Tag: Venezuela

Just another week in America

I haven’t blogged since last Monday because my computer monitor died on Tuesday. I couldn’t get a new one installed until over the weekend. As a blogger and writer, I was like a fish out of water while I didn’t have a computer. I’m “old school.” There’s only so much I can do on my cell phone and tablet. The up-side of that situation was that I used my newfound free time to do some decluttering.

I was sorry not to get to blog last week about one of the stories in my new book, Traveling Through History: A Collection of Historical Short Stories. I will blog about another story in a day or two.

The highlight last week was the Peace Walk by monks from Texas. I did not get to see them, but I’ve been following their 2,300-mile journey to Washington, DC on social media and the news. They spent one night a few miles from here. They and their dog, Aloka, walk quietly and in peace. That’s something in short supply in the world these days. Reports say that Aloka is recovering nicely from having leg surgery in South Carolina. We’ve all fallen in love with Aloka – the street dog from India. What an inspiration Aloka and the monks are! They’re expected to arrive in Greensboro, North Carolina today.

What to blog about today?

I could take today’s blog post in one of many directions, considering all that Donald Trump has done and said in the last week. Where would I start? I’m running out of words to write about the abuses committed by the Trump Administration. My blog posts risk sounding like a broken record. (If you’re too young to know what that means, Google it.)

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Minneapolis, Minnesota skyline. (Photo by Tom Conway on Unsplash)

If you are reading this in Minnesota, please know that you are in my prayers. I am with you in spirit. The nation is behind you. The photos and news reports coming out of Minneapolis are appalling.

If Minneapolis is the testing ground for the police state Trump has planned for us, I guess I need to update my passport application. I hoped I wouldn’t need to always have my birth certificate or passport with me, in case I had to prove my citizenship, but it looks like that was wishful thinking.

Trump said he was sending immigration agents and border patrol agents to hunt down and deport “the worst of the worst,” but 73% of the people held in his detention centers have no criminal record.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents keep shooting American citizens. Of the four shootings that occurred in Minneapolis in the first couple of weeks of this year, two of them were committed by ICE agents! And now Trump’s Department of “Justice” has been ordered to investigate the mayor of Minneapolis and the Governor of Minnesota. (It is basically Trump’s Department of Justice and not the U.S. Department of Justice, since he treats it like his personal legal team.)

News reports indicate that Renee Good and her wife will be investigated, but not the ICE agent who shot Ms. Good in the face while she was driving. I have not heard any law enforcement officer say it is recommended that they shoot the driver of a moving vehicle. It’s a miracle no one else died in that incident as Ms. Good’s vehicle continued down the street until it plowed into a parked car and utility pole.

And why was she denied medical attention for at least ten minutes even after a nearby physician offered to lend her aid but was not allowed?

U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that her ICE agents have complete legal immunity.

Only Trump supporters will put any trust in the FBI’s “investigation” of the incident.

ICE agents keep accosting Native Americans on the streets because of the color of their skin. Too bad they weren’t taught in school that North America was originally populated by non-Europeans. The indigenous peoples have more right to be here than the rest of us. There have been reports of ICE agents not recognizing citizenship papers from Indian tribes as legal proof of American citizenship.

Trump has two battalions of U.S. Army paratroopers on standby and is threatening to send them to Minneapolis. He already has 3,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents there creating intimidation and chaos. U.S. military personnel are never supposed to be turned on the American people. Will that be a bridge too far if Trump crosses it?

There have been so many actions and words that I thought would end his political career, but he always comes out unscathed. On Tuesday, he told the people of Minnesota that “the day of reckoning and retribution is coming.” How Presidential!

Of course, he also told the protesters in Iran that “help is on the way.” Funny how he wants to punish Iran for killing protesters, but his own agents are killing protesters in the U.S.

Greenland

A scene in Greenland (Photo by Visit Greenland on Unsplash)

If you are reading this in Greenland, Denmark, The Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, or Germany… all I can say is I’m sorry, and please don’t give up on the people of the United States of America. The vast majority of Americans don’t want to steal or purchase Greenland. We absolutely don’t want our country to take it by military force! We don’t want to see NATO destroyed! We’re sick and tired of all the tariffs. They aren’t making anyone rich but Trump.

Venezuela

Flag of Venezuela (Photo credit: Aboodi Vesakaran on Unsplash)

We didn’t want Venezuela, but we are enjoying the flood of cartoons springing up all over social media about Trump’s second-hand Nobel Peace Prize.

I don’t think anyone expected “America First” to entail any of this when Trump was campaigning.

What Trump does next is anyone’s guess. A year ago, he talked like an isolationist, but now he seems to want to rule the world.

Since the majority of Congress members don’t have the guts to remove him from office, the ballot box in November looks like our only option… unless he declares a national emergency and cancels the mid-term elections. He admitted last week that he is afraid Democrats will hold the majority of Senate and House seats after the election and he expects to be impeached. We all know he won’t allow that to happen. Chances are, with that fear eating at him, he would wreak as much havoc as possible before November.

My plans for 2026

I shall keep blogging – not always about politics, but I will not be silenced about the things Trump does. To remain quiet when I have this platform is to be complicit.

I shall keep writing my U.S. Senators and U.S. Representative, even though they are Republicans and two of the three have never said one critical word about Trump. The other one speaks out occasionally, but only because he is not running for reelection.

I shall keep writing my novel.

Most of us will just keep doing the best we can.

Janet

The government should be afraid of its citizens, not the other way around.

No real power limits?

Last week, four reporters from the New York Times interviewed Trump in the Oval Office. One question and Trump’s answer to it have overshadowed the rest of the interview. In fact, knowing his answer to this question means we don’t need to know his answers to any of the other questions.

A reporter asked Trump, if there were any checks, any limits on his power on the world stage.

Trump answered: “There is one. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me, and that’s a good thing.” A reporter asked a follow-up question: “What about international law?” Trump replied, “I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt people.”

Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash

It is the answer to that first question that has stayed with me all weekend. “My own morality. My own mind.”

Trump has said some chilling and frightening things, but I think this is the most chilling and most frightening.

Here we are.

No one should be that self-assured.

No U.S. President should think or say that the only check or limit on his power is himself – his morality, his mind. A U.S. President should at least reference that the U.S. Constitution limits his power.

This is especially frightening, since Trump has no morals. Not to mention, the state of his mind is very much in question.

This is a man who hold grudges. This is a man who never forgets a slight. This is a man with no sense of humor. This is a man devoid of empathy. This is a man who makes fun of handicapped people. This is a man who calls people from Somalia “garbage.” This is a man who daily calls anyone who differs with him such things as “lunatic” and “low IQ” and “horrible person,” etc.

This is a convicted felon who never spent a minute in jail. This is a man who was found guilty of sexual abuse by a jury of nine people.

This is the man who ordered a mob to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to stop the confirmation that he had lost his bid for re-election to the Presidency and then watched it unfold for hours on TV before calling off the people doing his dirty work.

This is the man who pardoned more than 1,500 of the Capitol rioters who viciously participated in his attempted coup. (Now he says the Capitol Police started it!)

This is the man who has access to the U.S. nuclear weapons codes. Think about that, if you dare.

Have you ever known of anyone so completely devoid of morals?

He said only one thing could stop him, and then he named two things – his morality and his mind. They are not synonymous. They are not interchangeable. But his misunderstanding of the semantics is the least of our worries.

There are now 52 U.S. Senators (all 47 Democrats and five Republicans) willing to vote to at least talk about curbing Trump’s war powers in Venezuela. It was refreshing to finally have a majority vote on something positive in the Senate last week, but the flip side is that we have 48 U.S. Senators (all Republicans) who did not even have the guts to vote to have a discussion about it this week and a final vote on the war powers resolution. Not that Trump has ever been reeled in by a Congressional resolution.

If the shoe were on the other foot (i.e., a Democrat president had gone into Venezuela and taken its leader to a prison in the U.S.), the Republicans in the Senate would be up in arms. In their eyes, Trump can do no wrong. At least, that’s the way they vote. They are complicit in everything he does.

As you begin your week, remember the people of Ukraine, Iran, and Venezuela – especially since Trump posted on Truth Social that he is the “acting President of Venezuela.” If he believes that, the Venezuelans need our prayers.

Janet

Oh, Donald, what have you done?

Last week I wrote a blog post for today. As a result of what Trump did on Saturday, though, it no longer seemed appropriate to use it. I’ll save it for another day, because it is about one of the stories in my new book, Traveling Through History: A Collection of Historical Short Stories.

I have mentioned or alluded to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro before.

Flag of Venezuela
Photo by aboodi vesakaran on Unsplash

On August 28, 2025 in my blog, Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, I wrote that Trump was quietly stationing U.S. Navy Aegis guided-missile destroyers and other military ships and planes off the coast of Venezuela. I wrote, “The official White House explanation is that it is an anti-illegal drug operation, but it is no secret that Trump wants to overthrow the Maduro regime.”

On December 10, 2025, in my blog, Trump’s National Security Strategy – The Western Hemisphere, I gave some details of Trump’s November 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) and the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. Among other things, it talked about our use of lethal force and how American businesses would benefit. The NSS went so far as to state that any U.S. Government employee who interacts with countries in the Western Hemisphere must understand that it is “part of their job to help American companies compete and succeed.”

Now that Trump claims the U.S. will “run Venezuela” and we will “take back our oil,” I guess Trump and U.S. oil companies will be the beneficiaries of Saturday’s military action.

On December 31, 2025 in my A look back at 2025 blog post, I listed a few of  the things Trump did last year. One of my paragraphs read as follows: “He thinks he has the right to oust the dictator in a South American nation because that country sits on a lot of oil. He claims Venezuelans are bringing massive amounts of illegal drugs to the U.S. in those tiny boats. In his mind, though, it is easier to claim they’re transporting drugs and obliterate all the evidence along with the people in the boats.”

What Trump did in the wee hours on Saturday morning gives Putin the greenlight to take Ukraine and other European countries. It gives Xi the greenlight to take Taiwan.

Trump has left the United States without a moral leg to stand on when any other dictator in the world decides to go off half-cocked and overthrow a government or a leader they don’t like.

Trump says Maduro is a “bad person.” Just because a country has a “bad person” in charge does not give the United States or any other country the right to overthrow that person and their regime. After all, most of us think Donald Trump is a “bad person.”

The United States has overthrown foreign leaders before. It has never gone well. It goes against the Constitution of the United States of America. It overrides the authority of the U.S. Congress when a U.S. President launches a military attack on another country.

This is not rocket science; it’s just political science. It is the very foundation of our nation. It is not difficult to understand for those of us who have lived here for seven decades. We learned the tenets of American democracy from birth in our homes and at school in our formative years. We have continued to learn it throughout our lives just by having the privilege of being American citizens.

It is beyond unfortunate that we now have a U.S. President who was either never taught those things or has chosen to ignore them. He thumbs his nose at the law and those of us who love America. He believes he is above the law, and those of us who obey the law are “losers.”

And that, my friends, is how we arrived at Saturday morning, January 3, 2026.

Maduro and his wife are now being held in a prison in New York City. It is said that they will be charged with running illegal drugs to the United States.

This is all smoke and mirrors by the U.S. President, for just a few weeks ago he pardoned the former leader of Honduras for his running of drugs to the United States. So why spend an estimated $1 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to overthrow Maduro? And he is just getting started. The hard work comes after the overthrow, especially when you have no plan and the American people are not behind you.

In Trump World, it all depends on who you are and what Trump can get out of you.

The American people don’t want to run Venezuela. We don’t want to make Canada our 51st state. We don’t want to steal Greenland from Denmark. We don’t want a $400 million ballroom at the White House. We don’t want Trump’s name on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. We don’t want a massive arch in Washington, DC. We don’t want masked federal officers snatching people off the streets. We don’t want Trump’s face on our money or our national park passes. We don’t want Trump’s name on anything.

Americans want affordable healthcare and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) we can trust. We want our food inspected by a reliable U.S. Department of Agriculture. We want people to make a fair wage that will enable them to reach the American Dream of home ownership. We want religion left out of our public schools. We want university professors free to teach without government interference. We want our national parks preserved and not destroyed for the sake of gas and oil exploration. We want endangered species protected from extinction. We want a country where citizens are encouraged to vote without intimidation. We want a country where we are all just Americans and minorities are not labeled “other.”

We want a U.S. Congress with the guts to stop Trump’s power grab and overreach.

We want a U.S. Supreme Court that admits the error of their ways when they ruled that a sitting U.S. President cannot be held guilty of breaking a law.

We want a President who speaks and acts from a place of intelligence and empathy – not a gutter-mouth bully. Is it too much to ask that we have a President who speaks in complete sentences? Is it too much to ask for a President who honors the U.S. Constitution? Is it too much to ask for a President who does not call our citizens vicious names?

Janet

P.S. Don’t forget the brave people of Ukraine.

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