the hook with apparently no one at the other end to answer the call for help
Photo by Trintage on Unsplash
  • KTVX in Salt Lake City reported that Carlos Trujillo, a naturalized US citizen working as an immigration attorney in that city received an order on April 11 to self-deport within seven days. “I know the laws of this country,” Trujillo told Nexstar’s KTVX. “I am not leaving. I am not deportable. But I do want everybody to know that these kinds of things are happening.” The report continued, “Trujillo said the ‘threatening language’ of the email bothered him. Trujillo encouraged the immigrant community to be aware of the changes in the laws and to know their rights. He said many people who received the email are in the country under legal circumstances. Trujillo isn’t the only one receiving a letter from the Department of Homeland Security saying it’s time to leave – a similar email was sent to hundreds of thousands of people across the United States…. However, Trujillo came to the U.S. about 24 years ago, and has been a naturalized U.S. citizen for roughly a decade.” I was born and have lived my entire life in the US, but I’m thinking about applying for a passport so I can prove that I am a US citizen. I realized my driver’s license does not prove citizenship.
Photo of a US passport
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
  • CNN reported on April 24 that the court document that migrants are handed gives them 12 hours to say if they will challenge their deportation under the Alien Act of 1798, which gave the government the authority to deport people during wartime. (We are not at war, folks! Just sayin’.) The form is in English only. If they wish to challenge their removal, they have 24 hours to hire an attorney and file their challenge. During World War II, immigrants were given 30 days to do so.
  • It was reported on CNN on April 24, that more than 1,500 student visas have been revoked by the US State Department since January 20.
Photograph of college students
Photo by javier trueba on Unsplash
  • Reuters reported that US Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has told states that they must ensure personnel practices are merit-based in order to receive federal funds. The Trump Administration said on Thursday that states could lose federal funds if they don’t cooperate with federal immigration efforts or if they continue DEI programs. Duffy had earlier announced that he will favor giving states priority for transportation funds for locations that have high birthrates. Transportation funding has traditionally been political, but this is the first time I remember the US Government announcing that as an official policy.
Aerial view of complicated highway interchanges
Photo by Jared Murray on Unsplash

Until my next blog post tomorrow

It’s difficult, but don’t give up on American democracy. (I’m saying that to myself. I need to hear it every day.)

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina. They do not have the luxury of worrying about every little thing the Trump Administration does. They’re just trying to survive and put their lives back together.

Janet

A War on Civil Rights

I didn’t want to post a blog on a Saturday, but here I am.

On Thursday, April 23, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy.”

Under the guise of allegedly encouraging “meritocracy and a colorblind society, not race- or sex-based favoritism,” the order calls for an evaluation of all pending proceedings under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA), which was passed in 1974 and was amended in 1976 to prevent lenders from discriminating against women based on marital status.

Only Congress can change the law, but an Executive Order muddies the water. If a lender chooses to follow the order, they can do so.

If a woman or a person of a racial minority thinks they have been discriminated against by a lender, they can file a complaint with the lender or thet can hire a lawyer and take their case to court. It could be years before the case is heard and settled. In the meantime, they did not get that credit card, or home improvement loan, or that loan that would have made it possible to buy a car or a home.

As reported by Newsweek, “The EO’s main target is the principle of disparate-impact liability, the idea that racism, sexism, or some other form of discrimination can occur without explicit intent. The President believes that disparate-impact liability is a key tool in a ‘pernicious movement’ that ‘endangers’ the U.S.’ foundational principle of ‘creating opportunity, encouraging achievement, and sustaining the American Dream.’”

In Trump’s mind, making sure that a dark-skinned person is not discriminated against equates with denying a white-skinned person being discriminated against. Or, the law making sure women are not discriminated against by financial lenders equates with denying men the opportunity to borrow money or get a credit card.

But that isn’t what it means at all!

Just because a woman gets approved for a loan does not mean that a man applying for a loan gets denied. There is enough pie for everyone who qualifies for a loan.

But this is all smoke and mirrors. Through Executive Order, Trump is putting dark-skinned people and women in their place. He is putting them at a disadvantage. He is denying them an equal opportunity to attain the American Dream.

That’s exactly what this is about. This is nothing but a white men’s backlash because some of them want to go back to “the good old days” when they didn’t have to compete with women or dark-skinned people. Some of them don’t want a level playing field.

Photo by Unseen Histories on Unsplash

In case you are saying, “So what?”

In case any of this sounds all right or good to you, you are obviously not a woman “of a certain age” or a black person.

I am a white woman of a certain age, so I can and will speak to this. I grew up in the era in which women could not necessarily get credit or a loan without a man co-signing.

Women of a certain age know exactly what Trump’s end game is.

I was turned down for a credit card by a major gasoline company in the early 1970s, and the reason I was given was, “we don’t give credit cards to single women.” But who needs Exxon or Texaco? Amoco gave me a credit card and I was a loyal customer for years.

When I bought my first car (used) at the age of 22 in 1975 after earning a Bachelor’s degree, I was told by an agent for a nationally-recognized car insurance company that my rate for car insurance would be higher because I was a single woman. My father was with me, and this made him as mad as it did me. We stormed out of the insurance agent’s office. Rest assured, my father nor I ever considered doing business with Nationwide Insurance again.

I was interviewed for a job with the City of Charlotte in 1977 after I had earned a Master’s degree in public administration, and the interviewer said to me, “I don’t think a woman can handle this job.” My father had died. I was single. I was desperately looking for a job in my chosen field. Cities and counties weren’t exactly lining up to hire women for management positions. I didn’t want to burn my bridges, so I didn’t file a complaint.

I want women who came of age after the late 1970s to believe me when I say, “You don’t want to go back.”

Until my next blog post

Find time to read a good book and take a break from the chaos, but then come back and continue the fight for our democracy.

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet

Environmental Justice

Today’s blog post is about one example of environmental justice… or, more accurately, environmental injustice.

What is Environmental Justice?

As succinctly stated on the website of The Goldman Environmental Prize (https://www.goldmanprize.org/), “Environmental justice is the idea that people of all cultures, races, ethnicities, and socioeconomic backgrounds deserve fair protection from environmental and health hazards, as well as equal access to the decision-making processes behind environmental policies and development.”

Dr. Robert Bullard, a pioneer of the environmental justice movement told Earth First! Journal in an interview: “The environment is everything: where we live, work, play, go to school, as well as the physical and natural world. And so we can’t separate the physical environment from the cultural environment. We have to talk about making sure that justice is integrated throughout all of the stuff that we do.”

It seems like it would be difficult to argue with that, but the Trump Administration finds it easy to do so.

In Lowndes County, Alabama…

The Associated Press (AP) reported that on April 11 (That’s almost two weeks ago! See, I can’t keep up!) that the US Department of Justice (DOJ) is “ending a settlement agreement regarding wastewater problems” in Lowndes County, Alabama. The Biden Administration launched an investigation into a sewage back up problem in Black communities in the county.

The AP’s report stated, “Federal officials said the decision follows President Donald Trump’s executive order forbidding federal agencies from pursuing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. ‘The DOJ will no longer push ‘environmental justice’ as viewed through a distorting, DEI lens,’ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.”

The AP report continued: “‘President Trump made it clear: Americans deserve a government committed to serving every individual with dignity and respect, and to expending taxpayer resources in accordance with the national interest, not arbitrary criteria,’ the statement said.

“U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in February issued a memo rescinding a Biden-era directive to prioritize environmental justice cases.”

I was struck by the fact that this statement came from the Civil Rights Division of the US Justice Department.

Focusing on the “D” in DEI – diversity –, I’m left to assume that until sewage is backing up into every home in America, the Trump Administration won’t do anything because the last thing Trump would want to do is play favorites. <sarcasm>

But, hey, wait! He can’t do anything because that would be putting all Americans on an equal (the “E” in DEI) footing in the eyes of the US Government.

We can’t help one group because that’s diversity and we can’t help everyone because that’s equity.

And it goes without saying that under Trump there can be no “I” for inclusion.

Thinking back to my March 31, April 2, and April 3, 2025, blog posts… I can’t believe we’re even talking about DEI because the Trump Administration said US Government agencies should no longer use the words “diversity, equity, or inclusion.”

But I’ve gone off on a word tangent, when the immediate problem for the people in Lowndes County, Alabama is a sewage/public health issue.

And the deeper issue is the audacity of Donald Trump to think it’s all right for such a problem to continue so he pulls the plug on the agreement that made federal funds available to fix the problem.

The end result is now no one, no city, no county, no state, no school district, no university, no library, no museum, and no country can depend on the stated or written word of the United States of America because with the scratch of a black Sharpie pen, President Trump can apparently cancel any agreement or promise or guarantee made by any of his or her predecessors. And the US Congress lets him.

I don’t have enough imagination to contemplate where this blatant disregard for the integrity of the United States of America will end.

The 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize Winners

The seven 2025 Goldman Environmental Prize winners were announced in San Francisco on Monday, April 21, the night before Earth Day. (I don’t know why that sentence is showing up in blue!)

Here’s a link to the April 21, 2025, Goldman Environmental Prize Award Ceremony on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=0rGdW17dyPE. The entire program lasts an hour and 40 minutes and is inspiring, to say the least. I highly recommend that you take the time to watch it. At the very least, watching the first 11 minutes just to see the fantastic photography will relax you and serve as a wonderful reminder of how beautiful and precious our natural world is.

The seven prize winners this year:

Laurene Allen, a clinical social worker, moved to Merrimack, New Hampshire 40 years ago. Co-Founder of Merrimack Citizens for Clean Water. In 2016, it was found that the town’s drinking water contained high levels of PFAS, also known as forever chemicals. The city water and well water had been polluted by an industrial plastics factory. Spurred into action by the local government downplaying the problems, she educated herself about the chemicals. Conducted door-to-door surveys to document health problems connected to PFAS. When she testified at a town council meeting, she was called out for using the word “contamination.” She was told that word was “inflammatory.” She was accused of fear mongering. Her citizens group engaged scientists and universities to test air, water, and soil. Members of the group ran for public office on the state and local level where they pushed for safer PFAS standards. And yet, production increased at the factory. In 2025, after eight years of fighting for clean water, Saint-Gobain decided to close the factory!

Photo of a clear, clean glass of water
Photo by Daniele Romanello on Unsplash

Semia Gharbi, a scientist & educator in Tunis, Tunisia & President of Association for Environmental Education for Future Generations. Six tons of illegal waste shipped to Tunisia from Italy… waste trafficking. Cargo ships of garbage!

Photo of a dumpster of garbage
Photo by Hannes Richter on Unsplash

Batmunkh Lavsandash, retired electrical engineer in Dornogavi, East Gobi Desert, Mongolia. His surveying and mapping efforts have saved 200,000 acres of land in the fragile and sacred Dornogavi Province from rampant mining operations, keeping that land available for the traditional Mongolian way of life.

Photo of a little girl in Mongolia
Photo by Uneke Ub on Unsplash

Olsi Nika, a social worker and Executive Director of Ecoalbania and Besjana Guri, a biologist and Communications Officer for Ecoalbania. Their work over 10 years to prevent the construction of 40 hydroelectric projects along the 120 miles of free-flowing Vjosa River in Albania, resulted in the river being saved and protected by the new Vjosa Wild River National Park. Established in 2023, the park protects more than 31,000 acres and ensures that the river will remain free-flowing.

Ariel photo of Vjosa River in Albania
A view of the Vjosa Wild River National Park. Photo Credit: Vjosa Wild River National Park website: https://www.vjosanationalpark.al/

Carlos Mallo Molina was a civil engineer who specialized in port construction. He moved to Tenerife, Canary Islands, to work on the construction of a major highway that would lead to the site of the proposed Fonsalia port. His life took a turn, though, when he went scuba diving and fell in love with the abundant wildlife and habitat for endangered green sea turtles and unique tropical pilot whales. He said, “I realized I’m doing something wrong. How can I love so much what I’m seeing here and at the same time I’m working to destroy it? I decided I needed to change what I was doing and find a way to protect what I love, so I decided to quit my job.” He founded Innoceana to oppose the Fonsalia port and dedicated himself to protecting the environment. He mapped the undersea area where the port was to be built, helped gather 420,000 signatures on a petition opposing the port’s construction. As a result of him and his team, the Canary Islands Parliament voted overwhelmingly in October 21 to abandon plans for the port and to create a marine education center there instead!

Photo of a sea turtle in the ocean
Photo by Kevin Wolf on Unsplash

Each of these stories is inspiring and each of the individuals has proven that one person can move mountains, but it was the story of Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari that touched me the most…

Mari Luz Canaquiri Murayari of Shapajilla, Peru. Founder of Huaynakana Kamatahuara Kana, a women’s association whose mission is to promote the rights of the Kukama indigenous people and to protect the environment. The 1,000-mile long Maranon River that eventually forms the Amazon River was frequently being polluted by oil spills. She combined the Kukama belief that the river contains spirits with the concept of rights of nature. Successfully gained the legal Rights of Nature for the river to remain free-flowing and free of pollution. Court ordered Petroperu and the local government to immediately address oil spills and create a protection plan for the river. However, there is an authoritarian regime in control in Peru now that is hostile to indigenous peoples and the defenders of nature.

In her acceptance speech on Monday night, Ms. Canaquiri Murayari said that when anyone speaks up for nature they are criminalized and some have been assassinated. She said, “For the collective struggles that we have led, I have been criminalized. And this is why I want to leave this final message for the world: to recognize our collective humanity and to defend our common home, Mother Nature that provides the air we breathe, our daily food, and the water we drink. Together, we can weave a social fabric that safeguards… all life, for future generations across the world. We, the Kukama women, exist and we re resisting in defense of nature, its rivers and territories! Without our rivers, there is no forest!”

Photo of the Maranon River in Peru
The Maranon River/Rio Maranon. Photo Credit: https://lacgeo.com/maranon-river-south-america

I hope being the recipient of the Goldman Environment Prize Award on Monday will not make her an even bigger target for harassment by the government of Peru.

Until my next blog post

Keep reading! If you don’t have a good book to read this weekend, go back to the public library or your local independent bookstore and keep looking. You’re bound to find one!

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, Kentucky, and western North Carolina.

Janet

17 more unjust things going on in America

Continuing in the vein of my blog posts on March 24 and 31, and April 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, and yesterday, today I highlight 16 more unjust things going on in America.

  • The Trump Administration has fired two Democrat-appointed members of the National Credit Union Administration. Since it was created in 1970 to credit union members and their deposits, it has been a bipartisan board.
  • The entire staff of the NIH office that sets federal poverty guidelines have been fired. It was the office that set eligibility guidelines for health programs such as Medicaid, food assistance, child care, and other services.
Photo of two bags of groceries
  • A top National Institutes of Health nutrition researcher quit his job after one of his research reports was censored because it did not reflect a preconceived outcome Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. desired.
  • US Secretary of Health and Human Service Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is so ignorant about the autism spectrum that he said, “And these kids will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.” When that statement hit social media, people came out of the woodwork to express their disgust and anger at Kennedy for making such a statement. One person after another gave personal examples from within their families to contradict every word in Kennedy’s statement.
  • The BBC reports that the US is poised to place a 3,521% tariff on solar panels from Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. (Is Trump just pulling numbers out of a hat?) The Solar Energy Industries Association says such tariffs will hurt American solar manufacturers because they will raise the price on imported cells for solar panels assembled in the US. Trump hates solar power and wind power, so he will do whatever it takes to destroy those industries. He is pushing “clean coal” energy.
  • As President Trump paves the way through Executive Orders to boost the coal industry through expanding coal mining into federal lands and removing emissions restrictions on coal-powered plants, there is concern over the simultaneous elimination of 900 employees of the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety. Included in those work force cuts are people from the respiratory health division in West Virginia that oversaw a black lung X-ray screening program.
  • More than 790,000 children under the age of six are in the Head Start program this year. They get educational help, meals, and healthcare. The Trump Administration is ending the program which has helped 40 million children since its establishment 60 years ago.
Photo of a little boy smiling with his school backpack on his back
Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash
  • In a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni last Thursday, Trump called himself a “tariff savior,” and admitted that he does not know what the Republic of the Congo is. He said, “You know they release jails, Giorgia, from all over the world. Not just South America. The Congo in Africa. Many, many people come from the Congo. I don’t know what that is, but they came from the Congo,” 
  • The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments from the Trump Administration that the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution should end. The Court will hear arguments in May. Trump maintains that the children of mothers who are in the US illegally should not automatically have US citizenship.
  • Via Executive Order on Thursday, Trump ended all protections on the Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument. About 750 miles west of Hawaii, the area was set aside as a US Monument in 2009 by President George W. Bush and expanded in 2014 by President Barack Obama. Trump’s order opens it up to commercial fishing, although it contains more than 160 seamounts (undersea mountains), coral atolls, and endangered sea turtles and whales. Typical of his blind goal of being the first in everything, Trump said, “The United States should be the world’s dominant seafood leader.”
  • Remember the cancelling of 1,200 National Endowment for the Humanities that I mentioned in my April 16, 2025, blog post, 16 more highlights of how things are going in America? The Associated Press reports that one of those grants was $282,000 to enable the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition to digitize more than 100,000 pages of boarding school records. For 150 years, indigenous children were taken away from their parents and put in US Government boarding schools where they were prohibited from speaking their language languages in the name of “Americanizing” them and “civilizing” them. It has only been in recent years that these stories have started coming to light. Another of the grants cancelled was $30,000 for the Koahnic Broadcast Corporation and the Alaska Native Heritage Center to broadcast oral histories of elders in Alaska. This coincided with the Alaska Native Heritage Center’s loss of a $100,000 Institute of Museum and Library Services grant to curate a boarding school exhibit. I hope all tribes are taking steps to preserve their stories, and I hope that someday those stories will be available for all to read and hear.
  • Trump is going after the major TV networks. Specifically, he is suing CBS over an interview with Kamala Harris that they aired on “60 Minutes.” He is upset because the interview was edited. I’m sure he know from his own experience on TV that a lot of editing occurs in TV. Full interviews are rarely broadcast, but he sues people at the drop of a hat. This sounds silly on the face of it, but the Executive Producer of “60 Minutes,” one of the most-trusted investigative news programs on TV, resigned today because he said he is no longer able to produce the show like he has in the past and he’s not going to bend his knee to the Trump Administration. If Trump can get his tentacles into all the major news networks, we are most certainly doomed.
Photo of a cell phone with CBS on the screen
Photo by appshunter.io on Unsplash
  • Trump is going to reclassify federal employees who work on policy matters as “schedule policy/career.” They will be required to support the President’s policies, apparently, in thought, word, and deed.” He said, this will finally ensure that the federal government is run like a business. That sends a chill down my spine because by its very nature and purpose, the federal government is not a business. It does not produce a product to be sold on the open market or even on the black market. It does not manufacture shovels or picture frames or sheets and towels. It provides services for the good of the whole. It does those things that individuals cannot do for themselves. It protects citizens from outside interference. It provides for the common defense. It operates a system of courts to protect citizens and visitors alike. It secures fundamental individual rights as well as the rights of the people collectively. There is a fundamental blatant intentional misinterpretation of the purpose of a democractic government by Donald Trump and his followers. They are hellbent on destroying every shred of the US Government as we have known it for 249 years. May God forgive them, because I cannot.
  • The US State Department has issued “Country Reports on Human Rights Practices” since 1977. These reports include all countries and are mandated by statute to give a “full and complete report regarding the status of internationally recognized human rights.” Now that the United States is guilty of trashing human rights on our own soil, the Trump Administration has ordered major changes in what those reports include. The reports will no longer include involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices, arbitrary or unlawful interference with privacy, serious restrictions to internet freedom, extensive gender-based violence, and violence or threats of violence targeting people with disabilities. The elimination of these parts of the traditional reports are across the board. These abuses will no longer be reported for any countries. When the Trump Administration is guilty of such abuses (or planning to put them in place?), I guess it would be awkward to put in black and white that his regime is guilty of the same things as other dictator-led countries.
  • First Lady Melania Trump got credit for hosting the annual Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn on Monday, but it became obvious weeks ago that her husband was calling the shots. It was the first Easter Egg Roll with corporate sponsors. There was a reading nook and photo op sponsored by Amazon; a “Bunny Hop Stage” sponsored by YouTube, owned by Google; and an “AI-Powered Experience and Photo Opportunity” sponsored by Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Thread’s parent company, Meta. A “Ringing of the Bell Photo Opportunity” was sponsored by the New York Stock Exchange. Call me sarcastic, but… nothing celebrates the resurrection of Jesus Christ like a bunch of billionaires buying more favor from the US President. To show how Trump has transformed the Republican Party into something unrecognizable… Richard Painter, an ethics lawyer who served in the White House Counsel’s Office during President George W. Bush’s Administration told CNN, “That would have been vetoed in about 30 seconds in my day.”
  • Four police officers from Seattle have asked the US Supreme Court to keep their names out of public records related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol. I would like to think they are embarrassed about their participation. One has to wonder how dedicated they are to upholding the law.
  • And this from The New York Times on April 21: The White House is getting ideas from various sources on how to create a “baby boom” in the US. Ideas being floated are to pay a married woman $5,000 when she gives birth, and married women will be encouraged to have six children. Another idea is to set aside 30% of Fullbright Scholarships for married women with children. Another idea calls for government-funded programs to educate women about their menstrual cycles so they can better understand when they are ovulating. There could be a National Medal of Motherhood for mothers with six or more children. The new word being bounced around is “pronatalism.” Vice President Vance told a March for Life anti-abortion rally in January the he wanted “more babies in the United States of America” and more “beautiful young men and women” to raise them. It seems that Elon Musk thinks the low birthrate in America is a threat to civilization. (Some people think he is a threat to civilization!) It seems that the people behind this think women are putting too much emphasis on education and career and not enough emphasis on being reproductive machines. The Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025 is a driving force behind this. Some of the people pushing this baby boom want the National Institutes of Health to ramp up research into infertility. Too bad Trump and Musk have already fired most of the researchers! Duh! The lengthy newspaper article does not address race or ethnicity, but it doesn’t take a genius to read between the lines. The Trump Administration certainly doesn’t want women of color having six or more children. I’m sure when all is said and done and the US is turned into a real-life Handmaid’s Tale, there will be restrictions on just which women qualify for the honor of giving birth and raising six or more children. It seems to me like if they were merely interested in boosting the birthrate, they wouldn’t be working so hard to deport 11 million people from Central and South America. Hmmm. But wait… don’t a lot of families today with even fewer than six children rely heavily on Grandma and Grandpa to help raise their children? Just what most grandparents need… six more children to raise! And let’s have a show of hands: How many of you men want six or more children? Go on. Don’t be shy. Raise your hands if you want six or more children. This is one more slap in the faces of single people and non-traditional families. As if single people aren’t already taken to the cleaners by the IRS! This would be funny if it weren’t so sick and misogynistic.

Until my next blog post … tomorrow

I hope you’re reading a good book.

Pay attention to what’s happening at the hands of the Trump Administration. This is the time to do what you can to stand up for American democracy.

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet

Some unjust things going on in America

When I blogged The Importance of Marbury v. Madison Today on February 24, I didn’t intend to start an endless series of political and political science posts, but there seems to be no end to the chaos the Trump Administration is creating.

I don’t make this stuff up. I’m trying to put a human face on the madness. All the numbers are huge. The suffering is individual and collective. The grief for what the United States of America used to be is real.

Watching various politicians and representatives of the Republican Party interviewed or speaking as panelists on several Sunday morning news shows on TV only serve to reenforce my fear that worse days lie ahead for the United States of America. Through the voicing of their beliefs, they demonstrated that Republicans have lost their way. They have lost sight of the US Constitution. They have lost sight of the truth.

Here’s just one example. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, this exchange took place between Host Kristen Welker and US Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana (https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/20/gop_sen_john_kennedy_if_trump_defies_a_court_order_ill_call_him_out.html):

“Kristen Welker: Do you believe that President Trump is following orders of the courts right now?

“Sen. John Kennedy: Yes. And I don’t believe that President Trump will defy a federal judge’s order. If he does, I’ll call him out on it.”

I hope when Senator Kennedy catches up on the news from the last several weeks, he will indeed call out President Trump.

Here we go…

As of April 14, 2025, all grants with the Office on Violence Against Women have been terminated because the US Department of Justice has concluded that these grants “no longer effectuate the agency priorities.” This is an admission by the Justice Department that they used to “effectuate the agency priorities.” I conclude that it is no longer a priority of the US Department of Justice to address violence against women. As a result, on April 14, 2025, the American Bar Association immediately cancelled “all its upcoming trainings.” This apparently refers to training lawyers on how to effectively prosecute men who violently attack women and educating women who find themselves in a dangerous situation. No wonder President Trump said he would “take care of women.” It creeped me out when I heard him say that because we all know how he personally takes care of women, but this official DOJ warning to women is a whole other level. It’s no longer creepy; it’s frightening. To use a term that Trump’s macho hunter friends use, I guess it is now “open season” on women.

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash
  • The US Air Force has removed webpages, photos, videos, and biographies about several trailblazing female pilots, including retired Colonel Nicole Malachowski. She served in the Air Force for 21 years and was the first woman to pilot with the elite Thunderbirds team. Does anyone see a pattern here?
Col. Nicole Malachowski
  • According to a Washington Post report, “Thiry-eight of 43 experts cut last month from the boards that review the science and research that happens in laboratories at the National Institutes of Health are female, Black or Hispanic, according to an analysis by the chairs of a dozen of the boards. The scientists, with expertise in fields that include mental health, cancer and infectious disease, typically serve five-year terms and were not given a reason for their dismissal…. These scientists rate the quality of the science on the nation’s largest biomedical research campus, where 1,200 taxpayer-funded investigators lead laboratories focused on Parkinson’s disease, heart disease, cancer immunotherapy, and other diseases and treatments.” A pattern, or a coincidence?
Photo by Drew Hays on Unsplash
  • Proposed US Department of Health and Human Services budget cuts would slash 40% of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and National Institutes for Health budget. I hope all the medical researchers and physicians who have lost their jobs due to Donald Trump will be able to find new opportunities in other countries where their knowledge and skills will be appreciated.
Photo by CDC on Unsplash
  • A doctor who is a US citizen born in Pennsylvania received one of the US Department of Homeland Security’s emails informing her that she has to leave the United States immediately. Maybe the new Department of Government Efficiency needs to investigate the top officials at Homeland Security. Seems like they’re making a lot of mistakes in who they’re trying to deport.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
  • US Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has threated to prevent Harvard University from enrolling international students unless it gives her information on all of its student visa holders’ disciplinary records and protest participation. Harvard has been given an April 30, 2025, deadline or it will “face immediate lost of Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP) certification.” It’s difficult to imagine Harvard University without any international students.
Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash
  • On Friday, Trump, who was partially elected because he claimed he would bring down the cost of eggs and other groceries, said, “You can have all the eggs. You watch, we have too many eggs. In fact, if anything, the prices are getting too low. So I just want to let you know that the prices are down.” Like he would know or care about the price of a dozen eggs!
Photo by Raiyan Zakaria on Unsplash

In case you needed more proof that Donald Trump does not have a clue what Easter is about or who Jesus Christ is…

Looking out from the empty tomb on Easter morning
Photo by Pisit Heng on Unsplash

Sunday was Easter Sunday, and President Trump chose the occasion to issue perhaps the most off-the-beam Easter greeting ever issued by anyone. I wonder if any Evangelical Christians read it. If they agreed with it and saw it as anything but disrespectful to God, then maybe they need to reevaluate their religious beliefs.

On Easter Sunday, Trump took to social media and wished “Radical Left Lunatics” a happy Easter. He attacked “weak and ineffective judges and law enforcement officials” for calling for the return to the US of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from El Salvador although the Trump Administration had already admitted that his deportation was an “administrative error.”

In light of the US Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that the Trump Administration must bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States, in his Easter message, the President blasted the legal pushback as “an attack so violent that it will never be forgotten!”

Violent? It was a decision made by the highest court in our country. There was nothing violent about it. I believe the violence was perpetrated against Mr. Abrego Garcia when he was sent to an El Salvador prison against a court order.

And Trump remains obsessed with President Joe Biden. Constantly drumming into the American people the lie that every immigrant is a criminal, in his Easter greeting he once again claimed that Biden “purposefully” allowed “Millions of criminals to enter our Country, totally unvetted and unchecked” and called it “the single most calamitous act ever perpetrated upon America.”

In case you missed it, this is how Trump concluded his angry Happy Easter greeting to the American people:

“But to him [Biden], and to the person that ran and manipulated the Auto Pen (perhaps our REAL President!), and to all of the people who CHEATED in the 2020 Presidential Election in order to get this highly destructive Moron Elected, I wish you, with great love, sincerity, and affection, a very Happy Easter!!!”

Whoa! That is just bizarre yet, sadly, not surprising.

But the worst thing that’s been proposed yet

This somehow got in under my radar since February 25. Blackwater founder, Erik Prince and its former Chief Operation Officer Bill Matthews sent a proposal to Trump’s advisers before January 20.To say it is chilling and horrific and un-American, is not strong enough language. Words fail me.

Photo by Alex Gallegos on Unsplash

In a nutshell, what I read in a New Republic article online last Thursday: For $25 million, Prince and Matthews’ new company, 2USV, will transport 12 million immigrants from America to the notorious prison in El Salvador in two years’ time.

But wait… there’s more… the US will buy part of the prison campus, declare it an American territory, and then the Administration can’t be accused of sending Americans or anyone else to a prison outside the United States.

Let that sink in.

No one outside the Trump Administration or Prince and Matthew’s orbit know what the status of this proposal is.

Keep in mind, it was just last week that Trump and the President of El Salvador discussed the possibility of sending more prisoners from America to El Salvador. Now we know that idea did not just come out of nowhere!

To deport 12 million people in 24 months, an average of 500,000 would have to be rounded up and transported every month. To facilitate this, 10,000 private citizens would be deputized. I’m not making this up.

If this were a novel or a movie, it would be labeled as horror.

Until my next blog post … tomorrow

I hope you’re reading a good book.

Pay attention to what’s happening at the hands of the Trump Administration. This is the time to do what you can to stand up for American democracy.

Remember the people of Ukraine, Myanmar, and western North Carolina.

Janet

Is your family getting together during Holy Week? Brace yourself!

I did not want to write a blog post for today. I did not want to blog on Maundy Thursday.

Photo by Bobbie Wallace on Unsplash

Maundy Thursday is a day to ponder Christ’s Last Supper with His disciples. It is a day to remember Christ’s arrest and his betrayal at the hands of His disciples. It is a day to anticipate His brutal treatment and hideous crucifixion on the cross that we will remember tomorrow.

Maundy Thursday is a day to slow down and consider the sacrifice Jesus Christ made for each of us. The horrors He endured for us on “Good Friday” should weigh heavily on our hearts and minds today, tomorrow, and Saturday as we dare not let the joy of Easter Sunday creep into our thoughts yet.

I did not want to blog today. I did not want to rant and rave. I did not want to call out my fellow Americans for blindly following Donald Trump. I did not want to get all worked up and end up with a headache or high blood pressure or a stomach ulcer.

So that’s not what I’m going to blog about today. Instead, I am writing about some of my very deep concerns and try to put the pieces together of how in the world America got to this place of distrust and disagreement.

I never anticipated that writing my little blog this is supposed to be about my writing, my reading, and my love of studying history was going to consume all my time in 2025 or that a US President’s abuse of power would come to be all I can even think about.

I never thought I would be able to truly understand what happened in Germany in the 1930s, but I now have a crystal-clear understanding. It only takes an extreme level of evil in a handful of people and the brainwashing of enough of the population.

It comes on slowly.

Each thing that is said or done sounds bad when you see that one thing in isolation.

You convince yourself that good people will prevail.

Something else is said or done, and you start to realize that “good people” are believing the lies.

You eventually realize that too many of  the “good people” and “good Christians” in particular aren’t who you thought they were.

You realize that too many of the white people in America have a deep-seated prejudice against all the non-white people.

You realize that the white people in America who fly the Confederate flag in their yard or put a Confederate flag sticker on their pick-up truck aren’t just stuck in the past. They aren’t just showing their pride that one of their ancestors fought on the wrong side in the American Civil War. No. They hate black people. They don’t just hate black people… they wish them harm. If this is not how they really feel, they need to realize that’s the impression they are giving to black people and people who think racial prejudices are a bad thing.

You realize that too many of the professing Christians have completely pushed aside the teachings of Jesus and have put a political leader above Christ and the good of the whole. You start hearing them say they truly believe that Trump was chosen and sent by God to save our country.

They hijack the American flag as theirs and theirs alone, along with the color red which used to be my favorite color. Now I’m afraid to wear red for fear someone will assume I’m a Republican.

You realize you cannot reason with the people who support the President of the United States. You cannot have a civil conversation with them. You can find no common ground with them because their world view is something you can’t comprehend.

This is not only tearing our country apart. It is tearing families apart.

“As a lifelong Presbyterian, I was taught that one should always strive to agreeably disagree”… to respect others’ points of view… to be able to calmly discuss our differences. Although we may not convince the other person to see things our way and they may not convince me to see things their way, the two of us should respect each other and in the end agree that we see things differently but we will still be friends.

The prejudices and hate were already there, but it became common during the 2016 presidential campaign that family gatherings for holidays or family birthdays and anniversaries are strained to the point that such gatherings only leave people with a sense of dread because they know there is always at least one person in the family who feels compelled to bring up politics at the table even though they know everyone in the group does not agree with them.

It seems to always be the family member with the most extreme right-wing opinions that will bring it up. They don’t bring it up for discussion. They bring it up to start an argument… an argument no one wins… and eventually everyone goes home and either dreads the next time they have to be together or vows they will just cut themselves off from the relatives they disagree with. It is impossible to find common ground anymore.

One thing we were taught in school about the American Civil War was that it often pitted “brother against brother.” Those words never made any sense to me because I couldn’t imagine being at such deep odds with my brother that we would be on opposing sides in a civil war. How can siblings raised by the same parents under the same roof be at odds over basic tenets of their faith and the basic tenets of the US Constitution?

I can’t believe my country has turned into a nightmare of a place where authoritarian fear-mongering reigns and the US Constitution is trampled every day and no one seems able to stop it.

I can’t believe I live in an America where people defending the US Constitution are openly belittled, made fun of, and shouted down on live TV by people who are willing to defend a US President to the death because their allegiance is to one man and not the US Constitution. I can’t believe it, but I see it every day.

Our “founding fathers” (and founding mothers, who get no credit!) warned us about totalitarianism, kings, and wannabe-kings, but after 249 years we didn’t think it could happen here.

I don’t recognize my country anymore.

As I commented to a blogger friend earlier this week, “I’m at the point now that I watch the world going on around me and on TV as if it’s 2024 and I wonder how they can ignore what is happening in real life. It reminds me of the feeling that one has when a parent dies and as you drive to the funeral home you want to roll down the car window and scream, “Don’t you know my ________ just died? How can you be going around business as usual as if nothing horrible has happened?”

My faith is in God. I’m not afraid to die because I know where my soul is going to spend eternity. I look forward to eternity! It is everything between now and then that I dread.

On the bright side, at least I don’t have to spend Easter with relatives with whom I disagree on politics and religion.

Janet

16 more highlights of how things are going in America

Are you as tired as I am of being bombarded with the news of the day? And yet I feel called to lay out 16 more instances today of not just cracks in our system of government but some basic failings and actions that fly in the face of the US Constitution and common decency. You can thank me now or you can thank me later for deleting three items from today’s list.

Many of the items on today’s list are not being covered in the media. I hear or read a snippet of a story, and then I look for more information and documentation. I use reliable sources, and I don’t deal in conspiracy theories.

I used to not know or care what political party someone else aligned with, but we live in an era now where that seems to be the first thing someone wants you to know about them. That literally wear in on their heads and post it in their yards. There is little tolerance for anyone who does not agree with them, so it is tempting to keep one’s mouth shut.

Our current situation in the US is exhausting everyone who treasures democracy. I am exhausted, but when I learn about something that blatantly runs contrary to the US Constitution and is so viciously forced on the American people, I can’t seem to stay quiet.

For good measure, I’m including a couple of things that you just might not have heard about. Lots of things are slipping under the news cycle radar because too much is happening too fast.

Each thing considered by itself might not seem so bad or dangerous, but when digested together patterns appear.

  • The Kremlin has confirmed that Russian President Valdimir Putin has gifted Donald Trump with a portrait he commissioned by a Russian artist. US Special Envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, was giddy talking about it on TV. After all, Witkoff’s diplomatic experience could fit on the head of a pin with room left over. His qualifications for being US Special Envoy to the Middle East – which apparently includes Moscow? – are that he is an American billionaire real estate investor. The portrait? Who knows better how to flatter and gain the confidence of Donald Trump than ex-KGB Agent Vladimir Putin?

  • The Associated Press reported, “The White House’s Office of Management and Budget has proposed gutting the State Department’s budget by almost 50%, closing a number of overseas diplomatic missions, slashing the number of diplomatic staff, and eliminating funding for nearly all international organizations, including the United Nations, many of its agencies and for NATO headquarters, officials said. The proposal, which was presented to the State Department last week and is still in a highly preliminary phase, is not expected to pass muster with either the department’s leadership or Congress, which will ultimately be asked to vote on the entire federal budget  in the coming months.” It depends on if Congress grows a spine. Stay tuned!

  • Trump has cancelled almost all 1,200 current grants issued by the National Endowment for the Humanities to reappropriate the money to his pet project of a garden of statues of 250 people in American history he deems heroes. I shudder to think whom he would choose for the honor… and whom he will not select. It takes no imagination to come up with both lists. It’s just too bad for the individuals and organizations who were promised funds for their projects and now the rug has been pulled out from under them. Did you enjoy the PBS film series The Civil War, by Ken Burns? Guess where Burns got some of his funding. This is an insidious way for Trump to kill the Public Broadcasting System (PBS). He wants to pull all federal funds from PBS and now he has moved money from a major source of funding for much of the system’s programming. According to the website for the National Endowment for the Humanities, it is an independent federal agency. I guess it isn’t “independent” anymore.

  • It should be no surprise that US Secretary of Health and Human Resources Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. chose David Geier, a person without a medical degree, to conduct a study of possible links between vaccines and autism. Geier his late father published six papers claiming there is a connection between the two. Geier has a Bachelor of Arts degree in biology. The Maryland Board of Physicians charged him with practicing medicine without a license. Anyone want to bet on what Geier’s conclusion will be?

  • A glimmer of Congressional backbone? US House and US Senate versions of a bi-partisan Trade Review Act of 2025 have been introduced which would give Congress the authority to end a tariff ordered by the President after 60 days.

  • It should have come as no surprise that North Carolina’s request for an extension of 100% matching funds for Hurricane Helene recovery was denied, since US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has said she wants to eliminate the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). NC Governor Josh Stein received the news, ironically, while he was in Avery County with country music star and North Carolina native Eric Church at the groundbreaking for a 40-home development for people who lost their homes in the storm. Eric Church’s foundation spearheaded the project. North Carolina suffered $60 billion in damage from Hurricane Helene last September, and the need for assistance is still great. In February, the State of Georgia’s request for an extension from FEMA was also denied. “Senior Official Performing the Duties of FEMA Administrator” (yes, that is his official title, according to the FEMA website) Cameron Hamilton said in his denial communication to Gov. Stein that the request was “not warranted.” The hurricane recovery aid to NC will continue as a 90% match to what the state spends.

  • On April 3, US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins declared 112 million acres of national forests to be in an emergency situation due to their high risk of wildfires and hazardous tree conditions, allowing them to be open for logging. That’s 59% of our national forest acreage. The emergency designation allows the US Forest Service to bypass environmental laws. Trees in our national forests are logged, so that’s not anything new; however, the 59% percent is troubling and declaring an emergency situation so environmental regulations can be ignored also concerns me.

  • Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-4) which gives the Department of Defense authority to take control of federal lands to carry out military operation to repel invasions and seal the border. This includes national wildlife refuges and national forests. Indian reservations are excluded. The military can designate those areas as National Defense Areas, closing off public access indefinitely. Using “national security” to override environmental protections and civilian control of public lands can then easily be applied elsewhere. All Trump needs to do is call something a “national emergency.” This is a very slippery slope in the hands of a man who has absolutely no appreciation for nature or the American citizens.

  • Trump and Musk shut down the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To put a human face on this… Dr. Erik Svendsen, Director of the division, is known for his studies of the effects of the chlorine spill that resulted from a train wreck in 2005 a Graniteville, South Carolina. When the office was suddenly closed by the Trump Administration, Svendsen had to end his participation in a childhood lead investigation in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and notify his employees who were working in western North Carolina where Hurricane Helene caused the worst flooding in the state’s history. Water and sewer infrastructure had been ripped apart in September and the area is still dealing with the environmental damage. Too bad! And too bad for state and local health departments across the country that depended on the expertise of Dr. Svendsen and his staff. Too bad for the localities across the nation that were being aided in children’s lead poisoning issues. The division was also in charge of the national asthma control program and other important environmental health tracking networks. The division helped states struggling to make sure private wells are properly built and free of contamination. It was Dr. Svendsen’s division in 2023 that helped health officials in North Carolina unravel a connection between children eating a certain type of applesauce and elevated lead levels in their blood. That work a few years ago resulted in Dr. Svendsen’s division launching efforts that identified 500 additional cases nationally. The result was a national recall of the applesauce polluted with a South American cinnamon high in lead content. An article about this CDC division’s closure in The State newspaper in Columbia, SC quotes Louisiana Sanders, a resident of Graniteville and former SC Department of Health and Environmental Control board member, as saying, “This is going to set us back another 20 or 30 years.”

  • US Secretary of State Marco Rubio struck a deal with Guyana, a neighbor and enemy of Venezuela, to share intelligence information and come to the aid of Guyana if it is invaded by Venezuela. Venezuela wants the oil resources in Guyana. In response, on April 11, Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro called Rubio an “imbecile.” I almost missed reading about this whole thing. We might need to just be aware.

  • Deportations on steroids: There have been quite a few heartbreaking and frightening stories about actions and inactions of the US Government over the last 12 weeks. (Has it only been 12 weeks since January 20th?) The most heart-wrenching stories so far have been about deportations. People being kidnapped on the street and forced into unmarked vans. University students forced out of the country because their visas are inexplicably revoked. American citizens receiving emails in the middle of the night telling them they have seven days to leave their country. (There are no instructions for just which country they are supposed to escape to. They are being told their “paroles” have been revoked. These are American citizens who have never sought a “parole” because, after all, they were born in the US and have always lived in the US.) One American citizen who received one of those emails from Homeland Security is an immigration attorney! The report I read said that the Trump Administration is revoking the parole of 532,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans who came to the US under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program. The immigration attorney in Massachusetts does not fall into any of those categories.

  • I wish I could share with you the details about what happened to an Australian who has lived in the US for more than five years on a work visa, but I can’t write several thousand words about it. I invite you to do an online search and read the gory details for yourself. In a nutshell, he took his sister’s ashes to scatter them in Australia in March. When his return plane landed in Houston, Texas, he was detained, called names, accused of being a drug dealer, and was put on a flight back to Australia after 36 miserable hours of detention. Everything he owns except two changes of clothes are at his home in the US. He is barred from returning to the US for five years. The details are scary, but they can be found at https://www.theguardian.com/ if you want to read them. I’ve only heard his side of the story, but it appears he was denied due process of law. There is an alarming pattern that the Trump Administration only wants due process when it is a member of the administration who needs due process. The rest of us, not so much.

  • In an apparent effort to ward off Trump taking back the Panama Canal, an agreement has been quietly reached in which US troops will be able to deploy to a bunch of bases along the canal.

  • The National Museum of African America History and Culture opened nine years ago. It has been praised for exhibiting the good and the bad in African American history. But Trump said the museum is part of a “widespread effort to rewrite our nation’s history.” I have learned that one of his recent Executive Orders in which he attacked museums and national parks stated, “Museums in our nation’s capital should be places where individuals go to learn ‒ not to be subjected to ideological indoctrination or divisive narratives that distort our shared history.” Trump says there are exhibits in the Smithsonian museums that make America look bad. He singled out the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Slavery is part of our national history, Mr. Trump, whether you like it or not. It is an ugly part of our history, but you cannot change the fact that it existed. The museums of the Smithsonian Institution are the envy of the world. At least they were until Trump came along.

  • This pales in comparison to Trump’s numerous threats to our democracy, but it deserves inclusion on my list. Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer arrived for a private appointment with President Trump on April 9 to discuss her concerns about the effects the tariffs will have on her State. Instead of being taken into the Oval Office for their meeting, she was blindsided by being ushered into the room for the signing of an Executive Order calling for the investigation of two high level people in the Biden Administration, Chris Krebs and Miles Taylor. Trump, who has never before had a kind word to say about Whitmer, took that opportunity before cameras to praise the Governor and thereby humiliate her in a public setting and set her up for knee-jerk criticism from her own political party. Can anyone say, “Con man?”

  • Every time Trump, White House Press Secretary Leavitt, or anyone else in Trump’s orbit or on TV calls a judge “rogue,” like Leavitt did yesterday, they are putting all judges at risk. They are not only undermining our justice system, they are encouraging their followers and listeners to pick up a gun or make a bomb to intimidate or murder a judge or someone in a judge’s family. We all need to value and stand up for the rule of law and freedom of the press. We could lose both in the blink of an eye.

Until my next blog post

I hope you have time to read a good book, and I hope you can concentrate enough to read it. I can’t.

Perhaps next week will be the week I only blog once instead of the recent four or five times. We can hope!

Remember the people of Myanmar, Ukraine, Kentucky, and western North Carolina.

Janet