M is for Maturity over Mar-a-Lago

 My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Maturity	Mar-a-Lago
Responsibility. Addressing what is going on in the world. Ability to admit when you are wrong.	Play Gatsby parties Golfing Inability to accept when you are wrong

I cannot think of any president who took the responsibilities of the job less seriously than #47 does. I mean, there are serious things going on in the world, mostly of his doing, that need his attention more than the golf course does. Almost every weekend since he was elected! And he used to make disparaging remarks when Biden went to Delaware once in a while. 

And how selfish is it of him to throw these lavish Gatsby type parties when the rest of the country is struggling to put food on the table.

He's just a spoiled child and unfortunately he has surrounded himself with people who like to play just as much as he does. I mean, how many times has the government been shut down because the Republican controlled congress can't get it together. Seems like they take vacations or recess at the drop of a hat as well. 

I can't wait until November when we can elect some mature (and I don't mean old) folks to get this country back on track. 

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. 

L is for Liberty over Limitations

My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Liberty	Limitation
Being free from oppressive restrictions. Able to make your own choices.	Unreasonable restrictions Laws Constraints

The Constitution of the United States guarantees its citizens the right to life, LIBERTY, and the pursuit of happiness, not life, LIMITATIONS, and the pursuit of happiness. Patrick Henry said, "Give me LIBERTY, or give me death," not "Give me LIMITATIONS or give me death."

Now clearly there have to be some LIMITATIONS and laws regarding the safety of others. You can't just take a gun and start shooting people for no good reason (oh wait, we DON'T have good restrictions regarding that, do we?)

Women should have the LIBERTY to decide whether or not to have a baby and should be protected against rape and incest. People should be able to love who they want and have the ability to feel comfortable in their own skin (oh wait, we DO have restrictions on that, don't we!)

Seems like we have gotten a few things backward. Time to make some changes!

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. 

K is for Knowledge over Kangaroo Court

My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Knowledge	Kangaroo Court
Knowing something through experience or association. The body of truth. Being aware of something.	Finding someone guilty without good evidence. Ignores recognized standard of law.

They say "knowledge is power" but in this day and age finding the truth is getting more and more difficult. We used to have a thing called the "Fairness Doctrine" where both sides of a situation needed to be presented equally so that people could make informed decisions. From Wikipedia:

"The Fairness Doctrine had two basic elements: It required broadcasters to devote some of their airtime to discussing controversial matters of public interest, and to air contrasting views regarding those matters. Stations were given wide latitude as to how to provide contrasting views: It could be done through news segments, public affairs shows, or editorials. The doctrine did not require equal time for opposing views but required that contrasting viewpoints be presented. The demise of this FCC rule has been cited as a contributing factor in the rising level of political polarization in the United States."

In 1987 the Fairness Doctrine was repealed because critics argued that it violated the first amendment rights. That paved the way for broadcasters such as Rush Limbaugh to get a foothold and now as we can see Fox Entertainment doesn't care whether they report the truth or not, yet many people rely on them for as their news source.

This in turn led to the kangaroo court (think Hilary's emails, Hunter's laptop, etc) and also to the investigations into such people as Leticia James, Mark Kelly and Jack Smith to name a few.

So what are we to do now? I think if we want to have the knowledge to make informed decisions we need to listen to more than one news outlet. We need to do our own research to make sure we are getting the actual facts. That's why I like Heather Cox Richardson so much. When she writes she includes the sources for all of her facts and encourages us to check her statements.

Here in California we have a situation where our frontrunner for Democratic governor of our state, Eric Swalwell, has been accused of sexual assault by a few of his staffers (I think 4 so far). Because of this he has removed himself from the race. Some folks are claiming that it is horrible for him to be judged before the case has had its day in court but at the same time, there is a lot at stake in our race because California has what they call a jungle primary and the two top vote getters move on to the general election. That could mean that two republicans could win. We can't take the chance of having no democrat on the ticket. If, in fact, the allegations are not true, Swalwell could run again in a few years if he wants.

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. 

J is for Justice over Judicial Overreach

My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Justice	Judicial Overreach
Impartial adjustment of conflicting claims Fair Conforming to truth Using the law to punish crimes	Court acting beyond its authority. Making decisions that intrude into the Legislative or Executive branch. Excessive and without substance.

I think this is one of the comparisons that bothers me the most. Using the law to punish crimes! Should be pretty simple, right? In my opinion part of the reason we are in the predicament we are in now is that the judicial system failed us right after the insurrection of January 6, 2021. It took WAY too long for criminal charges to be brought against #47 and his cronies. And even now, there are laws against many of the things that he is doing and yet congress is too slow to act.

On the flip side, those judges who are beholden to that guy for their positions have overstepped their boundaries when making rulings regarding things he has done. I'm specifically thinking of Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida who has made several decisions favorable to him even though they don't always follow the rule of law. She has even gotten reprimanded by the circuit judges stating that her rulings were inconsistent but nothing has been done about that either. Don't even get me started on the "supreme" court.

As with yesterday's mention of Heather Cox Richardson as someone I routinely follow, Attorney Mark Elias of Democracy Docket and Glenn Kirschner with Justice Matters. I find their explanations and insights very helpful as truthfully this whole mess is very confusing. I will admit that before now I took our democracy for granted. We can't do that anymore.

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. 

I is for Inclusion over Isolation

 My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Inclusion	Isolation
Making room for others Adding to	Setting apart     Being alone

I don't think we need to go far to find examples of this. From the minute he made fun of the disabled reporter we should have known that #47 would not be tolerant of people who in his opinion are "less than." His distancing himself from all of our natural allies is just disgraceful. And now he wants them to come to his rescue with the whole Iran issue. I don't blame them at all for keeping out of it and I totally understand why they would want to form alliances without including the US. How can they trust us after this?

Remember what it was like when you were young and perhaps not included in a game or invited to a birthday party? I'm not saying that you have to be best friends with everyone but to just generally push someone aside because of disabilities or differences isn't very nice. What a world it would be if we were able to truly include people who are different than we are. So many ideas and possibilities. Granted it is not always easy to understand other cultures or languages and it may take a little more work on our part but most of the time it is worth it.

Side note: I missed an opportunity yesterday to include a very important link to a very important "H." I don't know if you have heard of Heather Cox Richardson. She is an American historian and professor of history at Boston College. Since 2019 she has been writing Letters from an American nightly. Starting on Facebook, she has grown to include a Substack account and other social media platforms. In addition to her newsletters she does two podcasts a week (Tuesdays and Thursdays) on YouTube and Facebook. I don't know what I would do without her insights. She takes the craziness that is our life now and equates it to things that have happened in our history. She gives me hope that we can overcome this time and when we reclaim our country from the insane ruler we have now, we have the opportunity to make a much better place to live. All of her work is free to read/listen to and I highly recommend.

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. 

H is for Hopefulness over Hatred

My theme for this year's A to Z Challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Hopefulness	Hatred
Full of hope Optimism Anticipation Expectation of positive outcomes	Extreme dislike Ill will Resentment Intense negative response

Hate is a very strong word and I don't use it often. I try not to use it about people. Let's just say I extremely dislike #47 and what he is doing to our country. He gives off such negativity and is so resentful of anything that he considers a slight to himself. His speeches are full of threats and constant vitriol. I can't listen to them.

Contrast that with the speeches that Kamala Harris gave when she was running for President. She was always talking about how the policies she wanted to put in place would lift up the middle class and while she did speak against #47 it was more against what his policies would do and not about him personally (other than that he was a liar). Listening to Kamala talk definitely gave me hope for the future. I guess that's what made the loss even more devastating.

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. Thanks also to Tamara Gerber for suggesting that I write about the difficulties we are having here in the United States.

G is for Governing over Gaslighting

My theme for this year's A to Z challenge is the A to Z of Democracy. This is your trigger warning. If you are going to be bothered by my descriptions of what I believe America should look and feel like, please stop reading and come back next year when my topic may go back to music or scrapbooking or interesting tidbits. Please respect my space and DO NOT leave disinformation or inflammatory statements in the comments. It's my blog and I will delete them. Thanks for your cooperation. 

Governing	Gaslighting
Directing and making decisions for a country. Guiding the actions of someone or something.	Psychological manipulation of a person that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts and perceptions. The act of grossly misleading someone for one’s own advantage.

It seems to me that we have not had very successful governing lately. Even though the Republicans control both the House and the Senate very few decisions have been made. Indeed most of the time the Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has sent the representatives home without passing any legislation. We have had a shutdown of the government for months at a time of either some or all of the departments because the funding was not passed to keep them open. As of right now the fight is over the Department of Homeland Security because the bill includes funding for ICE and Border Patrol. Sadly this affects the other services like TSA agents which in turn causes problems at airports, etc. There was a lot of money appropriated for DHS in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" that was passed last year and if the department had not spent money on frivolous things (advertising and airplanes for former Secretary Noem for example) they would still have plenty of money to pay salaries of regular working folk.

Instead we have gotten endless misleading statements from those in power to try to convince us that "the people are eating dogs" and that there are millions of undocumented people committing heinous crimes on every street corner. We are told that "gas prices are going down" and that "affordability is a hoax." I know what I am paying at the gas pump and grocery store. Those prices are not going down!

We have the president getting us into a war with Iran and threatening to destroy an entire population. I don't think that that qualifies as good governing for our country. He says that the Iranians were in the process of getting nuclear power and would have been able to attack us when there is no credible evidence to that fact.

I think it is time for the "governing body" to get a spine and actually DO some governing. Stopping this incredibly dangerous behavior from the petulant child in the Oval Office would be a great start.

As always, credit goes to Speaker Hakeem Jeffries who gave an impassioned speech on the floor of the House of Representatives at the beginning of the 218th congress. I wish that he would heed his own words and rally the other representatives to take back some control.